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The bigger problem is this postmodern view creates a bit of a circular problem. Someone needs to decide what the moral values are. Oppressor's are evil (both

The bigger problem is this postmodern view creates a bit of a circular problem. Someone needs to decide what the moral values are. Oppressor's are evil (both consciously and unconsciously) and do not have an accurate view of the world. The lived experience of the oppressed situates them to better make this judgement. Once they can make that judgement they gain power. Power corrupts. The oppressed becomes the oppressor. What do you do next? How do you stop the cycle? I suppose Foucault believed that Heterotopia (utopia) is just around the corner, you just need to shift the power around and it will bloom but this doesn't seem logically consistent to me.

tunesmith 5y ago
How on earth is that postmodern? Unless you define Hume himself as postmodern. It's a classic is/ought problem. Just because two sets of people have different values doesn't mean one value isn't clearly better than the other. You and I can disagree on something like whether human life has value, but the one who holds it to have value is likely to have a lot more support. Did postmodernism get redefined to mean anyone who doesn't believe in moral facts?
- greenail 5y ago
  "Foucault’s ideas gave rise in the 1970s and ’80s to philosophical postmodernism, a movement characterized by broad epistemological skepticism and ethical subjectivism, a general suspicion of reason, and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernists attacked the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers and others to discover allegedly objective moral values that could serve as a standard for assessing different political systems or for measuring political progress from one historical period to another. According to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), for example, this project represents a secular faith that must be abandoned. In La Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern Condition) and other writings, Lyotard declared his suspicion of what he called “grand narratives”—putatively rational, overarching accounts, such as Marxism and liberalism, of how the world is or ought to be. He asserted that political conflicts in contemporary societies reflect the clash of incommensurable values and perspectives and are therefore not rationally decidable." https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/Foucault-and-postmodernism https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/Foucau...
  - tunesmith 5y ago
    Someone should just stick a fork in the term "postmodern" and finally declare it dead. The above meaning I largely agree with, as would Hume. Of course people can have different values, and of course people with different values, faced with the same facts, might come up with different normative conclusions of what should be done about it. But that's a far cry from how postmodernism is often decried, as something that professes no objective truth at all, or as a bunch of lazy moral relativism, where the value itself changes depending on circumstance. So you can easily have two people fighting about postmodernism that might even largely agree with each other; that they dislike moral relativism. But one would attack post-modernism, and the other would defend it, neither really quite clear what they are actually talking about. Which seems to be another definition of postmodernism itself. Anyway. :) Back to your original question. Given the absence of actual moral facts (which I take as axiomatic), I think the answer is limited to some public decision process that decides which moral values are in force, along with an effective way to re-decide frequently in a way that avoids the problems of becoming insular and self-reinforcing.

tunesmith 5y ago

How on earth is that postmodern? Unless you define Hume himself as postmodern. It's a classic is/ought problem. Just because two sets of people have different values doesn't mean one value isn't clearly better than the other. You and I can disagree on something like whether human life has value, but the one who holds it to have value is likely to have a lot more support. Did postmodernism get redefined to mean anyone who doesn't believe in moral facts?

greenail 5y ago
"Foucault’s ideas gave rise in the 1970s and ’80s to philosophical postmodernism, a movement characterized by broad epistemological skepticism and ethical subjectivism, a general suspicion of reason, and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Postmodernists attacked the attempt by Enlightenment philosophers and others to discover allegedly objective moral values that could serve as a standard for assessing different political systems or for measuring political progress from one historical period to another. According to Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), for example, this project represents a secular faith that must be abandoned. In La Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern Condition) and other writings, Lyotard declared his suspicion of what he called “grand narratives”—putatively rational, overarching accounts, such as Marxism and liberalism, of how the world is or ought to be. He asserted that political conflicts in contemporary societies reflect the clash of incommensurable values and perspectives and are therefore not rationally decidable." https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/Foucault-and-postmodernism https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-philosophy/Foucau...
- tunesmith 5y ago
  Someone should just stick a fork in the term "postmodern" and finally declare it dead. The above meaning I largely agree with, as would Hume. Of course people can have different values, and of course people with different values, faced with the same facts, might come up with different normative conclusions of what should be done about it. But that's a far cry from how postmodernism is often decried, as something that professes no objective truth at all, or as a bunch of lazy moral relativism, where the value itself changes depending on circumstance. So you can easily have two people fighting about postmodernism that might even largely agree with each other; that they dislike moral relativism. But one would attack post-modernism, and the other would defend it, neither really quite clear what they are actually talking about. Which seems to be another definition of postmodernism itself. Anyway. :) Back to your original question. Given the absence of actual moral facts (which I take as axiomatic), I think the answer is limited to some public decision process that decides which moral values are in force, along with an effective way to re-decide frequently in a way that avoids the problems of becoming insular and self-reinforcing.