Making An Effort To Understand
David Wong illustrates moral relativism with some telling examples.
This is the part that, in particular, becomes difficult to convey to others unless the discussion revolves around an examination of conflicting behaviors derived from conflicting value judgments.
No doubt many who have embraced moral narratives up and down the political spectrum have invested considerable time and effort in “thinking through” an issue in order to come up with what they construe to be the most reasonable [and thus virtuous] frame of mind. A perspective they then use to pursue political policies reconfigured into laws. Laws, in other words, that, once enforced, get down to the nitty gritty of human interactions: actually rewarding and punishing people for the behaviors they choose. Thus precipitating consequences that never crop up in discussions like these. Some here may even acknowledge that those opposed to their own values are able to convey their own intelligent arguments.
The difference between them and me, however, is that, even when the exchange does focus in on particular contexts, I become entangled in 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.”
…in a way that they do not.
That’s the part I am rarely able to “get across” to others. They still seem convinced themselves there is in fact a “real me” embodied in their extant Self and that as a consequence they are able to align this Self with the argument that they believe encompasses “the right thing to do”.
Instead, my own frame of mind here is inclined more towards what Richard Rorty called “ironism”:
[b] "She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
"She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
"Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. "[/b]
Only [of course] in exploring this intellectual contraption itself by taking it out into the world of actual conflicting goods in actual existential contexts only precipitates the same gap between words and worlds.
Then I’m back to more words still in my signature threads which in turn are rarely understood by others.
So, sure, I’ve got to conclude that this failure to communicate is derived from the fact that my arguments are just less reasonable than theirs. Instead, I cling stubbornly to the conviction – mere assumption? – that my arguments are rejected because the objectivists recognize what is at stake for them if “I” am in fact closer to whatever the truth may finally be.