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19. The Burkean Outlook | YaleCourses | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: 19. The Burkean Outlook
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This content introduces Edmund Burke as a radical anti-Enlightenment thinker whose philosophy emphasizes tradition, inherited rights, and a deep distrust of abstract reason and radical change, contrasting sharply with Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and rational societal reconstruction.
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Prof: So this morning we're going to start talking
about Edmund Burke and the anti-Enlightenment.
And one prefatory note is that when thinking about political
theory as opposed to everyday political argument I think it's
very important not to get hung up on labels such as left wing,
or right wing, or liberal, or conservative.
And I think the occasion of beginning to speak about Burke
is a good moment to make this point.
After all, I think it'd be fair to say that before you walked
into this course if you had looked down the syllabus and
somebody had said, "Who is the most radical
thinker on this syllabus?"
most of you would have picked out Marx.
But as we've seen, Marx is actually a footnote to
the Enlightenment.
Marx is not, he's not somebody who engages
in a radical departure from the ideas that were developed by
Locke and the other thinkers that shaped the main ideas of
the Enlightenment.
Burke, on the other hand, is generally thought of as a
conservative politically, and indeed he was a
conservative politically, but philosophically he's a much
more radical thinker than Marx was.
He is somebody who really goes to the root of accepted
assumptions in his critical questioning.
Burke completely rejects the Enlightenment project as I have
described it to you today.
Let me say a little bit about who he was.
He was born in 1829, so that makes him,
I mean 1729, sorry.
I gave him a hundred years there.
He was born in 1729, a quarter of a century after
Locke died, and the main work for which he
is most known, his Reflections on the
Revolution in France, was published in 1790 almost
exactly a century after, actually more like 110 years
after Locke's Second Treatise.
Well, I should say it was published a hundred years after,
but it was written a 110 years after because we now know that
Locke wrote The Second Treatise in the early 1680s.
But what motivated Burke to write his reflections on the
French Revolution was the appalling carnage that
eventually resulted from the French Revolution.
The French Revolution was not planned as a revolution.
It was really street riots that escalated in Paris,
but escalated to the point of the complete destruction of the
whole society, the inauguration of a massive
terror, which appalled Burke.
And so he wrote this, what started out as a pamphlet,
but became this very famous book on the Reflections on
the Revolution in France , and that becomes a
basis of Burke's outlook.
He wasn't a professional scholar or academic.
He was actually a public person.
He would eventually become a Member of Parliament and has
some things to say about democratic representation that I
will come back to when we get to the theory of democracy.
But at the time he wrote the Reflections on the Revolution
in France, which is what I had you read
excerpts from today, he was mainly preoccupied with
what had happened, what had transpired across the
Channel in 1789.
And he was, in particular, concerned to establish against
people like Richard Price, who's one of the people who he
engages there, that 1789 was in any sense a
logical follow-on of 1688 in England;
1688, of course, when we had the revolution in
England, the glorious revolution of 1688
when William was put on the throne,
which Locke defended, but from Burke's point of view
that was a minor palace affair not a fundamental or radical
revolution.
And in this sense Locke's view--I'm sorry,
Burke's view of the English Revolution,
for those of you who are historians here you might be
interested to know, is very much at odds with the
big new book called 1688 just recently published by
Professor Pincus in the history department here,
a very interesting book which argues that 1688 was a much more
radical break with the past than people thought at the time,
and certainly than Burke thought because Burke thought
that 1688 was not a radical break with the past whereas 1789
in France was a radical break with the past.
And I think that another thing to say before we get into the
particulars of Burke's view is that,
unlike everybody else you've read in this course,
Burke really does not have a theory of politics.
He does not have a set of premises that you can lay out,
conclusions to which he wants to get and then change of
reasoning that get him from A to B from the premises to the
conclusion.
There is no theory of politics in Burke.
With Kant we talk about universalizability.
Locke we talk about this commitment to principles of
scientific certainty.
Burke has, rather than a theory, he has an attitude or a
disposition, an outlook, and that outlook is
informed first and foremost by extreme distrust not only of
science, but of anybody who claims to
have scientific knowledge.
He thinks that human society is way too complicated for us ever
to get completely to the bottom of it.
