Necessary Evil: The Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln

Necessary Evil: The Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln内容摘要：

Necessary Evil: The Political Philosophy of Abraham Lincoln I begin in ambiguity, if not oxymoron. Can there be such a thing as a necessary evil? Can any evil be necessary? The ‘necessary evil’ to which I refer is slavery: American chattel slavery. The phrase seems to come from Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholding author of the Declaration of Independence. 1 “We have the wolf by the ears,” Jefferson reflected “and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in the one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” 2”Wolf by the ears” has long struck me as such an apt, striking characterization of a necessary evil. Before moving on to a closer examination of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson’s heir and fellow US president, let me call attention for a few moments to the other portion of my title, the notion of political philosophy. Political philosophy we are told has its origins in Ancient Greece, with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. From Socrates to Jefferson, from Athens to Philadelphia, the philosophers have taught us to respect, even revere the law. As citizens we have a basic duty to obey the law. (do you agree?) In Plato’s dialogue called The Crito, the condemned Socrates defends Athenian law in admonishing his friend: “Do you imagine that a city (or nation) can continue to exist, and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?” 3 Twenty centuries later, Tom Paine echoed Socrates in reminding his revolutionary friends that in contrast to England, “in America,” not a man or a monarch but “the law is king.” At the same time, the great political philosophers have gestured at a higher set of obligations, obligations above the laws of Athens or of revolutionary America, indeed, higher than any human authority. Socrates in the Apology inaugurates a 1 tradition of what we might call the higher law doctrine that winds its way from antiquity through Aquinas and Kierkegaard, among others, down to the present day. Saint Thomas speaks of Eternal Law and Natural Law, the latter consisting of rules that govern our moral conduct, that can be accessed by reason and that stand above human, civil statutes. Soren Kierkegaard offers a harrowing literary meditation on the plight of the biblical Abraham, who in Genesis chillingly grasps the limitations of human law. Knowing that obeying God means never transgressing divine law Abraham readily sets out sacrifice his son, Isaac, despite facing the inevitable wrath of the human community. The implication seems clear. All elements of any civil code, even so great as the injunction against infanticide, pale in comparison to the injunctions of the higher law. In American history several figures stand out as champions of the higher law. Mistress Ann Hutchinson in the earliest days of settlement defended herself from the authorities of Massachusetts Bay by contrasting her adherence to the higher law with her opponents’ embrace of the lower human law, a contrast informed by direct revelation from God.4 Later Americans, especially on the left, have championed Hutchinson and her antinomian appeal against merely human law. Distinct echoes of Hutchinson can be found in the Boston Tea Party (that one not this one), as well as in the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King. Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience”—to which I shall return—explicitly reminds citizens of the great gulf between human law and moral justice and their primary responsibility to the latter. Few of us today would consider ourselves acolytes of Thoreau, but ask yourself whether there are laws on our statute books that you consider unjust, that you believe call for some sort of disobedience. And on what basis are statutes 2 deemed unjust unless one assents to the conviction that there exists some form of higher law. It seems we have before us two contradictory imperatives. Does political philosophy commend to us a paradox, that it is our duty both to obey and disobey the same thing? This paradox, which philosophers have named for Socrates, has a long pedigree and is not without many levels of complexity. It asks us simultaneously to obey and revere the laws that bind together our communities and yet informs us of the existence of a law higher than that of the revered polity. And there’s more. When the two come into conflict, the higher law takes precedence. Socrates’ great speech before the Athenian Court tha