The Liberal concensus is to rush to the higher moral ground, even as the supposed pinnacle crumbles beneath them from their assumed height they preach to others who do not attain their assumed moral standards.
But is what they preach the truth?
To proclaim the truth first and then tell people what their preconceptions, or prejudice.s must be. People’s actual opinions, about their own preconceived ideas or prejudices as about anything else, count as evidence for little but the corruptness of their minds.
One cannot, in modern English, sensibly say that a proposition which is believed by a majority of leftist thinkers. It may be believed because it is, in fact, probable, but it is not probable just because it is believed.
But Aristotle does not make the clean separation between evidence and opinion on which this argument presumes. The fact that a proposition is believed by the majority or by experts is not for Aristotle just a sign that, if we asked them, they could cite evidence for the proposition. Their belief, as he treats it, is already some evidence in favour of what they believe; even if their opinion that you area bigot a homophobe, a racist a misanthrope etc is not correct, it is likely to contain an element of truth which the dialectic can sift out and formulate clearly.
So let us look at how Aristotle did in his efforts to attain this presumed height
Aristotle here holds the balance between a misleading hope of reducing the subject-matter of conduct to a few simple rigorous abstract principles, with conclusions necessarily issuing from them, and the view that it is the field of operation of inscrutable forces acting without predictable regularity. He does not pretend to find in it absolute uniformity's, or to deduce the details from his principles.
Hence, too, he insists on the necessity of experience as the source or test of all that one has to say.
Will Merkel's views expediently change in the light of her debacle in the recent German elections, remembering Aristophanes diktat that under every stone lurks a politician, the answer is YES.
Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. The mere intellectual apprehension of them is not possible, or if possible, profitless.
But is what they preach the truth?
One cannot, in modern English, sensibly say that a proposition which is believed by a majority of leftist thinkers. It may be believed because it is, in fact, probable, but it is not probable just because it is believed.
But Aristotle does not make the clean separation between evidence and opinion on which this argument presumes. The fact that a proposition is believed by the majority or by experts is not for Aristotle just a sign that, if we asked them, they could cite evidence for the proposition. Their belief, as he treats it, is already some evidence in favour of what they believe; even if their opinion that you area bigot a homophobe, a racist a misanthrope etc is not correct, it is likely to contain an element of truth which the dialectic can sift out and formulate clearly.
So let us look at how Aristotle did in his efforts to attain this presumed height
Aristotle here holds the balance between a misleading hope of reducing the subject-matter of conduct to a few simple rigorous abstract principles, with conclusions necessarily issuing from them, and the view that it is the field of operation of inscrutable forces acting without predictable regularity. He does not pretend to find in it absolute uniformity's, or to deduce the details from his principles.
Hence, too, he insists on the necessity of experience as the source or test of all that one has to say.
Will Merkel's views expediently change in the light of her debacle in the recent German elections, remembering Aristophanes diktat that under every stone lurks a politician, the answer is YES.
Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. The mere intellectual apprehension of them is not possible, or if possible, profitless.
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