back to the beginning: morality

Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.

Here I am tugged in conflicting directions. On the one hand, in the absence of a God or the secular equivalent, it’s true: all things are permitted. Why? Because, for one reason or another, all things can be rationalized. After all, look at the history of human behavior to date. What behaviors haven’t been rationalized? At times as an end in itself, at times as a means to an end.

And then those who are able to justify any and all behaviors because they reason that in the absence of God or any other demonstrable objective morality, their own self-interests becomes the font of choice. For them everything revolves around not getting caught for doing things they know that others deem to be immoral or sinful.

At the same time, however, it is not true that “permissibility rules” are just dismissed out of hand as all equally valid. It depends on the context and the actual substantive arguments made by those arguing for one rather than another set of behaviors. The part embedded in dasein embedded in a particular historical and cultural community in which rules of behavior are necessary to forge a consensus regarding the least dysfunctional society.

Thus:

Yeah, that is one way to look at it. And where is the philosophical argument able to encompass all possible contexts in which torture may occur? An argument in which there is no doubt regarding what one is obligated to do or not do as a rational and moral human being.

Instead, out in the “for all practical purposes” real world that we live in, different people have different opinions about torture. Rooted in particular daseins interacting out in a particular world. Assumptions can be made by those all along the political spectrum. And, one way or another, actual laws have to be enacted to deal with contexts in which torture is a reality.

And here enforced behaviors can revolve either around might makes right, right makes might, or democracy and the rule of law.

Then the extent to which any particular individual comes to be as “fractured and fragmented” as I am out in the is/oight world. That too is no less the embodiment of dasein.

Teaching Ethics: What’s The Harm?
Patrick Stokes discusses some of the ethical problems arising in teaching ethics.

There it is. How does one realistically discuss/teach the philosophy of ethics without taking the technical arguments out into the world and testing them against conflicting moral assessments of what is unfolding given conflicting descriptive assessments of what is unfolding? And then the gap between what individual daseins describe as happening and what they believe ought to be happening instead.

Especially for those intent on arguing that actual moral obligations can be adduced [philosophically or otherwise] given the most rational assessments that there are.

Exactly. I would bring followers of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant etc., into these daunting, painful contexts and explore with them the manner in which the components of my own moral philosophy [nihilism] are out of sync with their own assessments. And as soon as they attempted to yank the discussions up into the clouds of intellectual contraptions I’d yank them back down. I’d make it a stipulation that in my classroom, discussion of moral and political value judgments are always intertwined in theory and practice.

What am I missing here? The discussion is about the pros and cons of euthanasia and a student and his family is embedded precisely in this at times excruciating moral dilemma…but bringing it up is “glib and crass”?

I’d make it clear that in my classroom students were expected to bring the ideas professed by philosophers down through the ages out of the technical clouds by intertwining the definition and meaning given to words in any particular argument out into the world that they themselves have experienced.

Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

But the ambiguity here derives precisely from the complex and convoluted interaction between what we think and what we do. We think what we do based on the panoply of variables in our lives that are largely beyond our control. Let alone being able to completely understand.

After all, a Marxist or a fascist or a misogynist or a feminist or a liberal or a conservative or an objectivist or an existentialist or a nihilist or a Platonist or a Kantian or a Nietzschean can all claim to be what they do.

So, the far more important question is why do we choose to think the thoughts that precipitate the things that we choose to do.

From my frame of mind, this part…

…still requires one to reconfigure it as a “general description intellectual contraption” into a description of a particular context, out in a particular world construed from a particular point of view.

And here the components of my own moral philosophy are no less applicable to her.

Trust me: the book you are looking for here is her novel The Blood of Others. The ideas encompassed here may not be clear and rigorous in an academic sense, but they take her scholastic argument about an ambiguous ethics out into the world — a particular world in which certain French citizens risked their life and limb in the resistance against Hitler’s Nazis.

And that [in my view] basically explains the reaction of many here to my own take on morality being an existential contraption rooted in dasein. And not just the objectivists. To feel fractured and fragmented down in a reality “hole” is the last thing most of us wish to think or want to believe is a reasonable point of view.

Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

Which is precisely what most of us choose not to do. For many because they have been indoctrinated to view themselves and the world around them in a particular way out in a particular community; and then basically they embody this received identity all the way to the grave.

