Arcturus Descending wrote: ....Profound impact in which way? Just in your thinking or also in your way of future responding to an event since we can have no idea of an outcome for the most part.
iambiguous wrote:Profound in that it exposed to me how the gap [enormous at times] between the words we use to sustain our value judgments [and the way in which they seem clear to us "in our heads"] is not able to be translated as seamlessly out in the world.
Arcturus Descending wrote: Why do you think that is? I think that it may be because within our own minds we have everything figured out but when in relation to the outside world, which includes the environment and the minds of others, they fail because we see only with a limited perspective, our own, and the same goes for others.
When we are 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years old etc., we think about moral issues like abortion in particular ways. And, for some, it's the same way. But, for many of us, our point of view will evolve. At times into its opposite. Why? Because [again, for most of us] we come upon new experiences and/or new relationships and/or new ideas that prompt us to change our minds. And in a world [especially the modern world] bursting at the seams with contingency and chance and change, this becomes more and more common.
Then it comes down to rationalizing our new point of view. Again, most of us will tell ourselves that even though we did change our minds [meaning that we might well change our minds again], that's okay because we have simply become more sophisticated [or progressive] in our capactity to think things like this through. But we are still convinced that what we do think [here and now] corresponds to the most rational and ethical manner in which to think about it.
Well, that doesn't work for me. Why? Because contingency, chance and change are at the very heart and the very soul of dasein. And because my new point of view is no less entangled in the manner in which I construe conflicting goods.
Prior to this experience I was more or less able to ground my value judgments in one or another religious or political "truth". Afterwards, that became increasingly more problematic. Now I am all but hopelessly entangled in the way in which I construe a moral dilemma in dasein.
Arcturus Descending wrote: Hopelessly entangled? But do you actually feel hopeless about it?
Yes. I am not able to imagine an argument [here and now] that would allow me to extricate myself from either dasein or conflicting goods. Such an argument may in fact exist. But that is for all practical purposes irrelevant if I am not able to come across it.
Arcturus Descending wrote: I still see no problem here. A person's viewpoint changes if he's a thinking person. I may be misunderstanding your words or maybe not, but I think that every situation is different and has to be judged accordingingly. Things are not set in stone I have found.
If this frame of mind works for you, I'm glad that it does. If you are able to convince yourself that objective moral values are within your reach, okay. But it does not work that way for me. And that is because it changes nothing about the dilemma as I perceive it to be.
And we do not really have personal values that are "thoroughly subjective". Rather, in living in a particular community [rooted in historical and cultural parameters], our values are always intersubjective. After all, who really has the capacity wholly extricate "I" from "we"?
And I have found that, as a rule, many objectivists are particularly unnerved by this frame of mind. Why? Because they are able to glimpse the manner in which it might also be applicable to them.
But, again, that is only how it seems to me.
Arcturus Descending wrote: We just need to remember that we are all fallible creatures.
But, given the manner in which I construe our value judgments as being profoundly and problematically intertwined in dasein and conflicting goods, this too can only be particular point of view -- one ever subject to change in a world of contingency chance and change.
I just think about these relationships in a considerably more precarious manner than most others seem to.
And many, like you perhaps, construe this dilemma not as an immoral frame of mind but as an amoral threat to a world that they see as one in which we must be able to clearly distinguish right from wrong behavior.
But, absent God, how is this possible? Even folks like Plato and Descartes and Kant recognized the need for a transcending font here.
Arcturus Descending wrote: Transcending in such a way as Nietzsche meant - beyond good and evil. I think within a harmony of right reason and heart. Not necessary to bring a god into it.
With Nietzsche [who views these things in a world where "God is dead"], one can embrace the brute facticity of might makes right or [as many of his champions/sycophants seem inclined] concoct an elaborate philosophical matrix for behaving in a manner which, through one or another rendition of "will to power", the strong are able to devise arguments that are said to be rooted in Reason and Virtue and Nobility. Call it the Know Thyself Syndrome.
Thus you rise above the herd not only because you are stronger, but because your behaviors are Just and Righteous. By definition as it were.
On the other hand, to what extent did Nietzsche himself embody the "will to power". He spent much of his life stumbling into one or another psycho-somatic abyss...and he died insane.