moral subjectivists
Reader comment on article: From the Halls of Academia

Submitted by Joseph Grossman, Dec 31, 2002 at 19:21

The academics who oppose the United States declaring war on Iraq approach the issue from a fundamentally different set of philosophical premises than those who value individual rights and its political consequence, capitalism. With the exception of those few who are simply confused, most of these academics are envious mediocrities who hide their rage at society behind a philosophy of moral subjectivism which holds that nothing is objectively good or bad and that such outmoded concepts of good and bad are "social constructs" or a product of "social conditioning". In a desperate attempt to deligitimize people who have achieved anything by hard work, they declare that no one can help anything he does and that circumstances (usually "poverty" or "racism" or any number of other "isms") are responsible for everybody's lot in life. They despise the United States, which in three and a quarter centuries accumulated greater wealth and achieved greater advances in technology than all the nations of the world combined since the stone age. They hate the United States because it is a living refutation of the deterministic collectivism which they espouse to hide their inadequacy.

For such people, the issue is what the United States is, not what it does. These are not people who feel that the principles on which the United States was founded - individual liberty, economic and political freedom and (at least in theory) the primacy of the individual over the collective - are of supreme value and are being compromised by a war with Saddam Hussein's gang of thugs. Rather, they are people who are either unwilling or unable to draw any distinction between the principles on which the United States was founded and the corrupt and murderous tribalism which characterizes the Iraqi "leadership", which has no more legitimate a claim to govern than the the Gambino crime family would have to proclaim itself the legitimate government of the United States and murder everyone who opposed it.

The conflict between the academics and people who value individual rights is a conflict about ideologies. The ideologies to which these academics subscibe are collectivism, determinism and their corollary, moral subjectivism. Such people have nothing of any importance to say when it comes to promoting the interest of the people of the United States.

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