I will grant you this, but this is not a philosophical argument. Even Nozick, who thinks that rights are absolute side-constraints on what you can do to people, agrees that if respecting people's rights would lead to moral catastrophe, and he uses the same example, then it would be OK to violate people's rights.
But I did not say that NOTHING would persuade us to give up on democracy. I said that lack of a good philosophical justificion, or the existence of an apparently irrefutable theoretical objection (like Arrow's theorem), would not shake our faith that democracy is the best system of government. Arrow's theorem is a pretty strong test -- ir's a theorem, after all, and there is no answer that is remotely agreed on. And yet . . .
jks
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> andie
> > nachgeborenen wrote:
> >> What I think Rorty means by saying that democracy
> is
> > prior to philosophy is pretty much what you say,
> plus
> > what I said before -- that our adherence to
> democracy
> > is more basic than any argument we might produce
> for
> > or against it.
>
> I think this shows Rorty's lack of imagination. What
> if it could be somehow conclusively proved (via the
> use of a magic crystal ball) that we had two
> options:
>
> 1. Adopt a democracy that would be gentle, but lead
> to
> a thermonuclear war.
>
> 2. Adopt a dictatorship that would be plenty brutal,
> but not lead to a thermonuclear war.
>
> I know this is similar to a Wittgensteinian argument
> about religious beliefs in On Certainty that no
> emprical data or argument can undermine a tenet
> based
> on faith, but I think political beliefs are in a
> different class.
>
>
>
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