Talk it out

Time again for an open thread.   Now’s your chance to get that off-topic comment off your chest.  The burning philosophical or theological question you’ve been dying to raise?  That political rant you’ve been meaning to inflict on fellow readers of this blog?  Some tweet of mine that you wanted to complain about?  All fair game.  From real numbers to realpolitik, from That ‘70s Show to Kurtis Blow, from monads to gonads, there’s no limit to what you might talk about.  (Other, that is, than the demands of good taste and basic sanity.  So no trolling, please.)  Previous open threads archived here.

Solidarity

The ideal to strive for in international relations is what in the natural law tradition and Catholic social teaching is called solidarity. On the one hand, this entails respecting the independence of nations and their right to preserve their own identities, rather than absorbing them into a one-world blob; on the other hand, it entails promoting their cooperation and mutual assistance in what Pope Leo XIV calls the “family of peoples,” rather than a war of all against all in a Hobbesian state of nature.

Where economics is concerned, this entails rejecting, on the one hand, a globalism that dissolves national boundaries and pushes nations into a free trade dogmatism that is contrary to the interests of their citizens; but also, on the other hand, a mercantilism that walls nations off into mutually hostile camps and treats international economic relations as a zero-sum game. From the point of view of solidarity, neither free trade nor protectionism should be made into ideologies; free trade policies and protectionist policies are merely tools whose advisability can vary from case to case and require the judgment of prudence.

Where war and diplomacy are concerned, this vision entails rejecting, on the one hand, the liberal and neoconservative project of pushing all nations to incorporate themselves into the globalist blob by economic pressure, regime change, or the like; but also, on the other hand, a Hobbesian realpolitik that sees all other nations fundamentally as rivals rather than friends, and seeks to bully them into submission rather than cooperate to achieve what is in each nation’s mutual interest.

This solidarity-oriented vision is an alternative to the false choice between what might be called the “neoliberal” and “neo-Hobbesian” worldviews competing today – each of which pretends that the other is the only alternative to itself. It is the vision developed by thinkers in the Thomistic natural law tradition such as Luigi Taparelli in the nineteenth century and Johannes Messner in the twentieth, and which has informed modern Catholic social teaching.

The principle of solidarity is fairly well-known to be central to natural law and Catholic teaching about the internal affairs of nations (and famously gave a name to Polish trade union resistance to Communist oppression). But it ought to be better known as the ideal to pursue in relations between nations as well.

(From a post today at X/Twitter)

Preventive war and the U.S. attack on Iran

Last week I argued that the U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran.  America has now entered the war by bombing three facilities associated with Iran’s nuclear program.  Is this action morally justifiable in light of traditional just war doctrine? 

War aims?      

Let us note, first, that much depends on exactly what the U.S. intends to accomplish.  A week ago, before the attack, President Trump warned that Tehran should be evacuated, called for Iran’s unconditional surrender, and stated that the U.S. would not kill Iran’s Supreme Leader “for now” – thereby insinuating that it may yet do so at some future time.  Meanwhile, many prominent voices in the president’s party have been calling for regime change in Iran, and Trump himself this week has joined this chorus.  If we take all of this at face value, it gives the impression that the U.S. intends or is at least open to an ambitious and open-ended military commitment comparable to the American intervention in Iraq under President Bush. 

Shields on Aquinas on the Unmoved Mover

My review of Daniel Shields’ important recent book Nature and Nature’s God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover Argument appears in the July 2025 issue of The Thomist.

The U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran (Updated)

Let me say at the outset that I agree with the view that it would be bad for the Iranian regime to acquire a nuclear weapon.  How close it is to actually acquiring one, I do not know.  I do know that the claim that such acquisition is imminent has been made for decades now, and yet it has still not happened.  In any event, it is Israel rather than the U.S. that would be threatened by such acquisition, and Israel has proven quite capable of taking care of itself.  There is no need for the U.S. to enter the war, and it is in neither the U.S.’s interests nor the interests of the rest of the region for it to do so.

Immortal Souls in Religion & Liberty

In the Summer 2025 issue of the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, David Weinberger kindly reviews my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.  From the review: “Feser combines… rigor with his talent for making difficult ideas digestible… An admirable feature of Feser’s treatise is how thoroughly he engages opposing positions.”

Riots should be suppressed swiftly and harshly

In an article at Postliberal Order, I argue that the Trump administration has the right under natural law to intervene to suppress riots of the kind seen in Los Angeles this week.

MacIntyre on Hegel on human action

Phrenology was the pseudoscience that aimed to link psychological traits to the morphology of the skull.  Physiognomy was the pseudoscience that aimed to link such traits to facial features.  In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel critiques these pseudosciences.  Since they are now widely acknowledged to be pseudosciences, it might seem that Hegel’s critique can be of historical interest only.  But as the late Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out in his essay “Hegel: On Faces and Skulls,” Hegel’s main points can be applied to a critique of today’s fashionable attempts to predict psychological traits and human actions from physiological and genetic traits.  (The essay appears in the collection Philosophy Through Its Past, edited by Ted Honderich.)