That we are kind of carried along on a wave of very
complicated history that we understand only dimly,
if at all, and that that's not going to change.
The human condition is a condition first and foremost,
of fumbling in the dark.
He says, just to give you a flavor of this),
"The science of constituting a commonwealth,
or renovating it, or reforming it,
is, like every other experimental
science, not to be taught a priori."
So here you can see a complete resistance to the logical
reasoning that drove Hobbes and Locke in thinking about the
structure of mathematics and a system of axioms of the sort
Bentham tried to come up with.
"No," says Burke, "Nor is it a
short experience that can instruct us in that practical
science; because the real effects of
moral causes are not always immediate,
but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be
excellent in its remoter operation;
(so when we think we see something bad it might be having
a good effect) and its excellence may arise even from
the ill effects it produces in the beginning.
The reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes,
with very pleasing commencements,
have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.
In states there are often some obscure and almost latent
causes, things which appear at first
view of little moment, on which a very great part of
its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend."
So the world is fundamentally mysterious and murky.
And things that look good might have bad consequences.
The effects of our actions are going to be realized in the
distant future in ways that we can't possibly imagine.
And so that being the case the most important characteristic of
thinking about politics is caution.
We should be cautioned.
"The science of government being,
therefore, so practical in itself, and intended for such
practical purposes, a matter which requires
experience, and even more experience than
any person can gain in his whole life,
however sagacious and observing he may be,
it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture
upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any
tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society,
or on building it up again without having models and
patterns of approved utility before his eyes."
So what they did in the French Revolution was the antithesis of
what Burke recommends, because they swept everything
away and decided to build again tabula rasa.
Burke is deeply suspicious of all attempts to do that and he
thinks they'll end in disaster because the people who undertake
them will not know what they're doing,
and even more dangerous, they're not smart enough to
know how dumb they are.
They're not smart enough to realize that they really do not
know what they're doing.
They're not smart enough to understand that they will
unleash forces which they will not be able to control.
So Burke is, in that sense,
a conservative who thinks about social change in a very cautious
and incremental way.
He's not a reactionary in the sense of being someone who's
opposed to all change.
He's a conservative.
I think one of the nice definitions of conservatism in
Burke's sense was actually put forward by Sir Robert Peel in
the nineteenth century when he said--
he defined conservatism as, "Changing what you have to
in order to conserve what you can."
Changing what you have to in order to conserve what you can,
as distinct from a reactionary view which would be just flat
resistance to all change.
Now, of course, this idea of conservatism as
valuing tradition is very different from the libertarian
conservatism of Robert Nozick that we looked at earlier in the
course.
The libertarian conservatism of Robert Nozick is anti-statist,
anti-government, and resistance to authority
being imposed on you, hence the notion of libertarian
conservatism.
Burke is a traditionalist conservative.
He thinks that tradition is the core of human experience,
and he thinks whatever wisdom we have about politics is
embedded in the traditions that we have inherited.
"They have served us over centuries,"
this is his view writing at the end of the eighteenth century,
"they have served us for centuries.
They have evolved in a glacial way."
As I said, people make accommodations to change,
but only in order to conserve the inherited system of norms,
practices and beliefs in institutions that we reproduce
going forward.
So that's the sense in which it's a conservative tradition;
to conserve, the basic meaning of the word
conserve, conservative.
And so science is a really bad idea when applied to political
and social arrangements because there isn't scientific
knowledge, and anybody who claims to have
it is either a charlatan or a fool,
perhaps both.
And so, as I said, he doesn't have a theory
because he's skeptical of the very possibility of having a
theory.
He thinks we should, as Clint Eastwood says--
I've forgotten in which movie it is,
I think A Fistful of Dollars,
maybe--"A man's got to know his limitations.
Are you feeling lucky?"
A man's got to know his limitations, Burke thinks that
in spades.
He thinks we have to understand that our grasp of the human
condition is very limited and it's going to stay that way.
So, on the first of our two prongs of the Enlightenment
endeavor he's completely out of sympathy.
Now what about the second?
What about the commitment to this idea of the importance of
individual rights?
We saw how this developed initially in Locke's formulation
in a theological way when Locke argued that God created us with
the capacity to behave in a God like fashion in the world.
