There have been a number of posts recently at Public Discourse on the morality of the tactics employed by "Live Action" to catch Planned Parenthood workers doing and saying bad things on camera. The latest, by Prof. Christopher Tollefsen, is called "Why lying is always wrong", and it is here. He is responding to, inter alia, this piece by Prof. Christopher Kaczor.
There's a lot going on in these essays; I would urge readers and bloggers to read the whole things. Certainly, a number of very learned people have held, and hold, the view that Prof. Tollefsen sets out, namely, that it is always wrong to lie. To make a long story short (again, read the whole things), lying is always wrong because "all lies are unloving. . . . [They] are incompatible in the deepest way with a will towards communion with others, which must always be founded on truth, both generally speaking (for falsehood does indeed bring with it many pernicious consequences for a community), and, more specifically, the truth of persons."
To his credit, Prof. Tollefsen concedes that his position "could not easily be adhered to." Indeed, it could not. As he notes, his view seems to lead to the conclusions that, say, the "practices of undercover work, espionage work, and other forms of journalistic, police, and governmental work that might require lying" are also wrong. (Telling one's child that the present she is opening on Christmas morning was brought by "Santa Claus" is, I guess, also immoral?)
I'm pretty sure I'm not a consequentialist; that is, I do not believe that what renders an act "right" is the fact that it has welfare-enhancing consequences and I agree (I assume) with Tollefsen that an argument is not refuted simply by noting that among the consequences of its being correct are many costs and inconveniences. But, I guess I'm kidding myself, because I don't find myself much moved by Tollefsen's arguments (and, it appears, St. Thomas's and St. Augustine's!) here.
Maybe my reservations are not "consequentialist" ones; maybe, instead, they reflect different judgments on my part about what counts as a "lie" -- I'm not sure. Maybe my head is just too small: the distinction between a military feint (designed to trick the enemy into thinking that one intends to do X with one's forces when one really intends to do Y), which is apparently permissible, and going undercover to buy methamphetamine (and, in the course of so doing, lying about who one is), which is said to be impermissible, is hard for me to grasp.
Anyway, and again: Read the essays, and see what you think.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Here is (I think) a really good interview with my friend and former colleague, John Garvey, who is now the new President of the Catholic University of America. It's all worth reading, but this part struck me in a particular way:
In Catholic higher education, there’s much talk about Catholic identity. It seems that it means different things to different people. What does Catholic identity, on a practical level, mean here?
There are two kinds of things you want to look at. In the first instance, Catholic identity is carried by, and most importantly consists in, hiring faithful Catholics to teach on the faculty, and so that a majority of the faculty should be people faithful to the witness of the faith. Also, I think it’s important to represent people of other faiths who are committed to the mission of the university and who add intellectual dimensions or depth to the discussion, but within the context of this. It’s not something that people can be indifferent about. That is the most important thing, and it carries over into classes in history, classics, sociology, economics and business. That’s essential. The bishops, in the norms that they promulgated in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, had it exactly right.
I have said to the faculty that it’s important for all of us to keep in mind the norms that the bishops have promulgated, that a majority of the faculty should be committed to the witness of the faith. I’ve spoken to the deans and department chairs about how that’s something we need to make part of our hiring process — and not just keeping count after the fact, but rather at the beginning of the process, to make sure that our search operates in the way that good affirmative-action searches operate: You proactively go out and seek out people who want to work at a university like this and include them in the mix of people that we interview. We make part of the interview process a discussion about the nature of our Catholic mission and ask prospective faculty members what they would contribute to that. So, it’s very much part of our public discussions and search processes.
A second dimension is the student-life dimension. This is something I’m a little bit newer to, in one way, but in one way I’m not. Unlike many of my predecessors, I have been a consumer of Catholic education. Jeanne and I have educated five children in 95 years of Catholic education, all told. All of them have been to Catholic colleges and universities. It’s really important to us, in following our children through college, not only what they study in the classroom, but also because they are living at the universities: What are their lives like in the residence halls? What are their opportunities for the sacraments in their everyday life? What are their friends’ attitudes towards the Church, towards Mass and the sacraments, and towards the beatitudes? Because much of the work of raising your children, once they reach a certain age, is who they are living with. Having the right student life at the university is a really important part of what kind of adult Catholics they grow up to be. For us, it was really important that they be at a place where they could meet young Catholics, because they’re going to fall in love with somebody, and that is a consideration. . . .
