Law in Contemporary Society

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JonathanGuerraFirstPaper 4 - 20 Sep 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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The Untold Story

The businessman is cognizant that humans are creatures that need to feel desired and need to feel as though they are a part of something meaningful. He is driven by success and some antecedent condition in his life has caused him to believe that his success is determined by how much money he can make. The businessman is a person who because of his genetic disposition and upbringing feels it is ok for him to capitalize on the vulnerable dispositions of others—he may very well be addicted to a chemical rush that results from this. Therefore he is compelled to appeal to consumers’ emotions so that they may make him rich.
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  • This isn't an argument at all: it's just silliness. Every repeat smoker is physically addicted to nicotine, for which there is a wealth of evidence; your "addiction to scamming people" is a pure invention for which there is no evidence of any kind. The employment of this sort of rhetoric is discrediting: no serious conversation is happening, and it is apparent that this is mere disagreement for disagreement's own sake.
 

The Turn

So what makes this story any less likely than the story given to us for why consumers do not exercise choice? Nothing. They may both be true, and if so neither the businessman nor the consumer is blameworthy. Or both stories may be false—the result of an evolutionary survival mechanism designed to identify cause when there is none. However, it seems improbable that one story is true and the other is not. For this would entail that some human beings are unencumbered by causality.

So What?

Professor Moglen has done what many do: he inconsistently applied a theory of blameworthiness. So what? I concede this is not a prodigious error, but given the complexities of using determinism as a basis for blame, when in fact it is the quintessential basis of no blame for anyone, I think it should be abandoned. A better approach would be to lay out values that most of us agree on, and from those values determine whether the tobacco hustler and the corporate peddler can be blamed for acting contrary to them.
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  • I don't know what the point of revising was here. You haven't actually met my objections, or tried to show that we are disagreeing about something I too can recognize as a disagreement. It's not a conversation. You're asserting that I've made some sort of mistake, but as I pointed out last time, you'd be better off attending to the clear statement of your idea before deciding whether we are actually in disagreement and if so, whether you're right. None of that happened in revision, so it's still a matter of your jeering at me on the basis of an argument I can't follow against ideas I don't recognize as my own.

Revision 4r4 - 20 Sep 2009 - 20:54:20 - EbenMoglen
Revision 3r3 - 19 Apr 2009 - 22:44:52 - JonathanGuerra
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