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Okay, let’s assume you do know considerably more [philosophically] about the technical meaning of being logical in discussing capital punishment. Give us some examples of how you might instruct the protesters at Huntsville in grappling with the difference between being logical, being rational and being moral in regard to the particular execution about to take place.

Other then by way of yet another “general description” “analysis”.

For me, everything here revolves around the gap between what you think you know is true about it “in your head”, and what you are able to demonstrate is true about it to those you would deem to be reasonable men and women.

There would seem to come a time when you would have to acknowledge the limitations of “being logical” in the discussion. Which all of us would agree on. The part where only the language is critiqued vs. the part where the words intertwine with the world and the critiques become what I construe to be more or less “existential contraptions”.

And, for me, that revolves largely around the conflicting goods, derived from dasein out in a particular world where what you think you know is true may well butts heads with those who have the actual political power to enforce their own [conflicting] moral agenda.

In my view, you can’t turn to the folks here who embrace Plato or Aristotle or Descartes or Kant for the one size fits all answer. Or, rather, so it seems to me. No moral obligations, just the obligation to be in sync with the rules of language.

But it’s the part about what one “ought to do” here that by far generates the most controversy and conflict.

My guess: a lot of people will be scratching their heads.

Then those on both sides hit you with arguments like this: deathpenalty.procon.org/view.re … eID=002000

Then they pummel you with endless facts [and interpretations of the facts] with regard to this particular execution. Then you can either be an objectivist here or a pragmatist.

Pragmatism as you understand it, pragmatism as I do.

Meanwhile the one thing that everyone can agree on is this: the prisoner is either executed or not.

And the execution itself is neither logical or illogical. But [of course] that’s not at all what motivates people to protest for or against it.

The one that makes sense to me as a description of your “assessment” here but makes considerably less sense to you.

Because there will be conflicting assessments regarding which rendition of being reasonable ought to be “the chief source and test of knowledge” regarding this particular execution.

Ah, but forget about folks actually being executed and the relevancy of logic and rational thought and morality in discussing it. Instead, the problem here is really me:

This need on your point to expose me, to explain me, to disclose to everyone what is really going on beyond the curtain.

Or so it seems to me.

And then the role that logic, rational thought and virtue either play or do not play in discussing capital punishment is no longer even the point of the exchange.

No, as a matter of fact, any number very rich and powerful folks want only to sustain a world that they deem to be in their own best [and selfish] interest. Basically, their “morality” revolves around “show me the money”. Capitalism thrives on a generally amoral approach to human interractions. What counts are market transactions in which there are winners and losers. Interactions then rationalized by one or another rendition of suvival of the fittest. A dog eat dog world that revolves largely around K Street and Wall Street. And their cronies in Washington. At least here in America.

And then there are all the narcissists and sociopaths.

And what about the folks who own and operate nations like Russia and China. Do they want to create a just society? Do they want others to act in a manner other than in sustaining their wealth and power? Where does the “power of rational thought” fit in here?

And for those who are intent on creating a just world, what on earth does that mean with respect to actual issues like abortion or gun control or animal rights or energy policy or the role of government or separation of church and state or homosexuality or gender norms?

Rational thought here? Who gets to decide what that is? And common sense tells us that, in regard to value judgments, any particular individual’s point of view is going to be largely embeded in historical and cultural contexts. And clearly derived from the actual experiences that unfold in the life that they have lived.

Existential – subjective/subjunctive – variables are everywhere here. Engendering social, political and economic permutations that then fall up and down the political spectrum. And [so far] throughout all of human history.

And yet “general descriptions” of the relationship between words and worlds brings philosophy [however it is understood] no where near the actual contexts that make up our day to day interactions with others.

In my view, philosophy fails when it does not take into account the existential nature of human interaction. When, instead, it proposes that moral obligations can be “thought up” or “deduced” into existence; and then attached to words like “categorical” and “imperative”. Morality differentiated as either shadows on the cave walls or out in the clear light of one another rendition of philosophical realism or political idealism.

And then those who throw in one or another rendition of God in turn.

In what particular context? Regarding what particular behaviors?

Again: All I am trying to distinguish here is the difference between being logical in regard to value judgments, being rational in regard to them, and being moral in regard to them.

And in order to flesh this out you have to actually discuss your own views regarding these issues. And then when others react to that you can point out deficiencies in their use of logic and rational thinking and assumptions regarding virtuous behavior.

