“Normative” ethical theories

[The Grand Nudger]

I wouldn't blame the victims.  The left has been arguing for the benefits of fairness, equality, and pluralism, and for paying close attention to the facts, not for moral relativity.  The right simply lied about all of it because it is easier to tear things down than learn enough to understand the complexities involved.

The right set up propaganda outlets on the radio and television and -- guess what? -- they were effective at flooding people with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and hatred so that they couldn't think straight.  The right largely swallowed the lies and dogmas which made them impervious to the facts about crime, immigration, climate change, the economy, and other Americans.

The normative ethics which the right embraces are still there.  They are just not applied equally to everyone because many of us are now seen as evil.  If anything, the present situation is proof that normative ethics are as weak as we have been saying.  That's just one of many sad facts about the human condition.

The cultural left now finds itself the victim of the political right, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the political right ended up as the beneficiary of the ethical relativism of the cultural left.  Mind you, when I use the term cultural left I'm not referring to any shadowy or overt set of conspirators. I'm certainly not referring to academia, which shitcanned anti-realist sentiment before most of us were born. I'm referring to the types of arguments and excuses and criticisms arising from the popular left that the right wing propaganda machine took and regurgitated word for word as the script of their contemporary white grievance narrative. In my opinion, this was a matter of rhetorical expediency combined with a misunderstanding about descriptive theories and the history of philosophy in the face of batshitshit arguments and bad faith actors - and not what people actually believes about their ethical or moral statements. Nevertheless, here we are.

I don't think you'll find much disagreement between us about how the right pulled that off, but I do have to point out that no reference to a close attention to facts matters if we're looking for or at ethical systems devoid of such content.  There is only ever one relevant fact in subjective and relative ethics - and it doesn't have anything to do with crime, immigration, climate change, the economy, or other americans.

The political right still embraces a normative ethics, but it's not the normative ethics they embraced even as recently as the obama years, which was itself not the normative ethics they embraced in bush the dumbers term.  Normative ethics aren't weak.  We are weak. Poor craftsmen blaming the tools, and all that. An alternative explanation being that we're stupid. Sacrificing our ideals at the altar of our ideals.

In other words, Obama's use of force is most certainly debatable.

To the point of normative ethics, I suppose some people might support the Taliban's control of Afghanistan under the umbrella of pluralism, though that rather stands the idea on its head since there isn't much freedom there.

Is it? Debatable how, according to what? He was a drone warlord and a deporter in cheif. Those are just stats. With no realist content as a reference we could only be debating whether we liked that or not, not whether there is anything wrong with it. On that count, I have tended to like the ideas of the cultural left quite a bit more. I wish I could say I agreed with the policies the political left enacted....but we really don't have such a thing in the us. My liking them more, and in fact nothing at all, actually makes those policies better than magat shit, though, in context.