Sublime

Individuals with radically different values can agree on the importance of dependency upon others and the need for human association. There is no good life without free and democratically self-governing associations that respect the rule of law, such as trade unions, universities, faith communities, charities, sport clubs and the entire edifice of

Les idéologies sont des substituts au véritable savoir, et les idéologues sont toujours dangereux lorsqu’ils accèdent au pouvoir, car une approche simpliste façon « Monsieur Je-sais-tout » n’est pas à la hauteur de la complexité de l’existence.

Judaism without generosity is a hollow shell.

In each instance, what we are asked for is a combination—or more accurately, an integration—of emotion and action.

Asking democratic citizens to leave their moral and religious convictions behind when they enter the public realm may seem a way of ensuring toleration and mutual respect. In practice, however, the opposite can be true. Deciding important public questions while pretending to a neutrality that cannot be achieved is a recipe for backlash and resentme

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

This scale transformation from the particular to the general is behind my skepticism about unfettered globalization and large centralized multiethnic states. The physicist and complexity researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam showed quite convincingly that “better fences make better neighbors”—something

Any concept of justice that hopes to win broad support in the real world has to be political in these three ways: to be narrow in scope; to be free-standing of any comprehensive moral doctrine; and to be grounded in widely shared ideas drawn from the public political culture. The original position ensures that Rawls’s principles possess these featu