Here is an essay, "How Can Religious People Explain Something Like This?", in the Guardian, that tackles the question to which Rob and Susan have been speaking. The author, Martin Kettle, asks:
[I]t is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world.
Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike.
A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?
From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?
I agree with Kettle that we are all obligated to take seriously the challenges that real-world-facts present to even our most cherished beliefs. And, it would take an awfully uncurious Christian to pretend that death-dealing disasters like this week's tsunamis do not raise questions and even doubts. At the same time, it seems to fair to ask that those, like Mr. Kettle, who challenge Christians, on the occasion of such disasters, to re-examine their foundational beliefs in a benign, personal, providential God be no less willing to look critically at their own foundational premises, which might -- on examination -- prove no less vulnerable in the face of the hard "facts."
Rick
Update: Here is another take -- from a blogger who is "worr[ied]" about the MOJ bloggers -- writing in response to Rob's post.
Update: Amy Welborn also links to Rob's post, and there are lots of comments.
Rick raises the interesting question of whether I am throwing the (useful) Law & Econ baby out with the dishwater. I guess I need to be more precise about what aspect of Law & Econ I see as in conflict with the intellectual tradition of which Catholic Legal Theory is a part. I certainly have little quarrel with the descriptive, analytical elements of economics. Many of those elements -- the concept of efficiency, rent-seeking, the principal-agent problem, the prisoners's dimemma etc. -- "ought to be in the toolkit of any self-respecting social or political theorist," as the political philosopher Don Herzog has put it. And certainly there is nothing in the Aristotelian-Aquinian tradition which would preclude the appropriate use of such concepts. There is indeed nothing Catholic about inefficiency (although those of us in Catholic universities may wonder!). The difficulty, however, is the radical extension of economic concepts such as utility maximization, rational choice and social welfare as prescriptive, normative devices into the traditional province of political philosophy and jurisprudence. Many others have criticized severely the accuracy of the utility maximization principle as a means of modeling human behavior(see, eg, Amartya Sen, "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory," 6 Phil & Pub. Affairs 317 (1977)), so I won't belabor that here (though, see also, Don Herzog, "Externalities and Other Parasites". 67 U. Chi. L. Rev. 895 (2000), "[T]here is no reason to cast utility maximization, or preference satisfaction or the methodical pursuit of self interest, or any such category as the really real, the motor driving human action.") What I want to point out is that economics' assumption that ends (or preferences) are essentially irrelevant, or matters of indifference, and that all that matters is finding ways of satisfying preferences efficiently, is what flies in the face of our tradition, particularly when the assumption is applied to legal problems outside of market contexts. And L & Econ theorists are entirely aware of this conflict, indeed they trumpet it. See for example, Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Fairness Versus Welfare (2002), where it is argued that the pursuit of morally-based notions of fairness rather than welfare results in a pernicious reduction of individuals' well-being (or utility), and sometimes results in everyone being worse off (in terms of their own utility). Posner's critique of Rawls and Dworkin and other academic philosophers I think shares some of this, as does the argument he makes in the Leiter post quoted by Mike Perry below. All the things Posner lists are disfavored, not because they are intrinsically bad or evil, but because there are social norms or conventions that have defined them as such. In economist's terms, they are just preferences shared by lots of people. It is this determined refusal to meditate upon ends that distinguishes this prescriptive, normative aspect of the law and economics enterprise from the tradition of which Catholic legal theory is a part. I'm not making an argument here about which is right or wrong. I am just saying they are different, and that this difference is not obliterated by the usefulness of many economic concept as tools of analysis. I agree with Rick on their usefulness, but that does not diminish my sense of conflict on a different level.
