We're having an interesting, albeit somewhat testy, debate in the comment section to a post over at my blog over the distinction between just and minimum wages in Catholic social thought, which might interest some MoJ readers.
Monday, January 8, 2007
CST and Minimum Wage
Abortion and Catholic Social Teaching
ZENIT has this interview up, with my friend, Fr. Thomas Williams, about abortion and Catholic Social Teaching. Here is a taste:
Q: What does Catholic social thought offer to the debate on abortion that bioethics doesn't? What is its specific contribution?
Father Williams: Since Catholic social teaching contributes so much to this discussion, it is impossible for me to do this question justice here. In its analysis of the socio-cultural, political, familial and economic dimensions of human action, the Church's social teaching offers invaluable points of reference for a public discussion of abortion.
As I mentioned earlier, the Church's teaching on the content and requirements of the "common good" sheds important light on respect and reverence for human life as a pillar of the just society.
Moreover, the principle of equality, based on the equal dignity of all human beings, not only grounds our democratic system but also demands that we deprive no one of this essential dignity.
Historically the greatest social evils perpetrated on humanity -- genocide, racism, abortion, slavery -- have always violated the principle of equality, relegating an entire sector of the human family to an inferior status, with a dignity lower than the rest. Since human rights flow from human dignity, once the latter is called into question, rights fall at the same time.
As a legal "right," abortion brings forth countless social issues requiring a reasoned response: questions of conscientious objection, the rule of law in a democracy, the pedagogical function of law, and the role of moral truth in a democratic system, to name but a few.
The NYT series of exemptions: Update
A few months ago, I -- like many other bloggers -- linked to and discussed Diana Henriques's New York Times series on religious exemptions. I also linked to Dr. John Dilulio's very critical response, which appeared in the Weekly Standard. I should have also linked to this letter, which Ms. Henriques sent to the Standard, in which she replies to DiIulio's critique.
More on Romney, Mormons, and Taking Religion Seriously
Here is a long and thoughtful response, by Russell Arben Fox, to Damon Linker's recent TNR essay -- about which I blogged here --- on Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and politics. And here is law prof Nate Oman, of the Times and Seasons blog. Really good stuff, and (obviously) relevant to the question we so often address, in various forms, here, i.e., what does the Catholic faith mean for politics?
"Religious lawyering"
Here is the abstract of a new paper, "The Religious Lawyering Critique," by Bruce Green:
There is a developing body of legal scholarship on the relevance of religion to lawyers' work. Some authors offer a critique of the legal profession that views its norms as hostile to religious belief and identity, as inconsistent with religious and ordinary social morality, and as presupposing an amoral lawyering style. This article, which grew out of an AALS program on Professional Responsibility and the Religious Traditions, examines the religious lawyering critique. Initially, it notes that prior legal-ethics scholarship challenges both the critique's descriptive premises, such as that the profession has endorsed the extreme "hired gun" conception, and its normative premises, such as that a lawyer's personal values should dominate the legal representation. The article then explores how the critique is in tension with other writings on religious lawyering that assume that religious lawyers can generally practice consistently with the legal profession's norms, that it is not "amoral" to implement lawful instructions to which one is morally opposed, that helping clients achieve their ends can be a moral good in itself, and that professional values are largely consistent with religious ones at least at a level of generality. Finally, the article questions the critics' premise that when religious and professional expectations do conflict, religious expectations are necessarily better.
Rob Vischer and Amy Uelmen, what say you?
"Equal Liberty" and Religious Freedom
Church-state experts Bob Tuttle and Chip Lupu have a new paper, examining the new book by Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, Religious Freedom and the Constitution. Here is the abstract (thanks to Larry Solum):
This essay is a review of Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Harvard University Press, 2007). Eisgruber and Sager reject many conventional notions of church-state separation. They offer an approach to religious liberty based on two basic principles, conjoined under the label “Equal Liberty.” First, “no members of our political community ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundations of their important commitments and projects.” Second, all members of the political community have a general set of liberty rights, including freedom of speech, personal autonomy, associational freedom, and private property, which allow a broad range of religious beliefs to flourish. From these principles, they develop elaborate accounts of the proper role of the free exercise clause and the establishment clause in our constitutional law.
