Neo-liberalism is the dominant form of right-wing liberalism after about 1980. Yet this sort of thing happened plenty before neo-liberalism was a thing. CIA support for the coup of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, who was freely and fairly elected, occured in 1953 at the height of the post-war New Deal consensus. It was done in part because of the socialization of lucrative industries and the withdrawal of concessions for multinational firms (i.e., in defense of property rights), but even more so it was justified by the idea that the action was required to secure the liberty of the Iranians from prospective "communist oppression." Likewise, at the height of liberal progressivism after the First World War the US (and the rest of the Entente democracies) deployed troops to Russia to help the Whites on fairly similar grounds. Or you could look at America opening Japan to trade at gun point in the 19th century, or the Opium Wars, etc. Neo-liberalism just continued the trend.

John Locke justified colonial invasions and enslavement on the grounds that indigenous people would be "liberated" in the long run by the successes of the liberal economic order and increased consumption in future generations. "Liberation from indolence." Indigenous people did not have true ownership of their lands on the grounds that they failed to invest in their development.

I have to say, this sounds like a straw man

It wasn't meant to be a realistic depiction of their phenomenology. But you seem to just be using loose synonyms for good here, and having your anti-realist appeal to those. Why is a "healthy and harmonious" relationship preferable? If it is rationally known as a goal, it is for some reason. Why do they want to be "respectful" or "kind," etc.?

If it cannot be because "it is truly good," it has to bottom out somewhere else. Nowhere did I imply anti-realists are incapable of introspection. What they are incapable of is grounding their actions in a rational appetite. Hume, for his part, would say we prefer "harmonious and healthy" relationships and "kindness," etc. because of an innate, irrational prosocial sentiment. But of course, such a sentiment only justifies ethical behavior if you personally feel more strongly about the sentiment then about violating it.

Sure they do. But then they aren't strictly anti-realists about all values. Let's look at emotivism, which is probably the most popular form of anti-realism. The bumper sticker version of that is: "claims about value don't have truth values. They are merely pronouncements of emotion, 'hooray for x,' or 'boohoo for x.'"

If someone says: "lead is truly bad for children and it is objectively bad for them to suffer heavy mental poisoning," (i.e. their statement concerns fact and not merely "boohoo for lead poisoning") they are defaulting on strict anti-realism.

You and J are both making an appeal to slander here, which seems to me like an appeal to emotion. "What you're saying about anti-realists is mean," but then defending the position by introduction realism vis-a-vis value claims. But I already said that, to their credit, strict anti-realists virtually never act like they actually believe their own position.

Moral facts

Well this probably the kicker. You'll have to explain what makes a fact specifically "moral." IMO, the health is, ceteris paribus, beneficial for human flourishing and that there are facts about the promotion of health makes those facts "moral." I imagine that part of the disagreement here is that you would like to say that "moral facts" must deal with some sort of sui generis "moral good" that in unrelated to things like health, etc.

I don't think such a division makes sense, but at the very least it needs to be justified. Second, I don't think a rejection of a transcendent Good constitutes anti-realism. This would make Sam Harris an anti-realist. Anti-realism should mean something like emotivism. It means there aren't facts about value, talk about value is boo-hoo and hoorah. Saying "goodness reduces to this material thing," like brain states (Harris) isn't saying facts about goodness don't exist for instance.

The fact that the philosophical orientation you follow disagrees with the cartoonishly defined category you are passing off as liberalism doesn’t make the latter a ‘positively indoctrinated dogma’.

I'm using the term "liberalism" in the same way its most popular advocates (e.g. Fukuyama) and critics (e.g. Deneen) use it. As people have noted, "globalized capitalism" might work as well, but this would tend to exclude its political and cultural elements.

I think it's fairly obvious, given the distance of hindsight, that every culture in history has positively indoctrinated its members in its dominant philosophy and anthropology. This was true of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, medieval Europe, and Qing China. So too, it was certainly true for liberalism's 20th century rivals, communism and fascism. If it can plausibly claim to be excluded from this otherwise universal tendency, it is only because of the transparency of ideology mentioned in the OP.

This is particularly true because liberalism has been extremely evangelical, spreading itself through hard economic coercion, military funding, supporting coups, and even invading foreign countries to set up liberal states by force, while also generally refusing to recognize the legitimacy of any competitor systems. This is particularly true in the era of globalization, but it's been there from the beginning when revolutionary France was invading its neighbors and setting up "sister republics" by force, or sending the "Infernal Columns" to genocide devout Catholics loyal to elements of the ancien regime (i.e., their own local clergy, nobility, and customs). And even then it had its tendency for totalizing automation. When they couldn't behead priests fast enough with the guillotine they built barges with removable planks so they could fill them with chained prisoners and sink them all at once.

Sorry, it's in the quote right below the section you quoted if that wasn't clear.

And obviously, the classical view of freedom is aspirational. It is not something someone perfectly attains, but rather we become more free as we get closer to it. Since we cannot always be mindful of our actions—some action is more automatic, not a matter of rational deliberation and self-conscious reflection—freedom also involves the way we intentionally train our habits and tastes (and this intentional habituation be subject to self-conscious deliberation). Likewise, the ways in which we shape our environment and institutions can enable (or retard) our capacity for self-determination.

The Humean egoist cannot rationally order their appetites and desires towards "what is truly known as best" in this way because they have eliminated the rational appetites for Goodness (will) and Truth (intellect), reducing the whole of the rational soul to its lowest faculty, discursive ratio. They might justify a second-order volition. Perhaps they master their appetite for food in order to achieve a low body fat percentage in the hopes that it will make them attractive to the opposite sex. They can order one irrational desire (for food) to another (sex), but they cannot turn around and ask: "what is the truly best way for my appetites to be ordered?" (I mean, they can, since they have these rational appetites, it's just that according to their anthropology this would make no sense). Hume himself tries to resolve this by appealing to a sort of universal human sentiment, and we can order ourselves to this "sentiment of decency," but one might suppose that this "sentiment," mere irrational feeling, is just the rational appetites, only impoverished by a deflated understanding of the rational soul.

Help me see this. Why does the moral anti-realist not know why they act as they do?

Take sex. They want to have sex. Why? If they haven't totally erased any sense of human nature they might appeal to this. But this is just awareness that one has a desire and that one plans to act on it. It isn't a self-reflective conscious understanding of the act as truly good. To ask: "is it truly good that I possess this appetite to this degree?" requires some standard by which our own appetites are judged. If we have a rational desire for the Good as such, this is the obvious benchmark. Denying this, irrational appetites can only be ordered to other irrational appetites. It's like our AI probe that has had the desire to reproduce inserted in it. It didn't choose this desire. It doesn't know it as good and assent to it. Its "rationality" is a slave to the irrational, and in this way it is limited by its own finitude. Whereas, ordered to an infinite good, the rational soul can always ask on anything: "but is it truly best?" or: "is it really true?" and in so doing transcend current belief and desire.

How is this an argument for the ethical non-realist to become a realist? They merely reply, "Not at all. Nothing of the sort 'seems to follow.' My actions are neither irrational nor impulsive. I'm not aware of 'denying the very possibility of rational freedom' -- how so? Such a view of my actions comes with extremely heavy philosophical baggage, and you would have to show me why this must be the case. On the contrary, I choose what I rationally believe is best for me. Certainly I may be wrong, in any given instance. But how is that either irrational or immoral?"

I don't know what you mean, I included the argument right below the quoted section. They can advance their own competing definition of "rational action." Apparently "rational action" for them won't entail knowing why one acts and believing it to be truly best. It will involve ordering some irrational desires to others, ordering some finite ends to others, thinking this through a bit, and then halting the process of judgement at whatever point they feel is adequate. But this isn't "doing and willing what is good because it is known as good," it is rational only in the sense that discursive reasoning has been used to some degree to enable irrational passions that are not themselves justified or known as Good.

I suppose they can say it is "rational" if all "rational" is to mean is "using some faculty of ratio." It's not really self-determining. The entire process is, by definition, driven by "whatever desires the agent just so happens to possess." One cannot have justified second-order volitions because whether or not it is good to have (or not have) a desire can only be judged against some other inchoate desire.

It's like if you created an AI probe and sent it into space with the commandment "harvest resources and reproduce." Ok, it might do some computations as it decides how best to accomplish the goal it just so happens to have. It is "rational" in this sense. But if it cannot ask: "but is it truly good that I reproduce" then it is in an important sense unfree and not self-determining. It is rational and free just within the limits of slavishly driving itself towards instinct.

But the main widely Humean responses to this I am aware of just bite the bullet and say: "yup, I'm not free in that richer sense. No one is. We're ultimately just appetite machines." Which of course opens up the rebuttal that one should only agree with them or even argue with them in good faith if one feels like. There is, strictly speaking, nothing better about falsity than truth.

This wording signifies a right-leaning thingy where people believe everything should be approached with a sense of sacredness. I couldn't be more thumbs-up to that whole idea. That would really help people. Yet, it would be over my burned and rotting corpse that any religious group would step a foot into a public school in my area to talk about anything. Public schools are not for religious indoctrination. The answer is no.

I find it strange that you think that "education in virtue" must necessarily be religious. Military training involves a lot of ascetic training in virtue and character development and it isn't religious at all. Aristotle and Plato both have political philosophies that center heavily on education as the cultivation of virtue, and neither justifies this in religious terms. Instead, they make the quite defensible argument that collective self-government at the level of the polis requires self-governance at the level of the individual.

The idea that the main role of education was fostering virtue is a norm throughout Pagan thought as well as Christian thought, and was dominant in India and China too. The idea that it must instead belong to some separate, "private sphere of religion and spirituality," is itself a positively indoctrinated dogma of liberalism.

That is, if humans don't have the power to sin mortally, then they probably also don't have the power to accept a gift of salvation, or to be deified. The "eternal consequences" that humans cannot effect are bidirectional. Created freedom always has a dual potency, and this is precisely why "Corruptio optimi pessima" (the corruption of the highest is the lowest). It's no coincidence that the same world which holds to a low anthropology has also lost its grasp on human dignity and nobility. The reprobate and the saint disappear simultaneously.

Doesn't this point back to the controversy surrounding the Pelagian heresy though? Man, on the orthodox view, cannot know and strive towards the Good on his own. His nous (intellect and will) are diseased and malfunctioning. Even in writers accused of being Pelagians like St. Jonn Cassian have a large role for grace and the sacraments in the very possibility of the healing of the nous, which is itself a precondition of knowing and choosing the Good as good (i.e. known and willed as good).

The eternal consequences man can effect as man aren't bidirectional. For man to have this capacity in the upwards direction would mean something like Pelagius' conception of the righteous man who attains merit warranting beatitude on his own.

The other issue is that movement upwards, towards God, is classically conceived of as making us "more free." St. Paul used the language of "slavery in sin." So movement in either direction is not the same. As the Imago Dei becomes more disfigured by the curvatus in se of sin man also loses his capacity for self-determination.

TBH, I find the dialectical of nature and grace to generally be unhelpful. I think they are the same thing, looked at from different aspects. If one takes something like Ferdinand Ulrich's conception of "being as gift" it's "grace all the way down." Or, more appropriately, Eros all the way up, Agape all the way down, which is why St. Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love" terminates in "love of creatures for God's sake," or "with God's love."

At any rate, I think the larger issue would tend to center around God (and us as Christians) wanting "what is truly best for every creature." It is hard to see how eternal torment could ever be "truly best" for someone, nor how, if we are called to forgive everyone, we should ever want eternal torment for anyone. Is the benefit of God's justice for the damned greater than their suffering? But what of the late repenters? Wouldn't God's mercy be a violation of justice here?

Consider a man born out by the Indus, who never had a chance to hear of Christ and dies as a young adult. He grows up in a violent culture, perhaps part of a low caste. And he does wicked things. Perhaps not abhorrent things, but "lower level mortal sins." And he cannot repent and turn to Christ, for he has never heard the name of Christ. Thus he dies in his sins. Might he benefit from purgation, or even the retributive punishment of justice? Sure. But after the first 9,999 billion years of suffering, does justice still require additional torment to be met out for his 20 miserable years on Earth? More to the point, is continued torment "what is truly best" for him?

Even if one has a strong place for retributive justice, there is a point at which, at least on human scales, it becomes sadistic. There is a plotline in Pierce Brown's Red Rising series where a side character admits to having kept an enemy alive through high tech medical means for decades after decades while subjecting him to all the tortured futuristic science can provide. He has good reason for his wrath. If I recall correctly, the high caste captive had betrayed him, violated his wife, and killed his family, and likely done this to others on a regular basis. But of course, we find the endless nature of the retribution, that it goes on for human lifetimes to be gratitous and indeed demeaning for the original victim. When the side character decides to move on and kill the man, he has attained a sort of moral progress. Yet, depending on how God's "eternal punishment" is conceived, it puts God in the role of the punisher who, though initially justified, seems by all human measures to be demeaning himself by extending his vengeance indefinitely.

The risk here, as I see it, is that if one just passes over this disconnect one opens up a chasm of total equivocity between God's justice and man's, between God's goodness and man's, of the sort that plagues Protestant theology and sets up renewed Euthyphro dilemmas and voluntarism.

