Leading evangelical blogger Joe Carter acknowledges the debt today's evangelicals owe to Catholics, focusing on three areas: Mary, the sanctity of life, and ecclesiology.
Monday, March 12, 2007
What Evangelicals Owe Catholics
Personhood
Larry Solum's "legal theory lexicon" series turns its attention to the meaning of "personhood." An excerpt:
And person is sometimes defined as a "human" or "individual". But "person" has another meaning, one that distinguishes the concept of person from the concept of human. Suppose, for example, an intelligent alien species were to arrive on Earth (or humans were to encounter them elsewhere). If the members of the aliens displayed evidence of human-like intelligence and could communicate with us (e.g. were able to master a human natural language, such as English), then we might be tempted to treat members of this species as morally and/or legally entitled to the same rights as humans.
Consider, for example, the aliens Chewbacca or Yoda in the Star Wars movies. Neither Chewbacca nor Yoda is a member of the species homo sapiens, yet both are treated as the moral and legal equivalents of humans in the Star Wars universe.
Let us stipulate then, that term "human" is a biological term, which refers to all the members of the species homo sapiens and that the term "person" is a normative term, which refers to a moral and/or legal status that creatures or other bearers of human-like capacities can share with normal adult humans.
Is everyone comfortable with the terms of that stipulation?
UPDATE: As evidence of the long-term corrosive impact of blogging on brain function, my February 2006 post about Solum's "personhood" definition has apparently receded from my memory.
Generation Next
The New York Times Magazine reports on Generation Next's defiance of conventional wisdom on the two leading "culture war" issues:
Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage. Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the least Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders (with 20 percent of them professing no religion or atheism or agnosticism), it is curious that on abortion they are slightly to the right of the general public. Roughly a third of Gen Nexters endorse making abortion generally available, half support limits and 15 percent favor an outright ban. By contrast, 35 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds support readily available abortions. On gay marriage, there was not much of a generation gap in the 1980s, but now Gen Nexters stand out as more favorably disposed than the rest of the country. Almost half of them approve, compared with under a third of those over 25.
What it means is far from clear:
Liberals could take heart that perhaps homosexual marriage has replaced abortion as the new “equality issue” for Gen Nexters, suggested John Russonello, a Washington pollster whose firm is especially interested in social values; Gen Nexters may have grown up after the back-alley abortion era, but they haven’t become complacent about sexual rights. Conservatives might take comfort from a different hypothesis that [Pew Forum religion expert John] Green tried out: maybe Gen Nexters have been listening to their parents’ lectures about responsibility. Don’t do things that make you have an abortion, young people may have concluded, and do welcome everyone into the social bulwark of family responsibility.
For what it's worth, these statistics comport with my [woefully unscientific] experience with law students. Abortion is still very much a live issue; same-sex marriage, much less lively.
Response to Rob: Party Platforms and "Rules"
In response to Rob's post on whether a a Republican Party led by a pro-abortion politician would become a pro-abortion party: I thought it was fascinating that the editors framed their concerns in terms of setting "rules" and maintaining those boundaries: "Parents know that, when we make significant exceptions to significant rules, those exceptions themselves become iron-clad rules to our children. It’s the same in a political party." I wonder if this might be something of a literary key to understanding the sources of ideological polarization? It seems that if you think about the process of shaping and articulating a party platform as a process of articulating "rules" and maintaining those boundaries, that would have a significant impact not only on the choice of a party's rhetoric, but also it's capacity to imagine the more "problem-solving" dimensions of political life. Thoughts?
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Responsibility
I have read with great interest many of the recent MOJ postings that cover a wide variety of issues, and I have pondered two interrelated questions: to which do I respond; and, how do I respond? But other reports have also caught my eye in recent days. I just read several of the news reports covering the group of learned people who are predicting dire consequences for our planet and its inhabitants over the coming decades. More close to home in institutions of higher education that claim affiliation with the Church, I have read about initiatives to increase the number of opposite sex living arrangements and the distribution of condoms to enhance and protect the “rights of students in the face of reality” (I can just imagine what that means to some!).
My search for answers to the questions to which of these do I respond and how do I respond on the investigations of others concerning human rights, caritas, Catholic higher education, the economy, ecological concerns, terrorism, and on and on appeared rather hopeless until I recently decided to reply to an invitation to present a paper in a symposium on responsibility during the summer of 2008.
