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AnjaHavedalFirstPaper 4 - 26 Mar 2009 - Main.IanSullivan
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
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> | | | | Greed, Justice, and the 25-Million-Dollar Question | | | If an imagined influx of cash does not make us think about alternative paths, we are propelled by something other than greed. As lawyers, before we can serve justice, this is where we need to find ourselves. This must necessarily be our starting point. | |
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- I don't understand the superiority of position implicit in this supposed condition. The annual income on $25 million would be not less than $1 million, and to say that you couldn't think of a single good thing you could do in the world with a million a year would be a stunning absence of imagination at the very least. Spiritual pride is not an asset, it's an obstacle, unless you believe in one of the systems in which it's a sin.
- "Greed" is the self-interest of others, and naturally we are unsympathetic. Our own self-interest has other and less shocking names. But the sermon cannot be against self-interest, for if men were angels there would be no need of sermons. The point is to understand our self-interest in relation to the importance of our social commitments and values. Having done so, we neither have to pretend that we are indifferent whether we are potato farmers in Afghanistan or professors in Berlin, nor to imagine for some reason that money plays a very large role in every surrounding human life but our own.
- Speaking for myself, I need more than your supposed fortune, because the work I do presently costs about $2 million per year, which would be the income on something closer to $50 million. Instead of having that money, of course, I go out and raise it, which means that both the way I teach law and the way I practice it are affected by the experiences I have in the course of raising the resources for the work I mean to do. That's not all bad, but I can say—without thereby standing convicted of greed—that I would evidently do things differently if I had $25 or $50 million.
- I think a careful and unsparing discussion of the relation between self-interest and social concern would be immensely helpful in the development of our identities as lawyers. I think you're on the right track in your perception of the issues. But I think the post-colonial Buddha-natured pre-industrial "the love of possession is a disease with them" counterculture politics approach leaves most readers out in the cold. They don't have the combination of Calvinism and social democracy that makes eliminating the need for material comfort a healthy step in the direction of fulfilled adulthood. So maybe there's another way to get the conversation going?
| META TOPICMOVED | by="AnjaHavedal" date="1235770875" from="Sandbox.AnjaHavedalFirstPaper" to="LawContempSoc.AnjaHavedalFirstPaper" |
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| META TOPICMOVED | by="AnjaHavedal" date="1235770875" from="Sandbox.AnjaHavedalFirstPaper" to="LawContempSoc.AnjaHavedalFirstPaper" |
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| Revision 4 | r4 - 26 Mar 2009 - 22:07:54 - IanSullivan |
| Revision 3 | r3 - 28 Feb 2009 - 17:37:50 - AnjaHavedal? |
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