Hart has recently further popularized the thesis that Hell is unjust, and if a Christian views Hell as unjust then salvation is not undeserved. That is, if it is unjust for someone to not be saved, then salvation is not gratuitous.

This is a thorny issue. If beatitude in union with God is the natural end of all rational creatures, then it would seem that the denial of this end could be seen as a punishment by itself. Yet, we normally don't think of withholding rewards—i.e., of withholding aid towards a dessert we cannot attain to on our own—as punishment.

What exactly is the nature of the punishment in Hell though? Is it a denial? Is it primarily regret as in St. Isaac of Nineveh? It is sensuous torment, as in the image of Hell as a cosmic torture chamber or some subterranean Satanic kingdom?

I think this is an important issue because it is perhaps not "universalist" to deny that any soul is subjected to sensuous torments of infinite duration (the "cosmic torture chamber"), although it could also be seen that way. If everyone is "beatified to the extent they have made themselves able," this still might allow for a gradation (e.g. the metaphor of all cups filled to the brim, but some cups being smaller than others). And this "differential cup size" might also be taken as a punishment, although it is perhaps a punishment God cannot revoke through mercy without simply replacing sinners with new versions of themselves.

Or perhaps, punishment could consist in the very denial of beatitude and the grief this brings, something like Dante's Limbo. The problem there though is that, unless the will is extrinsically fixed some how, it seems that the damned in Limbo are striving to know and follow the Good as much as they are able.

At any rate, I think Hart would say that focusing on the gratuity of salvation as framed within the confines the infernalist lays out for it misses the point. Creation itself is completely gratuitous; man does not create himself, so it is still "grace all the way down" as seen from the top.

There is also an issue where soteriology ends up reducing the whole of the Christian life to avoiding extrinsic punishment and meriting extrinsic reward. The idea that sin is its own penalty tends to get washed out by the scale of retributive justice.

I wasn't speaking to religion, I was speaking any conception of human nature that strays from liberalism's volanturist Homo oeconomicus, and the "buffered self" who can achieve dispassioned reason without any need for training in virtue.

A liberal society isn't going to do anything to me until my behavior starts getting scary.

An ironic claim, given the absolute explosion in prison populations under liberalism (not that communism or fascism weren't also deficient on this front). The carceral state and constant litigation isn't a bug of liberalism, it is something it positively constructs as it tears down norms and culture in an effort to "liberate" the individual from these things. But, since the old structures played a regulatory role, a new vast system of administrative laws, courts, and prisons is needed to hedge in the atomized selves jockeying to fulfill their desires.

But more to the point, your words are 100% on point. A liberal society isn't going to do anything negative to you until your behavior starts getting scary, but it also isn't going to do much positive for you to stop you from ending up "too scary" for others. It will give you the "freedom" to ensure you end up locked in a cage (even for recreational drug use). Hence, you get the well-documented "schools to prisons pipeline" of the US, and Europe's segregated ethnic ghettos are not particularly better. Actually, in terms of assimilation they tend to be significantly worse.

Nor is the school to prison transition solely a problem of racial animus. For one, it is often worst in extremely left-leaning urban areas and places where minorities themselves hold chief positions of power in the state. For another, you can find it just as well in rural, overwhelmingly white areas as well. (This is, BTW, the problem with Michelle Alexander's maximalist thesis in "The New Jim Crow." Racial animosity doesn't explain why rural states with extremely small African American populations began putting thousands upon thousands of white men in prison to persecute the War on Drugs, or why conservative states tended to have draconian drug laws regardless of if they had many black residents to harass with them).

Now I suppose that you could redefine an anti-realist as (only) someone who not only denies objective facts about moral values, but objective facts about the value of anything whatever.

Well, this is often how it is framed. "Statements about value are not truth-apt, they are emotional expressions." If one wants to limit this to a special sort of "moral value," then one has to argue the point that such a delineation is preferable.

Personally, I don't agree with the egoist at all. I agree with you: No one is infallible about what is to their own benefit, as human history sadly attests. But what I'm claiming is that the egoist/moral anti-realist is not being irrational, and there is no argument you can make to the contrary, on the basis of objective values. It's not that the anti-realist has to say, "I know for a fact that my egoism is good for me. I can't be wrong about that." They can just say, "Well, this is the way it looks to me, and you have yet to show me an argument for all these 'common values' and 'human flourishings' and 'ethics that extend beyond the personal.' All you're doing is asserting your belief in them and claiming that, if I could only see them, I'd like them too. Perhaps, perhaps not."

But they aren't "being rational?" At least not on many views of rationality. Rather, they are denying the very possibility of rational freedom and rational action, at least as classically conceived. If we are incapable of desiring the good because it is known as good (i.e. a denial of the existence of Aquina's "rational appetites," or Plato's "desires of the rational part of the soul) then it seems to follow that all actions bottom out in irrational impulse.

On such a view, every end can only be judged good relative to the pleasure or positive sentiment we associate with it. Yet since there is no rational appetite for Goodness itself (an infinite, “Highest Good” sought by reason in which pleasure and sentiment also find their natural rest) every good can only be judged good relative to some other finite good. The result is an infinite regress. Yet since we cannot consider an infinite ordering of finite goods to other finite goods, practical reason must cease at some point. When it does, it must bottom out in inchoate, irrational impulse. Something that is chosen "just because I feel impelled towards it," not because it is known as good.

One potential resolution to this problem lies in selecting some finite good (e.g. pleasure) as a “benchmark,” or proclaiming it the “Highest Good” by fiat. However, this does not actually resolve the issue, as ultimately there is no definitive standard by which to choose between different potential "ultimate" or even "benchmark" ends in a rational manner. We can always ask of any standard or benchmark, “but is it a truly good standard.” This will force us to invoke another standard by which to secure our judgment vis-à-vis the initial standard. However, this new judgment must itself be secured by yet another standard, etc., ad infinitum.

Moreover, without a love of goodness and truth for their own sake (i.e., the desires of the "rational soul"), which are secured by non-discursive synterisis, we cannot transcend our own finitude, moving past current beliefs and desires. Lacking this capacity, we have no way of deciding which of our loves are proper, and should be fostered and allowed to lead us, and which we should strive to uproot. Here, the deflation of reason leaves reason stranded and impotent in the face of choice. We find ourselves unable to rationally justify what Harry Frankfurt terms “second-order volitions,” i.e., the desire to have (or not have) other desires [something he argues is essential for freedom and personhood]. Since all of our desires are irrational, each desire can only be judged relative to some other irrational desire, and this regress can never end in a properly rational desire. All that is left to us is the futile pursuit of whatever desires we just so happen to have.

Rationality requires that we have the capacity to choose certain actions because we at least believe them to be truly good.

Aside from this difficulty, there is also the phenomenological argument for the fact that man does possess an infinite appetite for goodness. We cannot identify any finite end to which we say "this is it, this is where I find absolute rest." This finding is, at the very least, all over phenomenology (including atheist phenomenology). Can someone claim: "I lack such desire?" Sure. Whether we believe them is another thing, but at any rate, that wouldn't show much. They need to claim that all men lack this desire, or that it is somehow confused or illusory, otherwise their condition is just a particular sort of spiritual illness.

Indeed, but even though I said that the Christian ethos was foundational to Western culture, I don't know if monastic spiritual practices are relevant to politics in a pluralistic society. It is by nature a renunciate philosophy.

Yes, but renunciate philosophy was once widely considered the cornerstone of education. Boethius' Consolation, for instance was the most popular ethical text of the Middle Ages. And it's still something that is part of the core of the Orthodox faith and expected of the laity.

I think you can find wide support for this view throughout ancient and medieval thought:

This highlights another important element in the pre-modern vision of reason. For Dante, man cannot slip into a dispassionate state of “buffered reason” where he “lets the facts speak” whenever he chooses. We are either properly oriented towards Truth and Goodness or we are not; we cannot chose to pivot between finite and spiritual ends as suits us. Rather, man’s intellect and will is subject to the pernicious influence of the unregenerated passions and appetites until “the rule of reason” has been positively established. The “rule of reason” can only be attained through repentance and a transformation accomplished through purgation and penance (something the Pilgrim must accomplish during his ascent of Mount Purgatory). In our life’s pilgrimage, our rationality, our most divine part, begins damaged by sin and in need of healing, a healing that can only be accomplished by ascetic labors and the aid of grace. We are born into a “web of sin” and will invariably become spiritually unwell in this way, to varying degrees, simply by living by the norms of a “fallen cosmos.” This means that a “turn upwards,” metanoia, a crucial part of each human life.

By contrast, if reason is merely something akin to computation, then we all have the same power of reason, albeit some of us may have access to more facts or might be quicker thinkers than others. On the modern view, asceticism and penance aimed at freeing the mind from the control of sensible desires in unnecessary. Here, it is worth noting why repentance is a prerequisite for the health of reason. Repentance represents a self-aware reflection on our own thought processes and choices, the ways in which they fall short, and a renewed commitment towards the pursuit of “what is really true” and what “is truly best” for their own sake. On the older view, where man’s reason cannot pass into an unclouded state free from the undue influence of the appetites and passions, such a move is necessary for the proper function of reason...

Indeed, in the Commedia, it is precisely the damned who appear to possess something like the Humean notion of reason. The damned are motivated by inchoate desires, impulses they do not attempt to master or understand. Count Ugolino will gnaw his rival’s brain for eternity, never questioning this act. The intellect of the damned has become a “slave to the passions,” and this is why we never see any gesture of repentance from them. They are rational just insomuch as they can draw connections between the senses and use these to pursue whatever desires have come to dominate them.

I think John Locke's point was that if we believe that the One Truth is discoverable by rational means, we'll never be at peace, because people come up with different formulations. It's better to start with mutual respect. If you're a protestant, it's none of your business what Catholics think.

Suppose for a moment that the sectarian, extremely exclusivist soteriology of the era preceding Locke's is true. Belonging to the wrong church puts people at a very high, perhaps certain risk of eternal suffering. On this view, simply "going along to get along" is completely abhorrent. It is to consign children to eternal torment to avoid finite, temporary strife.

Now, we might very well agree that dictating policy on the basis of this sort of knowledge is wholly inappropriate. Man cannot know what awaits him after death. Yet liberalism assumes much more about human nature than the ultimate fate of the soul, things we might think are eminently knowable through empirical exploration. And it positively indoctrinates according to its presumption of ignorance. Thus, it's far less modest than it seems. It doesn't just adopt a skeptical outlook, but presupposes the ignorance of others and then forces the conditions implied by this ignorance onto society writ large.

BTW, an interesting argument that can be derived from Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed is that the reason the Humean view or Homo oeconomicus seem so plausible today is precisely because modern liberalism works aggressively, through legal, economic, and military power, and positive indoctrination in both education and ubiquitous mediato make it a reality. Since all sources of identity and responsibility are seen as limits on freedom and these have very much precipitously declined, the system has striven (intentionally or not) towards producing the very anthropology it imagined for itself, the atomized utility maximizer.

It was not always thus. The modern tendency to make no distinction between the rational and sensible appetites obfuscates that Hume’s dictum that “reason is, and ought only be, the slave of the passions,”1 is an inversion of Virgil’s last words to Dante in the Commedia: "now is your will upright, wholesome and free, and not to heed its pleasure would be wrong." For Dante (and most of the pre-modern tradition), our pursuit of our own pleasure only becomes good (and ultimately, properly “good for us”) after the soul’s faculties have been purified through repentance (a self-conscious turn towards the good as good) and purgation (ascetic training and habituation) and the higher faculties have asserted their proper authority over the lower faculties.

I mentioned in the liberalism thread about how liberalism tries to project its norms into the past (or to dismiss anything that cannot be assimilated as mere religious dogma). But there is definitely a radical disconnect. "Reason as a slave to the passions," is quite literally a good summary of the condition of the damned in Dante's Hell. And so, to whatever extent Dante and co. is right, the drive to manufacture Homo oeconomicus is literally a drive towards slavery.

I really don't think it's that. The anti-realist is happy to acknowledge the fact that suffering is bad for the beings concerned

If an "anti-realist" re values acknowledges that there areobjective facts about values then they are not an anti-realist. The question of egoism, or of man as Homo oeconomicus, is really a question about the human good, human nature, and the nature of common goods, not the existence of facts about values. One cannot address those questions without first moving beyond an all-encompassing anti-realism.

i.e., there is no further moral conclusion to be drawn. The words "bad/good" carry no ethical implications, on this view; there are particular facts about what is bad or good for X in the sense specified above,

It takes a particular (and IMO strange) view of "ethics" to say such "facts about value" are not related to ethics (and so presumably, not related to human happiness?). It seems to me that the anti-realist often engages in something like a "No True Scotsman" argument here. "No, that's a fact about values, maybe even a fact about human flourishing, but it isn't really ethical." With the demand then being that to be "truly ethical" or "moral" such facts must be facts about a sui generis moral good that is excluded, almost by definition, for being meaningful to anyone, ever, outside of some raw, sterile impulse towards "duty."

