A Challenge to Schadenfreude
My friend Dylarama Link has proposed he and I develop an ideal political system. This is essentially a discussion about how best to order society, viz., Plato's Republic. Now the prudent observer will notice that from the outset this is an exercise in futility, but it could be productive in at least a linguistic sense as we will be trying to form consensus regarding the application of certain terms and their rules for proper use. We will be defining and naming, and inevitably we will be advancing our conceptions of the good. I think this can do no harm and will definitely be fun for the philosophically minded, as I most assuredly am. And so we begin.
Dylarama has enumerated a series of candidates for our first principles . This is a necessary first step in any meaningful discourse; that this is true should be evident to everyone and I would suggest not reading any further until this is accepted.
However appealing the use of the term 'Man' may be, I think it is confusing enough to warrant replacement with 'person' as the irreducible unit of political power. A person is something more than just a human being. A human being is not necessarily a person and a person is not necessarily a human being, though there are no counter-examples and this distinction does little to make anything clearer for our purposes. A human being is an organism with the human genome; it is a biological definition. A person is an individual capable of making decisions, acting on those decisions, and is also eligible for praise or blame for those decisions. Obviously this excludes certain humans from personhood, such as infants, severe cases of mental illness, Alzheimer's vicitms, and those humans who have suffered whole-brain death. This is not the full list, but the distinction should be clear. Responsibility comes in degrees and this is reflected in our practice of inflicting lighter punishment upon minors and the clinically insane.
I emphasize responsibility, the capability of recieving praise or blame, because I believe only a responsible individual human being, a person, can relinquish his natural liberty, his freedom.
The next step I would like to take is arguing that the only legitimate form of governance is one that persons freely assent to. But to do so now would be to get ahead of myself. Please dearest Dylarama, tell me what you would add or subtract.