``...Working toward the imagined greater good, might be a mistake...'' (CG)
ED: What does one work toward? (Eric Dorkin)
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I am a little late on this thread, but...
The truth? I don't know what one works toward. What I do know from experience is that every organization I've ever been part of or worked with others to create has been first of all turned into a hierarchy, and second, at some early point the `greater good' was used to excuse a blatant violation of the founding process which was communal. Thus people were thrown out for the great good, people were arranged by authority and pay hierarchies for the greater good, obvious directions of development were ignored for the greater good. In effect, all these projects devolved into the typical top down, executive director and core management over an office full of worker drones with no say. A veritable replication of every other office in the world---so fuck that.
Therefore, it has to be that the process of the work (and other social relations) itself that is the only arbiter (not final as an abstract merit or scheme of value) and there is only a vaguely defined, but never mandated greater good. I am afraid this leaves me heading in the direction of the anarchist camp (hi Gordon, Chuck_0, Ian, ...).
Aristotle starts to get to something like this in the (and I couldn't finish it last night), opening sections of Nicmachean Ethics where he discusses the idea of the good as the self-sufficient, as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing... But I don't consider this happiness, which is where A goes with it. I think of it as another name for committed process---the fight itself as it were.
This leads to the sad possibility that politics (society) is nothing more than one long over heated committee meeting, haggling over the rules of order forever. Well, it beats working for empire's capital, or going to prison which seem to be the current alternatives.
When Justin dismissed the whole problem, answering ``A liberal state premised on the fact of fundamental disagreement about ends, and based on the rule of law--is that so hard?'' what he forgot is Law.
In other words, law defines the process, which in turn pre-conceives or delimits the nature of the ends. Hence, my comment, about the soft click of handcuffs.
Most of which you (Eric) noted in the next post, ``...but the exact form the rule of law takes will depend on the particular end....''
Except, I would reverse this. That ultimately any end is only defined first of all if it is ever achieved (and hopefully it never will be). That is, it has to be materially manifest, and second, in the meanwhile it can only be achieved if it is enacted or materially manifested in each and every step, embedded as the process itself. But this is almost equivalent to ignoring any end at all, and focusing entirely on the means. This focus on the moment to moment process of enactment and its arbitration has to be among the methods to nullify coercion and all the varied evils of authoritarianism, hierarchies, and their isomorphic image in the ideal realm of pure thought as the greater good--that is the absolute.
Chuck Grimes