Philosophy

Philosophy articles feature reflection and analysis about public life, values, ethics, and morals.

All philosophy articles at Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages.

Filter posts by category

The Fall of Intellectual Heroism

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

The case against lockdowns and state medical mandates is the obverse of the case for freedom itself. It seems unconscionable for any liberal mind to be wrong on this point. That so many have gone silent or even shown sympathy for medical despotism reveals just how tremendously confusing these times have been. 

The Fall of Intellectual Heroism Read Journal Article

The Covid Cult’s Attack on Science and Society

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

There will always be a new variant, there will always be a new mandate, and there will always be the new carrot dangling on the stick in front of your face (like the booster jab) only to be pulled away again. You can acquiesce to this conditioning and reorganize your entire life around the principle of avoiding this one pathogen while giving up all expectations of freedom. Or you can resist the propaganda, get informed, and join with those who are working to rebuild after the disaster of the last year and a half. 

The Covid Cult’s Attack on Science and Society Read Journal Article

The Forgotten Principles of the Risk Assessment

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

These principles can help risk assessments function as intended – as a tool to help individuals and communities evaluate risk and put in place targeted measures, to contain and ultimately reduce anxiety, and to move away from more performative measures that simply serve to entrench anxiety and cause harm, without any benefit.

The Forgotten Principles of the Risk Assessment Read Journal Article

LinkedIn Censors Harvard Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Receiving less attention has been the rise of censorship on the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, the social network for professionals that has thus far seemed to be a less active participant in the Covid information wars. Its largely passive approach is starting to change. 

LinkedIn Censors Harvard Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff Read Journal Article

Three Tragic Assumptions Behind Lockdown Strategy

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

The lesson is that the questions, answers, and solutions are within the capacity of individuals in society to discern and implement. We do not need powerful institutions with legal rights over us to feed them to us, to legislate us, to coerce us.

Three Tragic Assumptions Behind Lockdown Strategy Read Journal Article

The Totalitarian Ideology of Lockdownism

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root. It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets. 

The Totalitarian Ideology of Lockdownism Read Journal Article

A Caste System Threatens the West

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

The great turn from ancient political and economic structures into more modern ones was not only about property rights, commercial freedoms, and the participation of ever greater waves of people in public life. There was also an implicit epidemiological deal to which we agreed, what Sunetra Gupta describes as an endogenous social contract.

A Caste System Threatens the West Read Journal Article

What Were Lockdowners Thinking? A Review of Jeremy Farrar

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Every age has generated some fashionable and overriding reason why people cannot be free. Public health is the reason of the moment. In this author’s telling, everything we think we know about the social and political order must conform to his number one priority of pathogen avoidance and suppression, while every other concern (such as freedom itself) should take a back seat. 

What Were Lockdowners Thinking? A Review of Jeremy Farrar Read Journal Article

Are We Too Ready for the Next Pandemic?

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

We need desperately to rethink the panicked ideology that consumed the nation last year and still consumes the world today. Liberty and health go together. These plans to eradicate the next germ to come along eradicate instead everything we love about life, namely its liberty and our rights to choose.

Are We Too Ready for the Next Pandemic? Read Journal Article

civilization

The Fight for Civilization

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

A system that would severely damage human psychological health and thus, morality would be one that dramatically uproots every freedom that people had previously taken for granted. The phrase “unleash hell” comes to mind; that is literally what lockdowns did to this country. We see it in surveys of mental health and it manifests itself in crime and the general collapse of public morals.

The Fight for Civilization Read Journal Article

A Framework for Understanding Pathogens, Explained by Sunetra Gupta

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

If it is possible to mash together hard science, poetry, epidemiology, and sociology, it is this book. It is not a huge treatise but closer to an extended essay. Every sentence is pregnant with meaning. Reading it not only made my heart race but also caused my imagination to run wild. It’s both bracing and beautiful.

A Framework for Understanding Pathogens, Explained by Sunetra Gupta Read Journal Article

Sign up for the Free
Brownstone Journal Newsletter