True enough. But I make no bones about my own goal here: to be yanked up out of the hole that I am. Pertaining both to this side of the grave [moral nihilism] and to the other side of it [oblivion].
Most folks here know that if they engage me in a discussion and/or a debate, the trajectory will sooner or later get around to “how ought one to live?” in a No God world? As that pertains to either the OP or to any other context in which values come into conflict.
As that relates to this:
An exploration into the existential parameters of ones own particular set of political prejudices.
This part:
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.
This is how I – “I” – think about my own moral and political values as “existential contraptions”. How then do others not think about their own in this manner?
Zero will either go there with respect to his own value judgments or he would be advised to avoid me here altogether.
After all, you and I had our own rather protracted exchanges here once, right? You basically pulled away from them after having given me your best shot.
And I will be the first one to admit that the problem there revolved around my own failure to grasp that your “pragmatic” frame of mind was more reasonable than my own. It just didn’t sink in. I – “I” – am still as “fractured and fragmented” as ever.
Even in a world sans God sans objective values other people may very well have internal lives and goals of their own.
Okay, and they will either discuss this at length with regard to the value judgments they bring to the Trump/Putin relationship [on this thread] or they won’t.
The “internal lives and goals” that particular individuals have here are in my view largely “existential contraptions” rooted in dasein. And that is no less true of Trump and Putin. They just happen to be in possession of the sort of power that could ramify the lives of literally millions of people.
So, are they moral objectivists more or less than they are moral nihilists? That might be an interesting discussion.