GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

80| ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
it is prior to law and custom, and it is their business to
to it; It is on these lines that writers in the
give expression
nineteenth century would have argued for the right of
the individual to the full development and expression of his
personality.
But what if "the objective moral order of the universe "
be denied. The twentieth century, with the experience
of the war behind it, lacks the confidence which imbued
the nineteenth. It does not feel certain that the universe
is friendly to man, conformable with his wishes, or respon-
sive to his aspirations, and, if it recognizes an order at all,
it is inclined to doubt whether it is moral. I do not, then,
know how to substantiate this principle save by a direct
to the conscience of mankind.
appeal
THAT THE INDIVIDUAL is AN END IN HIMSELF.
For the last two thousand years the conscience of mankind
has insisted, at any rate in theory, that the individual
should be treated as an end in himself. For what, it may
be asked, is a man for, or, as the Greeks would have put
it, what is the true end of man? We do not, the fact must
be admitted, know. But there is one thing upon which
that part of mankind which still accepts Christ's teaching
is agreed; it is that the true end of man includes the
maximum development of his personality. We expect it,
in other words, ofa man that he should develop his faculties
to their utmost capacity, utilize his powers to the full, and
realize all the potentialities of his nature; that he should,
in short, become as completely as possible himself. And
since he cannot do these things alone, it is the business of
the community to help h** to do them. It is, then, the
business of the community to make the good life possible
for all its citizens: not any sort of life, be it noted, but the
sort of life that seems to men individually to be good.
"Political societies," to repeat Aristotle's aphorism, "exist
for the sake of noble actions and not merely of a common
life."
Now the principle of individualism insists that each