Sublime

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

“From being solicitous about the honor of other people all the interpersonal commandments flow.”

Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly

Socrates had said something about ignorance: All I know is that I know nothing.

It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness

Here the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre perceives a shift from communal ethics to a world order in which the individual has apparently become the norm. In his magnum opus After Virtue, MacIntyre explodes, among other things, the myth of modern moral freedom. Yes, we have been liberated from priests and the morality they imposed on us; but,