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A Duty to Forgive?
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Arendt’s response raises interesting questions: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity,” she wrote. In her letter…
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Meliorism versus Perfectionism
Consider two courses of action: One has a low probability of success but promises to mildly increase welfare (however defined). Call this “meliorism.” Rawlsian liberals, Burkean and Oakshottean conservatives, and Hayekian libertarians frequently identify with this view. Another has an unknown probability of success, but promises to massively increase welfare (however defined). Call this “perfectionism.”…
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Jonathan Haidt’s Conflation of the Personal and the Partisan
There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives. He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists identify…
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Why I am still hopeful for Egypt’s revolution
It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful protesters, whose only defense is the military standing by. To ask for the…
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Can I Buy a Vowel? Joe Pettit and Godless Morality
My colleague Joe Pettit has posted a defense of theism that takes up the traditional Christian onto-theological response to the Euthyphro problem. God is the Measure Rather than speak of God as in some sense separate from the moral law, Pettit posits that God is the moral law. That way, there’s no dilemma when we…