|
so objective is a synonym for transcendent.
i'm fine with that.
i don't think you need statements on the order of a universal or transcendent validity to ground an ethics. i think you merely need a socially binding prohibition. what makes for a socially binding prohibition can involve many different registers of statement---but what's objectively/transcendently valid about any of those statements, really, is their function in shoring up the socially binding character of a given prohibition. that's it. and nothing more than that is required.
unless you're doing something like trying to figure out how to write a universal declaration of human rights or other such document which operates rhetorically in a space that requires (de facto) claims to universality---but that's a rhetorical register. the question of whether claim x or y written in that register **is** universal apart from the its operating in a sentence that stages it as universal in a particular context is an aesthetic matter. how could it be otherwise? to whom would one appeal to determine?
of course, it's also possible that what's universal is what everyone says is universal and because everyone says it, that thing is necessarily universal because the characteristic that defines the universal is that everyone says it is universal.
and/or you could say that universality is a rhetorical mode used in ethical propositions to the extent that they use a collective second person, work in the imperative and are written to apply to the entirety of a given community. and i'd agree with that.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|