Or because they have come to embody one or another rendition of this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

Either way it is the psychology of objectivism that sustains their capacity to resist disturbing frames of mind that often prevail when confronting moral/political ambiguity and uncertainty head on.

Indeed, it’s not for nothing they are everywhere in this philosophy forum. And on most others. What they all share in common of course is the belief that there is in fact a “real me” able to connect the dots [philosophically or otherwise] to the “right thing to do”.

They all swear by that, don’t they? Instead where the exchanges often become quite fierce – think liberals vs. conservatives here – is when all sides insist it is their own moral narrative and political agenda that must prevail. Why? Because all rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to think what they do. Then around and around they go.

Some just go further and exclude entire groups from their ranks. Based on gender or race or ethnicity or sexual preference.

Which also explains why so many of them avoid at all cost bringing their political ideals out into the world as I have come to understand it given the components of my own moral philosophy. They’ll be sticking with their objectivist “serious philosophy” one suspects until the day they die.

Here, the liberals may heap scorn on the conservatives heaping scorn right back on them, but: they all cling to the ideals themselves. Only the moral foundation and the political prejudices ever change.

That and the definitions.

Here of course is where this particular existentialist reconfigured himself into a moral nihilist. All courses of action can be rationalized in a No God world. If only because the “nature of our relationships” can in turn become attached existentially to various sets of assumptions that prevail on all sides of the conflicting goods wars.

And then the perspective of the narcissists and sociopaths. There may well be a philosophical argument that obviates the assumptions they make about human interactions in a No God world, but I haven’t come across it of late.

Only I am the first to acknowledge that my own arguments here cannot be excluded from my own arguments here.

Of course all you need but do here is to insist that I exclude them anyway. Anything to keep yourself up out of the hole yourself. After all, look what is at stake here if you do start to tumble down into it.

Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

Actually, given the conflicting assessment of the relationship between “I” and “we” that plagued the relationship between Sartre and Camus, Sartre’s existentialism leads to anything but a “clear individualism”. After all, who associates that with Maoism?

Instead, Sartre recognized just how foolish it is to ignore the points raised by Marx and Engels in regard to social, political and economic interactions…given the existence of a particular political economy. And given the very real historical components embedded in class struggle.

What makes other people hell, is their tendency to objectify us. They refuse to see is as an individual subject and subsume us in their own rendition of the “human condition”. They become objectivists. I merely expand on that given the components of my own personal philosophy.

Nuanced? Here, however, it is “characterized by subtle shades of meaning or expression” in yet another intellectual contraption. Freedom? Okay, but freedom given what particular context viewed from what particular point of view. Simone de Beauvoir obviously grappled with the idiosyncratic/historical, personal/political relationship between “I” and “we” when tackling gender in The Second Sex.

In other words, women are both individuals who embody one or another set of personal experiences and, historically, culturally, politically etc., members of the female sex. It seems futile to try to pin that down so as to establish definitively where “I” ends and “we” begin.

Then it’s just a matter of the extent to which in approaching it at all, “I” becomes more or less fractured and fragmented.

Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

This, in my view, is being wildly optimistic in today’s world. Instead, just in perusing news media headlines from day to day, we know that ethics revolves more and more and more around “one of us” thumping “one of them”. Folks on opposite ends of the moral and political spectrum seem considerably more intent on “using the existence of others” in order attain [and then sustain] their own political agenda. God help those who don’t join in our projects. Thus, here, “hell is other people” because they refuse to objectify themselves as we do.

And yet here we know all too well that this “general description” varies considerably down through the ages historically and across all manner of cultural divides. Some children are locked into a moral vice as soon as their parents, church, community etc., are able to begin in on indoctrinating them. Only it is not seen as indoctrination at all, but simply what is expected of those in raising children properly.

As for the good or the poor use of freedom, this too is also an existential contraption by and large. What becomes crucial for existentialists is that freedom revolve more around “authenticity”. Treating the self as a subject willing to dig deeper into an understanding of the world around it; rather than as those who tend instead to subsume “I” in one or another God/No God, totalitarian dogma.

Still, from my frame of mind, the “hole”…

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…does not go away.

Then this part:

All I do here is to extend this “self-deception” to any number of existentialists themselves. It is one thing to make a conscious effort to aim ones behaviors in the general direction of authenticity, and another thing altogether to imagine that this makes dasein, conflicting goods and political economy go away.

