Raphael's passionate appeals for humanitas, justice, and peaceful free government are among the most powerful in world literature. So urgent and so vivid are they that many identify them completely as author Thomas More's. Are they? How do we know? And can we ever know if author More agrees with his character Morus?

Raphael's appeals to humanitas in Utopia are usually made while showing Utopia's superiority to the inhumane practices of other countries, especially England itself. Raphael vividly describes such practices as starving veterans maimed while fighting loyally for war-mongering kings but left with no means of livelihood; starving citizens hung for stealing grain needed for survival; war-bent kings hoarding gold needed by citizens for trade; and citizens “eaten by sheep” because of get-rich-quick schemes by callous sheep-barons. Such images show us a country stratified by wealth and poverty, by corrupt power and desperate need – the very conditions that Aristotle presented as the major causes of factions and civil war.