I guess the philosophical world is divided between those who believe that "good/beneficial/conducive to happiness/healthful/pleasurable for me" is what "morally good" means, and those who conceive of moral good as above and beyond the personal. I'm not sure how to bridge the division.

No, they often think that, due to human nature, "good/beneficial/conducive to happiness/healthful/pleasurable for me" extends beyond the personal. To say it doesn't is to deny that common goods exist or are an important part of human flourishing. It's to say all apparent common goods, the good of a good marriage, of family, of citizenship, etc. are really just conglomerations of individual goods reducible to the individual benefit each member derives from their participation in what is common.

Obviously, a great deal of moral theorists disagree with this reductionist line. It's only a very particular view in the Anglo/liberal tradition that insists upon the "atomized individual in the 'state of nature'" as the absolute starting point of moral analysis, and so ends up with Homo oeconomicus, the "rational" self-interested utility maximizing voluntarist agent who must be somehow "made to have an ethics that extends beyond the individual." And of course, such extensions always fail, because the presuppositions have already made man atomized and cut off from any truly common good.

But I think you struggle with getting beyond egoism in particular because you think that, provided the egoist keeps on affirming that they are better off being an egoist, then this simply must be true (i.e. they are infallible about what is to their own benefit). If someone says "I don't currently prefer x," then it cannot possibly be the case that they would truly be better off learning to prefer x. That is, "good for me" gets defined in terms of current desire.

I don't know why we should think this is true though. It is demonstrably false in children, who often have extremely strong attractions to things that will make them miserable, and biological maturation does not ensure rational self-government or wisdom.

All moral theorists are relativists to some degree. You can see straightforward analysis of relativism in cultural norms way back in Herodotus for instance. The Greeks would accept no amount of payment to eat their dead and were offended by the very notion. They must burn them on pyres. The Callatiae would accept no amount of money not to eat their dead, and were disgusted by the notion of burning them.

We might allow that it is cruel to randomly circumcise a child in the context of Japanese culture without any medical justification, where it serves no real purpose, but that circumcision might be beneficial in the context of Jewish or Muslim society where it is a ubiquitous mark of group identity. The problem for pernicious forms of relativism is that they make everything relative. Thus, they have no way to criticize even the most extreme social practices foisted on children, e.g. female circumcision, foot binding, etc. Because the "culture" becomes the absolutized measure of morality, there is no way to step back and ask: "even if foot binding is beneficial for Chinese women as a mark of status, wouldn't they (and Chinese culture writ large) be better off (more flourishing) without this custom?"

Relativism doesn't require anti-realism. When relativism is paired with anti-realism, you end up with a multiplicity of absolute cultural standards, and find yourself saying things like: "if every third child is brutally tortured to death at age 3, we cannot really say if this is bad for human flourishing or not."

Just because someone is a moral anti-realist doesn’t mean they are unconcerned with the suffering of people or animals.

Sure. They just deny that the suffering of people or animals can actually be bad for them as a matter of fact. A total denial of facts about values equates to saying that the following statements:

• Garry Kasparov is a better chess player than the average kindergartener;
  
• It is bad for children to have lead dumped into their school lunches;
• It would have been a bad investment to buy Enron stock in 2001 or Bear Stearns stock in 2008; or
• It is bad for a bear to have its leg mangled in a bear trap.

...are neither true nor false (or true only relative to ultimately arbitrary cultural norms).

Nor does relativism actually seem to be coherent when it makes the "culture" the ultimate arbiter of morality. It could just as well be the individual. Nor is the relativists' common appeal to "tolerance" as a universal value in the face of relativism free from the problems of self-refutation.

Anyhow, I think arguments for this sort of relativism are often (but perhaps not always) incredibly facile.

The most common arguments for moral relativism run something like this:

P1: Different peoples have many different standards of right and wrong. If one were born and raised in another culture, one would have different, perhaps contradictory ideas about what constitutes moral, just behavior.

Conclusion: Therefore, there are no absolute facts about right and wrong. What is good or just is entirely determined by cultural context (alternatively, for moral nihilism: “Therefore there can be no facts of the matter vis-à-vis good or evil.”)

If this does not look like a valid syllogism, there is a good reason for that! The conclusion does not follow from the premise at all. Cultural differences are only evidence for the truth of relativism if one has already assumed relativism and is suffering from confirmation bias.

To see why, consider that the same sort of argument could be made for all sorts of things. For example, “what shape is the Earth?” or “what causes infectious diseases?” What people have believed about these questions has varied by both time and place. If you were raised in a society where people thought the Earth was flat, or that infectious diseases were spread by witchcraft, you would most likely believe those things. Yet, does this demonstrate that the shape of the Earth or the etiology of infections varies by culture, or that there can be no fact of the matter? Does the fact that people disagree—that even today some people intransigently insist the world is flat—in any way demonstrate that the Earth either has no shape or that its shape varies?

To be sure, more savvy relativists will not argue that the conclusion follows from the premise. Rather, they will follow Nietzche’s lead in the Geneology of Morals, claiming that they have a better, abductive explanation for why moral norms exist. For instance, they might claim that ethics just reduces to evolutionary psychology, and that the customs that develop from our instincts don’t have anything to do with any objective standard of goodness.

Still, these sorts of arguments also have their weaknesses. They are open to all the attacks that have been leveled against reductionism. Arguments from speculative hypotheses in evolutionary psychology to the causes of moral norms flow from premises that are less well known than their conclusion. Not only this, but even if our customs were largely “the product of evolution,” it is unclear why this should entail that there are no facts about values. We might very well allow that what is “good for man” is related to (if not reducible to) his biological nature...

The "cultural differences argument’s " key premise can also be challenged. To be sure, cultural norms do vary. Yet we can allow that culture shapes morality without subscribing to an extreme relativism. Perhaps morality is always filtered through culture, but that does not preclude something stable from standing upstream of culture.

For instance, both the Greeks and the Callatians value honoring the dead, they just do so in different ways. Likewise, it seems that all cultures value courage, prudence, fortitude, etc. Hence, while we do observe meaningful differences in moral norms, these might be grounded in universal commonalities. For example, no culture gives babies razor sharp hunting knives as toys for their cribs. Such a prohibition is clearly not arbitrary. We can also note here that something very similar might be said of early attempts at science. While explanations of the world often did vary quite a bit, they also shared similarities because they were—in the end—attempts to describe the same thing.

Such an attack on the key premise of the "cultural differences argument" might be even more relevant to abductive arguments for moral relativism. For, it does not seem that morality can be “cultural norms all the way down.” Cultural norms come from somewhere, they have causes, they do not spring from the aether uncaused.

Hence, we can ask: “is it not true, at least on average, ceteris paribus, that it is better for people to be temperate instead of gluttonous or anhedonic, courageous instead of brash or cowardly, properly ambitious instead of grasping or apathetic, etc.? A strong rebuttal of virtue ethics would need to show that these traits are not beneficial on average, or that we somehow equivocate on these terms when we move from culture to culture. Yet this does not seem to be an easy case to make. To be sure, the critic can point to instances where “bad things happen to virtuous people,” or vice versa, but everyone is exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune, and it is the virtuous person who is most able to weather bad fortune

But arbiters of 'good' and 'bad' are literally nowhere to be seen, except within agreements between people. Is this clearer?

If this were true one would discover what a good therapy for liver cancer is solely by investigating people's opinions instead of by studying livers. The Wright Brothers would have had to develop a successful, good flying machine by studying people's opinions instead of aerodynamics. Farmers would likewise learn their trade by studying opinions about wheat instead of wheat. One would learn that wet, mossy logs are bad for starting fires and that dry tinder and kindling is good only though talking, not through the practice of starting fires.

More problematic, we'd have to explain all these opinions re goodness vis-á-vis ends. If they don't tie back to the things themselves, e.g., that dry hemlock and birch bark burn easily and that mossy wet oak doesn't burn easily, then these opinions would have to spring from aether uncaused. You'd need some explanation for why "being chemicals and energy" makes it impossible for wood to be "good for anything" per se, but the human being, itself also just chemicals and energy, is capable of the sui generis capacity to project the illusory goodness of things vis-á-vis different ends onto the whole world, such that "hammers are better for driving nails than tissues," seems to be an obvious empirical fact.

But it's a radically skeptical position, and frankly farcical, to claim:
"Tissues aren't actually any worse for driving nails than hammers,"
"Having its leg ripped off in a trap isn't bad for a fox" or
"Being lit on fire isn't bad for children."

This is why the more convincing moral skeptic doesn't try to claim that nothing is truly good or bad relative to different ends, which leads to absurdity (e.g. an F-150 is equally as good of a boat or plane as it is a truck). They instead point out that ends like "driving in nails" and "having a plane that flies," are not sought for their own sake. They are only choice-worthy vis-á-vis some other end. Driving in a nail is good relative to securing a shelf. Securing a shelf is only good relative to some other end. Driving a nail into your own hand isn't good. What is good as respects some end is empirical (else science and experience cannot tell us how to accomplish goals), but then each end also has to be justified in terms of some other end.

The skeptic, to have a claim that is more plausible than "stomping my cat isn't bad for it," needs to claim something like "all ends are ordered to other ends," and this ordering, since it cannot extend ad infinitum, must always bottom out in irrational impulse. On the other hand, there is the fairly dominant idea that what all men seek, they seek for the sake of being happy/flourishing (eudaimonia), and that this end is "sought for its own sake," securing an ultimate human end by which all other human ends (and means towards those ends) are judged "good" or "choiceworthy."

So, there are lots of attacks here. One can deny that man (or any organism) has any nature at all, meaning that happiness is unique and sui generis for each individual. I think this is patently ridiculous, since it's obvious that some things are always bad for people, but people have argued for relativism on the idea that man essentially creates himself and his values out of the air. The weakness here is that this sort of self-creation narrative, aside from challenging empirical experience, also tends to assume what it sets out to prove.

Hume's view, from whence we get the "is-ought gap " is another popular one. It essentially begs the question on this though because Hume presupposes his answer in how he defines reason in the Treatise, essentially declaring by fiat that rational appetites do not exist (i.e., that there are only sensible appetites). That Hume often is guilty of demonstrable question begging (e.g. the assault on causes) by presupposing definitions that contain his conclusion has certainly not affected the popularity of his arguments though. But I think it's more relevant that, if Hume is right, it isn't just emotivism or sentimentalism that follows, but that man cannot have a rational nature at all and that man cannot possess a rational, self-determining freedom in any sense, since all action always bottoms out in inchoate impulse that lies prior to the reach of his dessicated conception of reason.

Anyhow, like the radical skeptic, the moral anti-realists seems absolutely incapable of actually acting like they believe their stated position. , you make a great many posts about things being "better" or "superior" or "worse," for instance, e.g. "indigenous ways of knowing," or the justness of special indigenous privileges, etc.

I'd argue that if a philosophical position requires rejecting obvious truisms like "it is bad for children to be lit on fire," and it is literally impossible to act like one actually believes it with the courage or their convictions (i.e. for its form to inform the mind), that's a clear sign of deficiency and we should question the epistemic standards that lead to such an untoward judgement.

the middle to upper class dictum: "get good grades and wrack up accomplishments so you can go to a good college, and do the same there so you can get a good job, and then you can get a good job and do what you want."

By the way, I don't even think champions of liberalism want this. Our "meritocracy" has become a sort of curse. David Brook's writes about this a lot. As the chasm between the few "haves" and the vast multitudes of "have-nots" grows ever wider, families are forced into a sort of meritocratic arms race to secure elite status for their progeny, lest they fall down the ladder to a point where the rungs are so far apart that ascent becomes impossible. The system ruthlessly sifts winners and losers, wheat from chaff. Yet since most people are consigned to being "chaff," we might ask if time wouldn't be better spent on teaching the ways in which "having-not" in the context of a developed welfare state is not inimical to flourishing.

At any rate, parents and children do not seem to actually want the sort of education system liberalism suggests to itself. Even if they buy into the idea of man as Homo oecononimicus, they would prefer to be educated as Homo sapiens. For instance, when we look to contemporary fantasy and science fiction, a sort of mirror for the imagined ideal, we can find many novels that focus on education. Indeed, the “elite academy" is practically its own sub-genre. When we look at the stories that capture our imaginations, they do not look anything like our contemporary education system. They are decidedly not for "raising up consumers." When fiction writers strive to envision an education system that will produce heroes, very often they turn to the old, ascetic model of education, an education heavily focused on developing self-governance and character. Moral, intellectual, and often physical virtue (excellence) are often seen as the goals of education in such narratives.

I am thinking here of the pressure cooker academy of Orson Scott Card’s “Battle School” in his popular novel Ender’s Game. Similar themes show up in the “Institute” of Pierce Brown’s best selling series Red Rising. Likewise, in the fantasy world of R. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series, the superhuman “Dunyain” monks are trained using methods that recall Christian and Buddhist monasteries far more than modern classroom. The training Paul Atreides, the main character of Frank Herbert’s Dune receives likewise focuses on ascetic discipline and contemplative exercises. Indeed, these themes are particularly popular in works targeting young adults themselves, e.g Veronica Roth’s hit Divergent series. Other examples abound here.

