Kostya

Sorry for the delay, Christmas, New Years and the beach have kept me away from my computer lately.

Anyhow, I see your suggestions:


And I think they are very good. First of all, because I agree with the stated aim, that is to ‘curb terrorist activities’ and with the methodology which is multifaceted, much like the phenomenon of terrorism itself. What I don’t see listed here is the death penalty. I for one think its deterrence value is little if any, nobody undertakes a terrorist attack frivolously, many are prepared to blow themselves up and those that are deterred by the death penalty are probably the kind of people who wouldn’t strap a bomb to themselves in the first place.

I am glad we cleared up that Guantanamo Bay issue, I agree with you that it is not a good facility. I think the problem you have with it, and I also is that there is no ‘access to legal recourse’ as you pointed out, which is quite unacceptable to you and I both.

I’m a little confused. What your saying here requires some disentangling and I want to be very clear in what I am saying, so bear with me as this may become quite long.

As far as I can see, you’re making a distinction between ‘justice’ and ‘laws’, the former being ‘for everone’ that is universal, and the latter being for specific ‘peoples and nations.’ I cannot agree quite with the claim that ‘we as a nation need laws’ because I think ‘nations’ are non-existent but let us get on to that later. Now, I also make this distinction quite easily, for instance, there is hardly any question that the law prohibiting women from owning property in Britain was a law, but it was not justice. I agree with you also that ‘all would have some sort of cultural, social and religious input in accordance with their customs and beliefs’ as well, the above law for instance had the input of a belief that men were superior to women. The Aztecs had ‘cultural and religious inputs’ that told them human sacrifice was necessary for the Sun to move in the sky. The problem with these various ‘inputs’ is that they can be and often are wrong, that is to say either totally mistaken factually such as the Aztecs, or injust such as the chauvinism of the British Isles circa 1700.
So, to say that ‘one law is better than the other is incorrect’ simply baffles me. First of all, you freely admit that ‘justice is for everyone’ and that ‘laws are subject to flaws and mistakes.’ I think you would agree that a flawed law is not as good as one which is not. I can say without hesitation that the law which required human sacrifice in Aztec society was inferior to the one which replaced it. Why can I say this? Quite simply, the basis of the Law, that human sacrifice was necessary for the rising of the sun, was fallacious.
The next problem is if as you claim no law can be said to be better than any other law, why would we change our laws at all? Certainly all laws are as good as each other, and hence there is no reason to alter any laws, ever. But this doesn’t quite seem right, we constantly change our laws, often we change them because they are unjust. For instance, I can say without hesitation that the law endorsing slavery of black people in the United States was not as good as the one prohibiting slavery which replaced it. The new law was better than the old one, and that’s precisely why it was introduced. We can determine whether a law is better or worse by checking to see if it stands up to the standard of justice. That is to say, I believe there is a standard, a standard ‘for everyone’ which you may call justice or whatever you wish, by which it is possible to assess the laws of any institution. This leads me to you final question:

To be honest I have problems with the concept of a ‘definition’ but leaving that aside allow to explain to you as best I can what I mean by justice.

