ABSTRACT
In thinking about justice, and about morality more generally, the traditions of both Aristotle and Locke have had a powerful influence. Both have been adapted to contemporary life in constitutional democracies. ‘Sanitized' is perhaps a better description, particularly in the case of Aristotle. It would appear at first sight that Aristotle and Locke conflict but I think this is a superficial observation. Locke is indeed a severe individualist, while Aristotle stresses the social nature of the human animal: how an individual is, in her/his very identity, in her/his very humanity, a part of a greater whole. The very structure of our choices, the beings that we are, the very ‘I' that is part of a ‘we', are inescapably the expressions of a distinctive social ethos. And this, of course, includes the values and norms we have, our very most primitive conceptions of what is right, just and desirable. Locke, by contrast, sees individuals as independent. He views them as people capable of living in a state of nature, independent, tolerant of differences, seeking knowledge and concerned to protect their autonomy or self-ownership. A Lockean ethic will be concerned most fundamentally with the protection of individual rights. This individualist stress need not conflict with Aristotle's, or for that matter Hegel's, stress on the deep and irreversible way we are social animals through and through: how our very identity is formed by our society. Individualists, with a Lockean orientation, need not ignore their own past and how they are formed by a particular ethos with its distinctive structure of norms. We are socialized in distinctive ways that are inescapable and are a condition for our being human. But we need not be prisoners of our socialization. We are all distinctive sorts of human beings formed by a particular ethos. Sometimes, when we are a certain sort of person and fortunately situated, we can change our ethos, moving it in different directions in part as a function of our thoughts, desires, will and actions. And almost always we can by our distinctive reactions situate ourselves in patterns of our own choosing or partly of our own choosing, though set, and inescapably, in the distinctive social context in which we find ourselves. These thoughts do not, of course, come from nowhere. They are not simply the creation of the persons who think them. But they also are not unaffected by their individual thoughts. They are their own and they reflect who they distinctively are. People – or at least a not inconsiderable number of people – think of what kind of world they want and they have the ability to reflect carefully on what kind of world they have, including what distinctive kind of social creatures they and their fellows are, and they sometimes can, under propitious circumstances, forge a world a little more to their own liking, including to their own reflective and knowledgeable liking. There need be no conflict between a Lockean individualism and an Aristotelian stress on our social formation.