One example of this in the real world is the enduring appeal of military training for the imaginations of young people (particularly young men). This is what the very well-funded and well-researched marketing campaigns of the US military focus on. "Join the Marines and we will challenge you and make something out of you. We will reforge you." There are serious drawbacks to military training, it's only appropriate for soldiers, but not all of what makes it appealing is impossible to capture. Indeed, part of what makes it appealing is precisely the camaraderie and shared purpose, not having everything focused on the atomized individual.

Obviously, fictional worlds are no sure guidance to real world education, but if this is the sort of training we think heros, as opposed to “rational self-interested consumers,” need, then we might very well want to reflect on that. Certainly, part of the appeal of these narratives is their foreigness, and often their danger. But one doesn't need to go all the way into violent competition and days spent out in the wilds without food to capture something of what these narratives take hold of.

Edit: BTW Deneen points out that the dramatic pivot away from the "liberal arts," even by elites, is a pivot away from precisely the sort of education that was previously seen as enabling human freedom. The switch is a switch to what was previously considered to be appropriate for servile education. Liberalism started with the slogan "every man a king," but in this respect seems to trend closer to "every king a commoner."

Maybe. "Capitalism" would be too narrow, and wouldn't capture the philosophical anthropology underpinning the problems of globalized liberal capitalism. It would also miss how "anti-capitalist" social democrats are often quite "liberal" in the political sense.

And "modernity" might capture some of the broader, bedrock philosophical ideas that lead to the liberal anthropology in the first place: the mechanistic view of nature, the ideal of the Baconian mastery of nature, nominalism, voluntarist understandings of liberty, the deflation of reason such that it becomes merely discursive ratio (i.e. man's rational soul reduced to the lower faculty of just one part of the traditional "rational soul"), etc.

But "modernity" also seems too broad if the focus is primarily conceptions of human liberty. Modern movements opposed to liberalism (now vanquished) did have very different visions of human flourishing and freedom.

Maybe part of the problem has to do with the way we've come to view the world? The Baconian view of "nature" (and so, the entire cosmos, and literally everything per materialism) is that it is something to master. We make it serve us. We remake it in our image. You figure out how it works and then build it how you want.

When this is the default approach to being, and understanding being, then it makes sense that political issues might involve "scrapping one project and starting over." The political system, culture, and even human nature become our invention, and if they are preforming poorly we can radically rebuild them, or build something totally new.

Whereas if one starts from a more organic view of nature, the analogy is less something like the design of a new car engine (very much the model for contemporary political science and economics), and much more like tending a garden. When you tend a garden, you don't want to go around lopping of limbs unless you really have to. You work with the plants, with their natural form. A garden is something to be nurtured, and having to tear things up by the roots and starting over is a sign of failure. It's not what a good gardener does. They cultivate rather than design, heal rather than repair. Gardeners, from my experience, are particularly proud when they have extremely long-lived plants that have made it through all sorts of crises.

Funny enough, the dictatorship of the CEO in the "corporate city-state" imagined by the Alt Right, with the heavy focus on a right to "exit" is not so much illiberal, as its critics often claim, but essentially hyper-liberalism. It is the absolutizing of individual voluntarist choice as the sole axiom of political organization.

I can see your point here (and Han's) but isn't it the case that liberalism in this context is not as significant the marketisation of everything and everyone - the West is in the business of churning out good capitalists who can live the dream of individual transformation though education, qualifications, enhanced earning power, spending and then, of course, there's the children we set upon the same path.

I don't think we can really separate these. They are deeply related. Liberalism's anthropology is what justifies both capitalism and the modern welfare state. It's view of liberty is inclined to see consumerism as a type of freedom.

Isn’t human dissatisfaction and unhappiness inherent to our condition, rather than simply the product of the particular culture we come from? Even in societies with radically different values and social structures, people still grapple with restlessness, longing, and the sense that something essential is missing. Might this not be something to do with our nature? In the contemporary West we have given people permission to rebel and drop out since the 1950's - is it any wonder many people seem primed to do this as an almost ritualistic response to their lives? The idea that we are not authentic, not good enough, and not happy enough - a familiar trope in Christian Evangelical thought - and that we might become better, happier, and more authentic through a radical shift in belief or practice, seems to serve as a defining narrative of our time.

Sure, but just because an issue is perennial (or at least long running) doesn't mean it cannot become better or worse, or more or less pernicious.

Its core vocabulary assumes a world of discrete individuals, neutral institutions and voluntary agreements. As a result, it lacks the concepts necessary to address power that operates indirectly, structurally or collectivel

This is Patrick Deneen's main thesis in Why Liberalism Failed?. Actually, he identifies two main threads that run through both the left and right in liberalism:

A. A view of the individual as atomized and a voluntarist view of liberty and choice.
B. A view of man as separate from nature and nature as primarily a "problem to be solve." (I think you could go a bit further here and connect this trend to metaphysical outlooks like nominalism too).

He argues that liberalism tends to destroy culture because of a commitment to these two beliefs. Where as "culture," "cultivation," "agriculture," etc. all involve the foster of a specific nature in the old view, e.g. Aristotle and Plato put a lot of focus on culture and education in their political works, nature ends up being simply something else to be manipulated in the pursuit of voluntarist freedom (transhumanism might be the furthest reach of this tendency).

The same is true for economic concentration. A company like Google or Facebook may have been built through freely entered contracts, investments and user agreements. No rights have been explicitly violated. Yet these companies exert enormous influence over public discourse, access to knowledge and the contours of civic life. Liberalism sees this as the exercise of legitimate freedom rather than as the emergence of de facto private sovereignty. Because the framework is based on rights and voluntary choice, it struggles to see how power can aggregate without formal coercion. (But Power is everywhere).

Right, everything is acceptable so long as there is "consent." In the sphere of interpersonal romance this can lend itself towards hedonism, although I think it takes on frankly sociopathic connotations in the realm of "pick-up artists" and the "manosphere" (although there is also no shortage of female oriented, manipulation/transaction centered relationship advice as well).

Liberalism’s emphasis on rights also tends to obscure the role of duties. If rights are powers granted through the mutual structure of society, they ought to imply obligations to that structure. But liberal theory tends to treat duties as secondary or voluntary. Civic responsibility is something you may take on, not something that defines you. The result is a moral and political culture where everyone is entitled and few feel responsible, where freedom is understood as non-interference rather than shared self-governance.

Hence, the "illiberal" Alt-Right focus on the right to "exit" is actually a sort of hyper-liberalism.

I think the bolded part here is where the pre-modern tradition has the most to say to modern issues. I don't think earlier theorists (whose work gave birth to liberalism) were wrong in thinking that collective self-governance could not succeed without individual self-governance, nor in thinking that this was actually something that is quite hard to fostered and requires a lot of effort and intentional thought.

Even in areas like education, healthcare and water access, liberalism’s instinct is to see goods as optional and their distribution as a matter of individual choice. When these goods are commodified or enclosed, when water is bottled and sold, when care work is commercialised, when genetic information is patented, liberalism cannot object. These are seen as legitimate exercises of property rights and freedom of enterprise. The fact that these markets systematically exclude and exploit is not, by itself, grounds for concern unless someone’s rights are violated.

That's fair, although I think the left wing of liberalism does put a pretty high premium on ensuring access to these goods and certain capacities, making them less "optional" in some sense. But the thing is that this "ensuring of goods" (e.g. childcare, healthcare, education, etc.) is all seen as enabling the atomized individual to be atomized. The Obama campaign had a whole ad campaign based on a fictional woman who gets through life's challenges thanks to all these helpful government programs. The only other human who appears is a small child (no father), who is shown being shuttled off to a government provided bus. Conservatives hated the campaign for showing "dependence on the welfare state and big government's reach into every aspect of life," but it's important to see that the vision here is still extremely liberal. There is just the individual and the enabling stat. The state "makes straight the way" to atomized pursuits.

For me, freedom and therefore the protection of most liberal "values" is about maximising democracy in every facet of socio-economic interaction and decentralising decision making as much as possible.

Yes, but the erosion of institutions and culture this leads to mean that the government must play an ever greater role in enabling the cooperation of individuals and access to the necessities for living an atomized life. Hence, the state grows larger and larger, even as the goal is decentralized. The state has to keep growing larger to solve the problem of everything else becoming decentralized.

The right/left paradigm seems to me to be very much about how large the state should be, but not about challenging the assumptions of liberalism.

Ah, the tragic heart of your post. What do you mean by "And I do think this is different"? Different from the past?

Yes, although, like I said, you can see something in the period before WWI, a lot of discussion about how a war was needed to restore honor, glory, vigor, and to wash away modern malaise and hedonism. I don't think it's any coincidence that Jünger's "Storm of Steel," in many ways a positive account of the First World War—the brothership, heroism, meaning, and purpose service on the front provided—has become a best seller again (even warranting mentions by folks like Musk).

Such malaise exists in every era, or at least throughout modernity. We have the Beatniks, the Lost Generation, the Hippies, Gen X angst, etc. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that just because a problem is perennial it cannot be more or less extreme.

I think you can see this phenomena in the extremely high demand for apocalyptic media these days. Naomi Kline and Astra Taylor have a new piece on this for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk) although as one might expect it is a partisan polemic. I do think this sort of thing might be more active on the right, but it definitely exists on the left.

And I think there are key differences in range in intensity. People have always been attracted to politics as a replacement for religion, or revolution as an identity. But today we see desire for a revolution that simply tears everything down, where anarchy, not utopia, is the point, because people can only see meaning and heroism arising in such contexts, not in an improved political situation. I think this probably has something to do with the inevitably globalized, liberal capitalism projects for itself. People see no real escape from it outside collapse. As Mark Fisher says: "it is easier to imagine the world ending than capitalism."

Second, styling oneself a revolutionary and chomping at the bit for conflagration was previously largely a young man's game. The sentiment is stronger and wider now. Look at pictures of armed protests and you see more men with gray beards than teens. That's important, because we have societies where adolescence is long extended and young adults aren't taken seriously or given much power (a sea change from the Baby Boomers, who took control of the White House and Congress at Millennials' age, and held it for the next four decades, into their 80s, whereas representation under 55 remains absolutely tiny at the federal level*).

I cannot help but think this has something to do with the atomized, voluntarist conception of humanity that underpins the global system, but also its inability to sustain the "progress" it previously used to justify itself. That most people think coming generations will live shorter, poorer, less secure lives is a quite big shift in polling data, maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy.

*That's a US example, but gerontocracy is a phenomena across the West.

The key examples of the "ruthless" pursuit of liberalism that came to my mind is the US attempt to foist liberal democracy and social norms on Iraq and Afghanistan by force of arms, direct support to liberal factions in civil wars across the world, or the less dramatic continual involvement in coups, efforts to undermine states, sanctions, etc. to pressure non-liberal regimes (e.g. socialist aligned states during the Cold War, Iran after its revolution, the opening of Japan to trade at gun point in the 19th century, and the very heavy pressures that the WTO, World Bank, IMF, etc. have put on states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to adopt not only market liberalization, but also political liberalization, and, crucially, liberal social norms.)

So for instance, part of the alliance with the Shah in Iran involved the defense of Western social norms, at least in urban centers (while the political structure remained quite illiberal). The "shock treatments" and privatization forced on post-Soviet states in exchange for aid is another example.

Obviously, there are very pertinent and valid national security and grand strategy concerns behind some of these policies, but a sort of "liberal evangelism" is definitely part of it too, and at times it is pursued quite ruthlessly. The whole idea behind letting China into the WTO was that market liberalization would entail political and social liberalization, a bet that turned out to be very bad. Part of the reason liberal leaders thought the bet would go well is because they thought they could coerce the CCP much more than they were actually able to. And they certainly tried such coercion, it just failed because the CCP has extremely robust, totalitarian control in China that is often underestimated.

Also, consider how the "race to the bottom of globalization" was justified. Nike was "offering freedom" and a path "upwards" by offering children labor in sweat shop conditions, etc.

Political correctness is just one example from the leftward side of liberalism. I also think it's fair to note that the right has adopted the same tactics of denouncement, canceling campaigns, boycotts over trivial matters, a steady output of "rage porn" propaganda, etc.

lol, the word I was searching for was "opprobrium."

I agree with you, and we could stretch the analogy to say that overly aggressive conservatism is like an autoimmune disease that attacks the proper ordering of the body. It's like anaphylaxis. Perfectly healthy food sources become downright fatal, depriving the organism of what would otherwise be healthy food. Whereas the liberal pathology might be something more akin to AIDS, an inability of the immune system to recognize pathology, or in the more advanced forms of Wokism that lead to Cultural Revolution style struggle sessions and the destruction of institutions and history, it becomes like MS, the immune system actually attacking the body because it sees it, and not the pathogens as threats.

But of course you are right, we can and should exercise rational discernment in such matters. Whether we always do is another matter. A lot of this stuff is habit so overcoming pathology means intentional training. The problem is that the disease can also involve efforts at intentional training (e.g., some tolerance and DEI trainings have been shown to have the opposite of the results they are intended to have, or to be supported by pseudoscience, and yet they remain common practices because to challenge them is seen as being against "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and who would want to be against that?)

