Gordon Fitch wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox:
> > ...
> > This assumption that any word of approbation or approval is necessarily
> > a moral proposition referring to a "moral order" is merely itself a
> > manifestation of the power of moralism. But while Gordon (on lbo-talk)
> > was probably being facetious in his references to god in his response,
> > he should have been deadly serious. ...
>
> On the contrary, I was quite serious, although possibly not
> quite deadly (enough).
>
> For some reason, human beings, needing God,
This is simply not true, either as a general statement or as an empirical summary of human experience. Most humans (including most of those who claim, if asked, to believe in god) get along very well without any god.
> are born into a
> world in which God is materially absent. Therefore, they must
> find or create God (or the gods, or Nature, or reality --
> Nietzche's God-in-the-grammar).
_You_ seem to need some sort of god. Most humans don't in fact. God is no more absent than are three-headed field mice, one-ton blue frogs with three eyes, etc. You seem to argue that we need some metaphysical absolute in order to ground our approval and disaproval of this or that. But none exists, so we'd better learn how to get along without one. But as it happens, we never really needed such a support and don't now. We are better off without it, since in fact all such supports (as Ollman suggests) turn out to be disguised arguments for capitalism.
It is no accident that the single greatest argument for some metaphysical "Good," the ultimate source perhaps of all such arguments, was written originally as a really vicious attack on the legitimacy of Athenian peasants interfering in affairs of their betters. Morality (as a standard or set of fixed principles or value judgments) is reactionary to its core.
Here what is your original post:
<<It doesn't seem to me that any kind of long-term social enterprise could be carried out without some sort of "fixed principles" simply as a matter of maintaining sufficient coherence to know that what had been done before was connected to what was done after;>>
We need to try not to get mixed up over mere word usage. The kind of principles you refer to here, when you speak of the coherence of a movement, are what in leninist tradition (and I presume other traditions) are called "principles of unity." These have nothing to do with approval or disapproval and are irrelevant to the present discussion.
We are talking about "value judgments," not, for example, the principles of analytic geometry, or the kind of principle we have in mind when we speak of "principled argument," or "explanatory principles," and the context is Ollman's suggestion that, had Marx written a work on ethics, the question would have been posed as: ""Why are approval and condemnation represented in our society as value judgements?" It is a historical argument -- the implication is that condemnation and approval do _not_ under all historical conditions take the form of value judgments, i.e., judgments that refer to a specific realm of "value" which exists independently of human practice and thought and which may be appealed to.
<< if God were not in the grammar (and the vocabulary as well) we would have to have invented her if only in order to recognize ourselves. The insincerity of hiding her will multiply our labors.>>
Nonsense. This is mere assertion, and I can't make any coherent sense of it. The immediate impetus for my posting on Ollman was the argument (underway on both lists) that "non-violence" was in and of itself a _principle_ in terms of which one could judge any and all situations in which the question of violence came up. I deny that any such "fixed principle" exists in terms of which one can pass a "value judgment" on a particular act of "violence," and I denied that there were any "fixed principles," any always applicable judgments of the correctness or incorrectness of violence in a given instance. I would also argue that the practice of advancing arguments against "violence" as such, in terms of some such moral principle or "value judgment" is almost always politically divisive. And it achieves nothing -- that is, in practice violence is never controlled by arguments about violence in the abstract. And my principle here is an analytic and historical one, not a moral one. Progressive movements are disrupted by debates over the morality or immorality of violence. And if you ask why we should "value" progressive movements I reply with the proposition that we are here talking to each other and your question is as silly as the question of does the world really exist. (Incidentally, for later reference, this is both where the discussion of Timpanaro on pen-l is relevant and the context for making sense of Doyle's post. Timpanaro argues that the only serious epistemological questions are questions for neuroscience rather than for philosophy.)
>
> Hence this contradiction: almost everyone says there is a
> moral order,
I don't. Ollman doesn't. Marx didn't. No one who is an atheist has any basis for claiming that there is a moral order.
> or acts as if one exists,
Not true. Everyone acts as though they approve or disapprove of various features of their world, which is empirically true. The attempt to label such acts of approval or disapproval as moral judgments is an ideological error. No one really believes in such a moral order. They just resort to it when challenged.
> but nobody can agree
> on its contents
For the same reason that we could never reach agreement on the biological principles manifested in the body of a three-headed field mouse.
> or point out a material basis for its existence
> and features.
That is because it has no material basis. Marxian historical analysis can explain why the belief in it persists.
> We have no choice but to gesticulate and insist
> that the shadows we produce are revealing the walls of a mighty
> edifice.
Choice is not a relevant category here. The world is not a supermarket where you are forced to make an abstract free choice among competing brands of lima beans.
Carrol