Okay, then be rational in reacting to the conflicting goods that revolve around the death penalty. Note your own value judgment here. Note for us why it is deemed rational to you.

And then when I note that my own value judgments here revolve precisely around the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy, you can point out the parts that are in sync with the true rationalists and those that are not.

Morality is not fundamentally about what is true. Nothing is fundamentally about what is true. Morality, in the sense you are using it, meaning social justice, is about what enough people with enough power (people who matter enough) will accept.

I want you to picture a wall that someone has just painted, except that he has left a few square feet undone. If you had hired him for this job you would not pay him, because he hasn’t done the job at all. That is, that he was hired to paint the wall, the entire wall, and he didn’t do that. This position is consistent with your all-or-nothing view of morality.

He claims he did 90% of it, so you should pay him 90% of the money. You both claim that your position is just. In the end a small claims judge decides, according to laws that are informed by moral thinking, thinking concerning “what is just”.

This is not difficult.

The fact is that a decision is made. See what we (humans) did there? We made rules so that you didn’t have to shoot the painter and ransack his house. And kill his bird. Some of this process included rational thinking (as an antidote to your homicidal rage). Some of this was valid arguments using premises that are generally accepted as true, some of which are not directly related to morality at all.

These rules are applied to your very real civil case, your very real wall, partially covered with very real paint. But no mother’s son is going to make a rule just for you. So, yeah, it has to be kinda general. The “off the skyhooks, down to earth, nose stuffed into Godzilla’s armpit (or whatever)” stuff already has happened and happens every day. There would be no purpose to the rules if it did not. The rules were formulated exactly because of everyday daseinpoopen.

Give me a specific situation. I have the option of doing this, but I don’t. I don’t try to find those people and engage with them. So what is a specific situation with protester at Huntsville. How do I meet them? Do they stop me in the street? There are hundreds or thousands of issues and arguments related to capital punishment. Can you give me some kind of concrete scenario revolving around a specific argument? I am willing to hallucinate that I would spend time instructing some Huntville protester for a thought experiment, but you are also asking me to choose out of mass of different arguments some random one to demonstrate my ideas about logic. And I am not sure why?

Otherwise I am just making shit up, even if I am specific.

And by the way, I have nowhere said whatever I say to them would be effective, let alone end the conflict, so I don’t understand why you are asking me to do this.

It seems like a set up. I present what I say. Then you say ‘oh, they won’t understand that.’ Or ‘but they still have conflicting values’

and to that all I can say is '‘Yeah, duh.’

So, why are you asking me to instruct these protesters about logic

and why don’t you instruct them about dasein and contraptions?

Needless repetition.

If anyone here is saying that conflicting goods go away when we clean up language, have at them.

Fuck yeah. That’s one of the reasons I would not engage them. They’d scratch their heads at dasein and contraptions also. So what? You let me know what I say ‘all the people need are some lessons in logic and conflicting goods disappear’ or ‘a good approach to Huntsville is teaching them about logic in arguments’ or whatever strawman position you seem to be attritubing to me.

Why should I apply rationalism to conflicts? what position are you hallucinating that I have? Have I asserted this would be a good thing? Not in my memeory

Behind the curtain. It was right there in the posts I quoted. You responded to a post to Faust I made.

and Ironically elsewhere You asked for a specific example when you do the kind of thing you did in relation to my post to Faust. So, following YOUR request I pointed out the example.

Now you shift the context using an inappropriate metaphor about revealing what is behind the curtain.

And notice how you do not respond. You ask for an example. I give one. Now you ignore the example and blame me for focusing on you. Why did you enter a discussion between me and Faust about you?

The post that you quoted was my response to Faust. Right?
That post had a purpose dealing with you and a confusion he seemed to have. Right?
I explained my sense of what was going on. YOu quoted me doing that.
that interchange was not about capital punishment and it is in thread not about capital punishment.
It was not the point of the exchange.

but you will never admit that.

Its a simple thing. You responded to my post to Faust as if I was solving some OTHER issue. I pointed this out. If you can’t see it, go through the posts again.

I get blamed if I do what you ask.
I get blamed for not solving problems I never claimed to have solved.
I get blamed for executions because in a philosophy forum I focused on certain issues and people are still being executed, while the one blaming me focused on philosophical issues and people are still getting executed.
I get blamed because my explanations would have people shaking their heads at Huntville by someone using arguments that would have poeple shaking their heads at Huntville.
I am asked to give a specific example - I actually already had when asked - of a pattern of behavior. I give a new example,s ince I was provided with one in this thread and then I get blamed for focusing on you.
I respond to anohter poster about an issue he had and get told by you, a third poster, that my post to him was not on the topic it should have been and failed to solve your problem.

