Let's turn the microphone over to Abraham Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address: If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vi...

Our economic appetite - THE WEEK: http://www.theweek.com/article/index/92638/Our_economic_appetite Nearly eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes did the math on economic growth and concluded that within a few generations—by the time his peers' great-grandchildren came of age in, say, the 2000's...

Ross Douthat writes: Perspective - Ross Douthat: But the most pressing issue, it seems to me, is whether we've reached - or will reach - a point at which all our abundance cushions us against the political consequences of suddenly-diminished expectations. In 1932 or so, the West's porridge-eating pa...

I am reminded of this piece by Michael Berube and my recent thoughts about the decline of the Chicago School--the fact that nobody in residence there appears to have understood the economics of Milton Friedman, and so they try to do macro by deriving false conclusions from accounting identities and ...

This is the post which I said I might write about the intersected lives of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. In 1933 they became friends in Paris having both fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution. I've been trying to imagine them at that time, in that place, circumstanced as they were. And I've b...

Charles Fried says that the law is not the law when the crimes are "political crimes" committed by a highly-placed Republican: The Washington Monthly: But should the high and mighty get off when ordinary people committing the same crimes would go to prison? The answer is that they are not the same c...

Denis Dutton's Arts and Letters Daily always contains something that interests. The other day he pointed to Adam Kirsch's New Yorker profile of Hannah Arendt and drew attention not, as I did, to the personal flaws which Kirsch says kept Arendt from any effective "confrontation with political evil, e...

(As a regular lurker, and occasional commenter, I've noticed that the topic of Plato and/or Platonic philosophy comes up on occasion -- most recently in the form of a post by writingstudent . Given that, I thought it might be interesting to broaden the subject of discussion by posting a synopsis of ...

A while back I wrote about the Milgram experiments and what I called the problem of evil. At the time I recalled, but did not mention, Hannah Arendt's notorious construction, "fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." A quarter century ago Arendt was attacked for her use of the phrase wi...

It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality - not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct? It doesn't seem you can simp...