On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 12:10:41PM -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:
> This is oxymoronic. A progressive person has much better things to do
> with his/her time than spend it "regulating their consumptive
> practices." I'll stop here, because your positions seem too absurd to
> bother refuting.
Let me see if I get this straight, as all my political reactionary stuff seems to have made me stupid. (And mere assertions that an argument is oxymoronic, without a showing that it is, always makes me wonder what *I'm* missing.)
In the same message in which you declare, unilaterally, that progressive people don't have enough time (?) to, say, avoid eating at McDonald's, you say that *my* positions "seem too absurd to bother refuting" but also that --
> Moralism of your sort can only become a widespread social practice if
> the state adopts it and enforces it with widespread use of firing
> squads.
-- *my* position requires the coercive powers of the State to implement?
What about all those thousands of Food Not Bombs-lovin' vegans who were in Quebec last week, trying to give capitalism a black eye? They all seem to have plenty of time to do both.
Oh, but I guess your point is that any time they spend trying to avoid eating food produced by corporations for profit from the easily avoidable physical suffering of billions of animals is better spent doing more *real* progressive work?
My guess is that you'd need the State to impose your own views about how progressives should spend their time a lot more quickly than I'd need it to impose my "moralism". There are, after all, societies in which many people, for moral or religious reasons, refrain, say, from eating meat -- and without the State pointing guns at them.
Despite our "you suck, no you do!" posturing, I would still like an answer to my sincerely-asked question: Do you recognize any fundamentally individual moral obligations at all? It sounds like you don't, but I can't really imagine such a position.
Best, Kendall Clark