Core value - authority and hierarchy

Burke’s idea of a ‘natural aristocracy’

‘Natural’

• Innateness of talent and leadership

  • Not acquirable through effort nor self-advancement

‘Aristocracy’

• Upper class of people

‘Authority from above’ - relating to paternalism

‘Authority’

• Develops naturally from necessity

• Nurtures/guides/punishes us (like a father)

• Acts in our own interests

‘From above’

• Cannot arise from below

• Paternalism

  • Power exerted from above governs in the interests of the people

    • E.g. children do not agree to be governed by their parents

• Human nature - we are too intellectually and psychologically imp. to agree to being governed

  • Yet we are morally imp. and need authority to prevent chaos

Limits to authority

• Cannot be by an artificial contract

• Can be by natural responsibilities that are included in responsbility

  • We cannot treat those we have authority over however we choose

Quotes: Burke

“A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted”

“a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation”

We should respect “institutions on the principle which nature teaches to respect individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended”

You should “lov[e] the little platoons to which you belong”

Quotes: Hobbes

“laws of nature” bind everyone (now known as morality) and that we can’t determine for ourselves