ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 17: REFORMERS, UTILITARIANS, IDEALISTS A STRIKING FEATURE of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.

So the contract theorists and the believers in natural rights in the seventeenth century were reviving features of medieval doctrines, while the doctrine of the divine right of kings was essentially a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century invention. So also, at the time of the French Revolution, it is Tom Paine who revives Locke, and it is Burke who invents a quite new form of the appeal to tradition.

Paine is not a source of philosophical argument in himself; his importance lies in the way in which he, and more especially, his French associates helped to force the moral traditions of the English ruling oligarchy away from the doctrine of natural rights. How did they do this? The danger of all appeals to general principles on one’s own behalf on a particular occasion is that one renders oneself liable to have the same principles invoked against one on some subsequent occasion.

Precisely this is what happened to the English ruling class; the principles of 1688 were invoked against them by the Americans in 1776 and by the revolutionaries against their French colleagues in 1789.

It was this fact which underpinned Tom Paine’s appeal to the rights of man; and it was this fact that Richard Price, whom we have already noticed in his role as a believer in the rational intuition of moral first principles, emphasized in his sermon at the dissenting meetinghouse in Old Jewry in November, 1789.

Price emphasized the assertion in 1689 of the right to choose and to dismiss sovereigns, and above all, of the right to frame anew the constitution, and reiterated the correctness of this assertion. In so doing, he played his part in goading both to fury and to reply Edmund Burke. Burke’s attitude to the mass of men is well conveyed by his phrase “a swinish multitude”; his attitude to the rights of man is entirely coherent with this.

He denies, first as a matter of history, that the Whig Revolution of 1688 did involve the kind of assertion of rights that Price claimed.