Vortrag: What's Law got to do with it? Cultural Logics and the Formation of Social Subjects

"How can we change social systems to be more just? I will argue in this lecture thaqt once we see how both cognition and agency are shaped - by education, populat culture, and family life - for the purposes of coordination, the philosophical strategy of promoting justice through argument and deliberation, is not as promising as it might initially seem. Is legal activism a better option? Law is a means for coercing people, or "incentivizing" them, to do things differently in a way this presumed legitimate. But agents are not utility maximizers - or at least they they often take other values to be more important than what the law dangles as incentives and, legal activism, even if justified, tends to be ineffective unless there is a corresponding cultural change, over which law has limited control. Moreover, law functions as means of social reproduction as much (or more) as it disrupts it. Legilation depends on elites who, for the most part, have been disciplined to perform their "proper" social function and have an interest in maintaining the system. Societies and their systems evolve in response to multiple factors and it is important to understand the dynamics of these different factors and their interplay. Although social movements need allies in the state, effective and legitimate social change requires that we employ tools of both disruptive and everyday activism to change the material and cultural conditions of agency. Practices change when we do things differently, together. Nothing ist ever promised by such activism, but it is morally wrong to hold out for promises.

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