On the Square Today

In his latest On the Square column , Joe Carter presents a thought experiment on John Rawls, justice, and abortion:

Let us imagine that we live in a totalitarian state and are part of a governing body tasked with determining bioethical policy. On the agenda for the first session of the Benign Dictator’s Council on Bioethics is the establishment of a moral principle on abortion. Our sole guideline is that we must establish a precedent that is not chronologically arbitrary. In other words, any policy we set would have to be applicable not only to the present and the future but to the past as well.

Also today, George Weigel laments the lost art of the gentlemanly insult :

One of the (many) signs of our cultural decline is that verbal insults, these days, are almost invariably scatological or sexual, provoking a blizzard of asterisks whenever A wants to put the smackdown on B. Once upon a time, it was not so. Once, the ability to come up with a clever insult that could be repeated in polite society was thought an important, if not necessarily essential, component of being a gentleman.