PHILOSOPHY CLUB

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24405, 17 September 1940, Page 9

PHILOSOPHY CLUB

INDIVIDUAL AND STATE A meeting of the Philosophy Club was held at the University, on Friday evening. Mr C. F. Wigley read a paper on " Idealist’Political Philosophy,” in which he discussed the contributions of Green and Bosanquet to English political theory, and the criticisms that have been made of the idealist position. The speaker pointed out that some definite ethical justification for the State was required if there was to be any duty for the individual to obey the State. The first requirement in any political philosophy was for an adequate conception of the relationship of the individual and the State. Green asserted that the individual depended for all his rights upon his membership of the community, because it alone could give him the power of full moral development, and. further, that it was the duty of the community to provide for the individual these conditions which were necessary for his " self-reali-sation.” The State was the fulfilment and not the antithesis of the individual’s rights. Bosanquet carried Green’s conceptions further. In his writings, there appeared to be a tendency to think of the individual as possessing no independent life of his own. and his ultimate well-being as being his absorption into organised political society. He favoured a view of the State as involving a working conception of life as a whole. But political theory must not lose sight of the limits imposed upon the State bv its employment of force—the individual must will the Ideal himself before his action could have any moral value. By making adequate allowance for the moral influence of society, idealism represented an advance on the individualism o f Locke and John Stuart Mill, but it should not be forgotten that the individual was logically prior to the State, which was not an’end in itself but merely a means to the moral well-being of the individual.