This is written on the fly, so to speak so I ask your forgiveness for any lack of polish....
I cannot share the expressed enthusiasm for elevating the individual and his or her individual (and often singular) perspectives to any level that is beyond reproach. And yet that is exactly what is being espoused.
If I understand what is being posited, defining your own standards of quality, quite apart from any consistent or agreed upon standard no matter how steeped in history and the human context, is not only a god-given right but wholly justifiable on the basis of self-interest and "Liberté, égalité, fraternité ".
Excuse me, but I say..."Bah!!" I've seen this viewpoint expressed too many times to shed anymore tears over it. However, I would ask if a person's definition of "quality" is so inalienable and so beyond question or even misgiving by the rest of humanity...
...how then do you define "cruelty?" By what standards? Is there such a thing as "objective" cruelty? Come, come, let's be consistent (and thereby introduce a bit of logic) here. Surely if if the definition of quality is a "personal choice" then so too must the definition of cruelty be personal and beyond criticism or second guessing.
Solipsism, by definition, does not recognize any other "self" or other selves (the "other" ) as being of any note. In the soloipsist's world there is no "other." Relativism, is a watered down...or perhaps better marketed...version of the exact same impulse. By its very definition, relativism elevates the individual and his or her judgment above all his fellows. Beyond second guessing or criticism...even
self-criticism (which, I think, explains its currency.)
Every monster that has ever plagued human history has been, at his heart, a relativist. Oh sure, they give lip service to empirical or even absolutist thinking (especially at first)--to "community values", but it is only self-justification and an attempt to engage the tools he (or she) needs to further his own ends--ie., other people. How can it be otherwise?
This is not to say that every relativist is a monster but every monster, at some point, has to invent his own unique justification for ignoring, and inevitably annulling the precepts of tradition, his adopted faith or ideological "principles," and creating his own definition of right and wrong, good and evil, value and rubbish, people and pawns.
At some level, I think we all distrust the individual who sets himself and his own definitions apart from the rest of us...apart from the human context. And I think that is both a necessary and laudable instinct. Human beings are capable of great nobility and even acts of transcendence.
"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!"
Yet he is capable of the basest behaviour too and in every instance that I can think of man is at his best in the service of his fellow man and God, and at his worst in service of self and self-interest.
Tight Stitches
DWFII--Member HCC