Moral rights exist to give the intellectual proletariat a way to participate in debates.
Thought through carefully, the above statement, which is I think intended to deflate, provides a basis for understanding what we (cannot help but) mean by the moral and the right, in other words what we cannot help but pre-suppose or must always already have pre-supposed in order to commence – or, to be more precise, to re-commence – the or any inquiry into the moral and the right, or any inquiry at all.
In recent years there have been several efforts to think through the moral and the right along these lines, though Peirce in the 19th Century, at almost the precise moment of the dissolution of Christian Republicanism into Progressivism, performed the operation in as pure a form as I have seen – except possibly for the Apostle John or the Prophet Muḥammad. For Peirce, logic at all or logicality presumes faith, hope, and charity, or a necessarily pro-social and transmortal concept. For John, as we have noted, it was easier but not exactly simpler to say that in the beginning was the Word. In Islam and in Judaism, the giving and receiving of words as The Word likewise, or in a certain literal sense even more clearly or purely, occupies the mythopoetic center point. In diverse traditions, the sacred texts must be stolen from gods or demons at the beginning of what can then become human time, and all religion, as “setting down” of the moral and the right, is the replication of that same or its own format, which, if it is universal, must be considered not simply myth but a true telling: that, to (be said to) believe at all, we must be able to speak and understand, and that, to (be said to) speak and understand, we must believe.
In other words, “giving the intellectual proletariat a way to participate in debates” would be no small accomplishment or frivolous consideration, unless one considers civilization to be a small accomplishment, or considers distinguishing between the good and the bad or progress and regress or moral and immoral or right and wrong to be frivolous or impossible – positions that are subsidiaries of the same position of the non-position of perfect nihilism, which everyone enjoys imagining someone might hold, but no one does hold because no one can. In the meantime, to discredit the inquiry into the moral and the right, while pursuing it, is not just self-effacing, but self-disfiguring, for any ordinary blogger especially.
