Virtue or rights?
Constitutional law
By Sam Ghandchi
November 24, 2003
The Iranian
Socrates in his defense, addresses the ideological democratic
state, that had accused him of believing in supernatural gods
and corrupting the youth with such beliefs, in the following
words:
Please do not be offended if I tell you the truth.
No man on Earth who consciously opposes either you or any other
organized
democracy , and flatly prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities
from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly
escape with his life. The true champion of justice, if he intends
to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine
himself to private life and leave politics alone." [Socrates'
Defense (Apology), Collected Dialogues of Plato,
Princeton University Press, P.17]
This is as if Socrates
is speaking in the courts of Islamic Republic of Iran. But not
the current IRI, rather the
ideal IRI of reformists,
namely an "Islamic Democracy". He
is tried and condemned to death in a court with the presence
of a jury, in an ideological democracy, on charges of believing
in supernatural, holding thoughts of other gods different from
the gods sanctioned by the state, and encouraging the youth with
such beliefs thru reasoning. He finally drinks the hemlock,
and for centuries humanity has been in shock and bewildered
about why things went wrong, and how this treacherous murder
happened in a democracy.
What has been less noticed in Socrates' defense,
is the fact that he does *not* speak of his *rights*, when addressing
the
jury, *contrary* to the way the political prisoners address similar
courts in our times. He tries to convince them that his ideas
are the expression of *good* and *virtues* and not the thoughts
of his prosecutors in the court.
Even at the end, he says if
his own sons grow up and "put money or anything else before
goodness", he asks the same jury and judges to take their
revenge and plaque his sons "for neglecting the important
things and thinking that they are good for something when they
are good for nothing." And he continues that if judges do
that, "he shall have justice at their hand, both he himself
and his children." [Ibid P.26].
It is as if Socrates, just like Bukharin in Stalin's
court, deeply believed that the system in which he was being
prosecuted, is
the ideal just system, and this is why to the end, he does not
want to escape from prison, because he considers the escape to
be undermining the system which he considers to be just, although
he thinks the functionaries of the system at the time, had distanced
themselves form the just path of the regime, especially with
regards to their judgment of him, and thus he does not escape
although he can, and drinks the hemlock.
The same way Bukharin, centuries later, at the
Soviet gallows, with the outcry of long live communism, bids
farewell to this
world. And today, Hashem Aghajari, although himself
condemned to death for his views by an IRI court, does not reject
the Ayatollah Khomeini's death fatwa
against Salman Rushdie, even when their verdicts are
similar to a disinterested eye. In Aghajari's mindset, he
is representing virtue, whereas Rushdie represents vice, and
Rushdie deserves to die for his views but not him, because
for Aghajari the *rights* of freedom of thought do not determine
the path of the state, virtue does.
What Socrates, Bukharin, and Aghajari have in common,
is the dominant concept of justice in antiquity
and
the Middle Ages. Societies back then viewed justice equivalent
to *goodness* and *virtue*. To them, justice does not include
*rights*
such as freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the like.
John Rawls has shown this difference very well, in a his book "Lectures
of Moral Philosophy". He shows that philosophers
of ancient times, such as Plato, in contrast to post-renaissance
philosophers such as
Hume and Kant, viewed justice and moral philosophy as issues
of *virtue* and not *rights*.
This is why the dialogues of Socrates is about *virtue* and *goodness*,
whereas Hume and Kant discuss *rights*.
Rawls mentions that in ancient
Greece religion had been civil, similar to what
religious
reformists and their supporters propose for Iran. In fact,
he mentions that religion of ancient Greece focused on civil
rituals, and the critical philosophers were the ones concerned
with *virtue* and *goodness* in their *reasoning*, which
they considered as the philosopher's search for justice. In
Europe of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, religion had a
complete doctrine for *virtues*
and *goodness*, and finally modern philosophers
used *reasoning* to define *rights* and did *not* use *virtue*,
in order to arrive at justice and the modern state.
In fact Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati, although
in different ways, were both searching for justice of the type
of the
ancients. Khomeini in his book "Velayate Faghih", calls
for Plato's state of philosopher-kings, which in practice was
ushered in with the position of *vali-e-faghih* (supreme religious
authority) and the Assembly of Experts. The clergy
took the role of guardians
of virtues. And the IRI constitution was drafted on the basis
of Islamic *virtues* and not human rights. Now if such a state
was
formed,
even if it was civil and did not include the clergy, would the
likes of Shariati and Aghajari, not be slaughtered by it, just
like Socrates, if they remained as critics of the state?
A lot
of people have been upset about my criticism of Shariati and
I hope my explanations here clarify that this is not a personal
issue. Perhaps if Khomeini had had been killed at the beginning
of the revolution, today he would not have been as hated as he
is, and some might have called for the return of Khomeini's ideology
and not Shariati's. But I still would have made the same criticism
of his views, as I have here, because of his error in placing
virtue as the basis for the state and law. And in this modern
world, this
is the biggest retrogression, even if it is in a non-religious
form, such as the state under communists. The great thinker
Karl Popper showed this error from Plato's time to ours and I
have written about it elsewhere.
The error of the model of justice
in antiquity and the Middle Ages is that it places *virtue*
as the basis of justice, and not *rights*. And
even their "philosopher-kings" cannot agree
on the goodness and virtue of an idea or an individual. This
is why in the modern world, rights of people are
separate from any ideology, and are recognized today as universal
human rights. John Rawls, in his books "A
Theory of Justice" and
his new work "Justice
as Fairness", has tried to define these rights, independent
of liberal philosophy, as a logical template independent of any
any religious or philosophical
system.
Today, the attempts to write the future constitution
of Iran has already started, and it is important that we do not
make
the same mistakes we made in 1979. We should
not define *virtues* acceptable to the law, which the IRI constitution
has done, but instead focus on the rights
of citizens and how to best limit the power of the state and
religious institutions, so that again we do not become victims
of the regime we created >>> See here
Author
Sam Ghandchi is publisher/editor of IranScope,
an Iranian news and culture portal site.
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