My former student, Matt Emerson, has a new essay up at Patheos, called "A Return to Repugnance," in which he reflects on his own reactions to the recent stories about "reducing" twins in the womb. He writes:
. . . The old arguments—quarreling over Roe, debating about viability, debating the onset of "personhood"—seemed outmatched and outdated. Something had changed, and drastically.
The conviction hit me: We had arrived. We had arrived at the future we were cautioned about, the place where human life had no value except as a field of experimentation, where men and women manufactured life like canned food. Here, in this new place, unborn babies are called "singletons" and willful killing excites all the moral energy of selling a home.
You have to read the article to begin to absorb how bad things have become. . .
Matt then quotes from Leon Kass's famous essay, "The Wisdom of Repugnance":
In crucial cases . . . repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human flesh, or . . . raping or murdering another human being? Would anybody's failure to give full rational justification for his or her revulsion at these practices make that revulsion ethically suspect? Not at all. On the contrary, we are suspicious of those who think that they can rationalize away our horror, say, by trying to explain the enormity of incest with arguments only about the genetic risks of inbreeding.
I understand the criticism of "yuck factor" arguments: "If you cannot give a reason, then that must be because your position is a weak one. After all, that's what we human beings do. We give reasons -- reasons for or against action." Martha Nussbaum and others have offered related criticisms of what they regard as unjustified morals legislation, e.g., that they rely on "disgust." To be sure, that something is unfamiliar, unsettling, provocative, etc., does not mean it's wrong or to-be-proscribed. And yet, in my view, given that we human beings are the kind of beings that we are, and assuming that we think it matters, morally, that we are the kind of beings that we are, there continues to be, as Kass suggested, some "wisdom" in repugnance.
Monday, September 19, 2011
SPREAD THE WORD:
On May 2-4, 2012, Touro Law Center will host the biennial Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools. The Conference will explore a variety of important issues related to the general theme of "The Place of Religion in the Law School, the University, and the Practice of Law. " Specific topics of discussion will include, among others: the relationship between the religiously affiliated law school and the university; bringing religion into the classroom; law and religion programs and institutes; and the role of religion in the work of public interest lawyers.
Along with the formal Conference proceedings, there will be time for informal discussions among participants, on these and other issues of common interest.
In addition, Touro Law Center will help facilitate opportunities for participants (and accompanying family members) to enjoy New York culture and entertainment, both during the Conference and in the weekend that follows.
For more information on the conference, please contact Professor Samuel J.
Levine: [email protected]. For information on Touro Law Center, please see http://www.tourolaw.edu/ <https://legacy.tourolaw.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=https://legacy.tourola
w.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.tourolaw.edu/>
Friday, September 16, 2011
My friend and colleague, Chris Smith, was the subject of a recent David Brook's op-ed, to which Marc linked recently. Here's Chris, in Huffington Post, on the phenomenon of "liberal whateverism":
This outlook reacts against sectarian conflict by dramatically discounting the claims of religion. The more aggressive side of this view asserts that religion per se is pernicious and should be eliminated or radically privatized. The more accommodating side says religion is fine as a personal lifestyle commodity, but that religious inclinations are ultimately arbitrary and should not be taken too seriously. . . .
. . . I think we need to reject both sectarian conflict and liberal whateverism and commit ourselves instead to an authentic pluralism. Genuine pluralism fosters a culture that honors rather than isolates and disparages religious difference. It affirms the right of others to believe and practice their faith, not only in their private lives but also in the public square -- while expecting them to allow still others to do the same. Authentic pluralism does not minimize religious differences by saying that "all religions are ultimately the same." That is false and insipid. Pluralism encourages good conversations and arguments across differences, taking them seriously precisely because they are understood to be about important truths, not merely private "opinions." It is possible, authentic pluralism insists, to profoundly disagree with others while at the same time respecting, honoring, and perhaps even loving them. Genuine pluralism suspects the multi-cultural regime's too-easy blanket affirmations of "tolerance" of being patronizing and dismissive. Pluralism, however, also counts atheist Americans as deserving equal public respect, since their beliefs are based as much on a considered faith as are religious views and so should not be automatically denigrated.
At Public Discourse, Chris Tollefsen has an essay that should -- given his treatment of the moral-anthropology question that is necessarily at the heart of any legal-theory enterprise -- be of interest. Tollefsen argues, among other things, that what he calls the "Essential Dignity" view -- i.e., the view that human beings possess "essential, underived, or intrinsic dignity . . . in virtue of the kind of being they are" -- supports (and, if I read him correctly, requires) the conclusion: "no intentional killing of human beings."
Chris is comfortable in action-theory waters that are too deep for me. That said, it seems to me that the "no intentional killing, ever" rule requires a stylized definition of "intentional" -- one that does not include, say, shooting a charging enemy soldier (in, let's assume, the context of a just war) in the chest. (The idea, as I understand it, is that a soldier does not, or need not, "intentionally" kill, because his or her "intent" may be, and should be, to disable, and not to kill.) Also, it is not obvious to me that the Essential Dignity view necessarily includes or travels with a rule that it is per se wrong to intentionally kill a human being. Tollefsen engages closely the claim that a human being may, by virtue of having lost or alienated his or her dignity, deserve to be killed and therefore may be killed. But, could it be that a person may deserve to be killed, and therefore may be killed, without losing or alienating his or her essential dignity? I have always appreciated the argument, in C.S. Lewis's little essay, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, that respect for the dignity of human beings should lead us to punish those (and only those) who deserve it. (And so, again, the question is whether capital punishment a permissible sanction for those who deserve to be punished.)
Like I said . . . deep waters! (By the way, and in case it matters, unlike both Gov. Perry and Pres. Obama, I oppose capital punishment.) And, I have tried to explore, in this paper, the implications for the capital-punishment debate of what Blessed Pope John Paul II called the "moral truth about the human person."
Thursday, September 15, 2011
MOJ-friend Aidan O'Neill has started, with some of his colleagues, a new blog on EU law and policies. It's called "eutopialaw" (St. Thomas More!). Check it out!
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The most recent issue of Commonweal includes a conversation among Peter Steinfels, Dennis O'Brien, and my colleague Cathy Kaveny about the morality and regulation of abortion.
O'Brien insists, as others sometimes do, that strong opposition to abortion (such as that expressed by those called to serve and lead the Catholic Church) is rendered less convincing by the fact that most who strongly oppose abortion are, in O'Brien's view, reluctant to use the law to punish those who perform or procure abortions in the same way as those who intentionally kill persons who have been born. I've never thought this was a powerful argument, and Steinfels does a good job of responding to it.
In Cathy's essay, she helpfully reminds her readers of something that, in my experience, is often forgotten in the abortion debate, namely, the radical character of the Roe decision, and the extent to which it is Roe, more than the witness of those Bishops with whom O'Brien apparently disagrees, that has made it so hard to "talk about" abortion.
There's more . . . Check it out.
regulate abortion in the same way that
