> > >
> >
> > 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 claim about legal obligation. Maybe a metalegal claim. Certainly a political one (as Carrol says). I'm defending Rawls' idea of a political conceotion of demcocracy (and rights) based on an overlapping consensus, where we don't care what errors people make gettingto support views that are acceptable to us.
My point is is if that
>claim is itself adjudicated via majoritarian methods and you don't get the
>result you prefer, what's
>the metasocial basis for the claim that the majority is acting immorally if
>they have no legal
>obligation to parse the moral/legal distinction you adhere to?
I don't understand the point. If the majority opposes something I think is morally required, say socialized medicine, the moral basis for saying that it is morally required is just my moral basis, say that health care is is the sort of good that should be distributed according to need. I can perfectly happily argue that others, morally, ought to agree. But I struggle politically for my goals using all democratic means. If I can persuade others who don't agree with my moral basis, I am happy if they agree because of theirs, or considerations of prudence, or whatever. It's not imortant taht they agree for what I think are the right reasons.
>> > Democracy means that the
> > people have the right to make horrible moral mistakes.
>
>Oh geez we're not gonna solve this without book length arguments that won't
>budge our positions. By
>your own claims, the second sentence faces non-compossibility constraints
>regarding legislative
>embodiment. Extreme counterfactual; the legislature decrees by by majority
>vote that there's no such
>thing as morality or god and all those who believe in such things shall be
>put to death. It's
>begging the question as to whether what they're doing is immoral sub specie
>aeternitas, no?
Lost me again. I'd oppose such legislation as violative of liberalism. Also, I oppose the death penalty, but I don';t care if you oppose it because you think God, in whom I don't believe, disapproves.
>
How about "lets stop all those
>who hold beliefs we *both* disapprove of from exercising their liberties."
Still violates liberalism.
Secularism in politics
>hasn't been the friend of the poor or the "libertine" eh?
It's still a godd idea.
How can you even prove the majority is
>acting immorally on the WOD or in criminalizing prostitution?
The usual way, but why are you talking about morality here? I don't kno what WOD is, but the majority may criminalize prostitution, although I'd vote to decriminalize it.
>I guess I'm struggling to say you
>still haven't overcome Arrovian-type problems.
>
>
What you say desn't seem to me to have anything to do with Arrovian
problems. And I don't pretend to have a solution, though I refer you to
Pildes and Anderson, Slinging Arrows at Democracy, Columbia L Rev 1990.
Fortunately the legitimacy of democracy does not deoend on a theoretical
solution to the Arrow paradoxes.
>
>
>And if no majority even prevails in what can count as democratic
>procedures?
European countries deal with this all the time in practice. Are you suggesting that European coalition govts aren't democratic?
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.
>
I have no interest in trying to solve them. They don't affect my point. Democracy is prior to philosophy and other sorts of theory.
jks
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