RELIABILISM

And now again, off we go to have our five minute philosophy fix – although these days, what with my class in feminism, queer, and diaspora film studies I think more about the implications of formalizing positions that agents across class, gender, race, age, love relations etc., can avail themselves of when such positions are not made available to them by some circumstance than I think of distinctions between concepts of right or wrong vis-à-vis true or false statements. Mind you, however, and if you ask me, these days Vincent is doing cultural studies rather than philosophy, which is a good thing. At least he spares us all the pain and embarrassment in deliberately having to dismiss moral philosophy on account of its being a political question rather than anything else.

Thus, when Vincent makes the point that a true statement is not always synonymous with a right action, and nor does a false statement always indicate a wrong action, what he indirectly points to is a context within which such statements or moral evaluations are not only aligned with but also stem from a subject’s position of enunciation. In cultural studies, one does not even want to bother with anything else other than analyze the discursive functions of positions of enunciation. And why is that the case? Why, for the simple reason because positions, and the ways in which positions are negotiated, create categorizations. So, there we have it. If some think that it’s right to have the jungle deforested because it helps the Indians to get rid of their cocaine addiction, the evaluation of such an act as both truthful and rightful is more often than not the result of someone assuming a position of power which validates the legitimacy of such a statement however false this very same statement may also prove to be if enunciated from another position. Hence, it makes sense to follow Vincent’s suggestion that, sometimes, some shit is best left in the gutter rather than give it a virtuous status in the bedroom.

If however, I should want to follow Bush, whom Vincent quotes for saying that he believes that what he believes is right, then, I should like to anticipate what Vincent will make of active agents who believe in the radicalization of relativity in its relation to a presupposed absolute. For, what Bush’s statement suggests is that if belief enters in a relationship with righteousness then it does so because belief is assumed to be not only an absolute in itself but an absolute made relative to itself by the introduction of the modifier ‘right’. In other words, what Bush is saying is that he is right to believe in whatever he sees rightful to believe is right because he is the fucking president. A radical position. Now, I have a feeling that the cross between contextualism and epistemic logic, if filtered through cultural studies, has the potential to yield some smashingly interesting results. As they say, you can always count on reliabilism. Or what?