-Mark
For what it's worth: When Bernard Lonergan came to decide how to spend his last intellectually productive years, he was deciding between Christology and economics, the latter of which had been an interest of his for four decades. The result of the decision he made is volume 15 in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis. Some of his earlier work in economics is collected in vol. 21 of the CW: For a New Political Ecomony. In part II ("Healing and Creating in History") of vol 15 (at p. 105) Longergan writes: "If we are to escape [the collapse of our civilization], we must demand that two requriements be met. The first regards economic theorists; the second regards moral theorists. From economic theorists we have to demand, along with as many other types of analysis as they please, a new and specific type that reveals how moral precepts have both a basis in economic process and so an effective application to it. From moral theorists we have to demand, along with their various other forms of wisdom and prudence, specifically economic precepts that arise out of economic process itself and promote its proper functioning." What made Lonergan's particular approach to economics possible and exigent, he explained, was his discovery that the Thomistic tradition he inherited had been closed and static; Lonergan's economics has as its aim the expansion of being in (salvation) history. For Lonergan, any adequate Christian political theory must include an economics aimed at efficient creation and just distribution of all the goods necessary for human life and increase.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the tsunami disaster over the last day or so, which, as Rob suggest in his reference to the Christmas season, is particularly poignant as we gaze upon the creche, and even more so today as we celebrate the feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. (More than 10,000 of those killed....probably a lot more....have been children.)
Rob's post says if we want our project to be taken seriously we must try to offer an explanation of a world in which tsunamis rip children from their mother's arms. I'm not sure it is possible to offer an explanation that would be accepted by the critics.
It is true, as Rob suggests, that many people view an appeal to the mystery of God as a cop-out. Yet part of understanding and accepting that we are creations of God is understanding and accepting that we are not God and that there are things we will never understand. Things like this disaster may fall into that category. (If there is a better answer to this than mystery of God, I've yet to find it. Death, disease and destruction that are the product of individual and group sin are easy to understand. I don't know how to make sense of this and I agree with Rob's criticism of the other common response about creation falling with humanity. If others have better explanations, I'll be grateful to hear their thoughts.) Part of God's invitation to us is: will you walk with me even if you don't understand.
Now, I fully accept that is difficult to make the foregoing persuasive to someone without belief. But the reality is what it is, and we can't simply make up something more acceptable.
I don't think, however, that the fact that natural disasters cause the death of many people prevents us from insisting on the theologically grounded dignity of the human person. Our dignity comes from being created in the image of God, and our creation in God's image is not changed by the fact that God lets innocents be killed, as God allowed God's own innocent Son be killed. And God weeps along with us at their deaths and at the suffering of those left behind.
Susan
The tsunamis that have spawned mind-boggling human suffering across Asia represent perhaps the most difficult challenge to the anthropological presumptions driving the project that we've undertaken on Mirror of Justice. How can we insist on the theologically grounded dignity of the human person when the natural order itself appears to defy such dignity? Nature's challenge is especially poignant during this Christmas season, as the divine concern for humanity promised by the Incarnation seems relatively meaningless given the utter absence of concern embodied in the shifting of the earth's plates deep under the ocean.
Clinging to a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good deity appears hopeless in the wake of these deadly waves. Invoking human free will offers little help, as the earthquake (unlike all war, much famine, and many diseases) is not causally related to any human act or omission. Chalking it up to the mystery of God is understandably seen as a cop-out. Another common response is to insist that creation fell along with humanity, and this world is obviously not as God desired. But why would God have wired the earth itself to unleash death and destruction once humanity rejected Him? Murder is a human creation; plate tectonics are not. Is not God culpable for earthquakes? And if God is culpable, is not the entire Christian worldview proved to be the illogical relic portrayed by critics?
It seems to me that if we want a moral anthropology rooted in the Incarnation to be taken seriously, we must try to offer an explanation of a world in which tsunamis rip children from their mothers' arms. This is an age-old question, but it must lie at the heart of any effort to engage a culture made skeptical of our "Catholic legal theory" project, at least in part, by pervasive human suffering seemingly caused by the God we embrace.
So I'll ask readers and co-bloggers: What do we have to say for God (and ourselves)?
Rob
