The "Common Ground" Gathering; the Court's Recent Death Penalty Decision

I have nothing to add to Mark's posting below (March 7) about this past weekend's gathering in DC, except to highlight something Mark said in which I strongly concur and which merits emphasis:

    "[One often hears, frequently] from the right, ... that the [Consistent Ethic of Life] is philosophically and theologically incoherent because abortion involves a fundamental evil, a primordial affront to life, while the other values all involve prudential decisions about which people can disagree reasonably, i.e. the non-equivalence argument. We spent some time talking about this (tho not enough). I think part of the response is that there are at least some prudential issues to be considered by both citizens and lawmakers as to how the moral evil of abortion is to be handled as a matter of law in a pluralistic democracy, and that the questions of just war, capital punishment, amelioration of poverty involve the principle of life in such a way that not all disagreements can be dismissed as reasonable prudential disagreements. So there is more equivalence than is assumed by critics on the right. Furthermore, the argument that all of these issues are not 'equivalent' in importance, even if true, does not mean that they are not linked by the principle of life in a way that requires a consistent approach to them all."

    In his posting below (March 8) on the idea of a Seamless Garment Party, Rick asserts that the Supreme Court's recent death penalty decision was "raw, unprincipled, intellectually flabby, anti-democratic judicial posturing".  I have enormous respect for Rick--I wish he were my colleague--but I strongly disagree with his judgment (and with the language with which he makes it).   And, eventually, in something I plan to write, I'll explain why I disagree with Rick's judgment.  But for now I just wanted to register here my own judgment that the Court reached the right--the constitutionally right--result.   Of course, for a constitutional scholar to say this is rarely for him or her to say that the Court's opinion  was ideal.

mp