essayists-from-australia

"'Our sense of justice,' whether it is just yours and mine, or that of some much larger group, has no authority over those who dissent from its recommendations or even over us if we are inclined to change our minds."

"Notoriously, there are disputed territories — for example, border areas and regions occupied by groups which are not independent nations, but many of whose members wish that they were. Again, there are territories like that which used to be called Palestine; here the principles which in the case of Norway point univocally to one national group as that to which the area belongs diverge, some supporting the claims of the Israelis and others the claims of the Palestinian Arabs. Cyprus and Northern Ireland are two other obvious examples of conflicting prima facie rights of distinguishable national groups. In such cases the appeal, by both parties to a dispute, to supposedly absolute rights is disastrous. It reduces the readiness to negotiate and compromise, and it seems to justify any atrocities against the enemy, and any resulting losses and suffering for one's own side, that are needed to vindicate those rights."

"In one important sense of the word it is a paradigm case of injustice if a court declares someone to be guilty of an offence of which it knows him to be innocent. More generally, a finding is unjust if it is at variance with what the relevant law and the facts together require, and particularly if it is known by the court to be so."

"There are no objective values."

"The happiness with which I am, inevitably, most concerned is my own, and next that of those who are in some way closely related to me. Indeed, for any reasonably benevolent person these cannot be separated: he will find much of his own happiness in the happiness of those for whom he cares, or in what he and they do together, where the enjoyment of each contributes so essentially to that of the other(s) that it will be more natural to say 'We had a good...' (whatever it was) than to speak of a mere sum of individual enjoyments."

"Does the right of a nation as it is at present to its territory include the right to forbid or to limit immigration, or to deny full citizenship to immigrants and even to the locally born children of immigrants? Obviously this raises the question just what is to count over time as the same nation."

"If men had been overwhelmingly benevolent, if each had aimed only at the happiness of all, if everyone had loved his neighbour as himself, there would. have been no need for the rules that constitute justice. Nor would there have been any need for them if nature had supplied abundantly, and without any effort on our part, all that we could want, if food and warmth had been as inexhaustibly available as, until recently, air and water seemed to be."

"The abandonment of a belief in objective values can cause...a decay of subjective concern and sense of purpose. That it does so is evidence that...people...have been tending to objectify their concerns and purposes, have been giving them a fictitious external authority. A claim to objectivity has been so strongly associated with their subjective concerns and purposes that the collapse of the former seems to undermine the latter as well."

"No doubt one can stretch the notion of egocentric commendation...by saying that appropriate conditional, perhaps counterfactually conditional, clauses are to be assumed. The carving knife is one such as I would favour if I wanted to slice meat; the sunset is one such as I would favour if I were one for the beauties of nature; the weather is such as I would favour if I were a potato-grower — or, more dubiously, if I were a potato. But this is stretching the account, and it is gratuitous. What is common to all these cases is that in each there is, somewhere in the picture, some set of requirements or wants or interests, and the thing that is called good is being said to be such as to satisfy those requirements or wants or interests."

"If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."

"Life is, fortunately, not a continuous application of game theory."

"It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented."

"Each individual is linked not only to his biological ancestors but also to traditions of activity and information and thought and belief and value; nearly all of what anyone most distinctively and independently is he owes to many others. The taking over and passing on — with perhaps some changes — of a cultural inheritance is itself a part of the good life, and this too is a social relation to which there belong appropriate sorts of conflict as well as cooperation."

"If we see the good for man as happiness, conceived as a single, undifferentiated commodity, we may also suppose that it could be provided for all, in some centrally planned way, if only we could get an authority that was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently intelligent, and also one that we could trust to be uniformly well-disposed to all its subjects; and then the natural corollary would be that all property should be owned by all in common, collectively, and applied to the maximizing of the general happiness under the direction of this benevolent authority. But if we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit."

"On our view of morality we can defend only nearly absolute principles. But a theist can believe that strictly absolute variants of these are commanded by God, and that we both must and can safely obey them even when from the point of view of human reason the case against doing so seems overwhelming: we can rely on God to avert or somehow put right the disastrous consequences of a 'moral' choice. But though a theist can believe this, it would gratuitous for him to do so without a reliable and explicit revelation of such absolute commands."

"It is simply an error, though no doubt an attractive and inspiring one, to suppose that there is one evil — capitalism, say, or colonialism — the destruction of which would make everything in the garden lovely."

"Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take."

"Liberties conflict with one another, and almost any policy whatever can be represented as a defence — direct or indirect — of some sort of liberty. What we need, therefore, is not a general defence of liberty, but adjudication between particular rival claims to freedom."

"The denial that there are objective values does not commit one to any particular view about what moral statements mean, and certainly not to the view that they are equivalent to subjective reports."

"The kinds of behaviour to which moral values and disvalues are ascribed are indeed part of the furniture of the world, and so are the natural, descriptive differences between them; but not, perhaps, their differences in value."

"The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not so."

"Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connections seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy."

"Men...are almost always concerned more with their selfish ends than with helping one another. The function of morality is primarily to counteract this limitation of men's sympathies. We can decide what the content of morality must be by inquiring how this can best be done."

"Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices."

"Though we admit that the way to hell may be paved with good intentions, we are very sure that the way to heaven is not paved with bad ones."

"Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time."

