Roger Scruton spent his career as a conservative philosopher in the overwhelmingly left-wing world of British academia. His colleagues reviled him, many grudgingly conceding he was a brilliant and original thinker. In what looks like a throwaway line, Scruton observed that:
“Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”
It’s a devastating diagnosis. What Scruton identified is something deeper and stranger than a political position: that what matters when evaluating a claim about reality is the moral worth of the person making it. In this view, to be right-wing is to be evil, and any claim made from that position is merely an expression of the same.
Of course, conservatives also recognise moral distinctions between good and evil. The difference is that, like Scruton, they are less lik…