Justice is not a simple term. By justice, some people mean ‘social justice’ that is a certain state of affairs regarding freedom, wealth, power and so forth. This is no doubt related to the issue of ‘judicial justice’ that is a standard by which we assess various legislative provisions dealing with crime and punishment. I believe that you are talking about ‘judicial justice’ here. First of all, you are quite right, I do not believe that ‘justice’ is necessarily coterminous with governmental laws or UN laws either, since both may be mistaken and subject to review. That is not to say however, that a governmental law or UN law is necessarily unjust either. For instance, I think that the law ‘No person should be discriminated against on the basis of their gender’ is just, and it is also a law. On the other hand, I think that the law ‘All persons who have blue eyes shall have their left hands cut off’ is unjust, though it is a law.
Justice is based on rational arguments, not on ‘cultural inputs’, for instance the rational argument ‘That the sun will rise tomorrow without any human sacrifices’ shows us that that particular Aztec law was unjust, and that a new one, which takes this fact into account will be if anything closer to justice, if not perfectly just. What can be argued for on the basis of reason, not arbitrary assumptions, prejudices or ignorances is what I take to be justice.
It is sort of analogous to the concept of colour. We know what ‘red’ is, and we see things around us, we can make judgments as to whether Object A is ‘more red’ than Object B. The problem with justice is that our ‘vision’ regarding the ‘justness’ of laws and conventions and actions is not quite so sharp. It is a difficult thing to determine whether a law about abortion is just or not, certainly not as simple as comparing a reddish car and a reddish chair. However, if we develop our faculties, our abilities to rationally argue, we might see more clearly, we see for instance that women are not inferior to men, and that that was an arbitrary assumption and all the laws based on it are unjust. We might see that there is no need for human sacrifices, that Jews are not to be exterminated, that the death penalty is not necessarily the correct punishment for drug smuggling.
I won’t lie, even then arguments will persist. Amongst trained ethical philosophers there are disagreements about abortion, punishments, and so forth. However, that there are disagreements is not so much a bad thing as it might seem. In order to make arguments, people must appeal to something, they are not simply saying ‘nah nah I’m right and you smell’, they are trying to prove that their position is just, or more just than their opponents. We have cleared up many things that were once the subject of arguments, slavery for instance had its adherents for a time, but after many an argument, the anti-slavery movement made rational arguments that showed their position to be patently unjust.

Hitler is indeed not the norm, but that is precisely why I brought him into it. A lot of people complain to me that I introduce absurd examples during arguments, but I think this is a failure to see my point. What these examples show us is precisely that the position being put forward is clearly subject to such absurdities.

For instance, if a fellow argues: ‘That all good is happiness.’ The classic argument back is simply that: ‘Pigs are happy, therefore you would prefer to be a pig than Socrates.’
It is absurd to suggest that we would prefer to be pigs rather than thinking human beings, and what that clearly suggests is that the fellow’s original position is wrong, what is good is not simply happiness, his position entertains absurdities.

So too your position entertains absurdities and I introduced them here to illustrate that. It seems to me a gross understatement to suggest that it ‘has a loose end or two or three.’ As far as I can see it has no ends, it is carte blanche, it doesn’t draw any limits on anything since it denies that laws can be wrong, it denies that there is any universal standard by which we can proclaim anything about laws. If I want to say that car is redder than that chair, I admit there is a standard of ‘redness’ by which I am measuring and assessing them. Your position, quite clearly was, there is no standard or redness or justness to assess things. I then duly pointed out that without a standard of justness, you can’t draw any distinction between the Third Reich and modern day Britain, any more than you can say the sky is less red than blood without a standard of redness. I won’t add your name to the list, Nabil the Worst, because you are not a mass murderer, you simply made an argument that was not coherent. Nabil the Irrational perhaps. This is not an issue of ‘vague definition’, but one of bases. You say ‘no law is better than any other’, but you also say ‘justice is for everyone.’ I for one do not think you believe that our laws are not better than Hitler’s or Ivan’s or Pol Pot’s, in fact I think you quite agree with me that there is a standard of justice, and we can safely place their laws well below ours. The proof of that is clear enough in your claim below:

I disagree with you that it is a ‘sense’ of justice. It is not merely prickles on the back of one’s neck. It is discerned through no small measure of deep thought, thorough and meticulous research, debate, revision and constant vigilance. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘changing times’, I might agree or disagree, but it is an ambiguous statement and probably of little account. The point is simply, you clearly do recognize that there is a regulatory standard that presides over the making of laws, and even though it is supremely difficult, it is possible to devise laws which most certainly are better than existing ones, and that this holds true not just for Nation X or the City of Z, but everywhere. Whether those laws exist everywhere is another matter.

that the sense of justice is universal in all humans. but that we need local and specific laws to run our local environment, but we find that as soon as we make these laws up, they can be unjust to some outsider. for example.. we as australians abhor the chopping of the hand in saudi..go to saudi and youll find proponents for these laws and they'll tell you how safe they feel in their own homes and country etc.