"It is the main function of any economic system to produce cooperation that is quite independent of affection or goodwill, and it is one function of political organizations to maintain conditions in which this is possible. But if we accept the centrality of self-love and confined generosity, we must, as a corollary, accept competition and some degree of conflict between individuals and between groups."

"The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, life is social. We can see each individual as located in a number of circles — smaller and larger, but sometimes intersecting, not all concentric — and so united with others in a variety of ways. Within any circle, large or small, we must expect and accept not only some cooperation but also some competition and conflict, but different kinds and degrees of these in circles of different size."

"We want people to see it as not only legitimate but right and proper that they should pursue what they see as their own well-being."

"To say that someone has a right, of whatever sort, is to speak either of or within some legal or moral system: our rejection of objective values carries with it the denial that there are any self-subsistent rights."

"If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life."

"The facts have to be determined by empirical evidence, and our thinking has then to conform to the facts, not the facts to our thinking"

"Mutual toleration might be easier to achieve if groups could realize that the ideals which determine their moralities in the broad sense are just that, the ideals of those who adhere to them, not objective values which impose requirements on all alike."

"Conflicts of interest are real, inevitable, and ineradicable. There is no question of doing away with them, but it is increasingly important that they should be limited and contained."

"A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.'"

"On an assumption that the normal and proper state of affairs is that people should live as members of various circles, larger and smaller, with different kinds and degrees of cooperation, competition, and conflict in these different circles, the appropriateness of telling the truth becomes disputable. Truth-telling naturally goes along with cooperation; it is not obviously reasonable to tell the truth to a competitor or an enemy."

"Hardly any part of anyone's conduct concerns only himself."

"A quarter of a century ago, when the were first discovered, all scholars were struck by their likeness to the works of later Greece. Even now, when the knowledge of dissimilarities in detail has obscured for many minds this broad resemblance, no one would assert that a or is impossible."

"Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’"

"... At the outset we are shown the two great armies, Greek and Trojan,—both winning our sympathy,—the one fighting for honour and justice, the other for home and country. We are shown , the fair woman who is at once the cause of the war and its prize; we are shown the two kings, in his noble endurance, in his restless activity; we are shown the two champions, and , both lovable and attractive to us, sworn enemies to one another."

"When the idea of Democracy first took hold of the modern world, it brought with it to many minds the demand for the . To many minds, but not to all, and this because the strongest arguments for that independence are bound up with the fundamental conceptions of the democratic ideal, and not with the secondary advantages of a democratic state, and there are always minds on whom the second have far more influence than the first. It is probably for a similar reason that the has made so little headway in Europe during the last century. For this has been a time of detailed work in legislation, rather than of far-reaching ideas."

"Melian Stawell (1869-1936) begins life as a certain kind of outsider. Born into an elite Australian colonial family, she received great early encouragement in her education, had access to a home library, and studied at and then Cambridge. Henceforth her academic, political, and friendship base was in England, wher she wrote a great number of significant texts in classics, as well as Aristotle, the League of Nations, Women and Democracy, and in particular a work on the (1911) that is still highly regarded. Her work is in the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at -, including The Growth of Intellectual Thought (1929), with reading annotations by ."

"The last works of a great artist have always a peculiar interest, and when they are the works of his old age they often show a peculiar change. The greatest artists do not copy themselves: stereotyping is fatal to creation. For creation, it cannot be denied though frequently forgotten, is always the production of something new, and this is why so often it is neglected or scorned by contemporaries. The creative artists, though their work corresponds with experience, are always outstripping experience, stretching forward to something they have never fully known, entering fresh worlds only half realised. Beethoven, Rembrandt, Titian, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, all show this in various ways. There is something unearthly in their closing work, and at the same time they are more at peace with this earth than ever. Nor is this because the world appears less terrible to them than it did, but because they seem to discern something more which countervails the terror."

"... After Philo and Plato, it was little use to say that Christ was merely like God, and the Spirit that came to us like both. Only the thorough-going assertion of unity could satisfy the longings and quiet the doubts that had been raised."

"(Berkeley) gave the impression that he too was a victim, that he took the assertion "Mind is a substance" in a literal sense, that he thought that the soul was actually a "substance" "in" which ideas "inhere" and which "supports" the ideas, ect. hence the expression "in the mind".... Berkeley had a purely substantivalist conception of the mind, confirmed by his private utterances."

"It is a confusion to present the items of one sort in the idioms of another -- without awareness. For to do this is not just to cross two different sorts; it is to confuse them. It is to mistake, for example, the theory for the fact, the procedure for the process, the myth for history, the model for the thing and the metaphor for the face of literal truth."

"In short, the use of metaphor involves both the awareness of duality of sense and the pretense that the two different senses are one."

"However appropriate in one sense a good metaphor may be, in another sense there is something inappropriate about it. This inappropriateness results from the use of a sign in a sense different from the usual..."

"Thus to the plain man there may be no metaphor in Aristotle's "substance", Descartes' "machine of nature," Newtonian "force" and "attraction," Thomas Young's "kinetic energy" and Michelangelo's figure of Leda. Placed in their customary contexts these present nothing to him but the face of literal truth. To the initiated, however, who are aware of the "gross original" senses as well as the now literal senses , they may become metaphors. There are no metaphors per se...."

"There is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die- the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor..."