Thanks to Amy Welborn, a link is available to the full Wall Street Journal story on "Canossa: The Sequel", a.k.a., the stand-off between China and the Holy See on the question whether China, or the Catholic Church, gets to run the Catholic Church. Here's a key bit:
The tensions over the Catholic Church are also turning into a test of just how much freedom China's government is willing to allow religious organizations in a materialist society whose people are increasingly hungry for spirituality. The difficulty is made more acute for Catholics by the central role of the pope and the religious bureaucracy he heads, which the Communist Party sees as a rival for political authority. . . .
Today's China is somewhat more welcoming. The country officially recognizes five religions, including Catholicism, but still keeps tabs on their leaders through a government bureaucracy and a collection of five "patriotic" organizations. Catholics, in particular, have long been viewed with suspicion as possible political activists with loyalties to a foreign power in Rome.
"The Chinese government and the Chinese people are afraid of the church turning and playing the role that it did in Poland," says Liu Bainian, vice chairman of the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, referring to the church's influence in the uprising against Poland's Communist rulers in the late 1980s that paved the way for free elections.
Political freedom and the Freedom of the Church. It's like a Reese's Peanut Butter cup.
So, I'm working on the syllabus and readings for a seminar, "Law and the Catholic Social Tradition," that I'll be teaching at the University of Chicago Law School in the Spring quarter. That quarter, as I understand it, is only 8 weeks long, and our class is scheduled to meet once a week (with an additional special get-together with Cardinal George). So, with only 8 meetings, I'm wrestling with what to cover, what to read, and what to emphasize.
It seems to me -- and I would very much welcome reactions -- that it would not be best to, say, pick 8 important encyclicals and do one per week. I'm more inclined to identify leading themes, or particularly salient problems, and focus on those. Here's what I'm working with right now:
1. Introduction to basic themes; historical context (French Revolution through Leo XIII).
2. The Nature, Role, and Problem of the State.
3. The Structure of Society (subsidiarity).
4. Individuals, Markets. Community, and Solidarity.
5. Religous Freedom, Pluralism, Conscience.
6. Prudence, Politics, and Legal Moralism
7. The Family as a Social Institution
8. Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Internationalism, and Patriotism.
"As China's Bishops die off," the Wall Street Journal reports, in this long article (subscription required), "Clash Looms With Vatican."
As Beijing and the Vatican escalate their battle for control of the Roman Catholic Church in China, people like Bishop Liu Jingshan are caught painfully in the middle.
The head of a diocese in the dusty plains of western China, the 93-year-old bishop is one of the church's last living links with a pre-Communist China, when Catholics could freely profess their allegiance to the pope. Bishop Liu also serves in the compromised present-day world of Catholicism in this country, in a government-approved church which the Vatican and many Catholics view as illegitimate.
This is a huge story, and I commend the WSJ for devoting so many column inches to it. That said, as I have written here before, it is unfortunate that the storyline in pieces about China's efforts to run the Catholic Church always frames the issue as a "power struggle" between the "Vatican" and China for "control" over the Catholic Church. No, the issue is Catholic control of the Catholic Church.
The superhumanly productive Larry Solum has posted a new paper, "Natural Justice." Here is the abstract:
Justice is a natural virtue. Well-functioning humans are just, as are well-ordered human societies. Roughly, this means that in a well-ordered society, just humans internalize the laws and social norms (the nomoi) - they internalize lawfulness as a disposition that guides the way they relate to other humans. In societies that are mostly well-ordered, with isolated zones of substantial dysfunction, the nomoi are limited to those norms that are not clearly inconsistent with the function of law - to create the conditions for human flourishing. In a radically dysfunctional society, humans are thrown back on their own resources - doing the best they can in circumstances that may require great practical wisdom to avoid evil and achieve good. Justice is naturally good for humans - it is part and partial of human flourishing. All of these are natural ethical facts.
Natural Justice develops these claims in four stages. Part I contextualizes the claim that justice is a natural virtue in relationship to Hume's famous argument about deriving ought from is, Moore's open-question argument, and the so-called fact-value distinction. The upshot of the discussion in Part I is the claim that there are no clearly decisive objections to existence of natural ethical facts.
Part II traces the movement from neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics to virtue jurisprudence by articulating a theory of the judicial virtues. Among these are the virtues of practical wisdom and of justice. Practical wisdom or phronesis is best understood on the model of moral vision, which in the context of law is legal vision or situation sense. The virtue of justice is best understood as lawfulness. Just humans are law-abiding or nomimos - in that they internalize the widely shared and deeply held social norms of their social groups. This part concludes with the claim that a legally correct decision is the decision that characteristically would be rendered by a fully virtuous judge under the circumstances of the case.
