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Robert T. Miller

Robert T. Miller is the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law and a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, a Research Fellow at the Law & Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, and a Fellow and Co-Director of the Program on Organizations, Business and Markets at the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University Law School.

UCLA corridor

Academic Freedom and the Community of Scholars: A Response to Nathanael Blake

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Arguments against academic freedom give the impression of being motivated by a deep insecurity: because conservative ideas have not triumphed in the public square, we need to resort to means other than argument and persuasion to promote those ideas.
philosophy, natural law

The Epistemics of First Principles

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All knowledge comes from sensory experience, including knowledge of the first principles of morality on which the natural law and moral reasoning build.
Interview

Friends Clashing—Yet One More Time—On Free Speech

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Hadley Arkes and Robert Miller go one more round on the moral norms that govern speech and the government’s authority in prohibiting immoral speech.
Speech

Moral Standards and Legal Enforcement: The Debate on Free Speech, Continued

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There are moral standards applicable to all forms of human behavior, including speech, but neither the existence of such standards nor even our acknowledgement of them entails that government should enforce them. Whether the government should enforce a given standard depends on the likely effects of such enforcement, and the sad history of censorship shows that empowering the government to suppress “immoral” or “offensive” speech is highly susceptible of abuse and results in serious violations of the rights we all have to engage in good speech and hear the good speech of others. Giving this power to government is wrong for the same reason that giving alcohol and automobiles to teenage boys is wrong.
Mic

Loose Talk on Free Speech

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If you really must attack other conservatives, take the time to figure out what they actually said and why, and interpret them charitably, the way you would wish to be interpreted. You owe this even to your enemies, but other conservatives are not your enemies but your friends. After that, have some definite arguments.

On Integralism, Religious Liberty, and the Authority of the Church: 19th Century Popes and 20th Century Popes Disagreed

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How should Catholics understand the contradiction between the nineteenth-century papal teachings on integralism and the twentieth-century teaching of the Second Vatican Council? We follow the solution of John Paul II and Benedict XVI: we take both sets of teachings at face value, admit that they contradict each other, and explain that the earlier teachings were merely doctrina catholica, which are not absolutely binding and are thus subject to future change.

Integralism and Catholic Doctrine

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Catholics today are not required to believe in a Catholic confessional state. If anything, they are required to believe that everyone has a right under the natural law to religious freedom, that the state has no authority in religious matters, and that coercion of religious activity by the state is morally wrong. In short, integralism is contrary to Catholic doctrine.

Free Speech and the American Experiment

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The noble impulse to purge the public square of offensive and insulting language quickly degenerates into censorship of unpopular viewpoints. By contrast, the American experiment is founded on the view that a people capable of governing themselves are worthy of the trust that the First Amendment places in them.

The Mortara Case and the Limits of State Power: First Things Should Disavow Fr. Cessario’s Defense of Pius IX in the Mortara Case

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Many people do care—and care a lot—what the editors of First Things think about Christian-Jewish relations, and this time the galloping statism of First Things is doing great damage in the real world. Robert T. Miller calls on R.R. Reno to disavow the position Romanus Cessario takes on the Mortara case and to reaffirm the journal’s historical commitment to the freedom of religion as understood in liberal states.

Economic Freedom and Economic Opportunity: R. R. Reno Discovers Economic Growth, Blames Capitalism

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Leaders should get the facts straight before they start theorizing.

Resisting the Fortress of Solitude: What’s Wrong with First Things’ Anxious Anti-Capitalism

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Young people today, especially the ones who are serious about religion and look to the editors of First Things for guidance, must resist the allure of an intellectual Fortress of Solitude where they can sit and feel superior to everyone. Griping about the state of society is a waste of time. Part two of two.

Notes from Reality About Economic Regulation: What’s Wrong with First Things’ Anxious Anti-Capitalism

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R.R. Reno’s manifesto on capitalism—in which he concludes, among other things, that expanding economic freedom leads to transgenderism—is based on empirically false claims. Part one of a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Riches, Religion, and the New Atheism

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It’s not that in misery and suffering human beings grasp at foolish theories that give them some hope. Rather, amidst prosperity, human beings can blind themselves to the reality of the human condition and so never ask the questions that, once asked, cannot be plausibly answered except in theistic terms.
Public Discourse

The Shopkeeper’s Dilemma and Cooperation with Evil

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A shopkeeper who objects to sex-same weddings but who nevertheless provides services at such weddings generally acts in a morally permissible way if he acts to comply with a validly-enacted law, to preserve the goodwill of his business, and to make a just profit. Nevertheless, a law that in this way coerces a shopkeeper to cooperate with actions he reasonably believes immoral is gravely unjust.
Public Discourse

What Reason Can Know and What Government Should Legislate: A Rejoinder to Arkes

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The existence of objective moral truth that is knowable by reason does not imply that people generally, much less particular public officials, will in fact know and embrace that truth. Very often, they won’t, and that is why systematic limits on government power, such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, are good laws.
Public Discourse

Professor Arkes and the Law

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When the law limits the courts’ power to inquire into the truth or reasonableness of religious views, this is not because the law is assuming that religious beliefs lack rational foundation. Rather, it’s because allowing courts to exercise this power on a large scale would be too dangerous.
Public Discourse

Why Harvard Was Right Not to Ban the Black Mass

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A policy that disempowers university officials from prohibiting student events on the basis of the viewpoint they express demonstrates institutional genius.
Public Discourse

Just Inflation

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A low but predictable inflation rate is sound, just policy.
Public Discourse

Philosophy and Morality in Public Discourse

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If we want to move public discourse in the right direction, we should rely on the many assumptions we share with most of our contemporaries.
Public Discourse

Nature and God in Ethics

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Just as an engineer can work out the purpose of a machine by examining its structure, reason can discover the proper end of human action by examining human nature. Yet there is also a supernatural morality that subsumes and exceeds natural moral standards.
Public Discourse

The Pragmatic Eudaimonist: A Response to David Tubbs

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David L. Tubbs’ criticism of pragmatic liberalism reveals that he misunderstands both the necessary complexity of constitutional law and its relation to civil society.
Public Discourse

Aristotle Can’t Refute Evolution: A Response to Seagrave

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While evolutionary theory shows us that we can’t divide living things into stable, distinct species, this doesn’t mean that it imperils the foundations of knowledge.
Public Discourse

Morality and Economic Freedom: A Response to Gregg

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Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy doesn’t imply that every economy should be capitalist.
Public Discourse

Hotel Pornography and the Market of Morality

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The legal institutions of a democratic and capitalist society are designed not to give people what is good and prevent them from getting what is bad; they are designed to give people what they want and not give them what they don’t want.
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