scott: but first one must define right and wrong, which is a problem in itself.

Says who?

“Right” and “wrong” are pieces of ordinary English. As a competant speaker of the language I am quite familiar with what they mean; I figure that you are too. One may, or may not, be able to say what they mean in the form of an articulate definition, but the ability to use them consistently and correctly isn’t dependent on being able to give the definition. It can be demonstrated simply by buckling down and applying them consistently and correctly in concrete cases.

Kennedy: I strongly suspect this is not a learned behavior at all but rather something to which men are generally predisposed.

Why?

scott: JK, how do you know what right is? and what is meant by right anyway? you can’t answer these questions without simply leading to others.

The fact that you can raise a question does not guarantee that it is a cogent one. And the fact that there are outstanding philosophical questions about ethics does not mean that no-one can competantly reason about right and wrong (any more than the fact that there are outstanding scientific questions about matter means that no-one can competantly reason about tables and chairs).

TH: I’d tolerate the StripperGram, the boob and underwear obsession, the whole nine yards—if only she had a friggin’ platform, biography page…you know, stuff that might indicate that she’s actually interested in running for office.

From the Flash animation page:

1. Click “Visit the Nall for Governor Website!”

2. Scroll down content area on the right side of the page for links to campaign updates and news coverage

3. Scroll down through the sidebar on the left of the page.

4. Click “Bio” for a biography

5. Click “Platform” for a platform

6. Click “News Releases” for a press release announcing the candidacy and bullet-listing the most important planks of the platform

You can tolerate or not tolerate whatever you want, but it is a bit silly to complain about your difficulty in finding campaign information when I found this material in the few seconds that it took to load the campaign website.

Paging Carol Adams. Carol Adams to the TV, stat…

Ann: Do you think everyone should be allowed to pick and choose, and to follow only those laws that they personally consider tasteful?

No, everyone should be allowed to pick and choose, and to follow only those laws that are, in fact, just. Forcing people to comply with unjust laws is tyranny, and doing so in the name of “the rule of law” is just tyranny with a powdered wig on.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. … One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Emphasis added.

Brian: And it is respect for the rule of law in general. Sure there are many unjust laws but that doesn’t seem particularly relevant to whether or not we should respect the rule of law per se.

lirelou was explicitly using “accordance with the rule of law” as a grounds for restricting the decriminalization of immigration, apparently because the restrictions under which immigrants have been suffering up until this point must continue to be enforced, just to be fair, or something. It does seem to me that this is one thing that people sometimes mean when they talk about respect for the rule of law — that is, systematically and carefully enforcing the terms of actually existing laws, whether or not they are just. The idea is that if you refuse to enforce a law based on your substantive disagreement with it, you are corrupting the legal process by inserting arbitrary discretion into what should be an impersonal mechanism. If that is what is meant, then it ought to be clear that “the rule of law” deserves respect only to the extent that, and in such cases as, the laws being enforced actually are just laws: consistency in justice is a virtue, but consistency in evil is only relentlessness. Where the promulgated law is unjust it should be ignored or defied, as openly, in as many cases, and by as many officials, as possible, since scrupulous enforcement of unjust laws just means scrupulous criminality against the innocent, and to hell with anything that says otherwise.

It may be that you have something different in mind when you say that you respect the rule of law. The phrase is a pretty fluid one, and more than one meaning has been assigned to it. For example, maybe you mean the (perfectly respectable) idea that the grounds for an act of legal force should be public, consistent, and general. Or maybe you mean something else. But if that’s the case, then given the argumentative context in which lirelou was using the phrase, I doubt that (s)he and you mean the same thing by it.

Randall: The liberal tradition incorporates both respect for the rule of law and refusal to comply with unjust laws.

Well. The fact that a tradition incorporates two claims does not guarantee that the claims are actually compatible with one another. Maybe the tradition is making incoherent demands. Lots of traditions do.

That said, I’d need to know more of what you mean by “the rule of law” to say anything substantial here, for reasons similar to the ones I outlined above. If it means that you should comply with just laws and ignore or defy unjust ones, then I wonder whether you’re using “the rule of law” as anything other than another name for political justice as such.

doj: It’s obviously silly to focus on the single use of government roads in getting to your house, and that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, I am trying to look at the big picture and comparing the case where an illegal immigrant is living in the US with the case they aren’t, since the largest marginal effect of the $40 job is a probabilistic increase in the number of illegal immigrants living in the country.

Well, no, the “largest marginal effect of the $40 job” is that your grand piano is moved, and the worker has $40 more than before.

