| Deals
and Ideals: Introduction |
| Chapter
1 |
Two
Concepts of Nature, and Two Concepts of Reason
The Sophists, Plato and Natural Law |
| The
key to an understanding of ethics and politics (and of the relation
between them) is in the conflict between Socrates and the Sophists.
The division between them polarised two claims to enlightenment,
with mutually exclusive concepts of nature, human nature, reason,
the good, justice, right, law, virtue, happiness and freedom. |
| The
Sophists' epistemological- and value-relativist position was
that all reasoning and all valuation is subjective because it
is relative to and subservient to the immediate, particular
desire or will of each individual. They also held that by nature
the primary, basic and inevitable desire of every individual
is to survive. Once that is guaranteed the next desire of everyone
(including Socrates, who was declared by Polus in the Gorgias
to be hypocritical for not admitting it) is to possess everything,
and to rule and enslave all others. That would provide the greatest
possible amount of value. There is no hierarchy of values; they
are quantitative, not qualitative. |
| The
Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian reply was that the Sophistic
perspective ignored the specifically human natural capacity
of the intellect to transcend the immediate, particular and
finite towards the universal, in the forms of the understanding
of universal essences, the orientation to universality as unity
and totality, and the love of infinite and absolute truth, beauty
and goodness. The fulfilment of the individual is found not
in the false infinity of the endless satisfaction of finite
desires for quantifiable things, but in the infinitude of these
values, which are qualitatively better and higher than that
of survival, and may require the sacrifice of one's life, liberty
or finite goods. The most fulfilling relationship between human
beings is mutual justice; that includes in principle the common
ownership of resources, at least as a ground for the community's
requiring that, if they are to be distributed (by the community)
among the citizens, they must be used for the common need and
the common good. |
| This
teleological, hierarchical but unified ethical, socio-economic
and political naturalism was developed by the Stoics, the Neoplatonists,
philosophers and theologians in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic
traditions, and the scholastics, notably Thomas Aquinas. Thomas
adopts the substance of Aristotle's ethical theory, seeing it
as a department of politics, and also of ontology. He also adopts
an Aristotelian method. He begins his ethics with the good and
happiness; he takes up Aristotle's theme of contemplation as
the most complete human happiness in his location of ultimate
happiness in the beatific vision; he devotes the bulk of his
ethics to the virtues; and he does not begin but ends with the
natural law theory. Unlike Kant, Thomas is not legalistic. What
he means by natural law is not a detailed moral code but a rational
guide to the good we seek. Above all he means that law is a
function of reason or intellect, not of desire or will. The
basis of the entire tradition is essentialism. Its approach
to the universal, unlike Kant's, involves recognition of the
capacity of the mind to grasp essences, as well as the demands
of formal logic. |
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