If utilitarianism is our public philosophy as it were, then the significance of 'harm', is the key concept for utilitarians to judge what is good and bad in terms of consequences.
Of course, many law and order conservatives reject utiltiarianism in favour of desert. Retributivism offers a model that is not about consequences at all. Instead, retributivism is about punishing offenders because they deserve punishment. Deserve punishment means to be morally blameworthy. The retributivist thus believes that the sole just end of punishment is to make the morally blameworthy suffer the sanctions we call punishment.
Thus Bill Henson, for Betty Johnston, deserved punishment. The guilty deserve punishment; punishment is their just desert. Punishment is proportional to guilt. People are punished because they are guilty, and for no other reason. Henson was guilty for Johnson. For her it is wrong not to punish the guilty. For her the consequences of punishment are irrelevant to determining when and how much to punish.
In his After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State Paul Gottfried argues that the contemporary liberal managerial state does not leave people alone, is neither indifferent to their values nor afraid to exercise power for the sake of overriding and changing them, and is manifestly not a broker among competing interests. As the Rudd Government in Australia indicates, the liberal managerial state is in fact an imposing system of power, backed by a huge public sector, by lower and middle class recipients of public assistance, and by media, journalistic, and expert defenders.
Popular support for specific programs and acquiescence in others is, however, combined with dissatisfaction with the whole. People no longer believe the regime’s rhetoric of freedom and democracy; it is too obvious that government ignores the will of the people and presents justifications for its policies that are false or contradictory.
Gotffried holds that populism is the principal current challenge to the liberal managerial state. The response of neoconservatives, communitarians, and the religious Right to the overwhelming success of managerial
liberalism has been to construct a social criticism that, as Gottfried points out, concentrates on cultural, moral, and spiritual issues in isolation from social realities.
In this review of Paul Edward Gottfried's After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State that managerial liberalism, by which is meant the the practice and ideology of contemporary Western societies bears little resemblance to historical liberalism and in many ways have its opposite.
Where, after all, is the division and limitation of power, the protection of private property, and recognition of an nviolate private sphere where the state has no business? How can an order be “liberal,” in which social planners reconstruct the human soul, or “democratic,” in which government feels itself entitled to reconstitute a people it finds lacking? Nevertheless, what Gottfried describes is managerial liberalism, which hasbecome the engine of the managerial state.
“Inclusiveness” abolishes all connection between the workings of society and any specific cultural heritage, so that only rational formal institutions that the state can easily control remain important. The drive to eliminate prejudice establishes a comprehensive system of control over social life, and destroys the attitudes and habits — sex roles, religious ties and standards, ethnic and cultural loyalties — on which independent and especially non-market institutions rely for functioning and strength. The personal has been transformed into the political.
In his article Combating Modernity: Piccone and the Role of Tradition in the Present Age in Telos Issue 131 (Summer 2005) David Goss conveniently spells out Piccone's argument about modernity and tradition. He says that Piccone's argument is this:
what had been occurring over the past several decades was a systematic assault not only on tradition as such, but on the social, cultural, and communal underpinnings of tradition. The cause and impetus of this assault was “modernity,” for according to Piccone it was the modern world that was waging a war on surviving pre-modern residues and sedimentations, treating them or the most part as “flawed incrustations.” It was likewise modernity that was eviscerating traditions, or where that was not possible, reducing them to a merely formal dimension stripped of meaningful content. And it was modernity that was degrading or destroying the basic social and cultural infrastructure needed for the sustenance of day-to-day life. In Piccone’s view, the long-range result of the unleashing of the “corrosive forces” of the modern age has been, not surprisingly, an increasing anomie on the personal level, and growing dysfunctionality on the social level
Timothy Luke in Telos says that under a neo-liberal mode of governance Husserl’s vision of intellectuals as “functionaries of humanity” becomes less and less viable under these conditions until even a pretense of any“humanitarian function” disappears in the fog of key competencies, general education goals or practical skills that rolls over universities with the technicization of thought and knowledge. Universities no longer seek truth, progress or freedom. are being remade as dedicated producers of 24/7 services for the “knowledge business,” and serious profits are the promised pay-off for their uninspired market-building and commercialization of research. He adds:
the “contemporary research university” can only be seen as another antiquated artifact in the current neoliberal era that no longer “imagines” its community in state-riven terms. Instead of standing for a political community’s vision of its self and society as the designated site for civic Bildung, as the traditional public university originally tried to afford, many top-tier research universities basically have forsaken that cultural mission in favor of franchising out their once almost transcendent authority over knowledge to private concerns by facilitating the business ventures of both big global corporations and small local start-ups. As a result, the research university puts “economic development” ahead of “education.”
