Discussing the psychology of objectivism as it relates to conflicting value judgments could hardly be further removed from playing chess. Or do you equate playing chess with the calculations that go into the raging conflagration that revolves around aborting human babies?
My point [aside from the polemics] is to nudge folks away from believing one can approach abortion as though it were just a game of chess. Chess: where each piece can only be moved in particular ways on a particular board and where you either do or not not checkmate your opponent. With chess everything is [ultimately] predicated on what must happen given the particular moves that are made.
The OP offers up one particular subjective narrative for assessing and then evaluating the relationship between an objective moral/political dogma and human psychology. It makes sense to me. Here and now. And since it also makes sense to me here and now that moral objectivism can become dangerous when it takes the form of a political ideology, it makes sense to suggest this to others. But I never go beyond this. I do not insist that this is [in turn] the most rational manner in which to think about these things.
Yes, this is precisely my point when I note this:
How can I think like I do and interact with others at all? If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then everytime I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might just as well have gone in the other direction instead…Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it together at all. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
That’s the paradox or the dilemma embedded in the irresistable force smashing into the immovable object.
But again: [u]What choice do we have if we do choose to intereact with others?[/u] One way or another one point of view will prevail. Re abortion, either babies will be killed or women will be forced to give birth. You can’t have a world in which both sides prevail.
This is the part I don’t think you really address. My own solution to it was [in part] to withdraw from interactions with others “out in the world”. Though there were other reasons for that as well. My health, mostly.
And there is always the possibility that my epistemological framework here is wrong. But how can I know this if I do not present my arguments in places like this.
But people DO make that assumption. How then do philosophers demonstrate to them that in fact there is no NEED to make it? They WANT to. It is how they have come [existentially as dasein] to construe morality out in the world. The real world that they live in.
No idea? But I do have some idea about all this. I offer a point of view regarding moral and political objectivism as a [possible] component of human psychological predispositions. Then I can note historical instances where moral and political objectivism have caused enormous human pain and suffering. It’s not like I am just completely making all of this up in my head – without making a number of references to the world of actual human interaction.
In my view, the pacifist is an objectivist if she insist that being a pacifist is the most rational and ethical manner in which a human being can interact with others out in the world.
Then she can either go in the James S. Saint/von rivers direction, i.e. that pacifism is applicable only one context at a time, or in the direction of the universalist, i.e. that pacifism is always the right thing to do.
She can either try to explain why hitting someone with an ax can be rationalized in this situation or, if she believes it is always irrational and immoral, then she is not a pacifist.
All I can do is to probe her life…to try to root out the existential factors that led her to become a pacifist [in a world where many do not] and to note how sets of circumstance might unfold that she had not really considered…sets of circumstanctes so dire that she may well change her mind about being a pacifist.
But what I don’t see possible is a philosophical argument able to demonstrate once and for all whether being a pacifist IS the right thing to do. Objectively.