The Morality of Consent
Just finished the first chapter of Alexander Bickel's "The Morality of Consent." It was a discourse on the two legs of American (Classical) Liberalism, Lockean-Rousseauian contractarian liberalism and Burkean "conservatism." Don't know if I entirely buy into Bickel's Burkean sympathies. It seems to me that Burke (or Bickel, more accurately) is trying to root morality in reality, with social norms and moral norms that tie a society together taken as given. But doesn't that make their "conservative" moral-arguments prudential and circumstantial rather than moral? I guess that depends on how we define the "moral."It also shed light on my understanding of the Confucian classics. Can we regard Confucius as a Burkean and Mencius/Yangming Wang as Kantians-German Classicals? (Eurocentrism aside perhaps we should really call Kant a Neo-Confucian and Burke a Confucian?) I also wonder how would Chun-I Tang fit in. Despite his conservative talk he seems to be a bred-in-the-bone Neo-Confucian.
I also wonder what Bickel and Charles Fried would say to each other when they meet (I'll be taking Fried's constitutional law class over the next academic year...)
posted by James Chang @ 11:56 AM
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