Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site hoptoad.uucp Path: utzoo!lsuc!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!sun!hoptoad!laura From: laura@hoptoad.uucp (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.politics.theory Subject: Re: Liberalism, Part III Message-ID: <632@hoptoad.uucp> Date: Tue, 18-Mar-86 01:33:39 EST Article-I.D.: hoptoad.632 Posted: Tue Mar 18 01:33:39 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 20-Mar-86 18:02:54 EST References: <363@gargoyle.UUCP> <608@hoptoad.uucp> <12428@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Reply-To: laura@hoptoad.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco Lines: 57 In article <12428@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> desj@brahms.UUCP (David desJardins) writes: >In article <608@hoptoad.uucp> laura@hoptoad.UUCP (Laura Creighton) writes: >> >>Unfortunately, this is impossible. You cannot both promote the belief >>that a government must treat all its citizens with equal concern and respect >>and be neutral on the question of what human beings ought to be. As a bare >>minimum you must have a theory which says ``government officials ought >>to treat all its citizens with equal concern and respect''. > > No, "government" is not the same as "government officials" (at least, >not always, and certainly not in theory). In practice, this means that >those who become government officials are those who are willing to enforce >the chosen principles of government. Since no one is forced to be a >government official, this is not a problem. You have missed it. Dworkin comes right out and says that a government must treat all its citizens with equal concern and respect. But this is a normative statement. It implies that, at a bare minimum, the government officials who create and enforce government policy treat all its citizens with equal concern and respect. Therefore it cannot be neutral on the question of what human beings ought to be. The two aims are incompatible. > > Nobody claims that liberals treat all citizens with equal respect. >Individuals of course are free to treat others with as much or as little >respect as they desire. But the *government* must treat people with >equal respect (equal protection under the laws). But the government, as an abstraction, only exists through the actions of individual government employees. And these employees, being human beings, cannot treat all citizens with equal respect. What they can do is treat human beings with a *minimum* of respect, but that is not the same thing. > >>Like everyone else, liberals have heroes, and accord them respect -- so >>people like Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King are accorded more >>respect than the average. > > But you would not want the government to accord them more respect, >or to treat them differently under the laws. This is the point. On the contrary, I would expect that the government treat them with more respect. This is inevitable. I would not expect them to be exempt from the laws of the land, by and large, but even this is not totally true. If Martin Luther King were alive today to organise civil disobedience in protest to some law which he found discriminatory, I would expect that more people would investigate the possibility that the law was in the wrong out of respect for Martin Luther King than if somebody else protested the very same law. This sounds unfair, but also sounds like what would happen. And at the end, MLK might not have to pay any penalty for breaking the law. Since I am assuming that the law was unjust to begin with, I would be glad that he did not have to pay the penalty, but the fact would remain that he was treated differently than the last person who had to pay the penalty. -- Laura Creighton ihnp4!hoptoad!laura utzoo!hoptoad!laura sun!hoptoad!laura toad@lll-crg.arpa