Autonomy, Not Separatism

In light of Michael Scaperlanda's thoughtful response to my previous post, I'd like to clarify what I mean when I propose that we shift the focus of cultural engagement from top-down impositions of the common good to carving out spheres of communal autonomy in which alternative visions of the good can operate.

First, I agree with Michael that intolerant liberalism cannot allow alternative visions of the good; we see this not only in the newspaper column that sparked my previous post, but in the Catholic Charities case, not to mention even more blatant instances like the French ban on religious garb in schools. I don't propose that we just cloister ourselves and allow this strain of liberalism to run free, but rather that we seek to turn intolerant liberalism into a conception of governance more in keeping with value pluralism. (In this regard, William Galston's value pluralism is more promising than John Gray's).

Second, hesitating to enforce the common good through the imposition of collective norms does not suggest that we separate from society. Indeed, I think cultural engagement can be more robust when those doing the engaging speak prophetically, rather than from the seat of power. Catholic teaching's transformative power is most clearly evidenced within the human person, not the legislative corridors. So far from proposing that we separate from society, I propose that we invest ourselves more deeply in it -- we should be targeting the hearts and minds of our neighbors, not with the aim of capturing the mechanisms of collective power, but with the aim of changing lives.

Third, this conception of the common good is not simply a concession to political reality, but reflects a fundamental premise of subsidiarity, in my view. Subsidiarity calls for the localization of authority in society. For this localization to have any real-world significance, local bodies must have the freedom to defy the surrounding society's conception of the good; otherwise, local bodies are only given power to act as agents of the collective.

Fourth, I do not mean that contested moral questions are never an appropriate subject for state action. Indeed, some contested moral questions can only be answered at the state level. Abortion is an example where the question is not so much whether an individual will be precluded from pursuing alternative visions of the good, but whether certain individuals have standing even to enter into the pursuit of any vision of the good. If we don't answer the question at the state level -- opting instead to give individuals freedom to abort or not abort as they see fit -- that question of standing has already been answered conclusively in the negative.

But on other contested moral questions -- the criminal prohibition on same-sex sodomy, for example -- creating binding legal norms based on one vision of the good is clearly inappropriate, in my view. Bringing the coercive power of the state to bear on citizens who dissent from that vision not only implicates the dignity of those citizens, but it turns subsidiarity into an empty vessel by eviscerating the localizing impetus, validating local authority only to the extent that it comports with an anthropologically authentic conception of the good. Because the validation will hinge on whatever conception of the good is held by those in power, we're back to the problem of subsidiarity as simply a cover theory for the collective to use local agents to pursue its (and only its) vision of the good.

Rob