When the Liberal apologist gets on his soap box/television studio and propound that they are guided by morals they are propounding a theory.
However all theories require a meta or ascendant theory and the Liberal moral claim that it is not undergirded by anything empirical stretches credulity, for the 'moral; claim does not cohere to anything outside itself (except if you make Religious claims on morals behalf),
But let us leave metaphysics aside.
Morals have causal chains - usually of a religious nature, Kant's Categorical Imperative deontologises morality by making a universalising claim - that there is a 'good' out there in the ether and we all know it. Really?
In claiming they are operating under a moral umbrella the liberal thinker is actually defending the idea that the self is created ex-nihilo, outside of any social context and that humans can exist (and flourish) independently of all social contexts?
While liberals may not have been arguing that individuals can completely extricate themselves from their social context, the liberal valuation of choice still seemed to suggest an image of a subject who impinges his will on the world.
Drawing on the insights of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, they argue that this view neglects the extent to which individuals are embodied agents in the world. Far from acting in ways designed to realize an autonomously arrived-at life-plan, vast areas of our lives are in fact governed by unchosen routines and habits that lie in the background.
More often than not we act in ways specified by our social background when we walk, dress, play games, speak, and so on without having formulated any goals or made any choices.
We cannot make sense of our moral experience unless we situate ourselves within this given moral space, within the authoritative moral horizons.
What Charles Taylor calls ‘higher, strongly evaluated goods’ (Taylor 1989)—the goods we should feel committed to, those that generate moral obligations on us regardless of our actual preferences are not somehow invented by individuals, but rather they are located within the social world which provides one's framework of the lower and the higher. Thus, the liberal ideal of a self who freely invents her own moral outlook, or private conception of the good, cannot do justice to our actual moral experience.
The best claim might be the one where the individual chooses what is worth doing, achieving, or being, though it may be that this choice has to be made within a certain framework which is itself unchosen.
However all theories require a meta or ascendant theory and the Liberal moral claim that it is not undergirded by anything empirical stretches credulity, for the 'moral; claim does not cohere to anything outside itself (except if you make Religious claims on morals behalf),
But let us leave metaphysics aside.
Morals have causal chains - usually of a religious nature, Kant's Categorical Imperative deontologises morality by making a universalising claim - that there is a 'good' out there in the ether and we all know it. Really?
In claiming they are operating under a moral umbrella the liberal thinker is actually defending the idea that the self is created ex-nihilo, outside of any social context and that humans can exist (and flourish) independently of all social contexts?
While liberals may not have been arguing that individuals can completely extricate themselves from their social context, the liberal valuation of choice still seemed to suggest an image of a subject who impinges his will on the world.
Drawing on the insights of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, they argue that this view neglects the extent to which individuals are embodied agents in the world. Far from acting in ways designed to realize an autonomously arrived-at life-plan, vast areas of our lives are in fact governed by unchosen routines and habits that lie in the background.
More often than not we act in ways specified by our social background when we walk, dress, play games, speak, and so on without having formulated any goals or made any choices.
We cannot make sense of our moral experience unless we situate ourselves within this given moral space, within the authoritative moral horizons.
What Charles Taylor calls ‘higher, strongly evaluated goods’ (Taylor 1989)—the goods we should feel committed to, those that generate moral obligations on us regardless of our actual preferences are not somehow invented by individuals, but rather they are located within the social world which provides one's framework of the lower and the higher. Thus, the liberal ideal of a self who freely invents her own moral outlook, or private conception of the good, cannot do justice to our actual moral experience.
The best claim might be the one where the individual chooses what is worth doing, achieving, or being, though it may be that this choice has to be made within a certain framework which is itself unchosen.
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