> On Fri, 13 Oct 2000 09:32:37 +0200 (SAST) Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com>
> wrote:
>
> > > And yet the words "guilty" and "innocent" still have meaning...
>
> > Ken, are you going senile or something? Think about what you're saying - the
> words "guilty" and "innocent" - doesn't that remind you of the debacle of
> Clinton and Lewinsky? The most recent test of innocence in US political
> consciousness - which culminated in Clinton bombing Sudan...
>
> If notions of responsibility and accountability currently fall short of their
> own ideals, or even some sort of non-idealistic practice, or the structures and
> institutions of national and international justice are impoverished, the point
> isn't to get rid of them, rather, to improve them (or get rid of some of them
> and built new institutions). Are you more comfortable with the designation that
> Clinton is neither guilty nor innocent? Guilt and innocence might not be the
> best ways to characterize responsibility and accountability... but we've got
> some fairly important concepts here that are tied up with justice, morality and
> law... concepts that I wager function to make any kind of sanity possible.
> Should corporations not be held accountable and responsible for their actions?
> Is the idea of guilt antiquated?
Possibly. I am not really convinced that the concept of 'justice' is ultimately a useful one on which to base a society. What does a just society look like? And how is this different from a disciplinary society? Or a subtly totalitarian state? These questions are quiet dear to me, since I live in a society which is quite deeply unjust - and, after spending a year in the UK, I feel that there is some virtue in this situation.
After all, is justice possible without the constant surveillance of every act? In the UK I witnessed what was, for me, a society cut through by systems of surveillance, all of which are justified on the basis ensuring consistency, accountability, safety. (I kinda know where James Heartfield is coming from, sometimes...) The most monstrous act in such a society is to act with no regard to the 'common good'.
Similarly, insisting on the "innocence" of actions of the US state implies for me the acceptance of a rigid network of responsibility, where critics of the state might be examined to determine with their motives are pure. This reminds me of Kundera's example (in 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I think, but I might be wrong) of the dissident whose private conversations were broadcast, revealing the 'impurity of his heart', with the aim of scandalising the public and turning people against him.
If we want a society based where 'the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all' (still to me about the best way to express my desire for a utopia), then I doubt that the falsely-disinterested language of justice is the best way to get there.
>
> I'm reminded of Annie Sprinkle here. The answer to bad pornography isn't no
> pornography - but better pornography.
along the lines of the liberal principle, the answer to bad law isn't no law, but better law? Seems rather one dimensional to me.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844