well
Confounding final paragraph of many disparate statements.
Much less impressed with this essay than the first time I read it.
I feel like this essay is Pangle throwing around her credentials and use of "things Aristotle said" to support a random smattering of points about how she likes liberalism, democracy, the importance of education and school choice, etc
Democratic self-government
Also - pretty sure Aristotle and Plato thought democracy was a bad form of government, right? Wouldnt they argue that we shouldnt have one?
To correct these errors and support these virtues, we need especially the right story to tell about ourselves, about what America has been and is trying to be, about what the human spirit needs to thrive and why the American experiment is a promising way to provide it. We need a story of our history that models honesty and balance. It needs to help students understand the mixed motives of human beings and the mixture of selfishness and decency that has shaped our nation. It needs to teach sober realism but especially hope, including dark unvarnished facts but also stories of inspiring individuals who have made us better. Wilfred McClay's Land of Hope is a fine example of a history textbook that a great civic education could be based on.
I agree, but this is pretty far from Aristotle, no?
human enactments grounded in a knowledge of our natures, our particular political community, and what is possible for us
Pangle definition of "rights"
Makes it sound somewhat relative, eh?
fundamental meaning of justice, which weaves all these others together, is the common good of the whole political community.
What about justice of the individual? What gives her the right to pick the community?
Also, justice in a liberal society is perhaps more focused on the individual (thinking vivek) whereas more communal societies and customs (thinking China or Catholicism or Vance) are more focused on the community.
commitment to equal, individual rights? Aristotle is the fountainhead of the idea of natural right or what is "just by nature" (dikaion phusikon). From this springs both the natural-law teaching developed in classic form by St. Thomas Aquinas and the modern teaching on natural rights.
I feel like she is confounding aristotelian "natural right", which is a product of virtue and is not definable by law-like structures, with modern "natural rights" and their basis in a definitive state of nature
Justice is, to be sure, a most challenging virtue to attain, sometimes so hard that it seems to be merely "the good of another." This is a crucial reason we need law.
Again, Lorraine seems to be blending the indeterminacy of virtue ethics with her desire to create law-like structures that support liberalism.
In the virtue ethics vision of justice, law-like structures are in conflict with true justice, which, as a virtue, is not a definitive law... right?
We all share a political nature that thrives best in a free community
Is this true? Or is this just her belief as a proponent of liberalism?
Virtue
But - how do we infer the best political arrangement from this? I dont think we can, right?
We are beings that naturally seek to overcome our mortality by leaving behind others like ourselves.
This sounds a lot like the Hobbesian view of what is natural -- to avoid violent death and to perpetuate the species
But as our consensus about the meaning of the American project erodes, this foundational deficit becomes more of a problem.
apropos of Jimmy
The first is that our constitutional system has worked well on the basis of faulty premises about human nature.
Is it possible to ever find definitive premises of human nature? My understanding of the socratics is that human nature can be interrogated, but it is always a dialectic. Neither Plato nor Aristotle gives us a definitive answer for how to form a best government.
Is it possible that the founders, by asserting premises about human nature, were incorrect in that they made any assertion of human nature, but that they did better than anyone before them to assert a view of human nature that would lead to the best possible political regime of real life?