The social contract, the most recent philosophical concept to have major importance as moral sanction, derives mainly from the work of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, who saw morality as an extension of nature. The needs of man for co-operative self-defense and communal existence required a voluntary surrender of certain absolute freedoms which should be balanced against the retention of certain inalienable rights. (...) protection of natural rights has tended to replace both divine authority and precedent as the driving moral force of the twentieth century. The three are not, of course, mutually exclusive. The great divide in recent history has tended to be in the conflicting emphasis on what tend to be the two most important: freedom and equality. The inability of all modern states to achieve complete fulfilment of both at the same time has been a fundamental source of conflict. A History of Sin - Oliver Thomson
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 22:52:30 +0000
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