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ryo
i get more and more annoyed every time i see this stupid fucking caricature, and prefixing with "often-cited" doesn't get you off the hook. just say you didn't do the reading. he has so many more interesting things to say you fucking losers.
willowJul 5, 2025
amadeus ulrich, ideology and suffering, 12 I surmise that the best response for realists would be to stress that they do not deny that a division of labour between moral and epistemic criticisms of ideologies in political theory can be worthwhile and productive (see Aytaç and Rossi, 2023: 1225–1226). Yet this amounts to admitting crucial limits of their approach. This concession sits uneasily with their frequent assertion that the elision of moral ideas is a desirable feature of ideology critique, which is rooted in the sympathies radical realists have for the strong thesis that moral norms tend to be ‘dead politics’, as Geuss (2010) has phrased it: ‘the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future’ (111). Is the point, perhaps, that some prefigurative struggles can escape this grip? How exactly? These are fascinating questions, but reflections on them require the fuel of moral argument to get anywhere at all.
geuss, politics and the imagination, moralism and realpolitik, 42 Ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Our past is an essential part of what we are, which we ignore at our peril. We could not completely leave it behind even if we wished to do so; but recognition of this necessity gives us no reason to romanticize it. Nothing stops us from making our own moral judgments on our past, on our present way of life, or, proleptically, on future action or its probable outcome, although the further away from present contexts of action we get, the less of a grip our apparatus of moral reflection will give us on the situations we encounter. One should not, however, confuse trying to refine our moral categories with trying to understand what is going on in the world in which we live. There is nothing wrong with cultivating our own moral intuitions, but for them to have any value they must be minimally connected with the cognitive apparatus by which we track the world as it is. There is certainly no guarantee that the fi t between these intuitions, which we in any case have reason to believe are historically highly variable, and the way the world is, will always be smooth and comfortable,so it would behoove us to be on our guard against trusting them too blindly
like this is a fine tension to bring up, but it's also more or less addressed head on by your citation. then again, i'm not too mad about this one because i think the frequency with which the catchphrase is thrown around to be a little off-putting and misleading,