back to the beginning: morality

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.

Un-oh, another Serious Philosopher!

In other words, with me, you’re off to a bad start.

From my frame of mind [and admittedly that’s all it is] an intellectual contraption on steroids! A gigantic general description that just begs for a particular context in which to assess the extent to which the definition you give to these words placed in this order is what all reasonable people are expected to be in sync with.

When is the last time a man was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy? A pregnancy that could play havoc with his life? A job or a promotion on the line, turmoil in family, censure from pro-life friends or colleagues, important plans that need to be shelved.

You’re talking about the community or the nation as a whole. I’m talking about an actual individual who becomes pregnant and does not want to be. Perhaps because of a defective contraception, perhaps as a result of rape or incest. All human interaction involves trade offs between “I” and “we”. And, in regard to abortion, there are clearly conflicting moral narratives and legal agendas all up and down the political spectrum. Why should everyone accept your own political prejudices as the optimal or the only rational point of view? What are you, the last of the philosopher-kings?

Again, a series of assumptions embedded largely in a world of words that make no reference to any specific sets of circumstances in which, once again, we are confronted with arguments passionately embraced by those from the extreme left all the way to the extreme right. And all points in between.

Consider: abortion.procon.org/

My point being that, given different sets of assumptions, both sides are able to make reasonable arguments in support of either the “natural right” of the baby to live or the “political right” of women to choose.

And then the argument I make in regard to individual value judgments here being embedded existentially in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. In particular, the points I raise on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

My defense is merely the embodiment of my own political prejudices [here and now] derived from the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

I do not argue that those who are opposed to abortion have a less reasonable point of view. Instead, “I” construe my self here as fractured and fragmented, tugged ambivalently in both directions; as, for all practical purposes, down in a “hole”.

This one:

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.

I’m sorry my friend but he – she? – needs to be taught a lesson.

Either that or I do.

“When is the last time a man was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy? A pregnancy that could play havoc with his life?”

And when was the last time a woman was confronted with being that unwanted pregnancy, somehow survives her own mother’s attempt to murder her, and then finally questions her about it in adulthood?

Besides, the funny thing is, men are confronted with unwanted pregnancies that can play havoc with their life all the time, it is just that we have no say in the conversation about letting that pregnancy continue or not, despite it carrying half our DNA.

" Un-oh, another Serious Philosopher! In other words, with me, you’re off to a bad start."

No; nobody hates philosophers more than I do. The existence of another challenges my bid for absorbing the mortis imago, in Ovidian language, into the image of my own morto imaginis and Self-hood; for silencing death, world, and god, in the image of my own EIDEIA.

“Again, a series of assumptions embedded largely in a world of words that make no reference to any specific sets of circumstances in which, once again, we are confronted with arguments passionately embraced by those from the extreme left all the way to the extreme right. And all points in between.”

Just as I explained in the paragraph about heuresis: yes. Well first of all, they aren’t assumptions they’re axioms and definitions: self-evident truths, as our spiritual Fathers would say, assuming you belong, too, to the US; and second, the whole point is to develop a theoretical framework without any reference to any one particular circumstance. Through the abstract moral principle, heightened and abstracted from all particularity: we judge the particular, in such a way as to draw out latent associations between events that would otherwise remain occulted, forever hidden from our sight. This is the point of philosophy, that is,- to conceive extreme cases, or abstract principles, that would allow us to test and find previously inaccessible patterns between apparently unrelated things in the world of our experience. Hence, to something else you said,

“A gigantic general description that just begs for a particular context in which to assess the extent to which the definition you give to these words placed in this order is what all reasonable people are expected to be in sync with.”

I would add that: I do not attempt to keep people in sync with it; just the opposite. I want to disconcert them by using these higher-level abstractions to create absurd, or what would be absurd scenarios at the level of the concrete, which would help to induce a change in perspective for a person, and facilitate their questioning various particulars they thought they knew quite well. My point is to provide a “new set of parameters” to borrow my own expression from the post, through which to force latent associations at the level of the disparate particular into consciousness. For at the highest level of abstraction, on which the famed Socratic equation of Virtue=Beauty=Truth is derived, there are no latent associations, and all is bound up equally by the depths, in which “everything is law”, to cite the poet of the Duino Elegies, Rilke.

