On Mon, 24 Jan 2000 10:57:25 EST JKSCHW at aol.com writes:
>Yoshie's statement that she doesn't reject morality "out of hand" is
>ambiguius, Does she reject, but not out of hand? Or does she not
>reject it?
>
>Yoshie is right taht notions of desert, etc. will not prevebt crime.
>She may be horrified to know that judge Richard Posner has recently
>published book, the Problematics of Legal and Moral Theory, in which
>he rejects moral theory and its application to law for this, among
>other reasons.
Justin,
You, yourself have often emphasized that Posner is one of the smartest people sitting on the Federal bench today. Are there any special reasons for us to be horrified?
> To him and to Yoshie I say that moral theory is
>supposed to help us understand and evaluate our practices, iuncluding
>those of criminal justice, and not to make people better. No one was
>ever morally improved by reading Kant, nor, probably, morally depraved
>by doing that either.
Why would anyone bother to concern herself with evaluating practices if not to improve them? Probably no one has ever been morally improved simply on the basis of having read Kant (or Aristotle or Mill) but all these thinkers as I understand them were interested in critically analyzing morality precisely in order to improve our practices in this regard among other things. And one of course seeks to improve these practices in order to make people better. Also, I would keep in mind Marx's statement in *Theses on Feuerbach* that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world. The important thing is to change it." One would think that you as a pragmatist would be sympathetic to such a view.
>
>Yoshie makes a characteristically slippery transition from my
>retribitivist insistence of making it a goal of the criminal justices
>system that the guilty and the innocent get what they deserve to
>talking about the notion of responsibility and desert in the context
>of economic distribution of wealth.
Well, a lot of philosophers do perceive a linkage between distributive and retributive justice. Rawls as I recall in his *A Theory of Justice* seemed to treat the latter as a species of the former. And Ted Honderich in various writings including his *Conservatism* sees the notions of responsibility and desert as underlying both the rationales for retribution and for the existence of economic inequalities.
>
>She knows damn well that I am not a Lockean libertarian, and she may
>even have read my paper attacking the Lockean view ("From
>Libertarianism to Egalitarianism," Social Theory and Practice 1993).
>She makes no pretense of actually arguing that if I want only those
>guilty of criminal offenses to be punished (does she disagree? would
>it help the workers to punish the innocent?) that I am thereby
>committed to capitalism red in tooth and claw, the workhouse, and the
>Poor Law. In fact there is no plausible argument that would support
>that transition.
>
>We can talk about economic (distribitive) justice, but that is a
>different kettle of fish from retributive justice. I'd like to keep
>these seperate until someone shows I cannot.
>
>
>In a message dated Mon, 24 Jan 2000 1:14:09 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes:
>
>> Justin wrote:
>> >I am puzzled on what basis Yoshie condemns rapists, racist thugs,
>and violent
>> >cops, since she rejects morality.
>>
>> I don't reject morality out of hand. I'm simply saying that the
>notion of
>> desert, retribution, personal responsibility, etc. do not prevent
>crimes;
>> nor will they make criminal justice less oppressive toward the
>working
>> class. As a matter of fact, nearly all Americans are more attached
>to such
>> moral standards than social democratic Europeans are, and look at
>the
>> result. . . . .
I think that Yoshie asked a very apt question. As I recall B.F. Skinner in his utopian novel *Walden Two* had his alter ego Burris Frazier ask the same question of the philosopher, Castle, with the implication that such notions had done little to improve human behavior. BTW I would be interested in knowing how such notions as responsibility, desert, retribution etc. are understood in Japan, and what role they play in publid discourse there.
>>
>> More preaching of personal responsibility is the last thing that
>American
>> workers need, who are already well on the way toward Mr. Locke's
>paradise
>> of virtue and industry.
>>
>> Yoshie
>
>
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