I'm not responding to your previous post because its arguments all hinged on your stance concerning the common good. If you're wrong here, you're wrong there.
This is basically correct. If there's no such thing as a common good, but only a private good, then the notion of public education is right out.
Saying it doesn't make it so. By what line of reasoning did you reach this conclusion? Is this just the first instinctive thought that came to mind or do you have a rational basis upon which to establish this unsupported assertion?
As a private individual, you have no right to tell me what to do, much less to coerce me into doing it. The very nature of law, however, is coercive. This is what distinguishes law from mere counsels. When I counsel you to do x, you can either do it or not. I have no power to make you do it. I can lead the horse to water, but I can't make him drink.
A law, however, is coercive. It says: "Do x or else." If there's no such thing as a common good, what gives anyone else the right to prescribe laws to me, much less to coerce me into following them?
Again, consider the Romans passage. The ruler does not wield the sword in vain. He is empowered to preserve order and punish evildoers.
What gives him the right?
Again, in the Bible we are commanded to be obedient to the rulers. Conversely, to disobey the rulers is to offend God, at least in some small way. In the Scholastic formulation, what is it about the ruler which empowers them
to bind me in conscience?
This is not, pay careful note, a modern question of the left. This is the question of St. Thomas Aquinas and of the Thomists and, I am sure, of other scholastics.
Again, I ask the question in a different way: what is it about the ruler which gives him authority over me such that he can command me to do x, forbid me to do y, permit me to do z, and punish me if I disobey?
The only way to explain this is as follows: as a private individual, I am part of a greater whole, i.e., of a political society. Just as I have my own good, so too, there is a good of the greater whole of which I am a part. Since my good is the good of a part, it is ordered to and subordinate to the good of the whole. He who has care over the whole has the authority to order the parts in relationship to the whole and to each other. This he does by means of law.
If there is no common good, and there is no whole which subsumes the parts, then the ruler has no authority, no entitlement to issue laws, and most certainly no right to punish people who disobey.
This is not so. The rights of any individual stop where the rights of another individual start. No one has the right to anything that someone else has to produce. To acknowledge this simple fact is to acknowledge the need for the rule of law and to say otherwise is to advocate theft and or slavery or in extreme cases, anarchy.
I vehemently disagree with this. If you start with a notion of rights in the modern sense, then you cannot derive thereby a notion of law. To the extent that the ruler says "Do what I say, or else," he violates my rights, if there are such rights in the modern sense (in fact, I deny that there are such rights; there are only commands, permissions and prohibitions of law). This is where the modern notion of a "social contract" just falls apart. If
you loan me money and I refuse to pay up, you don't have the right to bust my kneecaps. If there is no common good, why should the ruler have the authority to imprison me, impose fines or otherwise punish me for the very same thing?
But I do agree with you in this sense. There are two and precisely two alternatives: common good or anarchy.
Either there is a common good, and so a greater whole to which we are subordinate, and the ruler is entitled to bind us to follow laws, or else, there is no such common good, no such greater good, and the ruler has no such entitlement, and nobody is bound to follow any human law.
The fact that there is no actual thing known as "the common good" is not a new idea that began with Rand. The common good is an invention of the left and it has only ever been defined to be whatever the left needs for it to be.
No, it isn't. You can find it in Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc. The idea of a common good isn't new. It's a concept of ancient and medieval political thought.
It's precisely in modern thought (in, e.g., Hobbes and Locke) that we see the common good die, at least, as a political concept. Hobbes and Locke make the foundation of political society a kind of "social contract." At that point, society becomes a mere aggregate of individuals. It's less like a house (to which the wood and the bricks are naturally subordinated and ordered) and more like a mere heap of bricks and wood.
It's only in ancient and medieval thought, wherein we follow Aristotle in saying that man is a political animal and has a natural ordering to the political society, that we are entitled to say that there is a common good.
Of course, leftists will appeal to "the common good," but it takes on a completely different meaning for them. It becomes Rousseau's so called "will of the people," as though such a thing has ever existed or even could exist in this state of life.
