Deals and Ideals:

Chapter 1

Two Concepts of Nature, and Two Concepts of Reason

The Sophists, Plato and Natural Law

The key to an understanding of ethics and politics (and of the relation between them) is in the conflict between Socrates and the Sophists. The division between them polarised two claims to enlightenment, with mutually exclusive concepts of nature, human nature, reason, the good, justice, right, law, virtue, happiness and freedom.

The Sophists' epistemological- and value-relativist position was that all reasoning and all valuation is subjective because it is relative to and subservient to the immediate, particular desire or will of each individual. They also held that by nature the primary, basic and inevitable desire of every individual is to survive. Once that is guaranteed the next desire of everyone (including Socrates, who was declared by Polus in the Gorgias to be hypocritical for not admitting it) is to possess everything, and to rule and enslave all others. That would provide the greatest possible amount of value. There is no hierarchy of values; they are quantitative, not qualitative.

The Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian reply was that the Sophistic perspective ignored the specifically human natural capacity of the intellect to transcend the immediate, particular and finite towards the universal, in the forms of the understanding of universal essences, the orientation to universality as unity and totality, and the love of infinite and absolute truth, beauty and goodness. The fulfilment of the individual is found not in the false infinity of the endless satisfaction of finite desires for quantifiable things, but in the infinitude of these values, which are qualitatively better and higher than that of survival, and may require the sacrifice of one's life, liberty or finite goods. The most fulfilling relationship between human beings is mutual justice; that includes in principle the common ownership of resources, at least as a ground for the community's requiring that, if they are to be distributed (by the community) among the citizens, they must be used for the common need and the common good.

This teleological, hierarchical but unified ethical, socio-economic and political naturalism was developed by the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, philosophers and theologians in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, and the scholastics, notably Thomas Aquinas. Thomas adopts the substance of Aristotle's ethical theory, seeing it as a department of politics, and also of ontology. He also adopts an Aristotelian method. He begins his ethics with the good and happiness; he takes up Aristotle's theme of contemplation as the most complete human happiness in his location of ultimate happiness in the beatific vision; he devotes the bulk of his ethics to the virtues; and he does not begin but ends with the natural law theory. Unlike Kant, Thomas is not legalistic. What he means by natural law is not a detailed moral code but a rational guide to the good we seek. Above all he means that law is a function of reason or intellect, not of desire or will. The basis of the entire tradition is essentialism. Its approach to the universal, unlike Kant's, involves recognition of the capacity of the mind to grasp essences, as well as the demands of formal logic.