ABSTRACT
Far from playing an indispensable part in either law or ethics, "rules" have only a limited and conditional role. The current vogue for rules and principles is the outcome of certain powerful factors in recent social history; but these factors have always been balanced against counterweights. Justice has required both law and equity, while morality has always demanded both fairness and discrimination. When this essential duality is ignored, reliance on unchallengeable principles can generate, or become the instrument of, its own subtle kind of tyranny. In law, in ethics, and in public administration alike, there is nowadays a similar preoccupation with general principles and a similar distrust of individual discretion. The great ethical hope of the Marxists was that "working-class solidarity" would, in effect, create a vast and cohesive extended family within which the dispossessed would find release from psychological as well as from political and economic oppression.