Each individual is the bearer of the capacity to create
things, and therefore have rights over his or her own
creation.
In Locke's view we're all equal.
We're equal in God's sight.
He creates us all equally, and we're all also equal in the
sense, very important for Locke,
that no earthly power has the authority to tell us what the
scripture says.
Each person must do it for himself,
and when they disagree they have to either find a mechanism
to manage their disagreement, or if they can't,
look for their reward in the next life.
But basically each individual is sovereign over themselves.
And that's where modern doctrines of individual rights
come from.
We saw how that played out with the workmanship ideal,
Mill's harm principle all the way down through Nozick and
Rawls.
Bentham has, I'm sorry; Burke has a very,
very different view of the idea of rights.
They're first of all, they are inherited.
They're not the product of reason or any contrived
theoretical formulations.
They're inherited.
"You will observe that from Revolution Society to the
Magna Carta it has been the uniform policy of our
constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed
inheritance derived to us from our forefathers,
and to be transmitted to posterity--
as an estate specially belonging to the people of this
kingdom, without any reference whatever
to any other more general or prior right.
By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a
diversity of its parts.
We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage,
and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges,
franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors."
So what we think of when we talk about rights for Burke,
first of all, they're not human rights or
natural rights for him, they are the rights of
Englishmen.
They are the rights of Englishmen;
they are particular rights.
They're the result of a particular tradition.
The idea that there could be universal rights doesn't make
any sense.
It's not an intelligible question, as far as Burke is
concerned, to assay what Rawls would say,
what rights would we create for all people in some abstract
setting?
It doesn't make any sense to him.
So it's the rights of Englishmen.
And indeed, when Burke was sympathetic to the American
Revolution, not the French Revolution,
it was because he thought that the rights of the American
colonists as Englishmen were being violated by the English
Crown.
And he was also sympathetic to claims for home rule for
Ireland, again, on the same sort of basis.
But it's this entailed inheritance, what we have been
born into as a system of rights and obligations that we
reproduce into the future.
And those rights, above all, are limited.
Again, just as our knowledge of the world is limited so our
rights, in the normative sense, are limited.
"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human wants.
Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by
this wisdom.
Among these wants is to be reckoned the want out of civil
society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions."
We have a right to be restrained, a very different
notion than a right to create things over which we have
authority, a right to be restrained.
"Society requires not only that the passions of individuals
should be subjected, but that even in the mass and
body, as well as in the individuals,
the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled, and their passions brought into
subjection.
This can only be done by a power out of themselves,
and not, in the exercise of its function,
subject to that will and to those passions which it is its
office to bridle and subdue.
In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties,
are to be reckoned among their rights."
The restraints on men, as well as their liberties,
are to be reckoned among their rights.
"But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications,
they cannot be settled upon an abstract rule (take that John
Rawls); and nothing is so foolish as to
discuss them upon that principle."
So we have a right to be restrained.
We have a right, most importantly,
that others are going to be restrained,
and that our passion should be controlled is something that he
insists is an important part of what we should think of under
the general heading of what it is that people have rights to.
"One of the first motives to civil society,
and which becomes one of its fundamental rules,
is that no man should be the judge in his own cause.
By this each person has at once divested himself of the first
fundamental right of uncovenanted man,
that is, to judge for himself and to assert his own
cause."
That's not that different from Locke, that first part.
After all, Locke talks about the state of nature as being
exactly a state in which we get to judge in our own cause,
but for Locke we give it up in a conditional way.
We never lose the right to revolution if society doesn't
protect us, and that's what he thought was triggered in 1688.
Burke says no.
"He advocates all right to be his own governor.
He inclusively, in a great measure,
abandons the right of self-defense,
the first law of nature.
Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state
together.
That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of
determining what it is in points the most essential to him.
That he may secure some liberty; he makes a surrender in trust
of the whole of it."
This, to some extent, has a Hobbesian flavor that
Hobbes says, "If we don't have law
we'll have civil war, and so we have to give up
freedom to authority."
The difference is even in Hobbes's formulation there's
ultimately the recognition that if society does not provide you
with protection you have a reasonable basis for resistance
and for overthrowing it.
