Good point, and probably not a bad principle to follow. After all, if I want powerful institutions to behave in a more humane manner, it certainly helps if the people who run those institutions share some kind of baseline belief i what's right and wrong.
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Well, that just pushes the problem in a different direction without solving it. Who determines what those baseline beliefs are?
"Insider trading is wrong."
"No it isn't."
"Smoking pot is wrong."
"No it isn't."
These are inajudicable conflicts of norms and criminalizing them solves nothing. Using the rhetoric of objectivity/truth in order to impose compliance doesn't solve those particular problems either. One could give innumerable examples of such problems.
For example, if EvilCorp invests in slave labor in the Sudan, and I want them to stop, it helps if the CEOs understand in _some_ way that slavery isn't humane. If they didn't share some moral precepts with others, they could simply reply that they just don't see what's _wrong_ with slavery. (Once that happens, then we're left with nothing but force to impose our values upon them-- and vice versa.)
I should mention that Eubulides' comment "Why, in history, are there all the various attempts by groups to privilege their interpretation of reality and society at all and to impose it on others?" bothers me. Maybe it's the overuse of academic-speak ("privilege their interpretation of reality?" Oy.), but it reads as though E's saying that it's just a matter of different "interpretations of reality" and their imposition through power. If one's "interpretation of reality" accepts the use of power to impose moral values, than one can't fault it.
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I was responding/asking a question using the terms Joanna used. I'm not an academic. The problem *as indicated by precisely those terms* is what makes us zoon politikon and not homo sapiens sapiens [ a term of undeserved self flattery if ever there was one]. Plenty of people find plenty of faults with your last sentence which is why there is no power without resistance.
"The essence of all power is the right to define with authority, and the major stake of the power struggle is the appropriation or retaining of the right to define." [Zygmunt Bauman]
Rather than elaborate and take up too much space-time, I'll pull a Michael Pugliese and suggest that before you depart our precious planet, take a long peek at Nicholas Rescher's "Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus", Brian Martine's "Indeterminacy and Intelligibility", Torben Dyrberg's "The Circular Structure of Power" and any number of jokes relating to Trotsky-ism and related problems of factionalism/sectarianism within Marxism.........
Did I forget to mention that slave labor still exists on our planet compared to which the labor contracts of contemporary capitalist societies are relatively benign?
Ian