Sublime

Conservatism – at least, conservatism in the British tradition – is a politics of custom, compromise and settled indecision.

The practice of lived fraternity can shape a politics of affective attachment to people, place and purpose.

These inclinations include a powerful bias in favour of virtue and the good (the only truly advantageous thing), a natural affiliation with other human beings (our basic social nature), and our attachment to reason and truth.

Moreover they did not postulate a new man to be produced by the new institutions but accepted as one of their design constraints the psychological characteristics of men and women as they knew them, their selfishness as well as their common sense.

recent years, Giussani noticed how elites seemed increasingly guided by lite facsimiles of change. These ideas largely exempted markets and their winners from scrutiny, despite their immense power in deciding how people’s lives were lived and their support for a system that produced extraordinary fortunes and extraordinary exclusion. These notions

Where do the philosophers get their ideas? The answer is, other philosophers. Bentham

human nature is defined teleologically, in terms of its built-in purpose or function, and this function is fundamental to Stoic ethics.

As citizens, he argued, we need two essential moral “powers” or “capacities.” First, the “capacity for a conception of the good”—in other words, the ability to reflect on and pursue our own idea of how we want to live. Second, the “capacity for a sense of justice”—the ability to form our own view about how we should organize society, and to coopera

Aristotle’s views in practical philosophy, ethics and politics, are much plainer sailing than his metaphysics and psychology. They turn on the idea that the best kind of society is one whose individual members live the best kind of lives.