[lbo-talk] Is Obama Running Interference to ProtectBankers' Pay?

[Miles Jackson]

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Mar 23, 2009, at 12:07 AM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>> From this perspective, speculations about the morals of people 
>> supporting or resisting social change are irrelevant.  We know that 
>> moral systems will shift when historical transformations occur, so 
>> the important thing is political action to transform society.  The 
>> moral beliefs that justify and reinforce the new social conditions 
>> will follow.
>
> So why bother with trying to change things according to a set of 
> principles? Why should anyone bother to transform anything without 
> some moral/ethical sense that what exists is bad, or wrong, or sucks 
> in some sense?
>
> Doug
Look at this from a practical point of view: what is important is the 
social transformation that social movements can generate, not the mental 
state of the people involved.  --Thought experiment: imagine that all 
the civil rights leaders in the 1950s were robots, and they were 
programmed to do all the things they did.  The social results of the 
movement would have been the same, even though none of the leaders were 
motivated and guided by moral/ethical principles.  A social movement is 
an emergent property of social interactions; it is not simply the 
product of individual psychological characteristics (beliefs, values, 
opinions).  Thus speculating on the motives of people involved in social 
movements is irrelevant.  Some could be in it because of moral 
principles, others because of conformity pressure, others because of a 
crush on the hot guy in the Che t-shirt.  It doesn't really matter why 
they're part of the movement, because a social movement's impact is the 
result of the emergent properties of the social movement itself; it is 
not simply the result of the individual psychological characteristics of 
the individuals involved.

Miles