Moral Anthropology and the Practice of Law

Rick raises a foundational concept for this weblog, for Catholic moral anthropology speaks not only to our understanding of law as an external object of study, but for those of us who are lawyers, to our understanding of a life within the law. It is certainly out of fashion to bring a transcendent understanding of the human person into the public sphere, whether in political life or legal practice, but that is precisely the guidance given by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in its Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life. Such pronouncements are prone to caricature, so I thought it might be helpful to clarify the relevance of moral anthropology to a life in the law by highlighting the distinction drawn by the CDF between religious and moral truth in the decision-making of public actors – politicians and lawyers alike.

Observing the nature of liberal political discourse, the CDF notes that “citizens claim complete autonomy with regard to their moral choices, and lawmakers maintain that they are respecting this freedom of choice by enacting laws which ignore the principles of natural ethics and yield to ephemeral cultural and moral trends, as if every possible outlook on life were of equal value.” Catholics and other like-minded citizens are reminded to contest the “falsehood of relativism, and with it, the notion that there is no moral law rooted in the nature of the human person.”

Discerning the content of this moral law must begin by recognizing that it is not a freestanding or random collection of prohibitions, but, as indicated in Rick’s post, a comprehensive worldview that emanates from “a correct understanding of the human person.” As such, Catholic lawyers, even when entering into the secular sphere of law, are bound by certain “fundamental and inalienable ethical demands,” including demands to “defend the basic right to life from conception to natural death,” to safeguard and promote the family “in the face of modern laws on divorce,” to ensure “the freedom of parents regarding the education of their children,” to protect minors and combat “modern forms of slavery” such as drug abuse and prostitution, to contest for religious freedom and the development of an economy “that is at the service of the human person and of the common good,” to help implement the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, and to pursue peace.

But apart from these core values, the CDF does not presume that every lawyer or politician will reach the same conclusions as to the real-world ramifications of this moral anthropology. Noting that “a plurality of methodologies reflective of different sensibilities and cultures can be legitimate in approaching such questions,” the significant limitation is that “no Catholic can appeal to the principle of pluralism or to the autonomy of lay involvement in political life to support policies affecting the common good which compromise or undermine” such anthropological demands.

Crucially, in the CDF’s view, the non-negotiability of these ethical demands does not represent the illegitimate intrusion of religious dogma into the secular domain. Emphasizing that “such ethical precepts are rooted in human nature itself and belong to the natural moral law,” the CDF explains that “[t]hey do not require from those who defend them the profession of the Christian faith.” This is a necessary characteristic given “the rightful autonomy of the political or civil sphere from that of religion and the Church – but not from that of morality.”

So the moral precepts binding on the Catholic lawyer in all aspects of her identity are not coextensive with the tenets of her faith, and she need not feel compelled to mirror every nuance of her own religious beliefs in the means or ends chosen by her client. In this sense, the CDF espouses a limited value pluralism. There is no pluralism “in the choice of moral principles or essential values,” but there is a “legitimate plurality of temporal options” given the “variety of strategies available for accomplishing or guaranteeing the same fundamental value, the possibility of different interpretations of the basic principles of political theory, and the technical complexity of many political problems.” There is also, of course, a plurality of religious values in the political sphere, a plurality safeguarded by the inalienable moral right to religious liberty and freedom of conscience. This aspect of pluralism does not slide into relativism because it “is based on the ontological dignity of the human person and not on a non-existent equality among religions or cultural systems of human creation.”

Certainly the CDF has not ended the debate over how best to integrate this moral anthropology with the performance of a public function in a liberal democracy, but it has underscored that the integration is a non-negotiable endeavor for those who take seriously this conception of the human person.

Rob Vischer