frog hop

The geese have it figured out. Summer. Time for a walk by the water.



Moved into the old new old office. Everything old new again? I feel like time is in a bit of a loop. But it often feels that way. I think. Sometimes I mind, usually not. Presently not. Presently ok but you know, it seems to change every week. Or not. Time feels like a bit of a loop.

Haircut. Books. Payments. Appointments. Apparently next week getting something weird done. Huh.

I'm having a bizarre and unpleasant set of conversations at work concerning social norms. In the course of these conversations, it's come up that I'm a moral relativist. This is a title I do not consider a "dirty word" the way so many people tend to employ it. I'll say why here. Then in the future if someone's curious about this term, I can link here and save myself the trouble re-explaining it.

To my thinking -- and I believe this is common among people willing to identify with the label -- moral relativism is merely an epistemic stance. A meta-ethical stance. It's saying that moral knowledge -- statements of fact about "should" or "right" or "shouldn't" or "wrong" -- have an implicit frame of reference. And that any time you hear or discuss a piece of moral knowledge, you need to be somewhat aware of the frame of reference in use.

That's it. That's the whole issue. It's like when someone discusses movement. To say that you believe in "relative motion" does not mean you don't believe in motion. You totally do. You just believe that saying "I am in motion" carries an implied frame of reference. In "motion relativism", frames of reference are spatial. In "moral relativism", frames of reference are social.

In motion, we say you're moving in one direction relative to your hands, a different direction relative to the ground, a different direction relative to the sun, etc. etc.

In morals, we say that something is right for you, wrong for your tribe, right for your nation, wrong for humanity, etc. etc.

The fact that there is always an implied frame of reference doesn't mean we always explicitly state it. This is a discourse issue. When I say "I walked north", I don't bother to qualify that with the frame of reference. It's understood, and it seldom implies "motion relative to self", but I can clarify that I mean "relative to my city" when asked. The same is true of moral relativism. When I say "right" it seldom implies "right only for me". Usually the implicit frame of reference is a larger group: my community, city, nation, or species. But I can clarify when asked. Sometimes I do only mean "right for me", and in those cases it's polite and helpful to say so.

It's not a hard concept, and it doesn't in any way invalidate the ability to perform reasoning in moral terms, any more than relative motion invalidates the ability to perform reasoning in spatial terms. It just makes it slightly more complex. You have to be aware of the frames of reference and pay attention to the influence of them on your reasoning. Both inter-frame reasoning and intra-frame reasoning (eg. an earthly frame of reference for motion entails that all north directions meet at the north pole -- how odd! -- and a human frame of reference for morals entails that all humans think unprovoked killing is wrong...)

Dearest persons of the internet, part II:

1. What are some professions that do not involve arguing?
   
2. Are you sure?
   

Thanks again.

Dear persons of the internet:

1. What are some things you have done, and want to never do again?
   
2. What are some things you have never done and want to never do?
   

Thanks.

On the moral discomfort one can rightly experience with capital-friendly "postmodern" subjects and presentations:

This "nihilist," or reflexive, postmodernism operates through a process of aestheticization whereby the unassimilable fragments of contemporary social life, having lost the mythic totality of history or religion that bound them together under modernism, become the objects of the only gesture left to the nihilist subject: an abstract and totalizing aesthetic affirmation. That is, having no real understanding of, let alone control over, the movement and representation of events, the subject can only treat the discontinuous series of moments that confront her/him as an aesthetic object whose ends are beyond her/him, and perhaps beyond capital itself. The only judgment left, in this context, is an anemic version of aesthetic judgment that Baudrillard calls "seduction"; pure and practical reason have no material left on which to operate, no adequate schemata or projections of purposiveness, so neither rationality nor ethics can be grounded. Let us call this process of seduction (or, more accurately, reduction) post-modernization since, like modernization or rationalization, it is a method of abstraction by which capital integrates antagonism into the process of production.

I just had an unusual feeling. A perspective I actually felt, possibly for the first time, but momentarily authentic.

"My job is actually kinda hard and mentally exhausting, and probably not everyone can do it or would want to do it."

I feel .. vaguely better about the whole situation now.

Living systems are dissipative structures that create internal order by expending energy in exchange for a local reduction in entropy.

I love it when wikipedia talks dirty to me.

LJ poll: what were the most interesting places on planet earth you have been? What were the most relaxing? Where were the best walks?

Ideally: far away.