The Conservative Philosopher

My edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, will be released this December. You can read the Introduction here at the CUP website. (Unfortunately, most of the endnotes have been left out. All the more reason to buy a copy, no?)

The standard explanation of the popularity of conspiracy theories is that those who accept them are simply looking for a way to attach a larger meaning to catastrophic events that would otherwise seem random. I think this is totally unconvincing, at least as an account of the motivations of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I present what I think is the correct explanation here, in an article from TCS Daily.

Here is my review of Steven Smith's excellent recent book Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism, from the May 22 issue of National Review.

Here is my review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's fine book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, from the March 13 issue of National Review.

First the government becomes the sole provider of medical care. Then it refuses to provide such care to those who express moral or political views of which it disapproves. Instead, it throws them in jail for expressing them.

A paranoid right-wing fantasy? A day in the life of the average North Korean or Cuban? Nope, just the latest news from the UK, as reported in The Times. This is very scary stuff, folks, and exactly the sort of thing that "paranoid right-wingers" have been warning us about for decades. (For more on this case see here.)

More creeping totalitarianism: Officials in Massachusetts claim that parents have no right to determine what their children should be taught in school vis-à-vis homosexuality. Wariness over "hate crime" laws prevents a Catholic network from broadcasting programs supportive of Catholic sexual morality. The EU wants to force Poland, Italy, and Malta to recognize "same-sex marriages," and to ban "homophobia." In Brussels, a priest is prosecuted for "Islamophobia."

But surely the human rights groups will save us, no? Don't hold your breath: Amnesty International, for one, is apparently too busy debating whether or not to declare abortion a "human right." (See here and here.)

(For links to previous Road to Serfdom Roundups, see here.)

Does Catholic teaching against condoms contribute to the AIDS crisis? The right answer is "No." Anthony McCarthy, of the invaluable Linacre Centre, explains why in a BBC interview available here.

Here is an op-ed piece critical of European anti-Americanism by philosopher David Oderberg, from today's San Francisco Chronicle.

Video of a recent lecture at Catholic University of America by David Oderberg on "The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Law," and the Q & A session that followed, are available on his website. (Scroll down for the relevant links.) Oderberg argues that a robust Aristotelian essentialism must lie at the core of any serious natural law theory, and criticizes the "new natural law theory" associated with Grisez, Finnis, and Boyle for its eschewal of this traditional feature of natural law ethics.

I am pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, which I have edited (and contributed a chapter to) for Cambridge University Press. The other contributors are Roger E. Backhouse, Peter J. Boettke, Bruce Caldwell, Meghnad Desai, Andrew Gamble, Gerald F. Gaus, Chandran Kukathas, Eric Mack, Anthony O’Hear, Roger Scruton, Jeremy Shearmur, Robert Skidelsky, and Aeon J. Skoble. These authors have produced an outstanding collection of essays offering a critical introduction to every aspect of Hayek’s thought. See here for details, including a list of chapter titles.

Theodore Dalrymple laments the increasingly Orwellian character of contemporary British society. (See also this recent TCS Daily article.) Britain will soon become the first country to monitor every journey by car, using a network of cameras.

Anti-smoking activists are now attempting to regulate smoking within private homes (for the sake of "the children," of course).

The European Union has passed a resolution outlawing "homophobia" (see here, here, and here) and tells doctors that they cannot refuse to perform abortions. A French Parliamentarian has been fined for "hate speech" against homosexuals.

On the upside, Deborah Lipstadt, hardly a fan of David Irving, has condemned his imprisonment for Holocaust denial as a violation of the right to free speech. And here is another call for Europeans to be more consistent in their defense of free speech.

(For previous Road to Serfdom Roundups, see here, here, and here.)

Much nonsense has been written about the attitudes Christians of previous generations have taken toward the human embryo. In particular, defenders of abortion sometimes claim that the Catholic Church's uncompromising stand against abortion is of relatively recent vintage and that earlier generations of Catholics took views that were conducive to a pro-choice position. David Albert Jones's recent book The Soul of the Embryo: An Enquiry into the Status of the Human Embryo in the Christian Tradition debunks this myth, and demonstrates that Christian teaching has always been firmly and consistently opposed to abortion, from the time of the Apostles onward. Here is a review.

In reply to my recent article "The Metaphysics of Conservatism," Max Borders has argued that contractarian moral theory is sufficient to ground a robust conception of human rights, and that no appeal to the realist metaphysics I endorsed in my article is necessary to provide a foundation for morality. Here is my rejoinder to Borders, from TCS Daily.

In today's San Francisco Chronicle, philosopher and ethicist David Oderberg argues that scientific fraud (e.g. of the sort recently perpetrated by South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk) is widespread and encouraged by government funding of scientific research. Accordingly, he calls for a "separation of science and state." You can read his piece here.

