>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Brian Siano" <siano at mail.med.upenn.edu>
>
>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.
>======================
>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.
>
>
Well, first of all, nobody says that establishing norms requires the
criminalizing of others, so you may be adopting a law of an excluded
middle. But these norms tend to come from general cultural consensus;
they're the norms which people tend to follow, more or less, with
differing ideas of how to apply them. There are some values which human
beings do share, simply because we're the kind of creatures we are: for
example, most people regard the murder of children to be a pretty
heinous crime, and that didn't require any kind of propaganda or
hegemony to get people to believe this. (Matter of fact, it took a _lot_
of propaganda and coercion to get people to actually _do_ it.)
And many of these things are subject to change: for one thing, discrimination against gays is much more widely regarded as _wrong_ than it was, say, thirty or forty years ago.
And one of the ways in which these norms change is through rational argument, and appeals to objectivity and truth. When we ask that people abandon their prejudices, and look at the world as it is, we _are_ appealing to objectivity and facts. Nobody would say that this is sufficient to change peoples' minds, but it's certainly one of the more benign and humanistic ways of doing so.
>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.
>
>======================
>
>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]
>
>
There's just too much that's wrong with that quote. If Bauman is
claiming that power _confers_ this right, then the issue of "rights" is
empty: after all, if people have no power, they would have no "rights"
to speak of. It's a statement as congenial to the fascist as anyone
else: it says that rights are a function of having power. (Conversely, a
humanist would argue that human beings have rights merely by dint of
being human-- and that resistance to power is done to protect those
rights from power's abuses.)
Anf if Bauman is arguing that the "right to define" is a function of power, then he runs the risk of abandoning the notion of empiricial or objective truth. It's one thing to question the claims of power and authority because those claims are factually wrong; it's another to assert that empirical fact is merely a function of power. The latter is merely a defense of power for its own sake.
>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?
>
That is why I mentioned slavery in the Sudan, after all.