I think we have hijacked Faust’s thread enough. Feel free to pm me or bring this up elsewhere if you are confused by any of your behavior as much as I am.

I will leave this thread or at least the dialogue with you in it. Probably similar stuff will arise elsewhere.

I agree. But any number of men and women down through the ages have scoffed at that. They have instead embraced “might makes it right” or “right justifies might”. There are the dictators and the ideologues. And the ideologues that become dictators.

And then those who recognize that [perhaps] the best of all possible worlds is embedded instead in democracy and rule of law. But [in the real world] ever and always subsumed in political economy.

Still, in focusing in on particular behaviors in particular contexts, there are the lines that are drawn between the logical rules of language, the assumptions made about rational thinking and the extent to which it can be argued that human morality ought to be predicated on rational thinking expressed logically.

I accept that. But then I introduce the elements of my own nihilistic morality: dasein, conflicting goods and political/economic power.

In a [presumed] No God world.

And then the “hole” that I have thought myself into as a result of putting all the variables together.

Huh? Where does dasein, conflicting goods and political economy really fit in here? As they do with regard to life and death issues like abortion or conscription or capital punishment or gun control or animal rights.

Painting a wall?!

Then this: All-or-nothing morality? My point is that if God does exist, if a particular political ideology or a deontological philosophical argument comes along able to be demonstrated as wholly in sync with objective morality, or an understanding of nature [re Satyr and his ilk at KT] is determined to definitively differentiate natural from unnatural human behaviors, then morality could be anchored to an all-or-nothing set of rules able to prescribe or proscribe human behaviors.

On the other hand, moral nihilism is exactly the opposite of all-or-nothing. But, given my own rendition of it, I’ve still thunk myself down into that hole. I embrace moderation, negotiation and compromise, but I have no illusions that this is anything other than the embodiment of my own particular “I” here as an “existential contraption”.

Then with folks like KT who seems to share my views regarding the presumed absence of objective morality and the need to be pragmatic in our interactions with others, I probe to understand how he himself is not down in the same hole that I am in.

This one:

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 every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

Over and again with regard to either the objectivists or the pragmatists, I ask them to explain how that is not applicable to them in regard to an actual set of conflicting behaviors in an actual circumstantial context.

You’re an objectivist. That’s why you still drink water.

Regardless of what anyone says, they still drink water.

That’s very down to earth.

You could have chosen differently, but like everyone else on earth, you didn’t WANT to choose differently, because you understand the objective, political and moral consequences of it.

You’re basically a fraud

We do what we can here. We’re not likely to agree to congregate outside the Huntsville unit the next time a particularly controversial execution takes place. Instead, here at ILP, we bring into the discussion our own personal experiences with the issue. Or we can discuss a film like Dead Man Walking, which powerfully presented both sides of this literally life and death issue.

Here we can think through the conflict and note to others where we draw the line ourselves between logical language, rational thinking and moral behavior.

No, I am asking you [and others] to examine the extent to which any particular individual’s argument for or against the death penalty is embedded [problematically] in the lives that we live in any particular historical, cultural and experiential context.

And while there are clearly things able to be distinguished as being expressed logically or expressed illogically, as comporting rationally with the facts or not comporting rationally with the facts, when we shift gears to value judgments regarding capital punishment, things are often not nearly as black and white.

And the reason that there are “hundreds or thousands of issues and arguments related to capital punishment” is because there are any number of different contexts that each of us grew up in, exposing us to very, very different sets of variables. Issues relating to class and race and gender. Issues embedded in aggravating and mitigating circumstance. Issues embedded in police bungling, jury selection, and out and out fraud. And then all the folks who have been released from prison [on death row] because it was finally determined that they really were innocent all along. Or the extent to which it can be pinned down once and for all if the death penalty is the very embodiment of “cruel and unusual punishment”.

What can philosophers [or scientists] tell us here. And what is beyond their purview, their expertise, their wisdom?

My point revolves around the likelihood that some will be impressed with your own moral and political narrative, while others will only be scornful of it. Why? How is this – these conflicting reactions – embedded in dasein?

