Should the world perish that justice be done?
Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 8:42 pm
The two quotations that follow are from the essay "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy":
Do you think that's an accurate description of the traditional relationship between life and morality? Or is morality ultimately concerned with the continuation and survival of life?
Do you think it would be better to establish a morality that was premised on life as the highest good?
Moving on...
If Arendt is right, and always acting so as to support life ultimately negates morality altogether, are we better off without morality?
How would you answer "the old Latin question?"
Do you agree with Kant that a life without justice is meaningless?
Before we get to the second quote, a few questions about the first:Arendt wrote:... to establish life as the highest good is actually, so far as ethics are concerned, question-begging, since all ethics, Christian or non-Christian, presuppose that life is not the highest good for mortal men and that there is always more at stake in life than the sustenance and procreation of individual living organisms. That which is at stake may be very different; it may be greatness and fame as in pre-Socratic Greece; it may be the permanence of the city as in Roman virtue; it may be the health of the soul in the hereafter; it may be freedom or justice, or many more such things.
Do you think that's an accurate description of the traditional relationship between life and morality? Or is morality ultimately concerned with the continuation and survival of life?
Do you think it would be better to establish a morality that was premised on life as the highest good?
Moving on...
Some more questions:Arendt wrote:... one could indeed argue that Life, the survival of the world and the human species, are the highest good. But this would mean no more than that any ethics or morality would simply cease to exist. And in principle this thought was anticipated by the old Latin question: Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Should the world perish that justice be done?), and the question was answered by Kant: "If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning."
If Arendt is right, and always acting so as to support life ultimately negates morality altogether, are we better off without morality?
How would you answer "the old Latin question?"
Do you agree with Kant that a life without justice is meaningless?