BklynMagus <magcomm at ix.netcom.com> wrote: Dear List:
jks writes:
> Here's the problem: there's a disagreement that is ineradicable
about what's moral.
So? You keep acting as if because there is disagreement we should just abandon the affort to come to agreement. When you adopt this position, you end up like Rawls, offering theory of justice, instead of pragmatic procedures to end injustice.
* * *
I don't think we are ever going to get agreement on fundamentals. Sure, we can argue with each other. That doesn'r mean we can base society on one particular conception of what's good, one moral view, on a bet that it will be agreed to in the end.
You want pragmatic procedures to end injustice, we can talk about those, that's a different subject. We can talk about that too. It's not exactly philosophy, more political strategy. But I thought we were discussing the idea that you are entitled to impose your conception og the good on me.
****
> Rawls' theoretical musings are defective because they are not based
on life as it is lived, but as an academic imagines it would be if we
were totally rational beings engaged in best practices all the time.
But this is not how people exist.
IO probably should have said taht I am not a Rawlsian, and I have actually atacked Rawls' derivation of his principles of justice from an Original Position on precisely these grounds several times in print. The point about the need not to presume agreement on conceptions of the good, that does not presuppose anything about ideal agreement among ideally rational persons who are deprived of all morally irrelevant informatiom.
***
> Do you want antiabortion judges acting in defiance of Roe and Casey?
No, I want them to prevent injustices from occurring which are in direct conflict with the principles that have been agreed to (theoretically) in Rawl's social contract
* * *
So, you want judges to ignore the law, if it doesn'y happen to be in accord with what you think morality is, and act from what you think is the moral thing to do. But the problem is, Scalia will not agree with you about what is the moral thing to do.
* * *
> (and why is it only one contract? Why aren't there
multiple contracts?). Isn't that what judges do when they declare a law
unconstitutional?
* * *
Absolutely NOT. THe idea that judges may rule on the basis of natural law (morality apart from positive law) was rejected very early in our legal history. What judges do when they rule a law to be unconstitutional is to hold it to be inconsistent with the Constitution, regardless of the ethics of the Constitution.
*****
> No, I want them to make sure that the laws that are passed are in conformity
with the underlying social contract that permited the laws to be passed in the
first place. If a social contract allows for the passage of laws that contravene
it, what is the use of a social contract in the first place?
* * *
So you do want judges to be moral policement, striking down immoral laws whether or not there is any authoritaive basis for them. That's really a bad idea. Why bother to have laws at all if any judge with a bee in her bonnett about how things ought to be can get rid it because she doesn't think it fits with her idea of the social contract? (Which is a myth, anyway.)
* * *
> What makes the liberties that Rawls' imaginary beings decided upon any
better/more moral that what I posit? Somewhere (there's a place for
us . . . oops . . had a Broadway moment), sometime, somehow, someone or
ones decide what basic rights people have. I much prefer it be real people
instead of the population of an academic pipe dream (oops . . . I did it again).
* * *
Quite right, it has to be done by real people. The real people who do it in our society are called the legislature.
* * *
> The problem with Rawls is that once his imaginary friends decide on a list of
liberties it is hard to get any others added. Guess it goes to prove that if you
don't get in on the ground floor . . .
I like that line about Rawls' imaginary friends, I may use it, with attribution. But as I say I am not a Rawlian -- I don't buy the imaginary friends line.
jks
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040902/26ffa3d2/attachment.htm>