Since my Cato Unbound essay name-checks Isaiah Berlin (at least in part as an excuse to make a bad headline joke), this is a good opportunity to circle back to an interview in with Francis Fukuyama in New Perspectives Quarterly that I’d meant to link when it first appeared. Apart from some musing on the […]

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First, if you have any interest in taking a Moral Sense Test run by the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard (and who doesn’t?), go click through and do it now before I deflower your pristine intuitions with my throbbing analysis.   All done?   Good. Ok, the test basically presents a series of short scenarios […]

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I can understand why some feminist bloggers are digging in their heels in the aftermath of the dismissal of charges against the Duke lacrosse players. Obviously, falsely accusing people of rape is a tremendously destructive act, both for its effect on the accused and because it tends to make people more skeptical of genuine victims, […]

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In the midst of an interesting Spiked essay on the disconcerting popularity of “denier” (as in “Holocaust denier”) as an increasingly broad descriptor for people who demur from the majority view on issues like climate change, Frank Furedi has a passing remark about how we increasingly tend to suppress overtly moral rhetoric, to conceal the […]

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I headed downtown earlier today to see Leon Kass speak at AEI on his favorite topic: Human Dignity. More or less as I expected, Kass is a master of what (in honor of the late Alan Bloom) I’ve decided to call Bloombast: The conservative version of that special gift for conjuring a sense that you […]

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For various reasons, inequality seems to be a hot topic of late, and in particular I seem to be seeing a lot of folk taking up the abstract question of whether it’s inequality per se that we ought to be concerned with, or only whether the absolute level of the badly off is sufficiently high. […]

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I actually pretty much agree with Jonah Goldberg here: It’s a mistake to cast such issues as the debate over stem cell research in terms of a battle between “pro-science” and “anti-science” forces, although it’s a little tempting insofar as some of the religiously motivated opponents do seem to have a more general hostility to […]

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Erstwhile roomie Glen raises a point I sort of dodged in the post below, partly because it was already way too long, partly because I’m not sure what the right thing to say is. What I suggested was that there’s a tension between the idea that it’s counterproductive to shame or judge young prospective mothers […]

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Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us exactly how weird the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is: What was the sequence of events? If [the woman described in a New York Times story] had fully delivered the child and then killed it, even at 18 weeks, then that wasn’t a clandestine abortion, and it wasn’t something that would have […]

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I meant to post about this a while back, but back I was home in the scenic New Jersey suburbs for Thanksgiving, I caught an episode of Law and Order that I ended up puzzling over for a bit. As it was blessed with neither competent acting nor a particularly compelling script, I’ll just stick […]

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