Thursday, March 23, 2006
(8:54 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Trial Logic and Everyday Life: An Observation
I have written before about my impatience with the idea that every debate has "two sides" and have traced it to the domination of two political parties in the United States. Now, however, I am starting to think that there is another source for this problem: the American judicial system. I am not in a position to judge the effectiveness of that system in absolute terms -- certainly it has its benefits and drawbacks. But in any case, the purpose of the judicial system is not to get at the objective truth; in fact, in many cases, the lawyers on either side have a vested interest in concealing the objective truth, and decisive evidence is excluded if it was not obtained legally. The purpose, rather, is to produce a legal judgment in accordance with certain legal norms. Sometimes that means that factually innocent people are convicted and even put to death; sometimes that means that factually guilty people go free.Through a bizarre series of misunderstandings -- first among them the idea that the Founding Fathers decisively answered every possible political question -- the judicial system has become, in the minds of many Americans (at least white Americans), the privileged means for obtaining truth, and every important question tends to be approached in ways modelled on that system. For example, we tend to say: "The jury is still out on that," a telling metaphor for questions that seem to remain undecided.
The jury system in particular seems to shape Americans' approach to serious questions. Having just narrowly avoided serving on one, I was reminded of the stringent standards used in choosing a jury: ideally, no previous knowledge of a case, no preexisting biases that might favor one side or the other, etc., etc. The overall goal is to act as if the information presented in the trial (and not even all of that, if the judge rules some of it inadmissible) is the first and last word on the facts of a particular trial.
This standard often carries over into everyday debates -- people who come into a discussion with preexisting opinions, even well-founded ones based on extensive research and reasoning, are often dismissed as being "biased." One should be "open-minded" in all discussions, and refusal to be convinced by arguments is taken to be a moral failing, a certain impatience, rather than evidence that one has perhaps heard the exact same argument before. If there is to be a real discussion, one that reaches a real conclusion, all previous arguments must be left at the door, and the basic facts must be established from scratch.
Think, for instance, of all the people who will claim that those who disapprove of the "president" are somehow "biased" against him or "hate" him -- as if he hadn't held office for over five years. No, people who are already ill-disposed toward Bush must be pulled from the jury -- he is innocent until proven guilty, until "both sides" have been heard.
Certainly people use arguments like this disingenuously, particularly professional pundits who presumably "know better" and still must advance their cause. And certainly the end result, if not the goal, of such rhetoric is most often to arrive at a mistrial rather than a definitive judgment. Yet it seems to me that what makes this type of argumentative strategy so plausible to people is the peculiar character of the American judicial system and, even more, the peculiar character of the American polity, where the constitutional structure is more or less unconsciously taken to be the only possible shared standard of reason and truth.
