PRESTOPUNDIT -- "An intense brain-buzz, guaranteed" (2blowhards)

News flash for Andrew Sullivan -- morality is not a product of our reason. Sullivan has always struck me as a rationalistic Millian liberal, rather than a Oakeshottian or Burkian conservative. Consider this statement:

surely the government does need to provide some kind of reasonable justification for a law expressing "morality," which doesn't just rely on what people have always believed or always assumed.

Conservatism doesn't rule out reflective consideration, but it does rule out the sort of naive rationalism which would hope to derive morality through "reason" or a morality which would meet hope to some ultimate demand for justification. This way leads nihilism and scepticism -- both in morality and epistemology. And it's all based on a grossly mistake demand for justification, modelled on the example of geometric proof. An interesting story, but one I won't pursue further here.