Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural LawRickaby, Joseph
Philosophy
Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law
Rickaby, Joseph
Ethics
8. We may observe that the whole reason for the being of the State is
not mutual need, nor the repression of violence. Main reasons these
are, no doubt, but not the whole main reason. Even if men had no need
of one another for the supply of their animal wants, they would still
desire to converse for the satisfaction of their intellectual
curiosity and their social affections. And even if we had all remained
as void of guile, and as full of light and love, as our first parents
were at their creation, we should still have needed the erection of
States. In a State there are not only criminal but civil courts, where
it is not wicked men alone who come to be litigants. From sundry
passages of Scripture it would appear that even angels may disagree as
to what is best and proper: angelic men certainly may and do. It is a
mistake to look upon civil government, with its apparatus of laws and
judgments, simply as a necessary evil, and remedy of the perverseness
of mankind. On the contrary, were all men virtuous, States would still
be formed, towering in magnificence above the States known to history,
as the cedars of Lebanon above the scanty growths of a fell-side in
our north country.
9. _There can be no State without a power to guide and govern it_. It
has indeed become the fashion to repeat, as the latest discovery in
politics, that what a State needs is not government but
administration. This saying comes of a theory, to be examined
presently, that sovereign power abides permanently with the people at
large, and that the sole function of princes, cabinets, and
parliaments, is to provide means of giving effect to the popular will.
This however is not quite a repudiation of government, but a peculiar
view as to the seat and centre of government. Those who hold it,
vigorously maintain the right of the Many to govern, control, and
command the Few. The need of some governing authority in a State can
be denied by none but an Anarchist, a gentleman who lives two doors
beyond Rousseau on the side of unreason.
10. _Every State is autonomous, self-governing, independent_. Either
the whole people taken collectively must rule the same whole taken
distributively, or a part must rule the rest. The ruler is either the
whole commonwealth, or more frequently a part of the commonwealth. An
autocrat is part of the State which he governs. Sovereignty whole and
entire is intrinsic to the State. A community that is to any extent
governed from without, like British India or London, is not a State,
but part of a State, for it is not a _perfect community_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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