In the The Long March Out of the 20th Century in Telos Robert D’Amico and Paul Piccone say that:
modernity and its successor, postmodernity, remain the broad horizons within which all problems are still framed, despite the fact that they have provided no viable solutions but, at best, only misleading ones. Although the kind of theoretical watershed prefigured but never registered after 1989 had finally arrived with 9/11 and the beginning of a new world order, and even the stagnant intellectual waters of academia are beginning to stir with the realization of the need for radical desecularization and the refunctioning of allegedly long-since buried traditions, the paladins of 20th century modernity are still celebrated as the starting point of any future critique
Do think tanks buy scholars who agree with them, or pay scholars to agree with them? In Australia its more the former than the latter. Hence the question mark over their publications. Is ihis judgement justified?Megan McArdle at The Atlantic has some ideas on on think tanks. MCardle says:
I like think tanks. .... I think they do a lot of good work. But the political policy ones do their best work when they are trying to decide policy within a movement; that's when you start seeing real innovative work. They are also very good at providing critiques of academic work in their areas of interest.
When they turn to fighting outsiders over, say, the minimum wage, the quality of their work sharply degrades. They have limited ability to change their policy position, because the donors will revolt; if they can't get an answer the donors will like, they don't ask the questions. They also only hire scholars who agree with them. That already biases their work, but then you have to contend with the groupthink problem: when everyone at the office agrees with you that your opponents are idiots, and you socialize mostly with other people in the movement, your thinking gets a tad lazy
I presume that professional means being paid to blog. The blogging world is still largely an amateur medium in Australia -----a few bloggers work for Big Media. A professional blogger is a paid pundit with a column that just happens to be on the Internet instead of on paper. So how is that different from working for a think tank?
Isn't it the case that those bloggers who are paid to blog by an institution generally do what that institution wants, and the institution hires them knowing they won't make waves?
I have just come across Telos online. Amazing. Things are changing for the better. Gee, am I going to have some fun digging around in the archives to see what has been happening in the last decade or so.
In the Introduction to the 2007 issue entitled Nature and Terror Russell Berman says:
Classical figures of thought endure. A long-standing image of the health of nature contrasts the bucolic landscape with the corruption of the city, where violence abounds. The only security is a natural way of life, far from the brutal metropolis— until nature turns out to be a threat, and we succumb to the uncontrollable fear named for that destructive god: panic. The state of nature is the homeland of violence, its only law the law of the jungle, as we scurry back to the city to find security—until it morphs into the security state. Critical Theory described this dynamic as a sometimes too narrow narrative of domination: the human mastery of nature, in the interest of self-preservation, turns into the mastery of humanity by an encompassing machinery of control. This is an old story, but it comes to us anew in this political season, in which nature and terror—the anxieties about the environment and fear of terrorism, as well as the reaction to it—haunt us, in public and in private.
How does it stand up in a world of climate change? Climate change is held to be the major issue of our time, A common ecological argument is that if humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half century, then the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable. The problem with this, as Eileen Crist points out is that:
Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. he race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve “the problem.” Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect he sun’s rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident: confront he problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects.
Crist argues that Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet. But questioning this civilization is by
and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.
The Burmese junta's refusal of international humanitarian aid in response to Cyclone Nargis is, the UN laments, “unprecedented”. When is it right for nation states to intervene?
In a 2003 speech Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group and Co-Chair, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty,says:
If the European Union countries are at one end of the kind of spectrum of states that have been prepared to embrace a whole variety of limitations and constraints on their sovereignty, and to move away from the traditional nationalist position that has occupied states responses and reactions and behaviour with each other for so many centuries, if the European Union is at one end of that extreme, I think it is fair to say that the Asian countries are really still at the other, with interstate rivalry, a rather fierce consciousness of national identity, very strong nationalism, very strong unwillingness to embrace any kind of limitations on sovereignty, that is very much the environment we are operating in.