Okay, imagine that I did. Here I am telling them that the choices that they make in their lives relating to value judgements are just so many ever and always subject to change existential contraptions in the No God world. Values that are no more necessarily virtuous than those who embrace just the opposite point of view. That “I” here really is just a historical and cultural and experiential construction, deconstruction and reconstruction from the cradle to the grave.

How would their reaction be all that different from the reactions of many here?

Two points:

1] repetitive points can be needless for some or they can finally begin to sink in for others
2] there are always new members here at ILP for whom the points are not repetitive at all. They’re hearing them for the first time and may well have something to tell me that effectively challenges my own assumptions here.

No, iambiguous, you do not agree. “What enough people with enough power will accept” is might makes right or it certainly could be. Ideologue dictators are regularly chosen by “the people” and are not necessary morally aberrant.

I have to ask you, do you keep asking about particular contexts because you don’t see the context of what others claim?

I’d be glad to “be rational” about conflicting goods:

People, or at least people who think about it, tend to come down on one of two sides of the issue of the death penalty - they are usually either for it or against it. But it’s noteworthy that many who are for it are for it in only certain circumstances, the relative importance of which varies a bit from one person to the other. People sometimes even argue about it. And laws are from time to time passed about capital punishment. The courts are constantly involved.

Now, why can’t we agree? And let’s stipulate that agreement would mean something that reveals a clear mandate for all the governments of the world. And that, given the impossibility of even knowing what 90 or 95% of the actual population of the world thinks, that we’re keeping the parameters inside the realm of the possible. But the rest is wide open - educational levels, literacy, IQ, mental health, wealth - it’s all on the table.

Is this starting to look like a waste of time, yet? It does to me. We don’t even know who we want to vote on this and we know it can’t be everyone.

So how do we get the two sides to agree? Well, God comes to mind, except that he has already abjectly failed to produce agreement. But here’s another problem - why the fuck should i care if the whole world agrees? Because i fancy myself a philosopher? Why do you care?

This is all on the skyhooks, but you have a) asked the question and b) not even attempted to give your own solution. The “real world” is that people argue about this stuff using moral language. Moral philosophers provide the vocabulary. No matter what else they claim to do. But moral philosophers have made many errors. The error that they can provide some universal and permanent solution to this problem is just one of many. Ignoring the logic of their arguments will guarantee that you do not understand that which you rail against,which is kind of a waste of time.

Getting obsessed with that certain mistake and ignoring the others will pretty much do the same thing.

But back to agreement - it happens one agreement at a time. Griping about there being no use for moral language, some of it provided by absolutist, rationalist assholes who are still hallowed and followed by many, is the complaint of someone who seldom wins an argument.

The fact is that people do get talked into things. They change their minds. ultimately, it’s the argument they have with themselves, using the tools made available by philosophers, that tells the tale. It helps if those arguments are valid and uses premises accepted as true by that one person. It’s not as easy as it seems.

What I was basically agreeing with was your point that “[m]orality is not fundamentally about what is true.”

Fundamentally in the sense that the might is said to be justified because it reflects the moral obligation of all rational and/or just people. Then you have all of the historical renditions of this. Lenin with his Communist Manifesto, Hitler with his Mein Kampf, Mussolini with his fascism, Mao with his Cultural Revolution.

Or there are those who skip that part and impose their will simply because they have the political and economic and military and police wherewithal to impose it.

And while there are behaviors in any particular human community that can be described accurately as “morally aberrant”, who is to say which behaviors all rational men and women are in fact obligated to choose?

Yep, that’s how it works alright. At least in those jurisdictions that practice one or another rendition of democracy and the rule of law. And not those who are in a position to dictate how all citizens are required to view state executions. Re God or one or another ideological dogma or one or another philosophical assessment. And certainly not in communities where for all practical purposes it’s the law of the jungle.

In my view, human interactions are ever and always embedded in an actual historical and cultural or experiential context. Out in a world where contingency, chance and change are always right around the corner.

Then further in my view it comes down to how any particular one of us implicates that in our own lives.

Again, that’s my point. That and the part about any actual flesh and blood “I” out in any actual flesh and blood world being at the intersection – the existential intersection – of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

In any specific context.

This is precisely the argument I make when confronting the moral and political objectivists among us. There are simply far, far, far too many variables intertwined in any number of actual social, political and economic contexts to ever realistically suppose that some sort of deontological prescription can reflect the ethical equivalent of “one size fits all”.

