Miers's experience irrelevant

As a fellow liberal, I feel compelled to correct David Shiffman's misguided stance in his letter, "Harriet Miers not qualified." He argues that she is inadequate as a nominee because she has no experience as a judge. Yet, what he obviously did not realize is that William Rehnquist, who presided over the Court as Chief Justice for 19 years, was never a judge before his appointment either. Chief Justices Earl Warren and John Marshall also had no previous experiences as judges before their appointments to the Court. Mr. Shiffman should be mindful of many things with this appointee, such as her crony relationship to the Bush White House and her unknown stances on topics of extreme importance in today's society. But one thing he should not be worried about is her lack of experience.

Matthew Novak

Pratt '07

DUPD efforts deserve praise

Note: This letter was sent in response to the Oct. 5 article "Police to discuss race with students."

I'm glad the Duke University Police Department and undergraduate students are starting a dialogue about race. You need communications both ways, to build up a basic trust and understanding of how the other operates. If you wait for a crisis before talking to each other, it doesn't work at all.

Nicholas Butterfield

Contrary to what Aroon states in her column ("The illusion of free will," Oct. 5), individual responsibility is not part of American civic culture in the 21st century. Instead of individuals accepting the consequences of their own poor exercise of free will, they blame the conditions around them: Civil lawsuits have become a burden to the courts, postmodernism's nihilist dismissal of objective morality dominates much of higher education and objectivism preaches that it's moral for me to help no one but myself. We are already living in a culture of blameless finger-pointing.

Aroon's idea that more burden should be placed on society encourages more individual shirking of responsibility. A wealth of literature exists warning us about such engineering of morality. Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange points to its unnatural cruelty, and even in Shakespeare's King Lear, the rationalist Edmund states: "When we are sick in fortune,-often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence."

"Aim for the Stars" is a good subtitle to Aroon's column, as there is little difference between blaming the heavens for one's poor decisions and blaming society. The latter amounts to no more than superstition. The reason dishonest behavior is on the rise is not because society allows it; it is because society encourages it. The more society takes on the responsibility of engineering morality, the less the individual feels accountable for his own mistakes. In kindergarten, after saying or doing something mean to another child, we are taught to take responsibility for our actions and apologize, yet when we grow up, we are told we are mere pawns of the forces around us. It's no wonder that when we eat too much McDonald's and have a heart attack, we sue.

Christopher Carr

Trinity '06