----- Original Message ----- From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
Heraclitus said, you cannot step in the same river twice, to which Zeno replied, you cannot step into the same river once.
Miles' brazen moral relativism (see below) not only makes it impossible to judge other societies, it makes it impossible to judge this society. If judgement implies a standard that transcends the given, which I think it does, not only is that the basis on which we can say that wage slavery is preferable to slavery or that slavery is preferable to cannibalism, but also the basis on which we can say that the society of the freely associated producers is preferable to wage slavery.
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Uh, no.
1) Without an exposition of the Absolute [or 'the Absolute'] the claims against relativism [or 'relativism'] fall apart due to a misdecription/misexplanation is to what most comparative historians/ethnographers/political theorists are attempting to do.
2)Miles did not seem to be singling out moral vocabularies to unpack the judgments or suspensions of judgments regarding the deployment of the terms superior, inferior, progress or regress. That being written, absent substantive consensus on the criteria for assessing those terms and whether they are universalizable with consistency/coherence across all historico-social epochs, contending terms and their inferential relations will vie for the attention of readers and be selected for all sorts of different reasons. As such, *pluralism* is our lot.
I would note that denizens of so-called anti-relativism have yet to say/write/show the Absolute ['the Absolute'], whether in secular or theological garb, in all the irrefutable final word-ism glory which they seem to desire.
http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssde/Death%20and%20furniture.pdf
Ian