late wrote:We have a rough sense of morality built into our brains. You can kill that small part and instant sociopath...
What is thought of as moral changes a lot from time to time, and place to place. It's not an intrinsic part of the world independent of us and our way of looking at things.
If there is to be such a place it has to do with our social nature from which all ethics stems from our collaboration with other humans.
So fundamental to our existence and being that even some of the worst acts are still based in it as only a failure of socialization produces the worst individual who acts out by themselves.
Indeed things change as so do our social formations. One can emphasize the relative differences, but the point is to emphasize the basis on which all are derived from. They take on an objective quality because they are institutionalized and aren’t based on the whims of individual humans as much as many experience the loose ethos of liberal society than thick ethos of communities in which they participate if any beyond work. The objective part being they belong to the objects of humans as a property of human activity and not merely belief and thus take on a objective character even while they aren’t objective the way nature is. But even nature is shaped by human practice and is not to be look upon as independent of human activity. There is a reality underpinning all that can severely disrupt beliefs even and cause a crisis of belief. The appearance of total objectivity of course occurs only when dominant and undisturbed.
Such things do not exist independently of humans but their institutional basis gives them a reality in the world that can’t be easily ignored as a matter of mere belief. One can argue what it means to be a good feminist or Christian and come out with differences, but as with Marx’s aphorism, “All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”.
One finds the virtues and ideal norms of a practice/concept in ones history and often a critique of their limits. Even scientific communities operate in such a fashion. Those who fail to abide by such norms tend to be excommunicated in some fashion.
The good is always a good of something and becomes meaningless when one abstracts people from their social contexts, rendering humans purposeless, only arbitrary.
And from this there can be better forms of life in which to defend against others. Not only abstractly but in relation to material conditions such that one isn’t merely a middle class moralizer. Against the purely descriptive approach of differences, one can argue of some ways as superior even while one resists the imposition of a colonizing approach.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/malik/not-equal.htmCLR James, like most anti-imperialists in the past, recognised that all progressive politics were rooted in the ‘Western tradition’, and in particular in the ideas of reason, progress, humanism and universalism that emerged out of the Enlightenment.
The scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values — these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously, or those that exist now in other political and cultural traditions. Not because Europeans are a superior people, but because out of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution flowed superior ideas.
The Western tradition is not Western in any essential sense, but only through an accident of geography and history. Indeed, Islamic learning provided an important resource for both the Renaissance and the development of science. The ideas we call ‘Western’ are in fact universal, laying the basis for greater human flourishing. That is why for much of the past century radicals, especially third world radicals, recognised that the problem of imperialism was not that it was a Western ideology, but that it was an obstacle to the pursuit of the progressive ideals that arose out of the Enlightenment.
As Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian nationalist, put it: ‘All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission that fell to them.’ [5] For thinkers like Fanon and James, the aim of anti-imperialism was not to reject Western ideas but to reclaim them for all of humanity.
Indeed, Western liberals were often shocked by the extent to which anti-colonial movements adopted what they considered to be tainted notions. The Enlightenment concepts of universalism and social progress, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, found ‘unexpected support from peoples who desire nothing more than to share in the benefits of industrialisation; peoples who prefer to look upon themselves as temporarily backward rather than permanently different’. Elsewhere he noted that the doctrine of cultural relativism ‘was challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists had established it in the first place’ [6].
How things have changed. ‘Permanently different’ is exactly how we tend to see different, groups, societies and cultures today. Why? Largely because contemporary society has lost faith in social transformation, in the possibility of progress, in the beliefs that animated anti-imperialists like James and Fanon.
To regard people as ‘temporarily backward’ rather than ‘permanently different’ is to accept that while people are potentially equal, cultures definitely are not; it is to accept the idea of social and moral progress; that it would be far better if everybody had the chance to live in the type of society or culture that best promoted human advancement.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdf Critical voice is the capacity of a person living ‘inside’ a society to form views available from a position ‘outside’ that society:
... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society. (Sen, 2002a, p. 476-77.)
Critical agency refers “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.”
The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be ‘critical voice’. This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But ‘critical voice’ does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society.
Critical voice is both instrumental, in that it is needed in order to sustain the other elements of well-being, and constitutive, in that only the person with critical voice is truly free.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By Tainari88
- By Rancid
- By Rich