A prejudice in favor is as hard to be totally overcome as a prejudice in disfavor. Many humans find no point in limiting themselves to what justice prescribes, provided that they could be unjust successfully and human nature is certainly egotistic. However, why do we sometimes prefer to consult the interest of others rather than our own interest? What is the relationship between selfishness and benevolence? Is altruism merely a mask for self-interest? In the Medieval World the underlying assumption is that human’s self-fulfillment is discovered in the love of God and of the rest of the divine creation. Conservatism most precisely denotes a hostility to radical social change, particularly social change that is instituted by the force of the state and justified by an appeal to abstract rights or to some utopian aim. Conservatives believe that governments are limited by the nature of their instruments to maintaining peace and order: any attempt to go beyond these functions is likely to create a disproportionate amount of misery and disruption. This barren little flow of doctrine which can grow in any kind of soil, from the sandy wastes of fearful privilege to the lush richness of artistic or religious sensibility. 

Life is only estimable as it is useful. Of what value is a jewel locked up in a casket, or a light burning in a dead man’s tomb? All conservatives are united in the belief that human affairs are extremely complicated and that the details of human behavior are unpredictable: this we may call the complexity thesis. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs. Political judgment therefore cannot be based on problems arising in the sphere of government. Conservatives regard ruling as a special kind of skill, possibly arcane and certainly not universally distributed among embers of the human race. It is learned by practice and example and therefore is likely to be most highly developed among members of a long-established ruling class. Many conservatives wish to avoid grandiose social blueprints (such as the collectivization of agriculture of the thousand-year Reich) whose operation in politics has in recent centuries produced so much misery. 

The mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof; calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracting progress in this life. Conservatives have accepted some version of the doctrine of original sin and view the government as being ordained by God as a remedy for human defects. Others have merely insisted on the prudential reminder that men are frail, unstable, and unpredictable. Most have agreed that virtue, stability, and civilization depend on the continuity of long-established institutions. Political stability is founded on state, church, and family, while moral stability rests upon a strong sense of duty, preferably buttressed by religious belief. The nature of man emphasizes either their enduring sinfulness or their frailty. What is the root cause of political and social problems? Conservatives will point immediately to the nature of an, while liberals and socialists will point to man’s environment. First, let us consider the claim that something must “conserve” objects in being from moment to moment, since they have no power in themselves to do so. In contrast, it might me that objects and organisms are being tacitly understood as derivative and dependent in a more radical and philosophical way. 

Life is full of care and anxieties; man has occasion for, and a right to make use of, many expedients to make it pass on with tolerable ease. Liberals tend to be dependent upon the player’s continuing to blow, as a shadow or projected film is dependent upon the continuance of light supply. However, we have no reason to believe that all existents are like this, that they are dependent for their very being upon continual behind-the-scenes activity. Changes in the environment may produce changes of the state in the entities within it; but even dramatic changes of state—for example, the death of an organism—are not identical with absolute loss of being. Therefore, there must be at least as much reality in the cause as in its effect; it is impossible that things wholly void of knowledge should be produce a knowing being. Where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind? From what experience can we know what can produce what—what causes are adequate to what effect? No cause can give rise to products of a more precious or elevated kind than themselves. Therefore, liberals and conservatives may be dominant, or both may play an equally important role. 

This World hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death. Unless a person is judged personally responsible for some act or outcome, one would not normally be thought to deserve blame, praise, reward, punishment, and so on. Personal responsibility is generally regarded as a necessary condition of the justice of person’s in receiving what one deserves. Persons are normally judged morally responsible for their actions. However, they may be judged responsible for almost anything—events, processes, their own psychological characteristics. Thus, a person may be judged morally responsible for ones firm’s loss of a contract, the Napoleonic wars, ones bad temper, a technique for maintaining the fertility of land, or his friend’s divorce. Under what conditions is a person responsible for one of one’s act or for some other occurrence? A person is regarded as morally responsible for some act or occurrence x if and only if one is believed to have done x, or to have brought x about; and to have gone it or brought it about freely. The concept of freedom is essential to more responsibility and will reflect one’s moral convictions, and especially one’s views about justice.  

A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing. Actions are compulsory when the cause is in the external circumstances and the agent contributes nothing and is therefore not free in the sense relevant to responsibility. The nature of free choice, the nature of human power and ability, the relevance of necessity to freedom, the role of choice, and many other issues are actually crystallized in faith in freedom of choice. However, if then all events, including any person’s decision and actions, are fully determined by circumstances which are ultimately beyond that person’s control. If this is so, then that person could not have decided or acted differently. Hence, the person was not free. Human decisions and actions are among those events which are not fully determined, those and actions occur by pure chance. However, what occurs by pure chance is not within a person’s control. Therefore, to the extent that decision and action are not determined, the person is unfree. A person is morally responsible for an action or occurrence only if one is free in that respect. Nothing is more common than to call our own condition the condition of life.