We Continue To Talk

1) Moral licentiousness and decay weakens a society
2) The left champions moral licentiousness and decay
3) Therefore, the left champions policies that weaken society
If you want to deny the conclusion you must deny one or more of the premises.

Which premise(s) do you wish to deny?

I deny both premises. As to #1, and speaking as a father of two teenagers, I think exposure to moral licentiousness and decay are not unmitigatedly bad as it exposes them to the real world and thus innoculates them for the real world. Of course, exposure to such is not the same as consent to such. I take a quasi-Nietschean, social-Darwinian view that a world without evil is a world without struggle and a world without the potential for good.

As to #2, I see that as neither a premise or a fact. To the contrary, who do you suppose it is that owns and manages the vast and effectives engines of moral corruption but rightist business people, most of whom are conservative Christians? Why? Because it is in their financial self-interest to do so. Fox is a stirling example. O'Reilly, who I admire for his tough-minded (albeit wrong-minded) independence of thought (in contrast to Beck who is a lunatic and Hannity whom is a GOP apparatchik) nevertheless almost always has a needlessly salacious segment on his show. But drill down a bit more. Who do you suppose are the people who are having abortions, the people who are getting divorced, the mobsters, the pediophiles, the murderers? They are not just generally Christians but conservative Christians, and repeated statistical studies support this. The denial of this ("No true conservative Christians are morally depraved") is of course the No True Scottsman fallacy, which takes this form:

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

The problem with this argument is that it derives an unproved predicate ("puts sugar on porridge") from the subject ("Scotsman"). The move is from a synthetic-contingent proposition (one that can be falsified by facts) to an analytic-necessary assertion (one that is true by definition but has no relationship to the facts). Now, sometimes the argument is valid as when the predicate derives from the subject, as in "no true vegetarians eat beef".

The family was generally in accord with that stipulation. This is a good example of the vast spread between principle and application and where deeply held principles are chucked in favor of situational ethics. We clearly don't see eye to eye on the pro-life issue although we are in accord with the general principle of an undivided reverance for human life. It is the application in real time under the fog of crisis that is the rub. At the time, I was disappointed at my family for thisi decision, although I've tried hard not to conceptualize in in legals terms such as homicide or suicide. I can conceive of a situation where it may be acceptable to remove nourishment from me if I was in my mother's place. However, I would never want this to happen if I was still conscious, as was the case for my mother, and nor should such decisions be compelled one way or another by the legislature. These kind of decisions are difficult, which is why I am suspicious of moral absolutist claims of any kind as compelleing as they may seem at the time. Such people who make them simply have not lived enough life or thought deeply enough to make them in my opinion.

I'm sorry it has taken me a while to get back to you on this. The account of your mother's late life and death is very moving.I take it that your family, supposedly pro-life as it was, was in accord with the stipulation to withhold nutrition and hydration?It is my own view that extraordinary measures may be withheld when it is pretty clear that a person's natural life-expectancy has reached its course, but that basic necessities such as nutrition and hydration should never be intentionally withheld. Those things, I believe, are the right of any human person, if they are available. So I think I'm with you on this one, and I am truly sorry for the suffering your mom had to endure at the end of her life, and I'm sorry that you had to witness it. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm sure it is not easy.

Do you see my mother's death in terms of either suicide or homicide?
I think many Kantians (although not Kant!) claim to be moral objectivists rather than moral absolutists. I see no incompatability with situational ethics or utiliterianism and Kantianism so long as the former is rooted in moral objectivity.

I agree there is a distinction between utiliterianism and deontological ethics in that the former considers consequences while the latter does not. However, there can be an overlap as well, as they both try to root moral rules in something other than God or feelings. In the case of Bentham's utiliterianism, it is happiness for the greatest number and Fletcher's situational ethics, in which agape love is the great goal, and in the case of Kant's categorical imperative, it is to treat others as an end rather that as a means to an end. I'm aware that both Bentham and Kant tried to turn their principles into absolutes, but that need not be the case. Consider for example Kant's discussion in Grounding for the Methaphysics of Morals on suicide: "A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels sick of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether taking his own life would not be contrary to his duty to himself. Now he asks whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. But his maxim is this: from self-love I make as my principle to shorten my life when its continued duration threatens more evil than it promises satisfaction. There only remains the question as to whether this principle of self-love can become a universal law of nature. One sees at once that a contradiction in a system of nature whose law would destroy life by means of the very same feeling that acts so as to stimulate the furtherance of life, and hence there could be no existence as a system of nature. Therefore, such a maxim cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature and is, consequently, wholly opposed to the supreme principle of all duty." The contradiction is framed in terms of the conflict of universalizing self-love with self-hate. There are historical episodes when suicide has been regarded not just as a heroic act but as a moral act, as in the Masada deaths. In my mother's case, there is both ambiguity as to consequences but also good will by all concerned, not that that mitigates the act by my mother and the doctor. I disagree with the existentialists that suggest that the action is meaningless or the cause for that action so long as we act in good faith. I'm looking for more.

I don't know enough about the circumstances surrounding your mother's death to say whether it might have been suicide, homicide, both, or neither. I'm only pointing out that you can use those terms morally and not just as legal terms.As for Kant, the principles generated by the CI, whatever they may be, are supposed to be absolute principles. That's the whole point of their being universalizable.You may not see any incompatibility between utilitarianism (or situationalism, or whatever you wish to call it) and Kantianism, but Kant sure did. That was the whole point behind his so-called second formulation of the CI: "Now I say man...." It was to preserve the dignity of the human person against any calculations of utility, which is what he took Hume to be pointing at and presciently feared would become a widely accepted moral theory.There is a lot more to Kantianism than mere objectivism. Utilitarianism is an objectivist moral theory, and Kant was a staunch opponent of (what we now call) utilitarianism.Kant would not have struggled with the permissibility of terminating innocent human life. He would have said it was impermissible because he thought it could not be absolutized as a universal moral law.