“You’re talking about the community or the nation as a whole.”

No, I am talking about the abstract ethical and legal category of the Individual and the nation as a whole, whose members can all be equally conformed to that abstract category.

“I’m talking about an actual individual who becomes pregnant and does not want to be. Perhaps because of a defective contraception, perhaps as a result of rape or incest.”

We can’t legitimize murder for the sake of such extenuating factors; I don’t support the death penalty either. I spoke of the significance of responsibility as applied to that abstract category of the individual, which- although all interaction is an interplay of I and We, is nonetheless granted legal and moral primacy in our Constitution. If the woman cannot take responsibility for the pregnancy out of her own volition in becoming pregnant due to a rape, she still has the potential to accept responsibility that, for whatever reason: a life now depends on her. That trumps any impulse to demand that the fetus takes responsibility for having been so conceived.

Bro wtf. That’s exactly why I hate philosophers too! Every time I’m fixin to absorb my mortis imago, some fucking philosopher gets right in the way.

The mortis imago, [the image of Death] through which the whole veil of Nature is permeated and torn: not your. That the expression is declined in such a way as to accept either a subjective or objective clause, is a bit of a grammatical clue as to it actually being Ovid’s take on the equally noteworthy expression from out of the Aeneid,- the Virgilian ‘lacrimae rerum’, which so many have attempted to translate but none have truly managed. In Latin, the subjective-objective case can both be implied simultaneously through the genitive, but in English either one or the other must be explicitly granted. Aeneas was contemplating the great heroes of Troy while gazing upon a mural at the temple of Juno, the full recitation being: sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Yeah I knew that. I was just testin you. Makin sure you knew your shit.

Yup. Not only are we absolutely certain this guy Aeneas existed, but we also know for certain where he was on the night of June 2nd, what mural he was looking at, and exactly what he was thinking.

Yeah man I was talking about the poem. The Aeneid. Written by Virgil… This guy named Aeneas is pretty important in it. He’s the son of the goddess Aphrodite, I don’t think the Aeneid is meant to be a historically accurate representation of anything. And the thing I just said, like. That’s from said poem… ?

do me a favor. when i’m an asshole, don’t be all polite and civil when you respond, because it’s rude. it makes me feel bad.

my thing with poetry is that when we are trying to draw from it things we can use in building philosophical points, we run an interpretational risk in doing so. it’s one thing to say ‘… and when achilles did x and y, he was being brave’, and quite another to read all into it and imagine there’s some meaning that’s meant for us to discover while putting together a few arguments to bolster a philosophical idea.

i have a hard enough time trying to figure out what the hell a philosopher means, much less a poet.

You’re missing my point. Sure, any particular individual in any particular set of circumstances can raise the arguments that those in both the pro-life and the pro-choice camps do. Conflicting goods let’s call them.

My question however is this: to what extent can either science or philosophy determine which argument reflects that which rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to embrace?

Also, I suggest that each of us as individuals come to embody one set of political prejudices rather than another based largely on the existential trajectory of their life. Again, I encompass that on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

How about you? What crucial variables in your life predisposed you to think this way rather than that way about abortion? Either you accept my point regarding dasein here or you are able to obviate it by coming up with an argument that does in fact resolve the issue deontologically once and for all.

Don’t skip this part okay?

Another general description intellectual contraption that would, for all practical purposes, be meaningless if proposed to those in the thick of the political struggle to sway the Supreme Court here in America to lay off Roe V. Wade.

Then more of the same:

I spent many years involved in political organizations that confronted the abortion wars head on. Back then I was a left wing objectivist. Thumping the right wing objectivists. Or, rather, back then, so I thought. One thing for sure though…almost no one I knew then would have a fucking clue as to what anything you propose here has to do with the nitty-gritty existential rights of the unborn to live vs. the rights of pregnant women to choose.

