I want to echo Patrick's praise of the incredible conference organized by Bill Wagner's Center for Law, Philosophy and Culture at Catholic University last week. I am, frankly, still reeling from the experience of hearing, seeing, and learning from so many of the brilliant writers & theologians whose work I've been reading for years now, all addressing different aspects of one of MOJ's central questions -- IS there a "common morality", is there a language or mode of thought in which persons of different or no faiths can even argue about fundamental issues of morality?
CUA has generously posted streaming video of the entire conference in their electronic calendar. You can see the program for the conference here, and choose the date and time for whatever talk you'd like to watch.
Some of my personal highlights were (of course) Patrick Brennan's elegant and trenchant response to Kathryn Tanner's talk about socio-cultural practices that keep us open to moral insight; listening to and watching the interaction between Gilbert Meilaender and Stanley Hauerwas; Robert George's defense of a natural law theory of human rights; Jean Bethke Elshtain's exploration of the application of the just war theory under Christian theology's claim that the distinction between justice owed to those inside the "polis" differs from justice owed to those outside ought to be abolished; and the contrasts and commonalities in Michael Sandel's arguments about the morality of engineering children and Hadley Arkes' comparison of the intellectual move to define "personhood" to exclude slaves in the 18th century with the current application of the concept of personhood to fetuses and disabled infants.
I found the most fascinating thread running through so many of these talks to be the theme of the Conference's subtitle: "In Gratitude for What We Are Given." Thomas Hibbs' exploration of the connection between Aquinas' metaphysics of creation and his account of the virtue of gratitude laid out for me most clearly what I think is a very serious question about the project of the conference (and MOJ). Underlying the most robust notions of justice and equality is some element of gratitude -- some recognition that all we have is a GIFT, that we've done nothing to earn the most significant aspects of our particular situations in life -- the age or country or family into which we are born, our genders, our capacities, our races, etc. But, (paraphrasing Hibb's account of Aquinas, from my hastily-scribbled notes) in the absence of some understanding of the "giver", it is hard to talk about gift. My question is, if we don't share some common notion of that giver -- of God -- can we really share an understanding of our lives as gift? If not, what does that mean for some of our equality-based theories of justice?
These papers will be an extraordinary resource, but if you have some time, do yourself a HUGE favor and make some time to watch some of those talks. This was really an incredible conference.
