First impressions

When I was in junior high or perhaps a freshman in high school a friend passed me his copy of Plato’s Republic and urged me to read it.

I did.

Never having heard of Karl Popper, I was nevertheless shocked and appalled not only or even primarily at the totalitarian nature of the ideal polis there described and defended but at the very idea, itself totalitarian no matter what the result, of a top-to-bottom conception of an economic, social, sexual, and political order sanctioned by the empty but obviously bloody-minded idea of natural justice.

The whole enterprise seemed to me as shockingly unnatural and downright inexplicable as the medieval Christian or Islamic aspirations to shape the world by violence according to what seemed to me to have been baseless but ferocious ideas of God and God’s will.

“Justice demands it!” seemed to me every bit as terrible a cry as “Deus vult!”

At fourteen years old I had not the least inkling of a preference concerning anything as breathtakingly remote from my power or my real life concerns as the whole shape of human civilization, right down into the minutest detail.

Of course, I most certainly did have preferences as to what might befall myself, my brother and sister, my parents, or my friends and relatives.

Certainly I did not want any harm to befall us, and I would have welcomed good things that might arise.

But I had no hint of a notion that or how such down to earth, real life and natural values might lead to preferences concerning all possible entire social orders in the abstract, whether or not I was supposed to imagine all of us living in them.

Much less how real and personal concerns might bear in the least on what might befall people outside my ken, or on the other side of the world, or aliens on other planets, or people in the remote past or in the far future.

Certainly, I wished no one ill, but all of that was as much outside my power and had as little to do with me or mine as storms on the surface of Jupiter.

My friend had questions about all of these things, all the same.

And I often wondered how they had got into his head or who had put them there – and where he, the mysterious mentor, had got them.

And as for justice, how could I possibly judge the justice of anything at all, the word being so empty?

Although I would later and for a long time at least fall for it to the extent of thinking there must be something to it, in some way, at that time I recall that I once answered when asked – possibly by this same friend who kept urging on me paperbacks of philosophical classics on the topic – that I had no moral opinions.

In fact, I had not the least idea what people were babbling about when they went on about things being right or wrong – mostly, in fact nearly always, about something being wrong – or where they could have got such talk, or why they made so much of it.

Much less, of course, did I have any thought of what moral or natural rights people might have, or rulers, or the state, or what might be a just state, or a just social order, or a just government, or how one could begin to tell.

True enough, I disapproved of overt cruelty and gratuitous harm to others and social practices embodying those.

[Update, 12262015.

Correction.

I pitied the victims and feared the perpetrators as one might when witnessing a sudden attack by a dog.

Neither of those is disapproval, nor is their combination.

/Update.]

[Update, 12/2/2016.

Is disapproval anything but reprehension of what one thinks wrong?

In which case recourse to disapproval cannot provide a  naturalistic substitute or stand-in for morality.

Despite Hume.

/Update.]

But that isn't actually a moral opinion.

And it certainly doesn't answer the question what price I might be willing to pay to fix things that were awry on the other side of the planet.

Update, 5/16/13.

OK, sure, at that point I could in some abstract sense have blindly partitioned all possible social orders into indifference classes according to how I and those I cared about would fare in them.

But that's neither a moral nor a political ordering and leaves completely unsettled, I think, everything politics is actually about.