"Prudential Judgment" Conference Report, I

The conference on "Prudential Judgment, Public Policy, and the Catholic Social Tradition," put on by the Murphy Institute at St. Thomas, was held this weekend.  If I do say so myself, it was a very interesting conference, and I hope a precedent for further systematic reflection on the matter of prudential judgments vs. fundamental principles, and the associated question of lay vs. magisterial primacy in addressing any given issue. 

I'll do two or three posts about different aspects of the conference.  The first day featured, among other things, two pretty much polar-opposite papers concerning the scope of the category of judgments that ought to be called prudential and left primarily to the laity and to political leaders rather than to bishops.  In his keynote address, Chris Wolfe (Political Science, Marquette) emphasized that although the magisterium has power to make particular political judgments, it should exercise caution and do so only sparingly.  Chris argued that because (among other things) policy issues are factually complex, the bishops have limited competence in many areas, and the laity should be energized (through taking responsibility in their fields of expertise) rather than enervated, the bishops should usually place much more emphasis on forming the laity spiritually and morally than on taking policy positions.  On a later plenary panel, Michael Baxter (Theology, Notre Dame) gave a paper called "The Trouble With Prudence":  the trouble, in his view, is that treating issues as "prudential" easily degenerates into a device for setting some moral problems aside (whether abortion or unjust war) in order to achieve one's overall preferred moral-policy goals (whether left or right).  He called on Catholics to be plain speaking in naming evil, to be more disciplined in avoiding cooperation with evil, and to renounce political utopianism that leads one to justify evil in the name of promoting an ideal such as democracy or freedom.

Just a couple of my own reactions on these points.  First, I appreciated Michael's warnings about the dangers of the category of prudential judgments degenerating into crude "end justifies means" analyses.  At the same time, however, there are plainly powerful arguments for making a choice for one imperfect political alternative over another, at least when the only other option seems to be a practical inability to promote justice in the political sphere at all (in anything other than the very long run).  This raises long-running issues in Christian ethics about "realism" vs. "faithfulness," whether Christians should "take responsibility" in the political sphere, and what precisely "taking responsibility" means.  But wherever one stands on that debate (my own view is pretty significantly "realist"), I don't think that urging Christians to renounce political utopianism gets one very far in resolving these questions.  One plainly can support one political party or the other without buying into a utopian view of what that party offers.  Indeed, a Christian can be driven to choose one political alignment over another not because it offers a utopia, but because there are no utopias in this fallen world and we are called to achieve what justice we can.

On the other hand, the embrace of a broad category of prudential questions by a number of conservatives could lead, I think, to a kind of "blowback" effect on issues like same-sex marriage or abortion.  For example, surely there are some complex factual questions involved in assessing whether recognizing same-sex marriage will harm traditional marriage or possibly even bolster it (at least when, as Jonathan Rauch has argued, a likely long-run alternative seems to be a broad embrace of non-marital civil unions that may undercut marriage more).  If we treat the category of prudential judgments seriously and broadly, why wouldn't the marriage issue also be significantly prudential in nature and thus appropriate for lay leadership based on the laity's greater expertise?

Consider also that among the conservative arguments for calling a lot of issues prudential -- and thus leaving them to the politicians and policymakers -- is that when the bishops pronounce on too many specific policy questions, they lose their credibility to speak on the foundational ones like abortion.  This assessment may well be true, but it seems itself to be prudential in nature, and surely arguments can be made the other way.  The willingness of the bishops to speak boldly on other issues of life and dignity, from the death penalty to immigration to others, could easily bolster their credibility on abortion among many Americans who would otherwise dismiss them as simply anti-women reactionaries.  Conversely, the silence of the bishops on those other issues could hurt their credibility on abortion; and criticism of the bishops' competence and judgment on the other issues -- including denigration of the idea that they might speak "prophetically" in those areas -- could lead to a questioning of their competence, judgment, and ability to speak prophetically on any case, including on abortion.

My own view on principles vs. prudence is similar to what Mark argued in his fine article for the St. Thomas pro-life progressivism symposium:  It's a mistake to divide the world into two widely diverging categories of principle-based issues, on which the bishops must simply be followed, and prudence-based issues, on which the bishops should be silent.  In fact, all the main issues on the political agenda today contain significant elements of both fundamental principle and prudential judgment, even if the fundamentals constrain decisionmaking more in some cases than in others.  Indeed, as both natural-law and more "realistic" Protestant moral theologies recognize, between the fundamental principles and the case-specific prudential judgments typically lie a series of intermediate moral principles, more contingent and revisable than the broad fundamentals but less contingent and revisable than the specific judgments.

Tom