By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western InsightWhat do we mean when we refer to people as being equal by nature? In the first book devoted to human equality as a fact rather than as a social goal or a legal claim, John Coons and Patrick Brennan argue that even if people possess unequal talents or are born into unequal circumstances, all may still be equal if it is true that human nature provides them the same access to moral self-perfection. Plausibly, in the authors' view, such access stems from the power of individuals to achieve goodness simply by doing the best they can to discover and perform correct actions. If people enjoy the same degree of natural capacity to try, all of us are offered the same opportunities for moral self-fulfillment. To believe this is to believe in equality. |
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... Host Property 39 The relation called human equality springs from some significant property common to rational persons. The convention about human equality identifies this special “host property” as the capacity of the human self to ...
... Host Property Uniform 66 If the human sharing of this capacity generates an equality (not a similarity), this must be because the host property is shared uniformly by all rational humans. Uniformity of this sort is possible, if moral ...
... host of others are all put in the dock for close examination of their theories of equality. Coons and Brennan let these historical luminaries speak on their terms, sometimes at length. They do not coach their historical witnesses to use ...
... host property.” It is this ability to combine reason and will in the pursuit of moral ends that distinguishes persons from beasts. To be sure, rational persons have various degrees of rational apprehension of this moral order. (A few ...
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By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight John E. Coons,Patrick M. Brennan Limited preview - 1999 |
By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight John E. Coons,Patrick M. Brennan Limited preview - 1999 |