--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote: Besides, even if you think, as I do that it's not a bad idea to bear in mind that you might be wrong, that doesn't mean that you need any commitment to relativism -- to the idea that there is no fact of the matter about who is right. In fact quite the opposite: you can't be modest and believe that you might be wrong if there is no right answer. If all views are equally good, the Inquisition and the Nazis are as good as King and Gandhi.
jks ---
There's a slight conflation of ideas here. The Nazis wre demonstrably wrong about things other than just their moral worldview (I happen to agree with Miles here, vaguely and approximately, and am really turned off by the Rortyesque "the Western liberal as moral yardstick" line). The Nazis believed in a racially defined humanity in which angelic Aryans were besieged by satanic Untermenschen. That's wrong just as a statement of fact. It was a paranoid fantasy that became translated into politics. They were wrong in a much different sense than, say, people who believe that slavery is justifiable (which is most people in the "civilized" world before around 1800).
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