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Originally Posted by Charlatan
Politicalphile, again, I agree completely that it is important to take a stand on moral issues.
The question becomes where does anyone draw the line and impose their morality on others?
To live in an absolutist world is to live in a constant state of war with your neighbours. It just isn't practical.
How do you square the practicallity of everyday life in face of absolutism? Surely something has to give?
Can you clarify this for me?
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Yes, I can clarify this. Essentially, the way to compromise and live with one's neighbors without starting a crusade every time you have a moral disagreement is to agree to disagree on some issues. That is, although I personally believe smoking is immoral, I also believe that it is not my obligation to prevent my neighbor from smoking, so long as he doesn't do so on my property. The fact that I don't impose the consequences of my moral judgment on my neighbor saves us from fighting about it, but it in no way prevents me from making that moral judgment.
I would only be open about moral judgments with the person I was judging if I believed they would be receptive to discussing the issue with me, rather than getting into a nasty fight about it. That's the reason I felt comfortable about posting my moral views on smoking on TFP. Whether I was justified in feeling comfortable is another issue at this point.
So yes, like everyone else, I make moral judgments with great regularity. This does not mean, however, that I am unable to sit by and watch others suffer the consequences of their immoral actions. My goal is to engage others in dialogue about their contrasting moral conceptions, not to force everyone to comply with what I hold to be true. I'm in the business of argument, not coercion.
What we have seen from other TFPers, especially ngdawg, is a series of denials about my underlying premise, which is that everyone is constantly making moral judgments about other people. In her post denying that she made such moral judgments, I went through and highlighted the moral judgments in magenta. The highlighting was intended to prove my point that she was making such judgments, not to criticize the substance of those judgments (except where they were self-contradictory).
What is perhaps more interesting, ngdawg asserted the moral principle of the wrongness of harming other human beings, as well as the fact that cigarette smoke harms human beings. Thus, not only is it clear that both ngdawg and I make moral judgments, but we actually have come to the same conclusion on the morality of smoking: namely, that it is immoral because it harms other people. The insults, the belittling, the taunting, were all in vain, it seems.
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"Your principle has nothing to do with harm, it's self-imposed moralistic righteousness...I doubt you are that altruistic...In the nicest way possible, I will ask: who the hell do YOU think you are that you can sit there and point fingers?...And to do it to people you have absolutely NO connections with is reprehensible...STFU...Unlike yourself, I have a somewhat working memory...your paranoia is showing."
That's all from you ngdawg. I'm self-righteous, not altruistic, reprehensible, forgetful, and paranoid. And here I was thinking I was presenting a personal opinion in an open forum for debate.