Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Exploring the Catholic Intellectual Tradition
Boston College has a new issue here of its regular publication "C21 Resources" that explores the Catholic intellectual tradition. The issue (edited by Father Robert Imbelli) includes excellent contributions from, among others, BC's own (and MOJ friend) Greg Kalscheur, SJ, CUA President and former BC law dean John Garvey, and the lovely and talented Anna Bonta Moreland on teaching and the Catholic intellectual life in Villanova's Department of Humanities.
Law's Virtues at Brookings
I will be a respondent at an event next week (Thursday, January 31) at the Brookings Institution on Cathy Kaveny's new book, Law's Virtues: Fostering Autonomy and Solidarity in American Society (Georgetown University Press, 2012) moderated by Bill Galston and alongside EJ Dionne and Melissa Rogers from Brookings and Margaret Little from Georgetown's Kennedy Institute. Details here.
Roe and "our daughters"
I was struck yesterday, on the 40th memorial of Roe v. Wade, by several statements by those favoring legal abortion who stressed the "need to protect the right to choose for the sake of our daughters." Our daughters. Hmmmm . . . . Every child (or, if you prefer, since it changes nothing, every "fetus") slain in an abortion is male or female. The victim is not a male or female mosquito or rat. He or she is a male or female human---a son or daughter. As it happens, worldwide more often the child killed is a female, a daughter, and very often the child is killed precisely because she is female. A daughter is destroyed in the womb because her father or mother or both want a son, not a daughter. She is not good enough. She will not do. She must be gotten rid of. How sad an irony that the defense of the legal right to take the life of a child in the womb is made in the name of protecting "our daughters."
The Abortion Debate
I was pleased to see some discussion of the abortion issue in several of yesterday’s postings on the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. After teaching for a good portion of the day, one of my young Jesuit colleagues who is studying philosophy here at Loyola University Chicago asked me to celebrate Mass and conduct an adoration hour for the students who will be going to Washington later this week and who will be participating in the March for Life and related events. I accepted the invitation, which is an honor for me. My confrere is the survivor of an unwanted pregnancy, and I understand why he is committed to proclaiming the pro-life message with objective reason and intelligence. He is talented, hard-working, and most productive. He is also a graduate of some of the most distinguished universities in the United States. He knows how close he came to being destroyed in his natural mother’s womb. In preparation for the Mass and adoration, he and I talked a little bit about how pro-abortion advocates assert the things that they do. I explained to him how their argument had switched from the privacy argument which was first made in the advocacy leading up to Roe to equality once the privacy argument failed.
I further explained that the equality argument also has its weaknesses and briefly explained an essay that I had written a few years ago [Download 45HousLRev] which examined the pro-abortion argument’s foundation on a misconception of equality. Since this essay relied upon an earlier essay of mine regarding the equality argument in general, I have also attached that essay here [Download 27QLR113].
Let us pray for our fifty-five million fellow Americans who were not so lucky as my young Jesuit brother. But let us also pray for those who think that privacy and equality arguments entitle them to destroy other fellow Americans.
RJA sj
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Lumen Christi seminar: "Catholic Social Thought: A Critical Investigation"
This seminar, with Russ Hittinger, for graduate students, looks great. (I wish I could enroll!) Five days in Berkeley, in August . . . what are you waiting for?
This seminar is an intensive five-day course for graduate students in how to read, analyze, and discern continuities and discontinuities in Catholic Social Thought from the late 19th century to the present. Lectures, seminar reports, and discussion will focus upon original sources (encyclicals and other magisterial documents), beginning with Rerum novarum (1892) and concluding with Caritas in veritate (2009). These documents are more often referred to thanactually read and studied. This intensive course is multi-disciplinary, for this tradition of social thought overlaps several disciplines in the contemporary university: political science, political philosophy, law, economics, theology, and history. The goal of the seminar is to provide a sufficient introduction to the tradition of Catholic Social Thought to enable graduate students to teach it as a course and integrate it into their own research
Why Is There So (Relatively) Little Good Scholarly Work on Abortion?
A thought (or just a hypothesis) for the day: For a topic that has convulsed American law and politics since 1973, the abortion issue has produced a surprisingly meager scholarly literature. This came to me when I was selecting readings for a seminar in law and bioethics, which I teach from time to time--it turns out it's hard (at least much harder than I expected) to find good resources on the topic. I don't mean to suggest, of course, that there has been nothing worthwhile written on abortion. Judith Jarvis Thomson's article about the kidnapped violinist in "A Defense of Abortion" (1970) remains a classic pro-choice argument, and our own Robby George, his mentor John Finnis, and John Keown (another Finnis student) have produced powerful defenses of the pro-life position. Then-Professor John Noonan's edited collection The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives (Harvard, 1970) includes Noonan's own "An Almost Absolute Value in History" and Paul Ramsey's "Reference Points in Deciding about Abortion." (Note that Thomson's article and the Noonan collection are all pre-Roe and now over 40 years old.) Will Saletan's Bearing Right (California, 2004) was an interesting read about the politics of the pro-life movement, Mary Ann Glendon's Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Harvard, 1989) is a wonderful comparative study, and my colleague Joe Dellapenna published a 1300-page survey of the history of abortion, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History (Carolina Academic Press, 2006).
