Varn Vlog: Charles Dashings and Devin Gouré on Morality and Political Thinking

Charles Dashings and Devin Gouré host the Moral Minority podcast ( www.buzzsprout... ). We talk about the need for morality and ethics in politics, classical ethical paradigms, the problems of ethics in Marxism, and other sources of normativity.
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Host: C. Derick Varn ( Twitter: @skepoet Bluesky @varnvlog.bsky.social)
Cohost of Excavations: Jordin Dubin
Cohost of Vulgar Complexity: Abi Hassen
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro Musics: Spaceship Revolution by Etienne Roussel (Solo Intro), Bitterlake (Political Intro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro), The Siege of Kalameth by Jon Björk (Main Show Intro), Teknique by Anthony Earls (Nailing It Down Intro).
Outro Music: Let Down by Issue AB
Intro and Outro Video Design: C. Derick Varn (Main Show Intro, Show Outro), Djene Bajalan (Solo Intro, Political Intro, Space Outro), Bitterlake (Strange Intro)
Art Design: Corn ( / cornflow ) and C. Derick Varn

[@PRSmith-vl6hi]

Great conversation. I think you all agreed on where moral norms are constructed, for better or worse. Which anyone can disagree with, but it's in better or worse discourses.

[@philipm3173]

44:20 Historiansplaining has a great episode on the havoc that appeals to culture have, among them this cultural relativism.

[@sankarchaya]

I have a lot to say about this episode because I wrote my dissertation on Marx's ethics, and hopefully will be published as a book in 2025 (I shouldnt say that because I might jinx it). I'll try (and fail) to curtail myself, since I should probably get back to editing and because nobody will want to read all my thoughts anyways ... I'll have to give their podcast a look. First, he said utilitarianism is the default mode of ruling class reason. this is true in the anglophone world, but I'm not sure its dominant in continental Europe. I think Germany at least is more Kantian, at least from what I've gathered from German thought, culture, and the Germans I've interacted with, though I am far from an expert. Second, as I read him, for Kant even with the second formulation you might still need to tell the truth to the Gestapo, as per his letter with Constant. Lying to the Gestapo treats the Gestapo as a mere means instead of a rational human. The real problem I think for Kant's enlightenment optimism is that the Gestapo operates on fundamentally irrational grounds as the servant of a vulgar Nietzschean state which pursues power and purity through suffering and hardship (I say vulgar nietzschean so the nietzscheans dont come at me ... I know Nietzsche would have hated the NSs). I'm no Kant expert though, and my Kantian professor friend from grad school says theres more to the stuff on the murderer at the door. Third, if we look at Hegel, Lukacs's book on Young Hegel, Engels's Anti-Duhring, On the Family, and Marx's own sparse writings on moral normativity, I think we can reconcile the anthropological tendency to moral relativism with moral progress and higher moral truth. I have concluded after a bunch of reading that Marx, Engels, and Hegel have a *tragic* conception of morality as seen in works of Greek tragedy like Antigone, the Orestia, etc. I take moral tragedy to be something like, morality is a product of social practices whose ends are human flourishing. but because of the contradictions of class society, society is incapable of forming a consistent body of norms. This is tragic because one can no longer consistently do the good without doing evil, the way Antigone and Creon could not act justly without also acting unjustly. Antigone is in a sense more right than Creon, but that doesn't mean her act was entirely just nor does it mean Creon was entirely unjust. For Marx and Engels, working class morality and bourgeois morality are fundamentally at odds with each other. These class moralities are not identical to the actual moral views of individual workers and capitalists but just moral tendencies that emerge from the way classes operate in relation to one another, nature, the "inorganic body", etc. Much the way Antigone's family-morality and Creon's state-morality are irreconcilable. So it's relativist in a sense, but it's only tragic because it's also realist. This only seems like a contradiction because we're already committed at least since Plato to the idea that morality must be internally consistent to be "real" and "true". Engels argues that morality can only be truly internally consistent and therefore universal once a classless society has been achieved. This coming of the classless society is akin to Athena's deus ex machina at the end of Orestia where she resolves the moral contradiction between the furies and Apollo on whether Orestes acted justly. Finally, not to sound mindlessly hegelian but the weakness of mainstream ethical naturalism is it's not dialectical enough. Aristotle was an ethical naturalist through his notion of functionality and ergon. The way to reconcile the claim that social reality contains certain fundamental normativity with the way societies contain contradictory values and norms is the fact that human function and what it means to be human is itself partially constructed. Class societies change over time, which changes the fundamental norms implicit in social relations, create new human needs, and so on in a way that changes the human ergon. As the human ergon develops and expands, moral norms change and expand and come into conflict with each other in a way that Aristotle could not predict as iron age society was more stable and changed more slowly. It only really became evident after the Enlightenment and the failure of the enlightenment project to Hegel and Marx. On the last point, Marx did seems to have thought racist jokes and prejudicial comments were funny so he'd be cancelled today. But he also was consistently antiracist in terms of political practice. I doubt he'd understand the impetus behind modern speech norms. Well I failed to make that short, but I do have more to say. But I need to get back to editing before I waste more time on a comment nobody will read.

[@xuxArtemis]

i read

[@VarnVlog]

I would agree that Neo-Kantianism plagues Germany the way Mill and Berkeley plague England.

[@user-ig4dl4iv1j]

Haven't read this yet but giving a like because I strongly support essay-length youtube comments

[@PRSmith-vl6hi]

A day late, but for all the Nietzschean self-reference, Devin seems pretty Habermasian. And I don't mean that as a slight.

[@vaughnmiller185]

You don't like J.S. Mill bro?

[@VarnVlog]

No. I am not a liberal.

[@zainmudassir2964]

He was huge simp of British empire and colonization of India so no