Sublime

For liberal individualism a community is simply an arena in which individuals each pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, and political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes such self-determined activity possible. Government and law are, or ought to be, neutral between rival conceptions of the good life

Philosophy begins, and in my view must end, as an attempt to answer real questions asked by real people.

A philosophy is the aggregate of your attitudes toward fundamental matters and is derived from a process of consciously thinking about critical issues and developing rational reasons for holding one particular belief or position rather than another.

It is important to grasp the purpose of Finnis’s enterprise. He rejects David Hume’s conception of practical reason, which maintains that my reason for undertaking an action is merely ancillary to my desire to attain a certain objective. Reason informs me only how best to achieve my desires; it cannot tell me what I ought to desire. Finnis prefers

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

It is in accordance with their dignity as persons—that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility—that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth.