On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Eubulides <[email protected]>wrote:
> Leftists are rightfully on guard against such ridiculously authoritarian > manners of speech. Carroll and others, whom I have mentioned to you > off-list in the past, merely want to expand our guard to see such > counterproductive speech acts as inimical to democratic deliberation > over how to get along with one another and the planet. > > What evidence do you have that empathy is a moral principle rather than > an aesthetic one? Is it a moral principle just because you say so? > > Perhaps one day in the future, our descendants will no more miss moral > discourse than we miss discourse about phlogiston or the ether or the > Roman deities. > I think you are way over-reacting. Empathy is a moral principle to me simply by definition: I use the word "moral" to mean anything informed by a sense of right and wrong. I believe this is what economists call "normative arguments" - economists of course are motivated by a pathetic need to have their discipline recognized as an objective science, rather than as moral philosophy, so they have to make up new phrases to avoid using the word "moral", but progressives now have to play the same stupid word games? It is as if the word "moral" itself is tainted now because of some vague association with the Vatican and Rush Limbaugh. I strongly believe progressives should be driven by a sense of right-and-wrong - and not just by some aesthetic sense. -raghu.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