I have been told by some wise people who have now gone home to God that as they entered the twilight of this life, each experienced an epiphany or manifestation of sorts. While their respective contexts were diverse, each of the individuals who had mentored me raised the same question: what will your answer be to God when He seeks an accounting from you? The response is not to be one expected to please or to entertain or to win approval. It is to be truthful (we may fool others, but it is not possible to fool God or ourselves). I think some of what I am suggesting about responsibility is represented in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. When Oscar Schindler is reflecting at his twilight on what he did and what he failed to do during his life, he says: “if I had sold this, I could have bought one more life; if I had done that, I could have bought one more life…” That is the sort of human accounting that I can see in the future that each of us will face.
This seems to be an appropriate way to begin to examine the matter of responsibility—of answering to ourselves and others when an accounting of acts and omissions is expected. The direction in which I am presently headed with this reflection that has some bearing, I think, on Catholic Legal Theory is this: are we not to be held accountable for the things we did and the things we did not do but could have done in our lives before the time God has allotted us expires? I submit that the answer to this question is yes. For that is what responsibility is: answering/responding to God, our neighbors, and ourselves, who share a proper claim to an accounting of our acts and omissions. The vocation of responsibility is certainly that of each Christian, but surely it is the special vocation of those who claim to be teachers who lead others in the search for wisdom and truth—not only human, but also divine. RJA sj
"The Brain on the Stand"
Jeffrey Rosen has a long piece in today's New York Times Magazine called "The Brain on the Stand." The piece is about neuroscience, neuroimaging, law, punishment, criminal responsibility, and lots more. (It quotes, a number of times, MOJ-friend Carter Snead, whose new paper on neuroimaging and capital sentencing is available here.)
This is fascinating stuff, I think. The piece has too much going on to allow for a blog-post summary, but here's just one paragraph which jumped out at me.
“To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain,” [Harvard's Joshua] Greene says. “If that’s right, it radically changes the way we think about the law. The official line in the law is all that matters is whether you’re rational, but you can have someone who is totally rational but whose strings are being pulled by something beyond his control.” In other words, even someone who has the illusion of making a free and rational choice between soup and salad may be deluding himself, since the choice of salad over soup is ultimately predestined by forces hard-wired in his brain. Greene insists that this insight means that the criminal-justice system should abandon the idea of retribution — the idea that bad people should be punished because they have freely chosen to act immorally — which has been the focus of American criminal law since the 1970s, when rehabilitation went out of fashion. Instead, Greene says, the law should focus on deterring future harms. In some cases, he supposes, this might mean lighter punishments. “If it’s really true that we don’t get any prevention bang from our punishment buck when we punish that person, then it’s not worth punishing that person,” he says. (On the other hand, Carter Snead, the Notre Dame scholar, maintains that capital defendants who are not considered fully blameworthy under current rules could be executed more readily under a system that focused on preventing future harms.) . . .
Even as these debates continue, some skeptics contend that both the hopes and fears attached to neurolaw are overblown. “There’s nothing new about the neuroscience ideas of responsibility; it’s just another material, causal explanation of human behavior,” says Stephen J. Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “How is this different than the Chicago school of sociology,” which tried to explain human behavior in terms of environment and social structures? “How is it different from genetic explanations or psychological explanations? The only thing different about neuroscience is that we have prettier pictures and it appears more scientific.”
Morse insists that “brains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes” — a conclusion he suggests has been ignored by advocates who, “infected and inflamed by stunning advances in our understanding of the brain . . . all too often make moral and legal claims that the new neuroscience . . . cannot sustain.” . . .
Still, Morse concedes that there are circumstances under which new discoveries from neuroscience could challenge the legal system at its core. “Suppose neuroscience could reveal that reason actually plays no role in determining human behavior,” he suggests tantalizingly. “Suppose I could show you that your intentions and your reasons for your actions are post hoc rationalizations that somehow your brain generates to explain to you what your brain has already done” without your conscious participation. If neuroscience could reveal us to be automatons in this respect, Morse is prepared to agree with Greene and Cohen that criminal law would have to abandon its current ideas about responsibility and seek other ways of protecting society.
Stay tuned!
