File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0311, message 75


From: "Marshall Feldman" <marsh-AT-uri.edu>
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 10:23:09 -0500


Mervyn,

Thanks for the reply. I'm starting to understand your position. Just to
clear this up, I thought I was playing off what you had said. I've
interspersed comments and quotes from your original positing, hoping to make
clear what I was responding to.

	Marsh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> [mailto:owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU]On Behalf Of Mervyn
> Hartwig
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 7:29 AM
> To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
>
>
> Hi Marsh,
>
> I used several arguments. The central one states that it's an actualist
> fallacy to collapse a right to the historical conditions of its
> recognition etc. But that's exactly what you're doing. It's not I who
> read off my philosophical anthropology and ethics in an actualist way
> from what some people do, it's you who suggest it.

My comments were precipitated by what you had said:

	That said, while the Spartacists may not have consciously struggled against
the institution of slavery, there
	never have been a class of slaves who did not feel in their hearts that
their unfreedom wasn't worthy of their human 	nature and resent and resist
it in one way or another.

Besides the obvious empirical issue of how we could know what all slaves
feel, it seemed to me that this statement was in fact actualist. But if we
reject actualism, and I suspect we should, that may open the door for red
terror. What slaves actually feel or say would become irrelevant, and some
Other could presume to speak for them. To take more contemporary examples,
the bourgeois homeowner or the contented housewife might say they're happy
with their lives. If we reject such statements as actualist, then it seems
we open the door for someone saying to the homeowner, "In your heart you
know you really don't want to be shackled by property," or to the housewife,
"In your heart you know you want more out of life than taking care of the
kids and hubby." If voice is always actual, doesn't rejecting actualism
imply dismissing voice?


>
> That said, I think you're getting into dangerous territory to suggest
> that (some) people unqualifiedly support their subordination. Sure they
> do things that do in fact support it, as do we all; but 'Sambo' and his
> counterparts are well documented as fronts to enable people to cope;
> behind the front - in the culture of the slave camp, the serf, the
> housewife - the pulse of freedom beats on.

The slave example is perhaps a bad one because the relationship is so
visible and because actual slave communities often had pre-existing
traditions of resistance. Still, I think it's hazardous to generalize even
about slaves. Slaves in the U.S. South, in ancient Greece, and in biblical
Israel were treated very differently. The Bible even mandates that slaves
should be set free after so many years and prescribes a procedure for slaves
who want to continue to be with their masters after that time.

Questions of rights and oppression become more difficult when dealing with
situations that are more grey. As Marx emphasized, part of the genius of
capitalism is its ability to obscure relations of exploitation and dominance
beneath relations of equality and freedom. Hence, in the modern world, the
ethics of the situation are necessarily dialectical. The problem is that
while a world without exploitation may be possible, at least in our
imaginations and based on our understanding of humans, as a practical matter
transformations to such a world are fraught with uncertainty and risk. Many
people opt to choose the security of continuing in their exploited
situations over the risk of attempting revolutionary transformation. How do
we adjudicate between the right of living free of exploitation and the right
not to risk what one has? This question is both philosophical and practical
because any political movement needs to answer it. Moreover, the question
does not require an actualist answer, although how we answer it in a
non-actualist way is partly what's at issue.

Beyond this, we come across cases of people who claim they love their
subordinate positions. Many people say they love their jobs, and I've had
women students who've said they'd love to have a man come along and support
them while they took care of the house. Of course such statement may presume
a benign employment situation or a loving marriage; things might be
different if the employer sweated the employee or the husband beat the wife.
Nonetheless, since actual situations are contingent and overdetermined,
there's a real danger of abstracting out certain principles at the real
level and using them as essences to make ethical judgments about such
situations.

Finally, and one point I agree with very strongly, is the question of
"emergent ethics." Much of what I wrote above is phrased in individualistic
terms. This is understandable, given traditional ethical discourse in
Western culture. However, as we find in the early Marx, we need to ask about
"humanity's rights" and "humanity's ethics" as much as we do "human rights"
and "human ethics," where the latter refers to individual rights. Making
this distinction might help us avoid red terror. But I wonder if we can or
should deal with such emergence at the level of the real. Since the actual
is contingent and overdetermined (at least in open systems), it seems to me
that emergence must be too -- not only due to emergent properties arising
from and at the real level, but also emerging from the actual events that
occur in the world.





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