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Wine fraud relates to the
commercial aspects of wine. The most prevalent type of fraud is one where wines
are adulterated, usually with the addition of cheaper products (e.g. juices)
and sometimes with harmful chemicals and sweeteners (compensating for colour or
flavour).
Counterfeiting and the relabeling
of inferior and cheaper wines to more expensive brands is another common type
of wine fraud.
To understand the meaning of the title and introductory paragraph,
see
here.
Thomas Hobbes
The entire theory of Thomas Hobbes
(1588 – 1679) amounts at bottom to a denial of the natural law.
Rommen describes him as a “gloomy fellow traveler of Epicurus,”
picturing the state of nature as chaos – a war of all against all. Hobbes, following Occam, held that reason is
unable to know universals; words describing universals are mere words, assigned
arbitrarily, without any grounding in fact.
Man, in a state of nature, is no more than a wolf – wicked,
devoted solely to himself, no natural tendency to live in society. This brutish individualism would cause in
Hobbes an antagonism toward cooperative organizations such as guilds and the
like. Such voluntary organizations could
not constrain man’s brutish behavior.
For this reason, Hobbes sees that man is willing to give up
many rights in order to achieve the greater good of peace. (How such a brute would decide such a thing,
how he might even come to know that peace is a “good,” is not clear.) These rights are given up to an absolute
sovereign.
Hobbes would argue that agreement among irrational creatures
is natural, but among men is artificial – by covenant only. As it is artificial, a third party must be
brought in to make the agreement constant and lasting.
“The only way to erect such a
Common Power…is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon
one Assembly of Men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices,
unto one Will….”
Everyone would then submit his will to the judgement of this
one Man, this one Will. Once everyone
does so, this one man can use terror to inform the wills of all. Hobbes natural law is nothing more than a law
of subjugation – the older idea of natural law as a moral basis for positive
law, as an objective for which law would strive, would lose all of its
function.
René Descartes
Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Man, from the ideas present in his own reasoning,
can construct the world according to the lines of mathematical reasoning – the ideal
of science. Individual reason was the
measure of itself.
Suarez’ prediction of what would
happen should human reason be made the source of the natural law now came
true. Rationalism soon made human reason
and its innate ideas the measure of what it is.
Human reason could now indulge in the uncontrolled construction of
systems that has ever characterized the natural law of rationalism.
The objective basis of natural law has disappeared.
John Locke
For Locke, natural law was meant to establish as inalienable
the rights of the individual. These rights
do not flow from objective orders of norm; instead, these rights bring about
whatever order exists. Order is induced
by voluntary agreement, still, with no objective standard by which to measure
such terms.
Civil society is, therefore, not a result of man’s social
nature; it is the result of individual self-interest. Nothing transcendent or overarching – a skepticism
of metaphysics, if you will. Instead of
an objective metaphysical reality, natural law would be based on – for Locke –
Locke’s worldview of proper law. Of course,
this opened the doors for others to hold to a different worldview.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Virtually the opposite of Hobbes, Rousseau saw the state of
nature as something approaching the biblical Paradise. Men happily and freely become citizens, a war
of all against all does not compel them into some sort of social contract. They enter because it is their will – and as
everyone has the same will, the General Will is born.
Of course, this didn’t end so well for those who, it turns
out, had a different General Will.
Rousseau’s passion for liberty and virtue would produce fruit in men
like Robespierre and the Reign of Terror.
The Primary Differences
Rommen would identify three primary differences when
considering the original idea of natural law of the Scholastics to the work of
thinkers such as these noted here. First
is the individualistic idea that the state of nature is the proper starting
point for the discovery of natural law; second, the nominalist attitude of separating
eternal law and natural moral law; third, the resultant autonomy of human
reason.
I might summarize: each man is an island: nothing above him,
nothing below him, nothing before him, nothing after him.
Conclusion
During the Middle Ages,
[if] a producer or merchant was found selling fraudulent or "corrupt
wine", they were forced to drink all of it. In medieval Germany, the
penalty for selling fraudulent wine ranged from branding to beating to death by
hanging.
The further development of this fraudulent wine will be
examined in a subsequent post.
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