Miles: Yes, we may be as lucky as you suggest. Still, looking back on human history, I suspect many of the moral and scientific beliefs we're moderately confident about will be considered ignorant and barbaric in the future.
Sure. And as official left-wing lunatics we can make hopeful predictions about what some of these: for example that it is OK to exploit others under the condituions of wage labor. In a civilized society that would be regarded with the sort of horrer that we regard slavery today.
> As long as our confidence doesn't solidify into
unassailable dogma (e.g., the way some people treat the U. S.
Constitution), I'm a happy camper.
Then we are definitely singing from the same hymnal.
> jks: Well, Miles, Judge Posner and I are both white Chicagoan American Jewish
> atheist middle class lawyers, and we have different beliefs and actions
> . . . . So I am not sure how much help your answer is.
>
Miles: > Well, your different beliefs and actions demonstrate that your social group memberships differ. On the other hand, you share many activities and beliefs with another lawyer that you don't share with the rest of us, and that marks you guys as part of a "lawyer" subculture with your own language and rituals.
Sure, that's why we go to law school, to share a lawyer subculture that the rest of you don't. But (although I think we've already covered this), that doesn't mean that the rest of you can't criticize lawyers and vice versa -- the moral/cognitive relativism problem doesn't arise bewteen lawyers./nonlawyers, right? So we still don't knwo what sort of groups, if any, might pose the problem I thoughtw e were discussing earlier.
Btw while clerking for Judge Cummings (now deceased, alas) on the 7th Circuit in Chigaco some years ago, I drafted an opinioon where we had to address the question of what counts asa group for 6th amendment purposes. The 6A guarantees you a right to a jury trial with a jury selected from a fair cross section of the community. The defendant, a bank robber who had creatively knocked over a bank wearing a gorilla suit and carrying a bunch of silverized helium balloons, gained entry under the pretence of deliveringa gorilla-gram (I love the law) -- claimed that this right was denied because he was tried in the Eastern Div. of the Eastern District of Wisc, which doesn't have any Indian reservations -- they are all in the W. Div., which hadn't held a trial of any sort in years. The Defendant claimed that reservation Indians, as opposed to the nonreservation kind (of whom there are lots in the E. Div.) counted as a group such that it violated his 6A rights.
He said that the exclusion of reservation Indians meant his jury wasn't picked from a fair cross section. Well, this took us into philosophy as well as law. The fact is, I wasn't able to come up with anything that good. Just obvious stuff liked shared values, language, cultural practices, common interests. (I got my list in part from the 11th Cir. and in part from the Poverty of Philosophy [some combination!], as well as from Margaret Minow.) The panel concluded that reservation Indians were not enough of a different group to make his jury trial a violation. But I wasn't very satisfied with my solution. It was just a sort of list that said, consider these factors, but didn't provide any real criteria for choice. Sigh.
jks
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