Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Conflicts in Conservativism

 

Business has the responsibility to utilize resources and maximize production within the rules of a free and honest culture. Moral responsibility is personal.


                             Conflicts in Conservativism

That human beings start out crooked and prone to sin means we require strong social institutions meant to form us, and that we cannot thrive in their absence. It means the good of the individual cannot be achieved in a society that is not meaningfully attuned to the true common good. But that human beings are made in a divine image and possessed of inherent dignity means that each of us has rights that in practice amount to constraints on what society can do to us. In this sense, the conservative anthropology points toward both communitarianism and individualism, and the tension between the two emerges in every conservative effort to wrestle with real-world governing challenges.

This is a thoughtful and provocative remark by Levin and is worth some reflection. The origin of human dignity, the nature of human error, these are basic elements that any thinking culture must at least consider. If it does not, then the culture has made up its mind on other premises that the culture should be able to express.

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