Read on Twitter
These Polish protests remind me of George Grant's response to Roe v. Wade:
The decision then speaks modern liberalism in its pure contractual form: right prior to good; a foundational contract protecting individual rights; the neutrality of the state concerning moral 'values'; social pluralism supported by and supporting this neutrality.
Indeed the decision has been greeted as an example of the nobility or American contractarian institutions and political ideology, because the right of an individual 'person' is defended in the decision against the power of a majority in a legislature.
Nevertheless, however 'liberal' this decision may seem at the surface, it raises a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism. The poison is presented in the unthought ontology. In negating the right to existence for foetuses of less than six months, the judge has to say what such..
Foetuses are not. They are not person but whatever else may be said of mothers and foetuses, it cannot be denied that they are of the same species... In adjudicating for the right of the mother to choose whether another member of the species lives or dies, the judge has to...
Make an ontological distinction between members of the same species. The mother is a person; the foetus is not. In deciding what is due in justice to beings of the sake species, he bases such differing dueness on ontology. By calling the distinction ontological I mean simply...
That the knowledge which the judge has about mothers and foetuses is not scientific. To call certain beings 'persons' is not a scientific statement. But once ontological affirmation is made the basis of denying the most elementary right of traditional justice to members...
Of our species, ontological questioning cannot be silenced at this point. Because such a distinction between members of the same species has been made, the decision unavoidably opens up the whole question of what our species is. What is it about members of our species which...
Makes the liberal rights of justice their due? [H]as the long tradition of liberal right any support in what human beings in fact are? Is this a question that in the modern era can be truthfully answered in the positive? Or does it hand the cup of poison to our liberalism?
Grant's conclusion in the essay is that yes, it does. Roe "Commends th' ingredients of our poison'd chalice/To our own lips."
Grant again: For the last centuries a civilizational contradiction has moved our western lives. Our greatest intellectual endeavour--the new co-penetration of 'logos' and 'techne'-- affirmed at its heart that in understanding anything we know it is ruled by necessity and chance.
This affirmation entailed the elimination of the ancient notion of good from the understanding of anything. At the same time, our day-to-day organization was in the main directed by a conception of justice formulated in relation to the ancient science, in which the notion of...
Good was essential to the understanding of what is. This civilizational contradiction arose from the attempt of the articulate to hold together what was given them in modern science with a content of justice which has been developed out of an older order of what is.
He continues that Nietzsche was the first to discover this contradiction, and the first to argue that we should not live in it any longer. Nietzsche would very predictably have us dispense with justice altogether and be governed according to will.
Grant however is a Platonist. He hopes that the conception of justice outlined in the Republic will overcome the Nietzschean alternative. In the English speaking world we have one advantage and one disadvantage in that.
Adv: people are still loyal to our ancient legal institutions
Disadv: we have long been disinterested in the thought about the whole of justice which is now required.
Disadv: we have long been disinterested in the thought about the whole of justice which is now required.
As usual when I'm reading Grant, I agree with him up to the point where he makes his pessimistic conclusion. It seems to me that we are living out the consequences of the contradictions in the liberal conception of justice now, and there is a real possibility that we can...
Resolve it in the Platonic direction.
This is the last chapter of English Speaking Justice which I highly recommend.
