Hi Cats,
So, you’re an abject relativist? What does it mean to say, “Values are primary”?
I don’t consider myself abject nor do i consider myself a relativist.I am a moral realist, though I don’t necessarily believe in a single moral truth. Just as polar and rectangular coordinates are both true there can be multiple local maxima with regard to ways of promoting human flourishing.
When I say that values are primary, it means that as an empiricist, I recognize that nothing is more empirical than value, and that things like subjects and objects and subjective/objective knowledge distinctions are inferences from value.
Positivism or what you call scientistic materialism is a philosophy that emphasizes science as the only source of knowledge. It sharply distinguishes between fact and value. It is an outgrowth of empiricism, the idea that all knowledge must come from experience, and is suspicious of any thought, even a scientific statement, that is incapable of being reduced to direct observation. But though it is an outgrowth of empiricism, it is not the same as empiricism.
I differ from positivists in holding that values are not
outside of the experience that logical positivism limits itself to. In fact, they are the essence of this experience. Values are more empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects. Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative.
This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow.
We have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths. Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any “self” or any “object” to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.
The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can’t do it. You get all mixed up because values don’t belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own. Likewise religious folks with the same cultural blind spot also find that values can’t logically reside in the subject or object, so they must postulate a spriritual domain for morality, but if values are primary, then no such postulate is needed.
Best,
Leela
