If there is one thing I am clearly preoccupied with at ILP, it is relationship between moral and political value judgments and the existential tajectory of the lives that we live.
And, in almost every thread in which I post about this relationship, I eventually get around to this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
This because in it are embedded two experiences that were of fundamental importance in shaping and then reconfiguring my own moral and political narratives.
Over the years, I have gone from an objectivist frame of mind [right vs. wrong, good vs. evil] to a way of thinking about morality in human interactions that basically revolves around moral nihilism.
And, then, in turn, this resulted in my tumbling down into a philosophical “hole” such that for all practical purposes, “I” became increasing more fragmented.
This hole:
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 other words, I am no longer able to think of myself as being in sync with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.
So, I decided to create this thread in order for others to at least make the attempt to describe their own value judgments existentially. Values as they became interwined over the course of their lives in “experiences, relationships and information, knowledge and ideas.”
The part where theory is tested in practice out in particular contexts out in particular worlds.
This thread is not for those ever intent on providing us with “general descriptions” of human interactions. Interactions that are then described almost entirely using technical or academic language.
Instead, this thread is for trying to explain [to the best of your ability] why you think you came to value some behaviors over others. Linking both the experiences you had and the ideas that you came upon that shaped and molded your thinking in reacting to them.
From time to time I will bring it back to the top in case any new members might have an interest in this.