Colo Millz

What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Not universal? What about the Declaration, which says that rights are self-evident and inalienable?

The difference Hazony intends is not that conservatism avoids reason altogether, but that it distrusts abstract reason detached from inherited practic...

This statement is actually something Burke might point out. Burke, who was a Whig, himself said A state without the means of some change is without th...

Fascinating OP. By coincidence I have just finished reading Hart's The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology, which presents much of the same ...

The problem with interpreting the OT from the lens of our post-Enlightenment modernity is that it completely misses the context of the particular pass...

I am a fan of David Bentley Hart's book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. Hart quotes St. Isaac of Nineveh: It is not t...

So you are proposing that this capacity is the only "ordering principle" which is valid - or the fullest expression of one anyway. Likewise: I need to...

Wow thank you. I had actually read The Brothers Karamazov but not for a long time, and needed to be reminded of what you were getting at in your first...

This is why I believe it is important to have someone or something to thank. Gratitude by its nature seeks relationship; it wants to move outward, to ...

Definitely on the list Could you elaborate this, this is an interesting thought and I am v interested in Dostoyevsky.

It's ok, we can go nuke. Plus we are on the verge of discovering fusion. Am I literally the only one left on the planet who is an AI optimist?

The Creator must join with V'Ger.

I think the conservative view is at its heart tragic. Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the d...

Yes I think this is the key - the grownups recognize that both poles are required - it's just a question of where the Vital Center is located, relativ...

Now to the language of the Declaration itself, it holds that rights are "inalienable" and this indeed suggests that they are clear to all men and wome...

So Hazony has got a whole chapter on the American Revolution and Constitution where he argues that the eventual result was a "restoration" of the orig...

For example: It is an assumption of Enlightenment liberalism that "all men are free and equal by nature". But this is neither empirically true nor sel...

I think the series of premises is a far more accurate social paradigm than any similar premises of Enlightenment liberalism.

1. Men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty. 2. Individuals, families, tribes, and nations co...

Is there some cultural smorgasbord we can all choose from, as if we are autonomous individuals with the leisure and expertise required? Are you overlo...

Reasoning is always situated. it is always already shaped by language, history, and moral tradition. This means that all reasoning proceeds from withi...

Furthermore enlightenment rationalism breeds hubris. This hubris manifests in the recurring modern impulse to replace evolved moral orders with ideolo...

In this view Enlightenment reason represents not rebellion but the establishment of a procedural means of adjudicating moral disagreement, where no au...

I suppose Enlightenment liberalism is not itself monolithic, we need to define our terms. What you are describing sounds more like a libertarian posit...

I am actually very sympathetic to the role of reason in all political discourse probably more so than the Hazony, the author of the quote in the OP. A...

I think it goes back to Aquinas and then from him back to Aristotle.

I would say this approach is completely impossible. It is not possible to view oneself from the "View from Nowhere", completely devoid of everything e...

The rationalism of enlightenment liberalism has produced nothing but monsters. The only surefire way to proceed is through slow, steady empirical anal...

Aquinas would say that principles are not like commands shouted by a superior - they are expressions of reason itself.

I begin to suspect that you are arguing against a strawman here. I don't think any deontological theorist would define "categorical morality" in the w...

If the soldiers don't intend to follow orders there's not much point being in the army.

Since Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I–II, q.18, a.4. Morality depends on what the will chooses as an end.

Moral truths may be “verifiable” in principle if one adopts rationalist, consequentialist, or intuitionist frameworks. But even a cultural relativist ...

In a material sense perpetual economic growth is not possible simply because of the laws of thermodynamics - eventually you reach a state where ethe f...

Since the intention is to save five, not to kill one, then in this case the utilitarian solution is the same as the deontological one. Problem solved.

What's wrong with saying that moral truths exist independently of human opinion. It seems to me that there are moral facts (e.g., “torturing children ...

Am I literally the only person left on earth who thinks it is going to be awesome?

Why if it's delivered in a ship is it cargo and why if it's delivered in a car it's a shipment?

Erm ... what? Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.

They are separate in the same sense that a true fact, 2+2=4, is "separate from" truth.

“That which exists is not the same as existence itself.” (ST I, q.3, a.4)

In fact MMA is much safer than boxing. In boxing you have the repeated blows to the head resulting in long term brain injury. The "punch-drunk" syndro...