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This chapter derives the constitutional doctrines flowing from the state's duty under the egalitarian paradigm to cultivate the conditions for everyone's living a self-authored life. In particular, it derives a right against strict criminal responsibility for harmful consequences, a right to express in right-respecting action one's conscientious beliefs, a right to state accommodation of conscientious belief where this is compatible with egalitarian public goals, and a qualified right to physician-assisted suicide. However, it criticizes those products of the egalitarian constitution flowing from the premise that the egalitarian principle is fundamental rather than part of a larger scheme. Specifically, it criticizes the egalitarian tendency toward strong legal paternalism, its repudiation of objective morality, and its inability to conceive of reasonable limits on the obscene and hateful public expression of conscientiously held beliefs.

This chapter describes the four conditions that justify the waging of a just war in the Catholic tradition: 1. there must be serious, lasting, and certain damage inflicted on a community (assessment of situation); 2. all other means to combat the source of the damage must have been shown to be ineffective (strategic consideration); 3. there must be a reasonable possibility that the use of armed violence will accomplish its goal (military possibility); 4. there must be a reasonable basis for assuming that the use of armed violence will bring about social justice and not lead to a situation of greater evil and disorder than that which it is attempting to replace (political possibility). Using these four criteria, the chapter examines the resort to arms by Liberation Catholics. It concludes that the third and fourth conditions were not present. Therefore in the writer's opinion, it lacked objective morality.

This chapter explains the considerable difficulty we have in making sense of the world and finding our place in it. To undertake that task we need to start with the most basic questions about how we gain knowledge of the world (epistemology), including the limits on our senses and the inevitable ways we form mental images that shape our understandings. It explores longstanding issues of the composition of the world (metaphysics), particularly the challenges of coming to terms with intangibles, along with the limits on human rationality and the inevitable origins of normativity in human sentiment, genetics, and cultural inertia. It takes up the cultural disorientation brought on by the decline of religion and the claims of Darwin, Freud, Einstein and others leading to the pessimism of such works as Krutch, The Modern Temper from the 1920s. It reviews the three basic definitions of truth, considers how the parts of nature form wholes with emergent properties, considers intangibles and continued claims for the objective reality of morals, and challenges the misleading claims about the social construction of nature. All of this supplies a foundation for a critique of prevailing culture and key institutions and calls for cultural reform.

The success condition for intervention can be interpreted in several ways. Some interpret it as requiring that interventions actually be successful; such a condition can only be judged to be satisfied ex post. Others interpret it as requiring that interventions have a good enough chance of succeeding ex ante. Yet others accept a mix of the two. This chapter argues that the purely ex ante view is the only acceptable position. As a result, interventions are, quite simply, justifiable only when they have a good enough chance of success ex ante.