by Summary:
Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions? 18th century liberalism raised to the status of revealed religion.Conceptual overreachOne prominent form taken by this degradation of public reason is the phenomenon I call ‘conceptual overreach’. This occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it. In its most extreme manifestation, conceptual overreach morphs into a totalising ‘all in one’ dogma. A single concept – say, human rights or the rule of law – is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when
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Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions? 18th century liberalism raised to the status of revealed religion.Conceptual overreachOne prominent form taken by this degradation of public reason is the phenomenon I call ‘conceptual overreach’. This occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it. In its most extreme manifestation, conceptual overreach morphs into a totalising ‘all in one’ dogma. A single concept – say, human rights or the rule of law – is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
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Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions?18th century liberalism raised to the status of revealed religion.
Conceptual overreach
One prominent form taken by this degradation of public reason is the phenomenon I call ‘conceptual overreach’. This occurs when a particular concept undergoes a process of expansion or inflation in which it absorbs ideas and demands that are foreign to it. In its most extreme manifestation, conceptual overreach morphs into a totalising ‘all in one’ dogma. A single concept – say, human rights or the rule of law – is taken to offer a comprehensive political ideology, as opposed to picking out one among many elements upon which our political thinking needs to draw and hold in balance when arriving at justified responses to the problems of our time. Of course, we’ll always need some very general concepts to refer to vast domains of value – the ideas of ethics, justice and morality, for example, have traditionally served this function. The problem is when there is a systematic trend for more specific concepts of value to aspire to the same level of generality....
This kind of thinking leads to the many paradoxes of liberalism that often make "liberalism" illiberal. The fundamental notion of liberalism is toleration and not imposition.
All In One
John Tasioulas | professor of ethics and legal philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford
John Tasioulas | professor of ethics and legal philosophy and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford