It is an assumption that there is always one single dimension for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority. This is the dimens… - Raymond Geuss

To the extent to which the pull that moves me really is irresistible, like an invincibly strong addiction, the normal procedures of evaluation, deliberation, choice, decision, etc. that constitute the substance of our political life are not operating. The same is true of overwhelming aversion. The person being tortured who simply wants it to stop, period, is also not a good model for an agent acting politically.

When we use a tool in everyday life, it usually remains a detached instrument under my control and activated only when, where, and how I decide. … In contrast, conceptual innovations often “stick,” escape our control and become part of reality itself. Once Hobbes invents the idea of the “state” this idea can come into contact with real social forces with unforeseeable results. The “tool” develops a life of its own, and can become an inextricable part of the fabric of life itself.

The Tories are bright enough to realize they cannot get away with a frontal attack on the principle of universal provision of health services "free at the point of delivery" because it is so obviously in the interest of everyone who is not a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company or an insurance firm, so the plans seems to be to change the internal administrative structure of the health services so as gradually and imperceptibly to siphon away potentially highly profitable medical services to private organizations on a variety of specious grounds, leaving a skeleton public structure that is responsible only for less immediately profitable forms of provision. This public structure can then be expected to collapse of its own weight, thereby seeming to validate self-fulfilling claims about the inherent superiority of the private sphere over the public.