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to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

For the modern world, questions about the nature of humanity would be viewed on par with the struggle among the Lilliputians about the correct way to cut open an egg. Hobbes, the first truly modern philosopher, boasted of how he deserted and ran away from fighting in a religious war; a cowardly life had become preferable to a heroic but meaningless... See more

Peter Thiel • The Straussian Moment

anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim that they truly care about people

Ashley • Tweet

a free society must be a moral society, for without the rule of law, constrained by the overarching imperatives of the right and the good, freedom will eventually degenerate into tyranny, and liberty, painfully won, will be lost.

Jonathan Sacks • A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World's Oldest Religion

In this age of utopian technologies, we can design mechanical limbs for amputees and chemically engineer happiness for depressives. But should we? From the fluoride in our water to genetically modified babies, scientific advances pose complex new ethical questions. We ask discuss the major bioethical issues of our time. Is philosophy braced for thi... See more

Emily Jackson • Lse Festival 2019 | Brave New World [Audio]

Enlightenment 2.0: We need another Age of Reason to save our civilization

Big Think bigthink.com

In his opening address at the 1945 war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson accused Nazi leaders of assaulting “all those dignities and freedoms that we hold [as] natural and inalienable rights in every human being.” The horrific negation of those rights — by the agents of totalitarianism — threatened the fabric o

nationalreview.com • A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review

Decades after the truce, John Locke—whose philosophy influenced the American founding fathers more than any other—wrote about human nature as if it were an “unknowable x.” He knew that disagreements over religion (Jerusalem) and over reason (Athens) were dangerous, so he declared the question of human nature an unfathomable idea that people would n... See more

Let’s imagine that a radical life-extension startup succeeds at developing a product for our deeply flawed, often inaccessible healthcare market, and presumably protects the intellectual property for that product from diffusing into the wider world. What would that breakthrough mean for the rest of us?