But in Locke's case, I mean, in Burke's case he
doesn't want to concede even that.
Because we cannot, once we've made the transition
into civil society, we cannot go back.
There is no turning back.
We are part and parcel of this system of entailed inheritances
and that is the human condition all the way to the bottom.
He doesn't reject completely the metaphor of the social
contract, but he makes it indissoluble.
He says, "Society is indeed a contract.
Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional
interest may be dissolved at pleasure (if I make an agreement
with you to do something we can agree to dissolve our
agreement)-- but the state ought not to be
considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in
a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco,
or some other such low concern to be taken up for a little
temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the
fancy of the parties.
It is to be looked on with other reverence (the
"it" here is the state) - because it
is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross
animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature - it is a
partnership in all science; a partnership in all art;
a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection."
"As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained
in many generations, it becomes a partnership (now
this is the most famous sentence Burke ever wrote) not only
between those who are living, but between those who are
living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be
born."
A very different idea of the social contract,
partnership between those who are living, those who are dead
and those who are yet to be born.
"Each contract of each particular state is but a clause
in the general primeval contract of eternal society."
So, the "law is not subject to the will of those
(this is a flat rejection of workmanship),
who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior,
are bound to submit their will to that law.
The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not
morally at liberty at their pleasure,
and on the speculations of a contingent improvement,
wholly to separate and set asunder the bonds of their
subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an
unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of
elementary principles."
So one way of just driving home the radical break here between
his thought and the social contract theorists is to mention
that one of the standard criticisms that often gets made
of social contract theory is, well, even if there was a
social contact, you know, some people think of
the adoption of the American Constitution as a kind of social
contract.
After all it was ratified by the states.
Actually, the Articles of Confederation had said it had to
be unanimously ratified, and they couldn't get that,
so they changed it to three-quarters of the
confederacy states.
Still, there was an agreement of some sort,
and it was ratified and so on, but people have often said,
"Well, so what?
So those people in the eighteenth century made an
agreement.
I didn't.
What has it got to do with me?
Why should it be binding on subsequent generations?"
And that's often been a critique of the idea of the
social contract.
Burke turns that reasoning on its head.
He says, "Once we see that this social contract is
multi-generational between the dead,
the living, and those who are yet to be born,
who are you (any given individual),
who are you to think that you can upend it?
What gives you the right to pull the rug out from under this
centuries-old evolving social contract?
What gives you the right to take it away from those who
haven't even been born who are part of this (he even uses the
word eternal) eternally reproducing social
contract."
So it's a sort of mirror image of the critique which says,
"Well, we never made it so why should we be bound by
it?"
He says, "It preexisted you,
and you're going to predecease it, and you don't have the
right, you don't have the authority to
undermine it because any rights you think you have are the
product of this evolving contract,
they're contained within it."
So society is not subordinate to the individual,
which is the most rock-bottom commitment of the workmanship
idea.
On the contrary, the individual is subordinate
to society.
Obligations come before rights.
We only get rights as a consequence of the social
arrangements that give us our duties as well.
So whereas the Enlightenment tradition makes the individual
agent the sort of moral center of the universe,
this god-like individual creating things over which she
or he has absolute sovereign control,
is replaced by the exact mirror image of the idea of an
individual as subordinate to inherited communities,
traditions, social arrangements,
and political institutions to which he or she is ultimately
beholden.
If there was a pre-collective condition it's of no relevance
to us now because we can't go back to it,
and any attempt to try, look across the English Channel
and see what you're going to get.
That is the Burkean outlook in a nutshell, and it is,
as I said, the most fundamental critique of the Enlightenment
it's possible to make.
And even though the Enlightenment tradition,
as we have studied it here, was unfolding in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, this anti-Enlightenment
undertow has always been there as well.
Not to make the metaphor do too much work,
but you can really think of every wave of advancement in
Enlightenment thinking washing down the beach and producing an
undertow of resistance and resentment against it,
both philosophically, and I'm going to start talking
in a minute about twentieth-century Burkean
figures, but also politically.
