Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Consciousness-raising assumes that there is an up, and a down
If someone believes that, for example, women should be basically enslaved and treated as inferiors, are they mistaken about that? Feminists talk about consciousness-raising. But, of course, consciousness-raising is only possible if there is an up, and a down.
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Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?
As C.S. Lewis once quipped, "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line."
If one starts at the midpoint of a continuum, there is up and down. If one starts at one end of the continuum, there can only be an up or a down.
Victor,
If someone believes that, for example, women should be basically enslaved and treated as inferiors, are they mistaken about that? Feminists talk about consciousness-raising. But, of course, consciousness-raising is only possible if there is an up, and a down.
I think this is yet another situation where many people want to ditch objective morality, but man, they sure want to retain the language, feel and idea of it.
Stating it frankly is a lot less persuasive.
I'm fine if feminists want to make use of objective moral terms in their arguments, and leave the arguments about the grounding of such terms to the philosophers.
Eventually it will be seen that some kind of transcendent reality is the only serious contender to ground moral claims without risk of sinking into conventionalism (in which case whether we treat women as property or as people becomes as objective as deciding whether chocolate or vanilla ice cream is better).
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