Ethics

Epstein Reviews Bork

By Ed Brayton

Richard Epstein reviews Robert Bork's new book in a Cato Institute publication (PDF) and nails Bork for his irrational social conservatism.

The nub of the difficulty lies in Bork's worldview,which is as weak and fearful on social issues as it is strong and confident on antitrust matters. Anyone who reads through these pages is struck by his deep sense of social alienation that has turned a former libertarian into a strident social conservative who rails incessantly against modern popular culture. Bork's near irrational leitmotif is that the absence of common values will lead our culture into a terrible moral quagmire from which it will never escape.He urgently postulates that all cultures need some common moral glue to hold themselves together. He sees the Supreme Court as a mortal threat to our traditional religious values when it champions a philosophy of excessive individualism, which is only a thin veneer for personal self-indulgence.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on July 15, 2009 (boomark / email).