Huh? Come on, what would that mean to a flesh and blood woman pregnant and not wanting to be? Or to a pro-life advocate speaking for the unborn that they insist should not be destroyed? That’s what it always comes down to. Particular men and women interacting in a particular set of circumstances viewed from a particular point of view. So much more so than “the abstract ethical and legal category of the Individual and the nation as a whole”.

Right. As though those on the other side of the political spectrum don’t have their own arguments in defense of a woman’s right to choose. Hell, we can’t even pin down the precise moment when the unborn becomes a “human being”. For some it’s the day of conception, for others a beating heart, for others its capacity to live outside the womb. While others are even able to rationalize abortion on demand. Or, for that matter, infanticide.

My point however is always the same. Are you an objectivist here? In other words, is your argument above regarding a woman who has been raped accepting the responsibility of raising the rapist’s child seen by you to be her moral obligation as a rational human being…or not?

Yo, Parodites, you’re up!!

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

Three points.

1] I agree that in a No God world there does not appear to a Humanist equivalent of either omniscience or omnipotence. And without an all-knowing and all-powerful perspective on human interactions, who gets to say which mere mortal’s perspective reflects the optimal, go-to assessment when confronting conflicting value judgments. Or, rather, no one has convinced me of late that their own moral narrative generates the most rational and virtuous set of behaviors.

And, sans God, there is every possibility that immoral behaviors can be chosen and the perpetrator is never caught. And, in not being caught, is never punished.

2] if “amoral” is understood to mean, “lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something” this does not preclude the necessity to establish rules of behavior in any human community. One can have a moral sense and be concerned with sustaining the least dysfunctional interactions in a community, without positing one or another God. Or, like me, they can come to believe that their own values “here and now” are just existential contraptions subject to change given new experiences. But still recognize the need to pursue rules of behavior.

3] Many call themselves atheists. But that does not necessarily preclude the existence of God. When push comes to shove, in the context of understanding what lies behind “all there is”, who really knows the explanation? So, for all practical purposes, we are all basically agnostics.

Here, however, regarding this distinction, I get “stuck” again. Given hard determinism as I understand it, any discussion of right and wrong/ethical and unethical behavior is merely a necessary, inherent manifestation of nature itself. Making the debate itself just another component of what was never not going to be.

As for “soft determinism”, how is what a soft determinist believes not in turn just another inherent component of nature unfolding only as it can/must given the laws of matter. If someone wants to believe that they have freely chosen to read something they were never, ever going to not read, it’s still a mystery to me how, for all practical purposes, this distinction is made.

I might be missing something of course but how was I ever really able to not miss it if my own brain is itself but more matter necessarily in sync with the laws that make it what can only ever be. What it can only ever do.

I get this distinction though. Or I think I do. It revolves around my 2nd point above. In other words, using one or another No God font, you are able to convince yourself that re deontology [philosophical imperatives] or ideology [political imperatives] or nature [biological imperatives] it is possible to know definitively which behaviors to prescribe and which behaviors to proscribe. “I” is not “fractured and fragmented” at all once you grasp the one true oversall assessment of human interactions.

And then there are people like me.

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

Isn’t this true? With religion the obligation is derived from God. With philosophy, the obligation is derived from Reason. And if not applicable universally then certainly applicable to all those who wish to be thought of as rational human beings right here on Earth.

Of course this part is readily dispensed with. How? By simply asking the secular objectivists if they need God to sustain their own authoritarian dogmas.

They will tell you “no” and then either ignore you or shun you or punish you for refusing to become “one of us”. That’s the reality, isn’t it? In a No God world where no one is able to definitively disprove this “ism” or that “ism” is necessarily false, then all of them become “necessarily” true merely by believing that they are.

