The Psychoses (was Re: ...muck...)

christian a. gregory chrisgregory11 at email.msn.com
Sun Feb 6 12:00:54 PST 2000



>
> My entire paragraph read like this: In this way, we could say that the
> legalization of abortion is an ethical judgement. But, strictly speaking,
it
> would not be a moral one. In one were to actuall fulfill their moral
> obligation, the Other, the objective cause of their morality would
disappear.
> The self would be assimilated into the Other (as is the case in
psychosis). As
> ethical judgements, we are always called to be responsible for our
> transgression - and the power contained / manifest within such choices.
>

Love it when people who've read Lacan presume to know something about actually-existing mental disorders. It's like thinking you know enough about England to rezone it once you've seen it on a map drawn 50 years ago by a pretentious teenager.

Anyway, wouldn't there be a big difference between claiming something is a moral choice (i.e. has a moral dimension) and saying that you could actually *fulfill* your moral obligation? That you can never fulfill your moral obligation doesn't make the decision non-moral. In fact, that seems like the condition under which it would *always* be moral. Or rather, you could say the same thing about ethics--you can never actually *be* ethical, since you're operating under ethical imperatives (Be careful not to smush the other! Be ethical! Don't just be moral! Etc.) There can only be ethical dimensions to decisions, but you can never actually accomplish being ethical. I mean, if this sort of thing interests you.

kelley wrote:


>ken, the problem with framing things the way you did in the abortion
>example is this, what if you used the same example in terms of the 'born
>gay' argument. from this perspective the entire edifice of the dominant
>arm of the glbt movement with it's claims to biological necessity are
>"psychotic" -- right now a big dispute as chapters are being hammered by
>the queer by choice argument:

Dominant? How do you figure? Besides, who cares?. It doesn't matter one iota if I'm queer "by choice" or not. People are granted the right to "choose" their religious faith and not be discriminated against for it; people "choose" their marital status and aren't discriminated against for it. There is no good reason why my "choice" of sexual partner, however construed, should make a difference according to prinicples already set up in civil law. The people claiming biological necessity aren't psychotic--they are just naive--at least if they think that this argument is going to make a political difference.

All best Christian



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list