Part III argues that natural justice can be understood on the model of natural goodness as articulated in the work of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson. The intuitive idea is that justice as lawfulness is naturally good for reason - using social creatures in human circumstances. This part also articulates and responds to a variety of objections.
Part IV concludes by articulating the sense in which an aretaic theory of law that incorporates a natural virtue of justice as lawfulness can be viewed as an expression of the natural law tradition. The natural law idea that an unjust enactment is not a true law corresponds to two senses in which positive laws can fail to be nomoi (in the technical sense specified by virtue jurisprudence). First, a given enactment may contravene deeply held and widely shared social norms. Second, such enactments may be fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose of law - the promotion of human flourishing.
I'm very attracted to Professor Solum's (and others') efforts regarding aretaic jurisprudence. My questions for him, and these others, are: First, does "virtue jurisprudence" require a theory of the state, i.e., a theory that explains why it is (assuming that it is) the case that the state may employ coercion (i.e., the law) to push citizens toward virtue? Second, does "virtue jurisprudence" require a teleological account of the person, in order to pour content into the idea of "human flourishing"?
Returning to Tyler Cowen's argument about inequality and well-being, Eduardo writes:
. . . I, however, think that a marginal increase in well being of the rich is not justifiable unless it -- at a minimum -- affirmatively improves things for those at the bottom. Finally, depending on the size of the increase for the rich and the poor, the improvement for the rich might not be justifiable, even with a small benefit to the poorest, since the independent harm to social solidarity of added inequality might more than offset a small (absolute) improvment for those at the bottom.
I agree that the "harm to social solidarity" that could accompany increased inequality is a cost that, along with "improvement for those at the bottom," needs to taken into account when we evaluate a proposed policy or the state of affairs. I disagree, though -- I think -- with the claim that "a marginal increase in the well being of the rich is not justifiale unless it . . . affirmatively improves things for those at the bottom." One problem with this claim -- it seems to me -- is that it seems to envision "increase[s] in the well being of the rich" as somehow being bestowed from the outside, by some kind of all-seeing-well-being-allocator, rather than by, say, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and skill. (I realize, of course, that the rich could increase their material well being in other, less admirable ways, but we don't need to talk about inequality in order to criticize such increases.) It seems too much to say that "the rich" (who are we talking about, exactly?) are categorically ineligible for what we normally would regard as just returns on investment, effort, and time unless those returns also cause or accompany increases in others' material well-being.
I love, and am completely hooked on, the tv-show, "24." I would pay a substantial sum of money to somehow have the first five seasons erased from my mind, thereby making it possible for me to start over and enjoy them, like new, again. So, I was curious about this op-ed, by Brian Carney, in the Wall Street Journal, about the "moral philosophy" of Jack Bauer.
Carney is impressed by the fact that, on "24", "tragic choices" abound, and are rarely presented as simple, or as having easy answers. (This is not to say that the show proclaims there aren't right answers, just that it is rarely clear, ex ante, what they are.)
Fair enough. That said, I would have liked for Carney to at least that at least some of the things Bauer has done -- with admirably other-regarding motives, of course -- are, well, evil. Aren't they?
Prof. Gary Becker and Hon. Richard Posner have a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed about the minimum wage, called "How to Make the Poor Poorer." (Link here, thanks to the Volokh Conspiracy.) Here is an excerpt:
An increase in the minimum wage raises the costs of fast foods and other goods produced with large inputs of unskilled labor. Producers adjust both by substituting capital inputs and/or high-skilled labor for minimum-wage workers and, because the substitutes are more costly (otherwise the substitutions would have been made already), by raising prices. The higher prices reduce the producers' output and thus their demand for labor. The adjustments to the hike in the minimum wage are inefficient because they are motivated not by a higher real cost of low-skilled labor but by a government-mandated increase in the price of that labor. That increase has the same misallocative effect as monopoly pricing.
Although some workers benefit — those who were paid the old minimum wage but are worth the new, higher one to the employers — others are pushed into unemployment, the underground economy or crime. The losers are therefore likely to lose more than the gainers gain; they are also likely to be poorer people. And poor families are disproportionately hurt by the rise in the price of fast foods and other goods produced with low-skilled labor because these families spend a relatively large fraction of their incomes on such goods. And many, maybe most, of the gainers from a higher minimum wage are not poor. Most minimum-wage workers are part time, and for the majority their minimum-wage income supplements an income derived from other sources.
