----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 5:06 PM Subject: Re: rights, rights, and still more rights
>
>
> Ian Murray wrote:
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >
> > > Moral truth is irrelevant to legal obligation.
> > =================
> >
> > This itself is a moral claim. Ok, metaethical if you want to get technical.
>
> No it's not. It's a political claim established by political power.
> Unless you want to claim a theological basis, there is no way of
> arriving at any "moral claim" not itself grounded in political power.
================
Oh lord not the anti-Habermas debate again....Uncoerced consensus on ethical norms are achievable; it is precisely their defections from/violations of that are partly constitutive of political power, even as political power formations are not called into existence-- or exhausted-- by them. The anarchist Michael Taylor has shown how a group can have binding ethical norms in the absence of a state or legal obligation or coercion.
Also, your claim seems to assume that all political power is an a priori public bad. That is not necessarily the case and many among those who insist on it being the case tend to make obstinacy the be all and end all of all discourse in their attempts to equate ethical norms as nothing but the result of an imposition performed by those who continuously desire to oppress those who disagree; as if disagreement for it's own sake is necessary for human freedom.
>
> My point is is if that
> > claim is itself adjudicated via majoritarian methods
>
> "Majoritarian methods" is a somewhat weasel-worded claim to ground right
> in political power. The original claim to ground "right" in "might" was
> an expression of the power of the Athenian Demos, and Socrates rejection
> of the equation of strength with justice was a rejection of democracy.
=============
Why the "..." around might and right? Are you saying there must be no zone of liberty around persons that is immune from majority rule even as that zone is continuously created and negotiated and renegotiated by the demos?
One person's equating of strength with justice is another person's oppression of negative liberty. Either there are possible social formations that resolve these social contradictions or there aren't or it's undecideable either way even as those possible social formations are not residing in some platonic realm. It is the notion of possible undecideability that makes for the need to engage in non-coercive deliberative pracitices regarding these problems.
>
> It is a historical fact not a moral claim that a demos will almost
> always accept and attempt to implement social principles deriving from
> earlier social relations -- hence the illusion, for example, that the
> prohibition of murder is grounded in some ruling ethic rather than in
> social practice. Any attempt to ground "ethics" in a realm outside
> political power sets up an infinite regress that always ends with god.
>
>
> > And if no majority even prevails in what can count as democratic procedures? Peter Suber has
been
> > all over this problem for years on the paradoxes of majoritarianism and objectivity; you're
coming
> > up against deep issues of transitivity and undecideability. When you solve them take me with you
to
> > Sweden when you go to pick up your prize.
>
> They aren't paradoxes -- they are merely facts of social relations.
>
> Carrol
=================
And of course there are no contradictory social relations; all conflict is an illusion. Contradiction-free social relations is a contradiction in terms, thus the paradoxes that emerge in the descriptions of those relations are illusions too.
Ian