----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 10:00 PM Subject: Re: Again,
> It's still not clear why that is an empirical question.
In some possible worlds, only the agent contemplating a particular course of action would know what's best for them. But not in this one.
> And while you are
> right about children, we were not talking about children. Most of us would
> agree that competent adults are the best judges of their own best
interests,
Sure. But the qualifier "competent" seems to turn your argument into a tautology unless you mean competent in some sense other than "able to judge their own interests."
> and, moreover, that even when they're wrong they have the right to make
> their own mistakes.
That's only because it's far too costly (in several different ways) to prevent people from making their own mistakes in many cases.
> Tie this more tightly to a real case. Were you talking
> about women in Afghanistan who prefer to wear burkhas, or what?
Daredevils who don't wear seatbelts.
> >Is the restriction of civil liberties a function of the war, or an
> >independent response on the part of the Bushies that would've occurred
> >regardless of any military actions?
>
> Without the war they wouldn't have dared to go anywhere near this far,
Maybe.
> and you know it.
No, I don't.
> This is too abstract. Rawls has a useful way of putting it. In a society
> that is too poor to support any principles of justice, he says we are
> outside the circumstances of justice, and questions of the proper
> distribution of freedom do not arise. In somewhat richer societies, he
> suggests that freedom can be traded off against equality and material
needs.
> In reasonably wealthy societies where, if things were arranged properly,
> people could be brought up to abide by principles of justice, freedom
comes
> first.
Of what sort? Freedom of the pocketbook takes precedence in the US, and the best way to argue against it is to point out that it's diametrically opposed to the majority's welfare.
> I note that your low evaluation of freedom is not shared by many ordinary
> people throughout history, who have struggled and died to win the freedoms
> we have.
I'll grant you that many ordinary people have struggled and died for more misguided and destructive causes (religion quickly comes to mind). My evaluation of freedom is actually loftier than you take it to be, despite the fact that I refuse to extol its virtues ueber alles.
> You have to understand that freedom is tied to self-respect, that
> thinking of oneself as a free person is central to many people's self of
> self-worth. Moreover, there is the Millean point that genuinely benevolent
> dictators are few and far between. Go reread On Liberty, which cam be
taken
> as a consequentialist defense of the priority of liberty.
Mill was a classical liberal. Some consequentialists defend conservatism and libertarianism. That doesn't suffice to show that a consequentialist is committed to any of those sets of political principles.
-- Luke
> jks