On Political Means and Social Ends

What society ought we to have, and what can we do to try to get it? This book sets out to answer these questions beginning with an essay on the foundation of our liberalism of means and ends, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty . It goes on to consider the culmination of liberal thinking in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice . It argues that liberalism is good intentions not carried forward into rational commitment. Conservatism, in its past and its present guises, is also made clear in its reality. So too is the leftism of the past, including G.A. Cohen’s attempt to save Karl Marx’s theory of history. Both are discarded. The book argues for another political and social morality - the generosity and fellow-feeling of the Principle of Humanity. It is a consequentialist rather than a mysterious morality, and its essential idea is that we should take rational steps to rescue the badly-off from lives of wretchedness and other distress. This is the commitment that led to Ted Honderich’s human and passionate response to 9/11, After the Terror . Further chapters consider hierarchic democracy - the democracy we have as distinct from the democracy we think we have - and the necessity of mass civil disobedience. The book ends with a new discussion of inhumanity and terrorism. A paper on terrorism for humanity takes forward the thinking of After the Terror , on the subject of the Palestinian moral right to terrorism in particular.