Family Attorney
The Cult of the Individual
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New YORKERS are used to graffiti on the walls, plainly deranged people living in the streets, news stories about murderous adolescents, mothers whose babies are born addicted to crack and anarchist militias springing up in the West, not to mention dishonest financial manipulators and fiendish cigarette advertisers at the opposite end of the economic scale. Little do they know that all these social disasters have their roots in a liberal tradition of political theory stretching back to Immanuel Kant, which includes John Stuart Mill and, in our own day, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, naive abstract thinkers all, Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings say, who put their faith in the pure reason of the detached, autonomous individual and fail to realize the importance of more basic moral emotions like shame, guilt and pride, and the influence of communities, family and traditions on human conduct and social order. The application of their ideas, the authors write, has created a monster: a ‘’culture of autonomy'’ that is ‘’the predominant sensibility'’ of our society, making Americans generally unwilling to control people unless they are actively harming others. This account of the history of political liberalism is false and unworthy of two authors connected with the Hastings Center (Mr. Gaylin, the author of ‘’Feelings'’ and ‘’The Killing of Bonnie Garland,'’ is a co-founder of the center, and Mr. Jennings is its executive director). Kant’s theory that morality is grounded in free will doesn’t imply that moral principles are up to each individual’s choice or whim. Mill did not believe it is wrong to appeal to people’s emotions to change their behavior. And the accounts of recent thinkers are just as inaccurate. More : query.nytimes.com |
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