What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

J. Budziszewski’s newest book is about the lost world of common truths—what we all really know about right and wrong.

We are passing through an eerie phase of history. The things that everyone really knows are treated as unheard of, and the principles of decency are attacked as indecent. Exposing the emptiness of contemporary moral fashions, Budziszewski explores the rules of human conduct that we can’t not know.

Budziszewski’s purpose is to "bolster the confidence of plain people in the rational foundations of their common moral sense." He shows that certain moral truths—"as real as arithmetic"—are part of the equipment of a rational mind. They are not only true for all, but at some level known to all. Yet, paradoxically, they are under attack. He explains why.

Addressing "the persuaded, the half-persuaded, and the wish-I-were-persuaded," Budziszewski shows the unanimity of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions about these common truths. But what about the unpersuaded—those who deny the reality of the moral law, who are on the other side of the great dispute over the basic norms for human life? Civility, he insists, does not require that this unprecedented gulf be papered over. What’s needed are charity and clarity, which he provides in abundance.

"A few times in a generation, if we are fortunate, moral intelligence finds a voice as lucid, engaging, and relentless as that of J. Budziszewski," says Richard John Neuhaus, publisher of First Things.

J. BUDZISZEWSKI is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Revenge of Conscience, Written on the Heart, and numerous other works of scholarship in political philosophy, as well as a book for students, How to Stay Christian in College.