I am a very tired human being; doing taxes; brain melting away. But I read your post and you've brought up so many things that are fascinating that I'd like to try to say something in response, at least about a couple of things that I think you're talking about.
You're right. It's hard to guarantee beyond all possibility of a doubt the truth of any claim that's more interesting than, say, "It's either Tuesday or it isn't." But, as you also seem to say, maybe we can at least weight claims or assign vague probabilities to their truth. but in the end, bringing up the golden rule the way you do, I worry that you might be drifting toward a kind of relativism: Whatever's true for you is true for you but not necessarily true for me, and so on?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and at the risk of sounding a little right leaning, it's dangerous. Here's what I think:
If we buy into something like "who's to say what's right or wrong true or false" what we're also buying is the result that reason and evidence have nothing to do with belief, since all it takes for something to be 'true for you' is the mere act of believing it. Argument and reason become useless.
This becomes especially worrisome when it comes to ethics. Absolute tolerance for whatever anyone happens to believe here degenerates into nonsense. It would mean that you would have to tolerate intolerance as just as dandy a moral point of view as a belief in tolerance. If I, for example, was rabidly xenophobic in my moral beliefs, and you stick to the idea that who's to say what's right or wrong, then this brand of wide-eyed so-called tolerance actually sanctions my INtolerance. See my point? Ethics, by definition, isn't a private business.It's simply not rational to allow people to believe and do whatever they want, obviously. the hard part is figuring out how this works. One last little speech which I think helps to explain a lot of this. Relativism as a philosophical point of view is well-motivated and born out of the exaltation of everyone's uniqueness. But uniqueness is a cheap property. Every speck of dust on my kitchen floor is unique. So what. Morality isn't about uniqueness, its a matter of figuring out what we all have in common that's worthy of respect. This, again, is hard to figure out. Exhausting, important, fascinating stuff which I HAVEN'T figured out.
Talk to you soon I hope |