I had the impression that Hadot sees Christianity as having appropriated the spiritual practices of 'pagan' philosophy and redirected them into a theological framework—ultimately subordinating philosophy to dogma. While Hadot respects many Christian thinkers, he is critical of the loss of philosophy’s independent role as a transformative way of life with its own internal plurality. (I think that is due to a kind of conflict between reason and faith, which the orthodox and Catholic traditions manage to reconcile (or believe they do), but which emerges again with Luther and reformed theology.)

I think that's a fair description from "Philosophy as a Way of Life." He doesn't spend that much time on Christianity and makes it seem largely just derivative. Maybe this is corrected elsewhere or maybe not, but in one of the other two books I mentioned (I think Michael Champion's) they review Hadot's stuff and say he never really gets beyond this (I think I saw this same opinion in a paper on the Philokalia as well).

Anyhow, what might be missed, depending on the value one sees in the later tradition is:
-Prayer as a distinct set of spiritual exercises

-The role of alms giving, works, the sacraments/mysteries, and communal activity (e.g. psalmody during the Liturgy of the Hours, the Eucharist, etc.)

- How the framing leads to asceticism, isolation as hermits, evangelism, and "infused contemplation" all taking on much wider roles. The Pagan philosophers embraced asceticism but they didn't produce dendrites (tree dwellers), stylites (pillar dwellers), or wild men.

-Hesychasm, stillness, as its own distinct goal with its own methods. It certainly shows up in Pagan thought, but not in the same way. The focus on total mental stillness as a prerequisite to "infused contemplation" (also more of a focus in the Christian tradition) led to different methodologies, particularly in terms of prayer and the recitation of short prayers (e.g. the Jesus Prayer, not unlike a mantra). The Desert Fathers themselves saw this as a difference, and in the Sayings there is a story where the Pagans come out to see them and they compare notes and they agree that they both fast, are chaste, spend time in solitude, study, meditate, etc. But the monks say "we can keep watch over our thoughts" (nepsis, the way to hesychasm) and the Pagan's admit "we cannot do this" (this is the monk's story afterall) and depart.

-That, although the Desert Fathers (and through them Christianity writ large) borrow terms from Pagan philosophy, they actually use them very differently. And actually, this is where the critique has most of its teeth. Hadot acts like Christians just copied and pasted ideas because the same Greek words get used, when rather it seems like they just borrowed the language. Most of the Desert Fathers were not educated. Those who were, like Evagrius, are using the established language of Greek thought to try to capture and organic and disorganized language. This, while both speak of dispassion or apatheia, or vanquishing "the passions," they mean very different things.

The Christian view has a much larger role for the appetites and passions in the "good life," and human perfection, and much more respect for the body in general. For them, the "Flesh" is not the body, but attachment to finite goods for their own sake. The goal of their asceticism is perhaps closer to Plato's original vision, the orientation of the appetites and passions by the nous (and their regeneration in grace with the nous). Apatheia isn't the death of passion and appetite, but their proper use in a sensible world where everything is a sign of God and part of a ladder up to God (a world that is "very good" Genesis 1). This is why the last step on St. Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love" is "love of creatures for God's sake."

The other difference is that, while they see the human nous as divine, they see it as extremely damaged by sin at the outset of man's pilgrimage. So the battle they are engaged in is not so much against the appetites and passions (although it gets framed that way), but also a regeneration of the nous, will and intellect, as well. It isn't just about establishing proper ordering or leaving behind the material, but healing the former and properly using the latter. And sometimes even the material world is "healed" in some of the stories of the Fathers, as nature itself is regenerated around the holy man.

The goal of "becoming like God" is stated the same way as well, but is quite different because, while the Christian God is impassible and immutable, the model for man is the Incarnation, who was fully man and fully God. Hence again, the role of the body, senses, passions, etc. have a much wider role. And since "God is love" and love is ultimately what unifies and orients the person (not dispassioned nous, since the nous begins sick), emotion plays a much larger role.

Not that this is particularly obvious in every Christian text, particularly since terms are often translated with the philosophical Greek meaning in mind. But I think Nietzsche's criticism of asceticism (reading Plato entirely through the Phaedo) actually applies to the earlier late Pagan tradition much more than the early to medieval Christian one. Ultimately though, I don't think Nietzsche really looked into the history that deeply.

I really like Hadot. His "Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates of Foucault" is quite good, although I do think he misses some of the important ways the Christian tradition of late antiquity differs from the Pagan. It's an area that surprisingly barren, although I did enjoy Niki Kasumi Clements' "Signs of the Ascetic Self," on St. John Cassian. It's very much from a post-modern perspective, and that causes some things to come through a bit strange (it also moralizes quite a bit, making excuses for violations of contemporary liberal norms, which sort of gets to my OP). But that also makes it novel and pretty neat.

And then there is Michael Champion's book on St. Dorotheus of Gaza, which really gets into the central role of ascetical practice and spiritual exercises in both the Pagan and Christian education of late-antiquity (an element of education that has been virtually eliminated, but still exists in a very tailored form in military training or in outdoor education programs).



Like I said, I'd see more merit in separating the terms if there were a single example where they don't go together. There isn't. That there are theoretical works that make a political philosophy look appealing doesn't say much. The same is true for communism, fascism, etc. It's the old "real communism hasn't been tried with any true Scotsman," thing. I think there are fairly straightforward ways where liberalism connects to capitalism and consumerism—the two haven't developed together by accident. That Eastern Europe experienced them all as a package deal with political liberalization is one example.

Nussbaum has some good ideas, but to the extent that developing citizen's positive capabilities for reflexive freedom becomes a major focus of education, it would seem to be moving away from liberalism, or at least liberalism as commonly practiced and the anthropology that undergirds it. At least, given the anthropology of Deneen, Augustine, Plato, etc. you cannot develop people's capacity for self-determination and self-governance and maintain a commitment to being neutral on "the good life." It takes a certain sort of anthropology (the one that has dominated liberalism), to say "all that people need to be free is the option and resources to become so," i.e., that the development of virtue can be promoted while taking no positive position on virtue. It's an extremely optimistic anthropology in this respect (dismal in others).

At any rate, my point, which was not "liberalism is bad," was about proponents of the current liberal system (as it actually exists)'s incapacity to countenance that rejections of liberalism and it's vision of human freedom could be anything but demands for authoritarianism (which this thread has borne out to some extent). People criticize the hyperbolic liberal state, and then their strangely accused on wanting a totalitarian autocracy.

Its bet is that we can coexist without agreeing on ultimate ends. That isn’t moral emptiness; it’s a kind of modesty.

Is it that modest? It still requires the claim that all its competitors are wrong. Suppose there is an objectively " better way." If there is, then obviously liberalism is not ideal. Indeed, depending on how people tend to orient themselves under liberalism, it might be extremely far from ideal. If the liberal is just a skeptic then this is a possibility. Hence, it needs to at least involve positive claims about what it thinks opponents cannot know.

Yet as you said, it is a doctrine. It does positively indoctrinate. So it doesn't act like a skeptical thesis that is unsure of itself. It is very active in the defense of its system and has aggressively sought to export it, or even force it on other countries. And it enforces its ideals on organizations within the liberal nation state as well.

There is an important, difficult sort of discernment in realizing that something can be wrong, or even terrible, without it necessarily needing to be addressed by some sort of crusade. Cancer, for instance, might sometimes benefit from less aggressive treatments, without us having to forget that it's still cancer, and dangerous. Sometimes the treatment can be worse than the disease. Sometimes significantly worse. And sometimes we can even be misdiagnosed.

To keep the analogy going, I suppose the opposite problem is becoming so scared of the doctor that one starts to deceive oneself about even having cancer, rejecting testing, refusing to accept test results, etc. Of course, this is all the more likely if all the doctors are crusaders who want to start loping limbs off at the first sign of disease. There is a sort of positive feedback loop between radicalism and defense of the status quo.

I think discernment at the intersection of politics and ethics is quite difficult, and it's why I imagine your experience is very common. I can certainly relate. This is why, ideally, I think personal ethics would be taught prior to political issues (whereas we tend to just flip right to the political).

Because, of course it's important to point to problems in prevailing systems, to point out how society is organized immorally, or in ways that thwart the very principles it takes to be most important. But there is a difficulty here where it is very easy to project the systemic onto the personal, without a proper recognition of the limits of personal agency in political contexts. This can lead to simplistic manichean narratives that reduce to "if only the wicked stopped being wicked and the just ruled, all problems would be fixed," or more pernicious, the derivation of personal guilt through mere "complicity" or association with systems that people have no realistic way to escape.

This is perhaps most obvious as relates to war, because war always involves extreme consequences. And, through a tendency to state things in the strongest terms possible, every war becomes a "genocide," and anything short of full mobilization to thwart the culpable parties becomes "enabling genocide." And here it becomes very easy to see how it becomes easy to find oneself supporting vile parties, or placing everything in extremely personal, moralistic terms that can also justify "any means."

You can see this in the careers of some leftist crusaders who, rightly outraged by some of the missteps of the Obama years and upset over some of the deficits in the neo-liberal global order, allowed themselves to become virtual cheerleaders for Trump, who seems almost certainly more inimical to their values. And there definitely seems to be this thought process of: "good, let him win. Then things can get so bad that we can destroy the system and start over!" Which tends to miss just how much suffering such a "tearing down" implies, or the fact that a great many revolutions do not produce better situations, and often end up reproducing many of the same problems (e.g. the Soviets were initially even worse on minority rights than the Tsars).

But this is where the "crisis of meaning" steps in and pours gasoline on the fire. Because people want conflagration. They fantasize about it. The shop for it with tactical gear and rifles. They accessorize for it. And I do think this is different. It isn't (just) about opprobrium, it becomes about fulfilling a life narrative, which I think can make it much more potent.

I think you can see something similar in the period before the First World War, a desire for conflict for its own sake.

I am reminded of some psychology/neuroscience research that showed similarities between moral approbation and disgust/fear of contagion. I don't remember them that well though, so perhaps they aren't that convincing. But it is a well documented fact that people have particularly strong reactions to cheaters and norm violations.

Hence, I think part of the issue might be that, since we rely on social norms to survive, we have an intuitive aversion to norm breakers, and obviously moral norms will be particularly salient. If the response is akin to fears of contagion (which has a certain logic, norm breaking tends to spread), it would make sense to quarantine the infected through ostracism.

You could probably go deeper with that thought using the idea of memes as being akin to viruses. Some ideas are seen as infectious agents. They need a host to thrive. You don't want the hijacking the faculties of a fellow citizen with good oratory skills, social capital, status, wealth, etc., else they might spread the disease.

Perhaps this also explains why people often feel more comfortable with marginalized groups being racist, sexist, etc. They don't fear contagion from those groups. "Let them hate Blacks in the trailer park, or talk about killing gays in the ghetto, it won't spread here," but if the same thing shows up in campus discussions, it becomes dire.

"Free enterprise" has indeed become synonymous with "capitalism." I think that's one of the ways in which liberalism and capitalism can make themselves transparent. There has always been enterprise, this "there has always been capitalism."

But liberalism makes a certain sort of argument for private property and free enterprise. It isn't Aristotle's argument, nor is it the argument of the Christian tradition (which was fairly divided on the issue, with Franciscians even being burnt at the stake over the issue of if Christ and the Apostles owned property). I'd say a defining feature of "classical liberalism" (which current globalized liberalism has inherited), is a very particular sort of justification for free enterprise and private property that relies on its anthropology (i.e. the rational egoist actor who is not defined as a social/political animal). This is particularly true in the Anglo tradition.

I don't think all of this tradition is all bad. I think Hegel's use of Adam Smith identifies some valid ways in which markets can help construct identity and allow for participation in a common good (e.g. "a rising tide [will tend towards] lifting all boats.") But I also think the anthropology is extremely deficient, and this manifests itself in a big way when it becomes totalizing, particularly vis-á-vis the way in which participation in common goods is understood (i.e. in terms of individualized benefit, a sort of reductionism).

(If Hegel is a liberal. I've seen him described as the grandfather of communism, fascism, and modern liberalism, and these are all apt labels to some degree).

Myopia isn’t unique to liberalism. It built into the normative commitments any political or philosophical view expresses

This is of course true, but it's a matter of degree. A century or so ago, when liberalism faced actual opponents in the form of reactionary monarchism, fascism, communism, and a Church that had not yet decided to embrace modernity, there was (as can be seen from texts from that era), a much larger recognition that liberalism's view of freedom and human flourishing was not the only possible view.

That is far less the case today. All ideologies might become translucent to some degree, but late-stage capitalist, globalized liberalism has made itself increasingly transparent, even as it also makes itself all encompassing by backwards projecting its norms across the whole of human history, and across the breadth of the human experience. One finds the language of the atomized economic actor, the goal-driven consumer, even in the language of romantic relationships these days. Be it in guides on attracting "high value males," and not being a "pick-me," for women, or the "attraction through competition," and "peacocking" schemes of male-oriented romance advice writers, homo economicus has replaced homo sapiens. And this is true now even in the realm of parent-child relations. So too, it holds in the spiritual realm, as churches strive to "compete," consumers "church shop," and Evangelicals come to describe evangelicalism methodologies like "Disciple Bible Study" in the language of mass marketing campaigns.

