Just war doctrine and Congress’s war powers

As I have argued since it began, President Trump’s war on Iran fails to meet several of the conditions of traditional just war doctrine.  Not the least of these is the “lawful authority” condition.  Under the U.S. constitution, the power to initiate war lies with Congress, not the president.  Trump’s brazen usurpation of this power is as serious an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law as can be imagined, and Congress’s failure to rein him in is a dereliction of duty that is no less grave.  There are many reasons to oppose the war, but the dangerously lawless way in which it was initiated and has been continued would alone suffice to render it unjust and indefensible.

Berkeley’s God

In my latest article at Postliberal Order, I discuss how the novel metaphysical assumptions that modern philosophy brought to the traditional project of establishing the existence and nature of God often either led to heterodoxy or greased the skids for atheism, using George Berkeley as a case study.

Abortion and partisan politics

This week, Massachusetts’ Democratic governor Maura Healey signed a law removing existing restrictions on late-term abortion, thereby legalizing it to the moment of birth.  The move has prompted widespread outrage, as has the ghoulish signing ceremony in which the governor was surrounded by jubilant women applauding this license to murder children.  Republican partisans have cited this episode as evidence of the depravity into which the Democratic Party has fallen.  And it is true that the Democrats remain worse on the issue of abortion than the GOP is. 

Anthony Kenny (1931-2026)

Sir Anthony Kenny died on August 3.  Of philosophers of his generation, Kenny was among those I most admired.  He made important contributions to the philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and other areas of philosophy.  He was also a formidable historian of philosophy, and his work on various problems in the field was greatly deepened by this historical perspective.  He was especially influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, which made him one of the founding thinkers of “analytical Thomism” (though I don’t recall whether that was a label he ever used himself).