Abstract

T.H. Green argues that rights cannot exist, save for in a society in which people recognise each other as “ ἴσοι καὶ ὅμοιοι.” Green leaves the phrase untranslated, and there is a certain ambiguity about what exactly Green meant and a lack of attention to this stipulation in the secondary literature. This essay argues that equality and sameness in Green must be understood as two categorically different criteria, both of which must be satisfied in order to make rights recognition possible. Further, this essay examines a tension this distinction between equality and sameness reveals in Green’s work: Green’s commitment to patriotism (“sameness”) in his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation may seem at first to be at odds with his more cosmopolitan tendencies (“equality”) in the Prolegomena to Ethics. However, a way of resolving this tension is suggested: re-conceiving what patriotism and “sameness” means by reading Green’s work as less dependent on the concept of “nation” than that of subsequent British idealists such as Bernard Bosanquet demonstrates that sameness and equality, though different, complement each other.