THE STATE BY: COPLESTON
being told for those were admitted into the
1. State – exists in order to serve the wants of men
 Men are not independent of one another and
need aid and cooperation for the production of
the necessaries of life.
- They gather associates and helpers into one
dwelling place called CITY.
 CITY – original end of the city is economic end
and follows the principle of division of labor
 PRINCIPLE OF DIVISION OF LABOR – Different
people have different natural endowments and
talents and are fitted to serve the community in
different ways.
- a man’s work will be superior in quality and
quantity when he works in one occupation
alone in accordance to his natural gifts.
- Stressed on the special classes of guardians
who will devote themselves exclusively to
the conduct of war.
 Existence of the State correlated to ordinary
and luxurious life.
 Rise of population consequent on the growing
luxury of the city = territory will be insufficient
for the city’s needs ; some of the neighbour’s
territory will have to be annexed.
 PLATO – finds the origin of war in an economic
cause.
2. Division and specialization of labor; special classes
of guardians; and education
 Special classes of guardians – spirited and
philosophic.
- must undergo to some process of
education.
 Education – man is not only an “Economic Man”
but for their happiness, to develop them in the
good life, in the principle of justice
- Education is necessary so that the members
of the society will become rational beings.
- Education to the true and good
- Philosophers – those who will allot time for
the various tasks of the State and are really
true and good.
 Plato objected the idea on how legends were
Ideal State and must set themselves to produce
examples of good moral character.
 EDUCATION:
- Music, gymnastics, astronomy and
mathematics
- Guardians of the State – ascetic character,
a “simple, moderate system” not calculated
to produce sluggish athletes who sleep
away their lives but rather a warrior
athletes who should be like wakeful dogs
and should see and hear with the utmost
keenness.
- state education for the young must be both
physically and mentally for the selection of
the rulers of the State was a matter of great
concern.
3. 2 Great Classes in the State:
 inferior class of artisans
 superior class of guardians
The question is who are to be the rulers of the State.
Qualifications:
- best men of the class
- intelligent and powerful
- careful of the State
- loving the State
- regarding the State’s interest as identical with
their own
- should pursue the interests without the thought
of their own personal advantage
- must be perfect guardians or auxiliaries
IN THE TEXT: THERE ARE 3 CLASSES IN THE IDEAL STATE
- excludes the slave class; arranged in asc. Order
 Artisans – bottom
 Auxiliaries – military class in the middle;
courage
- Not savage animals
- Friendly allies to the citizens
- Right education and mode of
life
 - Possess no private property
- Receive all the necessaries from
fellow-citizens
 Guardians - top; where wisdom resides
4. NATURE OF JUSTICE
 When the different classes of the State have
been outlined, it becomes possible to behold
justice in the State.
 wisdom, courage and temperance
 everyone attends to his own business without
interfering with anyone else’s
 individual is just when all the elements of the
soul function properly in harmony and with due
subordination of the lower to higher
 State is just when all the classes perform their
due functions in the proper way
 Political injustice – meddling or interfering of
one class to another class
5. COMMUNITY
 Gender equality
 Women – to be trained as men in the ideal
State
- Not simply stay at home
- Trained in music and gymnastics and
military discipline like men
- Duly qualified women will be selected
to share in the life and official duties of
the guardians of the State
Justification: men and women differ simply in respect
to the parts they play in propagation of the species.
Although women is weaken than men, but natural gifts
are to be found in both sexes.
 Marriage Relations
- Marriage of the higher class will be
under the supervision of the State
particularly, the magistrates (only 2
upper class); private property will be
abolished for the good of the State
- Marriages of Guardians or Auxiliaries
will be under the control of magistrates
in order to beget a best possible
offspring
- Artisan class retains private property
and the family.
- Upper class marriage will be strictly
arranged; marry who is prescribed to
them
- Children of the higher classes who are
not suitable for the life of those classes,
but who have been legitimately born
will be relegated to the class of the
artisans.