This review essay focuses primarily on Eisgruber's and Sager's approach to the establishment clause. They claim that “Equal Liberty” provides an overarching framework for evaluating the permissibility of all government-sponsored religious speech, including current limitations on public school sponsorship of religious expression. They also claim that Equal Liberty can bring coherence to the vexed question of government financial partnerships with religious institutions.
In the review, we argue that Equal Liberty is not fully up to the task of either policing government religious speech, or measuring the permissibility of government financial relationships with religious providers of educational or other services. We question whether all religion-protecting norms can be fully explained in the authors' individualistic, rights-oriented, egalitarian terms. And we assert that religious commitments and religious institutions occupy a constitutionally distinctive place that Eisgruber & Sager are at pains to deny.
Today's charmless atheists?
Sam Schulman thinks today's celebrity atheists have no new arguments, and lack their forebears' charm:
What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.
For them, belief in God is beyond childish, it is unsuitable for children. Today's atheists are particularly disgusted by the religious training of young people--which Dr. Dawkins calls "a form of child abuse." He even floats the idea that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents' religious beliefs.
For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it. The reviewer of Dr. Dawkins's volume in a recent New York Review of Books noted his unwillingness to take theology seriously, a starting point for any considered debate over religion.
Changing Stances (Herein of Mitt Romney et al.)
Sightings 1/8/07
Changing Stances
-- Martin E. Marty
More and more observers who keep score on politicians, especially as they approach campaigns for office, have been chronicling changes on some of the issues most would describe as basic. In each case, the chronicles point to movements that we would have to call "about-faces" or "180-degree turns." That repositioning goes on in politics every day is an everyday observation, so it would not normally inspire curiosity. But when defining issues get redefined, commentators take note, and not necessarily in order to play "Gotcha!" or to cry "Fraud!" though some may do so. They do it to discern what are the hot issues, the sticky sticking points -- why they are, and what can change. In my files is an example from columnist Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune, one December day.
Chapman first feels for Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the staunch Mormon who should be as good as his word -- his early word as well as his recent word. For years Romney courted Massachusetts liberal voters by siding with them; he was pro-Roe v. Wade, and said, "I believe abortion should be safe and legal." Now he hungers for a Republican nomination where the base is rooted in opposition to "safe and legal" and Roe v. Wade. He backtracked and reversed himself and gave reasons for his about-face: "I'm in a different place than I was probably in 1994." Critics watch his decisions and say that yes, indeed, he has changed, and his acts show it.
Chapman cited early and later Ronald Reagan, who signed a liberal abortion law in California and then went against his younger self. George H. W. Bush did the same. To keep things even, Chapman shows how Democrats Jesse Jackson and Al Gore did something similar, and Bill Clinton does not escape Chapman's Reversal-Meter standards either. The early and the later stands may both be sincere, and there can be good reasons for people to be on this side or that side of an issue, and even to convert. Chapman is suspicious about the timing and quality of the shifts. He's a pro-lifer who is sure that Romney is sincere and, with wit breaking through on this one, adds: "I have complete confidence that he will be there until he isn't."
While changes by leaders in both parties in the matter of support for the Iraq War "then" and "now" tend to be relative, and economic issues allow for large varieties, the two issues that draw most fire and do most defining of the base, abortion and gay marriage, are pictured as absolutely set apart -- by scripture, say some, by theological ethics, and by ideologies about freedom. Yet moves from the ideology that holds the base together might also lead observers to conclude that the "absolute" side of these has been overplayed. Most successful American politicians are pragmatists, broken-field runners; they are out of character when they feel constrained to recertify themselves all the time.
Can their back-and-forth motions also suggest that there is some fluidity even on this putatively solid-rock front, and that we may see some compromises and reconfigurations in the years ahead? If Romney and Gore, Reagan and Jackson could switch in times of climate change, who's next and what's next?
References:
Changing Stances
-- Martin E. Marty
More and more observers who keep score on politicians, especially as they approach campaigns for office, have been chronicling changes on some of the issues most would describe as basic. In each case, the chronicles point to movements that we would have to call "about-faces" or "180-degree turns." That repositioning goes on in politics every day is an everyday observation, so it would not normally inspire curiosity. But when defining issues get redefined, commentators take note, and not necessarily in order to play "Gotcha!" or to cry "Fraud!" though some may do so. They do it to discern what are the hot issues, the sticky sticking points -- why they are, and what can change. In my files is an example from columnist Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune, one December day.
