At Deseret, I'm writing about the hamstrung compromises we get when people disagree on moral grounds but fight on practical grounds. I'm writing specifically on the death penalty, but it's only one, particularly painful example, of how America sometimes makes a controversial policy legal but impossible. For years, the moral issue of the death penalty… Read More
Tag: fights in good faith
Reaching Out to Atheists with Bishop Barron
I joined Bishop Robert Barron in Santa Barbara to talk about strategies for having productive disagreements about hard topics. (My part of the video below starts at 15:30). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIY4AP3PbX4 After my talk, I joined Bishop Barron for a discussion that was taped for Word on Fire Institute members. Read More
Debating Virtue, Inculcating Virtue
In David Brooks's op-ed today, praising Alan Jacobs's How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, he cites what I'm pretty sure is Jacobs citing me! Brooks discusses C.S. Lewis's essay on the Inner Ring, and how the desire to belong to a group can warp our character as we compromise to be… Read More
“Didn’t you ever break on the floor?”
This post is a follow-up to a reflection on how going to rationality camp made me really grateful for my college debate experience. “Break on the floor” is, I’m pretty sure, part of the Yale Political Union vernacular, so a definition is probably in order. Our debates operated by Robert’s Rules of order, but our parliamentary debate style bears… Read More
The gift my weirdo debate friends gave me
Tonight is the summer alumni debate of my philosophical debating group, and I’ve had an awkward time every time someone has asked me what we’re planning to debate. You see, our topic for the night is “R: Heighten the Contradictions,” which tends to throw people for a loop if they were expecting “R: Elect Obama” “R:… Read More