[lit-ideas] Re: 'airy-fairy Proustian snob' or the Last Great AmericanPhilosopher?

gods aside, which is more common in the average human -- to deplore or to
embrace cruelty?  Do we not consider the embrace of cruelty to be aberrant?

Perhaps all ethics is not after the fact, but in process.

Re. Cheney & his best buddy God, you'd have to redefine "God" to sell that
one to me.

Julie Krueger
catching up on old e-mail, yet again

On 6/26/07, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



RP:
> Here's a piece from Slate (called to my attention by Jeff McLaughlin  at
> Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops BC) in which various people  offer
> their reflections on Richard Rorty.
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2168488/fr/flyout

a quote from Stephen Metcalf from the above site: "always and everywhere
deplore cruelty;"

But why?  Why deplore it?  Why not embrace?  I really like Rorty.  But he,
like everyone else lacking God-given absolutes, seems confined to personal
preference.  And from my perspective, judging from history and the history
of religion, it seems there's no God-given absolute against cruelty -- God
and Cheney seem to me to be best buddies.  Rorty, I imagine, would respond
that cruelty doesn't work, it only begets more cruelty, ergo, don't be
cruel
(unless you want to rule?).  But I would argue that the Western world is
where it is (mostly egalitarian, liberal, bourgeois democracies ) in large
part through past cruelty.  I have to wonder, you know?  Is all ethics
after
the fact?  But not tonight.  I'm going to bed.


Mike Geary
Memphis




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