You Don’t Decide What To Value
what is good for me, is good for others inhabiting same roles.
Bigotry is a major reason why I critique Alasdair Macintyre’s narrative conception of the person. He argues that life is a story, and man can only answer what he’s to do, by knowing what part of a story he is part of. That we approach circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. As such, we automatically inherit debts, obligations, and expectations from our family’s/tribe’s past.
When a man descends from heaven, he descends into a human society. - Gyekye.
This is contrary to Kantian and Rawl’s conception of person: that man is unbound from any responsibilities and moral obligation prior to choosing them. Man’s obligations, the former espouses, originate from either reciprocity or consent (voluntary choosing them). In Rawl’s Theory of Justice, morality and obligations are to be chosen behind a veil of ignorance. If everyone is stripped of cultural influences and questioned, what values would we priorities?
However, an objection to his veil of ignorance is the reductive fallacy connoted by assuming everyone starts at the same pace after thereafter.
Besides, the communitarian school believes that a third moral force, which is untraceable to consent place a greater role in the discourse. This, it opines, stems from solidarity to our particular identities. This is plausible: I owe more to my family, community, tribe than others.
Often questioning these ideas often is disturbing: asking why I (have to) love my father over another’s father, even though I did not choose my father?
Kymlicka, seeking a common ground, argues that what would value or presently value are those our cultures cherish. Therefore, liberalism is upheld, allowing us to make choices through consent and volition, but within the subset of cultural significance.
The best life is still the one where the individual chooses what is worth doing, achieving, or being, though it may be that this choice has to be made within a certain societal framework.
So who decides?
