[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????

JE (in response to my: "I also make moral judgments and that is my downfall"): 


No it isn't, Mike.  We have to navigate between the
Scylla of absolutism and the Charybdis of relativism,
as those students did that day.
Yes, I agree. But my moral standards are mine only. There is nothing backing them up outside my psychological make-up which I attribute to my genes and my personal history. I'm not a relativist in the sense that anything goes, I have some rather strict rules for myself, but they are for me, not you nor anyone else. Only in those places where our lives intersect do we need to accomodate one another. But accomodation is not likely to occur when one party (or both) is rejecting the other because they are judged wrong or inferior or morally reprehensible or intellectually primitive or evil or etc. That is what I meant by "my downfall". When I see parents yanking their kids along late at night and screaming at them, I'd like to rise up out of my chair and call out to them, "Avast!" swing down to the sidewalk from a rope off my verandah to intervene and change the childrearing skills of those people, but it ain't gonna happen, so I just sit there and pronounce my judgment on them as mean to the core, morally deficient, probably drug addled. The poor. No wonder they're poor. I pass judgment on them just like I pass judgment on most businessmen I see all spiffy in their suits, dismissing them as shallow, materialistic people with tawdry values -- and what is that judgment based on? They're businessmen, for Christsake. Yes, 'downfall' is the right word. 


Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message ----- From: "Judith Evans" <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 10:17 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????



Some theoretical comments to follow, I hope!, but
here's an anecdote.  Teaching: first year elective
feminist class.  British student originally from an
African country and very specific tribal culture
announces that in her tribe/culture children were
enouraged to experiment sexually.  All the other
students nodded and beamed in their right on liberal
tolerant etc. way -- feeling, of course, rather proud
of their ROLTW -- and went on doing do as she
elaborated, till the point where she said that the
girls were also er "loved" by older men.  At that
point they yelled at her.  (Great!)


I also

> make moral judgments and that is my downfall





Judy Evans, Cardiff


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