Patrick's post, responding to mine, makes me worry and regret that I was unclear, and gave the impression that I think "[d]emocratically pedigreed enactments can[] reduce what is God's by right." I don't. My statement that "in a democracy, requests for 'conscience'-based exemptions from validly enacted regulations, are almost always requests for concessions, for toleration, and not claims of right" was intended only as a description of what seems to in fact "go on" as requests for conscience-based exemptions are processed by the relevant political authority. But, I can see that I didn't say very well what I meant to say. So, I agree with Patrick, though I also think (maybe he does not?) that, in fact, the political authority grants requests for conscience-based exemptions when that authority decides that it is not costly to do so and not really because it thinks it is required, by virtue of the claimant's "right", to do so.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Conscience and "concession": A response to Patrick
More on "Institutional Conscience"
Like Rob, I am at a very interesting conference / consultation at Princeton's Witherspoon Institute, with a group that is exploring the challenge of protecting "institutional conscience." And, like Rob, I wonder how helpful, and accurate, the language of "conscience" is for dealing with threats to the character, integrity, and freedom of associations, institutions, and churches. Putting aside, though, for now, my reservations, I am also wrestling with the uncomfortable thought that, at the end of the day, in a democracy, requests for "conscience"-based exemptions from validly enacted regulations, are almost always requests for concessions, for toleration, and not claims of right. This is because the regulation in question will usually reflect the judgment of the political community about what is moral, or in the service of the common good, and so the political community can realistically only be expected to extend a "conscience"-based exemption if it believes that the "costs" of the exemption to its project -- that is, the project it is trying to pursue through the regulation -- are not too great.
In any event, MOJ-er Michael Moreland and Prof. Steve Smith will be giving papers today about church autonomy, freedom of association, and the freedom of the church. Stay tuned!
Thursday, June 2, 2011
"Engaging with Stanley Hauerwas"
This looks like a great event!
Theological Argument in Law: Engaging With Stanley Hauerwas
Duke University School of Law
September 9, 2011
Topical Essays:
* Hauerwas and Legal Ethics, W. Bradley Wendel (Cornell)
* Hauerwas and Disability Law, Elizabeth R. Schiltz (St. Thomas)
* Hauerwas and Bioethics, Michael P. Moreland (Villanova)
* Crime, Criminals, and Hauerwasian Punishment, James Logan (Earlham, Religion)
Panel Chair: Paul J. Griffiths (Duke, Theology)
Broader Applications:
Hauerwas and the Sermon on the Mount, David A. Skeel (Penn)
Hauerwas and the Common Law, M. Cathleen Kaveny (Notre Dame, Law and Theology)
Hauerwas, Reconciliation and the Courts, Richard P. Church (private practice)
Panel Chair: Guy-Uriel Charles (Duke)
Legal and Political Theory:
Must Law Be Violent?, Stephen L. Carter (Yale)
Hauerwas and Dworkin: The Limits of Integrity, John D. Inazu (Wash U.)
In Defense of Liberal Public Reason, Stephen Macedo (Princeton, Politics)
Panel Chair: Ian Baucom (Duke, English)
Response:
Stanley Hauerwas (Duke, Theology)
Moderator: H. Jefferson Powell (George Washington)
Conference papers will be published in Volume 75, Issue 4 of Law & Contemporary Problems. Sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute, Washington University School of Law, the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and Duke Law School’s Program on Public Law.
Monday, May 30, 2011
"Catholic Conservatives and the Common Good"
This essay, by Stephen White, is relevant to, well, many of the posts and conversations here at MOJ over the years. Let's put aside whether we agree, or not, with the essay's policy-related conclusions, and think instead about this paragraph, which strikes me as insightful and important:
Unlike political ideologies of the Right and Left, personalist and communitarian principles are not fundamentally opposed, but complementary. Libertarians and socialists may adhere to incompatible ideologies, but for Catholics, the common good is never “in tension with” (let alone opposed to) the dignity and proper autonomy of the individual person. Subsidiarity is not “balanced against” solidarity. The erosion of solidarity always endangers subsidiarity. In the absence of subsidiarity, solidarity is smothered by dependence upon the state. The dignity of the individual can never be sacrificed in the name of collective utility, and no true individual good can be legitimately won at the expense of the common good.
A "Winn" for Educational Pluralism
The lovely and talented Nicole Stelle Garnett explains (and praises), in the Yale Law Journal's "Pocket Part", the Court's recent decision in Winn, in which the Justices rejected (on "standing" grounds) a (frivolous) Establishment Clause challenge to Arizona's very important and successful tuition-tax-credit program.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Weigel on the John Jay report
Here's George Weigel, writing on the recently released report about sexual abuse by clergy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Of course, one case of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy is too many and, of course, one instance of misconduct or negligence by a Catholic bishop in dealing with such a case is too many. Still, report confirms that the narrative that has been constructed -- in the press, in litigation, in popular media -- is, in many respects, false. I admit, I worry that enough people have a stake in this false narrative that it is not likely to be dislodged by facts or reports. But, I hope I'm wrong. (As Mollie Wilson O'Reilly reports, at Commonweal, the strange reaction of the New York Times to the study indicates how important it is, for some (e.g., some at the NYT), to cling to the story ("Bad bishops! Bad celibacy!) they like.)
Ryan, Dolan, (and Rand) on budgets and Catholic teaching
Here is Rep. Paul Ryan's April 29 letter to Archbishop Dolan; here is Archbishop Dolan's reply. The exchange is well worth reading, I think, especially as a follow-up to the much remarked public letter to Speaker Boehner, which was signed by a number of Catholic academics. (As I indicated, in an earlier post, I thought the letter to Boehner overstated the alleged conflict between his voting record and "the Church's most ancient moral teachings", but that's water under the bridge.)
