In Creating a ‘Super Humanity’ We Would Forfeit Liberty
In a recent lecture at Davos Julian Savulescu argued that it is not beyond the reach of modern science to create human beings with considerably greater powers of intelligence, physical strength and...
View ArticlePress Freedom and Press Responsibility
The Royal Charter being set up in the wake of the Leveson Report marks an end to a period of 300 years in which government did not regulate the press. It is unprecedented in this country’s democratic...
View ArticleReasons to Hope in the Pornography Debate
The availability of pornography is nothing new, but reasons for prohibition need to be re-articulated, and sometimes re-discovered, as one generation succeeds another and re-evaluates what it has...
View ArticleSexuality, and the Conflicted Contortions of Modern Liberalism
Andrew Brown in a recent blog for The Guardian argues that Catholic attitudes to gay sex fail to account for human beings. Though his conclusions are different, in terms of argumentation Brown often...
View ArticlePhysician-Assisted Suicide is an Affront to Human Liberty
Liberty is a premise upon which physician-assisted suicide is routinely advanced. Some of those suffering from serious and incurable illness or distress seek to argue the case that their suffering is a...
View Article‘British Values’ and Extremism Disruption Orders
‘Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves’ – William Pitt the Younger Earlier in 2015 Baroness Warsi declared that Britain...
View ArticleIslam: Friend or Foe?
2016 was in many respects an atypical year. In the political arena, two events confounded and unnerved the grandees of establishment media: Brexit, and, in the U.S.A., the Republican nomination for the...
View ArticleElection Reflection III: Liberalism’s Illiberal Endpoint
This is the third and final part in a series of reflections on the 2017 UK General Election. Shortly after the recent General Election the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, offered his...
View ArticleSchumacher and Subsidiarity
In our current malaise(s) it is worth musing on the work of the great German-born economist E.F. Schumacher (1911–1977). Schumacher brought the social teaching of the Catholic Church, in the form of...
View ArticleNewman’s Age
In the coming year Pope Francis seems now likely to canonise the English Cardinal, John Henry Newman, completing a first step taken by Pope Benedict XVI who beatified him (declared him ‘Blessed’) in...
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