First of all, my own decision to remove myself “here and now” from political commitments, revolves more around issues of health. As you get closer and closer to officially being “old”, the body itself has considerably more to say about what you either can or cannot do.
And while I do continue to make my own “existential leaps” to what are generally construed by most here to be a “liberal” or a “progressive” political agenda, I have no illusions regarding the extent to which “I” here is an “existential contraption”.
And most objectivists [from either the left or the right] will have none of that. So, you more or less learn your lesson after a while. To the extent that you suggest to others that their own political commitments may well be “existential contraptions”, is the extent to which many will back away from you. You are pointing out that the manner in which you are down in your hole here may also be applicable to them someday. And that is precisely when “I” here begins to crumble. It crumbled for me, why not for them?
Others are either willing to grapple seriously with the implications of that [re their own sense of “self” in the is ought world] or they aren’t.
Look what’s at stake after all.
Sure, out in the real world – the world of actual conflicting goods – the social, political and economic permutations can accumulate dramatically. All three approaches become entangled in any one particular context. Depending in part on the extent to which the objectivists and the nihilists and the narcissists/sociopaths are themselves entangled in either assessing the situation or in resolving it.
But to the extent that the choices/values here are in fact rooted in dasein more so than in philosophical contraptions like deontolgy, is the the extent [in my view] to which moderation, negotiation and compromise reflect the best of all possible worlds.
Unless of course someone is able to contoct an assessment and a resolution that he or she is able to demonstrate to others as the optimal or the only rational way in which to embody human interactions out in any particular world.
Here again though [aside from one extreme context] you are noting this only as a general description of human interactions entangled in conflicted goods.
With issues like abortion, capital punishment, animal rights, the role of governemnt, gay marriage, gun control etc., there are considerable numbers of people on both sides of the issue.
And, even with regard to extreme contexts like rape, child abuse, genocide or slavery, the nihilists are still able to argue that in a No God world, it is perfectly reasonable to embody choices that revolve basically around “what’s in it for me?”
The sociopaths main concern is not whether their behviors are right or wron, but whether or not they can get away with doing something that gratifies what they construe to be in their own best interests.
But to what extent is this frame of mind itself just one more “existential contraption”?
The point is that many religionists will make this very point in arguing basically that even if God does not exist, He would have to be invented. Why? Because otherwise, any and all human behaviors are able to be rationalized from any one particular point of view rooted in any one particular sequence of experiences embodied by any one particular individual out in any one particular world construed from any one particular point of view.
And, from my frame of mind, objectivists more or less sense that if this is ever construed as applicable to their own “I”, then, like mine, it will begin to crumble. At least with respect to value judgments.
And, sure, it would be fascinating for someone like me to engage in a discussion such as this with someone like Martin Luther King. To the extent that he was an objectivist re the existence of God, his own “I” would have had a rather rock-solid foundation. But was he? Or, instead, was his faith more problematic. As, for example, embodied in the character Father Ralph de Bricassart from the novel The Thron Birds?
Here, again, there so many different possible manifestations of “I” because there are so many different lives that any one particular inidvidual can lead.
Then, from my point of view, you have accumulated a particular set of political prejudices rooted largely in the manner in which your actual lived life predisposed you to go in one direction rather than another.
You can never really know for certain then how things might have been very, very different had the course of your life been very, very different. Here I always go back to the man I was before being drafted into the Army and the man I was after being discharged from it. It is almost impossible for me to convey just how radical the change really was.
And only because my number was low enough to be drafted. And that was an accident of birth.