Chapman first feels for Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the staunch Mormon who should be as good as his word -- his early word as well as his recent word. For years Romney courted Massachusetts liberal voters by siding with them; he was pro-Roe v. Wade, and said, "I believe abortion should be safe and legal." Now he hungers for a Republican nomination where the base is rooted in opposition to "safe and legal" and Roe v. Wade. He backtracked and reversed himself and gave reasons for his about-face: "I'm in a different place than I was probably in 1994." Critics watch his decisions and say that yes, indeed, he has changed, and his acts show it.
Chapman cited early and later Ronald Reagan, who signed a liberal abortion law in California and then went against his younger self. George H. W. Bush did the same. To keep things even, Chapman shows how Democrats Jesse Jackson and Al Gore did something similar, and Bill Clinton does not escape Chapman's Reversal-Meter standards either. The early and the later stands may both be sincere, and there can be good reasons for people to be on this side or that side of an issue, and even to convert. Chapman is suspicious about the timing and quality of the shifts. He's a pro-lifer who is sure that Romney is sincere and, with wit breaking through on this one, adds: "I have complete confidence that he will be there until he isn't."
While changes by leaders in both parties in the matter of support for the Iraq War "then" and "now" tend to be relative, and economic issues allow for large varieties, the two issues that draw most fire and do most defining of the base, abortion and gay marriage, are pictured as absolutely set apart -- by scripture, say some, by theological ethics, and by ideologies about freedom. Yet moves from the ideology that holds the base together might also lead observers to conclude that the "absolute" side of these has been overplayed. Most successful American politicians are pragmatists, broken-field runners; they are out of character when they feel constrained to recertify themselves all the time.
Can their back-and-forth motions also suggest that there is some fluidity even on this putatively solid-rock front, and that we may see some compromises and reconfigurations in the years ahead? If Romney and Gore, Reagan and Jackson could switch in times of climate change, who's next and what's next?
References:
Steve Chapman's article "Former stances die in
'different place'" (Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2006), can be read
here:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0612170456dec17,1,6028076.column?coll=chi-news-col.
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Is Free Will an illusion?
Dennis Overbye wonders, in the New York Times:
As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. . . .
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that “people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.” Anything would go.
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”
He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
I'm "in denial," I guess.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Note taken
Michael P. links here to John Allen's Jan. 5 installment of "All Things Catholic," in which Allen contends that the reactions of Vatican spokesperson's to Hussein's execution "collectively mark a milestone in the evolution of yet another category in Catholic teaching: Positions which are not absolute in principle, but which are increasingly absolute in practice." I imagine Allen is correct in supposing that, in the future, we can expect the Holy See's spokespersons, and the various Bishops' conferences, to oppose all executions and all wars. (Whether their opposition will, in all cases, rest on convincing arguments is, I suppose, a question about which we'll have to wait and see.) And, I imagine Justice Scalia might take some comfort in Allen's observation that:
The fact that neither the death penalty nor war (for reasons other than what John Paul called "humanitarian intervention") are considered "ontic" evils probably means there will always be room for differing opinions in the church about the extent to which existing circumstances render them justifiable.
Finally, although Michael and I agree that the death penalty ought to be abolished (legislatively), I continue to think that the position set out in the Catechism, and in Evangelium vitae is unsatisfying. As Allen writes:
The church's teaching on both the death penalty and on war is rooted in its doctrine on self-defense: If someone intends to kill you, you're entitled to defend yourself, including lethal force if that's the only option. By way of extension, if the only way to protect innocent people in society from aggressors, whether criminals or invading armies, is to use lethal force, then that does not constitute "murder."
The problem is, as I see it, that the Church's teaching on capital punishment, until very recently, was not separated in this way from the Church's teachings on punishment. And, punishment is not about self-defense, but about justified retribution. If a criminal is killed by the state in "self defense", then -- it seems to me -- we are not talking about "punishment" at all.
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