What I am looking for revolves around the existential evolution of your views on abortion. Your own rendition of 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.
Why?
Because this relates precisely to my argument about values being rooted substantively in the actual life that you lived. Embedded in a particular historical and cultural context. Predicated on a particular sequence of experiences, relationships and access to information/knowledge.
Once you are able to grasp “I” here as an existential contraption, you can then begin to work on an argument that would enable you to transcend it. As a philosopher. To explain to me how you are not entangled in my dilemma above.
By noting specifically contexts in which you confronted others who were at odds with your own values. Contexts/conflicts in which your description might allow us to more clearly grasp a set of behaviors that “in the future” would come to reflect an objective morality in a world sans God.
I believed I have discussed the issue of abortion. I believe this issue even if you do not agree with whatever should be taken as ‘spilt milk’ thus why bother about the past, just focus on the present and plan for the future. Just accept no fallible humans can be absolutely perfect. We already have 7+ billion i.e. much more enough to ensure the reproduction of the next generation and preservation of the species.
Sure, this may be deemed an adequate rejoinder by you, but certainly not by me. Again, just imagine yourself outside that abortion clinic telling those pro-life/pro choice folks to “just focus on the present and plan for the future.”
How on earth does that even begin to obviate the conflicting goods that they will be pummeling each other with?
Instead, I get this…
I am well equipped [theory and practice] not to be emotionally bothered by such a dilemma.
I have no doubt that you have much invested psychologically in believing that this is true. I need but recall how much I had invested psychologically in my own wholly intact dictums.
On the other hand, there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of others down through the ages able to construct a “right makes might” contraption in their head. Anything to sustain “I” in the is/ought world as though morality could be grasped objectively as really just another manifestation of the either/or world.
You just take away the part about immortality and salvation and predict that in the future you will be vindicated.
For the No God folks, this may well be the mother of all psychological defense mechanisms.
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.”
I don’t fit in with Durant’s point.
It is most likely he was referring to academic philosophy, which someone has condemned as ‘incestuous’.As I mentioned above, Philosophy-proper must essentially both be theoretical and practical.
Let’s just agree to disagree then regarding the extent to which your own “world of words” here is, say, deftly intertwined in the lives that we live “for all practical purposes” from day to day. Lives that ever go in and out of sync in a world of conflicting goods.
You know what you believe.
I once did too.