From http://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2012/07/conscience-and-language-orwell.html, "See Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html"
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote: > Friday, the 3rd of October, 2003 Mike wrote below: >You don't understand Aristotle either. The idea is not that >anybody has absolute knowledge of anything. The idea is that >knowledge is possible, and therefore absolute knowledge is >in the theoretical game. You did not say absolute knowledge is possible. If it isn't, why should it be in the theoretical game? You have a greater difficulty than this, however. In order for there to be a final truth, the fine detail of the universe would probably have to be by definition finite. Even if finite (is that a provable proposition?) it would also have to be within the grasp of human understanding. It is for reasons such as this that I proposed, in Liberalism Reviewed Part 1, "a suggested liberal definition of truth as 'that conclusion from the currently available information which, when acted on, tends to produce the expected result.'" Truth, or as you say, knowledge, is a function of the current state of our best observations and reasoning. Your position, by contrast, is a concealed form of Platonism. "The highest vocation of the soul in Platonism is to 'perceive the eternal order of things'--to which the soul must passively adapt or conform." (Richard Wolin, _The Terms of Cultural Criticism_ p. 37) As Lee Smolin says in a chapter heading of _Three Roads to Quantum Gravity_, reality consists of processes, not things. Knowledge-- truth--is a process. As such, your "absolute knowledge" is a reification which should not be in the theoretical game. And as I have suggested in previous articles, intellectual propositions of this sort have unanticipated political consequences. Wolin: "As a species of first philosophy, ontology posits an immutable order of being. Far from there being anything intrinsically 'emancipatory' about this ideal, it is a conception fully compatible with the most authoritarian and rigid forms of political life." Wolin continues: With the transition from an "ontology" to "epistemology" inaugurated by Descartes, "reason" and "truth" need no longer be accepted on the basis of a spurious, supramundane claim to ontological primacy--for example, the claim that the "good" would be somehow a priori lodged in the "order of Being"; a claim to which human agents must simply submit. Instead, all truth claims and claims to right must be legitimated through the mediating agency of individual insight. The seventeenth- century shift from ontology to epistemology, therefore, displays profound affinities with the foundational values of political modernity: freedom, autonomy, and self-legislation. (p. 38) Truth is not "out there" in the sense in which you argue. Truth is an interaction between us and a non-subjective, extra-human "out there" which constrains the range of legitimate propositions which we may formulate about it but which does not, as such, determine those propositions. And that is the end-point of "absolute knowledge is in the theoretical game": a determinism which is in remarkable contrast to your libertarian wishes. A second note: This clearly is not absolutism (I'm arguing against it) but it is also not (moral) relativism, as you charge below. "Morality is, roughly, what human beings owe to one another," Avishai Margalit observed recently in the New York Review of Books. I've claimed previously in the Liberalism Reviewed series that ethical positions are roughly as described by Aristotle: something arrived at by the analysis of cases. Our ethics are a function of our growing understanding of the right--of learning how not to do wrong to each other. This occurs by our noting the consequences of our behavior and manners--our consideration and restraint--towards each other. What you wrote below contains a profound misunderstanding: The thing Nietzsche introduces is autonomy--the idea that there is no "moral code" and all there really are are possible "moral codes" which the victors make up at their convenience to pat themselves on the back for being "good", and [then] to kick the losers in the dirt for being "evil." First, autonomy is independence, not imposition (nor sovereignty, a word you overuse). "As I would not be a slave," Lincoln said, "so I would not be a master." Therefore: As I would exercise autonomy, so I would not constrain the autonomy of others (which would show that I do not believe in autonomy). Second, Nietzsche, and moral relativists generally, take an intellectually trivial position. They do not consider the possibility that ethical propositions may have functional value. Very strong arguments can be formulated, for example, that murder is dysfunctional: disruptive, destructive of human capital, destabilizing, producing a climate of fear and inaction (or conversely an internecine feud), etc. The relativists' argumentative inadequacy in this regard signifies that moral relativism is not worthy of critical inspection. Mike wrote below: >I do not wish to pretend to some agnostocism about whether, >in some societies, it might be morally good to go and >commit murder of those around one. Nor do I. As Travis Porco wrote here some years back, the wrongness of murder is "certain for all practical purposes." This is not, as Platonists will tell you, an absolute position. It is merely, as Gordon Fitch once noted, the "good enough." My point is that practical certainty is adequate for a human ethics, and that it avoids the cognitive and intellectual traps consequent on any claim of metaphysical certitude, to wit: You can't prove that; and therefore you must retreat to nihilism. Mike wrote below: >The whole point of Natural Law is precisely that it is that part of moral law >which does not depend upon Revelation. It's what intelligent men anywhere >and everywhere have understood to be ethically right in the absence of >divine guidance. Bravo! Unfortunately I cannot take seriously the claim that this is your actual position. On October 22 you wrote: You really are willing to call liberalism anything that has gotten divorced from the doctrine of the inalienable Rights of Man? Even in the face of the fact that the Declaration of Independence---the founding document of political liberalism if there ever was one---declares the Rights are the whole beginning and end of government in the first place? You forgot that the passage in reference begins "We hold these truths . . ." Before "these truths" the authors of the Declaration placed the active human intelligence which is continuously formulating truths. A reasonable observer will deduce from the tone of your statements about "the doctrine" that when you think of "Rights" you are thinking of "an immutable order of being [...] to which human agents must simply submit." You claim that Natural Law and Rights are "what intelligent men anywhere and everywhere have understood to be ethically right" as if it was not open-ended. But that can't be right. From everything we know of what they said and did the greatest minds prior to the modern era--Plato, Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul--never clearly formulated what seems morally obvious to us: the ethical status of slavery. Their position must have seemed to their contemporaries--if not to they themselves--beyond discussion. So as to your charge: "You are saying nothing is beyond argument" I repeat, That is exactly what I mean. I do not fear argument or free thought or discussion. That is how we got beyond the ancients on the question of slavery. Do we know--indeed can we know--that our descendants will not better us in some way which _we_ cannot now envision? End-Stuff: Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. - F. A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not A Conservative" [PDF] www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/09/after-strange-gods/?pagination=false
[Margalit cite above]
