JVF Conference Papers
The purpose of this Preface is to explain how our title, “Human Ends and the Ends of Politics,” reflects the research which is presented in the papers that follow. In the first place, our title points to the inevitable distance between the ends or aspirations and purposes of individual women and men, on the one hand, and the ends or purposes of politics or the community, on the other. Only in a perfect utopia would there be no such distance, and its existence raises such fundamental questions as that of the relation between an individual’s identity and the identity of the community to which she or he belongs.
