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Showing posts from July, 2018

Can Our Politics Be Moral?

It seems such an odd question. If it strikes us as odd, it’s probably because we’ve become inured to the corruption and duplicity of our current exceedingly-polarized politics. Nowadays, when we think of moral , we probably think there’s an ought hidden in there, as in “we ought to do this, and we ought not do that.” We say to ourselves, “Folks who think or do this are moral, while folks who think or do that are immoral.” That’s conventional wisdom (though for many it is more conventional than wisdom), and each of us quite likely has at least some inchoate sense of the sorts of ideas and behaviors that we would judge to be moral or not. Politics, on the other hand, is about gaining and exercising power through the apparatus of government in order to achieve certain ends, outcomes, purposes, or objectives sought by citizens. In a civil community or society where many people live together under a government, unanimous agreement is extremely rare because the objectives vary; d

Homeless? You're Under Arrest!

So sacred and inviolable is the home that no one may enter it lawfully for any purpose without the expressed consent of the home’s occupant – or a lawfully-obtained warrant based upon probable cause. Whether the home in question is a millionaire’s multi-million dollar mansion overlooking the sweeping valleys of the Rocky Mountains, or an impoverished farmworker’s hovel in southern Arizona, or something in between, the right of the owner to be safe and secure in his or her person and possessions in their place of residence is inviolate. The trajectory of development for this idea goes back to Roman civil laws on privacy, from where the principle was incorporated into English common law. The doctrine of privacy and the right to be safe and secure in one’s own home was articulated by the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, who in 1604 ruled in a case that “the house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence, as for his repose; … d