If the principles in either of these systems are not taken to be absolute, then one has moved into a different system of ethics all together.

I feel like seconding William James' "damn the absolute." It seems that absolute principles of morality are both nonsensical (unless we want to endorse an application such as "death to all killers" and dangerous. My father, for example, is a wonderful man in many respects. But there is not the slightest doubt that having to make a false choice between Jesus and my death, he would choose my death, and fanatics make choices like that constantly. In the more sane world, we also have doctors and generals who struggle with difficult lifeboat choices that confound deeply held principles. I'm not quite as dismissive as you are toward existentialism, especially when such choices are attached to a spiritual goal. It seems to be based on a realistic view of man and society and it upholds the notion of man's freedom of to make choices, as does Kant.

I wouldn't say "there are no absolutes" (even in the metaphysical sense) is a credo of any existentialism of which I'm aware. It also seems to me that you greatly mischaracterize existentialism in your comment below and also incorrectly tie the philosophy to "pro choice" impulses.

The Existentialists are crass non-cognitivists with respect to morality.. They held that something becomes morally permissible simply on the basis of its being chosen by an agent, and no truth-values attach to statements about morality. This intellectually jejune and socially naive exaltation of will and "choice" in ethical decision-making is still alive and well. It allows people to resort to violence against the innocent when they deem it convenient to do so."

In my years of debate, I've encountered only one person who tried to argue that "everything is relative" and "that we can be sure of nothing" including even trivial facts of science, i.e. the earth circles the sun. In my view, it isn't even something worth debating as it is a variation of solipsism.

I was introduced to the existential imagination in a honors literature class in high school. My teacher Richard Delzingero (we called him "Mr. D.") was one of a small handful of those rare teachers who really pushed me to think and write. He later went on to become a Barnabites priest.

http://www.catholic-church.org/barnabites/b56vocn1.html

Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism, and his thinking came out of his critique on the Danish People's Church for its secularism, politicization, and hypocrisy, and attack that hasn't lost its relevancy. (If you haven't already, I recommend you take a look at his writing.) One of his key concepts is the "leap of faith" to God. I also have come to see theistic apologetics as arguing in circles and there is not a single proof for the existence of God that compels my respect at least. His "subjectivity is truth" statement doesn't mean that principled ethics are chucked. It does mean, as I understand him, that an interior quality of acceptance needs to take place before ethical action can commence.

Some people think that existentialism is devoid of faith, because of the anti-clerical writings of Nietzsche and atheistic writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, most existentialists were theists. I see the same false dichotomy between Christianity-- love for God-- and humanism--love for man. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, wrote a book defining and defending Christian humanism Such belief are not in opposition to each other, and nor is existentialism necessarily in opposition to Christianity. Of theists who influenced existentialism, we must include Hegel, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and others. Unlike much of religious and modern thought that minimizes or suppresses the idea of man's free will, in existentialism man's free will provides the axiomatic backdrop that asks us to choose in a morally ambiguous world. Man defines himself by the sum of his choices, according to Sartre. Man is free. The coward makes him cowardly. The hero makes him heroic. Because God doesn't exist, Sartre says, man defines his essence though his actions. But I don't think this follows. Why should the non-existence of God have any bearing whatever on our actions? Why should it matter if our death results in nothingness, heaven, or reincarnation, so long as we act morally and authentically today? It makes as much sense to say: Because God exists man defines his essence through his actions. Bad faith emerges when we attribute to God consequences to our actions, or when we allow a creed to dictate our life rather than our conscience. As Dostoyevsky says: "Thou shalt love life more than the meaning of life."
The architects of the Cambodian genocide studied the existentialism of Sartre in the Paris of the early 1950s. Were Satre's children correct to make the leap from life is meaningless tohumans are worthless? Can we attribute the veneration of any kind of choice, no matter how willfully ignorant or immoral it is, to Kierkegaard? To me, that makes as much sense as blaming Hiroshima on Thomas Jefferson. All that they heard was that life is absurd, reality nauseating, and that man was free of commandments and obligations, while entirely forgetting the dimension of hard moral choice and hard moral courage. While Sartre was a Stalinist fellow traveler, he certainly wasn't advocating the abdication of morality that would result in pyramids of skulls under an Asian sun. The syllogism is not that since all is absurd, every act we take is absurd, including the claim that all is absurd. Rather, these are starting points to allow us to find meaning in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. I cannot deny that in existentialism we find nihilism and violence for its own sake. E. M. Cioran defined the case for total pessimism: "Life is a passionate emptiness, and intriguing nothingness" He writes that "I cling to the world no better than a ring on a skeleton's finger" but also says that "I fall back on God if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot. Since all life is futility, the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all." But what the existentialists generally emphasize about man is that is a decision-making creature blessed or cursed with the freedom to choose among a number of possibilities in a mysterious. Dostoyevsky asserted the eternal necessity for the soul to be free, but discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom, it led him into tragedy and evil. To be truly human, must man must accept this freedom by a commitment to authenticity. That authenticity can translate into either acts of immorality or acts of morality, but the act rests entirely with in our hands. This message can be become bracing in the religious version of existentialism in which choice is directed at a transcending spiritual goal.