People don’t want to be killed by tornadoes or earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or tidal waves either. But who accuses these “natural disasters” of being immoral?
Unless, of course, some come to argue that God ought not to have created a planet where these calamitous events happen all the time.
It can be said that God or Nature created human biology, precipitating any number of contexts in which the death or the birth of the unborn takes place. And while both are clearly predicated on the objective facts embedded in the evolution of life on planet earth, they precipitate in turn very, very different reactions.
Why then don’t our reactions here revolve around the sort of knowledge and experience an ethicist can glean from his or her own understanding of human biology?
Doctors can be praised by some for being skilled at aborting embryos and fetuses, while being condemned by others for acting immorally in doing precisely that.
Okay, Mr. Ethicist, using your knowledge and experience, tell us the moral obligation of all rational men and women here.
All I ever do is to make the distinction between those who insist their way to approach social, political and economic confrontations that involve conflicting goods is the right way, versus those who argue that given conflicting sets of assumptions, conflicting goods can be defended.
So you are either telling us that how you view Communism is the way in which all reasonable people ought to, or you are acknowledging – re “you’re right from your side and I’m right from mine” – that there are those able to reasonably defend Communism given a different set of assumptions about human interactions: “we” more than “me”, “cooperation” more than “competition”, the “collective” more than “individualism”.
I’m merely noting that over the years I have come to abandon objectivism here. That, instead, here and now, I have come to grapple with human morality based on how I have come to construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
No, I argue that assessments of success and failure are largely existential contraptions rooted in dasein historically and culturally. Whereas the objectivists insist that the only rational measure of either one is their own.
This always revolves around the behaviors either prescribed or proscribed in any particular community in order to achieve the so-called “ideal” society.
Do aborted babies suffer? Are they tortured? Are they dying? What should a successful, ethical soiety prescribe and proscribe here?
You have come back to this particular frame of mind a number of times. Of course, from my frame of mind, I imagine that being convinced can only happen when a particular moral narrative/political agenda is accepted by both sides. One side convinces the other.
That this is an option for folks like you is, in my view, precisely that which sustains the comfort and the consolation embodied in a life that revolves around the “real me” in sync with an optimal set of moral guidelines.
Again, as I see it, that is basically the whole point of objectivism.