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2- Ethical principles appear to vary greatly between cultures, but this is less true than it appears to be. Local variations are caused by specific circumstances and should be respected as such, but once these are accounted for a pattern emerges: the rights of those who are considered fully human are remarkably consistent. What is essential to recognize is that all are fully human.
Let us imagine three different cultures, with three different systems of law and morality. The first of these is a democratic republic, with officials elected by majority vote. Citizenship is restricted to owners of property, and sixty percent of the population are actual slaves, owned by the citizens and forced to work for them.
The second society we will imagine is a tribal system, with chieftains selected for their battlefield prowess. The culture has no slave class, and all men are warriors, while women are responsible for raising the children. In the event of a battle between tribes, the women of the defeated warriors are divided up among the victors, to become second wives, third wives, and so forth and so on.
The third society we will imagine is a nomadic culture, in which men do all the physical labor while women make the decisions. The lifestyle of these nomads is pastoral and largely peaceful, but there is no role for men in political life.
Three cultures more different from each other would be hard to imagine, yet none of them individually is an untenable option. What they don't have in common is obvious enough. So what do they have in common?
Within each of these three societies, notions of right and wrong would be roughly the same, as different as they might seem on the outside. It might be permissible in the republic to beat a slave, but it wouldn't be acceptable to strike a citizen. It might be quite normal in the tribal society to kill enemies in war, but murdering your neighbors would seem just as criminal to them as it does to us.
A free citizen in the republic would surely never be deprived of his vote, his accepted rights to due process of law, or his personal liberty. He wouldn't be forced to work without pay, or to obey arbitrary orders. A fighting man of the tribal society wouldn't be forced to marry against his will, and wouldn't be treated as the spoils of war. A woman of the nomadic society wouldn't be treated as a beast of burden.
In each case, the rights of a full citizen would be more similar than different, with the differences coming down to local conditions and the similarities to a broader principle. What is that principle exactly? The one first articulated by Immanuel Kant, to treat other people as ends in their own right rather than means. And in every case, those who are not full citizens are treated as means to some other end. What that means is that some are human, and others are considered not human in the fullest sense. Whatever progress humanity has made over the course of history- and any such progress has been limited indeed- it comes down to this, an ever-widening definition of who qualifies as an actual human.
The democratization of society is itself an aristocratic ideal, or rather the growth and expansion of aristocratic ideals. Many words which are now applied to whoever deserves them were once given a much more restricted meaning. Dignity, for instance, was a kind of gravitas, a noble spirit and intrinsic respect, as it is today. But it was also part of the definition that it was applied exclusively to noblemen. We have no noblemen now, but the concept remains, transformed by the alchemy of time and change into a universal aspiration, a quality to which anyone may attain and of which all have some measure.
The word gentleman is of the exact same category- a person who behaves in a certain way is considered a gentleman, regardless of his familial lineage. But in earlier times, it was not so. 'Gentleman' at that time referred to a social class, to one's status as a man of leisure and one's descent from a significant family.
The word noble is now a quality, the characteristic of a virtuous act, a self-sacrificing choice. Not very long ago it referred to a title, to the ownership of a great deal of land and one's power over its inhabitants.
The values of the modern world allow for no such parasitism, no such privileged caste at the apex of society. But the best of that dead class is preserved today, in the survival of its highest ideals and their expansion to a wider sphere.
It is my belief that these elite ideals are not properly elite at all, but simply the fullest expression of a human life. And it is the growing realization that we are all human, truly human in the complete sense, that I refer to as 'democratization.'
There is no one without a measure of dignity, no one at all. Just as no nobleman in the ancient times would have taken another nobleman as his personal chattel, so no person may be used by another as a means to an end, for to do so would violate the whole concept of dignity and leave it meaningless. The noblemen of that ancient time discovered the principle, but they had not discovered a more important principle- that it applied to everyone. In those days the notion of humanity was a matter of degrees, beginning with the members of one's own people and caste, and diminishing with distance. Some people were more human than others, and this was taken for granted.
The fact is that the distinction remains, but the basis is altered. All of us are equally and fully human- but only in potential, only in the extent to which we live the ideal and extend its reach. Dignity, gentle courtesy, noble self-sacrifice- these things mark the genuine human, the human who is what he was intended to be. One of the characteristics of a genuine human is that he treats everyone else as a genuine human, without requiring them to earn the privilege. A society entirely composed of such true noblemen would be a society of sages, and one with no further need of a government. Such a society would awaken from the rule of Law as if from a bad dream.
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