Absolutism vs. Postmodernism

[sandsleeper]

ah crap, i hate these in depth message board discussions, it's why i try and stay out of the political forum!

but basically this:

take an opinionated statement like "terrorists are evil." ok. this sounds about right for most people who have been victimized by terrorists. of course they're evil they kill peaceful citizens who had nothing to do with the conflict at hand. those evil bastards.

now say we pretend we're someone from hamas. terrorists are not evil to them. terrorists are heros. they go and give their lives for a cause that their group believes in. what could be greater? nevermind the people affected, attention was brought to the cause, these people gave their lives to make a political statment. how very heroic. fucking sons of god.

now we're just looking at the two extreme opposing opinions here, nevermind the gray areas. so what this whole postmodernist thing is is that you cannot say one person is right over the other. how could you? each side is just a group of people with a very strong opinion. just because you're one of those people it doesn't make your groups opinion necessarily "right." nor "wrong."

so there you have it, the only absolute is that there are no absolutes.

phew. and i know you've got a lot of arguments against this probably. it's contraversial shit. i didn't make it up, don't know who did. but it makes sense to me.

[Axtech]

If you can take an outside, impartial view, you get an absolute.

[Joey]

Exactly how I think too .. K, I'm staying out now.

Edit: referring to Kimmy's post

[sandsleeper]

If you can take an outside, impartial view, you get an absolute.

yep... that's where postmodernism as a philosophy seemingly contradicts itself. which is why i said "the only absolute is that there are none" because that in itself is an absolute.

[mosaik]

where's my shermer quote.....

here it is, in expanded form:

As long as it is understood that morality is a human construction influenced by human cultures, one can become more tolerant of other human belief systems, and thus other humans. But as soon as a group sets itself up to be the final moral arbiter of other people's actions, especially when its members believe they have discovered absolute standards of right and wrong, it is the beginning of the end of tolerance and thus, reason and rationality.

That man is a freakin' genius! Or at least his column about my former hero Ayn Rand was genius.

Shermer says, in summary, just what you said. That you can't define right and wrong becaue they don't exist in nature. therefore, it's impossible to clearly define an object code of morality that all men can follow, mainly because the idea of morality is subjective.

It was a big shock to my system when i had to slowly accept that fact. but i got over it.

so really, if that's all you meant by your statement that there are no absolutes, we've got nothing to argue about.

i thought you might be suggesting that reality cannot be objectively defined, and that's something i can definately debate. but we more or less agree on the concept of right and wrong.

[sandsleeper]

yep, that's all i meant.

there are a bunch of people out there thought who honestly believe that their opinion is "the one" and everything else is crap. which is one reason why i'm not too fond of organized religion. i refuse to believe that if someone else doesn't share my theological beliefs they're going to hell.

[mosaik]

religion is a scary place for me to tread due to it's irrational nature.

edited:

i used to believe that objectivist morality was an absolute because it was based on reason, but narbus kept asking me to prove it. and i couldn't. in another debate, some guy tried to debunk ayn rand's objectivism by posting the shermer article. i read it and modified my thinking.

it actually worked out for me. now where i used to say "right" i say rational.

i can prove what's rational and what isn't, but not what's right and what's wrong, and i basically think that if it's rational, it's right.

i don't know what philosophy that makes me a student of. i like to think i'm a jack of all trades.

[sandsleeper]

sounds good to me, since picking just one would be too much of an absolutist choice.

[mosaik]

i think i'm inventing my own.

but for now i'm just an anarcho-capitalist with a little objectivist/skeptic mixed in.

[joe_canadian]

that makes you a rationalist as opposed to an empiricist, I think.

[Johnny]

One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter

[joe_canadian]

my personal position is essentially what Kimmy described, but I have some problems with it.

I believe it insofar as a person's opinion is not forced upon others, or the opinion doesn't breed behaviour that's aggresively harmful to others. I think this has been discussed before, but if someone believes it's okay to say, kill another human (by which I mean the killing is a random act with no motivation behind it), I think it's crap. but under that system of thinking, I can't say it is morally wrong, just that I feel it is morally wrong.

I don't have a large amount of specific morals, but those I do I feel very strongly about. I know these are definitely products of my upbringing and personal character - so I can't debunk that line of thinking - but I simply cannot believe that there are no absolutes where morality is concerned.

I'd definitely like to hear more on the subject.

[sandsleeper]

check out this article by Stanley Fish: Condemnation Without Absolutes


i have a few problems with some of his statements simply because he contradicts himself in a few places, but at the end he explains how one can be a postmodernist relativist and still be opinionated... pretty interesting.

oh yeah, btw, it's tied in with terrorist/9-11 stuff but it helps to explain a lot about postmodernist relativism.