4 quotes
People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.
Conscience and Its Enemies (2013)
As human beings, we are rational animals, but we are imperfectly rational. We are prone to making intellectual and moral mistakes and capable of behaving grossly unreasonably—especially when deflected by powerful emotions that run contrary to the demands of reasonableness.
Conscience and Its Enemies (2013)
Robust support for marital norms serves children, spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor. Family breakdown thrusts the state into roles for which it is ill-suited: parent and discipliner to the orphaned and neglected, and arbiter of disputes over custody and paternity.
Conscience and Its Enemies (2013)
The true liberal-arts ideal rejects the reduction of reason to the status of passion's ingenious servant. It is an ideal rooted in the conviction that there are human goods, and a common good, in light of which we have reasons to constrain, to limit, to regulate, and even to alter our desires.
Conscience and Its Enemies (2013)