Okay, but here’s the problem with this from my frame of mind.
Any number of folks can claim to be pragmatists. They generally eschew “might makes right”/“survival of the fittest” political contraptions. They generally eschew “right makes might”/“kingdom of ends” political [and religious] contraptions.
Instead, most tend toward “moderation, negotiation and compromise”/“democracy and the rule of law” contraptions.
Like me. But, unlike most pragmatists, I am not able to think myself into believing that my own value judgments are not hopelessly entangled in dasein and conflicting goods. “I” am instead bascially drawn and quartered in confronting my “self” in confronting issues like abortion or Communism.
But no other mammal comes even close to grappling with their day to day interactions as does the human species. Instead, for them, it is almost always bahavior rooted far more in biological imperatives.
Yeah, but you have managed to think yourself into believing that “I” here, in taking steps to accumulate “preferences”, need not be concerned with the parts about dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. At least not to the extent that my “I” recognizes them as crucial in coming to grips with understanding why “I” want ths instead of that.
They are simply less construed as “fabrications” and “contraptions” to you.
And how is this not an assumption that deep down inside lurks this “real me” such that even had your life been “very, very different” you would still be pursuing the same “preferences”.
But the only way to test this at all is to find your life being upended by an avalance of new experiences that takes “I” into new contexts like never before. Does “I” stay the same?
So, has that been the case with you?
For me there are two contexts in particular that are applicable:
1] being drafted into the Army as a staunch conservative Christian and coming out of the Army as a radical Marxist atheist
2] the Mary/John/William Barrett experience which precipitated the deconstruction of my own objectivist frame on mind
My point though is this: only to the extent that you illustrate the text by situating your preferences “out in a particular context” am I likely to understand how “for all practical purposes” your “I” here remains less fragmented than mine. And that entails noting specifically how in a particular conflict with someone [or regarding a value judgment pertaining to an issue “in the news”] you manage to keep “I” more rather than less intact.
Because, sooner or later, despite recognizing that had your life actually been very, very different, you might be championing a conflicting value judgments, you settle for one moral and political narrative rather than another. Precisely because you have not allowed the parts about dasein and conflicting goods to rend your own “I” as mine has been.
That [again] is your rendition of my reaction. I steer clear of words like “must” or “inevitable” when confronting these problematic relationships. All I can do here is to note my own understanding of what I construe to be the profoundly existential juncture that is identity, value judgments and political power.
But this is precisely my point in connecting the dots here between “I” as the embodiment of dasein and particular preferences out in the is/ought world. Whether one refers to things like “religion” or “ideology” or “deolotology” or “pragmatism” or “nature” etc., as “contraptions” or not doesn’t make them any more or less effective in providing “I” with a font able make one’s psychological predisposition more or less comforting and consoling.
Whatever works I always say.
My point here is that I recognize my own value judgments as more in pieces because I recognize that “I” itself here as more an existential contraption than your “I” does.
Thus…
First of all, I acknowledge right from the start that my reaction to you here is no less an existential contraption enbedded in “in my view”.
As for, “I make no judgments on the weight of that based on pragmatism or ANYTHING ELSE”, what on earth does this mean?
Take us out into your world, note a particular context, and actually illustrate your point here. Judgments about what particular behaviors that have come into conflict?
Wolves?!!!
How close is that to the argumnts that Satyr and his clique/claque over at KT would make when in describing the nature of human interactions they come back time and and again to lions and zebras.
For wolves, the “contraption” is almost entirely instinctual. Genes with only the slimmest connection to memes. Given the extent to which they can learn new ways in which to susrvive. But none of them to my knowledge would describe their behaviors as either more or less deonotological, or more or less practical. The “stuff” that I am adding here revolves around a species of mammal able to actually ponder why one individual has one set of preferences while another has an entirely different set?
What, epistemologically, can we know about this? How is the manner in which I construe these conflicted interactions at the intersection of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy more or less reasonable than the manner in which you construe them given the manner in which you describe yourself as a pragmatist?