What do you mean by, "control your destiny?"
You surely know how all communist regimes thought that they were legitimate in controlling the destiny of humanity in general and of their citizens in particular. They thought that it was justified to use police for the purpose of political repression, mass executions of opponents, working to death political prisoners and starving to death the peasantry of entire regions in order to force them into collective farms, among other things. Since the collapse of the USSR and the opening up of its archives to historians, we have discovered that Stalin and his entourage were sincere communists to the end. Not a single hint of cynicism has been discovered in these archives. Like Steven Kotkin says: "The biggest discovery in post collapse Soviet historiography is that Stalin and his entourage, you know what? they were communists!" This means that the most blood-stained of the soviet leaders sincerely thought they were legitimate in everything they did. They had this "You have to get your hands dirty" mentality and they believed it was wholly justified.
Why did they think that?
Because they thought that Marxism, or rather, "scientific materialism", as they liked to call it, was indeed a science and that, as such, it had accurate
knowledge of the
true laws of human development. They held that all that Marxism said was JTB.
And if it had been, indeed,
it would have been morally justified to get their hands dirty. What are a few deaths compared to the eternal happiness of humanity. Indeed, anyone who opposes a JTB must be a despicable reactionary only preoccupied in his narrow self-interest, and therefore deserving of death.
I believe that as soon as you affirm the possibility of truth, and knowledge, you are providing moral justification for this kind of behavior.
Any system of thought that describes itself as JTB ipso facto implies that soviet-style behavior is morally justified in its implementation. Denying this would lead to contradiction. How can you justify
not using every means necessary to implement a program of social reform based on
true principles?
I hold that JTB is an important aspect of truth. This does not mean that I discount a priori truths, for example, such as mathematics, which happens to correspond to reality in a way that is closer and more accurate than should be possible (thanks, Eugene Wigner, for bringing that truth to our collective attention).
That is a statement that is rejected by most philosophers since Kant.
How can you check whether mathematics are "close" to reality if you cannot apprehend reality (in the sense of the Kantian "thing in itself") other than through sense-based experiments whose results are always revisable when more precise instruments become available? (think Newtonian vs. Relativistic mechanics)