But: whether accomplishing it is a waste of time it doesn’t change the fact that one way or another rules of behaviors must be proposed and then legislated in any given human community. And then enforced.

Again, it is here where I argue that “I” is largely an intersubjective agglomeration of value judgments out in a particular world of conflicting points of view derived from the actual trajectory of ones life experiences.

And not from God or ideology or reason or logic or views of nature. Not from the intellectual assumptions of folks like Plato or Aristotle of Descartes or Kant.

But that in turn is merely how “I” have come to view this existentially here and now given all the variables that came together in my own life. Many of which are surely beyond my understanding and control.

When have I ever argued that any one of us ought to care about any of this? It’s just that down through the ages there have been any number of folks who called themselves philosophers who took it upon themselves to care about it.

And what I propose we do here is to take their words, their ideas, their concepts, their theories, their intellectual contraptions down out of the “general description” clouds, and stick them out in the world that we live in here and now. As this revolves around the question “how ought one to live”?

My point is that with respect to an issue like capital punishment, there do not appear to be any objective solutions that philosophers, using the tools at their disposal, can provide us with.

Then [for me] it’s probing how others are not down in the hole that I am in when confronting this.

I propose first and foremost that my values here are embedded in the points I bring up here:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

Then I ask others how this frame of mind is not applicable to them. Given a particular context that most here are likely to be familiar with and to have thought about.

Yet another “general description” in which the supposed “errors” that philosophers have made are not fleshed out in regards to an issue like capital punishment.

Again, errors [or truths] that revolve around the part where logic and rational thinking and morality are grappled with “in reality”.

You still don’t get it. Philosophers don’t provide the answers using the tools at their disposal. They provide some of the tools so that you can provide answers for yourself.

Well, you can’t describe philosophers more generally than this, right?

And my point has always been that whatever tools philosophers [or scientists] use in confronting the question, “how ought one to live?”, there does not appear [to me] to be a way to get around dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

All I have ever asked of folks like Faust and KT is that they at least make an attempt to explain why they are not down in that hole I have thought myself into.

Sometimes they claim to have done so. But not in a way that has ever managed to sink in for me.

So, all we can do is to try another context and see what might begin to sink in. Stuff that they propose to me, stuff that I propose to them.

What hole? You don’t know how you ought to live?

I’m not in any hole. I decide how i ought to live. Now, every second of my existence informs those decisions and there are about eleventy-million decisions to make, if you’re lucky enough to live that long.

What would you have happen when you encounter someone you disgaree with? A merging of the minds? When did that ever happen? To anyone? That people were in agreement. i mean, other than a relatively small group? And even then…

By the way, you have accused me of a vast generization. But given the context of many other things I have said, it should be easily understood by anyone who knows that context that I do not mean that everyone we may call a philosopher is any good at providing those tools. So, in which context have I generlized enough to warrant an eyeroll?

The problem in philosophy is not generalization, it’s reification. It’s abstracting the living shit out of an idea and pronouncing the result a thing. Like a Platonic Form. Logic is easier when you are reifying, because you’ve made up all the important words yourself, or copped them from someone who has. Still, these reifiers slip up. But what has that to do with disagreements about abortion? It’s a strategy.

Political economy requires strategy. Ask Plato.

But compromise requires knowing the opposition’s position. Philosophy is the art of knowing their position better than they do. Or at least making them think so. It’s the art of argument for ideas we can conceptually point to but are not quite sure why we can and why we do point to them. Philosophy can tell us why, but has a different influence than experience or chromosomes have. Again, not very many people are good at it.

I thought that philosophy was supposed to be about love of thought.
I made a post about this already.
Love of thoughts, love of ideas, love of the beings which store and distribute ideas.

Love without intelligence is brought to basically nothing, though.
Love is a mode. It’s an existential condition.

Anyone who loves truth needs to also know truth.
Otherwise the love has no direction or goal.

Thus knowing is more important than loving.
Christians would disagree on that.

The hole that revolves around the manner in which this…

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 every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…seems reasonable to me.

Thus when I am confronted with a context in which values come into conflict, I recognize that my own values are largely derived existentially from the life that I lived. That had my life been very different I might now be espousing the opposite point of view. And that in regard to opposite points of view, both sides have reasonable arguments to make. There does not appear to be a way for philosophers to propose an optimal point of view.

