Speaking for Dwyer . . .

I hesitate to speak for someone else, but let me take up Michael S.'s question to James Dwyer regarding the anthropology underlying Prof. Dwyer's embrace (and aggressive enforcement) of liberal education norms, even as applied to religious schools.  My guess is that Prof. Dwyer's first aim would be to educate the child in a way that facilitates her choosing of her own anthropological premises later in life; in this regard, his project does not necessarily ignore the nature of the human person, but recognizes the multitude of divergent anthropological premises to which Americans cling.  In a broad sense, he does embrace a type of anthropology, albeit one that is arrived at via the "head count" method employed by Prof. Leiter.  Prof. Dwyer writes in the current Journal of Catholic Legal Studies (vol. 44 at 225):

I would suggest that state conclusions about moral rights and duties emerge from perceiving an overlapping consensus among people holding diverse conceptions of the good, a consensus around principles that can be explained in terms of shared values like happiness, autonomy, and respect for personhood that are generally viewed today as not requiring reference to religious texts or divine authority for their legitimacy and force. . . . The more general principle that no person should be made the object of another's rights, a principle that we today apply even to non-autonomous persons who are adults, I have argued, should also be applied to children.  At the most basic level, the state and private parties should treat every person as an end in himself or herself, and not as an instrument for the expression or gratification of others, no matter how well intentioned those others are.

Now I may disagree with some of the particular educational practices that Prof. Dwyer would find objectionable under this "thin" anthropology (and the degree of enforcement contemplated), but I must also acknowledge a sense of hesitation and discomfort if the state were to adopt anthropological premises much more specific and contested than the ones Prof. Dwyer lays out.  That's why I find his work to be so insightful and challenging.

Rob