Anti-Climacus

TO DARA (look dear, I increased the people reading your blog by two!):

I can see the thrust of your objections, inasfar as they go, but the thing that concerns me is that there's an obvious weak point: it is easy for us, at the remove of time, to see the vast and unsettling global effects of the Holocaust; I will also grant you that precient contemporary observers of events (including George Orwell, as the Hitch would want me to point out) who were not themselves German and, perhaps, had a grasp of the treatment of the world Jewry in the past and the attendant historical stresses occasioned thereby, would be able to construct a justification for opposing the Holocaust. The question, and I believe it's a key one for moral theory, is whether someone within Germany after 1933, who did not have a complete understanding of the geopolitics of the era, would be able to construct the same justification? And, indeed, even if they could, it is hard to see why they would choose that justification over the simpler and more obvious (and perhaps more obviously right) idea that "murder is wrong."
I would like to do justice to the thoroughness (and cleverness!) of your argumentation, I'd like to look at a couple of things you wrote specifically. First:

"I'd like to point out that while a universal moral standard (whether utilitarian or otherwise) is definitely necessary, the basis on which it is founded makes a great deal of difference. Surely, nearly all cultures and anyone with morals, whatever their origin, will agree that certain actions (let's stick with killing the innocent, for example) are wrong."

The upshot (I think) of what I had argued previously (I said it to Tara, at any rate) is that relativists of all stripes want the benefit of universal moral values to fall back on when necessary without having to deal with the consequences thereof.

"However, there is quite a problem when situations that are less cut and dried emerge."

I think I can let this off with a "perhaps." I've not seen the case convincingly made that one cannot, with a set of hard and fast principles, produce the revevant moral judgments on any situation possible. But moreover, I'm not convinced that the 'less cut and dried' cases are ethical questions in the same way that the clear cases are. And, even supposing that there are grey-area cases, I've not seen any reason to suspend our moral judgments when those cases emerge. To wit: stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family. Whatever final judgment one might render in that case, will it still not be true that stealing is bad and that taking care of people you have responsibility to is good? The murkiness of pragmatics does not seem to make the ethics murkier.


"Though a "moral realist" such as yourself might have an opinion one way or another, I think it is reasonable to accept that this question will not be universally agreed upon. In cases like these, there is no method for resolving differences between those with absolute views about right and wrong."

But again-- what is the point of having values that we acknowledge as paramount in the clear cases, if we're only going to drop them when things get difficult?

But as to the method of resolving point, I would say that I no more need to go above and beyond my argument for, say, the death penalty, then I need to go above and beyond my argument against the Holocaust-- I'm not making an epistemological claim that I must, in turn, justify, but I am rather making an ontological claim about the morality of the universe around us. The argument of a moral realist, then, does not seek to confirm or deny one set of beliefs, but rather explicate the consequences that stem form the world being as it is. I recognize that I just made a rather bold claim about moral systems, so if you would prefer to continue this part of the conversation in person, I wouldn't be offended