One story about the rise of fundamentalism,
and jihadism, and ethnic separatism is this
is all part of the political undertow against the current
form that the Enlightenment political project is taking,
which is globalization, homogenization,
this sort of McDonald's effect on the world,
produces this backlash against globalization where people
affirm primordial-looking attachments,
even though there's probably no such thing as a genuinely
primordial one, separatists,
partial affiliations and allegiances,
connections to doctrines which deny the scientific and rational
project of the Enlightenment.
And so, just as globalization has been advancing we've seen a
resurgence of separatists, religious fundamentalists,
nationalists, and other kinds of identities.
Quite the opposite, for example,
of what Marx predicted.
Marx predicted that things like nationalism, sectarian
identifications, would go away,
and Lenin too.
They thought that as the principles of capitalism defused
themselves throughout the world, things like national
attachments would go away.
And indeed on the eve of the First World War there was the
Second Communist International where they basically came out
and said to the workers of Europe,
"Don't get involved in this national war.
It's not in your interest.
You have a common class interest across nations against
the interest of employers across nations,"
and of course this fell on completely deaf ears.
In 1916 the Second International pretty much
disintegrated.
And, in fact, one of the big paradoxes of the
twentieth century has been the persistence of things like
nationalism through the first two world wars and then in the
last part of the twentieth century,
this resurgence of religious and other forms of
traditionalist attachment that are fundamentally antithetical
to the Enlightenment project.
So the Enlightenment has always produced reaction,
undertow, rejection, often from the people who don't
benefit from it, and it's one of the ways in
which I think the proponents of the Enlightenment have always
been politically na�ve.
They've always thought that as modernization and Enlightenment
diffuses itself throughout the world these kinds of primitive
thinking will go away.
Well, it turns out that they don't,
and so one of the big tasks of political science at the present
time is to try and understand why,
to try and understand what the dynamics of political
affiliation and identity attachment really are.
And so that's a Burkean agenda.
Now if you fast-forward from Burke to the middle of the
twentieth century, I had you read a short piece,
very famous and important piece,
by Lord Devlin who was an English judge.
Like Burke, someone with Irish origins,
though some certain amount of ethnic ambiguity in both cases
there about just how much Irish and just how much English,
but we needn't detain ourselves with that in this course.
And he was commenting upon something called the Wolfenden
Report, which was published in 1959 by
a commission that had been asked to tell the British Parliament
what it should do about homosexuality and prostitution.
And the Wolfenden Report had said, "The laws against
them should be repealed.
They should both be legalized on the grounds (they didn't use
these terms but this is the basic thought or the term we
would use today) that both homosexuality and prostitution
are victimless crimes."
They are, to use the jargon of our course, Pareto-superior
exchanges.
They're voluntary transactions among consenting adults that
don't harm anybody else.
And of course this was put in a different idiom because it was
the 1950s, but that was essentially the point.
They don't harm anybody, so it's just traditional
prejudice, bigotry that leads us to outlaw these things and we
shouldn't do it.
That was what the Wolfenden Report had said.
And Burkean-to-the-core Lord Devlin says, "No!"
I don't know how caught up you are in the reading.
Anyone who has read Burke--I'm sorry, Devlin,
tell us why he thinks this.
Yeah?
We need to get you the mic.
Why he thinks, why is it that Lord Devlin
thinks that the mere fact that there's no harm is not enough of
a basis for legalizing homosexuality and prostitution.
Yeah?
Student: He claims that it's not an attack against the
individual but a harm against society.
Prof: So what does that mean, though,
when you say it's a harm against society?
How do you unpack that in your own mind?
Student: I guess it's maybe an attack against the
morals that society tends to agree to.
Prof: Yeah, well, agreed.
Let's put brackets around agreed.
It's not what we mean by it, but certainly the morals that
are there.
And where do they come from?
Where do those morals, I mean, so we have a moral code
that says homosexuality and prostitution are wrong,
but where does that come?
Anyone?
Yeah?
Student: Well, he put a lot of weight on the
basis of religion for driving one's morals.
Prof: Correct, religion, an interesting--look
what he says about religion.
He says, "Morals and religions are inextricably
joined-- the moral standards generally
accepted in Western civilization being those belonging to
Christianity.
Outside Christendom (there's a 1950s word, we don't say
Christendom anymore, do we?)
other standards derive from other religions."
