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Utopia

The Better-Best Fallacy

Toni Vogel Carey argues that perfection is over-rated.

As American graduating students know, cum laude is good, but magna is better, and summa is best. That said, the good-better-best relation is not as simple as it seems. Better turns out to be better than we have supposed, while perfection gets only mixed reviews.

In a way, this is a story about the high road versus the low. Set, as you might expect, in Scotland, its characters are mostly Scottish Enlightenment philosophers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, et al.

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