The intrusion of homo economicus into the realm of romance is particularly revealing because it is very often wed to the (often spurious) language of evolutionary psychology. Through this, it pretends to describing not just "dating in the age of late-capitalism and Tinder," but human nature itself, projecting the image of homo economicus onto homo sapiens.

And how can man turn to the spirituality of the erotic ascent if he has been taught—has been indoctrinated into—the belief that Eros is fundamentally a matter of acquisition and consumption, a laying claim to a commodity (a commodity that "dimishes when shared," and so which sets up a dialectical of competition)? How can Eros or Reason be transcendent and ecstatic when both become saturated in the language of the self (the "Inferno of the Same")? They can't.

That is perhaps the problem, not just the myopia, but it's pairing with a truly totalitarian tendency, one that just happens to be joined to a vision of freedom that bottoms out in irrational, inchoate impulse. (Look, liberalism literally lashes me to alliteration in its inescapably inundating inferno of the identical! Help!)

I didn't think to clarify "liberalism." Maybe because I was thinking more in terms of contemporary economics and political science instead of political philosophy. When Fukuyama says "modern liberal states," for instance, he means wealthy market economies with welfare states and representative government (i.e. all current developed states). When Deneen speaks of "liberalism" in his "Why Liberalism Failed?" he means all developed states and the globalized economy they oversee.

The terms are not synonymous, of course, because you can have various degrees of market liberalization without political liberalization, and because political philosophy has an older use for the term "liberalism," but they are also not wholly different things because they have merged into a single global force through globalization. The apologists for contemporary liberalism I had in mind (e.g. Friedman, Fukuyama) are generally champions of the status quo of globalization, generally only recommending tweaks in terms of regulation, distribution or consumption, etc. I don't think this makes them outliers though. Social Democratic parties, the far reaches of the still "mainstream" left and right, generally hold to the core convictions of modern liberalism, which includes a welfare state (of varying size of course), market economy, and a certain vision of education and freedom.

I would just point out that every modern liberal state also has a capitalist, market economy. This holds historically as well. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how system could be "liberal" without a market economy. For instance, no communist states politically liberalized without also switching to a market economy as part of the process, and this seems true for other types of authoritarianism too. Market economies do not imply political liberalization, but political liberalization seems to historically have always involved market liberalization, and market liberalization is wed to political liberalization because of the particular vision of freedom and human nature that undergirds liberalism.

So in response to: "that's not liberalism's problem, it's consumerism, capitalism, secularism, individualism, etc." I would reply, "give me one example where the two don't go together?"

Perhaps I have missed one, but if all people can point to is unimplemented theory then I would chalk such an objection into the same bucket as "real communism as never been tried." Maybe that's the objection? "Real liberalism has never been tried." But it certainly seems to have been tried, so if it always fails and degenerates into consumerism, isn't that open to critique?

Anyhow, I think it's sort of moot point because liberalism is now very much a global order due to globalization. A good critique of liberalism in its own terms is that it didn't so much improve things for the lower classes as cause countries to export their lower classes abroad. And can anyone name one liberal state that hasn't taken advantage of this "race to the bottom," where a great deal of goods aren't produced by people in the developing world under extremely poor standards?

As I wrote earlier, liberalism only looks so good under the rubric of Rawls' veil of ignorance because part of the calculus here is that the peasants laboring under the medieval nobility, or the tenant farmers who lived contemporaneously with Jane Austen's landed gentry are considered "part of that elite's society," whereas, through a sort of neat accounting trick, we have decided that the slaves mining metals for Westerner's phones, the child laborer who sewed their clothes in a sweltering Dhaka factory, or the migrant workers who picked their food out in the fields, are each not "part of the Westerner's society." Hence, we might think that are least some of the claims about "radical improvements for even the poorest" play too much off the accidents of national borders, and the way in which globalization has simply allowed modern liberal states to export most of its lower classes safely to the other side of national borders. Afterall, more people live as slaves today than in any prior epoch, and a great deal more in conditions that might be fairly deemed "wage slavery." Likewise, anyone who prioritizes animal well-being to any significant degree can hardly look at modern agriculture as much more than "hell on Earth."





That's fair, I didn't even write it as an OP, and I didn't really write it to make it clear that my interest was primarily not in "all critiques of liberalism," but rather the advocates of liberalism's general tendency to be blind to critiques that question whether or not liberalism's definition of freedom is adequate (as opposed to critiques that call into question whether or not liberalism delivers on freedom as liberalism itself defines freedom; the second sort of critique essentially accepts the premises of liberalism).

Many of the critiques of liberalism put forth by posters in this thread are of the latter sort. That doesn't mean they are not good critiques, just that they are not what I was thinking of.


So, I can make it more concrete.

Say we have a privileged, wealthy guy with a "good family" who cares for him. He has lots of opportunities. And he follows the middle to upper class dictum: "get good grades and wrack up accomplishments so you can go to a good college, and do the same there so you can get a good job, and then you can get a good job and do what you want."

He does this. No extraordinary evil befalls him. He has no extraordinary vices. Maybe he drinks or smokes pot a bit too much, or plays too many video games, or has a porn habit, or cannot get a girlfriend, or cannot keep to just one. Maybe not. Nothing out of the ordinary.

And he's miserable. He's prime bait for radical ideologies of one sort of another precisely because he "did everything he was told," and is miserable. This isn't an uncommon phenomena. That's sort of the recruiting mantra of radicals on the right and left, although it certainly helps if people struggle in the labor market or are "overeducated." We could imagine this sort of thing playing out across many gradations. It can even happen to the ultra wealthy (perhaps particularly to the ultra wealthy).

Here is Han's point: in the autoexploitative context of modern liberalism, this man's unhappiness is a personal failure. The self is a project, and it's happiness is a goal that has to be achieved as an accomplishment.

And there are lots of men and women who have encountered this sort of "personal failure." Millions it would seem. So the question is, at what point do we stop thinking this is an aggregate of millions of personal, individual failures and begin to say it is a systematic, social failure?

I am not saying society has a responsibility to make each individual happy. I am saying though that the goal should be a common good, and the goal of education should probably be "to help people live happy, virtuous, flourishing lives." But I don't think that's the goal of education under liberalism. It is, in theory: "enabling people to do what they want." These aren't the same thing (and in practice, the goal is often more: "supplying the labor force with workers and providing daycare so that children can be raised by strangers for greater economies of scale so that we get economic growth).

Deneen's critique, which I agree with in part, is that self-government at the social level requires self-government at the individual level. Liberalism doesn't foster the latter. Indeed, it does the opposite because of the way it interacts with capitalism and consumerism. But Deneen's point is that this isn't a bug. This is liberalism molding man into the very anthropology that it assumes for man, the disconnected individual of liberalism's pre-historical fantasy of the "state of nature." And I think there is a lot of overlap between what he identifies and Han's "achievement society."



Outside the US all the same complaints exist. Indeed, the situation re housing and long term underemployment is often considerably worse. I don't think you can just chalk it up to "one side of partisan politics just needs to win more." If the "wrong side" keeps winning, that's also a failure. All that sort of narrative leads to is the sort of moralizing manichean narratives you can already find in this thread (e.g. "the problem is the forces of evil keep corrupting things.)

As I said in the thread on the NHS:

I'm a bit skeptical of narratives that try to pin all these problems on just the (mis)rule of leaders on one side of the political spectrum. The problems being discussed (difficulty getting good jobs, huge numbers of applicants for each job, over qualified workers, unaffordable housing, low quality services, welfare expenses becoming unaffordable, [and we might add extreme angst over migration] etc.) are endemic to the West. You see the same sorts of complaints re Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, the US, etc. Yet different sides of the political spectrum have had very varying degrees of long term control across these different states.

Nor is it clear that things are better anywhere else. Housing is increasingly unaffordable in the US, yet it is one of the most affordable rental and ownership markets in the world. It's "hell" in Canada and the UK, yet income to rental/mortgage rates are actually a good deal worse in most of the developing world.

The problems over migration are particularly a failure of liberalism anthropology in that the entire idea of "replacement migration" assumes a view of humanity as atomized plug and play consumers/laborers.

I feel like it's a cool way to develop magic systems in fantasy settings. I've long thought a fantasy series that based it's magic on Renaissance-era cosmology could be pretty cool.

More seriously, your post recalled to me Etienne Gilson's claim that metaphysics should not be a system. His point was that it should be an active engagement with being, never something complete. I couldn't find the quote I like, but this one from The Unity of Philosophical Experience captures the same idea:

The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in their own times, as we have to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?

As for poetry as metaphysics, look no further than an actual Keats!

"Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty" — the entire Doctrine of Transcendentals laid out in a single ode to a piece of pottery.

And the superiority of the intelligible order to the sensible? He's got that too:

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:"

The critique shouldn’t rest on some moralistic asceticism or a return to “just the essentials.”

It's perhaps my fault for having too many different critiques in mind to start. So, I will just home in on my favorite here. Disparate thinkers have considered it the case that people only choose to worse over the better out of:
A. Weakness of will
B. Ignorance about what is truly best.
(and we might add C., coercion by external constraints, or we could just apply A and B to the situations fortune provides people with).

Many of these thinkers would also maintain that weakness of will and ignorance of what is truly good represent limits on freedom. This is a reflexive, or "inner" freedom, as Axel Honneth puts it in his typology, a freedom over the self. This was long considered the most important type of freedom, because without it no amount of wealth, status, or freedom from external constraints leads to happiness (e.g. miserable celebrities committing suicide).

So, the argument here doesn't reduce to "moralistic asceticism" about the necessary evils of overconsumption. Indeed, advocates of this view say things like: Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse (St. Maximus the Confessor).

To be ruled over by vices is to not rule over oneself (Plato's "civil war in the soul" in the Republic, or St. Paul's "death in sin" in Romans 7), and so it is to be unfree.

Consumerism, that people spend a vast deal of their lives doing things they dislike in pursuit of wealth, status, and sensuous goods that do not make them happy, demonstrates a lack of freedom on this view. This does not mean that doing work one likes, or doing onerous work to procure things that truly make one happy, is bad. It is rather, the pursuit of what makes one unhappy, or what fails to lead to flourishing, i.e. an inability to tell the better from the worse, a sort of unfreedom.

Liberalism, because of how it envisions freedom, is generally blind to how it fails to offer its population this sort of freedom and the way this reflexive freedom needs to be fostered. Furthermore, because of what Benkei points out re consumption and growth, it actually tends to foster the exact opposite of this sort of freedom. Huge efforts are made to "boost consumption," and people are bombarded by marketing and a "culture of consumption." All the old wisdom about how wealth, status, power, etc. are not what leads to "living a good life," or "being a good person," falls into the background at best, or is openly disparaged as "a defunct order" at worst. After all, if freedom is actually about lack of constraint and ability to consume, then the old view is such a constraint, and perhaps an apologia for not focusing on consumption as a good to be sought by the state.

To Vera's point, if freedom is a good, and "the people" turn on it for lesser goods, or out of sheer ignorance, then, on this older view, they were never free to begin with. If freedom isn't a superior good, then so much the worse for liberalism.

Basically, if this knowledge and reflexive freedom is missing, liberalism is failing to provide freedom. This would be my same charge against Fukuyama. If liberalism cannot provide a huge swath of the population with recognition, a basic human need, then it cannot be the "end of history." Movement continues until a state of rest. He can only see liberalism as "the end of history" because he cannot escape liberalism's deficient notions of human flourishing and freedom.

Here is Han from The Agony of Eros:

Achievement society is wholly dominated by the modal verb can—in contrast to disciplinary society, which issues prohi bitions and deploys should. After a certain point of productivity, should reaches a limit. To increase productivity, it is replaced by can. The call for motivation, initiative, and projects exploits more effectively than whips and commands. As an entrepreneur of the self, the achievement-subject is free insofar as he or she is not subjugated to a commanding and exploiting Other. However, the subject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation— and does so of his or her own free will. The exploiter is the exploited. The achievement-subject is perpetrator and victim in one. Auto-exploitation proves much more efficient than auto-exploitation because it is accompanied by a feeling of liberty. This makes possible exploitation without domination.

Foucault observes that neoliberal Homo oeconomicus does not inhabit disciplinary society—an entrepreneur of the self is no longer a disciplinary subject1—but he fails to notice that this entrepreneur of the self is not truly free: Homo oeconomicus only thinks himself free when in fact he is exploiting himself. Foucault adopts a positive attitude toward neoliberalism. Uncritically, he assumes that the neoliberal regime—the system of “the least state” or “frugal government,” which stands for the “management of freedom”2—enables civil liberty (bürgerliche Freiheit). Foucault fails to notice the structure of violence and coercion under writing the neoliberal dictum of freedom. Consequently, he interprets it as the freedom to be free: “I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free.”3 The neoliberal dictum of freedom finds expression in the paradoxical imperative, Be free. But this plunges the achievement-subject into depression and exhaustion. Even though Foucault’s “ethics of the self” stands opposed to political repression and auto-exploitation in general, it is blind to the violence of the freedom that underlies auto-exploitation.

