Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x24gv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T03:56:46.531Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social Structures and Structural Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Louis Depré  and
S. J. William O'Neill
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Modern principles of morality are inadequate for solving the structural problems faced by contemporary societies. Early in the modern epoch the normative, social concept of nature that had supported Greek, Roman, and medieval ethical theories, became transformed into a purely empirical, private one. Thus for Hobbes, Locke, and most eighteenth-century political theorists, the “state of nature” referred to the opposite of a social state, ruled by lawful custom, it had meant before. The idea of “natural right” which gradually emerged as a substitute principle was denned in individualist terms. With the notion of “general will” Rousseau attempted to establish a more genuinely social basis for the State.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 327 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Stevens, Wallace, “The Poems of Our Climate,” The Mm at the End of the Mind (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 158.Google Scholar

2. Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince and The Discourses, trans. Ricci, Luigi, revised, Vincent, E.R.P. (New York: Random House, 1940), pp. 64–65.Google Scholar

3. Croce, Benedetto, Elementi dipolitico, p. 60,Google Scholar as quoted in Berlin, Isaiah, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” Against the Current, ed. Hardy, Henry (New York: Viking Press: 1980), p. 53.Google Scholar

4. Nagel, Thomas, “Ruthlessness in Public Life, ” Public and Private Morality, ed. Hampshire, Stuart (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978), p. 78.Google Scholar

5. Hampshire, Stuart, Public and Private Morality, p. ix.Google Scholar

6. Kennan, George F., Realities of American Foreign Policy (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1954), p. 49.Google Scholar

7. Cf, Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre DameUniversity Press, 1981, 1984), p. 33.Google Scholar

8. Maritain, Jacques, “The End of Machiavellianism, ” The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, ed. Evans, Joseph W. and Ward, Leo R. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), pp. 320–21.Google Scholar

9. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics 1094a22–b12.Google Scholar

10. Ibid.

11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–II, Ques. 58, art. 7, 9: I–II, Ques. 90, art. 2. Our treatment of Thomas is indebted to the analysis of Eschmann, I.T.. Cf, “In Defense of Jacques Maritain,” The Modern Schoolman 22, no. 4 (05 1945): 183–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Aristotle, , The Nicomachean Ethics 1129b6–1130b8.Google Scholar

13. Thomas, , Summa Theologiae II–II, Ques. 58, art. 6, 12.Google Scholar

14. Maritain, , “The Person and the Common Good,” The Social and Fblitical Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, p. 85.Google Scholar

15. Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1950), p. 82f.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 119.

17. Ernest Barker, “Translator's Introduction” to Gierke, Otto, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. xxxv.Google ScholarCf., Alasdair Maclntyre's contention in After Virtue that classical Aristotelian ethics “presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos… We thus have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored state) is initially discrepant and discordant with the percepts of ethics and needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos. Each of the three elements of the scheme —the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of rational ethics and the conception of humannature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos-requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible” (pp. 52–53).

18. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1968), # 217.Google Scholar

19. d'Entreves, A.P., Natural Law, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1970), p. 16.Google Scholar

20. Cf, Anscombe, G.E.M., “Thought and Action in Aristotle,” in New Essays on Plato and Aristotle, ed. Bambrough, Renford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 143–58.Google Scholar

21. Aristotle Politics bk. 1, chap. 2.

22. Barker, , “Translator's Introduction” to Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, p. xlix.Google Scholar

23. Maritain, , “The Person and the Common Good,” p. 82.Google Scholar

24. Cf, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: The Cross road Publishing Company, 1965),Google Scholar p. 278f.; and The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Smith, P.Christopher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, p. 159f.

25. Barker, , “Translator's Introduction” to Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, pp. xxxvi, xxxviii–xl.Google Scholar

26. Troeltsch, Ernest, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Wyon, Olive, vol. 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931): 508.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 503.

28. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan in British Moralists 1650–1800, vol. 1, ed. Raphael, D.D. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 32,Google Scholar # 44.

29. Ibid., p. 36, # 50, pp. 32–33, # 44.

30. Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), p. 263.Google Scholar

31. Kant, Immanuel, Werke, VI 380f.,Google Scholar as quoted in Cassirer, Ernest, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays, trans. Gutmann, James, Kristeller, Paul Oskar, and Randall, John Herman Jr. (Hamden: Archon Books, 1961), p. 35.Google Scholar

32. Kant, , Rechtslehre, par. 47 (Werke, 7:122)Google Scholar, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. Ladd, John (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. 80f.Google Scholar

33. Cf, Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 27–28.Google Scholar

34. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, trans. Cranston, Maurice (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 65.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 62.

36. Ibid., p. 65.

37. Ibid., p. 64.

38. Ibid., p. 84.

39. Morellet, , as quoted in Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 340.Google Scholar

40. Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

41. Marx, Karl, Werke 6:408; Selected Works 1:91:Google Scholar “The social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, are altered, transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, of the forces of production. The relations of production in their totality constitute what is called the social relations, society, and moreover, a society at a definite stage of historic development.”

42. Suarez, Francisco, De legibus ac Deo legilatore. Selections from Three works, ed. Scott, James Brown. The Classics of International Law, 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), 2: 345.Google Scholar