IVF is booming. 2.5% of births are IVF, growing fast. The technology still has a lot of room to improve, it will get cheaper and more effective. And it's just incredibly, incredibly popular among people who use it successfully. This technology literally gave you life.
Whereas the people who oppose IVF are almost all, it's some distant and theoretical thing to them. Some abstract principle.
I think this whole IVF debate is more like, a brief backlash to something new, the sort of backlash when something is becoming popular and people just start paying attention. Its fundamentals are very strong, politicians who align anti IVF are going to get burned.
I'd recommend a distinct term to distinguish between the normal meaning of 'revelation' in the religious context from the nature of the arbitrary (and evolving) value system underpinning progressive secular ideology.
In the religious context, the situation of revealed value hierarchy is explicit, acknowledged, and implicitly adopting the philosophical principle of meta-ethical moral nihilism that, absent the revelation, there would be no objective basis to claim greater validity or legitimacy for one set of values over any other. And this philosophical position is robust and irrefutable, see, e.g. Leff's "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law". All attempts at using natural revelation or utilitarianism or whatever else lead to dead ends, as their own internal logic dictates that they must.
Progressives on the other hand have a religious-like system of values, but explicitly deny that this system is supported by a basis in supernatural revelation, and claim further that it needs no such basis, and that by implication they have their own version of "natural law" where their set of values is effectively the subject of a real Science of ethics - objectively true with its basis in the nature of reality and whatever is not infinitely plastic and maleable about humanity - and furthermore in a way that is discoverable and inferable by means of observation, reason, and insight.
Can one properly call a value system revelatory when adherents - even erroneously - explicitly reject that it is revelatory and consider all revelatory value systems to be illegitimate? Maybe at least put a "crypto" prefix or append some other distinguishing modifier.
IVF is booming. 2.5% of births are IVF, growing fast. The technology still has a lot of room to improve, it will get cheaper and more effective. And it's just incredibly, incredibly popular among people who use it successfully. This technology literally gave you life.
Whereas the people who oppose IVF are almost all, it's some distant and theoretical thing to them. Some abstract principle.
I think this whole IVF debate is more like, a brief backlash to something new, the sort of backlash when something is becoming popular and people just start paying attention. Its fundamentals are very strong, politicians who align anti IVF are going to get burned.
I'd recommend a distinct term to distinguish between the normal meaning of 'revelation' in the religious context from the nature of the arbitrary (and evolving) value system underpinning progressive secular ideology.
In the religious context, the situation of revealed value hierarchy is explicit, acknowledged, and implicitly adopting the philosophical principle of meta-ethical moral nihilism that, absent the revelation, there would be no objective basis to claim greater validity or legitimacy for one set of values over any other. And this philosophical position is robust and irrefutable, see, e.g. Leff's "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law". All attempts at using natural revelation or utilitarianism or whatever else lead to dead ends, as their own internal logic dictates that they must.
Progressives on the other hand have a religious-like system of values, but explicitly deny that this system is supported by a basis in supernatural revelation, and claim further that it needs no such basis, and that by implication they have their own version of "natural law" where their set of values is effectively the subject of a real Science of ethics - objectively true with its basis in the nature of reality and whatever is not infinitely plastic and maleable about humanity - and furthermore in a way that is discoverable and inferable by means of observation, reason, and insight.
Can one properly call a value system revelatory when adherents - even erroneously - explicitly reject that it is revelatory and consider all revelatory value systems to be illegitimate? Maybe at least put a "crypto" prefix or append some other distinguishing modifier.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. But that was a stupid NYT op-ex.