religion/ethics/decision-making

[Sean Upton]

Some guy was on the Utah campus today holding up signs quoting scripture
about the apocolypse.  Somehow the idea that this framework makes up the
ethical standards that we would jugdge a debate's impacts by scares me.  I
find my ethics from within a completely different conceptual sphere, and
have a hard time trying to use one sort of ethical realism or another to
say: "The impact of nuclear war from the clinton disad is bad because God
says thou shalt not kill."  It seems to me that these sorts of ethics
undermine the establishment of decision making that doesn't cast as
suspect those who don't have the same religious beliefs as the person(s)
proposing "God's law" be applied to debate.  Faith may be a fine
justification (and we shouldn't ridicule it with science's equally
solipsistic "truths").  Nonetheless, it seems that to cross religious
cultures in a dabate round, we need to come up with an anti-realist lens
for ethics, rather than a dogmatic one.  This requires valuing the input
of all the participants involved in the debate and creating an
intersubjective ethics that doesn't scream dogma either one way or another
(religion vs. Science, etc).  It seems that this discussion is boxing
itself into an easy dichotomy between skeptics and pragmatists/believers.
What we need to realize is that there is a middle ground.  If
a critic believes that depression is bad, somhow inherently (maybe
she/he's a stockbroker or something), we must either adjust and adapt or
use the art of persuasion to try to develop a different set of ethics in
order to run our dedevelopment cards.  Perhaps this is one of the purposes
of our activity, and we are participating in a constant negotiation of our
ethical beliefs.

Dunno... it just sorta seems that way...

Sean


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Sean Upton / Utah Debate   sean.upton at u.cc.utah.edu

"History has a horrible need to erase the details so that its landmarks
stand out against the din. The three kids beside me were probably two
years old when the red light was on for Levitate Me. How am I supposed to
explain to them that the world into which Black Francis started screaming
still heard it like a scream and not like fashion? How am I supposed to
relate to them that context makes all the difference in how we view a work
of art or a work of rock?
...The wonderstruck old woman has given up on the passers-by and is
standing blithely against a gift-shop window...Unfortunately, I'm sure
she's never heard of Charles or Kim or Joey or Dave or any of the records
which changed lives and moved the whole tourist culture we live in to the
left a few feet. I think I might give her a real scare if I told her and
the alterna-boys that in September of 1987, the Pixies came to take the
kids. And they took them." -- Gary Smith, "Death to the Pixies," 1997
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