The Conservative Philosopher

Monday, 18 April 2005

Why Conservatives Cannot Be Libertarians

It is often said that libertarians can consistently favor legalizing certain “victimless” crimes while leaving it open that such things might really be immoral. Libertarianism, it is held, doesn’t entail that prostitution, drug use, and the like are morally acceptable, but only that there shouldn’t be laws against such things, because such laws would violate individuals’ rights to use (or misuse) their bodies as they see fit; so conservatism and libertarianism are compatible. I used to buy this sort of argument. I don't anymore. Here's what’s wrong with it.

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Posted by Edward C. Feser at 3:19 AM ET on Monday, 18 April 2005 (6 Comments)

Wednesday, 13 April 2005

Capitalism, Conservatism, and Catholicism

Since the death of Pope John Paul II, much nonsense has been spoken about the nature of his teachings, both by his detractors and his admirers. It has become a cliché among the former to hold that his body of doctrine was “contradictory” or “paradoxical,” insofar as he was “conservative” where theology and sexual morality are concerned but “liberal” on economics and capital punishment. The standard retort of his defenders, which seems to be hardening into something of a counter-cliché, is that the consistency of his views can be seen when one understands that they transcended the liberal/conservative divide. In my view, both sides are mistaken. While some elements of the pope’s teaching might give at least a superficial appearance of liberalism, the core of what he taught neither straddled nor transcended the liberal/conservative divide. It was simply and undeniably conservative, and consistently so.

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Posted by Edward C. Feser at 3:00 AM ET on Wednesday, 13 April 2005 (5 Comments)

Monday, 31 January 2005

Quine as a Conservative

W. V. Quine was unquestionably one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Almost the entirety of his body of work was in areas of philosophy far removed from ethics and politics: logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics. But he also happened to be politically conservative, and very occasionally he would express his conservatism in print. Two examples are the entries on "Freedom" and "Tolerance" in his book Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. They are, like nearly everything Quine wrote, elegant in style and well worth reading.

Quine's conservatism raises interesting questions about the relationship between a philosopher's metaphysical commitments and his ethical and political commitments. It would be hard to deny that the sort of commonsense metaphysics associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had a bearing on the conservative character of their moral and political views, or that the radicalism of Marx's social theory was at least in part a consequence of his brand of materialism. Yet while Quine's metaphysical position was among the most radically revisionist of any that philosophers have produced - physicalist, behaviorist, eliminativist - his political views were, again, conservative.

Posted by Edward C. Feser at 1:12 AM ET on Monday, 31 January 2005 (0 Comments)

Thursday, 27 January 2005

Horwitz on Same-Sex Marriage

Over at the Liberty and Power blog, my friend and sometime sparring partner Steve Horwitz has replied to my post on the essence of conservatism, taking issue with some of the things I said at the end of it concerning marriage and tying it in to the same-sex marriage debate. Steve and I have argued about this issue for years, and though we disagree, I hold him in the highest regard and think that he has made the strongest case one can for the pro same-sex marriage side. Unlike some others who share his point of view, he defends it without accusing those who disagree with him of bigotry, and tries seriously to deal with their arguments head on.

In reply to his comments, I want to emphasize first of all that my post was not intended to be a complete statement about the conservative view of marriage in general or same-sex marriage in particular. It was rather a follow-up to KBJ's initial post on the nature of conservatism. I was, in the spirit of the blog's inaugural week, merely trying to sketch out in very general terms what conservatism is and how it differs from other political philosophies, including that political philosophy it is often allied with, libertarianism.

Wednesday, 26 January 2005

The Essence of Conservatism

It is always difficult to give a satisfactory characterization of any of the main views in political philosophy, given the complexity of the histories of many of these views and given the complexity of the human world to which each of them tries, in each of its permutations, to do justice. There is probably no definition of "socialism," say, or of "liberalism," that some genuine socialist or liberal wouldn't have reason to quibble with. I don't see why things should be any different with "conservatism."

Having said that, my own suggestion would be that the central idea of conservatism is that human nature is fixed, where the account of human nature conservatives would endorse is richer than that held by non-conservatives and where "fixed" is meant in a stronger sense than non-conservatives would be comfortable with. This is still pretty vague, but it is already enough to distinguish conservatism from its main rivals. Socialists and liberals do seem to think either that human nature is strongly malleable, or that if it has any fixed elements they are few and that the ones they don't like can be readily countered with the right mix of educational and regulatory measures.

Posted by Edward C. Feser at 11:16 PM ET on Wednesday, 26 January 2005 (1 Comments)