Was Dolores Claiborne guilty? Abandonment of Attempts & Causing the Conditions of Own Defense

The Stephen King novel “Dolores Claiborne” and the movie and opera by the same name raise two interesting and arcane matters of the criminal law of attempts and self defense.

Deceptive Truth: Kant, Sandel, & Bill Clinton

Occasioned by the suggestion of Sandel that it may sometimes be morally permissible to deceive people, so long as you do so without lying, I here examine such alleged truths as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” After setting up the issues in Section 1, in Sections 2-4 I examine questions of language, communication, and truthfulness in assessing whether candidate deceptive truths really are true. These sections require little if any prior familiarity in the area. The fifth section, however, probably will be hard to follow unless you have some acquaintance with Kant’s ethics. Lacking that, you still may well be able to follow the Sections 6-8, and the final section on the Clinton impeachment has no prerequisites.

Was the US Constitution Unconstitutional?

In the United States we have a nearly universal reverence for our Constitution, the Constitution of 1789 together with its amendments. Largely inspired by the aura of that great document, citizens of the United States tend also to be strong constitutionalists, lower case, believing that every nation should be governed by a written constitution guaranteeing rights, representation, legality, and stability.

It is something of an irony, then, that the Constitution appears, at least on the face of things, to have been unconstitutional.

Feynman, the Onion of Scientific Discovery and Ultimate Laws of Nature

What if there were no ultimate laws of nature or even no ultimate description of reality? What if science would continue to make the kind of progress it seems to have been making without ever reaching a fundamental level of explanation?

The Constitution of a Christian Country

Looking back to the founding of the United States, is it right to say that the Constitution is the Constitution of a Christian country?  The answer has to be: “yes and no.” 

The Moral Underpinnings of Democracy and its Degree-Affected Variant

Motivated by some ideas that percolated around in the New Left, this essay argues that the core justification of democracy is not that it maximizes utility (which it often does pretty well) or even that it recognizes equality of citizenship (which is essential to any just political order), but instead that it is the best projection into the sphere of social decision making of the values of individual autonomy and liberty. It follows that democracy keyed to the stake that each voter has in the outcome will sometimes realize democratic values more fully than does one citizen one vote.

Probabilities, Atheism, Agnosticism, & Hope

What should we say of a person who assigns a low, but non-zero, probability for the existence of God, or a high, but non-one probability? Are they agnostics? Can one responsibly hope that God exists while believing the probability is very low?