Again: if someone were to ask me explain why, here and now, I think about abortion as I do [embedded in my dilemma], I explain it thusly:
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.
In other words, I note the extent to which my current ambiguous/ambivalent narrative is derived from:
1] grappling with the issue intellectually, philosophically, politically etc., and…
2] embedded in actual experiences [out in a particular world] that tugged me in different directions existentially
From my frame of mind then, it is always the manner in which value judgments are intertwined – given both approaches– that render them only more or less intelligible. Then it comes down to those things that we believe are true “in our head” that we can in turn convince others to believe are true. And then empirically, scientifically establishing it one way or another.
That is where AutSider, in my opinion, refuses to go. Unless of course he can convince you and others that he has in fact gone there.
After all, you and I have gone down this particular path ourselves, haven’t we?
True. But, in my view, there is an important distinction to be made between identity in the either/or world and identity in the is/ought world.
There are facts about me that are true for everyone. “I” on the other hand, in expressing value judgments [embedded in both moral and political narratives], seems far more an “existential contraption” to me.
Unless of course I’m wrong. Yet how would we go about establishing that [objectively] in turn? I don’t think that this is possible in a world sans God.
But then isn’t this conjecture just one more “existential contraption” in turn?
And here [I suspect] your guess is as good as mine.