Saturday, October 24, 2026

The Metaphysical Foundations of Conservatism

I notice that at PhilArchive, my essay “The Metaphysical Foundations of Conservatism” has been posted.  This appeared in the 2022 anthology Dissident Philosophers, edited by T. Allan Hillman and Tully Borland.

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5 comments:

  1. EXEOctober 24, 2026 at 12:15 PM

    (1/2)

    Interesting. So, insofar as I understood the article, the metaphysical foundations of conservatism come down to the defense of, at the very least, a presumption in the favor of tradition and common sense. Namely, that we ought to, at least, presume them innocent until proven guilty.

    OK. There are many things that could be said about this. My first and core concern is that this position typically holds an arbitrarily myopic view of what counts as "traditional moral and political arrangements". I've never once heard a conservative use this to defend egalitarianism on the grounds that hunter-gatherer societies were highly egalitarian. No, instead it's always used to defend hierarchy, monarchy, and so on. The problem is that Conservatives seem to think that hierarchical kingships where the Big Boss man is on top and everyone does what he says are our oldest and most natural form of existence. But anthropology shows that *that's simply not true*. We began as nomadic, egalitarian hunter-gatherers where both men and women did almost exactly the same work almost all of the time, and any chief who thought he could bully everyone else around by force could be and would be killed by the other members of the tribe.

    Point is, the social structures you regard as "traditional" are *not* natural or original to us - they are artifacts of the Agricultural Revolution. They only began to appear when we started settling down, farming, and especially inheriting land. Given that, why should *they* be given precedence?

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  2. EXEOctober 24, 2026 at 12:29 PM

    (2/2)

    Now, the second point about "Common Sense". I'm OK with it as a general, quick'n'dirty heuristic for everyday affairs, but there are multiple problems with trying to appeal to Common Sense on a philosophical level. For one thing, Common Sense is inherently culturally and temporally relative. What one culture thinks of as polite and deferential strikes another as weird, rude, or even offensive. What may be treated as obvious in the Academy may be treated with skepticism or confusion outside of it. The same is true across time periods.

    Secondly, Common Sense is often socially constructed from above rather than an expression of the genuine sentiment of the common people. The people in charge of society arrange for certain ideas to be promoted and for others to be discouraged, thus shaping what counts as "Common Sense". Gramsci's theory of Cultural Hegemony is all about this concept - about how "Common Sense" is frequently little more than the interests and/or sensibilities of the powerful. Ask a random peasant from the year 1600 if the Divine Right of Kings is Common Sense, and he'll probably say yes. Go forward a few centuries and the *falsity* of the Divine Right is seen as Common Sense. Which goes to show how contingent and malleable the concept is.

    Thirdly, Common Sense relies heavily upon our intuitions as a guide. But intuition is a notoriously unreliable tool for decision-making. It's not useless, but it *is* heavily flawed. Cognitive biases, emotional responses, and misinformation can all distort intuitive judgments and regularly do so. Indeed, critical thinking mostly consists of trying to *prevent* our thinking from being distorted in the ways that it is prone to. Given this, why on Earth would we have a bias *in favor* of intuition? Isn't that a lot like having a bias *against* critical thinking?

    The fact that a Tradition has lasted a long time doesn't guarantee that it reflects any deep truth. Much like with Evolution, all that it means is that it "works well enough". To achieve a venerable old age, a Tradition just needs to avoid being so deleterious to its community that it significantly harms their chances of survival. A useless but harmless Tradition can survive just as well as a genuinely helpful one.

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  3. AnonymousOctober 24, 2026 at 1:55 PM

    With all due respect, that was 14 pages of nothing.

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  4. OAPoliceOctober 24, 2026 at 2:16 PM

    Thank you for this Ed, I will read it fully with interest when I get home.

    The passages about Scruton remind of something on the recent Twitter posts about him--ironically reason I never much bothered with him is because (maybe wrongly) I had the impression of him as a quasi-Kantian and non-metaphysically serious philosopher--give a D.M. Armstrong or a Quentin Smith to disagree with any day rather than a columnist who brushes hard ontological graft aside.

    (Ironically I know Armstrong famously was a conservative; I am not sure about Smith, though he basically reinvents Aristotle's ethics)

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  5. EXEOctober 24, 2026 at 3:02 PM

    Actually, given how Burke gets brought up regularly as a founder of Conservative thought (he is mentioned as a critical source several times in the article), I think it might be worthwhile to explore Burke and his critics. Actually, Burke was criticized by some of the most famous and intellectually-significant people of his era, so any such endeavor would inevitably be enlightening in any event. Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Karl Marx all had considerable responses to the man, and they're all interesting thinkers. Of course, it's your blog, but I thought I'd make a suggestion.

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