In a new article of mine at TCS Daily, I argue that the philosophical distinction between realist, reductionist, and anti-realist metaphysical views can usefully be applied to the demarcation of various kinds of conservatism. In particular, I suggest that it helps to make sense of the controversy sparked by Jeffrey Hart's recent Wall Street Journal piece on American conservatism. Hart's conservatism, in my view, marks a radical (and unwelcome) departure from the metaphysically robust vision of Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, a book which helped to launch the modern conservative movement.

Some readers might find of interest an article of mine from Social Philosophy and Policy entitled "There Is No Such Thing as an Unjust Initial Acquisition," which is (temporarily at least) available free at the journal’s website. (Here is the PDF version, and here it is in HTML.) The article defends the claim that, given that natural resources start out unowned by anyone, there can be no such thing as an unjust initial acquisition of such resources, and therefore that Locke and Nozick were mistaken to suppose that justice requires a "proviso" on the initial acquisition of property (such as a condition guaranteeing that no one else’s position is worsened by such an acquisition). In short, it argues for a more radically libertarian view of private property rights than even Locke or Nozick was prepared to defend.

I should add that I would now seriously qualify the arguments I gave in the article (which was written several years ago). The reason is that I now see that if one follows through the implications either of Locke’s thesis that God gave the earth to human beings for their sustenance, or the classical natural law thesis that human labor has as its natural end provision for oneself and one’s family out of the earth’s resources, then one will see that there is a sense in which every human being has a right to the use of those resources, and thus has partial ownership of those resources. Since I endorse both of these theses, I no longer believe (as I did when I wrote the article) that natural resources start out entirely unowned. To be sure, I don’t think these theses support anything like an egalitarian theory of property; quite the opposite. But I do think they put certain restrictions on the acquisition and use of property, and in particular that they justify in principle at least a minimal safety net for those who, through no fault of their own, cannot support themselves in the market. How all this works out is a complicated matter, but the upshot is that I would no longer defend a libertarian theory of property (or a libertarian anything for that matter, but that is another story).

Does that mean that I now think the article is of no value? By no means! For if you are an atheist who rejects classical natural law theory, then I think the article shows that you can have no grounds for endorsing an egalitarian theory of private property. Since probably the vast majority of egalitarian philosophers are atheists who reject natural law theory, this is obviously not an insignificant result. (By the same token, I imagine it poses a challenge also to conservatives who would reject both theism and natural law and yet hope to justify limited redistributive measures on grounds of justice.)

Some years back, philosopher Ted Honderich wrote a very silly book about conservatism, which "showed" that in all its forms conservatism is nothing more than a mask for selfishness. The book was, shall we say, not a paradigm of rigor. A revised edition is now out, with the unpromising title Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? Here is an interesting—and negative—review of it by Julian Sanchez (who is a libertarian, not a conservative).

In the Middle Ages, people thought the earth was flat, debated over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and wore chastity belts, right? Wrong. These "urban legends" about the medieval world, and many others, are debunked by James Franklin here.

(Also worth looking at in this regard is Regine Pernoud's book Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths; and, for related myths about the Crusades and Inquisition, the readings cited in this earlier post of mine.)

In two earlier posts (here and here), I made reference to some examples of how radical egalitarians use regulations, lawsuits, fines, and educational policy as a means of enforcing their vision of equality, in a way that threatens the continued existence of a free society. Here are some more recent examples.

Here is a report about how some lawmakers in the UK are proposing to make pre-school mandatory from birth(!), with the government requiring that certain "learning objectives" be met by the age of three. What sort of objectives might these be? You can be sure that it is the state, and not parents, who will end up making the decision. A clue as to what many egalitarians would favor is provided by this report, which indicates that in Canada, the legalization of "same-sex marriage" coupled with anti-discrimination laws seems to entail writing advocacy of the sexual revolution into the public school curriculum, whatever the wishes of parents might be.

Here is a report about how the Danish Supreme Court has taken it upon itself to determine the conditions under which a church can excommunicate one of its members. And here we read about a debate over whether the telling of certain jokes would violate proposed hate crime legislation in the UK. Finally, here is a report on how the notorious David Irving "has been arrested in Austria on a warrant accusing him of denying the Holocaust." That's right, arrested. Is is one thing to criticize crackpot and immoral ideas, to refuse to publish them, etc.; but to criminalize them hardly seems compatible with a free and open society.

Philosopher John Haldane is to be an adviser to the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture. See here for details.

Haldane's article "What Philosophy Can Do," adapted from the first of his Gifford Lectures on "Mind, Soul, and Deity," has just appeared in the November 2005 issue of First Things (though the article is not yet available online).

Historian Michael Burleigh's new book Earthly Powers looks very interesting indeed, judging from this review in The New Statesman. His theme is the manner in which various political ideologies supplanted religion and took on a quasi-religious character of their own during the 19th century, and on the different ways in which religious institutions (particularly Catholic and Protestant) responded to this development. (Burleigh's previous book The Third Reich: A New History analyzed National Socialism as a kind of quasi-religion.)