Priori or Posteriori?

   The Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, as we discussed in class last Thursday, is full of flaws in the area of intellectual ethics. Aaron Mcleod discussed many different examples of this idea and covered different rules of intellectual ethics that were broken. The main point he discussed in class was that the Supreme Court did not own up to what they were actually doing. Instead, they put up a facade of beautiful words and tried to cover up their actual decision and how it was reached. This is what he claimed to be so devastatingly wrong with the opinion of the court.
   In my mind, this is very true. If the court is going to make a decision, they should own up to why they made the decision. In the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the court made the decision based on their beliefs as opposed to what they stated-- that it was supported by other means. The saddest part of this case, though I do not agree with the decision at all, is not the decision. I am not even as saddened by the fact that the court did not own up to their decision's roots. The part that saddens me  is that as members of the highest court in the United States, these justices would make a choice a priori instead of a posteriori. They made their decision, then tried to find reasons to back it up. Is it not the judicial system that is supposed to examine evidence and come up with a conclusion based on the evidence? To reverse that system is to jeopardize every future court case, regardless of its content.
   This is the epitome of a failure in the judicial world-- to put personal opinion in the place of evidence and to justify the reasoning with selective evidence. Not only is this true in the court system, it also applies to ethics in general. The decision must be made after examining the facts, not before lest the decision become tainted with bias.




P.S. I commented on Travis's post.