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Social Structures and Structural Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Louis Depré  and
S. J. William O'Neill
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Extract

Modern principles of morality are inadequate for solving the structural problems faced by contemporary societies. Early in the modern epoch the normative, social concept of nature that had supported Greek, Roman, and medieval ethical theories, became transformed into a purely empirical, private one. Thus for Hobbes, Locke, and most eighteenth-century political theorists, the “state of nature” referred to the opposite of a social state, ruled by lawful custom, it had meant before. The idea of “natural right” which gradually emerged as a substitute principle was denned in individualist terms. With the notion of “general will” Rousseau attempted to establish a more genuinely social basis for the State.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 327 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1989

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