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Full Idea
Our ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of personal worth. All other values are relative to personal values. To speak of any progress of a nation or society or mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons is to use words without meaning.
Gist of Idea
All talk of the progress of a nation must reduce to the progress of its individual members
Source
T.H. Green (Prolegomena to Ethics [1882], p.193), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II
Book Ref
Muirhead,John H.: 'The Service of the State: T.H. Green' [John Murray 2021], p.44
A Reaction
Note that, pre-verificationism, a Victorian talks of plausible words actually being meaningless. This is a good statement of the core doctrine of liberalism.
| 22531 | We aim to understand the best possible community for free people [Aristotle] |
| 23043 | All talk of the progress of a nation must reduce to the progress of its individual members [Green,TH] |
| 23410 | Modern liberals see a community as simply a society which respects freedom and equality [Kymlicka] |
| 23387 | Liberals must avoid an official culture, as well as an official religion [Kymlicka] |
| 23388 | Liberals need more than freedom; they must build a nation, through a language and institutions [Kymlicka] |
| 22818 | Liberals are not too individualistic, because people recognise and value social relations [Kymlicka] |
| 21121 | Liberal Nationalism encourages the promotion of nationalistic values [Shorten] |
| 22822 | Liberals promote community and well-being - because all good societies need them [Charvet] |
| 23124 | Liberal community is not blood ties or tradition, but shared choices, and sympathy for the losers [Gopnik] |
| 23127 | Liberal community includes flight from the family, into energetic reforming groups [Gopnik] |