What on earth do you mean by this? Cite an example of an offline situation in which you are capable of addressing your own actions. Actions involving conflicts with others who did not share your own moral and political values.
Time and again I come back 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.
Why? Because it delineates that crucial existential juncture where unique personal experiences get intertwined in unique philosophical and political narratives.
And how exactly is this trajectory not an example of me bringing my behaviors down to earth? How is this not an example of my being “concrete”? Where is the equivalent from you?
It’s just that with regard to many other moral issues relevant to my life, the same framework applies.
For example, go here: procon.org/
There are any number of moral/political conflagrations in which both sides are able to raise reasonable points/arguments that the other side is not able to just make go away.
And common sense tells us that our own value judgments are going to be embedded/intertwined in the actual sequence of experiences that we had and on our own particular access to information, knowledge and ideas.
Meaning, in other words, it highlights in turn all of the experiences, information, knowledge and ideas that we did not have or come across.
You either think through the “for all practical purposes” implications of this as I do or you don’t. But I would never argue that all rational men and women are obligated to.
All I can do however is to note that which seems reasonable to me here and now.
I use this example in particular because it articulates that point in my life where I myself started to seriously question my own objectivism.
Clearly, to the extent that others come to sink down into the hole that I am in, they will suffer in the same way as I do. Just as those religious objectivists who came to sink down into Nietzsche’s “God is dead” narrative, came to suffer in turn. Gone was their immortality, gone was their salvation, gone was their scriptured morality.
Should that then have motivated Nietzsche to keep his opinions to himself?
My arguments here are either reasonable or they are not.
No, my aim is to bring whatever manner in which we define the meaning of these words out into the world of conflicting human behaviors.
What does it mean to be a nihilist or an objectivist or an ironist when describing a particular moral context? How might a nihilist or an ironist or an objectivist react to, say, Trump’s position regarding gun control?
Is there a narrative/agenda here that would in fact reflect the optimal set of behaviors. A nihilist and an ironist would suggest that there is not. But think how ironic it would be if he argued in turn that all rational men and women are obligated to think the same!