We need to stop smuggling “comprehensive doctrines” into our public discourse, because that deceptive refusal to admit metaphysics distorts and corrupts it, writes senior editor R. R. Reno in Metaphysics and the Common Good , today’s “On the Square” article. In particular, those — like the philosophers John Rawls and Richard Rorty — who “have been eager to banish metaphysics from politics . . . smuggle in a crucial assumption: that our political life together is so cosmically important that we should sacrifice everything else to ensure its primacy.” This, he notes, isn’t true.
