[lbo-talk] Progress and Cariucature (Was Re: Catholicism. . . )

[Eubulides]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ted Winslow wrote:
>
>> This may be so on your understanding of
>> "history". I don't think it's so on Marx's.
>>
>> His understanding sublates a tradition
>> running from the Greeks through to Hegel
>> that treats values, including ethical values,
>> as objective and knowable.
>
> I'm just catching up with the thread, but I'm with Ted on this.
>
> This notion of Marxism as a cold critique of the status quo at the
> exclusion of the righteous moral condemnation of precisely all those
> social conditions that fragment, debase, humiliate, demoralize, and
> prostitute humans (those are all terms that Marx used) reminds me of
> the epistemological schools that view cognition as a cool, detached,
> dispassionate, unemotional exercise.  In fact, no engagement, no
> passion, no emotions, no knowledge.  Or more simply said: No passion,
> no action.

=================

Might I interest you in the works of metaethical error theorists J.L.
Mackie, Richard Joyce or Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, perhaps? :->

One need not appeal to moralese to substantiate withering critiques of
contemporary capitalism....Indeed one could argue that appealing to
moralese would exacerbate the problems of persuasion as much as
appealing to economese.

====================

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962447

Moral Fictionalism, Preference Moralization and Anti-Conservatism: Why
Metaethical Error Theory Doesn't Imply Policy Quietism

Don Ross
University of Cape Town - School of Economics; University of Cape
Town; University of Alabama at Birmingham

January 2007

Abstract:
The evolutionary explanation of human dispositions to prosocial
behaviour and to moralization of such behaviour undermines the moral
realist's belief in objective moral facts that hold independently of
people's contingent desires. At the same time, advocacy of preferences
for radical large-scale policy change is generally sure to be
ineffective unless it is moralized. It may seem that this requires the
economist who would advocate loud policies, but is also committed to a
naturalistic account of human social and cognitive behaviour, to
engage in wilful manipulation, morally hectoring people even when she
knows that her doing so ought rationally to carry no persuasive force.
Understanding the role of moralized preferences in the maintenance of
the self, and in turn understanding the economic rationale of such
self-maintenance, shows how and why preferences can be moralized by a
believer in error theory without this implying hypocrisy or
manipulation.

Keywords: preference moralization, policy, naturalism, evolution of sociality

JEL Classifications: A11, B25, D63, D64
Working Paper Series