Finding the Middle Ground to have a Functioning Society

During Monday's class, we held our symposium with people being Nozick, Marx, Kelsen and Rawls. Due to the night's vigil, we ended up discussing the UC Davis pepperspray incident and what the different philosophers would say about the actions involved.

We know the base stances each man have on government (Nozick and Marx being the most polarized) but we came to the conclusion that every single one of them would agree the cop should not have sprayed the students. This is a contiunation of a question I keep having when we discuss ideas of justice: the common conclusions different people have and now that we have learned Kelsen, it really takes on a whole new meaning.

As we know, Kelsen's theory of relativism is based around different people having their sense of morality stem from a grounding principle that helps them derive the conclusions of what they ought to do. He argues, when one is a relativist, they are more aware of their actions because they admit, they are choosing everything they do instead of almost blaming their grounding philosophy. It is very different for someone to say, "I am a Christian and God condemns that action." than for them to say, "I condemn that action of my own volition." With the degree of separation the different grounding norms give someone, it makes them feel less personally culpable. Culpability aside, it explains how different people (with radically different beliefs) come to similar conclusions, and also how America's government can function.

People in America have different beleifs: politically, religiously, morally etc. This is not a shocking new concept. Posing questions like "What is justice?" "Ought one do that?" will come up with hundreds of different answers, all conclusions stemming from each person's grounding norm according to Kelsen. Even with the different beliefs though, normality can be found to make laws and hold society culpable for actions, as well as allow people to live together in a healthy and positive way. It is illegal to kill another human being. This is because regardless of grounding norm (Mills would say it would decrease utility and not benifit the most amount of people, Kant would say one wouldn't want to be killed themself thus one shouldn't kill another, different religions would have reasons why their God says it is wrong) everyone agrees this is a good law for a society to employ. And this idea is how humanity can continue thriving: regardless of the foundational principle we choose to live our lives, there seems to be common ground with every one.

The major issues do have debate, which is why we continue to argue over things like the personhood bills or whether or not capitol punishment is a just punishment. These issues come up because there are grounding norms with hugely different ideas, thus hugely different conclusions that can be found from them. But because our country is built on the idea of people having different beliefs, the arguments must happen to progress forward. These debates are not lazy relativism, an open discussion can be the best thing to settle conflict and help people involved.

This is sort of where I want to end with this idea of many different people being able to function together: we need open discussion. A professor mentioned this at the vigil Monday night, without discussion there is never real progress made or resolution to anything. The cops pepperspraying the students was wrong to each of these philosophers because it did not really do anything productive.
If Kelsen is wrong and there really is some universal truth, how do we explain how society works? If there is some universal truth, do each of these different philosophies somhow work within it?