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

Wow. Two of my main philosophical interests combined: morality and free will.

In other words, how you think about one leading to particular conclusions about the other. And, of course, whether those conclusions are the only ones you were ever able to come to.

As for an elevated or exagerated sense of one’s own importance, I’m definitely on board here. Again, presuming I have the capacity – the free will – to choose not to be.

Why? Because over the course of the life that we live [and especially in our childhood] there are any number of variables we have little or no understanding of or control over. We merely configure and then reconfigure over and over again what we think we know [or have been indoctrinated to know] about the relationship between genes and memes out in a particular world understood from a particular point of view.

The part where I get stuck. The part where I’m thinking I must not be understanding the arguments correctly. In a wholly determined universe as I understand it, Einstein would have thought that what seemed obvious to him could not have not seemed obvious to him. And that there was never a question of him bothering to explain his reasoning if he was compelled by the laws of matter to not explain it.

Yes, that is precisely my own reaction. Either compelled by nature or not. Einstein’s lifelong support of or opposition to anything at all is either embedded in the laws of nature or there is some aspect of the human brain [sans God] that amounted to matter evolving not only into the capacity to achieve conscious thought, but, as well, self-conscious thought that involved the freedom to choose among conflicting options.

So now the author’s focus will be on those who are not just “casual observers”.

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

Really, for many, isn’t this possibility the most disturbing aspect of believing that all anyone thinks, feels, says or does is exempt from moral judgment other than as judgments that are no less compelled by the laws of matter.

Yet here we are unable to demonstrate conclusively that this is not the case. Or, rather, I am not able to demonstrate this to myself.

On the other hand, I have to admit that someone that I am totally oblivious regarding has in fact demonstrated that human beings either do or do not have free will. All I can do is to act on what I think is true here and now.

Just like you, right?

Of course my own frame of mind here is all that more convoluted still. Even if I take my leap to autonomy, that autonomy is but the embodiment of dasein and conflicting goods. I am free to react to the behaviors of others, but my reaction appears to be but an existential contraption unable to conclude one way or the other which behaviors are moral or immoral.

Up to and including me typing these words and you reading them? How inexorable are the laws of matter?

Back again to this. The part that makes absolutely no sense to me given my own understanding of determinism. The part where it could never have made sense to me.

How is the part about “focusing” here not in turn merely another inherent, necessary manifestation of what can only be? Einstein “took” only what he was compelled to take. The “wake up call” is, in turn, either compelled or not.

As for the “myriad of factors”, how vague will any of our understandings of them be going back to an understanding of existence itself?

bro. all that fracturing and fragmenting happens because you are over-analyzing everything. leave that silly shit to the philosophers and just pick something that pleases you. and don’t ask ‘why’ or if it’s ‘the right thing to do’. do like me, man. i’m irreproachably absolutely positively indubitably certain that i don’t like capitalists. like i don’t even examine why anymore. that was ten years ago. whether this is a good or bad thing and whether i am compelled by the laws of nature to do this, couldn’t be more irrelevant to me. you gotta follow your nose, biggs. like when you look at the world and recognize that there are stock piles of food going bad while millions of people are starving, or that there are more empty, unused houses then there are homeless people in this country, you know something ain’t right. you don’t need a transcendental critique of pure reason to figure this shit out, homes.

First, of course, this conclusion, in and of itself is, to me, just another manifestation of dasein. You came to it in much the same manner I came to mine: existentially.

Otherwise, one might argue that, actually, using the tools of philosophy or science, one is able to arrive at the one truly rational frame of mind.

But even this conclusion is [to me] just another existential contraption.

And the bottom line [mine] is that in your day to day interactions with others, you are embedded in capitalism up to your eyeballs. Historically, culturally and experientially. It’s everywhere in this country. Sure, you can take your own subjective leap to “irreproachably absolutely positively indubitably [being] certain that i don’t like capitalists”, but that doesn’t make my point go away.

And the other bottom line [mine] is that had your life been very, very different, there’s no saying beyond all doubt that you would not in fact have become a capitalist yourself. And, in turn, in my view, there is no way that you can be absolutely certain in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change, that new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge, won’t propel you to change your mind down the road.

