On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
So Joe Biden got caught actually reading the script instructions his handlers had given him. In claiming it was a joke, they are asking us to believe Joe is capable of telling a joke.
The obligation to care for one’s offspring is a human universal, like the incest taboo or the prohibition of murder. Human and primate mothers, as a rule, devote themselves to their children, and mother-love is regarded conventionally as the most selfless and irrational forms of human attachment.
No argument can be put forward for abortion that cannot be applied to infanticide. When does a woman’s right to control her body stop? If she gives birth in the wild, does a mother have a moral obligation to nurse a newborn and warm it with her body?
By Liberal Tradition, I am referring to an intellectual current that begins in the Renaissance, takes ideological shape in the 17th and 18th centuries and is decked out as a complete ethical, political, and economic theory by such writers as Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, and ultimately spawns its socialist mirror image in Marx.
Why would Bill Gates buy farmland in North Dakota? Should he be permitted?
In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view.
In addition to his legacy of materialism, hedonism, and the myth of the social contract, Epicurus also bequeathed a cynical attitude toward truth. While Aristotle and his students studied nature to find out how natural processes work, Epicurus and his disciples were only interested in attaining a serenity that was only possible in a godless universe.
It is easy to see how an empowered sense of equality might lead a blind law student into feeling justified at demanding, at public expense, a reader to help him get through his courses. The question, though, is why do people who are not blind acquiesce in the foolishness?
As a virtue expressed in Aristotelian terms, it is the mean between the character that invests everything into the distinction between me-and-mine and everything else and the character that rejects all distinction. In Jacobin terms, however, liberty, equality, and fraternity represent either or both of these three baneful extremes.
The Wrongs of Rights
