Dwyer: A Response to Rob

Thanks Rob for your comments on Dwyer.  The discussion about Dwyer’s views of child-raising overlaps nicely with recent discussions about a) the human rights, revelation, and natural law, and b) the destruction of embryos to harvest their stem cells.

Point 1.  Rob says that Dwyer’s “project does not necessarily ignore the nature of the human person, but recognizes the multitude of divergent anthropological premises to which Americans cling.”  My response is:  who or what is a “human person” that she is entitled to respect even if she holds anthropological premises divergent from the prevalent norms.  A Catholic anthropology has an answer to this question, but I don’t think secular liberalism (including Dwyer) has an answer to this question.  Rorty and Arthur Leff expose the nakedness of the secularist’s response.  In other words, Dwyer’s conception of the human person is so thin that it doesn’t provide a firm foundation for protecting society’s weak and marginalized, including the children he would like to “protect” by his radical shift toward a statist model for child-rearing.

Point 2.   Dwyer says that “moral rights and duties emerge from perceiving an overlapping consensus among people holding diverse conceptions of the good.” Journal of Catholic Legal Studies (vol. 44 at 225).  Are religious voices –whether expressed in terms of faith or reason – excluded from the development of Dwyer’s consensus?  Dwyer’s whole project seems aimed at eliminating religiously grounded conceptions of the good from informing or forming the consensus.  Like Leiter, he rules faith-based arguments out of bounds. (And, if his plan for a secularist takeover of childrearing is successful, one would expect that the ranks of the religious would diminish over the generations).  Dwyer also dismisses natural law arguments:  “An argument somewhat akin to, and often ‘code’ for, an argument based on divine command is one based on natural law or natural rights.  Many people, recognizing that no one will be persuaded if they base a claim on an assertion that ‘my god says so,’ translate that assertion into one that ‘nature says so.’” 

Id.

at 219.  Unless I am mistaken, Dwyer, with his extremely thin conception of the human person (which I said in Point 1 doesn’t even provide a firm foundation for his own project), would exclude all of us on MOJ from participating in the development of an “overlapping consensus” unless and until we renounced the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (rooted in faith and reason) as the foundation for our work.

Am I overreacting?  As to point 1?  Point 2?  Jim, I’d still love for you to weigh in.

Michael S.