That is until someone actually is able to establish beyond all doubt the most rational manner in one is obligated to think about capitalism.

You either grasp this as I do or you don’t. But how, in not being me, could you? I’m fractured and fragmented in regard to capitalism because, given the points I make in my signature threads, it still seems reasonable to be. Here and now. Just as, when I was a radical Marxist-Leninist – an objectivist – it seemed reasonable to revolt against it.

But the one thing I am definitely not arguing is that my own assessment here [either as an intellectual contraption or taken out into the world of human interactions] reflects the manner in which others are themselves obligated to think about it.

well i wasn’t really presenting a formal ‘conclusion’ because i wasn’t advancing an argument. but i did make a few indicative statements of fact so i’ll let you have this one.

define ‘truly rational frame of mind’. remember that even complete knowledge - say, understanding epistemology in its fullest sense and arriving at an indisputable conclusion about the nature of knowledge - doesn’t get past the naturalistic fallacy and provide any existential guidance for what one ought to do to be rational. philosophy and science may work together to get to the bottom of this, but neither can tell you what you should do. i imagine you don’t just mean by ‘rational’ being able to practice good inductive reasoning. you mean something more along the lines of moral judgement and having/holding values. no amount of epistemology can help us here.

but i wouldn’t be ‘me’ then, but another me. so i couldn’t say ‘i could have been otherwise’, only ‘i might not have been, and something else would have been instead.’ we often make the mistake of assuming what is logically possible can also be actually possible. but in a perfectly determined universe, nothing could be other than how it is. so, we can imagine ‘logically’ an alternate possible course of events which led to me becoming a capitalist, but this couldn’t actually happen in this particular universe. this shit gets complicated though with many-universe theory so let’s not go there. it’s interesting stuff, yes, but i can’t find any use in it. that is to say, if i discovered it were true, i still wouldn’t do anything differently.

yeah no i got it… but i avoid this problem in the first place. as there is no ‘right’ way for events to occur in this universe, there is no ‘better or worse’ way in the grandest of sense. there are different ways, and our inclinations toward wanting what we do are not founded on some ‘rationale’ (for reasons mentioned above). justification… in terms of producing lines of reasoning to defend some final conclusion… cannot ever reach a terminus. this is just an aspect of language itself. at some point the advanced thinker will realize that there is no ‘philosophy of right’ responsible for what has, now, become habit in him, and that his preferences, now, are purely a matter of aesthetics. so not only would i be unable to defend, rationally, my insistence that capitalism must die, but i also don’t rely on doing so to be sure it disgusts me. neat, eh? like i said; it’s my nose, man. i can sense its putridity and recoil at the smell of it. don’t ax me how i know because i’m no philosopher, but i know, bro. i know.

Again, my point here revolves around the assumption that, given this exchange itself, you and I have some measure of autonomy in defining anything at all. Also, that in whatever conclusion we arrive at in regard to the correct definition, that has to be measured against the correct definition given the complete understanding of existence itself.

Then the part where we exclude sim worlds, dream worlds, matrix reality etc.

That aside, I make a distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world. The world of mathematics, science, engineering, geology, biology, chemistry, physics etc., seem predicated on that which, from the perspective of the human species, seems as close as we have gotten so far to a “truly rational frame of mind”.

In other words…

Yes, that is basically the gist of the arguments I make in my signature threads. Only I don’t – can’t? – exclude my own argument from my own argument. In many respects it is no less an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

Here, in my view, this sort of assessment needs to be brought out into the world of actual conflicting human behaviors. Such that the points raised are more or less intertwined in a description of any particular ongoing behaviors. That way we see how far the words can go or can’t go when it comes to actually resolving the conflict. My point is that once you reach the part where “I” is as fractured and fragmented as mine is, there is no resolution. There are only leaps of faiths to particular political prejudices precariously embodied by “I” in world awash in contingency, chance and change.

You are able to “avoid this problem” by [seemingly] coming to a different set of assumptions regarding “I” here. Also, I never exclude the possibility that there are right and wrong ways to behave. Either given the existence of God or philosophically/scientifically actual deontological obligations.

All I can point out is that “here and now”, as an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in the staggering vastness of “all there is”, “I” don’t believe that there are.