6. GOVERNMENT
 Socrates – objected on the idea that no city can
be organized according to the plans proposed
- He stated that it is not to be expected
that an ideal should be realized in
practice with perfect accuracy
- Power should be vested to the
Philosopher-kings
 Plato – democratic principle of government is
absurd; against to Athenian Democracy
- Ruler must govern in virtue of
knowledge and that knowledge must be
knowledge of the truth
- Correlated this concept to the
navigator in the ship
- Politicians do not really know their
business
 Philosopher – finest fruit of the education
provided by the State; for he will draw the
concrete ideal State and fill up that outline
 Those chosen as candidates for rulers will be
educated (music, gymnastics, etc.)
- Sound in limb and mind
- Endowed with virtue
- Those who have proved themselves
satisfactory by the time they reached
the age of 30, being specially selected
for training in Dialectic
- After 5 years spent in the study they
will be set down into the den to hold
any military or other office in order to
get the necessary experience of life
and avoid temptations.
- 50 years old will have reached the time
at which they must raise the eye and
 soul to the universal light and behold
the absolute good.
 They will not be trained in math merely with a
view to enabling them to perform calculations
that everyone ought to learn to perform but
rather with a view to make them apprehend
intelligible things
7. PERFECT STATE
 Based on the 8th and 9th books of the Republic
 Aristocratic State – perfect State; happiest
 Timocracy – when 2 higher classes combine to
divide the property of other citizens and reduce
them practically to slavery
 Oligarchy – love of wealth grows, political
power coming to depend on property
qualifications
 Democracy – ended the oligarchy by a poverty-
stricken class; extravagant love of liberty
 Tyranny – slave of ambition and passion; most
unhappy State
A FILIPINO CONCEPT OF JUSTICE BY: DIOKNO
Arguments on what justice really means:
 Justice is what strong impose and weak accept.
(real)
 Justice is what puts limits on what strong can
impose. (ideal)
 John Rawls – Justice is the first virtue of social
institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A
theory, however, elegant and economical must
be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise
laws and institutions, no matter how efficient
and well-arranged, must be reformed or
abolished if they are unjust.
 Edgar Z. Friedenberg – cites the lawyer’s
phrase, “justice under law”, and, after noting
that the phrase suggests an “unpleasantly
sexual”.
- “It is not customary for Law to yield
Justice; if Law is to perform it social
function, Justice must yield to Law. . .
The relationship of law to justice is not
even ambiguous; it is essentially
negative.
 Social Justice – there is no unanimity either on
how to distribute the burdens and benefits of
social life
- Social costs and benefits distributed
according to: rank , merit
- WON distribution is to be according to
the deeds or to needs.
 Karl Marx – “from each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs”.
 Justice is somehow done or attempted to be
done if society is to hold together.
 Question of what justice is more than
theoretical, it is practical and urgent.
I. Correlation of words as to justice
 Justice – according to Tagalogs, Ilongos,
Cebuanos and Pampangos
- Derived from the Visayan root tarong
- Which means straight, upright,
appropriate and correct.
- Justice is rectitude, the morally right
act.
- embraces the concept of equity
- no native origin and employed the
Spanish derivative ekidad.
 Right – from the word karapatan
- Root is dapat
- Signifies fitting, appropriate and
correct
- Similar to the meaning of justice which
indicated that justice and right are
intimately related.
 Law – use the word batas
- Root word denoting command, order,
decree
- Meaning disparate from that of the
roots of our words for justice and right
- Recognizes law is not always just.
 Justice and right based on English Derivatives -
justice (from Latin word ius which means right)
- Separates justice from law since it
derives law from the Old Norse word
log which means something laid down
or settled.
 - English differ from our language in 2
respects:
- Justice in Filipino: katarungan and
equity which is not adopted in the
English word
 Spanish word of right – derecho, Italian
(diritto), French (droit), German (recht)
- Means both right as well as law in
general
- Connote 3 things:
1. Law must respect right.
2. What is law is right.
3. Law and right out to be
inseparable
- Ambiguity is absent from our language.
 Authority and Power - kapangyarihan; poder;
lakas
- Our language employs the same word
katarungan for both justice and
fairness as it does for both justice and
equity.
 The fundamental element in the Filipino
concept of Justice is fairness and that privilege
and naked power – two of the worst enemies of
fairness – are alien to the Filipino mind.
