Barry Obama and the Ethic of Justice

By now, you’re all familiar with President Obama’s description of what he’s looking for in a judge – someone with “empathy,” who can look beyond the law and understand the plight of the single mom or the minority businessowner.

This perspective reveals one of the fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives: the ethic of justice versus the ethic of care.

When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it...  Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly -- ...but in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.

In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn’t to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.

[So] ...Now we can see clearly what’s been happening in the United States during the last three decades.  While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 19:05:17 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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