>it is painfully obvious that whenever you claim to be making amoral
>arguments, you really are
I suppose you are trying to say that "amoralism" is akin to "atheism." Both may be thought of as ethical responses -- they just are ways of saying No to the prevailing dogma about what is moral & proposing ethical alternatives. Chuck must know this, though, so why do we need to point it out here? It's gratuitous, no? Besides, that political arguments may be thought of _by some_ as moral arguments pretending to be "amoral" arguments doesn't necessarily destroy the validity of the _content_ of the political arguments in question.
>you are making a normative claim about how people *should* act. you
>are legislating behavior and so you are moralizing.
Making a normative claim = legislating behavior = moralizing? I don't think that this equation makes sense. For instance, to legislate behavior, you must have either legislative power or moral authority. Chuck has neither, to take an example at hand. First of all, he obviously doesn't have legislative power in this forum. Moral authority depends on people's approval which one must gain without coercion. In this case, since you are not granting Chuck moral authority, Chuck can't legislate anything. You are free to be indifferent to his words. Moralizing, it seems to me, goes much _beyond_ merely making a normative claim, discussing morality, trying to act morally, etc. Moralizing, in my view, is about reducing everything to a matter of morality, or to put it differently, not granting relative autonomy to any sphere of human endeavor (be it individual or collective).
Yoshie