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Last week, I was honored with the opportunity to present a lecture sponsored by the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought, at the University of Virginia, on "Positive Secularism: Understanding the Separation of Church and State." Notwithstanding the Institute's mis-step with this particular invitation, they are doing great work; check them out, and consider supporting them. An inspiration for my talk, for what it's worth, was Pope Benedict's recent and increasingly frequent calls for a "healthy secularity." Check out, for example, this address, given in December:
. . . In order to understand the authentic meaning of the lay state and to explain how it is understood in our day, it is essential to keep in mind the historical development of this concept.
In the Middle Ages, "secularity", a term coined to describe the condition of the ordinary lay Christian who belonged neither to the clerical nor to the religious state, inferred opposition between the civil powers and the ecclesiastical hierarchies; in modern times, it has come to mean the exclusion of religion and its symbols from public life by confining them to the private sphere and to the individual conscience.
So it is that an ideological understanding has come to be attributed to the term "secularity", which is the opposite of its original meaning. . . .
Monday, January 31, 2011
The New York Times, not surprisingly, opposes those "House Republicans [who] are preparing to push through restrictions on federal financing of abortions far more extreme than previously proposed at the federal level." According to the Times, there is something . . . off about the fact that "[l]awmakers who otherwise rail against big government have made it one of their highest priorities to take the decision about a legal medical procedure out of the hands of individuals and turn it over to the government." How restricting funding for X amounts to taking away from individuals, and turning over to government, the decision about whether or not to do X is not made clear.
Does anyone recall the Times expressing concern that the persistent refusal of most legislatures in America to make it possible for low-income Americans to exercise their constitutional right to choose religious (and, as it happens, usually better) schools for their children amounts to a denial of that right? To a "taking away" from parents of the decision about education? Anyone? . . . Anyone? . . . (Bueller?)
Friday, January 28, 2011
"Abortion, Reason, and Science" is the name of this essay, by David Harsanyi, published at the Reason (a libertarian magazine) website. (My advice, for what it's worth, is that one resist any temptation to read the comments.) He says:
How many Americans instinctively turn to the pro-choice camp because pro-life proponents aggravate their secular sensibilities?
As Nat Hentoff, the noted civil libertarian journalist, once remarked, when he turned pro-life, his cohorts at The Village Voice wondered when he had "converted to Catholicism—the only explanation they could think of" for his "apostasy."
It's unfortunate that abortion is a social issue, because it is science and reason that can turn the debate. . . .
[If] the pro-life movement is going to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the nation, it's not going to need more God. It's going to need more reason.
On the one hand, the piece made me want to roll my eyes and grumble a bit. After all, the pro-life side of the argument (at least, in my experience) has been asking all along to have the abortion question subjected to the tests of reasoned argument. Bring them on! On the other hand, though, it seems hard to dispute the author's suggestion that many people (fairly or no) embrace abortion rights because they believe (incorrectly, in my view) that a "secular" orientation requires it. If Harsanyi can get a few people to re-think that embrace, more power to him.
UPDATE: This post, at First Things, has prompted some interesting discussion in the comments box. . .
Here (thanks to a friend) is an as-per-usual interesting essay by John Allen, in which he explains (among other things) that and why "[r]eligious freedom is destined to be the towering diplomatic and political priority of the Vatican and the global church in the 21st century." A bit:
As the 21st century rolls on, the leadership tone in Catholicism will increasingly be set by [those] . . . who live in neighborhoods where the battle for religious freedom isn’t about an alleged “war on Christmas” or the latest exhibit in an art gallery. It’s a matter of life and death, as recent events in Iraq, Egypt and Nigeria, as well as India, eloquently illustrate.
