The Wind Cries Mary

Showers with Praise

Wet weather could not dampen the ebullient spirit and iconic performances at this year’s Syracuse M&T Jazz Fest

By Jessica Novak

Michael Davis Photos

It’s Raining Men

The Friday segment of Jazz Fest opened to partly cloudy skies just before 5 p.m. with rays peeking through, strong and hot enough to get a tan. Throughout the set from the marqueebursting City of Syracuse Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs Stan Colella All-Star Band, the ominous weather held off and the students showed off, trading solos on charts including Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” and a piece by Paquito D’Rivera, arranged by Joe Riposo, Syracuse University’s director of jazz studies.

The Parks & Rec band was then followed by the All-County High School All-Star Jazz Band, directed by Steve Frank, a 2010 Syracuse New Times Syracuse Area Music Award (Sammy) Hall of Fame music educator and director of the OCC Jazz Band. Frank led the students in a set that shifted between old-time swing and a more modern, hip-hop-like groove.

The weather stayed friendly as the stage crew began to set the scene for Felix Cavaliere’s Rascals, but just as the microphones were getting checked, Mother Nature quit holding back and released buckets of rain that came incredibly fast and hard. Stagehands ran frantically to cover the equipment and umbrellas flew up in a flurry over the crowd.

The Moral Bargain…”The Wind Cries Mary” « Libérale et libertaire

Welcome to another installment wherein I attempt to tear assunder libertarianism and social justice. Two things the likes of LoOG, Let the wind between howl, lonely and wild , and BHL, The Moral Status Quo , are intent on marrying.

Let me begin by noting that BHL’s allusion to a “frozen conceptual sea” as a critical starting point nonetheless fails to extricate the discussion from the glaciers. BHL’s definition of “classical liberal” and “libertarian” are standard fare. The introduction of the term “High Liberal” offers little clarity and fails to crack the ice.

I take a different approach, one that is rooted in contractarianism and not economics per se. I define Liberalism thusly:

Liberalism: a rational normative social contractarian theory that views morality and justice to be a product of convention and agreement.

I would contend that this is universal definition, one that holds even today among the various factions. Divergences occur, however, around the different conceptions of what it means to act rationally. This is the basis of the fault lines within liberalism. And these fault lines have been there from the start. Examples:

(a) For Hobbes, the rational agent will cede it’s liberty to obey a sovereign. (c) For Kant, the rational agent will cede authority to a universal moral principle as means to ensure personal autonomy.

From a contractarian perspective, a primary distinction between “enlightenment liberalism” and modern liberalism is the shift from legitimacy of political authority to that of justice vis a vis the social contract. For the latter, we can certainly point to Rawls. For Rawls, the social contract is less about legitimizing political authority per se and more about justifying political and socio/economic arrangements.

There are three basic categories of justice that can be distinguished:

(i) Justice of Impartiality: equality of the moral agent (iii) Justice of Mutual Advantage: outcome of a bargain

Game Theory, a framework for analyzing strategic decisions under uncertainty, provides a model for contractarianism that treats it as a problem in a type of cooperative game. Bargaining solutions to cooperative games can perhaps shed some light on agent rationality.

Rawls

Rawlsian Justice is primarily concerned with (i). Rawls can be recast as fairness as a foundation for a “rules universalism.” Rawls’ “Difference Principle” is not the result of a bargaining outcome between rational agents–that is, an outcome rational agents should choose. Rather it is a decision rule an unbiased(impartial) moral agent should follow. Ralwsian Justice is not a solution to a coordination problem in a cooperative game, but rather it is treated as an initial value problem of the unbiased moral agent. Rawls resolution to the initial value problem relies on the hypothetical construct of the “Veil of Ignorance.” Rawls’ version of VOI, which is usually described as the “thick version,” simply means that unbiased agents will reason the same when it comes to “fairness.” Under a “thick veil,” they will maximize the minimum position. So any problem of universal choice reduces to the preferences of an unbiased individual agent.

The wind cries Mary, loosely adapted from Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

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