Brian Charles Dauth <magcomm at ix.netcom.com> wrote: Dear List:
jks writes:
> What do you want, a guarantee that nothing can go wrong?
>> Sheesh! Everyone is so touchy today. Must be the upcoming convention.
LOL.
Sorry if I came across as touchy. But it's very important to realize that the fact that guarantees can fail is just part of the way the world is. Yes, proper procedure can lead to terrible results. I have a paper (as yet unpublished) on this very point. That doesn't mean we have a better alternative.
> I am just trying understand what you are writing. To say that procedure
trumps content takes me a while to understand. The concept seems rather
wishy-washy and tepid -- prim to the point of uselessness.
It is pretty wishy-washy and tepid. It's designed to be lowest common denominator. It's also pretty useless, except the alternative is tyranny or civil war. So if you don't like those alternatives, may it's not so useless.
> It's like: get
all your tenses right, dot your i's, cross your t's and if queers are
persecuted, so what? You filled out the forms correctly. I think society
can do better than this.
Only if you are willing to impose the Correct View by brute force. Haven't we tried that? After all, the homophobes and fundamentalists and Stalinists all the people who have the Correct View know the answers. So do you. You think you are right. So do they. Looks like a standoff, right? Now you fight. They win because there are more of them. That is bad.
I don't pretend my answer is easy to take. In my paper I argue that correct procedure divides the Fugitive Slave Acts in pre-civil war US society from the Nazi Nuremberg laws. There is a case to be made that horrible and immoral as the FSA were, they were legally binding because they were enacted by a reasonably fair procedure ina society that was as democratic as any you could find in those days -- and the Nazi laws banning racial intermarriage and the like were not because they were enacted by a repressive tyranny.
I can hear the squawks about the undemocratic nature of antebellum society, but that is just an example. If homophobic laws are enacted by our society, I accept them as legally binding. That does not mean that we should not try to change them, or that civil disobedience to them is wrong. So it's not, So What if queers are persecuted. That's bad. But there is no alternative to procedural correctness except the imposition of a favored view by force or deception, and that doesn't distinguish between which views are favored.
> But can't we also agree on the principle of non-domination? Rawls seems
content to settle for freedom as non-interference.
I don't know what you mean by these terms. Maybe if you filled them out some, we might agree that non-domination, whatever that is, is necessary for procedural correctness. But if by non-intereference you mean that Rawls is some sort of libertarian who thinks that people should be allowed to impose their prejudices on on others in a private context, that is not right.
> I am wondering if fair procedure is all that can be offered. I am just
learning these concepts, so please excuse my questioning.
What would you add?
jks
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