Anti-Climacus

A NOTE ON SOMETHING THAT CAME UP IN CLASS TODAY:

One of the things that fascinates me about the classroom experience is the set of opinions or attitudes that students take up when first approaching new material (or approaching it in a different way). I've been through several iterations of just war theory being explained, and the observation I've made is that one opinion predominates, at first: if a war is just, then it's acceptable to use whatever means necessary to win it.* My best guess as to why this opinion appears as much as I've seen it is that when thinking about just war, the case everyone goes to is World War II. The evil there is sufficiently bad that a lot of acts that may not be licit in even the general run of things are at least okay (even Michael Walzer takes this position for some parts of the war). Thus from the case comes the rule. It's the job of the teacher to set out the reasons to follow ius in bello restrictions--they're not alien considerations, but more work has to be done to give students the full conceptual apparatus.

Today's interesting variant on this was a confimation of everything Jeremy Waldron writes in Law and Disagreement. In the context of discussing possible solutions (constitutionally and policy-wise) to the abortion issue, there was a strong sentiment that abortion is exactly the sort of thing you don't want legislated. The reasons given are the ones Waldron identifies as the common elements of skepticism about legislation: legislation is done by politicians (and politicians are influenced by interest groups, or not wanting to appear to adopt particular opinions), it's subjective in a really bad way, it assumes that it matters what the broader public wants when rights are in question.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this fact (among other things, I haven't seen it repeated in other contexts, as with the just war stuff), but it seems interesting and in need of explanation to me.

*If given a quick push back on this, they tend to move to a position of: "if a war is just, then it's acceptable to use whatever means so long as the other side has used them first."