A few months ago I wrote a recommendation for an honorary university degree for the Chinese filmmaker Hu Jie. I wrote that I admired Hu's commitment to justice and introduced myself to the selection committee as a common laborer in the fields of American criminal law. "We make judgments there," I wrote. It is the job description for us field hands as well as for our legal aristocracy to make judgments. It is our duty. Apart from the job specs it seems to me we, all we's not just legal we's, should make judgments. That is a normative judgment, a judgment of a judgment.
I would like to read scholarly writing on Abraham Lincoln which makes normative judgments. In biographies which concatenate the atoms of Lincoln's presidency I would like to read normative judgments on those atoms and on the...molecules, on the whole shebang. I would not like to hear another rendition of Dixie on the Balcony.
On rest breaks in the fields the undersigned has thought about the normative judgments which he should make on Lincoln's presidency and scratched out some "drafts" of those thoughts which he until now has not "published." The undersigned would like to see writing on these matters by better angels.
The world has seen armed conflict between nations precipitated by a soccer match. It has seen armed conflict in the uninhabited and uninhabitable Himalayas over an invisible mountain border. It may see it yet over two tiny uninhabited ocean outcrops and an invisible watery boundary. The consensus normative judgment of scholars on the 1969 El Salvador-Honduras war and the 1962 India-China war is: "stupid." It shall be the same if China and Japan start shooting at each other over those South China Sea islands. Experts agree that these examples show that "morality" is not necessary incitement to war. Is it sufficient?
Counterpoised to the above instances of human disharmony the 1861-1865 upset known as the American "Civil War" was occasioned by human bondage which most non-soccer fans agree does implicate human morality more so than does sports. Slavery implicated human morality in the heart and mind of Abraham Lincoln, who made numerous statements over his adult life condemning the practice as "wrong" and expressing his "hatred" of it, and who was elected president of the thirty-three United States in 1860. Lincoln's anti-slavery bona fides were so impressive that by his inauguration he was president only of twenty-six states, seven others, pro-slavery states, had seceded after his election and set up their own country, the Confederate States of America, with their own president and everything.
Lincoln felt misunderstood.
Lincoln felt that the seven pro-slavery states that had seceded had gotten him all wrong and on the occasion of his inauguration gave a speech in which he pointed out to them that he had just taken an "oath" before God to "support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," that said Constitution made unmistakable reference to the permissibility of slavery, and that he could not, consistent with his oath, nor would he, do anything to disabuse Southern white men of their human property. To a chorus of mystic chords Lincoln movingly concluded that white men like him who believed slavery "wrong" and white men like them who owned slaves "are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies."
Both the logic and the music of Lincoln's appeal fell flat on his friends in the South who five weeks later attacked.
I would like to read scholarly writing on Abraham Lincoln which makes normative judgments. In biographies which concatenate the atoms of Lincoln's presidency I would like to read normative judgments on those atoms and on the...molecules, on the whole shebang. I would not like to hear another rendition of Dixie on the Balcony.
On rest breaks in the fields the undersigned has thought about the normative judgments which he should make on Lincoln's presidency and scratched out some "drafts" of those thoughts which he until now has not "published." The undersigned would like to see writing on these matters by better angels.
The world has seen armed conflict between nations precipitated by a soccer match. It has seen armed conflict in the uninhabited and uninhabitable Himalayas over an invisible mountain border. It may see it yet over two tiny uninhabited ocean outcrops and an invisible watery boundary. The consensus normative judgment of scholars on the 1969 El Salvador-Honduras war and the 1962 India-China war is: "stupid." It shall be the same if China and Japan start shooting at each other over those South China Sea islands. Experts agree that these examples show that "morality" is not necessary incitement to war. Is it sufficient?
Counterpoised to the above instances of human disharmony the 1861-1865 upset known as the American "Civil War" was occasioned by human bondage which most non-soccer fans agree does implicate human morality more so than does sports. Slavery implicated human morality in the heart and mind of Abraham Lincoln, who made numerous statements over his adult life condemning the practice as "wrong" and expressing his "hatred" of it, and who was elected president of the thirty-three United States in 1860. Lincoln's anti-slavery bona fides were so impressive that by his inauguration he was president only of twenty-six states, seven others, pro-slavery states, had seceded after his election and set up their own country, the Confederate States of America, with their own president and everything.
Lincoln felt misunderstood.
Lincoln felt that the seven pro-slavery states that had seceded had gotten him all wrong and on the occasion of his inauguration gave a speech in which he pointed out to them that he had just taken an "oath" before God to "support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," that said Constitution made unmistakable reference to the permissibility of slavery, and that he could not, consistent with his oath, nor would he, do anything to disabuse Southern white men of their human property. To a chorus of mystic chords Lincoln movingly concluded that white men like him who believed slavery "wrong" and white men like them who owned slaves "are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies."
Both the logic and the music of Lincoln's appeal fell flat on his friends in the South who five weeks later attacked.
