a vote for notes of fairness

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Someone who is interested in the notion of public sphere these days caused me
to reply with some references and comment that I want to share, but expand.

Coincidently, New York Times journalist Thomas Edsall has this week re-raised issues of free speech with legal scholars in view of the authoritarian behavior of Trump (nothing new!—but now more dangerous than ever) and in view of the free reign of right-wing opinion in “viral” social spaces.

That dramatizes how philosophy of law is not basically about academic dispute. It’s about how we make and keep society good, humane, and, to my mind—and to Habermas, surely—make and keep society pragmatically progressive, which is also to say progressively pragmatic.

And that’s not mere academicism. What we are to do pertains to the scale of relevance that is each person’s daily life: being well, always being open to learning fundamentally new ways of thinking, and promoting community.