Sublime

the faith of a man who has considered the very real possibility that chaos and bloodshed are simply all there is.

These days, most of our arguments about justice are about how to distribute the fruits of prosperity, or the burdens of hard times, and how to define the basic rights of citizens. In these domains, considerations of welfare and freedom predominate. But arguments about the rights and wrongs of economic arrangements often lead us back to Aristotle’s

Judaism’s “possibilism” about human nature, its conviction that we can choose the good even if we often don’t.

However, the early theorists of social contract were able to take one thing for granted, namely the existence of a shared culture – Christianity – by which people made sense of their moral obligations. The battle in the seventeenth century was merely over which form of Christianity should prevail. Politics might be the arena of self-interest, but

our