RENDERING. Богатова С.М - 34 стр.

it and to bear the burden of attacks upon it? This question has never                  Machiavelli does not make it entirely clear why the preservation
been satisfactorily answered.                                                  of the political order outweighs any other known good, but we may
       Thus, the principle of popular sovereignty has provided modern          understand his thinking as a response to the rise of the modern, central-
states with the moral leverage to nationalize the lives of their citizens in   ized state. In a world of absolute sovereign states, no structure exists to
a way that puts them at risk. Terrorists of all stripes use this principle     which appeal can be made over the heads of the princes. The state,
for their own purposes, and they capitalize on the moral ambivalence           therefore, becomes the only hope for the survival of any conception of
reflected in the remark: «One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom         the good life. A transitional figure, Machiavelli reflected the tension
fighter.»                                                                      between the old and the new ways of thinking about justice. On the one
       Self-determination is one of those 19th-century liberal ideas           hand, he recognized the good in the traditional sense – that there are
which has worked its way into the primary documents of 20th-century            certain qualities of character that are worth having for their own sake,
international law, including the United Nations Charter. The principle         and goods that are self-evident in the sense that no argument or further
claims that «a people» has the right to determine its destiny and the          justification is necessary for them. On the other hand, he believed that
disposition of the land upon which it lives without the intervention of        necessities of state require the sacrifice of some of these principles (in
outside parties. The principle of self-determination came to the fore          particular, the prohibition against murder) for a greater good.
after 1945 as a rubric for decolonization.                                             Machiavelli’s thought was brought to completion in the 19th
       The moral tradition that shaped the West is an amalgam of clas-         century by philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
sical and Christian sources. This ethical confluence has possible despite      whose work faced up to the pure consequentialism of much modern
considerable differences between the two sources because both agree            politics. In its mature 19th-century formulations, consequentialism was
that the good life involves strict adherence to categorical moral princi-      a theory devised, in part, to deal with the perceived disappearance of
ples. Both Plato and Aristotle insisted that injustice was not permitted       generally agreed-upon moral standards. The skepticism brought on in
as a means of producing good consequences. Plato and Aristotle initi-          some quarters by the rise of empiricism, Darwinism and various forms
ated what was later to be called the natural-law tradition. Central to         of atheism led to the search for some standard that would unite radi-
natural-law thinking is the Platonic insight that it is possible to define     cally heterogeneous values. Mill and others fixed upon certain subjec-
objectively what it means to be good at being a person. Just as there are      tive ends, styled variously as «happiness» or «pleasure.» As the afore-
standards of excellence for being a doctor and a teacher, so there are         mentioned belief in divine providence continued to decline, the terrible
knowable standards of excellence for being human. The good society is          burden of completely securing the future seemed to fall entirely upon
one in which people are allowed to conform to these standards.                 human shoulders. In principle, no possible course of action could be
       The Judeo-Christian idea of a transcendent source of all value is       ruled out as wrong or impermissible in itself and no sacrifice of known
consonant with these classical insights. The commandments that gov-            goods could be regarded as too great if it would secure greater happi-
ern the life of the Jew and the Christian are strictly categorical in na-      ness in the future. Thus, in the search for a means of maximizing the
ture, as indeed are most ethical codes based on theistic sources. Friend-      good, moral rules lost their categorical force. Given the pervasiveness
ship with God is closely linked to walking the path of justice; it is un-      of this moral theory and its impact upon the common person, it is no
derstood that to damage any basic human value is to attack the very            accident that our own century is replete with political movements that
source of value and being.                                                     require or threaten the destruction of known values in order to create a
       The absolutist conception of justice was reflected in the medie-        future of unlimited happiness. The belief in the mutability of moral ob-
val theory of the just war. The notion that in war noncombatants must          ligations is one of the main arguments for terrorism. If there are no ab-
never be made the object of direct attacks is but one instance of the ap-      solute human rights, the innocent are in danger. «Calculations» about
plication of the categorical prohibition of murder to the realm of war.
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