Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural LawRickaby, Joseph
Philosophy
Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law
Rickaby, Joseph
Ethics
11. We have it therefore that _man is a social animal_. Naturally he
is a member of a family. Nature requires that families should coalesce
into higher communities, which again naturally converge and culminate
in the State. Nature further requires that in every State there should
be an authority to govern. But authority to govern and duty to obey
are correlatives. Nature therefore requires submission to the
governing authority in the State. In other words, Nature abhors
anarchy as being the destruction of civil society, and as cutting the
ground from under the feet of civilised man. The genuine _state of
nature_, that state and condition, which nature allows and approves as
proper for the evolution of the human faculties, is the state of man
in civil society. That is lost where there is no judge in the land.
12. There are men full of a sentimental deference to authority and
professions of obedience, who yet will not obey any of the authorities
that actually are over them. These are disobedient men. He is an
anarchist in practice, who meditates treason and rebellion against the
"powers that be" actually over him in the State wherein he lives. To
obey no actual power is to obey no power, as to wear no actual clothes
is to go naked. To keep up the comparison,--as a man may change his
clothes upon occasion, and thus go through a brief interval of
unclothedness without injury to health or violation of decency,
notwithstanding the requirement of nature to wear clothes: so it may
be or it may not be consonant with the exigency of our nature at times
to subvert by insurrection the existing government in order to the
substitution of a new authority; that does not concern us here. We are
stating the general rule under ordinary circumstances. The submission
to civil authority, which nature requires of us, must be paid in the
coin of obedience to the actual established "powers that be."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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