A liberal thinker who wants morality and complete freedom

In 2004 I wrote to liberal philosopher Susan Neiman, who had said that there is no inherent moral meaning in existence, and that we have to create moral meaning. A new reader now comments on that letter and I’ve replied. VFR discussions remain alive long after they were originally posted..

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

There are so many problems with Neiman’s position, it’s hard to know what to say to such a person. But the practical problem she’s grappling with is all too real. It is the problem of an elite that has realized that some moral order must be imposed upon society in order for it to be controlled. (The character Kramer from the Seinfeld sitcom summed the problem up with the simple admonishment that, “Let’s face it, without rules, there’s chaos.”) Whatever moral order she and her fellow liberals decide is best for all of us, it will necessarily be an arbitrary and tyrannical one—this is the Pyhrric victory of radical moral skepticism. Whatever conception of “justice” we are forced to accommodate ourselves to will be whatever conception seems right to The Credentialed Ones.

We cannot live without do’s and don’ts, it turns out. Moreover, with no objective moral order that people can discover, moral reasoning and moral argumentation become pointless enterprises—how can you demonstrate the existence of something that exists only within your own mind, and cannot be apprehended by others? And so all that is left is force, might makes right. Besides, if Neiman really believed that there was no intrinsic moral meaning in the universe, she would not bother trying to debunk and replace the one people already accept as true. So there is incoherence, dishonesty, and even tyranny in the liberal existentialist position.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2008 12:21 PM | Send