Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> >
> > What's important, as Justin keeps emphasizing, is a good method
> > for adjudicating between people with different moral beliefs and
> > practical objectives.
>
> On your premises, there's no basis for agreement about this either.
> Why would individuals valuing sadistic domination and exploitation of
> others, for instance, and having this as their practical objective also
> value "a good method for adjudicating between people with different
> moral beliefs and practical objectives"?
There is no such basis in the abstract. That is why the political and moral judgments of masses made up of the "abstract -- isolated -- individual" of civil society simply won't provide an enduring basis for Justin's liberal proceduralism any more than for Brian's surreal desire for judges to act on the basis of individual moral principle. And that is why both Engels's Preface to the German edition of _Poverty of Philosophy_ and Marx's one-word response to the reporter's "What Is" are such essential glosses on the Thesis on Feuerbach III (Engels's version):
****The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as _revolutionising practice_.****
The last two words are, I believe, sometimes translated as "revolutionary practice." If that is the correct translation, then Marx hadn't gotten his own thought straight when he wrote these words. I take it that "revolutionising" catches up (as "revolutionary" does not necessarily) that it is through revolutionary practice (and collective reflection on it) that men/women _also_ revolutionize themselves.
But those needed 'moral' premises have no existence prior to or autonomously of human practice (struggle). An institution as deeply grounded as was slavery in the whole of u.s. life was not going to be morally condemned except as it was repudiated in blood struggle. And a century ago the New York Times referred jestingly to lynching as a cute local southern custom. That took quite a bit of bloodshed (including the combat experience of black soldiers in WW2 and Korea) to get rid of.
Carrol