Darryl Hart's new book, "A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State," has been attracting some attention. Certainly, I agree that Christianity favors the "separation of Church and State," properly understood. It sounds like, though (see this review), Hart understands "separation" fairly broadly. That is, he contends not only that Christians should favor the independence of the Church from the State (i.e., the Freedom of the Church), but also that Christianity is "essentially a spiritual and eternal faith, one occupied with a world to come rather than the passing and temporal affairs of this world," one that "has very little to say about politics or the ordering of society." Still, the book sounds like it is worth checking out.
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
"A Secular Faith"
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
More from Karen Stohr on Ectopic Pregnancies and Double Effect
[Karen (Georgetown, Philosophy) sent this e-mail message to Richard, Rob, and me. The conversation continues ...]
Richard, I appreciate your thoughful reply [here], but as you might guess, I am not satisfied. I think we actually largely agree about this: "It seems a much too facile way of just "redescribing" the actions of the doctor."
It *is* facile (or at least, arbitrary) unless it is accompanied by an action theory that justifies sorting the descriptions that way. The same, however, applies to the way you want to to sort out action descriptions. You and others suggest sorting them this way:
"It doesn't focus adequately on the physical act that is being undertaken."
But I don't see how this helps. Indeed, I think it obscures the very issues that need to be settled within action theory. For what exactly is the physical act in question? What grounds are you using for saying that the craniotonomy/salpingostomy constitutes the physical act of killing the baby, whereas a hysterectomy/salpingectomy does not? Both, of course, are physical acts of some sort, and obviously they have the same result. In order to argue that the one constitutes killing whereas the other does not, you need to have a theory of action individuation that allows us to identify all and only cases of killing.
But let us suppose that we have such a theory and agree that craniotomies and salpingostomies constitute killings, whereas hysterectomies and salpingectomies do not. In order to argue that the former are grave moral wrongs, you would *also* need to argue that they are intentional killings, that death is the aim. And this is what I do not think that the physical description alone can get you. (After all, the cardiac surgeon and the knife-wielding murderer may be doing exactly the same physical act, but the one is attempting heart surgery and the other is attempting murder.)
In sum, there are two steps in the argument that still need justification in order for the salpingectomy/salpingostomy distinction to succeed. First, it needs to be argued that the salpingostomy is properly described as killing at all, and then it also needs to be argued that it is intentional killing. Pointing to the physical act gets you only to the first of those, if even that. But you need something more to get to the second part of the claim, and that something more will have to involve a theory of intention.
Those defending the Grisez-Boyle-Finnis line have an equal burden of argumentation. I do think that position has better philosophical grounding than the one you defend, but this could certainly be disputed. And this again is why the application of double effect troubles me so much, as it can amount to holding real people hostage to shaky philosophical distinctions.
Best,
Karen
Gender Choice
From today's New York Times:
Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. . . .
At the final public hearing for the birth certificate proposal last week, a string of advocates and transsexuals suggested that common definitions of gender, especially its reliance on medical assessments, should be abandoned. They generally praised the city for revisiting its 25-year-old policy that lets people remove the sex designation from their birth certificate if they have had sexual reassignment surgery. Then they demanded more freedom to choose.
Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said transgender people should not have to rely on affidavits from a health care system that tends to be biased against them.
In case you're confused by all this, allow Joann Prinzivalli of the New York Transgender Rights Organization to clear things up. She hails the "move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity," a fixation that is "based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes." In reality, she explains, "the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”
Rob
new book on double effect
I wanted to mention a new book on double effect. The book is Double-Effect Reasoning: Doing Good and Avoiding Evil by Thomas A. Cavanaugh. It is available in the UK and is scheduled to be published in the US very soon by Oxford University Press. Tom Cavanaugh is the chair of the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and has written several noteworthy articles on this issue. I haven't yet read the book but I expect that it will make an important contribution to the discussion of double effect.
Richard M.
