Yoiu're losing me here, Eric. If I understand you correctly, you object to any position that anyone might disagree with as involving commitment toa nything. If a prag says, i don't care what your basis is so long as you more or less agree with what I think is right, you say, well someoine may well care that others agree. In sort, you have set the conditions for putting moral discourse inoractice impossibly high. So, yes, I am a totalitarian democrat. That is my moral metaphysics and theology, Vox populi vox Dei. Submit to the majority decision, subject to constitutional protections, or we'll send the cops after you. No apologies. I plead guilty to that charge. I don't even think that democracy needs justification, I will not deign to answer your sneers at the great unwashed. Who should be in charge. the well-showered? jks
>From: virgil tibbs <sheik_of_encino at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: rights, rights, and still more rights
>Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 11:15:03 -0800 (PST)
>
>I think ALL rights talk is moral (ideological as
>well)and ALL moral talk is metaphysical (more
>precisely, I believe it to be teleological -- an
>Aristotelan I am).
>
>Even if as a pragmatist you are agnostic as to the
>precise metaphysical nature of rights, when you say
>that the metaphysical truth of a particular conception
>of a right should yield to the dominant consensus or
>to a particular conception of utility is to make a
>distinctly moral claim. The problem with democracy is
>that it says, in part, truth does not matter.
>Certainly, a proposition's truth can be an
>individual's justification or reason for action, but
>in a democracy what matters is not the truth of the
>proposition, simply a majoritarian acceptance.
>
>This is the dichotomy that gets the Right and the Left
>so worked up: if Truth matters at the individual
>level, it must matter at the social level. Thus, when
>certain of us bemoan the adamance of the "true
>believers," we are responding, to the belief that
>social governace MUST reflect particular conceptions
>of Truth and Justice.
>
>Any social order is a theocracy of sorts: whether the
>prevailing ordering principle is the Natural Law of
>Catholocism or Socialism; the moral rightness of the
>order is guaranteed by the moral rightness of the
>ordering principle. I take pragmatism to be of a
>kind: whatever the utility served by a particualr
>conception of pragmatism, that is the order dictated
>to the unwashed.
>
>
>
>
>
>--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >To say that a "rights regime" is a pragmatic rights
> > >regime is to dictate the proper conception of a
> > >"right," which is the precise subject of debate --
> > a
> > >theocracy of pragmatism as it were.
> > >
> >
> > Not at all. It's to say that I don;t care to get
> > into it--you can believe
> > that rights were delivered by Zeus in a sidecar,
> > Nozick can think that they
> > inhere in The Objective Order, and I can think they
> > are social conventions
> > based in facts about conditions for fair
> > cooperation. For the purposes of
> > talking about which rights there are, we need not,
> > and probably should not,
> > discuss our views about their bases. --Yes, I know,
> > we prags are
> > infuriatingly banal and diffident. We picked up the
> > trope from Rorty. I
> > come by it honestly. He was my teacher.
> >
> > jks
> >
> >
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