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The Western Canon Mailing List
Moderator: Paul John Barnette Jr.
Activation Date: March 8, 1997
Current Date:  August 20, 1997
Current Membership: 100
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Response to Western Canon #080

>My recommendations to the prince ought to be followed because this is
how the world is.

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If our understanding of your recommendation is correct, the (logic?) is
pernicious--it gives expediency and even injustice (if deemed
necessary by those in power) primacy over justice--the good.
Would you or any sane person want to live in a state (China) whose
policies give primacy to what is expedient over what is good?

The only standard we have for judging all of our social economic, and
political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad,
as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on
earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it
is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts.

There must be sufficient truth in moral philosophy to provide a rational
basis for the efforts at social reform and improvement in which all men,
regardless of their beliefs or disbeliefs, can join. Such common action for
a better society presupposes that the measure of a good society consists in
the degree to which it promotes the general welfare and serves the
happiness of its people--this happiness being their earthly and temporal
happiness, for there is no other ultimate end that the secular state can
serve.

The highest good, which is self-sufficing because it is the ultimate or
final good that leaves nothing more to be rightly desired, is happiness,
ethically understood as a whole life that is well lived in accordance with
moral virtue and one that is blessed by good fortune. Hence, if the state
serves the greatest good, which is also the complete good, the state is the
association that comes into existence for the sake of a good human life.
Man is by nature a political animal who can live well only in the
state--that is, in a civil and civilized society.

Man, being a social as well as a political animal, lived in families and
tribes or villages before states came into existence. The state served
better the purposes also served by families or tribes and villages (i.e.,
the perpetuation of the species and the needs of subsistence). But beyond
that, the state or civil society enabled man not just to live, but to live
well (or better).

Human nature is the foundation of political and moral philosophy (ethics),
and the same ultimate good is the controlling end in both. Ethics is thus
the architectonic discipline in the practical order, and a "sound" political
philosophy is both founded on ethical truths as well as guided by them.

What in our universities is called political science is a "descriptive"
discipline and value-free, but political philosophy is concerned with
"prescriptive" truths and so is not value-free. Another way of saying this is
that it sets before us the ideals we ought to seek in framing and operating
our political and economic institutions. Liberty, equality, and justice
(with justice limiting liberty and equality) are the chief values that
enter into the political ideal, which calls for the maximization of these
values.

The difference between ethics and political philosophy is that the latter
does not remain the same in all centuries, but changes with alterations in
the political and economic institutions that human beings innovatively
establish. There is progress in political philosophy, whereas there is
little or none in ethics. Errors and inadequacies of political philosophy
occurred in antiquity and the Middle Ages. They were corrected by advances
made in modern times, advances occasioned by the institutional changes that
occurred.

This is not to say that some of the basic prescriptive truths in political
philosophy are not to be found in Plato and Aristotle; nor that errors in
political philosophy (such as the notion of the social contract and the
error of thinking that the good of the state is superior to the human good)
have not occurred in modern times. But for the most part, progress in
political philosophy lies in correcting ancient errors and remedying the
inadequacies that could not have been avoided in earlier centuries.

In fact, it may be said that political philosophy is the only dimension of
philosophy in which great progress has been made and is still to be made in
the future.

Adler/Weismann

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