Well I'm *not* a new subscriber, but I enjoyed your comment on Holly's blog too. Especially your appreciation of how so many thinkers like Harris fool themselves into ignoring the is-ought problem. (Though Bentham was worse than Harris, and he certainly did know about law.)
But I had a thought which was off topic for Holly's post, where you point out the following very depressing mostly-truth:
> ... and the province of elected politicians and their senior advisers and senior civil servants, to the exclusion of all others, including scientists—is to make ethical choices on policy ...
It's a scary thought that the ethical function of our society is delegated to this lot. And this explains much that is wrong with society.
That said, there is another source of law. A common law judge is expected to make rulings and thus make precedent in the light of what is. This includes fact, law and something in between where the meaning of facts get interpreted (with or without the help of a jury). Was action X "reasonable", was it "undue" etc.
If the judge is doing her job badly, she will substitute her own preferences into these decisions (it's only human). If she is doing her job well, she will observe the customs and expectations of actual people in society and encode it into case law. This is a channel through which (to Bentham's chagrin) everybody's moral actions shape the law.
Yes. But democracy is a somewhat broad concept, broader at least the beaurocratic representative democracy. While I prefer modern Australia to ancient Athens, on the margin, I would feel safer the more we moved towards a participatory model and away from the fiction that various Senior Executives of the public service are enacting something called the will of the people.
Well I'm *not* a new subscriber, but I enjoyed your comment on Holly's blog too. Especially your appreciation of how so many thinkers like Harris fool themselves into ignoring the is-ought problem. (Though Bentham was worse than Harris, and he certainly did know about law.)
But I had a thought which was off topic for Holly's post, where you point out the following very depressing mostly-truth:
> ... and the province of elected politicians and their senior advisers and senior civil servants, to the exclusion of all others, including scientists—is to make ethical choices on policy ...
It's a scary thought that the ethical function of our society is delegated to this lot. And this explains much that is wrong with society.
That said, there is another source of law. A common law judge is expected to make rulings and thus make precedent in the light of what is. This includes fact, law and something in between where the meaning of facts get interpreted (with or without the help of a jury). Was action X "reasonable", was it "undue" etc.
If the judge is doing her job badly, she will substitute her own preferences into these decisions (it's only human). If she is doing her job well, she will observe the customs and expectations of actual people in society and encode it into case law. This is a channel through which (to Bentham's chagrin) everybody's moral actions shape the law.
"It's a scary thought that the ethical function of our society is delegated to this lot. And this explains much that is wrong with society".
Always remember that democracy is the worst system of governance in the world, except for all the others that have been tried.
Yes. But democracy is a somewhat broad concept, broader at least the beaurocratic representative democracy. While I prefer modern Australia to ancient Athens, on the margin, I would feel safer the more we moved towards a participatory model and away from the fiction that various Senior Executives of the public service are enacting something called the will of the people.