That’s why folks like me here are particularly loathed. Not only do we refuse to take sides, we suggest instead that the sides themselves are fabricated existentially over the course of time historically and around the globe culturally. And that, further, each individual’s own personal experiences can be profoundly different from others.

But this is no less his own existential contraption, isn’t it? He has no way of knowing whether new experiences, new relationships or access to new ideas will change his mind. Instead, he makes his own assumptions here the “commands” that he obeys.

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

Except that any number religious folks will make what they construe to be a crucial distinction between explaining how biological life evolved on planet Earth and explaining how life itself came to evolve out of what is clearly the overwhelming preponderance of matter in the universe: the brute facticity of “stuff” utterly lacking in any components of life at all. Let alone matter able to become conscious of itself as matter able to become conscious of all the other things that allow for the invention of, say, this laptop computer and the internet. Or the human “conscience”.

In other words, while it might be presumed that a God, the God is not necessary to explain the existence of these words that I am typing and you are reading, there is, in turn, no way in which to entirely rule Him out.

Okay, but even in a No God universe, there may well be no moral commands here on planet Earth other than those that are compelled by the very laws of nature themselves. In other words, merely the appearance of morality given that choice itself is merely the psychological illusion of free will. The evolution of life may be but a necessary component of whatever lies behind the explanation for existence itself.

Though, if autonomy is assumed, sure, it may be possible to explain morality as somehow inherently intertwined instead in the evolution of life on Earth into the human brain. The brain is hard-wired for survival and it sets out the parameters in any particular context for distinguishing between surviving [good/moral] and not surviving [bad/immoral].

Philosophers [among others] just take it further by coming up with the idea that all of this revolves around ideals and principles, and natural rights and moral obligations.

Categorically and imperatively as it were.

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

This is basically the argument that some will throw at me. They do believe in objective morality, so they can point to this or that behavior as particular examples of the “wrong thing to do”. Whereas I am not able to convince myself that any behaviors at all are inherently, necessarily wrong. So, some will retort, “what are you saying, that torturing a baby is okay?!”

And, admittedly, there is part of me that hesitates in concluding that, in the absence of God, all things [such as this] are permitted. But I can’t come up with a definitive philosophical argument that, in the absence of God [or His secular equivalent] is able to demonstrate which behaviors all rational and virtuous human beings are, in fact, obligated deontologically to either choose or to eschew.

And what of the narcissists and sociopaths, who, for whatever reasons, given experiences in their lives very different from my own, have come to conclude that morality revolves around that which sustains their own personal satisfactions. Period.

How would someone demonstrate that this frame of mind is necessarily wrong in a No God world?

“In reality” of course this part can get especially convoluted. He likes and dislikes things as opposed to insisting that he likes things because they are moral and dislikes things because they are immoral. But liking and disliking something from my frame of mind is no less an existential contraption rooted in dasein.

And in that respect how is vivisection – animal-testing.procon.org/ – not just one more example of conflicting goods?

Deception here is still just a point of view embedded in a world where value judgments are subjective assessments ever subject to change given new experiences.

Even performing experiments on human beings is able to be rationalized by some. Consider the film Extreme Measures: youtu.be/SBRFmU-3mf8

My reaction to it:

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2367738&hilit=extreme+measures+directed#p2367738

Precipitating reactions of others:

nrin.nl/ri-collection/libra … ures-1996/

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

This is how I always imagine approaching those Kantians who embrace human morality deontologically. Those that all concur human beings have an obligation to behave morally as a rational necessity.

So, let’s examine the lives that they live. Are there behaviors they choose in their interactions with others relating to the treatment of animals that are in conflict? How then would one of them go about convincing the others that as a rational necessity their own views on animal rights reflects the one true moral obligation of all reasonable men and women?

In other words, if we lived in a world where all who claimed to be Kantians came to the same conclusion regarding their own interaction with and their own thinking and feeling about animals, that would be one thing. If, on the other hand, they [like all the rest of us] came to different conclusions what does it tell us about how “for all practical purposes” Kant’s philosophical assessments play out in the real world?