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

Here we go again, he thought. He being me of course. Is this what folks like peacegirl are aiming to communicate to me? My point then being that we distinguish them only as we were ever able to distinguish them. Given that the human brain is just another necessary component of the laws of nature.

Is anyone at all actually foolish enough to believe in “absolute free will”? This would seem to entail one comprising the only entity in the universe. You and nothing else that could possibly impact on what you think, feel, say and do. On the other hand, in a wholly determined universe as some [compelled or not] posit it, feeling a loss of freedom is just another inherent manifestation of the psychological illusion of freedom.

As though “I” over time and the immediate “I” are somehow two different entities in a universe where “I” is of, by and for nature inside and out. From the cradle to the grave. And then all the way back to star stuff.

An Amoral Manifesto
A special extended column from our (erstwhile) Moral Moments columnist Joel Marks.

Of course we all know that “for all practical purposes” no human community has ever existed in which there were no “rules of behavior”. Behaviors that are either prescribed/rewarded or proscribed/punished.

It merely revolves around one or another rendition and combination of might makes right, right makes might, or moderation, negotiation and compromise. The fact that, historically, philosophy has come into existence hasn’t made that part go away. Philosophers have merely given us new ways to think about it.

After all, unless you choose to abandon all contact with others and live entirely on your own, there are always going to be situations in which, in pursuing your wants and your needs, conflicts will occur.

Instead, the question for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike revolves more around the extent to which right and wrong behavior can be grounded in a font such that the community can turn to it when these conflicts do occur.

Either a religious or a secular font.

Consequently, to propose an amoral manifesto is not unlike proposing any one of the hundreds of moral manifestos that are out there. It still has to be embedded in particular contexts understood by different people in different ways.

Einstein’s Morality
Ching-Hung Woo looks at the many facets of Albert Einstein’s approach to ethics.

This would seem to be an inherently tricky balance. No one is more modest than I am in regard to my own moral values. I believe what I do only because I have convinced myself that what I do believe is the embodiment of dasein out in a particular world understood [here and now] in a particular way. Beyond that my confidence collapses. And yet clearly in any given human community what could be more important than that which is established as behaviors to be rewarded and behaviors to be punished.

It’s a predicament that I argue is beyond the reach of philosophers and their tools. Or, rather, that none have convinced me of their own prescriptions and proscriptions.

Exactly. How could the is/ought world of one particular species of life on one particular planet not be subsumed necessarily in the “deep mysteries of the universe”? Making moral and political objectivism [to me] all the more problematic. Where does human “reason” fit into the explanation of/for the universe itself?

There’s that word again: intuition. And what is it really but something we invented to “encompass” all of the many aspects of what it means to be human. There’s the biological I, the thinking I, the feeling I, the psychological I, the ethnic I, the social I, the political I, the economic I. All imploded down to some “visceral” sense of what it means to embody a “self”.

And, to date, who hasn’t failed to pin it down with respect to reacting to a particular context in which human behaviors come into conflict over ethical values? Other than [of course] the objectivists. Hundreds and hundreds of them all clamoring to embrace their own hopelessly contradictory rendition of “one of us.”

[size=85]Ah, Dasein: the phenomenological closure of Being to mankind, by which Heidegger positioned his fundamental critique of Western thought in terms of a bifurcation of truth (to cite my favored secondary literature on the subject, from the pen of Balthasar) into the ontological a la. Thomistic metaphysics/the Absolute of German Transcendental Idealism and the ontic,- the later constituting man’s existentia or lived-reality, that is, the basic fact of Existence. For Heidegger, the Western tradition had, from its inception, subsumed the ontic to the ontological: that is destruktion; that is the Heideggerian critique. However, the brilliant answer arrived at by Heidegger to this self-manufactured problematics and monumentally inflated straw-man extended to the entire Life of the Mind, at least on the part of the West, was to conduct a reverse operation in subsuming the ontological and all hope of abstract ontology to the ontic, thereby creating a “phenomenological closure to Being” that, besides framing the consciousness of man in terms of a ‘horizon of meaning’ or orientation- a “thrown-ness” into Being, prevented any transcendental Absolute from being used as the basis of an ethos and gave us an equally impermeable and yet vague philosophic Angst, into which all hope of a real ethos (as opposed to the merely cursory ethos of Heidegger’s mysticism or poetics of the Good) and moral project was swallowed up. You must forgive me for not going along with any of that.

" Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true “gender equality” if we forced women to give birth against their wishes."

You forgot one small detail in your line of thinking. That being the fact that the goal of our legal system (the European quasi-states differ in this respect, to be sure) is not gender equality, Iambiguous. We do not respect the group- any group, as the primary ethical or legal category, but that of the individual. Granting women the right to vote for example was more about recognizing the individuality of women and deepening the concept of the Individual in general than catering to any nebulous group-identity. It is the natural rights of individuals that we codify in law, since only an individual can take responsibility for their actions and exercise agency, whereas it would be unjust to demand that an individual take responsibility for the deeds or misdeeds of a group they are part of, or to demand that a group must take responsibility for the actions of one of its members, be the group in question gender, race, class, etc. Preserving the sphere of natural rights at the level of the Individual is the only way to ensure the long-term stability of a free society. The moment you begin introducing legislation that caters to the interests of the group over and at the expense of individuals, is the moment you introduce potentially irreparable damage to the underlying moral and political fabric: damage that will breed civil unrest eventually,- just as our populace is now experiencing in the recent catastrophic fracturing of the demos into an endless contest of identity politics, after having been leveled in continuous misjudgments of exactly this nature. [/size]

With all this in mind, your defense of the woman’s “right” to kill her own child due to a need to establish gender equality really just amounts to forcing the unborn child to take responsibility for his mother’s impregnation- by dying, which is illogical and therefor unjust.

Don’t do it, Biggs. Just… let it go, man. Let it go.

Let it go? Well I for one, am just getting started; so:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBo_pLrwAX0[/youtube]

[size=85]Ah, Dasein: the phenomenological closure of Being to mankind, by which Heidegger positioned his fundamental critique of Western thought in terms of a bifurcation of truth (to cite my favored secondary literature on the subject, from the pen of Balthasar) into the ontological a la. Thomistic metaphysics/the Absolute of German Transcendental Idealism and the ontic,- the later constituting man’s existentia or lived-reality, that is, the basic fact of Existence. For Heidegger, the Western tradition had, from its inception, subsumed the ontic to the ontological: that is destruktion; that is the Heideggerian critique. However, the brilliant answer arrived at by Heidegger to this self-manufactured problematics and monumentally inflated straw-man extended to the entire Life of the Mind, at least on the part of the West, was to conduct a reverse operation in subsuming the ontological and all hope of abstract ontology to the ontic, thereby creating a “phenomenological closure to Being” that, besides framing the consciousness of man in terms of a ‘horizon of meaning’ or orientation- a “thrown-ness” into Being, prevented any transcendental Absolute from being used as the basis of an ethos and gave us an equally impermeable and yet vague philosophic Angst, into which all hope of a real ethos (as opposed to the merely cursory ethos of Heidegger’s mysticism or poetics of the Good) and moral project was swallowed up. You must forgive me for not going along with any of that.

" Because out in the world we live in there can be no such thing as true “gender equality” if we forced women to give birth against their wishes."

You forgot one small detail in your line of thinking. That being the fact that the goal of our legal system (the European quasi-states differ in this respect, to be sure) is not gender equality, Iambiguous. We do not respect the group- any group, as the primary ethical or legal category, but that of the individual. Granting women the right to vote for example was more about recognizing the individuality of women and deepening the concept of the Individual in general than catering to any nebulous group-identity. It is the natural rights of individuals that we codify in law, since only an individual can take responsibility for their actions and exercise agency, whereas it would be unjust to demand that an individual take responsibility for the deeds or misdeeds of a group they are part of, or to demand that a group must take responsibility for the actions of one of its members, be the group in question gender, race, class, etc. Preserving the sphere of natural rights at the level of the Individual is the only way to ensure the long-term stability of a free society. The moment you begin introducing legislation that caters to the interests of the group over and at the expense of individuals, is the moment you introduce potentially irreparable damage to the underlying moral and political fabric: damage that will breed civil unrest eventually,- just as our populace is now experiencing in the recent catastrophic fracturing of the demos into an endless contest of identity politics, after having been leveled in continuous misjudgments of exactly this nature. [/size]

With all this in mind, your defense of the woman’s “right” to kill her own child due to a need to establish gender equality really just amounts to forcing the unborn child to take responsibility for his mother’s impregnation- by dying, which is illogical and therefor unjust.

