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| META TOPICPARENT | name="EbenSalon" |
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-- NonaFarahnik - 25 Feb 2010 |
| | I was pretty riled up after class today. Of course, part of the problem is that Eben is one of the most knowledgeable people I have met. Arguing with him feels like taking a paintball gun to a tank (it is difficult to use a metaphor because I know Eben can immediately break it down to its precise historical meaning and quickly strip away the basis of an ill-informed comparison). In general, this is good because it requires us to do our homework, and to choose our words carefully and precisely. Still, it leaves me knowing that my argument will always be vulnerable to some historical reality I have never contended with or the misuse of a word that wasn't even central to my point in the first place. |
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< | Sometimes I wish Eben would give us more time to talk out our ideas, even if they are formulated in imprecise ways. It often feels that he responds to the inaccurate parts of what we say, even when he knows it is not what we mean. In this way, his conversation with Mike was deeply dissatisfying for me. Our complacence in the face of our military robot apparatus' killing of innocent Afghans is more than an exercise in suppressing empathy (though it is part of it). I think it is honorable and worthy that Eben would be the most zealot advocate for Mr. Stack if he had lived to see a murder trial. I also, however, think it is honorable and worthy for someone to represent our government, its people (what people? Eben might say) and Vernon Hunter's family, and to prosecute him. In class we make abstractions of the People In Charge and the People In Shackles. Those abstractions remove us from the reality that WE ARE GOING TO BE THOSE PEOPLE (mostly, the ones in charge). |
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> | Sometimes I wish Eben would give us more time to talk out our ideas, even if they are formulated in imprecise ways. It often feels that he responds to the inaccurate parts of what we say, even when he knows it is not what we mean. In this way, his conversation with Mike was deeply dissatisfying for me. Our complacence in the face of our military robot apparatus' killing of innocent Afghans is more than an exercise in suppressing empathy (though it is part of it). I think it is honorable and worthy that Eben would be the most zealous advocate for Mr. Stack if he had lived to see a murder trial. I also, however, think it is honorable and worthy for someone to represent our government, its people (what people? Eben might say) and Vernon Hunter's family, and to prosecute him. In class we make abstractions of the People In Charge and the People In Shackles. Those abstractions remove us from the reality that WE ARE GOING TO BE THOSE PEOPLE (mostly, the ones in charge). |
| | As students at CLS each of us is already part of an elite class of citizens. Moreover, law is politics, and we are going to be lawyers. In Eben's "America is an aristocracy, not a democracy" formulation, we are the supposed aristocrats. And this is where I get stuck. How can I simultaneously be acquiring a license to fight for justice and be seeking to do so through the much-maligned societal positions we discuss in class? I don't think we give a fair shake to the people who actually make up the public order. (I know that we can find 1000000 people who have done fu**ed up sh*t over the course of their roles in public life but there are another 1000000 who give it their best and who have made positive, lasting, and unnoticed change in this world). Is our distribution of resources troubling and unjust? I think so. Does that mean there is no value to the advancements we have made and where we stand with respect to the rest of the world? I think not. |
| | I similarly feel your frustration about arguing with Eben. But one thing you must remember is that a lot of the time it is just theater. |
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MatthewZorn? 28 Feb 2010 - 23:21:18 - |
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> | -- MatthewZorn 28 Feb 2010 - 23:21:18 -
You're kidding, right? Like this guy? I'll get to your other absurdities down below in a minute, but for now I'd love to understand why it would be in our interest to perpetuate an idea of moral difference between ourselves and other living things. Can you sell me that one? The argument should be even easier than just the difference between ourselves and other people. Do you even see why dropping those distinctions might be productive for us, or have you never listened to the other side of the debate you think you're in? -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010 |
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| | See Richard Dawkins articulating the same idea with regards to abortion and vegetarianism (Cows are mentioned!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihdlsARGAJk |
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< | EricaSelig? |
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> | -- EricaSelig |
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"that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned (Rawlsian Veil)." |
| | Eben is challenging us to think critically but there is nothing morally consistent about the "we are all kin" theory within the context of this course. I'd suggest it might be cognitively dissonant within a course that spent so much time on legal realism. Of course, I don't actually think for a second that Eben truly believes his "we are all kin theory." I agree with you Erica, he is just trying to "challenge" us. He is staking out the most absolutist position on the issue, because, by doing so it opens our mind and drives us further away from preconceived notions. |
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> | How exactly is a lack of ethical difference between humans inconsistent with legal realism? These two things seem perfectly congruent. On the one hand, the law perpetuates arbitrary distinction (property rights, citizenship, etc). On the other hand, the actors themselves are morally indistinguishable - it is only through our lens of perspective that they get imbued with moral significance, or "hats," if you will. The law is what it does. There is no such thing as "Right" in this world, only luck - if we want to understand our surroundings empirically we would do well to acknowledge the actual underlying system. -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010 |
| | @ KayKim? : The "Rawlsian Veil" to me is also utter bullshit. It is a pointless, unexecutable exercise. I will always be me, even when I am pretending not to be me.
