Note to others:
That is Mr Reasonable’s response to this:
[b]
Sure, you can lie. Of course the Kantians might object.
Yes, that’s certainly one way to look at it. You can watch the news from day to day and argue that philosophy has no role to play in it. That when folks like Plato and Aristotle explored, among other things, ethics and politics it all revolved formally/epistemologically around philosophical realism.
But then…
Note to others:
A Satyr by any other name?
If you understood philosophy and could grasp epistemology, then you wouldn’t be going around thinking that nothing can be known, and you wouldn’t be going around thinking that equivalent rhetoric = equivalent reality. Some things we can know based on the way we combine observations with a methodology that’s constructed to rule out certain possibilities and to guarantee certain necessities are accounted for.
When have I ever argued otherwise? Instead, my argument pertains more “for all practical purposes” to the “use value” and the “exchange value” of intellectual contraptions like this out in the world that we interact in. And, in particular, when those interactions come into conflict.
Again, you seem convinced that the role of the philosophers here is to just punt everything to the politicians.
And yet even here I agree. It’s just that some folks embrace a particular moral and political narrative/agenda that revolves around one or another rendition of “right makes might”. And while they may not justify being “one of us” by way of a philosophical argument, they still huff and puff at those they deem “one of them” as though there really was a way in which to differentiate right from wrong, good from evil.
Some do this “naturally” by way of this:
1] I am rational
2] I am rational because I have access to the ideal
3] I have access to the ideal because I grasp the one true nature of the objective world
4] I grasp the one true nature of the objective world because I am rational
But not you? You just somehow, what, “intuit” that you’re right?
You seem to want the difference between right and wrong to be constructed the same way as our knowledge that mixing certain chemicals yields certain results. That’s not how knowledge works. There are varying degrees of certainty that can be ascertained given the conditions under which we gain knowledge, and the kind of knowledge that we can gain under those conditions or another kind.
On the contrary, my reaction here is that this is, well, reasonable . I merely root it instead in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
And then to folks like you I try to probe what unfolds “in your head” when your own values come into conflict with others. How are you not entangled in my dilemma?
After all, perhaps one day I will come upon a frame of mind that allows me to yank myself up out of it.
Again:
How do you claim that the world is when your own values do come in conflict with others? How are reasonable men and women able to make a proper distinction here when it comes to rewarding or punishing particular behaviors?
Cite some examples.[/b]