Once again I have to take issue with this ‘sense of justice’ claim. Obviously if it is universal, then all our laws would be the same, but as you go on to say, they are not. The ‘sense of hunger’ is universal, therefore no matter where I go people are always eating or wanting to eat food at regular interviews. But, people seem to have very different ideas about what is ‘just’ some rational, most irrational. I can’t see any reason for a debate between an Australian and a Saudi, couldn’t they both simply consult their ‘sense’s of justice’ which are apparently identical and resolve their problem very easily. But that’s not the problem, the Saudi’s think that it is just, and I claim the complete opposite. So whatever is informing our claims on what is just, it is most certainly not universally shared by both of us.
I’m a little curious about this ‘local and specific laws to run our local environment’ claim. Certainly it seems to me to be true of those laws pertaining to geographic issues, for instance we currently have water restrictions in Brisbane, because there is little water. There are no water restrictions in Paris right now as far as I know. Of course, this is a minor issue, and still subject to a universal standard that is: Where there is little water it is better to have water restrictions than to condemn the city to die of thirst. What changes is not the standard, but the amount of water in the general vicinity.
However, what changes between here and Saudi, to an extent, is not anything to do with ‘local environment’, and everything to do with a different standard for determining laws. It’s not just that I abhor the cutting off of hands, that is to say if I saw it I would be sickened, but that I think that law is unjust. I abhor strawberry icecream, but I don’t think it is unjust. What rational argument can there be made for the cutting off of hands? I myself can’t think of one. I mean, I would have felt quite safe in Hitler’s Germany, being blonde with blue eyes, but that doesn’t mean I would have thought his policies just, because it’s no justification for those laws, just because I wouldn’t be the one being brutalized.

I’m at a loss. How can you say your definitions run parallel? One says ‘Justice is universal’ the other says ‘Justice is relative’, that’s a flat contradiction as far as I can see. Unless you mean something different in those two statements, which is entirely possible and if you are I request that you make that clearer to me because I am having difficulty understanding how they fail to contradict.
Moving on to the contradiction that is inherent in your next two statements, I can’t believe what I’m reading here. I don’t often use quotes, but there’s one that I think sums up my sentiments exactly:


"If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished... But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes 'culture', and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western 'moral thinkers'." Donald Symons

How you can not place that under ‘oppression’ boggles my mind. First of all, I’m sure some Aztec folk ‘thought’ they were OK with being sacrificed, hell they might have been proud about giving up their lives to ensure that life continues. But, they were just plain wrong about that, their deaths were needless, meaningless and entirely unjust. Female circumcision is based on an arbitrary and needless tradition, one that can be safely discarded as both useless and dangerous alongside human sacrifice, sexual slavery, cannibalism and anything else that is rationally indefensible and which furthermore causes significant harm to many individuals.
I cannot stress to you how vehemently I disagree with your claims here, I find them disturbing and contemptible.

Touche, it is true that the eating of pork was one of the tests that the Inquisition used to identify crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims living in Spain during the medieval period. However, if pressed I can come up with other laws that were frivolous and brutal, such as those in Leviticus that prescribed stoning to death for backtalking one’s parents, or traditional Confucian laws which prescribed torture for informing the Emperor of a problem and so forth. Absurd laws have existed, based on absurd foundations, I’m simply saying that the laws which we ought to have are rational ones based on rational foundations.

I have left it until last to explain why I do not believe in nations and so forth, because it is a difficult and complicated matter that is better separated from our original argument about laws and justice.

