Conceptual Overreach Threatens the Quality of Public Reason – John Tasioulas | Aeon Essays
In short, my philosophical starting points are: “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.
Tyler Cowen • Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
The historian Adam Garfinkle gives more pointed expression to Mir and Wolf’s concerns. He contends that abstract reasoning is “integral to liberal-democratic politics.” After all, “the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order” and “the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility” are “very abstract ideas.” As deep literacy declines, the public ... See more
Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics?
Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o
... See morePhilip K. Howard • Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society
Contemporary liberalism erodes the liberal tradition in two ways. First, it promotes ever-increasing negative liberty – freedom from restrictions except the law and private conscience – to the point where it flips over into the tyranny of individual choice abstracted from any relational constraints of family, community or nature.
Adrian Pabst • Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal
The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.