Sublime

‘We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors … We shall then see that

Gewirth argues that anyone who holds that the prerequisites for his exercise of rational agency are necessary goods is logically committed to holding also that he has a right to these goods. But quite clearly the introduction of the concept of a right needs justification both because it is at this point a concept quite new to Gewith’s argument and

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

It is important to grasp the purpose of Finnis’s enterprise. He rejects David Hume’s conception of practical reason, which maintains that my reason for undertaking an action is merely ancillary to my desire to attain a certain objective. Reason informs me only how best to achieve my desires; it cannot tell me what I ought to desire. Finnis prefers

It is the question of whether in these days the claims of government are to leave anything whatever of the rights of man.

“Don’t you really think the sacred Notting Hill at all absurd?” “Absurd?” asked Wayne, blankly. “Why should I?”

was in vain that the editor of The Atheist filled his front window with fierce and final demands as to what Noah in the Ark did with the neck of the giraffe.

The other main type of theory—of which Locke is a representative -maintained that civil government is the result of a contract, and is an affair purely of this world, not something established by divine authority.