My first objection to ‘nations’ is simply the historical one. Nations are fabricated, made up things. Australia was made up only 230 years ago, just conjured into existence from nowhere. What I mean is that any claim that nations are somehow permanent is simply false. Australia did not always exist, the nation of East Germany no longer exists. Nevertheless, we seem to think it is OK to treat nations as though they are not mere fabrications, but as though they are very real, as though by consensus we have created these things that did not exist before, though we have seen them made and destroyed in our lifetimes.
The other problem is that often there is a claim that nations are somehow grounded in a deep historical blood bond of people who are somehow linked together in a vast extended family. Clearly in Australia this is false. But elsewhere it is false also, as though English men have never had French wives, or as though any genetic similarity, even if it did exist, confers any kind of sociological similarity. This talk of ‘national characters’ if it is of anything, is not an inherited genetic trait shared by the inhabitants of a geographic area. As if a boy born in Ireland to Irish parents and immediately afterwards taken to Russia and raised with Russian parents would somehow stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore I deny the historical basis of the concept of ‘nation’ both in its political sense and any of the various ‘natural’ bases such as common origin, natural frontiers or national characters.
Now, we live in the state of Australia, it is a nation state, that is to say the government proclaims to represent the ‘nation’ of Australia. As far as I can see, the only thing that could be said that is true of all Australians is that they happen to be bound by the laws of Australia, vote in its elections, and to be represented by the Australian state. It is not that the ‘nation’ determined the ‘state’, but that the ‘state’ delineates the ‘nation.’ So, at the very least, to be Australian is not to be a primordial tribal group who own this land and are all bound by blood to each other and the land, but rather to be a citizen living under the state. Now, if a nation is merely contingent upon a state, that is it is entirely an arbitrary and synthetic grouping, then there is no such thing as a nation in and of itself, the state is not representing something that exists prior to or anterior to itself. A nation is no more a legitimate grouping than a city state or a commune, it is just a name for the people living under a particular government, nothing more.
Now if the nation be merely that group presided over by the state, it may be legitimately claimed that there is an entity, the State, that embodies The Nation. This is implied in claims about national ideals, value, character and so forth. Isn’t there some kind of ‘general will’, some kind of ‘national will’ if you prefer, that the government is representing? I for one don’t think that any such entity exists. I agree that there is a group of individuals, a very large group, which we refer to as Australia, or as the Australian nation, or the Australian people. Each of these individuals has their own free will, they have ideals, values, thoughts, emotions, relationships and so forth. There is no entity which is independent from these individuals, no national entity, that also exists to have feelings, ideals, thoughts, emotions, relationships and so forth. The reason we might speak of a national ideal of democracy is most certainly not because there is some metaphysical entity, a suprabeing or supraconsciousness which holds the ideal of democracy, but because the vast majority of Australians do hold democracy as an ideal. All it is then, as far as I can see is a statement about what the various individuals who live under the government think, and not even all those individuals, but rather a statistical generalization about them. The point is simply, the ‘nation’ is not anything apart from those individuals who happen to be in the group to which it refers, it has no life of its own, it is at most a mere statistical correlation. Those statistical correlations are contingent upon the individuals, not the other way around.
Now, no doubt there are oddities in this regard, because while a nation is not metaphysically real, it is imagined to be real, and this exercises a significant influence over people’s behaviour. Many people think and act as though there is an Australian nation, and in a way this makes many of the generalizations about ‘Australia’ true on that account. What is does not do is make Australia real, merely a sociological illusion, which, if people began to act differently or were educated otherwise would evapourate as fast as morning dew.
Furthermore, generalizations are useful, but not binding, they do not contradict or negate the free will of individuals. There is nothing stopping people who happen to live under a government from changing their minds about something, from disagreeing with the ‘national values’, nobody is compelled forcibly to adopt them, though many people do because they are easily persuaded, irrational or simply convinced that they are serving something greater than themselves which does not exist. People have acted in ways that made generalizations about all sorts of imaginary groupings true, the Athenian City, the tribe of the Huns and the Master Race, but none of those things was anything real.

As for sovereignty well it’s an ambiguous word. Do you mean the source of power, as in the monarch is the sovereign? Or do you mean the more modern sense, that no nation may have its borders impinged upon?