You can produces massive compulsion, on which the achievement-subject dashes him- or herself to pieces. Because it appears as freedom, self-generated compulsion is not recognized as such. You can exercises even greater constraint than You should. Auto-compulsion proves more fatal than auto-compulsion, because there is no way to resist oneself. The neoliberal regime conceals its compulsive structure behind the seeming freedom of the single individual, who no longer understands him- or herself as a subjugated subject (“subject to”), but as a project in the process of realizing itself (entwerfendes Projekt). That is its ruse: now, whoever fails is at fault and personally bears the guilt. No one else can be made responsible for failure. Nor is there any possibility for pardon, relief, or atonement. In this way, not only a crisis of debt occurs—a crisis of gratification does, as well.

Relief from debt, financial and psychological, and gratification both presume the Other. Lack of a binding connection to the Other is the transcendental condition for crises of gratification and debt. Such crises make it plain that capitalism—counter to widespread belief (e.g., Benjamin)—is not a religion. Every religion operates with both debt (guilt) and relief (pardon). But capitalism only works with debt and default. It offers no possibility for atonement, which would free the debtor from liability. The impossibility of mitigation and atonement also accounts for the achievement subject’s depression. Together with burnout, depression represents an unredeemable failure of ability—that is, it amounts to psychic insolvency. Literally, “insolvency” (from the Latin solvere) signifies the impossibility of paying off a debt.

Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able (Nicht-Können-Können) represents its negative counterpart. The negativity of otherness—that is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all ability—is constitutive of erotic experience: “The other bears alterity as an essence. And this is why [we] have sought this alterity in the absolutely original relationship of eros, a relationship that is impossible to translate into powers.”4 Absolutizing ability is precisely what annihilates the Other. A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure. Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear:

Can this relationship with the other through Eros be characterized as a failure? Once again, the answer is yes, if one adopts the terminology of current descriptions, if one wants to characterize the erotic by “grasp ing,” “possessing,” or “knowing.” But there is nothing of all this, or the failure of all this, in eros. If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power.5

Quote from Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

I find it interesting that Levinas mentions "knowing" here. This problem itself comes from a certain conception of knowing, this is knowing as a "possessing (of representations." This is not the knowing of ecstasis one finds in Plato and much of the pre-modern tradition, or the "knowing by becoming" of the Neoplatonic ascent, but rather a knowing where a static self lays hold of the other and makes it a part of itself. There is no "going out" or "being penetrated" in such a view, but merely "acquisition."

This makes perfect sense when one considers the modern reduction of man's rationality to discursive ratio alone. Aquinas himself says that ratio is to acquisition (and movement) as intellectus is to possession (and rest). The latter is, of course, likened to "possession," but this is as respects a rest in its goal, a rest in the other as an end, rather than a frenetic, never-ending movement, a need to extract from the other as means.

They also control the organs of propaganda to stoke dissatisfaction and displace their own wrongdoing onto convenient targets, thus turning gullible people against their neighbours as well as their own self-interest.

If liberalism creates citizens who are so easily manipulated, who are so ignorant, then doesn't this directly impugn its claims to empower freedom? For, ignorance can easily be seen as a limit on freedom.



I had this conversation with Joshs before. He said that American's urban centers, NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. represented the "economy of the future." I do believe he is right, but I think this "future" looks a lot less like how its advocates envision it and much more like Saudi Arabia or Guatemala.



The problem is that the mainstream of thought can only think of addressing this by moving consumption around. I'd argue that this, at best, moves us back to America's post-war boom years, and doesn't address the problem of staggering global inequality (leading to a staggering demand for migration), nor any of the deeper problems of modernity. It would maintain the same focus on consumption that seems to be leading us towards both ecological and spiritual exhaustion. Not to mention such a move is probably quite impossible now, the public's appetite for socialism has been undercut by the eroding of the nationalist identities that originally supported redistribution. Liberal democracy sublated its nationalist and socialist foes, incorporating key components of each into itself, but new global issues, particularly off-shoring and large scale migration, have set these two "pillars" in conflict with one another.

Traditional premodern religion provided an ontological security, by grounding us in an encompassing metaphysical vision that explains the cosmos and our role within it.

Modernity and postmodernity question such transcendental narratives and therefore leave us with ontological anxiety about the apparent meaninglessness of the universe and the ungroundedness of our lives within it. The result is that we are afflicted with “a deepening condition of metaphysical homelessness,” which is psychologically difficult to bear (Berger, P. (1973). The Homeless Mind.)

Great quote, and I think my point would be that this "questioning" tends to result in its own sort of dogmatism. The standards by which such questioning procedes, particularly what counts as valid philosophical evidence, is held to the rigid epistemic standards of Anglo-empiricism. This tends to exclude a lot of philosophy from the outset, and tends to dismiss a good deal else as "pseudoproblems" that aren't worthy of engagement. But more than that, these epistemic standards are often seen as absolutely inviolable. They are beyond questioning because they aren't even seen as the sort of thing that should be subject to questioning, even though they are fairly recent innovations, and even though they have a produced a tradition whose answer for "what can we know?" seems to be "not much of anything."

But this perhaps is what feeds into the "bourgeois metaphysics," the notion that "one has the right to choose the truth," or "live your own truth," because nothing much can be said about capital T "Truth" (or Goodness) anyhow.

...If one’s self-image involves internalizing the perceptions that others have of us, the anonymity of mass society is part of modernity’s lack-of-identity problem. How to distinguish oneself, if, as DeLillo has also said, “only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith,” is taken seriously in modern society (Juergensmeyer 125)? Better to be known as someone who was willing to die for his beliefs, than not to be known at all – than to be no one at all.

This helps us to understand why terrorist attacks such as those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which seem strategically absurd and self-defeating, can nevertheless be desirable. They are not instrumental means to realize political goals but symbolic. ...

And it's worth noting here that the standard profile of "First Wave" Islamist terrorists in the West were younger men who were raised in, or at least spent their adolescence in, the West. A great deal were engineers or engineering students as well, and a great deal had serious difficulties with any romantic relationships, which is a recurring theme in terrorism in the Western context. That profile is far different for suicide attackers within the context of MENA and Central Asia's civil wars (who are often developmentally disabled, fed drugs, etc., and have much less agency in the whole situation). By contrast, the "First Wave" terrorists and many of the ISIS inspired "lone wolves" in the US and Europe seem to have a lot in common with racially motivated right-wing terrorists in the West and apolitical spree killers.

The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. ...

I agree. This is very reminiscent of Charles Taylor's assault on "subtraction narratives" of secularism, that it is just "what you get when superstition and authoritarian control pass away." It leads to a sort of transparency of ideology where it cannot be recognized as such.

By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians...

Through and because of which (through a positive feedback loop), we get Taylor's "buffered self," and Weber's "disenchanted cosmos." This feeds into the unfreedom many see in liberalism. If one thinks that one must be free from the vices to be truly free, and that freedom from the vices is not easily accomplished, then there must be a positive education in and training of virtue to attain freedom (e.g. the ascetic disciplines and spiritual exercises that characterized Pagan, Christian, and Eastern philosophy and education until the modern era).

The buffered self needs no such training. First, because it is pure ratio and can slip back into a disengaged, buffered reasoning as needed, and second because, having denied man any "rational appetites" (i.e. the appetites of Plato's "rational part of the soul"), reason is itself just a tool for meeting the demands of desire; it is and ought only be the slave of the passions (it's worth noting that Hume's recommended dictum, so common today, is a concise summary of the conditioned of the damned in Dante's Hell, and would be seen by him as literally the definition of slavery.

The OP offers a broad indictment of liberalism. But there is no clear argument. You've written a mood piece. The dissatisfaction is real, but the reasoning is thin. Liberalism is accused of being hollow, flattening, spiritually dead. But the case is assumed rather than made.

But it isn't a broad critique of liberalism? I mentioned a broad array of very different "external" critiques of liberalism that see it as incompatible with human flourishing and freedom (i.e., precisely because liberalism offers up a myopic and desiccated vision of human freedom, and Rawls certainly would be a target of some of these critiques; Simpson's title is an explicit response to Rawls). I mentioned several because I figured people might be familiar with at least some of them.

My point, however, was that liberal apologists aren't able to digest these critiques because they cannot get past the presupposition that the liberal conception of freedom is the only possible valid conception of freedom. Hence, they always frame dissent as advocating a "return to authoritarianism," or a desire to "trade freedom for some other good," which often entirely misses the point. And this is because liberalism is often not seen as an explicit ideology by its proponents, but rather "the freedom to choose any ideology."

To wit, your response is a great example:

At its core, the critique chafes at pluralism itself. It wants one truth, publicly affirmed and normatively binding. Liberalism refuses this. It does not deny truth—it refuses to coerce consensus. That refusal is treated here as decadence. But it is, in fact, a guardrail against authoritarianism. The demand that a culture publicly reflect a metaphysical or theological unity is a recipe for repression—of minorities, of dissenters, of difference. Liberalism protects that space. It allows communities to pursue deep, even ultimate, goods—so long as they don’t do so by coercion. That is not a bug. It is the point.

The deeper issue is metaphysical. Liberalism is faulted for not being a theology. It doesn’t offer a doctrine of eros, virtue, or transcendent meaning. But that’s by design. Liberalism is a political framework. It permits those deeper views—it doesn’t impose one. If that’s the flaw, then name the alternative. A confessional state? A return to teleology? A politics grounded in love? Perhaps. But that needs to be argued, not implied through nostalgia and allusion.

Is liberalism really just a framework that "permits those deeper views," without "imposing one" of its own? Are the only options aside from it a return to the oppressive institutions of the past? Does it really only "protect spaces" of discourse and not impose discourse or indoctrinate its citizens in its own dogmas and doctrines?

To quote the OP:

Indeed, despite the fact that it seems obvious that all cultures indoctrinate their children into the dominant ideology, liberalism often seems to think it is excluded from this historical norm, such that any alternative form of education seems like pernicious indoctrination. That's one of the perils of "bourgeois metaphysics," is that it becomes transparent and cannot be recognized as an ideology. It can default into the claim that it "isn't an ideology," but rather "the freedom to have any ideology one wishes." That's the myopia of liberalism in a nutshell, ideology gone transparent, a historically distinct (and historically quite narrow) vision of freedom become totalized and absolutized.

This reminds me on the thread on classical education, where the immediate fear was that an education in a framework of virtue ethics (the norm in East and West for most of history) would be "indoctrination," as if modern liberal education was "value-neutral" and free from any such indoctrination. It isn't.

Liberalism is equated with consumer capitalism, secularism, and moral relativism.

Can you name a single society where they haven't gone together? These issues are certainly written about across the Anglophone world, Europe, Korea, and Japan. Eastern European writers came to similar conclusions and reflect on the "shock" it brought, which has led to the phenomena of "Soviet nostalgia" in the former Warsaw Pact nations.

Consider this alternative view of freedom from a quote from St. Augustine:

Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices.

We might fault Augustine for a certain privilege in saying this, but it's worth noting that Epictetus, who was a slave, said the same thing, just not as pithily.

Now, does liberalism do a good job at educating and training individuals in the virtues so as to avoid the unfreedom that comes with being vice-addled? Does it even see this as desirable or an important function of a "liberating society?"

I would say it doesn't. Kids are plied with caffeinated corn syrup slush from grade school, and are now exposed to hardcore pornography through the internet on a regular basis from about the same age. Everywhere, one sees powerful examples of the ideal of freedom as freedom to consume, to "live one's truth," and to "fulfill one's appetites and desires." And as noted in the OP, "capitalist realism" attempts to backwards project these norms onto all prior epochs.

The role of education for the upper classes is rather to gain markers of success so that one might attend a good college, so as to attain more markers of success, so as to attain a good job, so as to earn a lot of income, so as to fulfill one's desires. Perhaps those desires involve a "prosocial" element. Perhaps they don't. That's the individual's choice after all. The education system is there to empower them to make those choices (and to sort them by "merit"), not to help them discover what is "truly good and choice-worthy," or "truly just."

But obviously this view conflicts with other powerful visions of freedom. It certainly conflicts with those views that see ignorance of what is truly best as a limit on freedom. "Freedom" to do as one pleases, on these views, isn't freedom if one is bound by ignorance about what is truly better. It's merely "being a slave to appetite, instinct, circumstance, culture, and the passions." The presupposition that an "education in virtue" is somehow a pernicious form of indoctrination is, of course, itself a doctrine that people are taught from their youth. As noted above, Hume's vision of freedom is pretty much identical to Dante's picture of spiritual slavery; to claim one is right is to claim the other is wrong. They cannot equally be respected by a "value-neutral" system. The purportedly "value-neutral" system we have sides heavily with Hume.

Nor need we only look to the pre-modern tradition. Han is a great contemporary example. Nietzsche has one of the fierier condemnations of the way in which liberalism leads to unfreedom.

