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ould there be a more important or timely question than that of how, in 2008, to interpret the Second Amendment? Today in a 5 to 4 decision the Supreme Court ruled that Americans do indeed have the right to own and bear arms for self-defense and hunting.

Mark Sherman in the Associated Press reports:

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

What most interests me here, apart from the future effects of this ruling for public safety, is Antonin Scalia’s use of the phrase “historical narrative” to support the majority decision. I’m not sure that “historical narrative”–what has been, no matter whether right or wrong, false or true, ugly or beautiful, cruel or kind–is a good enough, sufficient reason to be for something.

Questionable if not immoral, even horrific, practices and behaviors can be “supported” by “historical narratives” of one sort or another. History purports to tell us why or how events and things came to be; the law should be more concerned with “oughts” that are founded in compassion and reason, not an “historical narrative.”

I am not saying I disagree with the decision. But I do want to point out that “historical narrative” is vague in a way that legal terms like stare Decisis are not.

I will have to read the entire decision with the majority and minority views laid out in full before I decide whether to agree or disagree with the majority.

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for stare decisis:

In other words, stare decisis applies to the holding of a case, rather than to obiter dicta. As the United States Supreme Court has put it: “dicta may be followed if sufficiently persuasive but are not binding.”

The doctrine that holdings have binding precedential value is not valid within most civil law jurisdictions as it is argued that this principle interferes with the right of judges to interpret law and the right of the legislature to make law. Most such systems, however, recognize the concept of jurisprudence constante, which argues that even though judges are independent, they should rule in a predictable and non-chaotic manner. Therefore, judges’ right to interpret law does not preclude the adoption of a small number of selected binding case laws.

Meanwhile, let’s all be safe out there!

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from a review of Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity on Slate.Com:

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f you’re a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That’s because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative).

Click here to read the entire review.

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given history of something is a story without an author. The events, objects, and persons comprising the action act autonomously. Those elements in a history to which we attribute consciousness and intention act according to known and unknown laws.

The historian seeks and then explains the manifold of butterfly effects that comprise the subject under study. Histories are always already written, but they remain hidden until someone chooses to interpret for an audience.

Is science a type of history? After all, equations unfold in time and constitute the episodes and plots of the phenomena to which they are applied. But there are no conscious actors in scientific, qua scientific, narratives. If conscious actors are introduced, the narrative becomes historical, biographical, or autobiographical.

What about natural history museums? They presumable employ some type of scientific, historical narrative in their exhibits. Everything may be reducible to story, but it will always be someone’s responsibility–everyone’s actually–to decide which stories are better, truer, more meaningful than others.

Our very lives depend on making the right critical judgments and decisions.

It’s true. Otherwise the story of our times will someday cease to be told by historians in a non-existent future.

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