For much of my academic life, I considered the terms, “values,” “rights,” and “social justice,” to have equivocal meanings. When these terms were used without clarification, they disrupted any fair social order. Each of the phrases had two or more meanings that usually meant the direct opposite of each other. Conversations and legislation in which [...]
Long used as a justification for affirmative action, diversity is in many ways more useful and sustainable as a freestanding program of action for those hostile to our inherited traditions. It sounds self-justifying. Who could be against diversity in a polyglot society such as ours? The Supreme Court currently is considering the case of Fisher [...]
And the truth is, justice was something like that, as it seems, but not anything connected with doing what properly belongs to oneself externally, [443D] but with what’s on the inside, that truly concerns oneself and properly belongs to oneself, not allowing each thing in him to do what’s alien to it, or the classes [...]
Having spent a few weeks teaching here in Iceland, a few things are becoming clear. First, Icelanders are a friendly people who have managed to maintain a society with very little crime or violence, in which children are very safe and in which there is an extremely strong sense of community. Second, it is a [...]
So here’s* my contribution to a symposium on “originalism” as the mode of interpreting the Constitution that facilitates the maximization of the libertarian value of “negative liberty.” Everyone else in the symposium operates on a higher pay grade than I do when it comes to really knowing all about the controversies in the field of [...]
Recently reprinted on these pages, a Notre Dame professor wrote a reasoned and well-crafted response to a controversial essay, in which a Harvard student wished to replace academic freedom with “academic justice,” or censorship silencing conservative views at odds with what she termed her “university community.” After discussing the recent history of academic freedom, chiefly [...]
I admit to being rather pleased when I first read that a number of “actors” in pornographic films had been told by their banks that their business was no longer welcome. It seems the banks had determined that such persons posed a “reputation risk.” Too distracted by other things to pay much attention, I assumed [...]
In the Autumn of 2013 two Christian pastors from the mid-West were convicted of sex offenses against children. The first concerned a Protestant from the Victory Fellowship Church in Iowa. Youth pastor Brent Girouex pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping four boys (and eight more have come forward with accusations). Girouex’s crime was particularly sick. He [...]
This essay is a bit of a follow-up to my earlier essay, “Is Jacques Derrida Serious? or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deconstruction.” If you are at all familiar with the contents of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, you will get the inside joke if I say that this is a supplement to that [...]
“Jurisprudence” generally is defined as “the philosophy or science of law.” Pardon the pun, but the definition does not do justice to the topic. Questions like “what is law?” and “what is justice?” and “how do we judge the first in relation to the second?” are intrinsically interesting, as well as important. The definition is, [...]
The agency driving the threefold development of the Oresteia is human effort in partnership with divine purpose. The Athena of the third play provides the executive, personal agent who, in founding a polity, gives over divine to human providence. The great question provoked by the trilogy is the question of assigning ultimate causality, since from [...]
Edmund Burke Taking it for granted that I do not write to the disciples of the Parisian philosophy, I may assume that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and that, having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to [...]