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Article: A century of skepticism.
- Article from:
- First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Article date:
- February 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Institute on Religion and Public Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The left and the right in American legal thought are more alike than different. They are united in their skepticism, especially their skepticism concerning values. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. sounded the principal theme of twentieth-century jurisprudence when he wrote that moral preferences are "more or less arbitrary. ... Do you like sugar in your coffee or don't you? ... So as to truth." Judge Learned Hand added that values "admit of no reduction below themselves: you may prefer Dante to Shakespeare, or claret to champagne, but that ends it." Hand insisted that "our choices are underived" and that "man, and man alone, creates the universe of good and evil."
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