Nicholas J McBride, The Humanity of Private Law – Part II: Evaluation

DOI10.3366/elr.2021.0687
Published date01 January 2021
Date01 January 2021
Pages144-145
Author

Nicholas McBride believes that Western civilization has run its course because it has adopted a flawed view of human flourishing, one that has brought material prosperity at the expense of truth. In his previous book (The Humanity of Private Law – Part I: Explanation (2018), reviewed by Claudio Michelon at (2019) 23 EdinLR 451), McBride called this picture of human flourishing the “RP”: the picture of human flourishing that most reflective people in Western liberal societies would endorse and the picture that they have received from the culture in which they live. According to the RP, a human being is flourishing the more he or she possesses certain goods such as friendship, knowledge, health, education, and so on. In that same book McBride defended at length the claim that this view of human flourishing provides the best available explanation of English private law. It was also in that book where he announced the rather surprising claim that the RP is, in fact, a fundamentally flawed conception of human flourishing. The present volume defends this claim and argues that human flourishing consists not in the possession of goods (the “RP”) but in being engaged in a quest to lead a truthful life (the “QTL”). It also considers whether and how private law should be transformed in order to fit within a...

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