I’m not really a Jesuit, I just play one in the blogsward. My mother had had enough of the Church before she went to high school, and, in consequence, I was sent to public schools. Those were actually quite a bit better then than they are now, but, even so, I bear my ignorance as a curse. I am too much aware that I am too much unaware, and every effort I make to correct this deficit serves only to deepen it. This is why I spend so much of my time crouched by Brother Quintilian, learning evermore to learn, to make up for my failure to have learned in the first place.
Say what?
In short: I am unswayed.
I have not heard what I consider to be a persuasively-valid argument in support of Dual Agency. Counting Our Lady Ardell in a comment, we have three testaments to personal integrity, and these I do not dispute.
But: So what?
The question is not: Can very trustworthy people effect Dual Agency in a way that occasions no overt objections from their clients? Surely this is possible.
The question is, rather: What policy should obtain in the absence of a presumptive angelitude?
The question is: Taking account that a certain percentage of licensees will be stupid, untrained, avaricious, uninformed or openly larcenous, what policy best protects the interests of the consumer — the alleged justification for our licenses?
Russell Shaw raises a lot of side issues that really don’t have anything to do with the debate. He gets quite a few of these sideways, in my opinion, but we can save those debates for other days. The meat of his argument is here:
My seller WANTS ME TO SELL THEIR HOME TO A BUYER I ALREADY HAVE – this is THE very thing they are hiring us to do.
That is: Dual Agency is valid because sellers want it. We turn to Quintilian, who advises us that, by this reasoning, Sub-Agency is also valid. Sellers want it, and many of them don’t truly understand that they no longer have it in Arizona.
Why don’t they have it? Because as much as sellers might Read more
