Letters on Liberty: Taking Conscience Seriously

Partners:

During the pandemic, public life came to a standstill. But long before lockdowns and viruses threatened the freedoms that we hold dear, there has been a problem with our belief in liberty.

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the 21st century.

In his Letter – Taking Conscience Seriously – author Dolan Cummings argues that it is no good to simply defend conscience from overt censorship. Instead, conscience is an essential bulwark against groupthink and moral conformism. From debates about abortion to Black Lives Matter, Brexit to gay cakes, Dolan writes that there is little belief that some deeper questions are best given space away from the hurly-burly of politics – even if that’s never easy in practice.

Join Dolan and respondents to ask whether conscience should be understood as an alternative to public debate or an invaluable supplement to it? Are stereotypes about religious conscience and its limitations stifling our ability to understand one another? And does conscience matter not simply when it challenges a moral and political consensus, but especially when it does?