Disenchanted

What do you do if your intellectual work reminds you--hour by hour, minute by minute--that there is no external source of authority for normative action? That philosophy can brilliantly tear apart the prescriptions of philosophy before it, but only weakly make recuperative attempts at new normative values (these will be the next wave's targets)? Assuming you have some basic psychological inhibitions in place, you can avoid suicide. Great. I don't want to trivialize that. But can we be comfortable with the complete lack of theoretical justification for normative action?

I've heard and thought about two related reasons why maybe we can: (1) We manage to make it through the social necessities of every life, just like everyone else. We can doublethink our way into (a certain degree) social cohesion by ignoring some deep facts about social reality and using the practical knowledge we have to get by. (2) We should be grateful of our ability to begin perceiving and understanding the world around us. The phenomenal universe, including others and self, is beautiful... or just complex... and perhaps therefore interesting. Let's just live and think about that universe.

These models are somewhat seductive for me. I do like trying to understand the world. But can reveling in that be enough? Short-termism corresponds to a particular political-economic-cultural complex, like any other philosophy. A number of diverse causes produce a similar outcome: humans passively engaging in advanced capitalism without out long-term or global perspectives on their behavior. The result? All the bad things that result from politically disinterested capitalism on a small scale: environmental destruction, wars, exploitation, etc. It's not enough to say "if I were in charge, I wouldn't be conducting wars or destroying the environment or exploiting Third World labor." Some other people would, and my apathy is all they require.

And yet, I can't summon a moral justification for interfering with other people? I'm willing to throw up my hands and default to libertarianism because I'm not willing to commit to a moral decision-making calculus? Pathetic. If I become an academic and teach in a framework like this, why do I deserve to be alive at all? Why disillusion other people when right now they want to go do things that intuitively I think are good but logically I can't justify?

In part because I have no more trust for the intuitive than for anything else any more, especially when it comes to reflection about the long-term and the global.

This isn't an idle academic question that I should just stop worrying about it. That attitude is part of the problem. The solution to this problem, provisional as it may be, determines how I act now to orient myself for the rest of my life. I need some better ideas. Greater minds than I have tackled this problem; recommendations of books that those people wrote would be greatly appreciated.