Leftists may appeal to the common good, but they do so illegitimately. They are not entitled to do so by their own principles. Proof of this may be seen in the fact that leftists are overwhelmingly moral relativists. If there's no such thing as an objective good or evil, then there's no such thing as an objective common good, i.e., what is objectively good for a well-ordered political society.
You cannot, in one and the same breath, think that morality is relative, and yet hold that there is such a thing as a good of the whole political society, i.e., independently of your good and my good as private individuals.
In other words, its a non-entity on purpose! It cannot be defined and those who like the idea and understand its power would never allow its definition to be pinned down to anything firm.
It's conceived analogously. Just as there is a good for the virtuous person, so too there is a good for the virtuous society. It simply requires that society be conceived as a single thing, a single whole with a determinate nature. If it is such a thing, then there is a good proper to it.
It is for this reason that we are able to differentiate between good and bad societies.
The political society is nothing at all but a collection of individuals!
If that's true, then one private individual has no right to have authority over and punish another private individual.
Furthermore, if that's true, then the notion of a national or state border is completely groundless. The State has no authority to keep tabs on who is coming into and out of the country, much less to keep people out.
If you lined up everyone in the society, shoulder to shoulder and could stand in front of each individual and say "I don't owe it to you to obey the law" and then move down the line to the next individual and say the same thing, you'd eventually say, "I don't owe it to you to obey the law." to the whole society.
This is what is meant by saying the the common good does not exist. Societies are only collections of individuals.
I simply disagree with the bolded. I conceive of political society as an organic whole of which the individual members are subordinate parts. Evidence of this may be seen in the fact that a political society pre-exists and outlasts its members.
Since the argument either for or against this point presupposes the notion of a common good, we'll have to bracket this discussion.
I do wish to note, however, that if your point is correct, then every act of war becomes a horrible injustice. What gives soldier A the right to shoot and kill soldier B? What gives military pilot C the right to drop a bomb on a munitions factory full of workers?
If you agree with me and say that soldiers A and C are, in a very real sense, public authorities acting on behalf of the State and in the person of the whole political society, then there is no injustice. Why? Because the political society, conceived as a single organic whole, has an objective right of self-defense, and soldiers A and C are acting on her behalf. They are acting, not on their own behalf, but as agents of the State, who has care over the whole political society.
If you disagree with me, then you must assert that they are committing acts of murder, vandalism, etc.
Let me ask you a question to help illustrate the point being made here. By your logic, it was the political society that murdered six million Jews during World War II. In your view, who was responsible for the things that occurred in the Jewish concentration camps in Germany? Was it "the society" or was it the individuals who did the killing who are responsible?
Both. The Nazis were acting as agents of a disordered political society. This is why things like war, sanctions, etc. on Germany as a whole were justified. Nonetheless, this doesn't absolve individual Nazis of guilt. They had a Natural Law duty to disobey (Acts 5:29).
Nor is yours worth more than mine! How is that not commensurate?
Incommensurate; incomparable: You can't weigh and measure my life against yours, my rights against yours.
The police have the legal authority to arrest people if they have a reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime, yes. They have that authority because the law which governs our society says so, not because the wear a badge and a gun. The same law that gives the police their authority also gives judges their authority.
The bolded precisely is the point at issue. If there is no such thing as a common good, and if political society is not a single organic whole, then there is no basis for human law.
At that point, it becomes a mere matter of individual private contracts and agreements, into compliance with which you have no right to coerce me.
However, if the common good is a real thing and it isn't the majority, what is it?
It's the good of the whole political society conceived as a single organic whole.
According to analogy. As the good of a virtuous individual is to that individual, so too is the good of a virtuous society to that society.
Who decides what is "the good of the political society" especially if, as you say, it is "conceived (by whom???) apart from the good of any one or any number of its members"?
You just as easily could ask me what is the good of an individual human being, especially if, as I say, he is conceived as somehow superior to and independent of the individual parts of his body.
