Law in Contemporary Society

View   r3  >  r2  ...
MyThoughtsOnThisClassSoFar 3 - 15 Feb 2010 - Main.ChristopherCrismanCox
Line: 1 to 1
 I have been trying to identify and understand a kind of anxiety I have felt while reading materials for this class thus far.

The “problem” of the course has been identified, albeit with some hesitation (aka the “pawning of the license”). The Holmes and Cohen pieces were assigned to provide us with the tools to attack the problem (aka the function of the functionalist approach). Accordingly, the next step will probably be for us to learn how to use tools like functionalism to not pawn our licenses.

Line: 39 to 39
 But all this doesn’t mean that there are no more algorithms. In fact I think that within the tension between our present and future interests there lies an ethic impelling those algorithms forward while we yet remain conscious that things are not so rosy as we would like. And in making ourselves conscious of the present -- in realizing that in our lives are also implicated those of others, that out there are children, so to speak, in broom closets -- we enable ourselves, to however slight an extent, to walk away, and forward into the future, from Omelos. And so the force compelling us would be our conscience.

-- GloverWright - 09 Feb 2010

Added:
>
>		Interesting point, Glover. It appears you are saying that although the present moment may lack a simple algorithm (such as "work hard to prove that you're one of God's chosen), we can still build algorithms to guide conduct by strategically balancing present concerns with future concerns in order to map out the best path forward to a "better world." I suppose this is true.

But I would argue that the problem today is that no one really knows how to get to a "better world" at all, either by sacrificing present concerns or by balancing future and present concerns. Various macro-level theories are advanced about how to proceed to a "better world." The problem is, there seems to be no agreed upon way to determine whether a particular macro-level theory works or not. Statistics are thrown around, groups rally mindlessly around their own particular theory-totem, and no one ever really knows whether a particular policy actually did anything productive or not.

-- ChristopherCrismanCox - 15 Feb 2010


Revision 3r3 - 15 Feb 2010 - 23:01:54 - ChristopherCrismanCox
Revision 2r2 - 09 Feb 2010 - 07:48:22 - GloverWright
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
Syndicate this site RSSATOM