What we should be seeing in this pandemic is that freedom from constraint is empty if it leaves us unable to live safely. No truly liberty-loving nation would need persuading that the freedom to stay well and to earn a living requires both government action and the willingness of the population to follow the rules for the collective good.
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For decades after its construction in the 1960s, the only controversy about the naming of the University of Edinburgh’s David Hume Tower was whether Britain’s finest philosopher, if not the world’s, deserved a better memorial than this modernist monstrosity. Yet this week, owing to far more serious controversy, the building was renamed 40 George Square, a response to the dishonour of his deplorable views on race.
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It seems fitting that a government lacking in substance is now urging the nation to lose some of its own. But its strategy for weight loss it has a basic and fatal flaw: it doesn’t work.
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The birth pangs of modern philosophy may be discovered in the lives, and disruptive claims, of four intellectual titans.
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Asking where this is all going to end is a very effective means of whipping up panic. But slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery and need to be treated with caution. They force us to take one of two extreme, polarized positions and do not allow anything more nuanced.
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