Suggest you modulate your rhetoric. The "madmemn" who think that justice can be detached from ethical talk include Bentham, Jmaes and John Stuart Mill, the entiree utilitarian tradition, and if I, Wood, Holmstrom, and Reiman are right, Marx. You commit an elementary logical fallacy (affirming the antecedent) when you reason that
Justice is a moral conceot Moral concepts are indispensible Therefore Justice is indespensible
Not all moral concepts may be indespensible even if some of them are. Utilitarians think that the concept of the good is indispensible but the concept of justice and rights is derivative and secondary. The fact they may have bneen wrong about this, and I agree that they were, though you have not shown it, does not change your fallacy into a vbalid argument. Marx thought that freedom was an essential normative concept andf thought justice talk literally laughable. Was he insane? I think he was wrong, but not crazy.
You will score no points by calling your interlocultors stupid, mad, blind, illiterate, obscurantist, sophistic, etc. That is table-pounding. If you disagree, make an argument and make your point. I am cutting you may more slack than your overheated language deserves.
--- Michael Dawson <MDawson at pdx.edu> wrote:
> > It's also debateable whether Marx rejected all
> moral
> > talk. Richard Miller has an impressive argument in
> his
> > book Analyzing Marx that he did. I think this is
> > wrong, and Peffer exolains why in his Marx,
> Morality,
> > and Social Justice. But talk of morality in
> general is
> > different from talk of justice, fairness, and
> rights.
> > Utilitarians, fir example, happly talk about
> morality
> > but think that justice talk is wholly derivative
> at
> > best. Bentham called it "nonsense on stilts." Marx
> was
> > not a utilitarian, but he shared Bentham's view of
> > justice. Jeremy Walsron even has a book
> collecting
> > Bentham's and Marx's attacks on justice along with
> a
> > good intro essay called "Nonsense On Stilts."
>
>
> I'm stunned that anybody sympathetic to him could
> claim Marx rejected moral
> talk. To my eye, every letter of every work he ever
> wrote is all about
> ethics. To my mind, his whole project was to show
> why capitalism's claim to
> be the end of history was bogus, and that's
> ultimately a moral claim about
> the best of all possible worlds.
>
> Beyond that, what kind of madman thinks
> consideration of justice is
> detachable from consideration of ethics? Justice is
> a wholly ethical
> concept, is it not? I mean, go on out in the street
> and start up a
> conversation on the subject. "I want to talk to you
> about justice, but this
> is purely a technical question." That's insane!
>
> Of course, the first utilitarians rejected talk of
> justice! They
> short-circuited the application of their own model
> by presuming that they
> already lived in the best of all possible worlds,
> that letting the poor vote
> would ruin it, etc. And they were wrong --
> shockingly so, given what they
> argued about micro-politics. If you say (rightly)
> that the best of all
> possible worlds is the world that maximizes
> happiness for the maximum number
> of people, then logic compels you to a pretty strong
> and clear theory of
> justice. That Bentham et al. stopped themselves
> from talking about this
> merely shows how partial and inadequate they were.
> As none other than Herr
> Marx, cuttingly, noted...
>
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