The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and EthicCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic
Croce, Benedetto
Economics; Ethics; Will
As we see, if the names of the writers and sometimes their phraseology
change, the thoughts that alternate or combine are always the same.
Rümelin, who undertook to criticize a series of definitions of rights,
from that of Kant onwards, reproved Kant for having drawn too great a
distinction between rights and morality, and others (Ahrens, Stahl,
Trendelenburg) for having drawn too little. Finally, he gives his
definition in a provisional and tentative manner: "juridical ordinance
has the task of assuring to a people that part of the good adapted
for realization by a social force, according to universal norms."
Jellinek distinguishes the norms of rights from those of religion, of
ethicity and of custom, by a triple character: _(a)_ because they are
norms for the external conduct of men among themselves; _(b)_ because
they derive from a recognized external authority; _(c)_ because their
obligatoriness is guaranteed by external powers.--Stammler attaches
secondary importance to the element of compulsion, and although he does
not explicitly identify justice and morality, assigns to them the same
territory, where they should act with different methods, since the
perfectionment of the soul, the character and the thought are distinct
from right behaviour. And adopting the turn of phrase of a famous
proposition of the _Critique of Pure Reason,_ he ends by formulating
the following statement: "Justice without love is empty; compassion
without a right rule is blind." The Frenchman Duguit transports with
greater frankness the centre of rights into morality: he conceives of
rights as altogether different from force; not as _political,_ but
as _limit_ of force; as consciousness of human solidarity, beneath
whose rule we are all placed, State and individual, strong and weak,
governors and governed. French philosophers of rights generally oppose
the German school, in which the character of force is prominent, so
that French juridical philosophy sometimes assumes (for example, in
Fouillée) an attitude analogous to that assumed, as we know, by the
"generous" French economic school toward the English economists. And
merely that some Italian name should not be absent from this review of
recent writers, we will record Miraglia, who repeats the old Kantian
division, making it yet more empirical: "Morality and rights are part
of Ethic, because the good can be chiefly developed in the intimate
relations of the conscience, or on the contrary can be developed
by preference in the external relations between man and man and
between man and thing";--and Vanni, who mixes a little positivistic
evolutionism with this empirical reduction, affirming that rights are
not originally distinct from morality, but that afterwards they were
gradually differentiated, and rights now have the special function of
guardianship and guarantee: "that is to say, the ethical minimum alone
has been guaranteed, that much of the ethical field as is most directly
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