Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the v...
Accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession.
A consensual order is one in which the decisions on which our relations with others depend are, discounting emergencies, freely taken. Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life...
There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literatur...
The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.
One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.
Belief without any practice is of no use to us. But there are two sides to religious practice: one is the ritualistic, which is terribly important to the people engaged in it, and the other is moral,...
As a call to rectify the existing order, socialism should appeal to us all. But as an attempt to revise human nature, and to conscript us in the pursuit of the millennium, it was a dangerous fantasy,...
Accountability in public office is but one manifestation of this cultural inheritance, and we should not be surprised that it is the first thing to disappear when the utopians and the planners take ov...
There is, in the circumstances of modern life, only one solution to the problem of resentment, and that is social mobility. The worst thing that the state can do is to create those traps – the poverty...
There are many American conservatives, including those influenced by the Roman Catholic tradition of natural law philosophy, who believe that, in the end, the conservative position rests on theologica...
The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way...
The most important political effect of this displacement of civil by enterprise association has been the gradual loss of authority and decision-making from the bottom of society, and its transfer to t...
Political philosophers of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Locke, reaching down to John Rawls and his followers today, have found the roots of political order and the motive of political obligation...
In the light of this, it seems to me, we should recognize that the problem of climate change that occupies international negotiations today is not in fact a diplomatic problem. It is primarily a scien...
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur.
For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the...
Durkheim pointed out that you don’t merely believe a religion but (more importantly) you belong to it, and that disputes over religious doctrine are, as a rule, not simply arguments about abstruse que...
Christians are under an obligation to bear witness to their faith, but this does not mean inflicting their faith on other people or forcibly requiring them to adopt it. As the founder of the Christian...
Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. It's binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love. Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of whi...