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Ethics, Politics and Imperfection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Recent social change has produced a relocation of the sense of personal identity from communities rooted in time and place to voluntary associations gathered around common interests. In consequence, the focus of moral consciousness has shifted from natural human values to constructed, systems of rights and obligations.
Against these trends I argue that while times and circumstances change, the principal moral truths remain constant as do their implications for the place of ethics in public life: first, do no evil; and second, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What lies beyond is not in the field of moral law, though it may be in the field of moral virtue. Here what is required is, as St Augustine, Adam Smith and Aurel Kolnai would say, human wisdom; and it part of human wisdom to recognize that in public life where what is at issue includes the well-being of the community, one does better to strive for the good and the acceptable than to seek for the perfect.
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- Copyright © The author 2008. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008
Footnotes
1
The present essay is a shortened version of a lecture delivered to the conference Europe in a World of Transformation, convened by the Pontifical Council for Culture and held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), Budapest in December 2006. The event marked the twentieth anniversary of the symposium on Society and Ethical Values organised by HAS and the Pontifical Secretariat for Non-Believers.
The preparation of this text as made possible by research support provided by the institute for the Psychological Sciences. I am particularly grateful to Dr Gladys Sweeney, Dean of the Institute, for facilitating this support.
References
2 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by Raphael, D.D. and Macfie, A.L.. Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), p. 304Google Scholar. see http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS7.html
3 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, and The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For critical discussion see Haldane, John, “The Individual, the State and the Common Good”, in The Communitarian Challenge to Liberalism, edited by Paul, E.F., Miller, F.D. Jr., and Paul, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, and “Public Reason, Truth and Human Fellowship”Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2006Google Scholar.
4 For an account of Kolnai's life and main ideas see Dunlop, Francis, The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002)Google Scholar. See also Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings in and About the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai edited by Balazs, Zoltan and Dunlop, Francis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Kolnai, A., The War Against the West (London: Gollancz, 1938)Google Scholar.
6 Kolnai, A., ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’Philosophy, 35, 1960. p. 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Kolnai, A., ‘Morality and Practice II, The Moral Emphasis’, in Dunlop, F. and Klug, B. (eds) Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected papers of Aurel Kolnai (London: The Athlone Press, 1977) p. 105Google Scholar.
8 Kolnai, A., ‘The Moral Theme in Political Division’Philosophy, 35, 1960. p. 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Some of the ideas discussed here were also presented to this seminars at the University of Virginia and at Princeton in Summer 2007. I am grateful to members of the audiences on those occasions for discussions that will be reflected in a more extensive future treatment of the issues.