PHIL202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Imagined Community
11 Apr 2017
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A sense of personal identification with the country. Special concern for the well-being of the country. Willingness to sacrifice to promote the country"s good. Leo tolstoy: patriotism is both stupid and immoral. Stupid: every patriot holds his country to be the best of all. George kateb: patriotism is a mistake twice over. Patriotism is expressed in a readiness to die and kill for one"s country. A country is not a discernible collection of discernible individuals, but an abstraction . Benedict anderson: imagined community , all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact are imagines. Imagined community but rather of community is not the opposite of real community but rather of community whose members have face-to-face relations. Question: is patriotism a virtue: alasdair. Morality and justice require that we act on principles that are essentially universal and impartial. Patriotism seems to demand that we act according to principles that are neither universal nor impartial.