Yet this is nothing more than another “general description intellectual contraption” in and of itself. The point is not that we assume different things about either meta-ethics or ethical behavior [God or No God] but how we come to the views that we do as individuals.

Bottom line [mine]: are our thoughts and feelings about animals predicated more on the accumulation of actual experiences we have out in a particular world understood in a particular manner, or is it possible using the tools of the scientists, philosophers, naturalists or theologians, to determine how one ought to think and feel and behavior in regard to animals in our lives.

Can conflicting goods here be subsumed in a categorical and imperative moral obligation on the part of all those who wish to be thought of as rational human beings?

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

Me too. More or less. Only this is extremely difficult to explain to those who embrace one or another moral narrative and political agenda rooted in objectivism. The part about “I” being “fractured and fragmented” in particular.

Maybe I will be more successful this time…maybe not.

I start with the obvious. That, if you choose to interact with others socially, politically and/or economically [in whatever human community], your wants and needs will almost certainly come into conflict with others. Over any number of things. One way or another [between individuals or between individuals, groups and the state], “rules of behaviors” will be a necessary condition in order to avoid a Hobbesian “law of the jungle”.

The “social contract” is born. But: so too are countless arguments regarding what that contract should consist of.

So, basically, a moral nihilist such as myself, starts with this “for all practical purposes” explanation for “morality”. Or, in philosophy, ethics. In other words, sans God, I don’t believe these rules of behavior [whether invented or discovered] exist essentially, objectively, necessarily, intrinsically etc. So they have to concocted in any particular community in order to facilitate the least dysfunctional social interactions. It then comes down [in each community] to one or another general consensus regarding what these rules are derived from. In a No God world that leaves such alternatives as reason or political ideology or the most rational understanding of nature. Or, as well, any one of hundreds of so-call spiritual paths to enlightenment.

But: I am not able to subscribe to any of them. Instead, I have come to conclude that my own value judgments were fabricated at birth by others out in a particular world. And that as I acquired the capacity [in this modern world, given human autonomy] to choose for myself, this “self” is no less embedded largely in the experiences and relationships and access to information, ideas and knowledge that “I” came to embody existentially in a world that I can only really grasp or control up to a point.

And then the paths chosen by any number of the more narcissistic “amoralists”: might makes right derived from political and economic power.

Sure, there may be a way [philosophically or otherwise] to transcend this and to comprehend a “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”, but I have not come upon it now for years and years.

Now it revolves around this:

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.

Instead, I can only seek out the narratives of others in places like this who do not think as I do.

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

Here, of course, all the meat-eater has to do is argue that her moral narrative revolves solely around the sentient human beings in her community. There would seem to be no argument able to demonstrate that human communities must take into account the welfare of all living things.

At best there might be hard evidence that either eating or not eating meat has a significant impact on how long you live or on how healthy you are however long you live. But, again, given all of the many, many different historical and cultural and interpersonal contexts there are to be taken into consideration, how would even this be pinned down with any degree of finality?

Consider all the different moral fonts available to an individual interested in exploring the question of animal rights: home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/ … ories.html

What might a member of each camp argue is the right thing or the wrong thing to choose when confronted with that Big Mac?

And, here, the one I often zero in on is this one: The Ethical Egoist:

“Right and wrong is determined by what is in your self-interest. Or, it is immoral to act contrary to your self-interest. Ethical Egoism is usually based upon Psychological Egoism – that we, by nature, act selfishly.”

Not that there aren’t reasonable arguments against this frame of mind as well. But, again, out in a particular context, how are these conflicting arguments broached and described; and then reconciled or resolved existentially?

“By her lights” is precisely my point. How, for each of us, is this not embedded in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein in my signature threads? How, in relationship to the consumption of animal flesh, is this not a potent ingredient in your own sense of identity here.

And, then, once the philosophers and the ethicists have taken that into account, what conclusions might they come to in regard to animal rights that would come closest to the moral obligation of the rational human being?

