Noam Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault

That is the most French accent I’ve ever heard

I'm just chilling around watching philosophy debates and end up watching this video. Then as I look at the members of the panel I'm surprised to see that my grandmother is there to the left, and her companion is the one asking the questions. What a find.

Man went to grad school during Alan Turing's day and is still this sharp at his age

I don't agree with him on some things (albeit instinctively; I would fail miserably debating him), but I admire that every single word he says is important and relevant to his argument. He's different than any other public intellectual in that way. Chomsky is the most consistent thinker alive I can think of.

His main point is that since humans are biologically restricted, their moral systems are also restricted to a universal spectrum of morals, which therefore does not expand indefinitely.

"It's not even false" - I LOVE IT!

A man who thinks and expresses himself in whole coherent sentences and paragraphs ! Bravo Prof Chomsky !

I fully share Chomsky's values, but most of his arguments here, albeit intriguing, don't strike me as very strong. When he takes change as evidence for 'a universal moral grammar', his reasoning seems to be based on the idea that this change must be for the better, but that idea itself remains unmotivated. He just assumes progress towards a more correct moral system, but the objective difference in correctness is the very thing that he needs to prove in this discussion. If we continue the analogy with his linguistic theories - like languages, moral systems vary in space, as well as in time; like languages, children appear to learn different moral systems just as easily. And no linguist claims that one language as a whole at a given point in time is inherently closer to universal grammar than another, or that language change is progress towards perfect alignment with universal grammar. I don't see why that should be claimed about morality. I think the closest he came to a good argument was in the beginning. You literally can't be a moral relativist in practice, at least not without being a moral nihilist. To have a moral system is to consider it to be the right moral system. You can't hold the moral view that slaughtering children is bad and yet accept as equally valid the view of some other culture that it is good. It's inevitable that you should consider it evil, seek to discourage everybody else from doing it and otherwise try to prevent it if possible – if you don't, then you do not truly hold that moral view. It seems to me that ultimately, at the roots of every moral system, you find axioms that are based on feeling and experience, and the latter are subjective. To the extent that the axioms are shared, you can indeed progressively deepen your understanding of their consequences. But when they aren't shared or are differently weighted, rational discussion can't bring consensus about morality. For example, if somebody, as outlined by the person to the right, thinks that the 'survival' of a certain 'culture' (i.e. its preservation in a given state) is a value more important than the happiness and freedom of the individual human beings within it, then I think that it's difficult to prove him wrong with rational arguments - the only thing that I think may be likely to change his mind is further emotional experience.

Mr. Chomsky's microphone fashionably matches his sweater!

Chomsky needs to download himself into an artificial body and become the curator to a museum dedicated to himself and his transition from human into digital entity. Right?

Chomsky is someone I admire because he is not just a critic of prevailing systems. He acknowledges human progress and also offers solutions according to his philosophy

Came here from a Jordan Peterson video. The difference is night and day.

there is so much tension among the panelists! noam is super chill..

"The direction is towards more tolerance of variation and more opposition to coercion and control. I think that's a very definite tendency and I think it suggests something pretty strong what the fundamental moral values are"

Too many people sweep too many incongruous things under the label of postmodernism. Unless you've read the majority of the French philosophers from this era, you'd be tempted to think that this was a doctrine, and a homogenous one at that. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were many different and conflicting positions during the 70s and 80s among french philosophers, and in fact none of them ever called themselves "postmodern" thinkers. This is a label that was bestowed on them by American academic circles, on the basis that the concept of post-modernity was frequently cited (among others) in those days. It's impossible to conflate the hallucinatory discourse of Lacan and Derrida, with that of Deleuze and Lyotard, for instance (and I read them in French, my native tongue). Lacan was a scam artist living off his impersonation of psychoanalytical discourse and amazing ability to improvise incoherent discourse in front of a mesmerized student audience. Derrida was somewhat similar but slightly more coherent while not offering a particularly potent set of ideas. At the opposite, Deleuze was highly coherent and we owe him among other things powerful concepts such as the rhizome, in place of the antique concepts of hierarchy and arborescence. In parallel, Lyotard's admirable and visionary essay, The Postmodern Condition, predicted back in the mid-70s everything that we witness today with social media, knowledge databases and the collapse of traditional discourse. A must read. There's not a shred of what's come to plague US academia in these works: so-called "cultural studies", gender studies, identity politics and so forth. It would be a fallacy to claim otherwise. These are anglo-saxon extrapolations stemming from a gross misreading of many of these philosophers' various intents.

Chomsky is a reminder to me how hard it is to actually remain logically consistent and exercise dry truth. Completely negate any flights of fancy from our thought.

Long live Prof Chomsky and his legacy !!! براك الله في حضرتك

Does anyone know where I could find the full interview of this forum?

I want a pillow made out of chomsky's voice

I think the other panelists are actually grasping at good points and valid criticisms of Chomsky's argument, but they let themselves get all worked up and flustered for some reason and it totally undermines the arguments they're trying to make.