I'm finally reading some of Foucault's stuff - Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. I have to admit I'm enjoying it. :-) It's also kind of embarrassing, because I can't help but recognize myself in various configurations of the technique's of the self. Foucault identifies changes in the ways people used to write about the self, tracking several phases from the Greeks, through Christianity and the Renaissance. It's sad he died in his 50s, one imagines he could have still accomplished a lot.
Speaking of moral discourse (mentioned in comments about the movie Crash):
David Hume, "A treatise on human nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects
Wikipedia's entry on human nature is terrific.
Time ran out before I could chatter on about the last couple chapters of MacIntyre's book last night, but I thought I'd put my random thoughts 'out there' anyway. :-)
I wasn't going to talk about the different moral philosophers at all, because according to MacIntryre after Hegel everyone is just rehashing old positions in supposedly new formulations. I was thinking of the language, social structure, individual categories that Robin said are essential to any definition of morality.
My cumulative question in reading MacIntyre's last four chapters has to do with the relationship(s) among Nietzsche's emphasis on health and sickness (224) and MacIntrye's use of "fatal" (201) and "grave" (202) while discussing Hegel. It's unclear to me if he is paraphrasing using Hegel's terms or his own. It seems there is a judgment operating that if persons don't find/discover/invent/create/whatever (!) an ethics then they "die" - but since we all die anyway I'm not sure of the conceptual function of these dire terms.
Context: the study of moral discourse
Kierkegaard is big on choice and rationality. (They are all big on rationality. This is where I take issue. As if there is only one kind.) At some point, Kierkegaard says argument must end and we must choose to believe - we must decide. To decide - this is sparking a memory of latin roots from a comparison of different kinds of talk (debate, discussion, etc.). "cide" has something to do with murder, right? So to make a choice, to decide is to kill off other possibilities. "de" probably means something too . . .
I commandeered this thread for the course on Moral Discourse - I know we're supposed to examine others moral discourse, but you know I find ourselves implicated in everything we study? Yeah.
I've understood Marx as pinpointing work as the fulcrum of the social structure, but I never took him for a class-based relativist. Instead of arguing his own points and critique of the bourgeois, he chose - rhetorically? - to utilize their own internal arguments. I also didn't know he neglected any serious examination of the morality of the working classes.
I do know he didn't account for the actual mechanisms of transformation from capitalism to socialism. According to MacIntyre, Marx's conception of freedom is Hegel's: "not something which [men] have, as men, but which they are" (211).
I'm not sure about MacIntyre's assessment that there are no philosophical innovations after Hegel because changes in social structures could (I imagine) invoke new kinds of relations and thus different orders of morality. This notion is in keeping (?) with Hegel's emphasis on the dialectic between the specifics of a social situation as a frame that conditions/limits the morality that can emerge.
There's something about freedom and the negative which lock up in the individual who wants to experiment with virtue. Hegel poo-poos the notion mightily, scoffing at the arrogance of anyone who thinks they can buck the norms of a social group. This is because "what gives a sanction to our moral choices is in part the fact that the criteria which govern our choices are not chosen" (208).
***On Fri 5:40a Sep 2, 2005 maillist@michaelmoore.com wrote***
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of
Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
