[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

[Matthias Wasser]

But to engage in the sorts of social behaviors most would readily recognize
as moral approval and disapproval - "I donated to charity! I'm such a good
person!" "You cheated on Amy? How could you...?" - it hardly seems
neccessary to be a Moralist, or to use a perhaps less confusing term, moral
realist. One can say, when one returns to one's computer, that one acted as
one did because one has an irrational desire implanted by
culture/evolution/God/libertarian free will not to see people suffer, that
relationships are reciprocal, that people say things that correspond to
reality, and so on and such forth. One might even realize you start
referring to the same general objects of desire and so invent words for
them; justice and honesty and so forth - all without believing that justice
has any more claim than beauty to some prior existence in the objective
world. At the practical level I don't think there's much difference between
your error theory and this emotivism - just that the latter allows you to
accept that people using words like "wrong" and "just" aren't fanciful
mystics. Aren't you the first to condemn writing off the other as Irrational
and speculating about her internal states?

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> **MW{ even if you understand that your desire not to see people suffer
> is an irrational product of culture/evolution/whatever. . . .**
>
> Cbc: What in the world is irrational about it? This completely baffles
> me. Five thousand years of human struggle went into creating this desire
> not to see people suffer.

A-rational, then. I subscribe to the notion that reason is purely
instrumental, although of course that's another controversial question in
its own right. Reason must ever be the servant of things prior to her.


> **MW] Carrol seems to think it requires moral realism; that for an
> objection to be moral it would have to be grounded in reference to a
> transhistorical True ideal. **
>
> Cbc: The wording sneaks Moralism back in here by the phrase "for an
> objection to be moral."

 Here by "moral" I mean "germane to discussions of morality," not
"approvable."