(disclosure: I have had the experience of talking to many people who fought recently in the Middle East and have seen multiple disturbing presentations)
To use Eben's tactic: Life in Afghanistan might not be so bad. It's only bad because of who I am, an American. I cannot fathom being an Afghani. Are perpetual Civil Wars bad? I don't know. They seem bad. But then again, they seem bad because I don't have to experience them. Behind the "veil of ignorance" I may reach that conclusion. I may not. It is pointless to think about because it can never happen. Afghans could be quite happy people and we are just getting in the way of ourselves from seeing it. |
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< | Daniel Gilbert makes a similar argument illustrating the nonsense of the Rawlsian Veil in a book called Stumbling on Happiness. He looks at adult conjoined twins and asks whether if they could separate, would they? From our vantage point, we would think this life were terrible. Indeed, non-conjoined twins thought that a conjoined condition was absolutely miserable. Yet, the conjoined twins answered that they would not separate if they could. I remember a similar event in my own experience when I once saw a person who was paralyzed from the waist down who said it was "the best thing in his life that had ever happened to him." It is all relative--including the concepts of happiness and justice. |
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> | Once again, I have to know if you're kidding. I actually assume so in this case. If so, what's your point? -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010 |
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< | But the "Rawlsian Veil" requires some sort of evaluation on happiness and justice. But "all claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view — from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn't a view from nowhere." (Gilbert) Nowhere, being the place we would need to be behind the veil of ignorance. |
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> | Daniel Gilbert makes a similar argument illustrating the nonsense of the Rawlsian Veil in a book called Stumbling on Happiness. He looks at adult conjoined twins and asks whether if they could separate, would they? From our vantage point, we would think this life were terrible. Indeed, non-conjoined twins thought that a conjoined condition was absolutely miserable. Yet, the conjoined twins answered that they would not separate if they could. I remember a similar event in my own experience when I once saw a person who was paralyzed from the waist down who said it was "the best thing in his life that had ever happened to him." It is all relative--including the concepts of happiness and justice. |
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> | I put to you that from our vantage point, we would also think this conjoined life would be lots of other things, many of which aren't subjective. That is to say that from any vantage point, those twins will for example be in different rooms less frequently than they would ceterus paribus as nonconjoined people. In general, make any change and ceterus also wouldn't be paribus. But that's irrelevant. The exercise of the veil is to show that a) There are alternate possible futures, and that b) we probably don't live in the "best" of all possible worlds, even by our own normative lights. It's an attempt to make you ask what we might change to make it better, still by your own subjective conception. -- DRussellKraft - 01 Mar 2010 |
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> | But the "Rawlsian Veil" requires some sort of evaluation on happiness and justice. But "all claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view — from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn't a view from nowhere." (Gilbert) Nowhere, being the place we would need to be behind the veil of ignorance. |
| | -- MatthewZorn - 01 Mar 2010 |
| | A quick point about the Veil hypo: I think it's basically the Harvard political science department way of formulating the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Generally speaking most people find this to be a comprehensible and admirable moral precept, and most major religions to my knowledge include it as a central tenet. |
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< | Another key point I'd like to add to the current discussion about national boundaries is that I find it a bit ironic that the in the pushback to Eben's comments, the supposedly more deeply felt and "real" national community is being contrasted to "fake," more evanscent familial bonds descending from Mitochondrial Eve. |
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> | Another key point I'd like to add to the current discussion about national boundaries is that I find it a bit ironic that the in the pushback to Eben's comments, the supposedly more deeply felt and "real" national community is being contrasted to "fake," more evanescent familial bonds descending from Mitochondrial Eve. |
| | First, my understanding of Eben's point about mitochondria is that it is a biological reality which can be put to good use in ethical argument. I think it was a just a quick point of political rhetoric, not really an attempt at a general theory of ethics. I don't think the intended point was that, for example, if we discovered Australians had different mitochondria, we would suddenly cease to have ethical obligations to them.
But nationalism - the concept that the boundaries of our familial affection is somehow naturally limited to those within the territories of the same nation-state as us - is to my mind quite implausible as an ethical theory. The nation-state has its origins as a deliberate project by European states to establish more culturally cohesive populations amenable to centralized governing and winning wars. There is nothing natural about it, and certainly there is no inherent link between biological kinship and nationalism. |
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< | However, we might be able to make constructive use of nationalism nonetheless, now that we have it. Benedict Arnold's Imagined Communities made the argument, that, inter alia, nationalism can serve to expand one's boundary of concern beyond immediate kin. He worked on Indonesia, and Indonesia is an example of a case where a bunch of essentially separate island communities developed a common national identification in their struggle against their colonial occupiers and cooperated to throw them out. |
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> | However, we might be able to make constructive use of nationalism nonetheless, now that we have it. Benedict ArnoldAnderson's Imagined Communities made the argument, that, inter alia, nationalism can serve to expand one's boundary of concern beyond immediate kin. He worked on Indonesia, and Indonesia is an example of a case where a bunch of essentially separate island communities developed a common national identification in their struggle against their colonial occupiers and cooperated to throw them out. |
| | Elsewhere, and if someone else knows the source for this, I'd be grateful, I read an interesting attempt to explain why the Scandinavian social democracies are so generous with foreign aid. The argument was that the tradition of social democracy there had caused people to expand their circle of concern outside themselves and their family, and that this expansion had continued to encompass people in other countries. Now, I know it's somewhat bad form to cite an argument without knowing the source, but I'm really hoping someone might recognize it and point me to it, and I think it's a thought-provoking hypothesis. |