How can this be justified?

[Kelley]

At 11:07 AM 10/1/01 -0700, John Hall wrote:

>Not really.  It was Kant, who came later, that did that.  It has since
>been incorporated into Supreme Court Jurisprudence.


See

James Madison's explications behind his reasons for constructing the 
_entire_ system of the government the way he did.  IOW, there was something 
there before Kant influenced the SC's jurisprudence. The concept wasn't 
imposed willy nilly on a document or traditions which was impervious to 
such and interpretation.

See also: Democracy and the Ethical Life, Claes G. Ryn

You might also want to check out the Scottish moralists, among them Adam 
Smith, who deeply influenced Locke,Shaftsbury, and Hutcheson, for example. 
Smith wrote his major treatise, A Theory of Moral Sentiments.  Here you see 
the focus on the means, as opposed to the ends that jeff mentioned. Since 
the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers deeply influenced our Founders

"Again, the sole use and end of all constitutions of government is to 
promote the happiness of those who live under them. But from this love of 
art and contrivance, we often come to value the means more than the end, 
and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellows, less from any 
sympathy with their sufferings or enjoyment than from a wish to perfect and 
improve a beautiful system. Men of the greatest public spirit have often 
been men of the smallest humanity, like Peter the Great; and if a 
public-spirited man encourages the mending of roads, it is not commonly 
from a fellow-feeling with carriers and wagoners so much as from a regard 
to the general beauty of order.

This admits however of a practical application, for if you wish to implant 
public virtue in a man devoid of it, you will tell him in vain of the 
superior advantages of a well-governed state, of the better homes, the 
better clothing, or the better food. But if you describe the great system 
of government which procures these advantages, explaining the conexions and 
subordinations of their several parts, and their general subserviency to 
the happiness of their society; if you show the possibility of introducing 
such a system into his own country, or of removing the obstructions to it, 
and setting the wheels of the machine of government to move with more 
harmony and smoothness, you will scarce fail to raise in him the desire to 
help to remove the obstructions, and to put in motion so beautiful and 
orderly a machine. It is less the results of a political system that can 
move him than the contemplation of an ingenious adjustment of means to 
ends. " --from Smith's Lectures on the Theory of Moral Sentiments






kelley