Are You Patient Enough to Actually Think? — Law Professor Jedediah Purdy’s Fine Essay about Capitalism, Freedom, and Ignored Questions

© 2012 Peter Free

 

23 January 2012

 

 

The value of a legal education has nothing to do with law — but with the power to think competently

 

Law professor Jedediah Purdy saved me the trouble of writing about "our" dim-witted non-grasp of what is really at stake in political conversations about capitalism, regulation, and freedom.

 

If you are a thoughtful person, and one concerned about the escapist avoidance that characterizes American politics, I recommend Purdy’s short essay.

 

Though Professor Purdy’s ethical stance is presumably “liberal,” his analytical framework is not.  Intelligent conservatives will benefit from analyzing their own ethical platforms via Purdy’s obvious, but almost uniformly overlooked, insights.

 

 

Citation

 

Jedediah Purdy, The (Im)morality of Capitalism: How to Have the Argument We Aren't Having, Huffington Post (23 January 2011)

 

 

A sample from Purdy’s relatively short essay

 

This is the kind of “reality” dilemma that good law professors highlight:

 

If we think freedom means making your own choices and taking responsibility for them, big and complex financial capitalism doesn't meet the test in any simple way.

 

It leaves too many people out of too many of the choices that shape their lives most basically.

 

The only level where it's possible to exercise control over these decisions is political and legal.

 

Regulations have their costs and problems, of course, but so does less regulation.

 

Talking about freedom doesn't dissolve the question, and decisions about what kind of market to have are not avoidable -- although of course it is possible to ignore them and pretend we never made a decision. But that is thoughtlessness masquerading as tough-mindedness.

 

© 2012 Jedediah Purdy, The (Im)morality of Capitalism: How to Have the Argument We Aren't Having, Huffington Post (23 January 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

The moral? — We don’t get anywhere particularly positive by constantly ignoring the obvious difficulties that Reality sets in front of us

 

Avoidance, denial, and the inability to deal with unavoidable nuance are not admirable traits.  Government by “sound bite” is foolishly inept.

 

Reality is almost always too complex to gain workable directions from too-broad definitions.  The “Devil being in the details” is  Purdy’s point.

 

This phenomenon is somewhat similar to the difference between (a) being asked to go to the grocery store for “food, whenever” — versus (b) making a budget-prioritized list of what we will actually need (for specific members of the family) today, tomorrow, and a week from now.