Abstract
Our public life owes much to our expectation that we will prefer good to evil in our everyday exchanges with one another. Admittedly, this expectation is as much disturbed by exceptional acts of goodness as of evil. In either case, we are forced to examine our commonplace assumptions invested in the injunction to do more good than harm towards others whose vulnerability we share. This is that law of the Gospel:
Whatever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them. And that law of all men, quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris.… Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself.
(Leviathan, Ch. XIV: 85; Ch. XV: 103)
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© 2010 John O’Neill
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O’Neill, J. (2010). Ecce Homo: The Political Theology of Good and Evil. In: Cheliotis, L.K. (eds) Roots, Rites and Sites of Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298040_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298040_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30301-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29804-0
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