First Things 241 (2014)
If neutralism is impossible, then bias is inevitable. So what am I saying? Should laws and rules and policies embrace bias? Is bias good?
Toleration is a virtue. But it is a puzzling one, because the whole point of it lies in putting up with some things that are immoral, offensive, erroneous, in poor taste, or in some other sense bad.
When I was young, barbarian that I was, I used to think that although some intellects are smarter and some not so smart, at bottom there is only one kind of mind – my kind, of course. The first shock to that cocky misconception was marriage. The second was raising children. My wife and daughters think beautifully, but they think differently.<
A peculiar feature of our intellectual culture is that we don’t believe anything until we can describe it in a language which looks like physics. The reason the social sciences have not advanced as far as physics is that they are trying to be the same sort of thing.
And so we must give up the project of mere natural law. There is no such thing as natural law made easy. There will never be a book entitled Natural Law for Dummies, unless it is written for dummies. Natural law is as real as falling down the stairs, but that doesn’t make it as simple as falling down them. We had better be ready for
People who think about natural law consider it in various ways.