1. Conspiracy Theories
Edward Feser is a teacher of and writer on philosophy, who has written a couple of articles on 'conspiracy theories', one on the counterknowledge website, one not.
Feser summarises his views on the possibility of treasonable or similarly criminal conspiracies carried out by members of the government and government agencies as follows:
First, that while conspiracies of a small-scale nature do sometimes occur, the nature of modern bureaucracies makes it practically impossible for would-be conspirators secretly and effectively to engineer anything on the scale of a 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenario. Second, while liberal democratic societies are capable of great evil, the adversarial nature of their institutions and the diverse ends and belief systems of the people staffing these institutions make it practically impossible for would-be conspirators to organize enough relevant personnel to do evil of the specific sort involved in 9/11 “inside job” or JFK assassination scenarios. Third, the scale of deception posited in conspiracy scenarios of this scale is so all-encompassing that it effectively undermines the very evidential base that conspiracy theorists themselves must rely on to support their theories.
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