----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
> >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.
==============
Fair enough; but there is no necessary move from metalegal or prelegal to a State that instantiates and enforces the legal obligation[s]. The set of possible institutional formations for securing obligation includes non-State social formations. So your argument for liberal democracy can be used for other social formations that secure even greater scope for liberties. This would make your approach a little tougher to justify.
>
> 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.
================
Again fair enough; so why should anyone use moral discourse at all in the process of collective deliberation/action to secure majoritarian goals? And does that not present problems for minorities using moral discourse that lose out to majorities that eschew moral discourse altogether so that moral discourse is a chimera?
> 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.
==============
Again we're back to Carrol's point and the issue of anti-moral[ism] discourse and what, if anything, renders moral discourse necessary for inuargurating or constrain majoritarian formations to achieve social goals, no?
>
> >
> How about "lets stop all those
> >who hold beliefs we *both* disapprove of from exercising their liberties."
>
> Still violates liberalism.
===================
Well your model still doesn't explicate or defend the nice clean demarcation of liberalism and majoritarianism you wish for when that very demarcation is to be decided upon via majoritarian methods or not. So it seems you want objective morality, whose truth is immune to majoritarianism to fall back on to say when the majority "violates liberalism." If you don't need moral discourse to say when when majoritarianism violates liberalism then it's hard to see when moral discourse is needed at all in the demos-agora.
>
> 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.
================== The WOD is the war on drugs. You seem to be showing that double standard again; you don't want or feel the need to use moral discourse to defend or allow prostitution but you want to be able to use moral discourse to show a majority opposition they're wrong when they use a non-moral or conflicting moral discourse to mobilize and defeat a position a minority holds when you think the outcome is wrong or leads to something horrible.
>
> >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
>
===================
This is patently false in historical terms and as incapable of demonstrable proof as the claim that ontology is prior to epistemology and vice versa and physics is prior to both and mathematics is prior to physics. What was it WVOQ said "there is no 1st philosophy" or some such.
To paraphrase Deidre McCloskey, this is all blackboard political philosophy.............
Usual caveats,
Ian