How are so many impassioned modern-day commentators against slavery the heirs of Taney and Thoreau? (See previous post to see the impact of Kant on Taney and the South.)
Answer: Start at "Perfect happiness" and read to the end of the paragraph.
Showing posts with label Taney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taney. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
p. 292-297 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa
How did Taney use Kant's categorical imperative in his Dred Scot opinion? How did abolitionists ironically side with Taney's use of the categorical imperative? How is the categorical imperative one and the same with Thomas Sowell's unconstrained classification?
Answers on p. 292 - 297
Answers on p. 292 - 297
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Friday, August 27, 2010
p. 217 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa
What was the great rift between Taney/Davis vs. Alexander Stephens? Given the various rifts between prominent Southerners regarding the Constitution, the Declaration, succession, revolution, etc. behind what ideas did the South eventually rally?
I think the answer is that, according to Taney/Davis, regardless as to whether you were for or against slavery, if the government restricted Southerners from take their own property into the new territories it could only do so by violating the Constitutional rights of the Southern states (and Taney/Davis saw Constitutional rights as group rights and not so much as individual rights).
I think the answer is that, according to Taney/Davis, regardless as to whether you were for or against slavery, if the government restricted Southerners from take their own property into the new territories it could only do so by violating the Constitutional rights of the Southern states (and Taney/Davis saw Constitutional rights as group rights and not so much as individual rights).
Saturday, August 7, 2010
p. 77 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa
What is the difference between the old revisionists (circa 1920) who said the Civil War was unnecessary, and the new revisionists who are all modern-day abolitionists? And what is it that joins the modern-day revisionists with Justice Taney?
Relevant Passages: The earlier revisionists, whose hero was Stephen A. Douglas, thought that sensible statesmanship would always work for the subordination of moral questions to matters of interests, and consequently for the peaceful accommodation of conflicting interests. In this respect, they preserved something of the rationalist tradition they otherwise rejected.
Their successors, however, have substituted commitment for reasonableness (in any sense of that word) as the norm by which human actions are to he judged. Our latter-day writers, who generally detest Douglas, are by and large committed to the moral superiority of the antislavery cause. For them, the impotence of reason to decide moral questions does not mean, as the earlier revisionists concluded, that moral questions should be ignored, bypassed, or compromised. It means rather that a full-blooded and passionate commitment should he made to the position one regards as moral. Since reason cannot speak against their moral commitment, there is no reason for them to moderate their passionate feelings about slavery.
They have much in common with Chief Justice Roger Taney, who in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, declared that the Signers of the Declaration of Independence could not have regarded slavery as wrong, since they did not abolish it-ignoring the fact that, in any event, they had no power to abolish it! For such historians as these, the portrayal of a "racist" American Founding is a necessary preamble to the disavowal of any authority to the principles of the Revolution, notably those enshrined in the Declaration.
Relevant Passages: The earlier revisionists, whose hero was Stephen A. Douglas, thought that sensible statesmanship would always work for the subordination of moral questions to matters of interests, and consequently for the peaceful accommodation of conflicting interests. In this respect, they preserved something of the rationalist tradition they otherwise rejected.
Their successors, however, have substituted commitment for reasonableness (in any sense of that word) as the norm by which human actions are to he judged. Our latter-day writers, who generally detest Douglas, are by and large committed to the moral superiority of the antislavery cause. For them, the impotence of reason to decide moral questions does not mean, as the earlier revisionists concluded, that moral questions should be ignored, bypassed, or compromised. It means rather that a full-blooded and passionate commitment should he made to the position one regards as moral. Since reason cannot speak against their moral commitment, there is no reason for them to moderate their passionate feelings about slavery.
They have much in common with Chief Justice Roger Taney, who in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, declared that the Signers of the Declaration of Independence could not have regarded slavery as wrong, since they did not abolish it-ignoring the fact that, in any event, they had no power to abolish it! For such historians as these, the portrayal of a "racist" American Founding is a necessary preamble to the disavowal of any authority to the principles of the Revolution, notably those enshrined in the Declaration.
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