I wrote:
> My view is that we shouldn't rely on the current
> legal system or the
> politicians -- but instead should figure out how to
> change the balance of
> power (favoring the "good guys" of course).
JKS writes>Yes, why not both?<
maybe we should use the legal system (e.g., to defend anti-war demonstrators or "suspect Arabs" persecuted by the Bushmasters) but we can't _rely_ on it or trust it. The US legal system, for example, is a creature of the capitalist system. There are interstices where dedicated lawyers can work successfully to defend and extend civil liberties, for example, but the overall deck is stacked. (sorry about the mixed metaphor.)
me:
> But I wasn't advocating the taking of moral stands
> by individual judges.
him:
>Good.<
> Maybe I might, but I haven't thought about it
> enough.
him:
>You shouldn't. Advocate it that is. Think about is
another matter.<
Call me an academic (I'm sure that He Who Should Not Be Named would), but I reject this kind of appeal to authority. _Why_ is it verboten for judges to take moral stands? I can imagine that it would be better if they were to do so openly rather than doing it covertly, as they typically do now. But again, I haven't thought about this issue. I'd rather hear an argument against it than mere assertion. (It reminds me of the plaintiff's lawyer in the civil case I was a juror for, who simply asserted that his case was good.)
> This is way off the subject under discussion (or at
> least what I was talking
> about, i.e., the contradiction between morality and
> the current judicial
> system).
>I think the confusion arises because you are attacking
the immorality of the law, as you see it, not focusing
narrowly (as I am) on the role of the judge. Hence
"judicial system" is misleading.<
I never was focusing on the "role of the judge." How did the focus become only on the role of the judge? In this thread, I was _always_ talking about the legal _system_.
> as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the
> strongest (and easiest)
> moral cases one can make is by pointing to the
> contradiction between moral
> theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy),
> because there's no need to
> develop basic moral principles
JKS:>I think that's cheap, actually, not strong. <
again, an appeal to authority!
In a world where there is no moral consensus, I see nothing wrong with a "cheap" criticism of hypocrisy. Noam Chomsky, for example. uses that kind of critique regularly, and with good effect.
>(which some say is
> impossible).
JKS:>But no one except philosophers really believes that.<
Should we ignore philosophers and go with what the non-philosophers say, even when the latter could be wrong?
>(According to
> Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics ended up
> focussing precisely on
> this contraecitions.)
JKS:>Not West's strongest argument in my view.<
_why_ is it weak? just because you say so?
My impression is that West doesn't present enough evidence for his case. But once you think of the mature work of Marx in these terms, it makes more sense. Marx clearly is morally committed, but does not argue in terms of "capitalism is immoral." Instead, he does stuff like comparing the realm of "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham" (the official capitalist morality of his day) and the reality he sees in production and in capitalist society as a whole of Capitalist Supremacy, Inequality, Exploitation, and Rule by Profit.
Jim
