I've been thinking of people who use postmodernism as a sword, but it's like a katana -- blade outwards, never inwards.
Use postmodern deconstruction on their care/harm morality and it falls apart like wet tissue paper. Who gets to call something care or something else harm? Why do we end up having to ignore anything that's harmful that doesn't fit a certain grand narrative of oppressor/oppressed? If you're not allowed to speak if it might cause harm, yet silence is violence, then how are we supposed to figure out which speech is harmful and which speech's silence is harmful if you're not allowed to speak the thing you think is truth and discuss whether it's harmful or not?
In the end, you have to be able to say things that might hurt in the short term in order to make sure what you're saying is what is the most true, the most correct, the most useful. If you're too stuck in an orthodoxy and doing something because you've been told it's the right thing unexamined, then all it takes is one pig nosed ugly Socrates to come up and ask one piercing question and your whole worldview is cut to shreds.
Some people might go "just listen to the experts, just listen to the authorities", but if the experts and authorities were always right, then believing the experts or authorities from 50 years ago would be correct, and most people agree that's not the case. You also can't believe experts everywhere because experts disagree on things in important ways, sometimes fundamentally. So we're stuck with the terrifying prospect of having to think for ourselves.
Use postmodern deconstruction on their care/harm morality and it falls apart like wet tissue paper. Who gets to call something care or something else harm? Why do we end up having to ignore anything that's harmful that doesn't fit a certain grand narrative of oppressor/oppressed? If you're not allowed to speak if it might cause harm, yet silence is violence, then how are we supposed to figure out which speech is harmful and which speech's silence is harmful if you're not allowed to speak the thing you think is truth and discuss whether it's harmful or not?
In the end, you have to be able to say things that might hurt in the short term in order to make sure what you're saying is what is the most true, the most correct, the most useful. If you're too stuck in an orthodoxy and doing something because you've been told it's the right thing unexamined, then all it takes is one pig nosed ugly Socrates to come up and ask one piercing question and your whole worldview is cut to shreds.
Some people might go "just listen to the experts, just listen to the authorities", but if the experts and authorities were always right, then believing the experts or authorities from 50 years ago would be correct, and most people agree that's not the case. You also can't believe experts everywhere because experts disagree on things in important ways, sometimes fundamentally. So we're stuck with the terrifying prospect of having to think for ourselves.
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