Although legal prohibitions against murder, robbery, and theft can be justified by reference to utility, some “taboos” require a different type of justification. In The Clouds, Aristophanes’s brilliant “comedy of ideas” about household debt and Socratic sophistry, the great playwright suggests that only a religious culture gives liberal rights their nonconditional status as moral imperatives.

Other Independent Review articles by William P. Baumgarth, Sr.
Spring 2019 From Red to Rainbow: The Transformation of the Left—Some Key Intellectual Sources
Summer 2015 Cigarettes, Same-Sex Marriage, and Vladimir Putin: Reflections on Carl Schmitt