Abortion and "Improved Outcomes"
A group of economists has posted a new paper, Abortion and Selection. Here is the abstract:
The introduction of legalized abortion in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility behavior. Some research has suggested as well that there were important impacts on cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the mechanisms through which abortion access affects cohort outcomes, and use that framework to both address inconsistent past methodological approaches, and provide evidence on the long-run impact on cohort characteristics. Our results provide convincing evidence that abortion legalization altered young adult outcomes through selection. In particular, we find evidence that lower costs of abortion led to improved outcomes in the birth cohort in the form of an increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent. We also find that our empirical innovations do not substantially alter earlier results regarding the relationship between abortion and crime, although most of that relationship appears to reflect cohort size effects rather than selection.
Rob
Monday, November 6, 2006
Law and Religion at Emory
I am just back from a roundtable conference -- the third annual meeting of a five-year project on Christian Jurisprudence -- at Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. It was a great time. In a nutshell, the project convenes two dozen or so scholars (including MOJ-ers Michael Perry and Kathy Brady) -- lawyers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists -- from the Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Christian traditions for meetings and workshops aimed at, eventually, producting two dozen or so new monographs on "the contributions of modern Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox figures to fundamental questions of law, politics, and society."
Emory's John Witte is the ringleader for the project. He is, of course, a force of nature.
I presented this paper, on the Freedom of the Church, which will -- I hope -- eventually be part of a book about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, properly understood. It received a helpfully, but quite forcefully, critical response.
"The Cross and the Crescent"
A must-read for folks interested in, well, the future of the West: Here is John Allen on relations between Catholicism and Islam, in a piece called "The Cross and the Crescent." Allen writes:
The heart of my argument in that lecture is that Pope Benedict XVI may well be the last, best hope for serious dialogue between the West and the Islamic world, because he is the lone figure of global standing in the West with the spiritual and theological credentials to address Muslims from within their own thought world. Hence when Benedict challenges Muslims to embrace reason and to respect religious freedom, he does so from within a shared space of commitment to religious truth. . . .
The fundamental “clash of civilizations” Benedict sees in the world today is not between Islam and the West, but between belief and unbelief – between a culture that recognizes the supernatural and a role for religion in shaping both public and private life, and one which does not. In that struggle, Benedict regards Muslims as natural allies. He has said repeatedly over the years that he admires their moral and religious seriousness, and he believes the West has something to learn from Muslims about resisting secularization. He believes that the Church and Islam can also be partners in the social, cultural and political arena. . . .
In the wake of Regensburg, the climate for Muslim/Christian exchange, I would submit, has been made more poisonous. If many Muslims harbor unresolved resentments about the pope’s language, many Christians and others in the West are experiencing a kind of fatigue about Muslim outrage. Seeing images of the pope burned in effigy, of Muslims irrationally associating Benedict XVI with the foreign policy of President George Bush despite the Vatican’s long track record of opposition to both Gulf Wars, and of violent attacks against churches and missionaries, many in the West may be tempted to conclude that dialogue with these people is impossible, that the best we can hope to do is to prepare for the cataclysmic showdown that seems to be looming.
If Benedict XVI is to lead us out of this blind alley, that project will require the energy and imagination of committed women and men of good will, including all of you in this room tonight. It is a challenge that all of us together must face – but one we must pray, along with Pope Benedict, that all of us together can face
Bess to deliver Schmitt Lecture
MOJ-friend and Catholic new urbanist Philip Bess has the honor of delivering this year's Schmitt Lecture, sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. The lecture is called "After Urbanism: The Strange Bedfellows of Neo-Traditional Architecture and Town Planning." If you are around South Bend on Nov. 15, check it out.
By the way, Philip's new book, "Till We Have Built Jerusalem," is out and available.
Gallicho reviews "Deliver Us From Evil"
The documentary film, "Deliver Us From Evil," which deals with the sex-abuse scandal, has been getting lots of (positive) press. Here is Grant Gallicho's (of Commonweal) thoughtful, critical review.
Michael's correspondent
I imagine that each one of us regrets the tone of and sentiments expressed in the e-mail that Michael received from an angry reader. And, I'm sure I'm not the only MOJ blogger who has received similar e-mails (though mine come more from the "left" than from the "right").
The cranky missive Michael received serves as occasion to remember, it seems to me, that 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.) So, I hope our readers in Omaha will not be swayed by the crochety complaining of Michael's correspondent.
And, of course, someday I will succeed in convincing Michael Perry to agree with me about those few matters where he persists, at present -- no doubt just to keep things interesting -- in disagreeing with me. Stay tuned. . .
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