[lit-ideas] Re: Justifying Moral Principles?
- From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2015 09:20:12 -0330
Mike,
I think this is just your culture talking. (Lucky thing you're not from
Arizona.) Cheers, Walter
Quoting Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Walter asks: "Are these really but articles of political faith?"
>
> The answer is yes, if by "political" you mean cultural. I have of late --
> whence, I know not -- become a deep down believer in culture. Everything
> is culture (anthopologically speaking) or as Heidegger put it "we are
> always already immersed in a world. It is passed on to us through the
> generous auspices of Mum and Daddums first and then the world. From the
> first moment out of the womb until the final breath, our "selfhoodness" is
> but that "set of beliefs and values" held by one's parents which, of
> course, were similarly given to them and which they adopted and adapted in
> their encounters with other of cultures (the neighbors) during their
> journey through life, just as we adjust our given culture to accomodate
> changes in the world. Philosophy, I contend, is basically just the
> encountering of other cultures and making judgments about them. In the end,
> Mom and Dad are our personal Plato and Aristotle, and all those folk we
> meet along the way to dusty death, they are those who hone our values, or
> even totally dislodge them. We meet the other and according to our needs,
> we choose to change our views to accommodate theirs or not. Essentially,
> life is but the process of becoming our own unique culture. Each Culture
> (another way of saying "each individual") starts, as said, with Mommy and
> Daddy (or their surrogates) -- we are given their culture, and as we
> encounter other people in the world (encounter, that is, instances of
> different cultures) -- we assess those cultures as to whether they supply
> better or worse explanations of our experiences in the world than those
> that were given to us by Mom and Dad. Accordingly, we either increase our
> support for Mom and Dad's cultural ways of explaining, believing, doing and
> valuing, or we graft new beliefs onto that culture. We find ourselves in a
> more or less continual process of either confirming our culture by
> rejecting some other one, or of adapting our culture when we determine that
> some other better explains the world that we are constantly encountering.
> In such a manner we develop our own uniqueish culture unto ourselves. You
> may sneer at this, my culture, dismissing it as sophomoric, but, hey, that
> just explains a lot about you -- so there.
>
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 4:58 AM, Walter C. Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> > We justify our judgements and actions through the giving and assessing of
> > reasons. In doing so, we appeal to one or more moral principles for
> > purposes
> > of securing satisfactory levels of impartiality and objectivity. But can
> > the
> > principles themselves be justified? Could Rorty"s "ethnocentrism" really
> > be the
> > last word on the subject? On that meta=ethical view, any attempt to
> > justify a
> > moral scheme or "vocabulary" would prove to be question-begging since the
> > justification would have to appeal to principles, norms and criteria
> > internal
> > to its own vocabulary. So how then do we justify the Categorical
> > Imperative,
> > Principle of Equal Respect for Persons, The Original Position, Principle
> of
> > Discourse, etc.. Are these really but articles of political faith?
> >
> > Thawing out on the Avalon, NL
> >
> > Walter O
> >
> >
> >
> >
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