Blog Archives - Page 19 of 21

Mills Two Democracies

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:December 28, 2016
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The Two Democracies This war between the two democracies is still under way. It had been the failure and – to most intellectuals of the time – the tremendous disappointment of the theory and practice of Rousseau’s collectivist freedom that…

Mill’s Religion of the Self

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:December 22, 2016
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The New Religion Of The Self In an earlier chapter we discussed the two contrasting metaphors of the Mirror and the Lamp that stand for the vast cultural shift from the Classical/Christian to the Romantic ethos.[i] The metaphor of the…

Mill’s Sham Morality

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:December 20, 2016
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Sham Morality: Mill’s Two Fibs and The New Golden Rule His assault began with the bold announcement that the object of his essay was “to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with…

Mill’s Contradictions – Only Apparent

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:December 18, 2016
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Mill’s Contradictions – Only Apparent The conflict between wholes (organic society: Rousseau, Humboldt) and parts (individual freedom: Locke, Kant, Mill) continues throughout Mill’s On Liberty, and has generated considerable unresolvable controversy about what exactly Mill meant. No wonder. He was…

Exposing the “Harm Principle” of J. S. Mill

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:December 15, 2016
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Trying something new. For the next ten days or so I will be posting a a series of connected installments taken from Chapter Eight, “The Road to Hyperdemocracy,” as published in my book The Trouble With Democracy (Stoddart, 2001, and…

Trump Or Clinton: Will It Be Personalities, Or Policies?

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:November 26, 2016
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It will not be possible in November for Americans to elect a “good” President of high character. Both candidates are unlikeable and tainted with very shady, if not illegal behaviour; and both are cut-throat and tough as nails. If I…

A Quick Note on Global Warming

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:November 18, 2016
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I just sent this brief note to a fellow who blames mankind for global warming, and asked him to refute all or any of it. No reply, as yet ……

The Folly of “PPP”

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:October 27, 2016
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What follows is my contribution to a recent email discussion of “free speech” with a handful of close friends. It began with one of our group deploring the fact that Professor Jordan Peterson, who teaches psychology at the University of…

The Radical Camel’s Nose is Under the Conservative Tent!

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:July 12, 2016
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This is a clarion call regarding Canada’s deVeber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research – an organization that has been busy since 1982 defending the sanctity of human life from conception, critiquing sex-ed programs, and which most recently has launched…

The Role of a Senate, Democracy, and “Filtration”

Post author:William Gairdner
Post published:June 15, 2016
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This is a response to a column in the National Post, June 9th., about democracy and the Senate of Canada. But the underlying argument could as well apply to the proper role of a Senate, as originally conceived, in any…