Noam Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault

22 thoughts on “Noam Chomsky on Moral Relativism and Michel Foucault”

1. This guy's argument around 17:00 is so bizarre. There was some thought about political identity being determined by how highly you value five different attributes, harm, fairness, in-group, authority, and purity. Good argument and many like it make me wonder if there's credence to that idea.

2. What if Foucault was alive?

3. We're still talking about Foucault. I don't think we'll talk too much about Chomsky after his death afterall

4. •Problem with Foucault: uses cryptic writing to draw pretentious people into a pseudo-intellectual cult of personality of hedonism and nihilism.
   •Problem with Chomsky: uses the word “fact” in philosophical and political discussions way too often and seems to have a problem intellectually empathizing with viewpoints beyond his own.

5. I admire Noam Chomsky but do not share his atheist inclinations. He says here that just because we are human beings, as biological organisms our moral and ethical values are biological as well. Tangibles are ruled by laws of physics than intangibles are void of, put simply. The values and ethics are not dependent on what the biological sentient being adopts indiscriminately. In other words, not because you are a biological creature, as a consequence your values are subject to biological alterations. This clarification, just by itself, makes his arguments based at best, in debatable assumptions and at worst on rather weak statements as matters of fact . Again, I strongly admire him in many other areas of expertise but not on this topic.

6. Chomksy – 'There is universal moral truth'

   Proceeds to give several examples of moral values changing over space and time.

7. Here is a reason for why moral progress exists, in terms of evolution:

   The reason humans exist is because we are survival machines for our genes. Therefore one can argue that true morality comes from everything that increases our genetic survival. Cultural progress increases the chance of our genetic survival. Therefore cultural progress is moral progress. If we legalise homosexuality, for example, that means that very intelligent people who happen to be homosexuals will much more likely create new technology that will benefit every person living, and therefore benefit their individual genes. If homosexuality had been legal in Great Britain when Alan Turing lived, perhaps then he would have created even more new technology or come up with more mathematical theory, which would have benefited all humans even more. The same thing can be said about subjugation of women or slavery.

8. 4:20

9. i mean, yeah, morality is always relative

   but when its for pedo seksuals relative, to fuck children, than its also relative
   if the parents take revenge on the pedo.

   Capitalists be like, morality is relative, i exploit people, because its all relative. Yes
   and its also relative, when the workers sabotage the machines , kill the boss

   In the end its all about power/might

   what can i do, what will i do, what do i want to do, besides the
   morality of the given culture

10. Postmodernism is not a choice. Making it one is mystification. Not making it one is mystification, too. Theres no way out of the rabbithole we know of. What do we even know? 1+1=2?

11. Some of the post structalists or postmodernists (their numbers don't matter, they are often in influential positions) are self serving low quality academics. Rather than developing their own views or the ideas within the field, they fill their heads with contradictions in order to be "nice" and "likable" for everyone. They “tolerate” anything that doesn’t sound quite right to them for whatever reason. Right or wrong doesn’t exist because right or wrong are not necessarily the things that lead them to their positions. They are centrists of an irrational kind.
    Instead of trying to develop the good ideas inside their fields or instead of focusing on producing creative new ideas, they focus on their careers and they only care about the kind of work that can get them a better title or a better reputation. They don’t try to replace the things they “criticise” with better alternatives, they “replace” them with vagueness. The vagueness is often associated with their political views. The good and the bad is often defined by some understanding of “equality”. They believe their vagueness somehow forms a better type of a knowledge and makes them superior to other people. They have a tendency to replace the timeless concepts like right or wrong with the ones about “being new” or “being old”. Even though it seems the only beneficiary of their “work” is themselves, their function displays that they are simply the tools of larger power systems which they pretend to oppose. They take the focus away from economic issues to identity politics.
    They are often the useful "elites" of the third world, they are the cancer within social sciences. Their ideas aren’t correct as they are ignored by the scientific world, their ideas aren’t popular or interesting as nobody except their A students and themselves give a shit about them. Yet their positions have an importance because of historical reasons. We value scientists and intellectuals. If they continue to do be in their positions not only themselves but the respectable position and their fields will be damaged with time. Their behaviour is just like the behaviour of climate change deniers. They consume and exploit without caring about future.

12. Chomski is basing his argument on a 200 year timeframe and a western perspective…..i dont see how that is a scientific argument.

