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.)
Friday, November 10, 2006
Lonergan advanced the metaphor of the "double undertow" to describe the obstacle faced by persons who seek to do good in a (significantly) defective culture. Having grown up on the shores of the Pacific, I know the force of the aquatic undertow. Living in this culture, I recall Lonergan's suggestion that reversals of the cultural undertow may come to pass thanks to irony, satire, humor, or other modest-but-powerful means. Prophecy always needs to be tested. "Reason" always needs to be purified, as the Holy Father reminds us. The more shocking the prevailing culture, including its capture of "reason," the more needful will be means tightly calibrated to correct the mistakes at their points of entry. A corrective that is helpful today, in my judgment, is the Catholic insight that we live under law -- not mere "practical reason." Yes, we discover, implement, and give specification to that law through and thanks to "practical reason." And yes, that requires casuistry. The dilemma between "prophecy" and "practical reason," though helpful to a point, may be false.
[Michael S's post here. Now, Cathy's message:]
Dear Michael,
I heard you posted my Commonweal blog contribution on Mirror of Justice, and I just learned of Michael Scaperlandas quite negative reaction to it. And I wanted to take a minute to respond to him. He is quite right to point out that my response to Robby George and Gerry Bradley two years ago was heated. I was hurt and angered by their response to Dean Roche's op-ed, which strongly implied that Roche, and by implication, other hold-your-nose -and-vote-for-Kerry types like me, were either stupid dupes of the NY Times, or else in bad faith about being pro-life. Remember, at the time, prominent conservative Catholics were saying that it was a mortal sin to vote for Kerry-- a sin, if done with full consent of the will and sufficient reflection, would deprive one of eternity with God. It saddens me that Catholics like Professor Scaperlanda can't see how deeply hurtful this way of framing the debate is to their fellow believers. I thought then, and continue to think now, that the rhetorical strategy Bradley and George used was not a helpful way to conduct a discussion of complicated issues involving prudential judgment. It shuts down conversation, it doesn't open it up. Professor Scaperlanda suggests that I continued the tone in protesting it. Perhaps. But then, I didn't know and still don't know -- how one can effectively protest what one believes is an attack on one's fundamental integrity as a Catholic.
I took this dust-up very seriously, though. After the election, I started to think more systematically, and academically, about how moral conversation should take place; more specifically, I started to think about the relationship of rhetoric and morality. I came to recognize that there were two types of moral discourse dominating the religious discourse around the 204 election: 1) practical reason or casuistry and 2) prophetic discourse. I looked at these issues in light of abortion and torture in the 2004 election, and examined when and how both the religious right and the religious left employed both rhetorical forms. I came to the conclusion that 1) practical moral reasoning or casuistry is our normal form of discourse; 2) prophetic discourse rightly comes in when the conditions for the possibility of sound moral discourse have broken down. But it has its dangers. Prophecy is best viewed as a moral chemotherapy. It aims at destroying a cancer within the moral conversation, in order to reconstruct on a sound basis. But like actual chemotherapy, sometimes it destroys too much good along with the bad and ends up seriously harming the polity it purports to be saving. The full-blown 80 page analysis (Latin footnotes and all) is in Prophecy and Casuistry: Abortion, Torture, and Moral Reasoning, Villanova Law Review, 2006. I hope to turn it into a book.
My bottom -line position, right now is this: the culture of death v. the culture of life rhetoric is prophetic 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 youre part of the culture of death, or voting for the contemporary equivalent of Nazis, or slaveowners, theres just nowhere for the conversation to go.
My take on the 2006 election: Most Americans now believe the country needs a reasonable conversation; they want practical reason, not prophecy. The culture wars rhetoric has to fade into the background for that conversation to occur.
Best,
Cathy
I shared with a colleague Lisa's post titled "Support for Complementarity" (here). I thought that my colleague's response would be of interest:
About the Wellesley College study on the impact of women on corporate boards. I couldn't get web access to the study itself, only to the abstract of the study. The abstract doesn't tell me much about the methodology of the study. I do know that of 62 persons interviewed, 50 were women directors who, not surprisingly, tell us that having lots of women on boards is a good thing for corporations. Why only 12 CEOs? How many of them were women? Is bias possible here?
The next problem with the methodology is the interview format. Economists care more about what behavior reveals than what people say, and thus are always suspicious of survey results. In this particular area of corporate governance, the question that is usually asked about various practices that have been studied is "do they improve corporate performance, as evidenced in stock prices?" There are studies that demonstrate that even long term anticipated benefits, such as from research, are reflected in current stock prices. There is no suggestion in this blog or the abstract of any such rigor in this study.
I serve on the Nomination and Governance Committee of [name deleted], which I currently chair. (We have one woman on our board, a representative of a venture capital firm that is an investor.) We have been looking for new directors, using both the contacts of our current board members and a search firm. Very few women have shown up in the pool, and their experience has generally been more limited than that of the men, many of whom have served as CEOs and COOs of public companies. The limited number of women CEOs and COOs thus explains the thin pool of women candidates, as far as I can tell.
One response to this problem might be - why not think outside the box, and pick candidates with other kinds of experiences? On our board, I'm an example of such a pick - an academic. One of the problems is that I add value only in certain limited areas to the board's deliberations. I don't understand science, and I have no experience in the drug industry. Here I learn from and rely on others, which is proper. But how many such semi-ignorant board members do we need? Does a woman have a different take on issues of drug development than a man? I can't see how - we do our research in limited areas - HIV and Hepatitis drugs, where gender doesn't seem to play a role. Has the company hired women for responsible positions? Two of our vice presidents (regulatory affairs and alliance and project management) are women. We have one Hispanic vice president. What we look for are the smartest and most experienced people we can attract, because the united goal of the board is to (1) find the financing to allow us to develop and test our present and future drugs, (2) get them through the clinical process to FDA approval, and (3) then get them into the market where they can save lives and earn a return for our investors, some of whom have been stockholders for eight years without any return at all. This kind of patience is what it takes in the drug development business. I can't see how gender makes a difference here.
There may be companies where gender might matter. Consumer product companies where the market is largely composed of women is an obvious example. There may be other companies faced with charges or complaints involving gender, such as discrimination, where women's insights could be valuable. But proving that would require a focused empirical study, not simple assertions or anecdotal observations.
