In other words, you simply did it again. I ask you to situate these Capital Letter Words embedded in what I construe to be an analytic contraption, in an exchange that revolves around a context that most of us will be familiar with. I like to focus on abortion here for all the reasons that I have noted on other threads. But, sure, choose your own context, your own conflicting good.
In other words…
…the discussion then shifts from what is in fact true here for all of us, to our oft-time conflicting reactions to the choices/behaviors made by individual women in individual sets of circumstances regarding individual unborn babies.
Here are different reactions: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_abortion
Some who believe in God are able to rationalize abortion, while others are not.
What then does constitute an “inferior” or a “superior” judgment from God here?
And how then do secular philosophers pin down the optimal or the only rational resolution to this particularly ferocious conflicting good?
You need to critically rationalize God away using your highest level of the reason faculty.
The question of an “inferior” or a “superior” God do not arise in relation to the issue [re morality] you raise above.The primary knowledge to deal with the above is Philosophy-proper and Philosophy of Morality and Ethics. The absolute Moral law is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, but within Ethics there are provisions where killing is permissible without triggering guilt.
The basic requirement is ‘equanimity’ so that one do not get shaken in the event any doubts creep in.
From my own frame of mind, this reflects yet again the numbingly scholastic didacticism embedded in the so-called analytic contributions of the “serious philosopher”.
Again, what Will Durant called the “epistemologists”:
“In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company…he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him…He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist.”
It doesn’t surprise me then that you don’t follow “politics”. Of course my problem may well be worse. I do follow politics. Only to come back time and time again to 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 other words, unlike the objectivists, my own “I” here is busted. And then right around the corner is oblivion.
My only option then being to find a narrative that might yank me up out of it. But your narrative in my view is really not all that far removed from the narratives of the folks you are going after. Again, what counts seems less who is right than that one of you must be.
And that ever and always brings me back to one or another rendition of this:
[b]1] For one reason or another [rooted largely in dasein], you are taught or come into contact with [through your upbringing, a friend, a book, an experience etc.] a worldview, a philosophy of life.
2] Over time, you become convinced that this perspective expresses and encompasses the most rational and objective truth. This truth then becomes increasingly more vital, more essential to you as a foundation, a justification, a celebration of all that is moral as opposed to immoral, rational as opposed to irrational.
3] Eventually, for some, they begin to bump into others who feel the same way; they may even begin to actively seek out folks similarly inclined to view the world in a particular way.
4] Some begin to share this philosophy with family, friends, colleagues, associates, Internet denizens; increasingly it becomes more and more a part of their life. It becomes, in other words, more intertwined in their personal relationships with others…it begins to bind them emotionally and psychologically.
5] As yet more time passes, they start to feel increasingly compelled not only to share their Truth with others but, in turn, to vigorously defend it against any and all detractors as well.
6] For some, it can reach the point where they are no longer able to realistically construe an argument that disputes their own as merely a difference of opinion; they see it instead as, for all intents and purposes, an attack on their intellectual integrity…on their very Self.
7] Finally, a stage is reached [again for some] where the original philosophical quest for truth, for wisdom has become so profoundly integrated into their self-identity [professionally, socially, psychologically, emotionally] defending it has less and less to do with philosophy at all. And certainly less and less to do with “logic”.[/b]