I have tried to avoid this annoying practice, admittedly not always or always successfully, instead following the normal scholarly practice of putting positions stated by others, especially if I think I disagree with them, in the best possible light, and assuming the interlocutor knows the layout of the arguments. However, since you want play this game of caricature the interlocutor, I can do that too, probably better than you, since that's what law professors are trained to do.
However, here, Since I am a semi-sentient human being who has thought about the issues, however, it is not difficult to make the appropriate distinctions. Intuitions in moral philosophy are useful only insofar as you can persuade others to share them or insofar as they express things others want to say. The term means, as I use it, "something we want to say if we can either justify it or don't have to." So yes, you do get to base your science on intuitions; but they are nor personal in the sense of being idiosyncratic. No intuitions are.
Chris and Shane evidently think that science is insulated from social influence, somehow , magically, being separated from all other kinds of beliefs in that they are directly connected with The Truth whatever the social context or social interest that surrounds them. Moral beliefs and other ideology are of course idle chatter merely because they express the social interests of the dominant classes in a historical epoch, and therefore have no truth value, they are nur die alte Dreck, which will fall away when we transcend ideology in a classless society. And we needn't worry that this fact seems to make it arbitrary whether you end up on which side, because, er, science shows that progress to higher form of social organization is inevitable, and we can somehow grasp and incorporate the appropriate values without being subject to social influences that do not yet exist. And we can know these new forms are progressive and superior without making any value
judgments because we know that they are appropriate to the new forms of social organization that must (science tells us) come to past. And it doesn't matter that they haven't because the way they come to pass is by the development of forces in the existing mode which come to exemplify in an admittedly distorted form, which, however, we can discern the cleaned up version of because we are really smart, and so in a sense already exist in the consciousness of the oppressed when they resist the current forms of exploitation.
Have I piled on enough fallacies and misrepresentations to you to keep you busy disentangling yourself from views that none of us think that you hold for the present? Is that a fun game to play? If not, don't do it to me. It's annoying, insulting, time-wasting, and unconstructive.
--- On Sun, 12/14/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Catholicism, was Re: blacks about as morally conservative as Republicans
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, December 14, 2008, 3:16 PM
> Do I get to base science on my personal intuitions too?
> Cool.
>
>
> --- On Sun, 12/14/08, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I think that science and ethics are on
> > the same footing. It's not as if scientific belief
> > floats free of social context or lacks a social basis
> in a
> > mode of production. It's actually quite difficult
> to
> > explain why we should treat science as objective if
> you
> > regard morality to be relative for the reasons you do.
> >
>
>
>
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