[MD] Reason, Tradition, Absolute Truth

[Matt Kundert]

Mike,

Mike said:
I wasn't aware that "decision" carried all this philosophical baggage. In 
any case, I wasn't using it in what you call a "philosophically interesting" 
way. I didn't have in mind any distinction between "choice" and "decision", 
as you seem to when you say "Those kinds of choices don't look like 
decisions to me."

To me, "choice" and "decision" are just different words for what we might 
call, in a Pirsigian sense, "evaluation". And the "something different" 
about liberal social patterns of value is that they allow for a sphere of 
evaluation by individuals, alongside (and growing from) the customary sphere 
of evaluation by the society as a whole. Does that make sense?

Matt:
Well, I'm just trying to make sure no one goes in for a bad Enlightenment 
picture of the self.  The type of ethics that philosophical liberalism 
produced was the kind that thought there was something philosophically 
significant about "free choice".  But when you think that, you start to get 
parity between "I decided today to put my left leg in my pants first, 
instead of my right" and "I decided today to be an atheist."  I never 
_decided_ to be an atheist.  I never decided to be a pragmatist.  Putting 
those kinds of things in terms of choices doesn't seem to do justice to 
them.  You can probably pinpoint the day that I woke up and decided that 
"Christian" probably wasn't the best label for me.  But I didn't just up and 
decide to not believe in God, it was more like over a course of time on 
reflecting on a large mass of my evolving belief that I eventually came to 
the conclusion that perhaps going to Church shouldn't be the only 
requirement for calling oneself a Christian.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a sphere of evaluation by individuals, 
alongside (and growing from) the customary sphere of evaluation by the 
society as a whole."

Mike said:
I didn't think it was necessary to get out of the liberal paradox. 
'Indoctrinating people to think for themselves' seems like a perfectly good 
description, paradoxical or not. However, I also agree with your 
non-paradoxical way of putting it: "Liberalism is a set of values, but it is 
the set of values that says that you can have your own conception of the 
good above and beyond the minimal one's set by liberalism." Is there really 
any difference, though?

Matt:
Depends on if you want to be called a paradox mongerer.  Having been lumped 
with so-called post-modernists for quite a while, I've caught that label 
enough to be tired of it.  Typically in philosophy, one wants to stay away 
from paradox and contradiction.  If you didn't, it would be hard to tell if 
dialectical argumentation had any use at all.

What's worse for the liberal paradox is that it is aimed less at us for 
having dirty language use, then for calling us out on hypocrisy, much like 
we called the communists out on hypocrisy during the Cold War.  The Commies 
say they are all free and equal, but are they?  That was important to point 
out, so I take it to be important to untangle and answer the criticism, 
rather than taking it at face value and accepting it.

Matt said:
Our "self" is not an empty container that we fill up with values, our self 
is made up of these patterns of value.  We don't _have_ beliefs or values, 
we _are_ our beliefs or values.

Mike said
Agreed. However, we can say that liberalism clears a space in which 
individuals can evaluate for themselves, without implying that the 
individual is "an empty monad that points outward at beliefs and chooses 
among them".

Matt:
I'm not sure what you mean by "liberalism clears a space in which 
individuals can evaluate for themselves".

The two places I underscored as not understanding are passages that make me 
suspicious.  They make me wonder if we are on the same page.  So I'm just 
wondering if you can offer some more gloss on them.

Matt

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