[lbo-talk] Moral Foundations

[Somebody Somebody]

I'm still waiting for Carrol's explanation as to why morality is a mysterious entity. It isn't. It's the absolute substrate that provides a basis for any society, under any given relations of production, to determine whether one action should be favored over another. Carrol's position is so extreme, it makes Trotsky's critique of Dewey's pragmatism in "Their Morals and Ours" look like mushy liberalism. Just because morals change with the development of the productive forces, or in a punctuated fashion as one ruling class gives way to another, does not mean that it has no validity. No, let's be clear. Carrol has no moral qualms about the genocide of the Herero people in German Southwest Africa. Or any moral quibble with the use of cluster and white phosphorus bombs in Iraq. Believing in right and wrong is tantamount to superstition in his book. Honestly, we might just as well accept the definition of justice as injustice given by Thrasymachus.