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

This part is always tricky for me. The relationship between what someone knows about something, all that can be known about it, and how this gap in and of itself can have a significant impact on their own moral reasoning.

If you go about the business of consuming animal flesh without any real understanding at all of factory farming, of the suffering that the animals often endure in order to sate your appetite for meat, it is all the easier to avoid seeing your behavior as a moral issue at all.

With these new facts, though, you might change your mind. Change your eating habits altogether.

Or you can choose to consume animal products only once you are able to assure yourself that the animals you are eating endured an absolute minimum of pain and suffering. Though no less butchered in the end.

With all other conflicting goods in turn there are facts that can be known if you make an effort to accumulate them before choosing behaviors.

But what there does not seem to be is the sort of knowledge that would enable one side or the others to demonstrate that their own facts obligate rational and virtuous human beings to behave one way rather than another.

And there is still the argument of those who could not care less about what the facts are if the fact is that the only thing that matters to them is satisfying and fulfilling their own selfish wants and needs. This is always the argument that most troubles me because it seems to require the existence of God in order make the argument null and void.

If there is no font that knows all and is all powerful, then it comes down to the conflicting moral and political narratives of mere mortals.

Thus…

Yes, but this “honest recourse” either succeeds in persuading another to adopt your own subjective assumptions about the treatment of animals, or it doesn’t. What is always most crucial to me is how exchanges of this sort are rooted in the components of my own moral philosophy. Such that even your own value judgments “here and now” are no less existential contraptions and, as such, are ever open to change given new experiences, new relationships and access to new sources of information and knowledge.

And in the best of all possible worlds…

…one’s motivation and intention here can be honest or dishonest, but, for me, this too is just another manifestation of dasein.

Then I’m back to how I have never been all that successful in explaining it to others. I figure that’s because of one of two reasons:

1] my explanation is wrong…end of story.
2] my explanation is right…but is rejected by others because they simply cannot or will not accept the implications of my own frame of mind being applicable to them.

The part about becoming “fractured and fragmented” out in the is/ought world is simply more than they can accept about their own self.

After all, I remember my own grueling transformation all those years ago.

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

Still, what this all revolves around [in my view] is not keeping morality in or removing morality from our lives. It is more about the word you want to use to describe that which will always be a part of any human community: rules of behavior.

How to sustain the least dysfunctional interactions by rewarding some set of behaviors and punishing other sets.

And I also believe that calling the world a “better place” will still remain an existential contraption rooted in daseins grappling with conflicting goods in a “real world” – historically, culturally and experientially – where those with the most political and economic power almost always prevail.

Turning this into an intellectual or a philosophical discussion and debate changes none of that.

This is the part that seems reasonable to me given the assumption – and that, for now, is all it ever seems to be – that we live in a No God world. Sans God there does not appear to be a way to establish beyond all doubt that any human behavior is necessarily, intrinsically good or evil. How would that be done? Especially the arguments of those who would molest children or go on a mass-killing spree, and predicate it entirely on their own selfish motivations. What do you say to them, “can’t you see that what you did is terribly, terribly wrong?!” Meanwhile their own frame of mind is rooted in variables rooted in a life so far removed from yours that a communication breakdown is inevitable.

Again, unless I am not thinking this through carefully enough and there is a philosophical, deontological assessment [in a Godless universe] able to obviate the behaviors of the narcissistic sociopaths. An argument demonstrated to be so airtight, it could not be refuted. Some may still choose to be evil, but they can’t deny that’s what they are.

But how is this still not a general description intellectual contraption? Yes, there clearly seems to be a global consensus – derived from both genes and memes – that molesting children is as close to a “universal taboo” as our species is likely to come. But enough if still happens to lead one to suspect there are other factors embedded in the human condition – also derived from both genes and memes – that allow many to rationalize going down that path anyway.

But without an omniscient, omnipotent font cognizant of, and able to punish all such behaviors, it just gets kicked back into the multifaceted, conflicted, subjective jumble of human reactions that can be all over the board.