Tanner lectures on human values

First Amendment defenders greeted the Citizens United ruling with enthusiasm, while electoral reformers recoiled in disbelief. Robert Post offers a constitutional theory that seeks to reconcile these sharply divided camps, and explains how the case might've been decided in a way that would preserve free speech and electoral integrity.

Vanity Fair has declared the Age of Irony over. Joan Didion has lamented that Obama’s United States is an “irony-free zone." Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human. It forces us to experience disruptions in our habitual ways of tuning out of life, but comes with a cost.

Taking up three urgent problems of social justice—those with physical and mental disabilities, all citizens of the world, and nonhuman animals—neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation.

Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle—whether happiness or death—the pictures fall apart.

In East and Southeast Asia, as well as China, people are asking, “What does Confucianism have to offer today?” For some, Confucius is still the symbol of a reactionary and repressive past; for others, he is the humanist admired by generations of scholars and thinkers, East and West, for his ethical system and discipline.