Sublime

Justice is a commitment to the common good, a recognition that we are interdependent. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius believed that justice was “the source of all other virtues.” When we act with justice we are honest, and we take the full consequences of our actions into account. We can’t build good habits alone, and the latter part of this chap

The secular argument for human freedom, launched almost three centuries ago under the rubric of “natural rights,” has often been reduced to a calculation of probabilities: democracy and the personal freedoms it protects are good not because they have an inherent moral superiority over other forms of organizing society, but because they are the leas

Without government, life and liberty would be impossible to defend.

in civilized, open societies, the majority abide by a functional social contract, aimed at mutual betterment—or at least at existence in close proximity without too much violence.

I believe that future critics of our current political order will identify, as political fictions, what might be called the liberalism triad: freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.

By contrast, modern political philosophers—from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth century—argue that the principles of justice that define our rights should not rest on any particular conception of virtue, or of the best way to live. Instead, a just society respects each person’s freedom to choose his or her own

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares.