Tristan Rogers

Virtue jurisprudence views the purpose of law as the promotion of virtue. “Such claims,” as R.A. Duff writes, “cause tremors in contemporary liberal hearts, redolent as they are of nineteenth-century ‘legal moralism’.” But legal moralism is better reconsidered as vice jurisprudence, that is, the purpose of law is not the promotion of virtue through a specific conception of the good, but rather the reduction of vice according to a public morality. This is how James Fitzjames Stephen and Patrick Devlin, the English jurists associated with legal moralism, understood the criminal law. The distinction, as will be argued in this paper, matters for understanding virtue jurisprudence and its relationship to liberalism. According to a liberal conception of law, for instance, law should be neutral among competing conceptions of the good, while permitting the liberty required to realize any of them. Such liberty plausibly extends, for example, to the legal protection of pornography, sports gambling, and drug legalization. According to vice jurisprudence, however, the liberal conception of law, while purporting to express public virtues like toleration, in fact, permits (or even encourages) the proliferation of socially destructive private vices, such as lust, intemperance, avarice, imprudence, sloth, and gluttony, all of which make neutrality impracticable. Vice jurisprudence, by contrast, may retain liberalism’s pretense to neutrality about promoting a specific conception of the good without abandoning the ambition of virtue jurisprudence to promote virtue. Law can promote public virtue by discouraging private vice, thus securing the social cohesion and stability that liberalism requires.

In Conservatism Past and Present: A Philosophical Introduction, Tristan J. Rogers argues that philosophical conservatism is a coherent and compelling set of historically rooted ideas about conserving and promoting the human good. Part I, "Conservatism Past," presents a history of conservative ideas, exploring themes, such as the search for wisdom, the limits of philosophy, reform in preference to revolution, the relationship between authority and freedom, and liberty as a living tradition. Major figures include Aristotle, Saint Aquinas, Edmund Burke, G.W.F. Hegel, and Roger Scruton. Part II, "Conservatism Present," applies philosophical conservatism to contemporary conservative politics, focusing on issues such as nationalism, populism, the family, education, and responsibility. Rogers shows that conservatism has been defined differently at different times: as a loose set of connected ideas reacting against the French Revolution; as a kind of disposition or instinct in favor of the status quo; and more recently as any ideas opposed to the political left. But he also allows a set of questions to guide his argument for conservatism's merits: What is conservatism? Is it a coherent and attractive philosophy? What are conservatives for? And how is today's conservatism related to its past? In his answers, Rogers paints a compelling and coherent picture of an aligned and attractive set of ideas.

Edmund Burke was an Irish-born British statesman and political philosopher who is best known as the father of modern conservatism. Developed in response to the French Revolution, Burke's conservatism aims to preserve and promote the existing (or traditional) institutions of society, including the rule of law, property, the family, and religion. Burke himself sought to defend these things, as embodied in the British Constitution, against the revolutionary spirit sparked in France. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke develops the idea of society as an inheritance that must be conserved before it can be improved upon. In this piece, we examine Burke’s arguments, which draw on tradition, observable cause and effect, and a mix of moral and religious sentiments. Contrary to expectations, Burke insists that the principles of conservation and change are not opposed.

I am very attracted to the theory Rawls has put forth in A Theory of Justice. I feel that he gives a good explanation of how principles of justice can to be arrived at in order to have a fair and just society. However, I do not think that Rawls’s way of doing this is the only way. In many ways, it seems that utilitarianism can be used to justify the same principles that Rawls is advocating. Specifically, it seems that his notion of the veil of ignorance is just a tool used to decide principles in an essentially utilitarian manner. So, for the purpose of this paper, I will note the similarities between Rawls’s notion of the veil of ignorance and utilitarianism, and I will argue that by using this concept, Rawls is really advocating a kind of utilitarian reasoning

Justice under Law Law and justice are near synonyms in common speech. We expect the law to deliver justice, and we cannot imagine justice absent some system of law. In his recent book, Justice before the Law, Michael Huemer challenges this traditional view of law and justice. Given the prevalence of unjust laws and legal practices in the United States, and the deference shown to law by agents of the American legal system, Huemer argues that we ought to affirm the primacy of justice over the law. This article argues that Huemer is right about the primacy of justice, but he errs in his understanding of what justice is, and the means through which it is best achieved. Law operates as a form of enquiry that seeks to discover what justice is. Law is a necessary means to justice. True justice must be justice under law.

What might a Stoic approach to politics look like? David Goodhart aptly describes the political divide pervading Western societies in terms of the ‘somewheres,’ who are communitarian, rooted in particular places, and resistant to social and political change, versus the ‘anywheres,’ who are cosmopolitan, mobile, and enthusiastic embracers of change. Stoicism recognizes a similar distinction. This paper defends a conservative interpretation of Stoic politics. According to ‘Stoic conservatism,’ cosmopolitanism is an ethical ideal through which we perform the obligations assigned by our communitarian role(s) in society. The view is ‘conservative’ in that it favors existing institutions as the starting point for virtue instead of reasoning a priori about what virtue requires. Stoic politics consists neither in cosmopolitan transcendence of particular attachments, nor in passive acceptance of the communitarian status quo, but in ethical improvement toward virtue, within the political structure of society.

Political philosophy was once dominated by discussion of the virtues of character and their importance to the good life and the good society. Contemporary political philosophers, however, following the towering influence of John Rawls, have primarily focused on a single virtue of institutions: justice, while largely avoiding controversial claims about the good life. As a result, political philosophy lacks a unified account of the virtues of institutions and the virtues of character. More importantly, we lack an understanding of the connection between the just society and the good life. This book begins to mend this broken seam, which, on reflection, lies at the heart of our deepest political problems. The book’s central argument is that the virtues of character require institutions, while good institutions enable persons to live together virtuously. Political institutions are a necessary precondition for the moral agency exhibited by the virtues. But good institutions enable virtue to grow, while helping to constrain the excesses of vice. On this view, justice emerges primarily as a virtue of character, not institutions. The just person balances conformity to existing institutional norms with practically wise reforms. Ultimately, this book concludes that the just society and the good life are linked through the common good of virtuous activity within the shared institutions of a political community.

What is the relationship between justice as an individual virtue and justice as an institutional virtue? The latter has been exhaustively explored by political philosophers, whereas the former remains underexplored in the literature on virtue ethics. This article defends the view that individual justice is logically prior to institutional justice, and argues that this view requires a conception of individual justice I call ‘justice as lawfulness’. The resulting view consists of three claims. First, just institutions are composed of the relations between just persons. Second, the just person has a disposition to act in accordance with the legal and social norms (collectively, thenomoi) of the existing political tradition. Third, departures from thenomoirequire that the just person act with practical wisdom to reform thenomoiaccording to an implicit standard of justice in the political tradition.

G.A. Cohen was perhaps libertarianism’s most formidable critic. In Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality he levels several strong criticisms against Robert Nozick’s theory put forth in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In this paper, I counter several of Cohen’s criticisms. The debate operates at three stages: self-ownership, world-ownership, and initial acquisition. At the first stage, Cohen does not attempt to refute self-ownership, but weaken its force in providing moral grounds for capitalism. Here I argue that Cohen’s attempt to overturn Nozick’s slavery argument is unsuccessful because partial-slavery, while normatively different from full-slavery, is still normatively wrong. At the second stage, Cohen argues for a joint-ownership view of the world’s resources. In particular, he claims that self-ownership is rendered merely formal in a jointly-owned world and in a capitalist world. To rebut this challenge I show that even if Cohen is right about this, libertarian self-ownership is only formal in Cohen’s peculiar case where only two people exist and one owns everything. In contrast, self-ownership in a jointly-owned world is formal in all cases. Lastly, at the third stage, Cohen argues against Nozick’s interpretation of the Lockean proviso, claiming that it is impossible to satisfy. Granting Cohen’s argument here, I go on to defend Jan Narveson’s no-proviso view of acquisition from Cohen’s thus far unanswered criticism. I show that significantly, in his critique, Cohen equivocates between positive and negative rights. Taken jointly, my responses at these three stages ground the anti-egalitarian conclusion that, in Cohen’s words, ‘[e]xtensive inequality of condition is unavoidable, or avoidable only on pain of violating people’s rights to themselves and to things.’ The sequence, then, is from self-ownership, to world-ownership, via initial acquisition