----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 6:19 PM Subject: Re: rights, rights, and still more rights
>
>Fair enough; but there is no necessary move from metalegal or prelegal to a
>State that instantiates
>and enforces the legal obligation[s].
I'm a pragmatist. I don't believe taht there are _any_ necessary moves.
===============
I know that dadgummit but if obligations aren't a kind of necessity what are they? And please don't appeal to some form of Smithian voluntarism.
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.
>
But there aren't any feasible alternatives that we know of. The question is idle.
================ What, are you channeling The Iron Lady and Francis Fukuyama already? :->
The constraint on feasibility in the abstract is nothing compared to the fact the US would destroy any attempt to instantiate something that is feasible. One can imagine Mondragon gone global with all sorts of institutional arrangements for bargaining and collective deliberation that didn't rely on bicameralism, a hierarchical judicial buraeucracy, an imperial presidency. Democracy as a dang in sich is quite consistent with non-state contractarianism. Please don't tell me you think the US system with marginal tinkerings with the commerce clause, contract clause and the 5th 13th and 14th amendments are all we need to make a Schweickartian economy possible. The place would be just as boring and oppressive as it is now.
>Again fair enough; so why should anyone use moral discourse at all in the
>process of collective
>deliberation/action to secure majoritarian goals?
Because it's sojmetimes effective.
=================
And oppressive when used by knaves, which democracy was designed to deal with. It seems liberal democracy is failing even on that score. Thus the pervasive skepticism amongst the citizenry that we even live in democracy anymore. Or are you going to go Hegelian on me and tell me the actually existing US is a democracy rather than a form of State capitalism with an incredibly shrinking zone of civil liberties.
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?
Don't understand your point. Unless it is, sometimes moeral discourse doesn't work, which is true. Then you have to use something else.
================
Theological discourse doesn't work in any epistemic sense I can think of but is effective. Are the factions that employ it telling the truth or are they knaves? A democracy with the majority constituted by effective knaves is not a democracy.
>>
>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?
Nothing renders it necessary. Experience shows that sometimes it is useful and effective. See Dr. King, for example.
================
And it was effective in making pot and coca leaves and lots of other things illegal. Hell they'd go after skateboards if it wasn't for capitalists. You're starting to sound like......a government official......................
>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.
We start where we are, and the line is contested. Even if I had a perfect clean philosophical proof, it would still be contested. Where we are is the liberal democracy that we have won in struggle.
====================
I don't think we live in a liberal democracy anymore. I'm not alone.
So it seems you want objective morality, whose truth is immune to
majoritarianism to
>fall back on to say when the majority "violates liberalism."
Not at all. My defense of liberalism is political. I have a moral defense of it, but I don't expect it to be widely shared. The political defense of it is that it is the lowest common denominator way of resolving our differences and making decisions on terms of more less mutual respect in a society where there is and can be no agreement ob fundamentals.
===================
Well considering there is no non-political defense of liberalism I'm not surprised. If your moral defense is not widely shared, nor the metamoral method by which you justify and explain your moral stance is shared, what does it mean to say it's objective. Please don't send me fishing for my JL Mackie.......
>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.
Yes, but what's the double standard? Why should I foreswear a perfectly good rhetorical strategy taht is sometimes useful as long as I don't insist too hard that those whose disagree with my moral views are vipers who should be exterminated? ===================
No, just jail 'em whenever the county cops bust 'em. For the sake of your sanity get out of the government Justin.
>
> > Democracy is prior to philosophy and other sorts of theory.
> >
> > jks
> >
>===================
>
>This is patently false in historical terms
What do you mean, that democratic theory came first? But I am not talking about temporal priority. I mean practical priority. If you come up with a knockdown disproof of democracy--arguably that is what Arrow did--we'll laugh and keep on voting and bargaining.
==================
There are no knockdown proofs in political theory. If there were there'd be no politics; we'd have transcended the tragedies of zoon politikon. All Arrow did was try to formalize some assertions made by Condorcet; I've always read it as more of an proof of the untranscendability of zoon politikon than a disproof of democracy. Usual caveats apply on that; we're not going to be able to resolve the issues he raised on an email list. Hell if we did, we *should* win that goddam prize. In fact somebody did write a book critiquing AT a while back. I'll see if I can find the title.
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.
Right. Democracy is practice, not philosophy. I don't care about proving the point. It's obviously true in the sense that it's justified the way any belief without express justification as long as serious grounds of doubt do not arise. They haven't. You happen toa gree with me, practically speaking.
