Gordon Fitch wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox:
> > ...
> > This assumption that any word of approbation or approval is necessarily
> > a moral proposition referring to a "moral order" is merely itself a
> > manifestation of the power of moralism. But while Gordon (on lbo-talk)
> > was probably being facetious in his references to god in his response,
> > he should have been deadly serious. ...
>
> On the contrary, I was quite serious, although possibly not
> quite deadly (enough).
>
> For some reason, human beings, needing God,
This is simply not true, either as a general statement or as an
empirical summary of human experience. Most humans (including most of
those who claim, if asked, to believe in god) get along very well
without any god.
> are born into a
> world in which God is materially absent. Therefore, they must
> find or create God (or the gods, or Nature, or reality --
> Nietzche's God-in-the-grammar).
_You_ seem to need some sort of god. Most humans don't in fact. God is
no more absent than are three-headed field mice, one-ton blue frogs with
three eyes, etc. You seem to argue that we need some metaphysical
absolute in order to ground our approval and disaproval of this or that.
But none exists, so we'd better learn how to get along without one. But
as it happens, we never really needed such a support and don't now. We
are better off without it, since in fact all such supports (as Ollman
suggests) turn out to be disguised arguments for capitalism.
It is no accident that the single greatest argument for some
metaphysical "Good," the ultimate source perhaps of all such arguments,
was written originally as a really vicious attack on the legitimacy of
Athenian peasants interfering in affairs of their betters. Morality (as
a standard or set of fixed principles or value judgments) is reactionary
to its core.
Here what is your original post:
<<It doesn't seem to me that any kind of long-term social
enterprise could be carried out without some sort of "fixed
principles" simply as a matter of maintaining sufficient
coherence to know that what had been done before was connected
to what was done after;>>
We need to try not to get mixed up over mere word usage. The kind of
principles you refer to here, when you speak of the coherence of a
movement, are what in leninist tradition (and I presume other
traditions) are called "principles of unity." These have nothing to do
with approval or disapproval and are irrelevant to the present
discussion.
We are talking about "value judgments," not, for example, the principles
of analytic geometry, or the kind of principle we have in mind when we
speak of "principled argument," or "explanatory principles," and the
context is Ollman's suggestion that, had Marx written a work on ethics,
the question would have been posed as: ""Why are approval and
condemnation represented in our society as value judgements?" It is a
historical argument -- the implication is that condemnation and approval
do _not_ under all historical conditions take the form of value
judgments, i.e., judgments that refer to a specific realm of "value"
which exists independently of human practice and thought and which may
be appealed to.
<< if God were not in the grammar (and
the vocabulary as well) we would have to have invented her if
only in order to recognize ourselves. The insincerity of
hiding her will multiply our labors.>>
Nonsense. This is mere assertion, and I can't make any coherent sense of
it. The immediate impetus for my posting on Ollman was the argument
(underway on both lists) that "non-violence" was in and of itself a
_principle_ in terms of which one could judge any and all situations in
which the question of violence came up. I deny that any such "fixed
principle" exists in terms of which one can pass a "value judgment" on a
particular act of "violence," and I denied that there were any "fixed
principles," any always applicable judgments of the correctness or
incorrectness of violence in a given instance. I would also argue that
the practice of advancing arguments against "violence" as such, in terms
of some such moral principle or "value judgment" is almost always
politically divisive. And it achieves nothing -- that is, in practice
violence is never controlled by arguments about violence in the
abstract. And my principle here is an analytic and historical one, not a
moral one. Progressive movements are disrupted by debates over the
morality or immorality of violence. And if you ask why we should "value"
progressive movements I reply with the proposition that we are here
talking to each other and your question is as silly as the question of
does the world really exist. (Incidentally, for later reference, this is
both where the discussion of Timpanaro on pen-l is relevant and the
context for making sense of Doyle's post. Timpanaro argues that the only
serious epistemological questions are questions for neuroscience rather
than for philosophy.)
>
> Hence this contradiction: almost everyone says there is a
> moral order,
I don't. Ollman doesn't. Marx didn't. No one who is an atheist has any
basis for claiming that there is a moral order.
> or acts as if one exists,
Not true. Everyone acts as though they approve or disapprove of various
features of their world, which is empirically true. The attempt to label
such acts of approval or disapproval as moral judgments is an
ideological error. No one really believes in such a moral order. They
just resort to it when challenged.
> but nobody can agree
> on its contents
For the same reason that we could never reach agreement on the
biological principles manifested in the body of a three-headed field
mouse.
> or point out a material basis for its existence
> and features.
That is because it has no material basis. Marxian historical analysis
can explain why the belief in it persists.
> We have no choice but to gesticulate and insist
> that the shadows we produce are revealing the walls of a mighty
> edifice.
Choice is not a relevant category here. The world is not a supermarket
where you are forced to make an abstract free choice among competing
brands of lima beans.
Carrol
