Robert George on Your Conscience

Many times in public discourse one finds oneself repeating the old line from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” We disagree about the terms of the debate, but also fail to address the more substantive disagreements that lie below the surface. Few thinkers speak as clearly as Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. “Self-awareness is, indeed, an obligation of democratic citizenship,” George writes. By that reckoning, he is a model democratic citizen. George’s newest book, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism is a collection of essays that have appeared in various books and academic and popular journals. As such, they repeat themselves frequently, and one imagines that a research assistant could have further streamlined the collection as a whole. That complaint aside, the book offers some of the strongest arguments at all levels of public discourse, from anthropology to the meaning of conscience and marriage.