Horwitz on Stone on Bush's veto

Paul Horwitz has a very good post, over at Prawfsblawg, commenting on Geoffrey Stone's claim that President Bush's veto of the public-funding-for-embryo-destroying-research bill exhibited "reckless disregard for the fundamental American aspiration to keep church and state separate."  Stone writes:

What the President describes neutrally as “ethics” is simply his own, sectarian religious belief. Is this an ethical (or legitimate) basis on which a President should veto a law? Of course, Mr. Bush is entitled to his belief. He is entitled, for his own religious reasons, to choose not to donate an embryo he creates to try to save the lives of living, breathing children. More than that, he is entitled to protect the interests of others who do not want the embryos they create to be used in this manner. Thus, he could ethically veto a law that required all embryos to be destroyed in the name of scientific research, even over the religious objections of their creators. But in what sense is it “ethical” for Mr. Bush – acting as President of the United States -- to place his own sectarian, religious belief above the convictions of a majority of the American people and a substantial majority of both the House of Representatives and the Senate? In my judgment, this is no different from the President vetoing a law providing a subsidy to pork producers because eating pork offends his religious faith. Such a veto is an unethical and illegitimate usurpation of state authority designed to impose on all of society a particular religious faith.

Paul writes:

[The President's] veto statement does not speak in clearly religious terms at all.  Rather, he simply argues that the bill does not strike a proper ethical balance.  Surely the President's sense of what is ethical is substantially derived from his religious beliefs, but the same could be said, directly or indirectly, of many Americans.  And for those whose ethical beliefs are at least nominally untethered to any religious views, those of us who are non-philosophers are likely at some point to come to rest on arguments that are equally publicly inaccessible: "It's just right."  "It's just wrong." 

Unless Professor Stone thinks that we are all obliged to appeal to some form of utilitarian philosophy, or some other closely reasoned form of moral philosophy, every time we give our sense of what is ethical or unethical, I can see no reason why the President's publicly offered reasons can be seen as intrinsically "unethical."  And if I am wrong, then I would expect that Professor Stone would demand the same level of reason-giving from any legislator who voted for the stem cell bill on the basis that encouraging medical research is the "ethical" thing to do, or simply "the right thing to do."

Politicians may justifiably suffer if they offer reasons for their actions that satisfy only a narrow band of the public; one of the political benefits of publicly accessible reasons is that they enable public officials to retain the support of larger coalitions of voters.  But Professor Stone seems ultimately to argue that there is something unethical or illegitimate not just in speaking in religious terms, but in having religious motivations, and acting on them, regardless of what reasons the public official gives publicly.  That, I think, is altogether too expansive a view of "the separation of church and state."  I may think the President's veto was wrong, but it certainly was not wrong for those reasons.

It seems to me that Professor Stone, like many others, assumes that an objection to public funding of research involving the destruction of human embryos is -- and could only be -- a "religious" or "sectarian" one. It is not the case, though, that the arguments against such funding require, or always involve, recourse to revelation. I am starting to think that *all* moral claims -- e.g., "it is wrong to deny equal protection of the laws on the basis of race" -- are, in the end, "religious" arguments, but put that aside. The claim that there is something about a human embryo such that its destruction for research purposes ought not to be funded by the government -- whether we are moved by it or not -- is not, it seems to me, any more "religious" than any other argument about how human persons ought to be treated.