Fair Governance: The Enforcement of Morals is a study of legal interference with individual preferences and will canvass the interdisciplinary literature in economics, psychology, philosophy, and law. It discusses the particular conditions necessary for the state to legally interfere with our freedom of choice, whether it be to either satisfy our individual pursuit of happiness or to prevent us from making immoral choices. Relatively few philosophers know much of the parallel literature on this central problem of ethics; while many legal (...) scholars are acquainted with the psychological literature on judgment biases, they are frequently unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on perfectionism. Francis H. Buckley carefully links these two notions of state power with recent empirical literature on judgment biases and happiness studies and surveys the literature, arguing for a nuanced form of social perfectionism, one which seeks to promote the kind of liberal nationalism found in the United States. (shrink)

Laughter as superiority -- The elements of laughter -- The one necessary thing -- Objections to the normative thesis -- Comic virtues and vices -- The social virtues -- The charismatic virtues -- Machine law -- Machine scholarship -- Machine art and machine cities -- The battle of the norms -- Resistance to laughter -- The sociability thesis -- Conclusion.

Regards an orientation toward success (i.e., winning the approval of others) as an obstacle to hope. Moods and expectations unrelieved by hope can degenerate into a compulsive idea that life is a process of losing and dying without any compensatory gains. The prime source of deepened hope is to move toward the experience of presence with another. Acknowledging the dialectic nature of hope is itself also a source of hope. Affirming life and love enables one to face their opposites—death and (...) suffering. (shrink)