Abstract
In a paper presented at a 1978 conference under the same sponsorship at this one, I argued that human moral capacity, defined as the potential outreach of one’s moralistic behavior toward others of the species, are stretched beyond tolerance limits in modern political settings (Buchanan, 1978). Humans are called upon to “care about” unknown persons with whom they have no means of identification, and with whom they share no common loyalty to external symbolic entities capable of stirring emotions. Thrust involuntarily into such settings, modern people necessarily behave so as to further their own narrowly defined self-interest. I inferred from this essentially empirical hypothesis that the moral potential of humankind could only be exploited if the institutions of political interaction were to be reconstructed so as to correspond more closely with the limits of the human moral “community.”
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© 1983 The HUMANA Press Inc.
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Buchanan, J.M. (1983). Moral Community and Moral Order. In: Miller, H.B., Williams, W.H. (eds) Ethics and Animals. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5623-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5623-6_6
Publisher Name: Humana Press
Print ISBN: 978-0-89603-053-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-5623-6
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