Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince

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Traditional morality is typically defined as an individual's judgment of what is right or wrong. Political morality differs since it regards the area of public ethics. Political morality is separate from personal morality because it is specifically the ethics of those who hold office. What kind of methods they use regarding, or disregarding morals. Niccolo Machiavelli achieved universal fame for his manual of politics The Prince. Machiavelli wrote a guide to Princes that seemingly usurped morals in his small book that glorified forceful qualities and deceit. He stressed the optional nature of ruling according to values. Instead, he endorses any activity deemed necessary by a prince to maintain firm authority and rule. In the following text, …show more content…

The good shepherd symbolism is an obvious acknowledgment to biblical allegories. This is a striking difference between what The Prince values and what Utopia is proposing. Comparing a king to a shepherd makes him appear as a caring and loyal leader, rather than a ruler. A driving force behind More's creation of his island paradise was his belief in staying by his Christian ideals and practices. The moral obligation is placed on the ruler to benefit others, and not keep power allocated in one area. It completely rejects the politics of greed, which seems to be intrinsic to the human nature of power seeking, selfishness. That is, if you accept a simple duality of man, as Machiavelli so does in The …show more content…

In the second, the prince requires the obedience of the people to govern. From these two points, it follows that between kindness and cruelty, the latter is the more reliable. Machiavelli never advocates the use of cruelty for its own sake, only in the interests of the ultimate protection. A closer reading then, reveals that Machiavelli’s argument about ruling with force and manipulation is a logical extension of his assessments of human nature and virtue.
Thomas More presents in Utopia opinions of human nature that are far more positive than negative. More shows that human nature is affected by their environment, socially, politically and economically. It is inferred the Utopians believed in the betterment of humanity and human behavior is through the manipulation of the social environment. This could be seen in his lean towards compassion rather than ill-treatment when dealing with

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