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In A Quandary...

BTW, I'm going to be reading Kundera's The Joke over Christmas break.

Though you may have, I haven't forgotten...
 
WordInterrupted said:
I accept that human beings are the kind of creatures who have ethical committments because of their biological makeup. I don't accept that we can define the content of normative ethics through study of biology. It's fallacious to confuse what is with what ought to be.
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No one's arguing that, dipshit.

Try again.
 
Friday said:
Now, 6, you should know by now that I am not adverse to exploring new topics or points of view. Milosz and Skvorecky not withstanding...

I'll look the site over.
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Though you often have an allergic reaction to common sense, and you don't take the step of analyzing the presuppositions of the left when you are confronted with potential problems in their dogma.
 
So what is your argument regarding ethics, Einstein?
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I'm partial to Christine Korsgaard's neo-Kantian argument in The Sources of Normativity. She begins by observing that human beings are reflective creatures: we have desires that can pull us one way or the other, but we also have the capacity to take a refelctive position, to step back from our desires and consider them as things in the world. When we take this reflective position, we can evaluate our desires and decide whether or not we have good reason to act on them. We take ourselves to have "good reason" if acting on a particular desire is in accord with the ethical committments that comprise our identity. For example, because of your identity as a professor, you might take yourself as having good reason to be well-prepared for your lectures, and because of my identity as a student I might take myself as having good reason to do all the required reading for my classes. If I don't do the reading and flunk out of school, my identity as a student will disintegrate. Under this view, feeling one's identity disintegrate is what it means to feel guilty.

So far, this is still a relativistic argument that provides no basis for morality. There's no reason to suspect that one identity is fundamentally superior to another. Korsgaard attempts to resolve this problem with an exceedingly clever argument: human beings from different cultures and backgrounds may have wildly different identities, but they are all essentially the same in that they have an identity in the first place. All human beings need an identity because they all need some reason for choosing one desire over another. If we had no reason for doing anything at all, we wouldn't be human. Since having an identity is what it means to be human, anyone who has an identity must think that being human is valuable. If everyone values humanity, then there's a basis for some kind of universal deontological morality.

I don't think this this argument completely escapes the criticism of moral skeptics in the Benthamite tradition, but I like it because conceiving of morality as a function of identity is very useful in thinking about politics, both theoretically and practically.
 
Number_6 said:
Though you often have an allergic reaction to common sense...
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Common sense I have a lot of, my friend. I just have to unlearn reacting emotionally, as opposed to intellectually.

...and you don't take the step of analyzing the presuppositions of the left when you are confronted with potential problems in their dogma.
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Yes, I do, when I see said problems. But I don't often see them.
 
LOL No, I don't have a problem.

BTW...remember that "online job opportunity" I discussed with you awhile back?

Well, I'll be a son of a bitch...I bagged the sucker! Check it out...
 
Too bad. Perhaps some time amongst the moonbats will help you to understand their lack of any intellectual standing.

Or not.
 
Hmmm....

The only reason I was inactive was the same reason I was inactive over here. RL. Otherwise, I really found some of the ideals expressed there challenging and intriguing. Honestly, the Head Admin is a very intellectual person.

Maybe now that I have RL and online a little more balanced, I'll make a last minute plea to keep my position.
 
Marxism has been proven flawed again and again. If you cannot accept this, you are living in a fantasy world.
 
You're right (gasp!). Marxism doesn't work, but that doesn't mean I should close my mind to learning about the different ideologies floating out there.
 
Capitalism is flawed too. They're all flawed. Marx had some good ideas, and in time Capitalism will take on those ideas (some it already has). True capitalism doesn't exist in this country at least. Just like the left and right eventually adopt good ideas from each other, so does Capitalism from Socialism and Marxism.
 
I agree, Hamster Person.

Capitalism would be improved by a dash of socialism and marxism. The danger is when those philosophies are taken to the extreme.
 
Hambil said:
Capitalism is flawed too.
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And so far, it's the least flawed of the economic systems in contemporary use.

They're all flawed.
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No shit. Statements like this usually indicate that the next statement in line is going to be a sales pitch for something no one wants to buy, though, so...

Marx had some good ideas, and in time Capitalism will take on those ideas (some it already has).
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Yep. There's the pitch. "This one isn't absolutely perfect, so let's try this one. Yeah, the one that didn't work, caused tens of millions of needless deaths, and abject misery for hundreds of millions more." Gee, okay...

True capitalism doesn't exist in this country at least.
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"True" is only an adjective for con artists. There is no such thing as "false Capitalism", because either a system is Capitalism or it isn't.

Just like the left and right eventually adopt good ideas from each other, so does Capitalism from Socialism and Marxism.
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Such as? Name one? And if that's true, then tell me -- what Capitalist ideas has Marxism adopted, considering the fact that Marxism's entire theme is anti-Capitalist?
 
Hambil said:
Marx had some good ideas, and in time Capitalism will take on those ideas (some it already has).
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What ideas do you have in mind? Personally, I don't think Marx provides us with any useful policy perscriptions. With a few brief exceptions, he doesn't talk about how we should change capitalism or what sort of system we should put up in its place. Most of his work seeks to explain how capitalist economies function and why they will eventually collapse, but his theories on these subjects have proven largely inaccurate. One can make an argument that Marx is useful as a philosopher, but as an economist he's a failure.
 
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