Can governments intervene? Can they override the principle of national sovereignty----that what happens within state borders, however grotesque and morally indefensible, is basically nobody else’s business----in the name of international law? Evans observes:
in 1999 and 2000 there were major debates in the General Assembly on this issue of the so-called humanitarian intervention with absolutely no consensus being evident at all in what the appropriate response should be, a very big division opening up between those states, mainly western on the one hand, who are arguing the case, at least in principle, for more robust intervention when certain criteria were satisfied; and a number of other states, mainly from the developing world being acutely sensitive about the issue of sovereignty invasion thus involved, and being very unwilling to acknowledge any general principles at all that should apply in this area.
These two events pointed to a growing consensus in international law that a right to intervene to prevent serious human rights abuses is emerging. With the "responsibility to protect" comes the idea that sovereignty can, in some circumstances, be breached when a State fails in the duty to its people. In 2006, the "responsibility to protect" notion was adopted by the UN Security Council.
It is well known that Hegel’s dialectic arises out of the need to propose a different logic than traditional Verstandeslogik because such logic cannot ‘see’ or grasp conflict, contradiction, and hence historical change. And since these are fundamental features of the modern world, understanding is incapable of giving an account of the dimension of the Gegenwart—the historical present or actuality of the world. Thus, if philosophy’s task is indeed the comprehension of the Gegenwart, that is, the translation of its own time in living thoughts philosophy becomes impossible under the premises of traditional logic.
The following quote begins Ted Mullighan preface to his 600 page Commission of Inquiry on sexual abuse on South Australian tribal lands in the Western Desert in central Australia in the far north-west of South Australia in and around the Musgrave Ranges. The report is entitled Children on the APY Lands, and it uncovered a sad stream of stories from the Lands, identified the nature and extent of child sexual abuse on the Lands and made recommendations to prevent and respond to it.
I have known for many years that the plight of the Aboriginal people in this country is the greatest social issue in our history and remains so. Prior to the mid-1970s, life for the Angangu on the (Pitjantjatjara) lands was generally healthy, peaceful, safe and content. There was an effective system of social order, law and governance, and mutual responsibility. During the '80s and '90s, life changed drastically for the people, and sadly for the people. By the turn of the century, communities were dysfunctional and abusive. There was widespread violence and alcohol and drug abuse.
I have heard that sexual abuse of children on the lands has been widespread throughout the communities for many years. It occurs in the context of destructive and disorganised communities, poor health, poverty, alcohol and other substance abuse, the breakdown of traditional law and authority, generational cycles of abuse and neglect of children, violence, fear and a general powerlessness of many women. In many ways, conditions on the lands are comparable to a Third World country.
In communities on the lands, where petrol sniffing has destroyed a generation and alcohol and drug abuse is prevalent, parents do not know how to care for and protect their children or have become unable to do so. These children are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse.....
It is clear the scourge of child sexual abuse is widespread, devastating and a national disgrace. That little children can continue to be damaged physically, sexually and psychologically is devastating. A man with vast experience living on the lands told the inquiry that there was a deteriorating social fabric and "graft and corruption is really part of why people think that the law doesn't apply, that it's open slather; it's the law of the jungle here".
Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, in a recent speech made a distinction between a hamburger university--the management training facility for the McDonald's restaurant chain.--- and a real university, which is what we have in Australia What distinquishes the latter from the former Schwartz asks?In answering this he takes us to a definition of neo-liberal university as engines of economic growth.
In answering his question Schwartz says that it is not the narrowness vs the broadness of the curriculum, nor whether the university is a private or public institution. .He goes on:
One place to look for the answer is in research. Universities seek truth; their aim is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge. Hamburger U does this, too. For example, it discovers and preserves knowledge about how to cook consistently great chips. But let's be honest, Hamburger University's academics are not high-flying researchers, unlike our university academics, who are all scholars. This is what we would like to believe, but is it really true? There are thousands of academics teaching in Australian universities. Are they all scholars conducting research? A Griffith University study found that 44 per cent of Australian academics published exactly nothing in a particular year. In other words, when it comes to research, many Australian academics are no more active than the staff of Hamburger U.