13. Post modernism is nihilism for cowards.

14. if you rent a car and don't take care of it you will most likely to liable to damages (depending on the insurance options you take out) but either way somebody will have to pay

15. When Chomsky argues that a moderate form of moral realism is uncontroversial, he seems blissfully unaware of the silliness that is a lot of neo-intuitionist garbage that is currently developed under the name of moral realism.

16. Whenever i watch these videos with Chomsky, it never fails that the shadow of his nose makes it so that he looks like he has a moustache in the style of Hitlers lol

17. I enjoy Chomsky on different fronts, but the straw mans in this interchange really struck me. I'm not sure any of the original 'post-moderns' would advocate for the extreme relativism Noam accuses them of; I just don't think that was their objective at all. And, oddly, he spent most of his time making the case for moral relativism, how moral beliefs do change, then claiming that this is part of some deterministic progress. Of particular note, is that he never makes the case for this; he merely punctuates his long list of examples of moral change with the unwarranted assertion that this is somehow inevitable given intrinsic constraints. I've never been into his Universal Grammar, but I just didn't realize how much of an idealist he is. I mean, he's positively modernist in claiming the biological, or otherwise, inevitability of our grand narrative towards some supposed moral ideal; reminds me of Pinker.

    In any case, it's no wonder he dislikes the post-moderns so much, because the only unambiguous thing those original thinkers have in common is critiquing Modernism. They all did it differently — and I agree current academia has taken it to an incoherent place — but, Chomsky really fell flat for me this time in presenting any real argument against the original post-modern thinker's primary objective: breaking down systems such as fascism, nationalism, among other grand narratives that just aren't viable in the long term. Ironically, the post-moderns' project, each in their own way, contribute to the very process that Chomsky merely, and fallaciously, asserts to be manifest and deterministic destiny.

18. These are not intellectuals. They are retards.

19. 207 retard

20. "What is wrong with amorality?" – The question has an inherent contradiction.

21. I like how Chomsky discusses here with man made of straw called Foucault.

22. I respect Chomsky so much in so many ways, that it pains me dearly that he's so incredibly bad at philosophical thinking. Well, that's being unfair. Rather he's incredibly bad at engaging a tradition he knows absolutely nothing about (as anyone would be, I presume). It wouldn't take him A MINUTE of his very valuable time to confirm that reducing Foucault to a "moral relativist" is nothing short of stupid. In fact, it's kind of embarrassing that someone of his stature is going through pretty much all the worst wikipedisms about what Foucault supposedly thinked/researched/advocated. How can someone like Chomsky —who, I repeat, has my entire respect and admiration— fall in this kind of behaviour? In what rarefied sphere can someone of his intellectual acumen fall prey to this attitude? Because, he really isn't discussing Foucault here, he's discussing what he conveniently imagines Foucault says and thinks; a straw-man. Foucault, whatever else you might think about him, was an erudite and a brilliant thinker and, to much of the surprise of these people pontificating about him without ever having read him, a marvelous prosist. So, when people say that Foucault is a very obscure and undecipherable thinker… well, either you're a very novice reader (which is great and unavoidable for a while) or you simply haven't read the man and are repeating the opinion of others who… haven't read him either (I'm thinking mainly of the Jordan-Peterson-type-of crowd) or have engaged with his thought in a very lackadaisical manner. I'm not saying that you have to "like" Foucault, I'm saying that the criticisms most of these people parrot, reveal that they haven't read him at all. Hate Foucault all you like but, please, at least read him charitably and with your full attention.

    By the way, the tendency to lump into a homogeneous mass the ensemble of the very disparate and heterogeneous thinkers that Europe produced over the last century betrays a very pervasive and typical attitude found mostly in the Anglo-Saxon world; the not-so-slightly xenophobic and dismissing behaviour there is towards so-called "continental philosophy"  —ah, the insularity of the very lexicon used to define it is so revealing!— as a sort of unintelligible farsical blabber that is not up to the standard of "real" philosophy (that is, Analytical —and very Anglophone– empirical philosophy).
    Foucault needs to be criticized but not in these terms, not on the predication that it can be criticized without first having engaged fully with his work. It's very sad to watch this "illustrated philistinism" rising everywhere, to much applause. Why would it be different? Philosophy is precisely what resists the applause, the received knowledge, the common opinion, the doxa

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