Stanley I. Benn - Social Principles and the Democratic State

First published 1959

This edition first published in 2010

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1959 George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN 10: 0-415-49111-8 (Set)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49111-2 (Set)

ISBN 10: 0-415-55528-0 (Volume 4)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-55528-9 (Volume 4)

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FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1959

ELEVENTH IMPRESSION 1977

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the Publishers.

George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 1959

ISBN 0 04 300028 2 paper

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY COX & WYMAN LTD

LONDON, FAKENHAM AND READING

There are a great number of students who take Social Philosophy as part either of an Honours Degree or of a Diploma in Social Studies, Sociology, or Public Administration. The authors, in teaching such students, have been constantly embarrassed by the absence of a textbook which takes account of recent developments in philosophy without being too remote from the institutions of the modern welfare state. They therefore set to work with the limited intention of providing a text-book in this field, Richard Peters tackling the ethics and Stanley Benn the politics and institutional analysis. The hope was that there would be a kind of intellectual osmosis in the middle region of social principles.

But this was not how the plan eventually worked out. The chapters on Moral Theory and Justice and Equality were the first to be written and discussed, and they showed that the authors were thinking on remarkably similar lines. These chapters became a growing point for the rest of the book, which thus grew from the centre outwards. This has two results. Firstly, instead of merely covering the syllabus in the mundane manner originally planned, the authors found themselves developing, in a concrete institutional setting, a few central social principles. Secondly, it became increasingly difficult, especially in the central part of the book, to disentangle the ideas of one of the authors from those of the other. They are both to blame, therefore, for whatever defects the book has. And if it be a defect for a modern book on Social Philosophy to have a definite point of viewa cautious Utilitarianism which takes full account of the principle of impartialitythey are equally responsible for that too. They do attempt, however, to give reasons for it. Indeed, this is in a way the theme of the book: the close relationship between what is implied in being reasonable and the principles and institutions of the democratic state.

Thanks are due to Maurice Cranston for his comments on (a substantial part of which was published in an article in Philosophy, October 1958) and to Anthony Manser, on whom Stanley Benn tried out many ideas before ever they reached paper, and who helped to point a way out of many difficulties. The authors are especially grateful to Professor W. Harrison who made detailed comments on the completed MS. Thanks are due, too, to Mrs Dunn and Miss Rouse for typing the MS and to Miss Marshallsay for compiling the index. Miriam Benn did much to clarify the ideas, and laboured to simplify the style of the book, in the face of every possible objection and obstruction from its authors. To her they owe their very special thanks, for this and for much besides.

STANLEY BENN

RICHARD PETERS

London and Southampton

1958

Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal. He lives in society and is thereby able to survive, to talk, and to develop a culture. This is no doubt true, but the initial difficulty in theorizing about society is to be clear what we are talking about. If an ornithologist says that woodpeckers live in trees there is little to puzzle us. For trees and birds are easily picked out; they have definite contours; they move about; they have parts which mutually influence one another so as to make them both recognizable wholes. But when a social theorist tells us that men live in society, the matter is more puzzling. We are not inclined to dispute what he says, but it is not quite clear what he is saying. For though men are recognizable wholes like birds, societies are not wholes of the same order at all. The way in which a man lives in a society is quite different from the way in which a woodpecker lives in a tree. For membership of a society does not necessarily imply residence in some larger spatial whole. What then does it imply?

The first and obvious observation to make is that there is no such thing as society. By this is meant, firstly, that men are members of various societies rather than of society, and, secondly, that societies are not things in the ordinary sense of thing. The most obvious characteristic of a thing is that it is spatially extended with recognizable contours. Yet quite obviously such a criterion does not fit the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Indeed, very few societies conform to this criterion. For all members would have to be present at a given placea rare occurrence at even the annual general meeting of any society. The fact, however, that societies are not things in the obvious sense of the word thing need not worry us unduly; for neither are minds, and yet we all think that we have got themexcept, perhaps, behaviourists. People palpably are thingsthough, of course, things of a special sortand when we speak of societies we are using language to pick out types of order which make an intelligible pattern of the activities which people share with one another. As a matter of fact we have to be taught to recognize forms of order which seem obviously given to us, as the psychologists have shown. Language itself makes possible a new level of life; by initiation into it we are also introduced to the contours of our environment. We learn words for cats, cars and clouds. And the process of learning the word is part of the process of learning the type of order intimated by it.