Right Reason

The new conservative blog, Right Reason, has been up a couple weeks now and I've found a few of their posts to my liking. Max Goss has a post on the value of rootedness, including how different communities help shape our identity and how rootedness within the community can make us more free in some ways. Jim Ryan has a post on the role of rules and algorithms within morality, arguing that they are much less important than people generally think and that "fine-grained analogical reasoning" ought to have a central role in moral reasoning.

The down side to Right Reason is that many of the contributors seem prone to seriously misunderstanding the left. Ryan, for instance, describes liberals as quasi-marxists who want complete egalitarianism while Rob Koons defines conservativism and liberalism in such an imbalanced way that the pacifists who were concerned that nuclear war might wipe humanity off the face of the earth were paradigmatic conservatives. Even when their claims about liberals vs. conservatives are less far-fetched, they still seem to mostly be a distraction. I am much more interested in what Goss thinks about the value of rootedness than with what he thinks about whether conservatives are more likely than those on the left to recognize its value. Overall, though, the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough to add Right Reason to my list of regular reads, and I wish them the best of luck at producing quality posts from a conservative point of view and attracting eyes to those posts.