Outside Christendom other standards derived from other
religion.
"In England we believe in the Christian idea of marriage
and therefore adopt monogamy as a moral principle.
Consequently the Christian institution of marriage has
become the basis of family life, and so part of the structure of
our society.
It is there not because it is Christian (this comes to the
point about whether we've agreed).
It has got there because it is Christian,
but it remains there because it is built into the house in which
we live and could not be removed without bringing it down."
It's there not because it's Christian, it got there because
it's Christian, it's a matter of history.
It was a Christian civilization.
So we have a Christian conception of morality,
but he's not saying it's true.
He's not saying that the Christian set of beliefs about
religion is true.
He has no interest in the question of whether or not it's
true.
He's saying here, "A different society might
be glued together by a different religion which wouldn't create
monogamy.
It might create polygamy, and that would have its own
history and its own system of rights and institutions and
everything that goes with that."
So it's conservative in the sense of affirming tradition,
but not conservative in the sense of saying there are
absolute moral values.
Neither Burke nor Devlin ventures any opinion on that
subject.
They say it's not even really important.
What's important is that the people in the society believe in
these values.
And if the people in this society don't believe in some
system of values as authoritative,
the society will fall apart.
You can't put together a society just on the basis of
interest.
It needs more.
It needs moral glue.
So these folks, you could say when I say they
don't really have a theory in the sense that we've looked at
theories up until now in this course,
it's because you could say, "Well,
they're not political theorists.
They're really sort of sociologists.
They're really sociologists of stability because they're saying
that it's necessary for a society to be stable that it's
held together by this kind of moral glue of authoritative
opinion."
So when you say to Lord Devlin, when he's defending the
outlawing of homosexuality and prostitution,
"Well, that's just your bigotry,"
his answer wouldn't be to deny that it's in some absolute sense
an irrational position, but he would say,
"Every society needs its bigotry.
Every society needs its prejudices."
And so he doesn't appeal to rationality, but he does appeal
to what he calls reasonableness.
And what is reasonableness?
It's basically the system of beliefs, as he puts it,
"of the man on the Clapham omnibus."
We might today say the woman on the A train reading the New York
Post.
The prejudices of the average person that is the basic
yardstick, and if the average person is
appalled by some practices, then they should be illegal.
And that's the beginning and end of it.
So what about that?
You could fast-forward it since he talks about homosexuality and
what we call gay rights today.
If you look at the American trajectory,
in 1986 this came up before the Supreme Court in a case called
Bowers versus Hardwick, and they essentially took the
Burke-Devlin position.
That is that states should be allowed to outlaw homosexuality
because most people find it deplorable.
A couple of years ago it came back to the court and they said,
"Well, mores have evolved enough since 1986 that we're
going to overturn Bowers versus Hardwick,"
very Burkean.
They're following the man on the Clapham omnibus.
They're following the woman on the A train's prejudices,
beliefs and values, and that's as it should be.
What about that?
How many people find this appealing?
Only two?
How many people find it unappealing?
So we still have at least half undecided.
What's unappealing about it?
Yeah?
Student: >
Prof: Take the microphone.
Student: According to his perspective we might still
have a system of slavery in this country.
Prof: According to this perspective we would still have
slavery in this country.
Well, I think he wouldn't concede the point that quickly.
He would say what I just said about Bowers versus Hardwick
that if the views of the man on the Clapham omnibus evolve
enough, then we can recognize change.
Now you might want to not accept that because what if they
happen before--Yeah?
Student: Yeah, to refute that I would just say
that our morals and our ideas of what is right and wrong are
shaped by the systems that we were born into and consequently
I feel like Burke and Devlin's system ascribes a great deal of
value to the moral conceptions at the beginning of society and
that almost leads us to a system of stasis in terms of our
morality.
There seems to be too much stasis and no ability to
reevaluate given how our moral systems are shaped.
Prof: I think that's right,
and we will pick up with this on Monday,
but if you think that the basic society structure is okay you're
likely to find this doctrine appealing,
but if you think the basic structure of the society is
deeply unjust then you're likely to be affronted by this outlook
because one person's reasonable morality is another person's
hegemony, and we'll start with that idea
next time.
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