{"id":153,"date":"2019-05-05T20:42:35","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T20:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/?p=153"},"modified":"2020-12-05T21:40:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-05T21:40:00","slug":"feeling-good-about-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/feeling-good-about-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling Good About Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Culturally in the West since the 1960s, popular culture might be summarised with the words <em>&#8220;your truth but certainly not mine and so you certainly cannot tell me what to do, my view is equally as valuable as your view&#8221;<\/em>.  This is an in-depth essay developed from a conference paper that I presented called <em>&#8220;Feeling Good About Truth&#8221;<\/em>.  It was a review of the debate between the Cambridge University moral philosopher, Simon Blackburn, to the most famous proponent of this view, technically known as <em>relativism<\/em>, the famous philosopher and cultural critic Richard Rorty (d.2006).  Richard Rorty was famous for asserting there could be no moral &#8220;absolutes&#8221; for all morality was culturally defined, we decide in each era what &#8220;good&#8221; and &#8220;evil&#8221; are as a society.  He was also controversial for his essays about George Orwell&#8217;s &#8220;1984&#8221;, he did not know what Winston (the central character representing Orwell&#8217;s view) was so worried about, Big Brother was good at &#8220;social solidarity&#8221;, he could see no use or relevance for the concept of &#8220;truth&#8221; at all if Big Brother got the job done.  In a similar vein, when challenged by a sympathetic interviewer about whether a Holocaust guard at a prison camp was complicit in genocide, he replied &#8220;<em>moral condemnation is too easy here<\/em>&#8220;.  Blackburn found that position untenable and believed we must be able to describe acts such as the Holocaust as &#8220;immoral&#8221; and hold people to account for their actions.  I agree.<\/p>\n<p>The essay is found <a href=\"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/Documents\/Content\/TruthMajorRevision.pdf\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Culturally in the West since the 1960s, popular culture might be summarised with the words &#8220;your truth but certainly not mine and so you certainly cannot tell me what to do, my view is equally as valuable as your view&#8221;. This is an in-depth essay developed from a conference paper that I presented called &#8220;Feeling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,14],"tags":[70,72,69,73,75,71,74,68],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","category-politics","tag-correspondence-theory","tag-disquotation-theory","tag-moral-truth","tag-objectivity","tag-postmodernism","tag-pragmatic-theory","tag-subjectivity","tag-truth"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\r\n<title>Feeling Good About Truth - Planet M Blog on Planet Macneil<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Feeling Good About Truth - An essay about the possibility of moral truth discussing the issues in the debate between Rorty and Blackburn.\" \/>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/feeling-good-about-truth\/\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Feeling Good About Truth - 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