[lit-ideas] Re: Euthyphro & Habermas
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:36:41 -0800
Mike Geary wrote:
Occasionally on lunch duty -- one detail of which was to patrol the
school grounds -- a timid/scrupulous student or two would come and
ask me if they could leave campus to go to the corner market (there
was always a steady stream of students to the store that no teacher
so far as I knew had ever tried to interdict). Of course I could
not, as a school official, say "yes" without assuming possibly
enormous legal consequences, and so I would, of course, say "no" even
as the stream of students walked by shouting hello's.
Occasionally students would ask me whether they could get their papers
in after
the deadline, tell me that they had to leave a week before the end of term (in
order to catch a connecting flight on their way to Switzerland), etc.
Stop! I'd
say. Don't ask me if you can do it, because I'll have to say you can't or
shouldn't. Just do it; then we'll both have to deal with it somehow. If anyone
thinks there should be a symmetry between judgments before the fact and after
it, they must be inveterate Kantians.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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