MW] When Doug says a moral statement isn't abstract in this discussion, he means - and can correct me if I'm misrepresenting him -
Cbc] I am not concerned here with whether this is Doug's meaning or not, but only with the argument (below) considered on its own merits.
MW: that "x is wrong" isn't a statement about a property that inheres in the platonic form of x (because, of course, there is no platonic form of x)
Cbc] If anyone (including me) has dragged Plato in, it was a mistake. There are many forms of abstraction other than Plato's Forms. This then is irrelevant and a distraction.
MW: but a statement about his attitude
Cbc] We are not talking about any0one's private thoughts here; we are talking about the world out there.
MW[ towards the vast majority of encounterable objects in the world that we would call "x;"
Cbc] Exactly. "X is wrong" refers to many objects, and therefore is an abstraction. That's what we _mean_ by abstraction. It will be confusing to go on speaking only of Xs and Ys & Ps & Qs here, but clearer than trying to create some hypothetical instance. Let us take P & Q as among those (allegedly) 'encounterable' objects which are instances of x. Let us admit (for arguments sake) that P is indeed x. How do we know Q is X? What links it to P in such a w ay as we can call both X?
(Now we are back to Plato but not to his forms. This is where Socrates begins. You say "X is bad." He says, what does X mean. You say, for example, P. He says: Wait a minute, I didn't ask for an example of X, because I can't know whether the example is an example of X until you first tell me what X is> And off we go on 25pp years of philosophical history.)
MW] namely, "boy, do I hate x!" Is this not precisely the attitude you have towards the prison system,
Cbc] This is terrible. No one ever has or ever will encounted the "Prison System." Any reference to the Prison System is highly abstract. Any judgment (moral or otherwise) is Abstract. The only exception can be something like the following. You and Peter are in a room together. He points at a chair (he MUST NOT NAME AS A CHAIRI) and grunts and makes a face. That is a concrete judgment. As soon as Peter opens his mouth he is making an abstract (and ins oem sense, a universal) judgment.
Incidentally, the use of words of praise or blame does not in itself constitute a moral judggment. A serious left in the U.S. were one to arise would have as a major part of its program the dissolution of the Prison System. (Even to define what the Prison System _is_ with any precision would require, to begin with, a lenghty book or several books, followed by many articles, followeed by a lot of miscellaneous practice aimed at making the concept clear. In other words we wont _really_ know what the prison system is until, in a collective way, we are already engaged in the battle to dissovle it.
The prison system iteself is not immoral or wrong as those words are often used. Nor are the men and women who maintain it bad or immoral; it is simply an element in a sytem of complex social relations which A Left would work to overcome. It is history, not evil.
MW] the Democratic Party, et cetera? When you way you want abolition of the prisons I'm pretty sure you aren't just aggregating individual opinions about particular prisons, the vast majority of which you are surely individually unacquainted with.
Cbc] Huh? I can't make head nor tail of this. If you are simply saying that the prison system is abstract, of course. "Abstract" is a positive, not an evil, word in myvocabulary. I just want others to become more aware of what they are doing when the abstract. I don't want discussion reduced to grunts and pointing fingers.
Carrol
P.S. A note on going back this far in the thread (MW's post exact date & time: Mon, 27 Jul 09:35:50). Before I could read any of the posts carefully I had to go through a long process, only so far completed upto this post. First I had to gather all the Blue Dog posts into a Notepad file (this is why I'm still using an antique e-mail program; it contains a single command to do this with anywehre from one to several thousand posts). Then I transferred that to a Word file, still not readable with my ravaged sight. Then I went through that file identifying who was sayig what (since the next step would eliminate all the >s, >>s, >>>s, etc). Then I pur the file through the e-stripper program, giving me word wrap & eliminating the daggers, which I then copied into a second Word file. Then I started going through that manually, keeping only those quotations from other posts essential to the given post. THEN I started, finally, going throuh that file, reading it. Just yesterday I finally arrived at the post by MW being responded to here. (I haven't completed the first steps yet for all the Blue Dog posts.)
(My eyes may have worsened in the last two weeks. Up until recently while I couldn't read a post carefully without plading it in a word file and refromatting I could browse the posts sufficiently to know which threads I wanted to follow. I haven't even been able to do that the last week or so. I have not the slightest idea of what the Badiou thread is about, and I don't know whether I want to spend sevveral hours transcribing a random selection of posts to see if I want to transcribe the rest.
Another thing about my vision: even after the trnascription I speak of I still read with glacial slowness, & the slightest typo or syntactical slip is ap to add several minutes to my reading of a paragraph. Someone typed "Plantonic" in a post today or yesterday. Easy to see the typo, so easy that if one were reading at a decent speed one would see the right word without even noticing that it was misspelled. I went over that sentence, more or less one or two words at a time, for several minutes before the meaning of Plantonic dawned on me. Similarly in the paragraph from MW quoted above. I don't ever remember myself encoountering or using the word, "encounterable"; clear enough in context but slow reading, with some letters blurred by the angle of reflection off the screen, and I labored for 5 minutes to figure out what the hell he was wsa saying in that sentence.)
It will probably be a week or two before I get around to the most recent batch of Blue Dog posts - Alan R seems to be saying something interesting, and I'm looking forward to actually reading those posts.
Oh yes. I was rather shocked that Doug misconstrued a bit of sarcasm on my part. Granted it was pretty clumsy sarcasm, no better (but no worse) than the sophomoric cuteness of the "cue Cde. Cox" with which he decorates a number of his posts. But really - I know that no one on this list _really_ claims to have a link to the eternal! Jessh! I do think, however, that those who claim the imprtance of Moral Principles have a serious problem in saying what gounds those principles. Why is it wrong that some people have three houses and some none? And if it is only a private response, why should other people attend to it?
And also. Michael Smith did, I think, err, in his references to visceral feelings. It was on the basis of visceral feelings that Hitler had quite a few million killed in the death camps. It was his moral intuition or visceral feeling that it was wrong for Jews to exist in the world. Morality is a two-edgedsword.
PS. 2 Sooner or later I will be writing on this. Some years ago, in one of the recurrent bellyaching threads abut the decline of American intelligence, Andie cited the 19th-c Americans who stood in the sun of several hours listening to and understanding the complex debate between Lincoln & Douglas. Precisely. Listening. I have a pretty good grasp of Postone from having it read to me. I COULD NEVER understand that book by reading it now -even if I had an electronic copy and could format it for maximum reading ease. I just don't take in enough words at a time to follow a complex (and new) argument on screen or in print.
My point. It is perfectly possible witho someone with as good a grasp of English (and powerful a composing power) as Milton would flunk English 101 or be unable to make sense even of an Eddy Guest poem. Some people with powerful intellects cannot read or write, but would be geniuses of the word in an oral culture.
Probably, if you want equal educational opportunity for all, readers and stenographers should be provided fo any student who had difficulty reading and writing. And of course, for such a student, exams should be oral, not essay exams or even objective exams.