His argument is that the difference between Hamburger University and real universities is that real universities are the engines of economic growth without which civil society would wither and social justice would be impossible. Hamburger U adds value to McDonald's employees. the real reason we need to have a sound economy.is because we need money to provide the education on which our freedom and liberty depend.
And democracy and citizenship? Are these not different to the economy and civil society? For Schwartz universities shape democracy by strengthen the voluntary social groups (trade unions, professional associations, churches, political parties and business groups) that make up civil society.
Though the idea of democratic decision-making constrained by constitutional terms has become pervasive in modern governance, but its popularity has not erased the deep questions of legitimacy that such constraints raise. many hold that if democratic self-rule is the legitimate form of government, then what can justify restrictions on (current) democratic majorities?
In his review of Howard Schweber, The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism, Brian Bix says:
When most constitutional law scholars think about constitutional theory and language, they consider arguments about how the terms of the United States Constitution (or some other constitution) should be interpreted: according to the Framers' original understanding, according to the Framers' views about application, according to the accepted meaning in the general population at the time of ratification, according to changing or modern understandings, etc. Schweber is making a different sort of point: that the sort of language one uses in arguing within and about a constitutional provision is, or at least should be, different from the sort of language one uses in other sorts of political, moral, or legal debate. To put the point a different way (and in the way Schweber usually couches the claim), constitutions limit the language in which claims can be made; constitutional language is "exclusive."
The lack of democracy in contemporary liberal democracy has given rise to many calls for the reinvention of the category of the political. Many say that this is an imperative and unavoidable task. Gabriel Riera, in this review of Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, observes that::
Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics.
There has been a lot of media talk (largely condemnation) in the US about Reverend Wright, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, with Barack Obama repudiating Wright's recent address at the National Press Club under political pressure. Obama is outraged by Wright's comments.
So what did Wright say about the black church and liberation theology? Here is the section of the Jeremiah Wright Jr. address on reconciliation:
Reconciliation, the years have taught me, is where the hardest work is found for those of us in the Christian faith, however, because it means some critical thinking and some re-examination of faulty assumptions when using the paradigm of Dr. William Augustus Jones. Dr. Jones, in his book, God in the ghetto, argues quite accurately that one's theology, how I see God, determines one's anthropology, how I see humans, and one's anthropology then determines one's sociology, how I order my society.
Now, the implications from the outside are obvious. If I see God as male, if I see God as white male, if I see God as superior, as God over us and not Immanuel, which means "God with us," if I see God as mean, vengeful, authoritarian, sexist, or misogynist, then I see humans through that lens. My theological lens shapes my anthropological lens. And as a result, white males are superior; all others are inferior.And I order my society where I can worship God on Sunday morning wearing a black clergy robe and kill others on Sunday evening wearing a white Klan robe. I can have laws which favor whites over blacks in America or South Africa. I can construct a theology of apartheid in the Africana church (ph) and a theology of white supremacy in the North American or Germanic church.
The implications from the outset are obvious, but then the complicated work is left to be done, as you dig deeper into the constructs, which tradition, habit, and hermeneutics put on your plate. To say "I am a Christian" is not enough. Why? Because the Christianity of the slaveholder is not the Christianity of the slave. The God to whom the slaveholders pray as they ride on the decks of the slave ship is not the God to whom the enslaved are praying as they ride beneath the decks on that slave ship. How we are seeing God, our theology, is not the same. And what we both mean when we say "I am a Christian" is not the same thing. The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen and still sees all of God's children as sisters and brothers, equals who need reconciliation, who need to be reconciled as equals in order for us to walk together into the future which God has prepared for us.
Reconciliation does not mean that blacks become whites or whites become blacks and Hispanics become Asian or that Asians become Europeans.Reconciliation means we embrace our individual rich histories, all of them. We retain who we are as persons of different cultures, while acknowledging that those of other cultures are not superior or inferior to us. They are just different from us.We root out any teaching of superiority, inferiority, hatred, or prejudice. And we recognize for the first time in modern history in the West that the other who stands before us with a different color of skin, a different texture of hair, different music, different preaching styles, and different dance moves, that other is one of God's children just as we are, no better, no worse, prone to error and in need of forgiveness, just as we are. Only then will liberation, transformation, and reconciliation become realities and cease being ever elusive ideals.That doesn't sound too radical does it. The task of reconciliation hinges on our ability to see each other as equals while we recognize our differences.