Word: consequentialist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What we're left with, then, is a purely consequentialist ethics: What are the effects of punishing Clinton? Now that we're in the middle of this awful morality play, what is the most productive way for it to end? What lessons do we want to teach--about Presidents, about prosecutors, about what's right and wrong, what's public and private...
THERE ARE TWO POSSIBLE ways to argue for intensive broadcast media coverage of trials, rape or otherwise. One is consequentialist: claiming that courts work better when they know they are being watched. The other is categorical: invoking a public right to know or a right to untrammeled free press. As applied to events such as the Smith rape trial, neither of these arguments makes sense...
First, consider the consequentialist argument, which is rooted in the knowledge that closed-door trials are Stalinist stuff. Abuses of justice breed easily when nobody knows that the judges are doing. Keeping trials open and public does not ensure that convictions and acquittals will not be based on arbitrary whim. Without reporting on courtroom activities, the guardians of justice are themselves unguarded...
...television audience does not guarantee any higher a level of judicial integrity than that ensured by the audience physically present. The consequentialist argument, then, actually works against TV trial coverage...