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Reply to Rick
Rick's question catches me just as I am preparing to hit the road for the better part of the next two weeks. Got to pack and take care of some odds and ends, so this will be quick. I've read the review of Lynn Hunt's book (Hunt, Rick, not Hurt), and what the reviewer (Joshua Muravchik) says seems sound to me:
To connect human rights to social history in this way is an original and interesting approach to the subject. But it is not entirely convincing. If bodily boundaries changed after the 14th century, why did a change in the perceptions of rights not happen until the 18th? Did a revulsion toward torture bring about new ideas about rights, or did the cause-and-effect relation go the other way, with a sense of rights coming first and revulsion after? Or is it possible that some third, underlying cause affected both?
Similarly, Ms. Hunt does a nice job of explaining the era's epistolary novels and their themes of empathy, but she offers no evidence of their direct connection to the emergence of human rights. Maybe "coincidental" is indeed the right word. In any case, it is hard to believe that epistolary novels were a more potent engine of empathy than the book of Genesis, which enjoins against murder on the grounds that "in the image of God made He man."
In Ms. Hunt's interpretation, our sense of rights is infinitely elastic and vulnerable to shifting emotion. She might have stopped to address the possibility--advanced by Steven Pinker and James Q. Wilson, among others--that morality has a strong genetic component. She also plays down the power of intellect in human affairs. For Jefferson's and Locke's ideas to take hold, must we assume that the 18th-century brain required some extraneous preparation? Couldn't it be that the insights and arguments of the era's great minds were forceful in themselves, playing a much greater role than "Clarissa"?
To say that the theory at the heart of Ms. Hunt's book is unpersuasive, though, is not to deny its value. Along the way, she offers a lively and informative history of human rights, even if the source of them remains something of a mystery.
In any event, we find (what I call) the morality of human rights as least as far back as the Gospels. I discuss the morality of human rights, and its religious ground, in my new book, Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts (Cambridge 2007).
Let me seize the opportunity to alert MOJ readers in the Salt Lake City area to a discussion that will take place at the University of Utah this Thursday afternoon, March 15. Fellow MOJ blogger Steve Shiffrin, Michael McConnell, and I will be discussing establishment clause issues.
Religious freedom and gay rights
The British Parliament's joint committee on human rights has issued a report that appears to call for increased (and intrusive) supervision of the content of education in private and religious schools, toward the end of making sure these schools do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Here's a bit:
In our view, the prohibitions on discrimination in the Regulations limit the manifestation of those religious beliefs and that limitation is justifiable in a democratic society for the protection of the right of gay people not to be discriminated against in the provision of goods, facilities and services. ... [T]here would be a compatibility problem if the Regulations provided for a wider exemption which expressly exempted religious bodies from the obligation not to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. ... An exemption to protect the absolute right of freedom of conscience and religion would therefore be likely to be justifiable, but not an exemption to protect the right to manifest one's conscience or religious belief, which, as we have sought to explain above, is capable of justified limitation and in our view can be justifiably limited in order to protect gay people from discrimination.
And then this:
We do not consider that the right to freedom of conscience and religion requires the school curriculum to be exempted from the scope of the sexual orientation regulations. In our view the Regulations prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination should clearly apply to the curriculum, so that homosexual pupils are not subjected to teaching, as part of the religious education or other curriculum, that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong. Applying the Regulations to the curriculum would not prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful. In our view there is an important difference between this factual information being imparted in a descriptive way as part of a wide-ranging syllabus about different religions, and a curriculum which teaches a particular religion's doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true. The latter is likely to lead to unjustifiable discrimination against homosexual pupils.
(Thanks to David Frum for the links.)
State schools, private school, and the poor in the developing world
It turns out that it is not only in America where the government's schools fail the poor, and special-interests slight the amazing achievements of private schools. Check this out.
The novel and human rights
Our fellow blogger here at MOJ, Michael Perry, has written, among other things, an important book called "The Idea of Human Rights." I'd love to get his reactions to this review, by Joshua Muravchik, of a new book by Lynn Hurt of a book called "Inventing Human Rights." The book asks, "[w]hat had happened that suddenly made the notion that 'all men are created equal and endowed with . . . unalienable rights' so resonant, both in Europe and America," in the late 18th century?
Hurt's answer? "Brain changes" -- that is, "new feelings" that were, in large part, the product of a new art form, the epistolary novel. Interesting. Michael?
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