===================
Seems to me you've obliterated the distinctions between demos, praxis, theoria and that's totally cool with me. Actually existing US political system in form and content *does* raise serious ground for doubt as to whether our institutional matrix serves the notions of democracy many on this list tacitly share. So in that sense, it seems we're still dealing with democracy as a kind of a dang in sich.
Now if you want to interpret that as what's still possible for what's left of liberalism that mights serve as an institutional path to your preferred possible system of property and contract with attendent civil liberties and feel that what your doing in this debate is setting us up for how to start thinking about those issues and how to make them enticing to the Donald Rumsfeld's and Trent Lott's of the world, then if we can do it on this list without boring everyone else to tears I'll go put on the kettle and make some tea........................
>
>To paraphrase Deidre McCloskey, this is all blackboard political
>philosophy.............
>
Quite right. And I'm talking real world politics.
jks
=============== Oh and speaking of Europe and democracy re your earlier post; please square this fractal for me:
< http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?selected_topic=9&action=view&article_id=5765 > 30 diplomats shape the majority of EU laws
"They do not make headline-grabbing soundbites, they do not boast about their influence, and if you met them in the street you would not recognise them. But you would be foolish to ignore them," the Financial Times writes on the invisible powers behind the EU throne, 30 diplomats who shape the majority of EU laws in weekly meetings behind closed doors.
The COREPER body While the press and the business community focus incessantly on the European Commission's latest uttering or national ministers' quarrels, these 'eminences grises' do most of the work that really matters in an obscure body called the Committee of Permanent Representatives or Coreper.
Several times a week, the 15 member states' ambassadors and deputy ambassadors meet at the European Council building in central Brussels when they usually take decisions that will have a direct and important impact on European businesses and consumers. The commission may make proposals and the European Parliament may be proud of its role as a "co-legislator", but unless the Excellencies and deputy Excellencies say so, these proposals will never become law, writes the Financial Times.
The diplomats prepare the ground for ministers' meetings, co-ordinate the results of working groups and legislate in their own right. Indeed, a recent high-profile decision by ministers to release 450m euro of EU funds for a satellite project called Galileo copied the conclusions Coreper had reached word for word.
To decide from Brussels "This is the forum where I really feel I can have some influence," says Kare Halonen, Finland's deputy ambassador. "It's very concrete work. It's really legislative work. The bigger part of legislation entering into force in my country is something that has been decided in Brussels."
Finland's situation is replicated throughout the Union. Every important piece of legislation has to go through one of Coreper's two incarnations: the deputies' body, which deals with the regulatory issues that can transform businesses' balance sheets, and the ambassadors' gathering, which focuses on "big picture" issues such as foreign policy and general economic affairs.
The deputies' group is called Coreper I, whilst the ambassadors go under the title of Coreper II. And although national capitals are in touch with their ambassadors and deputy ambassadors before a Coreper meeting, the diplomats have considerable leeway to take decisions.
A gentleman's club The irony of career diplomats, who have been trained to deal with international tensions and represent their countries at glamorous receptions, being responsible for nitty-gritty European law is not lost on some of them. "I am probably the only civil servant in the Finnish ministry of foreign affairs who has nothing to do with foreign affairs," says Mr Halonen.
While the commission is known for frantic horse-trading and the parliament struggles to be heard, the atmosphere at Coreper is akin to that of a gentleman's club, reports the Financial Times.
Coreper I and II meet twice or three times a week. Their workload and the sessions' length increases progressively during each six-monthly rotating presidency of the EU, as the country in charge tries to pack in as much legislation as possible before its tenure ends.
Despite the collegiate nature of the body, not everyone talks. Since EU countries are far from equal - France, Germany, the UK and Italy all have 10 votes each in a forum where a decision has to be backed by 62 votes out of 87 - the bigger countries tend to have most sway, and consequently talk the most.
Counting the votes France and the UK, both famously proud of their diplomatic services, are often the most influential voices at the table and tend to dominate Coreper meetings, no matter which country holds the EU presidency. Some of the smaller countries are most often appreciated when they stay silent, since in an EU of 15 states a mere tour de table can take the best part of an hour - a problem that will be exacerbated by the union's forthcoming enlargement.
When it comes to the crunch, it is rare for the participants to call a vote - and yet they tend to know which way the discussion is going. No matter how collegiate or technical an EU institution is, politics is never far away.
"It's nearly always the case that at the back of your mind you are counting the votes when the discussion proceeds," confesses one of the participants.
Written by Marcin Frydrych Edited by Blake Evans-Pritchard