ABSTRACT
Chapter VIII of Richard Peters's Ethics and Education is entitled 'Respect for Persons, Fraternity and the Concept of Man'; it was, so Peters said in his preface, the chapter 'which gave me more trouble than any other chapter in the book' (p. 8). 1 This, no doubt, is as it should be. The matters with which it is concerned lie at the very heart of that enlightened liberal democratic view of the proper nature of human society of which Peters has always been so notable an exponent in the fields of political philosophy and philosophy of education. If he had difficulty with these central and fundamental issues, it is that they are indeed difficult—and that he was both sensitive and honest enough to feel and to acknowledge the difficulties. It is in fact remarkable how well how much of this book still reads, getting on for twenty years since it was first written. Peters himself thought of it at the time of writing as being work still very much in progress and took himself to be publishing it 'somewhat prematurely'. Still, the point was, he said, 'to provide a few signposts for others and to map the contours of the fields for others to explore in a more leisurely and detailed manner' (p. 8). The context of one short paper does not provide much scope for leisure or for detail; but there can be no doubt that the topics of this chapter are more than worth coming back to.
