Mirror of Justice

A few recent posts have referenced the debates, on MOJ and elsewhere, that went on during the lead-up to the 2004 presidential contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush.  For newer MOJ readers, some context might be helpful:

Here is Notre Dame's Dean Mark Roche's New York Times op-ed, "Voting Our Conscience, Not Our Religion."  He wrote, among other things, that:

History will judge our society's support of abortion in much the same way we view earlier generations' support of torture and slavery - it will be universally condemned. The moral condemnation of abortion, however, need not lead to the conclusion that criminal prosecution is the best way to limit the number of abortions. Those who view abortion as the most significant issue in this campaign may well want to supplement their abstract desire for moral rectitude with a more realistic focus on how best to ensure that fewer abortions take place.

Professors Robert George and Gerard Bradley responded with this essay, "Not in Good Conscience," in National Review.  George and Bradley criticized what they called Dean Roche's "shoddy logic," and contested his claim that what were asserted or presumed to be John Kerry's positions on the death penalty, health care, and the war in Iraq should lead Catholics to support Kerry over Bush, notwithstanding Kerry's positions on abortion and embryonic-stem-cell research.  Responding to Dean Roche's suggestion that Catholics inclined to vote for Bush "supplement their abstract desire for moral rectitude with a more realistic focus on how best to ensure that fewer abortions take place," George and Bradley responded:

[W]ould [Roche] have said the same thing about efforts to ban slavery? Would he have lectured those who sought to ban it about "their abstract desire for moral rectitude"? Would he have proposed economic policies to reduce the market demand for slaves, as some opponents of abolition suggested, rather than supporting the party that promised to extend to all human beings — regardless of race — the equal protection of the law? Somehow we doubt that he would have regarded the cause of abolition as a mere "abstract desire for moral rectitude."

My Notre Dame colleague, Professor Cathy Kaveny, responded to the George & Bradley piece with this essay -- which is referenced in her recent post responding to Michael Scaperlanda -- and also here.  Professor Kaveny objected to the rhetoric and arguments of those she identified as "Rambo Catholics," i.e., "those Catholics who are
trying to bully their fellow brothers and sisters in faith into voting for a second Bush term" and "who tell their co-religionists, that no pro-life Catholic can vote in good conscience for Kerry--i.e., without committing a serious sin."  In Professor Kaveny's view,

[T]he culture of death v. the culture of life rhetoric is prophetic [i.e., as opposed to "practical moral reasoning or casuistry"] in the way it functions in our moral discourse.  It has real destructive consequences for our common conversation, even if those who deploy it do so for a constructive end.  Once someone tells you you're part of the culture of death, or voting for the contemporary equivalent of Nazis, or slaveowners, there's just nowhere for the conversation to go.

For what it's worth, I thought Dean Roche's arguments in his New York Times op-ed were not persuasive.  That said, it seems worth coming back to what I said, a few days ago, was the animating commitment behind Mirror of Justice:

Mirror of Justice is a public conversation among friends / lawyers / scholars about what the Faith means for "legal theory."  And, it is a conversation among people who disagree strongly about many things and who might -- this side of Heaven -- understand the Faith differently.  We have never promised that all of our posts will be sensible, let alone orthodox.  But, I hope readers know, we are doing our best.  No matter how misguided I have thought some of my fellow bloggers' views and conclusions were, I have believed from the beginning of this enterprise that the conversation was worth having -- and worth having in public -- if only to "model" for students and fellow citizens what good-faith searching-in-community might look like.  (This is not to say, of course, that all views are equally correct, or to pretend it does not matter whether or not we get it right.)