Moral Minority

In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 1, we discuss the meaning of Enlightenment as the advancement of thought and ask how we square the traditional narratives of historical progress and emancipatory potential with the pernicious effects of rationalised management, social alienation, and the homogenisation of political possibilities under the logic of Enlightenment. As argued by Adorno and Horkheimer, the destructive trajectory of the enlightenment project can only be understand by its purported point of departure—myth. By posing itself in opposition to myth it recapitulates the impulse of myth to subsume the multiplicity of the world under the dictates of unitary, abstracting logic. By detaching ourselves from the influence of nature and attempting to master it, we have enslaved ourselves more surely to the claims of the “natural” and “objective” and left ourselves exposed to the forces of irrationality that the Enlightenment supposedly had left behind. Is there a way to preserve the emancipatory potential of Enlightenment in the face of our radically circumscribed political present?

This episode discusses the German sociologist Max Weber's Vocation Lectures. In these lectures, Weber outlines a secular conception of the meaning of a vocation, the role of passion in politics and scholarship, and the kind of ethically responsibility that confronts us given the unavoidably violent nature of modern politics. Weber characterises modernity as the instrumentalization of reason and scientific knowledge towards the end of a kind mastery or control over the natural world.  In a secular world, how do we decide what matters to us or what ends to pursue?  If the nature of politics depends upon a desire for power, how do we motivate individuals of strong convictions to pursue politics and yet keep the lust for power in check? Weber doesn't necessarily offer satisfactory answers to these questions, but invites us to face the painful and frustrating choices of political action in a disenchanted world with clear-eyed dignity.

This episode examines Alasdair MacIntyre's attempt to explain the existence of interminable moral and political disagreement as a symptom of the disarray of our inherited moral concepts.  MacIntyre contends that the best way to unify our disparate and competing concepts of right, obligation, and virtue is to understand them as emerging from determinate social conditions. What modernity lacks or has forgotten in its instrumental use of moral concepts is that normative questions like "what ought we to do?" and "what does justice require ?" are only intelligible against a background of shared communal goals. In the absence of any shared conceptions of human nature and our ultimate ends, morality is unmoored.  MacIntyre proposes that a reinvigorated account of the virtues embedded in the narrative unity of a human life is our best bet for breaking the apparent incommensurability and confusions of contemporary moral debates.

In this episode, Devin and Charles climb down from the heights of Nietzsche's critique of conventional morality in order to take a brief detour into the domain of twentieth-century analytic metaethics. Together they explore the historical context, motivating forces and access the viability of moral realism—the view that our moral claims have objective validity.  The discussion focuses on  the social conditions driving analytic philosophy's turn to logical and semantic analysis and how this leads to divergent views on the meaning/use of moral statements and the ontological status of moral claims.  A version of moral realism known as intuitionism is explored through an overview of W.D. Ross's seminal work, The Right and the Good. Intuitionism claims that we come to learn moral truths as self-evident in analogous fashion to truths of mathematics and logic. Does this prima facie implausible view hold water? What does Ross's analysis of right action tells us about our obligations to our self and others? What virtues does his account of a plurality of duties and intrinsic value have over alternative theories like utilitarianism? 

In the inaugural episode of Moral Minority, Devin and Charles make the case for Nietzsche's continual relevance to contemporary politics by examining the problem of moral foundations and how we make sense of our normative commitments in the absence of  transcendental warrant. This episode centers around a discussion of Nietzsche's under-discussed 1881 work, Dawn. What does it mean to undermine traditional morality? How do we avoid the temptation of nihilistic despair? What positive resources for adjudicating moral disagreements does Nietzsche's genealogical method enable? How might we begin to think and feel differently about our value systems? How does Nietzsche demonstrate the possibility of moral progress?