From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 19:50:07 MDT
On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu <dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu>):
> > Politics isn't ethics, neither is it aesthetics.
>
> I disagree; politics is nothing /but/ ethics, in the context of
> larger groups of people.
I think of ethical propositions as the expression of "we intentions" (the
phrase is from Wilfred Sellars), appeals to the "way WE do/do not do
things around here," as against prudential appeals, which tend to be more
logical. The tricky thing is that "we" always is formed against various
"theys".
Political propositions need not aspire to this kind of
identification, requiring only enough shared ground or common cause to
justify an adjudication of difference other than violence. Parties with
"irreconcilable differences" negotiate a compromise that neither is
particularly thrilled with but to which both agree, for agreement is
better than continued conflict. The losing side in an election maintains
loyalty to the victorious Administration, since they feel it is plausible
they will elect more reasonable candidates next time around. And so on.
While it is common for ethical viewpoints to have an evangelical
or even imperializing desire to expand their community of adherents (often
pretending to a universalism in principle that rarely is maintained in
practice), political viewpoints are *never* intelligibly expansionist in
this way -- they seek to reconcile differences, but assume that difference
is interminable and ineradicable and so that this process of
reconciliation is likewise interminable.
If that seems frustrating or disheartening -- it often does to
philosophical temperaments -- remember that the pleasures of politics are
not to be underestimated. If the pleasure of ethical life is flourishing
and belonging, the phenomenological experience of reconciliation, debate,
rivalry, intrigue, compromise, deliberation, and display proper to the
political realm is pretty much the pleasure of freedom.
Best, Dale
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