It’s true, of course, that it also has the effect of increasing the demand for labor not restricted by immigration status; and so it may contribute, on the margin, to the probability that more undocumented immigrants will live in the country. But so what? The only reasons you’ve offered for thinking that there’s anything wrong with having more undocumented immigrants living in the country is the allegation that it involves unspecified “costs” being imposed on innocent third parties—an allegation which has been objected to, since you’ve offered no evidence that this involves more “costs” for those third parties than hiring anybody else in a welfare state does, let alone that either the immigrant or the person hiring him or her is morally to blame for those “costs.” So let’s get down to brass tacks. You claim that increasing the probability of more undocumented immigrants in the country is something that you oughtn’t do. Why? What’s wrong with having more undocumented immigrants in the country, let alone with merely increasing the probability that this may happen?

doj: In principle, I may agree. However, just because one policy is optimal in utopia does not mean that policy makes sense in concert with the messy set of other policies that are currently in place. The welfare state in the US is not going away soon, and wishful thinking to the contrary when setting immigration policy is potentially disasterous. We need to be realists.

How is this any of the immigrant’s fault? There are lots of ways you could reduce the total welfare burden in this country. For example, you could shoot people standing in the queue at the welfare office. Or you could blow up government schools. Or you could implement a forced sterilization / abortion program for the poor. Do you think that these are acceptable methods? If not, why do you think that restraining, arresting, confining, an immigrant, beating or shooting them if necessary, destroying their livelihood, and exiling them from the country, is any more acceptable? Why are they fair game for your policy “realism” but not the domestic poor?

doj: And the reality is, among other things, that most of California’s public school system is shot to hell and can be expected to remain so as long as too many illegal immigrants stress the system.

Who cares? Why are you trying to fix the government school system?

doj: The majority of voters are quite willing to pay more for labor if they can reverse this sort of thing;

Then they are welcome to pay for it. What I object to is when they propose to force me pay more for labor in order to fulfill their demographic goals, which I couldn’t possibly care less about.

doj: … when we refuse to enforce the immigration laws they vote for, that is a subversion of our political process.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

“Because participation in a method at least implies some level of consent to the method.”

It certainly does not, unless you intend to obliterate the distinction between consent and surrender to coercion. Does turning your wallet over to a mugger, in order to avoid being beaten or stabbed, constitute “some level of consent” to being mugged?

“It might be possible, but generally speaking democratic elections are recognized as legitimate by people around the world based on the participation of the citizens within the area where the elections are held.”

But how is this the voter’s problem, rather than the problem of the people wrongly treating the resulting government as legitimate? It’s true that many people believe that voter participation makes the elected government legitimate; people believe all kinds of crazy things. But since plebiscites don’t confer legitimate authority to the government elected, the inference is an irrational one. And I see how I’m under any moral obligation not to take actions that people will irrationally treat as conferring legitimacy on the process. Rather, they have a duty not to make irrational inferences.

“To some degree, he did indeed lend legitimacy to the concept of slave ownership by his actions, although there is no doubt that was not his intention.”

How? Douglass considered it (and said so, in public) nothing more or less than paying a ransom. He did not pay it because his so-called “owner” was entitled to one dime, but rather because Douglass did not want to spend any more of his life in fear of slave-catchers. Of course, it’s true that his former slavemaster, and the courts, did think of it as a “sale” of Douglass to himself. But so what? Why is their take on it any more authoritative than Douglass’s? How did Douglass’s actions commit him in any way to accepting or endorsing their false beliefs about the situation?

“The act of participation would only serve to sanction the process.”

How?

Isn’t it possible to submit to a process imposed on you by others, in order to defend your own safety, without conceding the legitimacy of the process?

Did Frederick Douglass “sanction” slavery when he decided to “buy” himself from his former slavemaster, rather than continually risk being sent back into bondage by any slave-catcher who could get ahold of him?

Kevin, thanks for this post; I think you’re right and that the lesson generalizes to a lot of other revolutions ruined by the later efforts of the self-styled “vanguard.”

On the other hand, it should be recognized that a lot of the acts of “economic warfare” that the Marxoids are using to explain Castro’s power grabs were actually perfectly legitimate. The U.S. government’s withdrawal of state-to-state foreign aid transfers, for example, ought to have been celebrated — the last thing that a revolution needs is the colonial patronage of the U.S. government. Similarly, the big oil companies’ refusal to refine Soviet oil in the refineries they built was (prima facie, at least; I don’t know how they came by those refineries) something they had a perfect right to do. It was stupid of them, to be sure, but that’s a separate issue. The embargo and sustained threats of open war were, of course, completely unjustified, and clearly count as warlike. But these came after, not before, the implementation of state capitalism and the opening wave of nationalization. Castro was baring his fangs of his own initiative, well before the U.S. government was doing anything other than withdrawing from patronage into neutrality (a move which ought to have been welcomed, not retaliated against).