Out in the world of politics, perhaps the most dangerous people of all are those self-righteously confident that reason alone determines their courses but whose actual motivations are made up from the turbulent stew of their own emotional natures.
Tyrants and democratic politicians alike claim the mantle of reason when, in actuality, ambition, narcissism, vanity and lack of imagination propel their courses.
One can think of cases in recent British history The battle between rationalism and its more emotional competitor may sound to be only of academic interest but it spills into the real world.
Rationalism more readily consorts with absolutism, with untroubled conviction that our own moral views are uniquely correct, so that other cultures that do not share them are defective, sunk in unreason, irrational and, perhaps after all, best governed by us.
It is the view of a mandarin class (powerful group) and, in international politics, a colonial or imperial view. Its particular horror is the “relativism” that it associates with the alternative: the idea that our morality is just the haphazard creature of our particular culture, upbringing, emotional make-up, or prejudice.
From normative concepts. ethics, at bottom, is a purely subjective matter.
Tyrants and democratic politicians alike claim the mantle of reason when, in actuality, ambition, narcissism, vanity and lack of imagination propel their courses.
One can think of cases in recent British history The battle between rationalism and its more emotional competitor may sound to be only of academic interest but it spills into the real world.
Rationalism more readily consorts with absolutism, with untroubled conviction that our own moral views are uniquely correct, so that other cultures that do not share them are defective, sunk in unreason, irrational and, perhaps after all, best governed by us.
It is the view of a mandarin class (powerful group) and, in international politics, a colonial or imperial view. Its particular horror is the “relativism” that it associates with the alternative: the idea that our morality is just the haphazard creature of our particular culture, upbringing, emotional make-up, or prejudice.
From normative concepts. ethics, at bottom, is a purely subjective matter.
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