We could consider Huxley's "A Brave New World," here. What makes it dystopian? The heavy use of shallow media, endemic drug use, reduction of sex and romance to pleasure, etc? The desiccation of the human experience and removal of beauty? From the liberal point of view, I would imagine it must instead be the centralized control, caste system, and conditioning. Yet the conditioning is just a more extreme form of the incentive-based "nudging" that has come to dominate liberal technocrats' approach to problem solving. E.g., on the problem of rampant obesity and spiking rates of diabetes, the solution is "nudging" via vice taxes and reminder warning labels.

At any rate, if the caste system were removed, the centralized planning done away with, and the more extreme forms of conditioning and social pressure reduced, and the adults of the society consented to it (recall, those who dissent get to leave the society and go to their own private "Galt's Gulch" for romantics and intellectuals), it's hard to see what the liberal critique could be. "A Brave New World," is an "almost-utopia."

You can see this in liberal criticisms of anti-liberal movements as well. For instance, the "nu-Right" as simply "a bunch of sore loser men who are upset about too much equality and liberty." That is, liberalism has provoked an angry (perhaps now even existential) response by being too good and too just.

Whereas for the nu-Right, their liberal detractors (at least the non-elite/non-"winner/dominator" ones) are castrati, betas, cuckolds, bovine consumers who have accepted a pale simulacra of freedom and allowed all the depth to be sucked out of life. And this criticism arises from a certain sort of self-hatred within the nu-Right, for this is how the nu-Right often sees itself as well (which is why "conversion stories" are so common in nu-Right spaces, the story of one's "awakening to the reality of life" and "greater depths"). The movement is, I would argue, in many ways chiefly a revolt of Nietzsche's Last Men (Nietzsche himself being a great precursors critic to modern liberalism). After all, who else would have more reason to fetishize the Overman than the Last Man?

Bathing in one's subjective sense of the numinous might also be somewhat indulgent and narcissistic.

Perhaps, but you could consider Schiller's view where the moral and appetitive are aligned in the aesthetic and our actions are over-determined in desire and duty. On the view, the aesthetic and "spiritual" is precisely what helps us overcome egoism.

A lot of new "spiritual but not religious" stuff strikes me as somewhat akin to Romantic philosophy in a lot of ways, with the stress of the numinous, the deeper nature beyond mechanism and disenchantment, etc. But like any good modern ethos, it also has to sell itself in disenchanted terms, hence the peer reviewed studies on the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, the economic indicators referenced in appeals to "cultural Christianity," and of course sticking within the limits of bourgeoisie metaphysics such that "everyone can be right" about their own experience and synchretism.

I get the appeal. What I find bizarre is some of the Christian alignment with this sort of thing (or Muslim, or Buddhist, although the last is less surprising because Western Buddhism is itself often already stripped down for contemporary audiences). From the standpoint of Christian doctrine, a Jungian analysis in of the Pentateuch that does not invoke the name of Christ and the revelation of Christ in Scripture, is perhaps interesting, but hardly helpful for the "Lost." Nor is "cultural Christianity" much of a step in the right direction. Far from it, it's to lean on the clay leg of human pride; if anything it is better that people be brought low that they might rise higher.

Liberalism has always had the potential to become a victim of its own impulse to dismantle institutions and expand the definition of citizenship - especially in the context of capitalism.

I think this is actually the sort of critique liberalism is easily aware of. It moves "too fast," and "change needs to be managed." You know, "the people aren't ready," or "the system isn't ready for advances in technology." And so there is self-reflection in liberal terms about the threat of expanding wealth inequality under AI, or cultural tensions derailing the benefits of replacement migration, etc.

What I think it tends to have myopia about is the way it does positively indoctrinate, it does punish people for slipping outside its value norms, it does push ideologies that actually challenge it out of the public sphere by force, and it does manage to enforce many of the same systems of oppression it claims to have dismantled, and in some cases manages to make them worse (e.g. the "exporting of misery" referenced earlier).

I think this tends to get missed precisely because liberalism is seen as "the natural place where you end up if you dismantle what was bad in the old world." It's worth noting though that monarchy and noble privileged was also once seen as "natural." It was the natural place you ended up if you advanced beyond mere anarchy. If liberalism is "natural" in this way, then the problems of liberalism are "natural" and endemic, not attributable to liberalism itself.

So, for example, people focus on the option of "escape valves" and "exiting the system." But it's worth pointing out that the Russian Tsars tolerated anarchist communes and fringe religious communities. There mere existence of toleration of some low levels of dissent, pushed to the borders, isn't good counter evidence to the totalitarian tendencies in modernity anymore than it was in imperial Russia.

It seems to me that there is a plausible trade-off between duration and intensity in terms of punishment. One might justly meet out a short, but intense punishment for a sin that occured over a long duration or vice versa.

The problem I see for St. Thomas here is that the claim that breeches in the order of man's conformity to the will of God continue forever itself has to presuppose that universalism is false. If universalism is true, then God is eventually "all in all," and all such breeches are repaired "at the end of the ages" (perhaps after "the age to come").

If universalism is true, there are no human, or even demonic crimes that have infinite effects. By the same logic, if annihilationism or infernalism are true, there are indeed such crimes.

The difficulty for both sides is that appealing to this seems to require begging the question and assuming that one of the positions is the case in order to make a claim about the duration and effects of any creatures' transgressions.

And I don't know if it works to say: "well the breech would be infinite if God didn't act," because I think this has to rely on a sort of nature/supernatural distinction that I find extremely unhelpful and hard to justify. Absolutely nothing happens without God, and so of course God is required for any repair. God is also required for baptism, for reference, for the sun to rise, etc.

So again, logically, if eternal punishment does in fact occur, is God to then be understood as not being the ultimate telos/end of all that exists?

That man's telos lies in God does not mean that man reaches his end. On a deflationary evolutionary naturalist view, man's telos is to reproduce. That doesn't mean all men will eventually have children.

There is a more nuanced question of whether or not God would allow sin to exist forever, or if perhaps God's hands are tied in that God cannot both create free creatures and ensure that all shall reach their end in God. However, to my mind, sustaining this problematic becomes more fraught when it has to rely on the accident of the time of one's death marking an absolute limit on repentance, if only because there is no strictly logical reason why this must be so. Indeed, there is no logical barrier to reincarnation, etc. Hence, we rely on revelation. But in turning to revelation we see what appear to be claims of the total conquest of sin (as opposed to its sequestration and eternal persistence), e.g. that God shall be "all in all."

But nothing would seem to preclude things not attaining to their end. Hart makes a similar sort of argument, but it is crucially different. He says a rational nature stays in motion until it reaches its natural ends, and so barring extrinsic limits, it will move forever, at the limit turning towards its true end.

For my part, when I say infernalism has difficulties, this is not to say the other views don't themselves have difficulties. I think these are mostly theological though. When David Bentley Hart says that we couldn't be happy with our own ignorance about damned family members or their eternal torment without having been radically changed so as to be "replaced," he might be right. But this seems equally true vis-á-vis the truly wicked. What of the BTK Killer or Ted Bundy, or even a Jeffery Epstein would really remain once selfishness and attraction to finite ends is removed? Not very much it would seem, suggesting a sort of annihilationism within universalism (unless God is simply replacing the wicked).

Or, to the infernalists' point, it seems that some might refuse to turn towards God. Universalists make a good point that it makes no sense for a rational nature to flee from the Good forever, if only because movement will continue until it finds rest in the Good. Yet, just as St. Gregory of Nyssa sees an eternal ascent into the Good, an asymptotic approach to the infinite, one can envisage a similarly unending movement away from the purifying light that burns. Moreover, if one has disfigured the Imago Dei enough, are we still talking about a rational nature?

Or perhaps the Augustinian curvatus in se, the curving inward of the self in sin, becomes so extreme that, like a black hole, there is no escape velocity capable of pulling away from its gravitational pull.

I don't really find these questions to be resolvable in terms of philosophy. The case in Scripture seems more concrete though.

For, it is obvious that aion is sometimes used in the Scriptures to mean less than "infinite temporal duration" but also seemingly as an adjective for the uncreated, that which is without beginning or end (at least plausible). This can render a different reading of Matthew 25, and at any rate, annihilation is as much an infinite punishment as continuous extrinsic torment. So too, a lesser reward (because one has made oneself incapable of a higher beatitude) might itself be a sort of punishment. But this requires a perhaps less than straightforward reading of Matthew 25.

On the other hand, the New Testament is full of quite explicit references to "all," "the entire cosmos," "all in all," "every knee," etc. And the difficulties in rereading the inclusivity out of these seem fairly monumental, requiring us to attribute to the Apostles a seeming inability to write clearly such that straightforward readings of their words will result in us taking away the exact opposite of "what they really mean." "All" must really mean "some," "especially" means "exclusively," "not just us [Christians] but the entire cosmos," means "just the elect," and "all were made vessels of wrath that mercy might be shown on all," means "all were made vessels of wrath that mercy might be shown on some."

I think it would be fair to say that the decline in support for infernalism has pernicious causes in a culture whose ethics has become hung up on only the worst sort of offenses, and a general comfort with sin and lack of concern with the spiritual life, etc. But it also has certainly been helped by the widespread expansion of access to critical texts and education in Greek, that make at least some of the efforts to radically re-read what New Testament texts appear to say in a straightforward manner appear to be little more than doctrinal massaging. A good infernalist response to these issues, IMHO, cannot rest on trying to bulldoze through these passages by explaining that "all in all," really means "all in some."

And this is where I take umbrage with some historical narratives that try to dismiss the history here are little more than "some Church Fathers let too much Greek philosophy into their though and followed Origen, and this trend lasted a good deal longer out East because they were isolated." Because that isn't how the position was primarily argued, from abstract philosophical grounds, but rather by pointing to the straightforwardly universalist sounding lines of Scripture that appear in virtually every New Testament book, but particularly in St. Paul's epistles.

I will just chime in that here the objection 2 seems weakest to me.

Reply to Objection 2. Even the punishment that is inflicted according to human laws, is not always intended as a medicine for the one who is punished, but sometimes only for others: thus when a thief is hanged, this is not for his own amendment, but for the sake of others, that at least they may be deterred from crime through fear of the punishment, according to Proverbs 19:25: "The wicked man being scourged, the fool shall be wiser." Accordingly the eternal punishments inflicted by God on the reprobate, are medicinal punishments for those who refrain from sin through the thought of those punishments, according to Psalm 59:6: "Thou hast given a warning to them that fear Thee, that they may flee from before the bow, that Thy beloved may be delivered."

Punishment delivered as a means of deterring other would-be transgressors is punishment oriented towards an end that is distinct from retribution. But clearly it will not deter anyone from sinning to continue to punish sinners after the Judgement, assuming that those who have been beatified are incapable of sin. One only needs a continuous deterence policy when the people one is hoping to deter are capable of transgressing.

But the larger issue is that, if one takes infants to be born under the rupture in the order St. Thomas refers to, this could be read as saying:

"All men are subject to damnation from conception, since they cannot repair the order that is ruptured in Adam. And they can do nothing to repair this order themselves."

I.e. the Calvinist vision.

But the reply to objection four could be used just as well by Calvin in arguing for the impossibility of most men receiving any mercy from God, since the means of repair can only come from God, and it will remain unrepaired for so long as it is not repaired. But then there is no point even thinking in terms of human justice, since all are under condemnation and it is only lifted if it is lifted ("at God's good pleasure.") This remains just as true for infants and children who die without the sacraments, yet pace (later) Saint Augustine (who I feel might only be taking up the position to skewer the Donatists re ineffective baptisms) mainstream Catholic theology says God repairs this rupture for those who have died (either by way of beatitude or by way of sparing them from active punishment in Limbo).


Yet I would say rather that a means of repair does exist, that this is the key point of the Gospel, where Christ tells us to "repent," and mourns that Jerusalem has not repented, so that he might gather it up in his wings. This is, of course, a repair accomplished "by God," but it is also one attainable by man. So, to objection four, which seems the main point, the idea then has to be that repentance is not an option for the damned. For, were the damned alive and guilty of the same sins, they could repent and be saved. But can the dead not repent? Or if they repent are they punished anyhow?

Dante pointedly dodges this question by not having a single sinner in the Inferno take any responsibility for their sins or show any repentance.


Anyhow to the OP, I am now realizing in my rambling first post it probably would have been more helpful for me to note that all sin was generally taken as being primarily a sin against God. And I would agree with this, the idea of God as some sort of disengaged "third party" to sin does not make a lot of theological sense.

The question of whether eternal punishment is justified seems to me to be different from the question as to whether eternal punishment is theologically sound. The two need not go hand in hand, and indeed they usually don't go together, with the claim that God would be justified in punishing repetent sinners, but shows mercy instead, being a common one.

Theologically, the focus on "extrinsic punishment" and "extrinsic reward," seems less helpful, and it becomes a philosophical problem when it leads into voluntarism, such that "good" is just proper calibration of action, thought, and belief towards extrinsic goals. This is something Pope Benedict XVIII avoids here:


47. Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.

Yet aside from being an "opinion of recent theologians," this is also a conception right at home with many of the earlier Church Fathers.