Sunday 3 February 2013

On Security

I took the passage below out of its immediate context in Utilitarianism so as to understand its starkest and most ordinary meaning. In a sentence; we can't live without security. Obvious, plain, uncontroversial even. The headache begins when we try to discuss provision of security and the various things it has come to mean in the world today. Take "human security" for instance, which questions if the state should be entrusted with providing security. If not the state, then who?


On this stance I yield to no one; because of the ethical deficiency of most people, the state has to retain the monopoly on the use of force.
by Kudakwashe Kanhutu

Mill On Security



"Security is the most vital of all interests. Most earthly benefits, can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil and for the whole value of every good, beyond the passing moment, since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of all necessaries, after physical nutrition, cannot be had, unless the machinery for providing it is kept unintermittently in active play."


John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism.