Transcript
BILL GALSTON: We are here in a double capacity because this is a first in a new Brookings book series entitled Governing Ideas, and the premise of the series is that there are important links among political processes, institutions, and ideas, the sorts of ideas often discussed under the rubrics of philosophy and even religion, that as you look at this triad of processes, institutions, and ideas, each of them to some extent reflects, shapes, and provides context for the others.
The topic of the book under discussion today may seem pretty far removed from the practice of politics, but I believe that this appearance is deceptive. Let me just cite some obvious facts. In the U.S. context, conservatives often accuse liberals of taking tolerance too far, abandoning standards of conduct and accepting just about anything. In other words, and some conservatives say this explicitly, liberals have become relativists and relativism is a danger to the Republic.
For their part, liberals sometimes accuse conservatives of taking their beliefs too far, becoming harshly judgmental, as the terminology goes, exclusionary, and outright intolerant, and intolerance, liberals say, is a threat to the Republic.
Or consider putative global norms such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about which more will be said later. What is the standing of such norms and how do they affect issues such as what outside nations ought to do in cases such as Darfur? Or to pick a moral topic from the surface of contemporary American foreign policy, is democracy a universally valid moral norm, an aspirational expectation for every society, or does it represent what some have called an instance of cultural imperialism?
What about the United States as a nation? It would not be farfetched to say that our nation began with the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Do we? And what would it mean to hold a moral truth to be self-evident? I suspect we will hear more about that today.
What about torture? Is it ever permissible? And what about the issue that the late theologian Rienhold Niebuhr raised so forcefully, though he was not the first person to do so, is personal morality the same as political morality, or do we have to think differently about them?
I could go on for hours just listing topics, nouns without verbs, but I am going to stop here and introduce the distinguished scholars who are going to help us elucidate these deep and grave questions.
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