Speaker Boehner reponded, in a statement, to the Ryan-Dolan exchange:
“I welcome Archbishop Dolan’s letter and am encouraged by the dialogue taking place between House Republicans and the Catholic bishops regarding our budget, the ‘Path to Prosperity.’ Our nation’s current fiscal path is a threat to human dignity in America, offering empty promises to the most vulnerable among us and condemning our children to a future limited by debt. We have a moral obligation as a nation to change course and adopt policies that reflect the truth about our nation’s fiscal condition and our obligation to future generations, and to offer hope for a better future. Our duty to serve others compels us to strive for nothing less. As Chairman Ryan notes in his letter to the archbishop, Americans are blessed to have the teachings of the Church available to us as guidance as we confront our challenges together as a nation.”
Michael Sean Winters, at NCR, and others are underwhelmed by Ryan's letter and -- in Winters's case -- skeptical about the possibility for consonance between the vision proclaimed in the Church's social-teaching tradition and that on display in the work of Ayn Rand. I don't share (what seems to be) Winters's view that Ryan's reported interest in the (banal and turgid) writings of Ayn Rand has, in his budget, simply been translated into proposed policy. (By the way, for Rand-haters, David Hart's essay on the occasion of the "Atlas Shrugged" movie is a must-see.)
One does not have to like Ayn Rand (and I don't), or to be a "Catholic neo-con", to think that (a) it is both profoundly immoral and stupid to continue accumulating debt burdens at our current rates, (b) deep cuts in spending are required, and (c) these cuts require more than the usual promises of increased attention to "waste, fraud, and abuse" and "corporate loopholes" and will have to touch popular social-welfare programs (and defense spending). Winters is right, of course, to say that Rand's vision is less attractive (because it is unsound) than is Pope Benedict's; but this fact does not eliminate the need to attend more seriously than, say, Sen. Reid has been willing to do to the need to cut spending and to design carefully any tax increases so as to avoid stunting growth.
Fr. John Coughlin on human dignity, human rights, and being "a different kind of lawyer"
This past Saturday, my friend and colleague, Fr. John Coughlin, having been named by the graduating class the "Distinguished Professor of the Year", gave a wonderful commencement address. I think it's a must-read for anyone who is interested in the kinds of things we try to do and talk about here at Mirror of Justice. Here is just a taste:
. . . The regular practice of selflessness transforms one’s soul. In the transformation, one becomes more aware and respectful of others. For the lawyer who takes this path of human flourishing, it nourishes a deeper respect for each person’s fundamental human rights. The right to life is the most fundamental of human rights. All other rights depend on the right to life. The Torah contains many provisions about the right to life. In the development of Western culture, the Jewish respect for life stood in contrast to the pragmatic brutality of Greek and Roman antiquity. The Talmud famously states: “one who saves a single life, saves the world.” (Talmud, Sanhedrin, 4:5). The way that a society treats the child in the womb, the severely challenged human being, and the elderly and infirm is the measure of that society’s commitment to fundamental human rights. It follows that a different kind of lawyer serves as the advocate for society’s poor and powerless and especially for those whose very right to life is questioned. Imbued with the sense of justice that derives from self-donation, a different kind of lawyer knows that there are no disposable human beings. . . .
Read the whole thing (after the jump) . . .
Friday, May 20, 2011
"What is a Person?"
Here is a nice interview with my friend and colleague, Christian Smith, about his new book, What Is a Person? A bit:
What is a person? And why does it matter how we answer that question?
Every social science explanation has operating in the background some idea or other of what human persons are, what motivates them, what we can expect of them. Sometimes that is explicit, often it is implicit. And the different concepts of persons assumed by social scientists have important consequences in governing the questions asked, sensitizing concepts employed, evidence gathered, and explanations formulated. We cannot put the question of personhood in a “black box” and really get anywhere. Personhood always matters. By my account, a person is “a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who — as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions — exercises complex capacities for agency and inter-subjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the non-personal world.”
Persons are thus centers with purpose. If that is true, then it has consequences for the doing of sociology, and in other ways for the doing of science broadly. Different views of human personhood will provide us with different scientific interests, different professional moral and ethical sensibilities, different theoretical paradigms of explanation, and, ultimately, different visions of what comprises a good human existence which science ought to serve. In this sense, science is never autonomous or separable from basic questions of human personal being, existence, and interest. Therefore, if we get our view of personhood wrong, we run the risk of using science to achieve problematic, even destructively bad things. Good science must finally be built upon a good understanding of human personhood. . . .
Yup. As I put it, in this paper, "moral problems . . . are anthropological problems, because moral arguments are built, for the most part, on anthropological presuppositions. In other words, . . . our attempts at moral judgment tend to reflect our foundational assumptions about what it means to be human."
". . . and then there were none."
Sobering (I think) news from the U.K. (HT: the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance):
Until a few years ago, there were a dozen Catholic adoption agencies in England and Wales. But in 2007 Equality Act regulations came into effect, banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Six of the agencies secularized themselves, cutting their ties with the Church and changing their standards for evaluating suitable placements. Five of the agencies, unwilling to change their faith-based standards, instead stopped providing adoption services. One agency, Catholic Care in the Diocese of Leeds, decided to fight the new requirement, seeking an exemption.
Alas, on April 26th, Catholic Care lost again in the final stage of its two-year battle to be able to keep providing adoption services in accordance with Catholic Church teachings. So now there are none. Difficult to see in that a great victory for tolerance, children, families, and gay persons.
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