I am leaving a lot out that I could mention from many quarters (McMahan, Kaczor, Beckwith, eg), but, even so, this strikes me as a relatively small output of literature for a topic of such prominence. Law review articles working through the weeds of legal doctrine on abortion strike me as less common than one might expect (Jessie Hill's, Naomi Cahn's, and Reva Siegel's work on the pro-choice side, Mark Rienzi's, Michael Paulsen's, and Helen Alvaré's work and articles such as Stephen Gilles's "Roe’s Life-or-Health Exception: Self-Defense or Relative-Safety?," 85 Notre Dame L. Rev. 525 (2010) on the pro-life side being notable exceptions--again, leaving out some other candidates). Why is this? Are the arguments on each side now so well-rehearsed and known that there is little new--since, say, the initial outburst of literature in the early 1970s--to say on the topic? Are the terms of the abortion debate (sanctity of life, equality, liberty, autonomy) themselves so intractable that, as Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in After Virtue, abortion is merely one manifestation of the incommensurability in moral argument that afflicts our culture? And so writing on the topic--certainly writing in the hope of persuading those readers who disagree--is usually not worth the effort?
"The Competing Claims of Law and Religion"
As my friend and former student, Prof. Derek Muller, reports at Prawfsblawg, the various papers presented last winter at Pepperdine at an outstanding law-and-religion conference have been published by the Pepperdine Law Review. (Go to Derek's post for a list of all the presenters, and links to the papers.) My own, "Neutrality and the Good of Religious Freedom: An Appreciative Response to Prof. Koppelman," is here:
This paper is a short response to an address, “And I Don’t Care What It Is: Religious Neutralityin American Law,” delivered by Prof. Andrew Koppelman at a conference, “The
Competing Claims of Law and Religion: Who Should Influence Whom?”, which was
held at Pepperdine University in February of 2012. In this response, it is suggested – among other things – that “American religious neutrality” is, as Koppelman argues, “coherent and attractive” because and to the extent that it is not neutral with respect to the goal and good of religious freedom.
Religious freedom, in the American tradition, is not what results from the operationalization in law of hostility toward religion. It is not (only) what results from a program of conflict-avoidance or division-dampening. It is not merely the product of those compromises that were necessary to secure the
ratification of the original Constitution. It is, instead, a valuable and necessary feature of any attractive legal regime, because it reflects, promotes, and helps to constitute human flourishing. So, and again, the state should remain “neutral” with respect to most religious questions – primarily because
the resolution of such questions is outside the jurisdiction, and not just the competence, of civil authorities – but it may and should affirm enthusiastically that religious freedom is a good thing that should be protected and nurtured in law and policy.
On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade
Forty years. I started going to March-for-Life-type events in the late 1970s, and I remember the pro-life movement in my hometown as having more of a crunchy, Berrigan-brothers-meet-Mother-Theresa vibe than it came to have later. On the one hand, the right conjured by the (all-male, as Charlie Camosy points out in this nice post) Court in an opinion from which even most abortion-rights supporters feel a need to avert their case, seems deeply entrenched: judicial nominees are carefully instructed how to speak out it, Planned Parenthood raises millions to support its campaign in support of it by warning of ever-present threats (some, I hope, real; many imagined) against it, its dehumanizing premises are aggressively exported from rich countries to poorer ones; and even substantial numbers of Catholics profess to embrace (what they take to be) its teaching.
On the other hand, though, it does seem like progress has been made: The March-for-Life culture is young, enthusiastic, and happy. (Hundreds of Notre Dame students, God bless them, will take long bus trips to DC this week to carry the "March for Life" banner.) The public -- even those who identify as "pro-choice" -- seems more open to reasonable regulations, as do reasonable judges; and fewer people than before preach the "it's just a clump of cells" line.
It's probably unfortunate, but also (I think) unavoidable, that the most-discussed-issue here at MOJ, over the years, has been (in one way or another) abortion. And yet, if (as I am inclined to think is the case) the most important contribution that "Catholic" can make to "legal theory" is a correct understanding of the person, then there is no way that a blog dedicated to the development of Catholic Legal Theory could avoid addressing, and criticizing, our deeply unjust and profoundly anti-human abortion-law regime. "A person is a person, no matter how small." Don't give up.
UPDATE: Here's a similar post I did, on the same subject, at Prawfsblawg.
January 22, 1973
Heal us, O Lord, from the wounds that were opened that infamous day.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Mystery Millinery
By far the most fascinating story to be covered at today's inaugural festivities involves the genesis and meaning of Justice Scalia's head-dress. The voracious hunger for conspiratorial explanations in the Twitterverse was predictable, but it was sated (or perhaps 'whetted' is the mot juste) by Kevin Walsh, whose dash and sense of medieval panache is second to none.
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