Tahir: I don't perceive the irrationality in this. Would you care to spell it out for the likes of me?
But if this is so as a fundamental human condition, then there is no such thing as a given human nature, and therefore no a priori form of state or governance or custom that is best suited to that nature. The reason is these institutional forms and their imposed material conditions (the ultimate authors) constitute and help to create in a fundamental way the very nature these same institutions presume to govern. This ultimately turns on the relativity (and dialectic) of values and if, there is any such thing as a transcendental scheme of value that can be derived no matter how many societies, periods and people you consider.
Tahir: Well, I'm all for human nature, as long as one accepts that's a timebound thing; i.e. it's historical, changing, self-reflective, self-regulating (and malleable) etc. But what I don't understand is why this all turns on values. Why the primacy of values? Is this the sociological imagination at work?
Then finally, the State in the abstract can be consolidated or condensed into a set of laws. Here again we meet a deep conflict between what is rational and what is ethical (moral, just, good, etc). For example, Bush v Gore. It might have been rational, it might have been written by men and women much smarter than me, but it was profoundly amoral, unjust, and evil---as if written by the Grand Inquisitor himself---that is a complete perversion of the concept of law and state.
Tahir: Again I must say that the notion of ethics that I am most familiar with is that found in Hegel (which BTW is defined in opposition to morality) and this is entirely dependent on the very idea of rationality. What do you mean by an opposition between ethics and rationality?
So what kind of law or state is supposed to rule over the Karamazovs, or for that matter the Dorkins, the Coxs, the Browns, the Grimes', the Murrays, the Furuhashis', the Sokolowslis, the Schwartzs?
Tahir: Wow! Do you propose that this lot should all agree on the nature of this law or state? They won't and that's why I want you to come back to the question of the rationality and/or irrationality of the state mentioned earlier. How far can something that requires an impossible consensus be regarded as the be-all and end-all of rationality. At best it would seem like a very stunted and partially realised rationality. No?