About Me

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Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

Weekly self-promotion - on The Moral Landscape

This week, I'm promoting my lengthy and searching review, from 2010, of The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. If you have an interest in moral theory, including metaethics, check it out. My positive views on these topics are developed at some length in my latest book, The Mystery of Moral Authority, but writing a long review of Harris's book, explaining what I saw as its problems, cetainly assisted in clarifying my thoughts.

Much of the review is negative in the sense of raising doubts rather than developing a positive case of my own, but it is not a negative review in the sense of claiming that Harris has produced a bad book or one that doesn't merit an audience (I'm as surprised at the number of people who absolutely loathe The Moral Landscape as at the number who embrace it fairly uncritically). Negative in one sense or not, the review does, partly by implication, sketch a general thesis about moral theory. To see how I developed the full thesis, five or six years later, there's The Mystery of Moral Authority if you're interested.

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