Now, I realize that there are solid and serious economists who believe that we can increase the minimum wage without harming the poor. I do not know, for sure, who has the better of the argument. I would think, though, that we could all agree that it really matters who is right, for purposes of evaluating what seems to be the near-unanimous view among those who care about Catholic Social Thought that the minimum wage should be increased. Do the bishops, and those who promote this view, know whether or not Becker and Posner are right? I take it we could agree entirely with Eduardo about the dangers of economic inequality but still think the minimum-wage question depends on answering -- or at least addressing -- some tough empirical questions?
According to this piece by Ion Mihai, "[t]he Soviet Union was never comfortable living in the same world with the Vatican. The most recent disclosures document that the Kremlin was prepared to go to any lengths to counter the Catholic Church’s strong anti-Communism." More specifically, Mihai contends that the infamous 1963 play by Roch Hochhuth, The Deputy, which inaugurated the re-working of Pope Pius XII by the press from a heroic friend of the Jews to a heartless accomplice to the Holocaust, was the outgrowth of KGB efforts to undermine the Holy See's moral authority.
If this is true . . . wow. Will anyone investigate?
The case of Saint Louis University v. Masonic Temple Association of St. Louis involves Tax Increment Financing ordinances. To oversimplify (big-time), the City of St. Louis designated the area around SLU as a "redevelopment area" in order to make tax-increment financing available for some SLU-related redevelopment projects, including an arena. A lawsuit followed (brought and funded, apparently, by a real-estate developer who stands to gain if the TIF ordinance is invalidated), raising (among other things) state and federal establishment-of-religion arguments.
Long story short: SLU defends on the ground that, among other things (quoting SLU's brief in the MO Supreme Court):
Nowhere do the University’s bylaws state that it is or even should be controlled by the Catholic Church or by any other religion.The Church’s lack of control over
Saint Louis
University
and its board are shown by the sale of its hospital to Tenet Healthcare in 1998.The sale was made directly against the strong and well publicized objection of the Catholic Archbishop of
St. Louis
.(Biondi Depo., Ex. Vol. V, at p. 24, ll. 1-11). . . .
Saint Louis
University
is not controlled by any religion or religious creed; rather, it is fully controlled by an independent corporate board.It does not discriminate in either hiring or admissions based on religion (or any other classification impermissible under state or federal law).It does not require its students or faculty members to attend confessions or masses.It does not require Catholic catechism.Rather, it operates in and supports a spirit of academic freedom and open inquiry -- even in instances when such freedom and inquiry runs contrary to the teachings of the Catholic religion. . . .
By adopting as its primary corporate purposes the encouragement of learning and extension of the means of education, by dedicating itself “to the service of its immediate community,” and by committing itself to achieve these ends through means “appropriate to a university in our society, including teaching, research and the discovery, presentation and communication of knowledge,” the University has made clear that it is not controlled in carrying out its mission by a “creed” in the sense of a formalized system of religious beliefs.Rather, the University has chosen to be a “university” as that term is used in twenty-first century America, marked by the academic freedom and independence of thought that are essential characteristics of universities in modern American life. . . .
I was blessed, after law school, with the opportunity to work for a brilliant and decent man, Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals. Judge Arnold died a little over two years ago, on September 23, 2004. (Here is a blog post I did, right after learning about his death.)
The University of Arkansas-Little Rock's Bowen School of Law now hosts an annual Arnold Lecture, honoring Judge Arnold and his brother, Judge Morris S. Arnold. Last night, Justice Thomas -- who came to know Judge Arnold well, in connection with his assignment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit -- gave that Arnold lecture. Here is a report.
Here's a bit from a post I did, the day after Judge Arnold's death:
The Judge was humane, wise, and devout. . . . There are few like him. In terms of the law, he was an old-school liberal who admired both Justice Black and Justice Brennan, and a textualist with originalist leanings who loved and respected Justice Scalia; he was a "strict separationist" who really did believe that such a legal regime was essential to preserving religious freedom; he was passionately committed to fairness and to the dignity and rights of litigants and defendants; he knew that the law should be just, yet knew also that judges cannot right every wrong. His writing was at the same time elegant and simple, clear and memorable. . . .
Judge Arnold was a great judge, and a deeply good man. Thanks to the Bowen School of Law, and to Justice Thomas, for honoring him.