Thus when I was a Marxist and a feminist, there was no doubt about it: abortion was the absolute political right of all women. Now, I am drawn and quartered by the arguments from both sides. And I recognize that had I not been drafted into the Army allowing me to meet men who profoundly reconfigured my very conservative views on abortion into very radical leftist views, I might easily have remained staunchly anti-abortion as a devout Christian.

Here all you can do with respect to an issue like abortion is to explain to me why you believe this.

How are your decisions not the embodiment of how I construe the “self” here? How do you deal with those reasonable arguments able to be made by both sides?

To wit: abortion.procon.org/

You tell me: which point of view is the most rational? Which narrative is most in sync with virtue?

You either believe that it is one over the other or a rendition of “you’re right from your side, I’m right from mine”

Then what? Then it’s who has the power to enforce their own moral agenda.

It’s not a question of what I would have happen, but how I have come to actually react to those who don’t share my own values. Values that, in any event, I have come to construe as an “existential contraption”.

Another vast generaliztion about generalizing itself.

And political economy is rooted historically in all of the various ways in which the means of production allowed a particular community to set up the distribution of goods and services.

Thus the behaviors of those in nomadic communities, hunter and gatherer communities, slash and burn communities, feudal communities, mercantile communities, capitalist communities and socialist communities overlapped in the sense that they are all of the same species of animal. Human all too human. But there were also differences more in sync with each particular type of economy. And how that then engendered more or less separate and distinct social and political interactions.

Imagine if Plato were around today. What would be the same in his thinking and what might be very, very different?

This is an unfortunate viewpoint. You might have gone in another direction. What you are saying is that you don’t have any compelling reason for action. Most people do have a reason. That may be ideology or religion or god knows what, but when you’re lost in an Existential wasteland and reckon that no one is going to come and rescue you (which is a very Existentialist thing to reckon) you have to strike out in some direction or perish. In this context (are you getting the whole metaphor here?) any direction is better than standing still.

No “I” need fracture here. It’s the “I” that’s getting you away from crying beasts and back to your hut in the shadow of the Temple of Dasein.

Distributive justice, the political morality if you will, is like this, too. So what?

I don’t think Plato would be very different. There are still plenty of Platonists around.

Philosophers can help us to understand what the words “right” and “wrong” mean, before we decide which particular acts are right or wrong. That’s why they so often fall prey to metaphysical lust. So, a morally good act is right because it’s consistent with previously accepted principles. Like Rawls’ fairness or Aristotles virtue.

In the end, moral philosophers help describe the Social Contract, whether that’s what they’re trying for or not. Social contracts occur not when everyone agrees, but because not everyone agrees. If you have no concept of the operative (at a certain time and place) social contract, you will be lost indeed. The social contract is the motherfucking context.

So you were prochoice and now you’re… am I to believe that you have done no thinking, throughout all these influential experiences? What is your case against legal abortion?

Nice.

No, I’m suggesting that what compels the moral objectivists and the political idealists to action is the belief that they are in touch with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

Just as the religious folks are compelled by their faith in God. Just as the political ideologues are compelled by their own rendition of Humanism. Just as the KT crowd is compelled by their own [meaning Satyr’s] assessment of nature.

What is of greatest importance [in my view] is not what they believe that compels them to action, but that they are convinced there is a way in which to know this.

This is the psychological component of “I” that sustains both comfort and consolation in a postmodern world in which meaning and purpose are becoming increasingly more problematic.

One or another variation of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

Instead, I speculate that “I” here is an existential, construction, deconstruction and reconstruction from the cradle to the grave.

They are not lost in an existential wasteland because they do not construe “I” here as I do. So I ask them to reconfigure their moral and political narrative into a discussion involving an actual context. How are they not fractured and fragmented as I am? What is their argument in reacting to the components that are particularly meaningful to me.

Instead, over and again, they “explain” themselves by generating “general descriptions” like you do here.

I’m not arguing that “I” need fracture with regards to conflicting goods. I’m only pointing out that given how I have come to think about “I” at the intersection of identity, value judgments and political power, “I” am fractured and fragmented.

If you are not, okay, fine, try to explain to me why you are not given a particular context. Or don’t and move on to others.

So, in acknowledging this, you are confirming what many believe to be that crucial intertwining of “I” in unique sets of existential variables out in a particular world historically, culturally, and in terms of ones own personal experiences.

That, in other words, this is what the deontologists, the philosopher-kings and the political ideologues [among others] conveniently leave out of their own one-size-fits-all dogmatic strictures.