Lawyers, ethics, guns, and money

Well, no guns and money (just a Warren Zevon fan). But I've been thinking about that earlier post on Kinsley vs. Krauthammer, and how a city filled with lawyers (the DC one) discusses ethical issues. Nothing against lawyers here, per se, but there is a distinction to be drawn in the ostensive public debate as dominated by the juridical and its putative rigor -- because it refers to empirically doctrinal texts, which renders rigorous what is actually facile -- and the uncertainty that requires agility of mind in ethical discourse beyond doctrinal texts where absolutes are indeed difficult to sustain but relativism is equally so. So, what guideposts, lines of thinking, rules of inference to use when these poles essentially form the basis of strawman arguments? The DC legalistic answer is juridical. The DC economistic answer is cost-benefit. The Krauthammer vs. Kinsley discussion is reducible to these two modes of deliberation, excluding the ethical from an issue that is all about the ethical -- the juridical is empty of content without it. Thus continues the impoverishment of ethical debate in American public discourse. Ultimately, the juridical carves out a conservative space of judgment without ethical deliberation. The economic carves out the conservative space of cost, which is the most reductionistic self-interested form of the ethical.

I've been reading a bit of Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz. Agamben suggests that one of the common mistakes made about not only the camps but any discussion of morality and immorality is in taking law and ethics to be coextensive:

...the tacit confusion of ethical categories and juridical categories (or worse, of juridical categories and theological categories, which gives rise to a new theodicy). Almost all the categories that we use in moral and religious judgments are in some way contaminated by law: guilt, responsibility, innocence, judgment, pardon.... This makes it difficult to invoke them without particular caution. As jurists well know, law is not directed toward the establishment of justice. Nor is it directed toward the verification of truth. Law is solely directed toward judgment, independent of truth and justice.... The ultimate aim of law is res judicata, in which the sentence becomes the substitute for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice. Law finds peace in this hybrid creature, of which it is impossible to say if it is fact or rule; once law has produced its res judicata, it cannot go any further.

About Auschwitz in particular, Agamben writes,

Despite the necessity of the trials and despite their evident insufficiency (they involved only a few hundred people), they helped to spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome. The judgments had been passed, the proofs of guilt definitively established. With the exception of occasional moments of lucidity, it has taken almost half a century to understand that law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself, dragging it to its own ruin....

Behind the powerlessness of God peeps the powerlessness of men, who continue to cry "May that never happen again!" when it is clear that "that" is, by now, everywhere.

Tell me, aren't you ashamed? Aren't you ashamed of the discourse of torture or anything of such immense ethical importance -- immense because it touches not only law or economics or policy, but the very core of who humans take themselves to be and moves us back in the direction of barbarism? The common public discourse (which is a misnomer in this land, led as it is by opinionist "intellectuals" like Kinsley and Krauthammer and Wills), based as it is in the juridical and the economic, allows us to draw the circle of deliberation tighter to our little desiring chests, let our ill-defined "intellectuals" do the public thinking for us within an even tighter circle of capacity and intellectual patience, and emptily ignore the basic shift of human-ness led by those Arendt referred to as having "the curious, quite authentic inability to think."