“Abortion then is a human tragedy in my view precisely because, like so many other moral conflagrations, it necessarily involves a conflict of legitimate rights.”

Our rights reflect what the Socratic-Platonic thesis speaks of as the “Unity of Intelligibles”, just as God’s virtues are all perfectly harmonious and interchangeable, in keeping with Ramon Llull’s ars magna. In the terminology of symbolic logic, such metaphysical abstracts are commutative in their functionality. Truth is the aesthetic unity of the Intelligible; Beauty is the Intelligible unity of Truth. That is not meant to be mrely a poetic line, and I will explain exactly what that means. It means that ours rights cannot contradict one another, just as our Ideas cannot: as argumentation proceeds only after our having defined a set of axioms and definitions, so the sole issue for whose solution the entirety of our politikeia was conceived arises in the fact that, with as careful a geometry as they may have practiced, the branches of our Government were not successfully invested by our Founders with that same level of harmony as is invested to the soul, nor could they be: a harmony grounded, as is the moral project of the West, on a metaphysical capacity which humans alone, out of the total stock of nature, possess. It saddens me to read things like this, which you quote: "Christianity attempted to recuperate the suffering of history by projecting a divine plan that assigns it a reason in the here and now and a recompense later … " Really, that’s what you got out of the Abrahamic texts?

We can take physical reality and isolate elements within it based on whatever arbitrary parameters we wish (a process I call heuresis) in order to extract from it: patterns. There is a potentially infinite number of these patterns, and more to the point: we can then take a few of those patterns and repeat the process- abstracting data from this new set of elements on a secondary level of analysis, using an entirely different set of parameters. And then we can repeat this process again, in this way generating still more wide-ranging and broader patterns, and by a continuous derivation of the ‘alien third’ against whose Universe the stammered dyad of our sequential logic is abrupted, that is,- by means of a new set of parameters for further levels of reflection, we reach the concept of the “ontos” (meant to suggest the errant bifurcation of the ontic and ontological) as an application of Pierce’s triadic universe of symbolic logic and the Bataillean auton of transcendental reflection to what I call the process of Reification, that is,- the Negative as preserved in the face of the leveling synthesis of Hegelian totalization: the philosophical Negativity involved in the Platonic vocal plurality or aporia of Truth. That aporia, that silence,- that Negation firmly beyond all capitulation, deliverance, or subsumption, represents a kind of metaphysical capacity for transcendental self-reflection and recursive scaling, constitutive of the homoficans or daemon through which anthropos or the human-being is grounded in that which is not human, the poesis constitutive of his vital element or Becoming and ultimately, that power through which the reshaping of Nature in the image of God is accomplished,- the animating principle of our moral instinct: ethos; ethos anthropos daemon, following Heraclitus. The idea at the center of the Republic, as well as Plato more broadly considered, ie. the anabasis or act of ascending to reunite with our soul,- the doctrine of anamnesis and the escape from the Cave of Shadows toward Gnosis,- to become one of the bearers of light,- is a mythic narrative meant to provide a model for organizing these different levels of recursive, embedded abstraction, approaching their transcendental object ad infinitum like the infinite series of PI- for it is a difficult thing to manage and to get through them, endless as they are. This ascent is an ascent toward the Good. Toward true selfhood, and toward Beauty,- things which, to go back to the notion of intelligible unity, are at this height of Thought all one and the same thing.

" The day before yesterday the Founding Fathers kept black slaves."

And you keep brown ones, to make your iphone and clothes and food. But that is irrelevant. I would just ask if the writer have preferred Jefferson to free all his slaves, shove them out the door and wait for all the elderly ones to starve to death after being unable to find any work, or the young to starve as well, after failing to secure work due to a lack of any technical skills? Old slaves, or those without any skills, cannot find work: therefor they cannot eat, therefor starve. If you are going to free slaves, then you need more than revolutionary optimism, you actually need a well thought out plan and some kind of peremptory social infrastructure to aid in easing the mass transition of a large number of them into free society. No, better still: I would ask the writer what she would do if she was Jefferson at the time? How would she have gone about freeing the slaves without inadvertently causing them as much suffering due to political negligence as they had experienced due simply to the malevolence of other men.