Moral Maze

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Are America's founding ideals a reality or a myth?

July 02, 2026

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. During his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 620 slaves. As America marks 250 years since the Declaration, that contradiction is impossible to look past: a document of universal liberty, written by men who denied it to the women in their households, the people they enslaved, and the nations whose land they were settling.One reading says this was hypo...

Do we care more about the place where we live than about the nation we live in?

June 26, 2026

If Andy Burnham has a four-word philosophy, it is 'the politics of place', a phrase he uses often. Burnham argues that politics must concentrate on meeting local needs, on the devolution of power and on 'levelling up' the places that have been doing badly.While he was winning in Makerfield, the Scottish Conservatives were winning in Aberdeen South, on a promise to revive the North Sea oil and gas industry. That too was the politics of place.Burnham’s philosophical opponents say that 'the poli...

What Makes Us Human?

June 18, 2026

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence threatens the dignity of the human person.Human exceptionalism - the belief that we are special, both within the animal kingdom and in the eyes of God - rests on a single distinction. We don't just think. We know that we're thinking. We have moral agency. Our religions tell us we have souls. That distinction is now under threat from two directions simultaneously.Firstly, we have discovered that the ...