Examination on The Individual & the State's Relationship

. . virtuous institutions atomic number 18 carcasses without personalised morals, and personal morality apart from moral institutions is an unreality, a consciousness without a body (Bradley 114).

The moral mortal must be willing to tell apart personal morality with the morality of the community, or country. Key to that is finding one's "station" in the community, where one whitethorn "realize" one's moral self-importance (117). One's station "teaches us to identify others and ourselves with the station we fill; to consider that as computable, and by uprightness of that to consider others and ourselves good too" (117). He (!) who can nonplus his place in the military man "ought not to be dissatisfy" (117).

Bradley quotes Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind to the effect that the "realm of morality is nothing scarce the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals, which exists in the free-living reality of them" (120). For Bradley, the "true account of the evidence" is nothing else than "the moral organism, the real identity of might and right," which has the ability and option to " disprove every other doctrine, and do with moral approval of all told what the explicit theory of scarcely one will chastely justify" (119).

This could be interpreted as an articulation of communitarian determine wherein disinterested public service drives the engagement of social beings who befuddle up the community. Now Bradley's community (or give tongue to) is presumed to be

permeated with good will. Expressions of individuality that conflict with that good will be instances of bad will, when the moral individual should be content or "at peace with reality" as it is found in the community, and even though "good will in the world realizes itself by and in imperfect instruments, and in spite of them" (118-119). By "intuitive subsumption, which does not know that it is a subsumption" (131), tidy sum know how to act because they have received values from the presupposition of "the morality of the community as its basis, and [] subject to the approval thereof" (133).

Having cited the disconnectedness between the reality of imperfect community and the reality of self amiss integrated with it, Bradley articulates the need to balance right with office (duty), both being necessary to the concept of the good and to deposition of the moral universe, which indeed would not exist without both. Nevertheless, Bradley specifically says that the state is entitled to expect that citizens will do duty to the state even as they develop themselves individually within the protections given up by the state, "for the state lives in its individuals; and . . . the individual lives in the state" (146). By extension, state good lives in individuals, and individual good lives in the state.

The facts of post-1876 history are far from confirming Bradley's hatful of a state, despite his implication that real-world state goodness is imperfectly realized. Havel's discussion of state-enforced communitarianism aimed at programmatic disempowerment of individuals, which was the reality of experience in easterly Europe for most of the twentieth century, shows that notions of hopeful, participatory, and obligatory subsumption of individual morality into the morality of the whole fall before facts that are far more than mere imperfection. Havel develops the view that some states (specifically in Eastern Europe) are not only "in a confused or rotten condition" but a
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