 Not every justification is just.
 Filipino concept of justice: highly moral
concept, intimately related to the concept of
right; that is similar to but broader that western
concepts of justice, for it embraces the concept
of equity; that is discriminating concept,
distinguishing between justice and right, on the
one hand, and law and argument on the other;
that its fundamental elements is fairness; and
that it eschews privilege and naked power.
II. Justice based on history
 Chaim Perelman – justice as a principle of
action in accordance with which beings of one
and the same essential category must be
treated in the same way.
- Similar to Aristotle’s idea of ”treating
equals equally and unequals unequally,
but in proportion to their relevant
differences”.
- Both are formulas of formal justice not
concrete because neither tells us what
constitutes essential or relevant
equality in category, now how to form
categories, nor in what way to treat
each category.
 Principle of reason derived from principle of
identity not on justice.
- Perelman – every system of Justice will
finally depend on values other than the
value of justice.
- a law will be judged by means, not of
formal justice, but of concrete justice,
that is, of a particular conception of
justice which assumes a settled scale of
values. In effect we should not
condemn or reform in the name of
justice but in the name of a vision of the
universe
 history may be described as a continuous and
continuing struggle to create a just society.
1. A society is not only independent but in
which the people are sovereign.
2. A society which respects the freedom
and equal dignity of all.
3. A society which protects workers and
tenants, opposes oppression,
exploitation and abuse, and seeks to
eliminate poverty.
4. A society which is united in
brotherhood and relies on itself.
5. Moral society – people must radically
change not only institutions but also
our ways of beings and thinking. We
need and external and internal
revolution at the same time; we must
establish our moral education on more
solid bases and abjure the vices that for
the most part we have inherited from
the Spaniards.
- Moral government governs with the
truth and deceptions, sincerely obeying
the laws and fulfilling its promises to
the people; progressive; patriotic
government that seeks the common
 good and not the good an individual or
privileged class.
III. How social injustice is committed?
1. Not having a system of law at all, written or
unwritten, or one is flawed that people do not
know what their legal rights and duties are.
2. Not enforcing law fairly.
3. Enacting laws that does not pursue the social
values that constitute the Filipino vision of just
society, or that adopts means which subvert
those values
 Lord Lawton – Doing what is right may still
result in unfairness if it is done in a wrong way.
 Emilio Jacinto – Ang gawang magaling na
nagbuhat sa pagpipita sa sarili at hindi sa
talagang nasang gumawa ng kagalingan ay di
kabaitam.
 Due process – doing the right things in the right
way.
IV. Requirements to efficiently work such system of
law
 System of law – extremely rare to have a total
absence of the same; restores the equilibrium
1. The authority of the law-maker must be
recognized by the majority of the people as
legitimate and as enacted must not exceed the
limits on that authority imposed by the
prevailing consensus.
2. Laws must be published or made known to the
persons who are to be affected by them.
(Emperor Caligula)
3. Law must not be changed so often or so quickly
that people cannot reasonable base plans on
them.
4. Laws must be understandable and not
contradictory and must not prescribe acts
beyond the capacity of the people or against
their conscience.
 Lon Fuller – to stay with the system and cast his
ballot as a kind of symbolic act expressing the
hope of a better day.
V. 6 Types of Court decisions (Judge Joseph Hutcheson)
1. Analytic – product of study of law and its policy
and facts of the case
2. Intuitive – product of hunch or feeling of what
is right of this case
3. Aleatory – acc. To Rabelais Jude Bridlegoose
product of toss of a coin or throw of dice
resorted out of indolence to avoid the hard
work of thinking the issues of the case
4. Pusillanimous – product of fear of displeasing
authority that could block or retard promotion
5. Venal – product of bribes sometimes offered
but of late often demanded
6. Asinine – product of an ass
Standard:
 Infuse courage
 Competence
 Integrity into lawyers
 Competence
 Industry and respect for the rights of suspects
into policemen.
IV. Rights
By what standards should we judge the content of law?
 Every law must respect if it cannot promote
both the individual rights of man and the
collective rights of the people.
Rights:
 Right to survive
 Right to development
 Right to external and internal sovereignty