As leaders from those parts of the world exercise greater influence on the Vatican and on global Catholic consciousness, religious freedom will be set in stone as the church’s top diplomatic and geopolitical priority.
In English-speaking Catholicism, India in particular will be a force. By mid-century there will be 25 million Catholics in India, more than the Catholic populations of England, Ireland and Canada combined. Since English is the primary language of Indian theological and public policy debate, Indian Catholics will exercise a gravitational pull in Anglophone Catholic circles.
The pride of place assigned to religious freedom may frustrate some Catholic social justice activists, who would like to see a greater share of time and treasure invested in anti-poverty crusades, campaigns against war and the arms trade, environmental struggles, and so on. Those issues won’t disappear, but as long as Catholics have to fear for their lives precisely in those parts of the world where the church is experiencing its most dramatic growth, defending religious freedom will remain at the top of the to-do list. . . .
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The inaugural address of my friend, mentor, and former colleague John Garvey -- now President of the Catholic University of America -- is here. A bit, from the concluding section:
What is the particular contribution a Catholic university makes to the integration of virtue and intellect?
. . . First, although we sometimes speak (as Bonaventure does) of learning virtue from a holy man (a kind of moral Bruce Harmon, or yoga master), we learn it better as members of a group. . . .
Second, as Christians we believe that the community we live in here is not just us. It is God with us, in the sacraments we celebrate every day. His grace is more important than our mutual example in helping us see and drawing us to the life of virtue.
Third, we must not lose sight of the essential connectedness of intellect and virtue. . . .
To put it in concrete terms, Student Life, Campus Ministry, Residential Life, Athletics, and Student Organizations are not offices concerned with different parts of the day and places on campus than academic affairs. They are integrally related. . . .
Finally, I have been talking about the role of virtue in the life of the intellect. But I want to conclude by observing that the intellectual life of a Catholic university is something that is unique among institutions of higher education. . . .
The Catholic University of America is a university – a community of scholars united in a common effort to find goodness, truth, and beauty. It is a place where we learn things St. Monica could not teach her son. Holy as she was, she could not have written the Confessions or The City of God. Smart as he was, neither could Augustine have written them without the intellectual companionship he found first at Carthage and later among the Platonists in Milan. The intellectual life, like the acquisition of virtue, is a communal (not a solitary) undertaking. We learn from each other. The intellectual culture we create is the product of our collective effort. A Catholic intellectual culture will be something both distinctive and wonderful if we bring the right people into the conversation and if we work really hard at it. . . .
Thursday, January 20, 2011
I have started several times writing a post about the horrifying recent reports coming from Philadelphia about "[a] filthy abortion mill where prosecutors say babies were delivered alive and killed with scissors".
In its report, the grand jury said failures of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and other agencies allowed Gosnell's "house of horrors" to persist for decades, with baby body parts on the shelves and clogging the plumbing, a 15-year-old high school student performing intravenous anesthesia, and Gosnell's wife, a cosmetologist, performing late-term procedures. . . .
Gosnell also kept jars of severed feet on his shelves, Williams said. Gosnell also had a taste for macabre jokes, once muttering that a nearly six-pound baby born alive to a 17-year-old who was 7 1/2 months pregnant could "walk me to the bus stop," the report said.
Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy, or just under six months, and most doctors won't perform them after 20 weeks because of the risks, prosecutors said. . . .
[In fact, my understanding is that not all abortions are illegal in Pennsylvania "after 24 weeks of pregnancy". UPDATE: I checked the soundness of this understanding and it now seems to me that, in fact, Pennsylvania's "health" exception is fairly robust and so it now seems accurate to me to say that most -- if not almost all -- abortions are illegal in Pennsylvania after 24 weeks.]
What can one say? The attack in Tucson -- the "massacre", it is often and reasonably called -- on innocent public servants and bystanders by a deeply disturbed young man prompted not only hasty and unfounded partisan attacks, but also more sober reflections about (among other things) gun-control laws, legal protections for students' privacy, the mental-health system, and the "tone" of our political discourse. Will these revelations from Philadelphia prompt any similar or analogous kinds of reflection, even critical self-examination?
