Monday, December 3, 2012
Recalling the MOJ Joint Statement on "the Situation at Ave Maria"
In September of 2007, a group consisting of most of the MOJ bloggers posted this statement on "the situation at Ave Maria School of Law." In light of the piece, to which Kevin Lee linked, by Austin Ruse ("Ave Maria Born Again"), it seemed to me that the statement was (as Rick Reilly might say) again "relevant."
Kontorovich on Sex With (German) Animals
Eugene Kontorovich, whose blogging is a treat, has a wonderful post up on the new German zoophilia. The old German zoophilia was manifested in the civil right to bestiality back in 1969, and the rise of predictably associated phenomena of moral decay -- the taste for which, it seems, is on the rise. The new zoophilia champions the rights of animals to be left alone -- one might even call it a right of privacy -- in seeking to have these libertine liberties reversed (note that animal cruelty laws do not seem to be in issue, though I haven't studied the challengers' case well enough to know). The difficulty is the question of the grounding of the right, since moralistic reasons, or reasons of "legal moralism" (whatever those may be) are now widely deemed outré in Germany. Professor Kontorovich has an interesting observation about the issue of consent:
I suspect the motives behind the ban are entirely moralistic. Yet the government cannot come out and say so. Thus effort is made to distinguish the matter from Germany’s libertarian approach to sexual matters by suggesting the animals do not consent in the way consenting humans do. Yes, but they don’t consent to being bought or sold, or butchered, either, and they are not human, so consent is a red herring. This would not pass intermediate scrutiny in the U.S.
He then notes the now-common move of grounding the moralistic regulation of sexuality in arguments from social harm and public policy, but here perhaps I differ a bit with Professor Kontorovich. It was always the case that the retrograde moralizers grounded their arguments in ideas of social harm, beneficent social policy, and so on. The distinction is not of the method of argumentation now and then, but of the difference between what passes for harm now and then. These two excellent papers -- one by Bernard Harcourt (but sadly unavailable without payment) and the other by Steve Smith -- come at matters from fairly different angles but gesture toward the same larger idea.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
“One Political Party Is Dangerous and the Other Is Stupid”
In a recent article in Our Sunday Visitor, Russell Shaw (here) quotes an anonymous American cardinal: “This is the situation now . . . One political party is dangerous and the other is stupid.”
Terry Mattingly at the blog Get Religion (here) says that this very well “might be the religion-beat quote of the year.”
Mattingly praises Shaw for the depth of his post-election analysis of the Catholic electorate – an analysis that shows “why it is unwise for journalists to keep pinning current-day political labels on the foreheads of people whose lives are defined by centuries of religious doctrines.”
Shaw’s story doesn’t identity the cardinal, and the cardinal doesn’t identify which party is which – but MOJ readers might have some ideas.
So here’s the question: From a Catholic point of view, which of the two major American political parties is the “dangerous” one and which is the “stupid” one, and why? Comments open.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
An Open Letter to Austin Ruse Regarding Ave Maria School of Law
Dear Mr. Ruse,
I am writing this letter to you in reply to your recent blog post regarding the ill-fated Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was moved to Naples, Florida several years ago. I have decided to make this an open letter in the hope of clarifying some points for readers of your blog, who I believe might be misled by your post.
I was a member of the Michigan faculty of Ave Maria. I left in 2007, having experienced first-hand the beginning to the troubles at the Law School. Mr. Ruse, you have no first-hand knowledge of the events that took place there many years ago. It doesn’t appear that you have done even basic research. If you had, you would know for example that the ABA complaint wasn't anonymous, as you state. The ABA does not accept anonymous complaints. The names were withheld from the Law School because the faculty members had been threatened with retaliation.
As it stands, the account you have given is one-sided, at best. You obviously did not reach out to talk with any of the members of the Michigan faculty who were pushed out to find out their perspectives on what happened. If you are genuinely interested in finding out what happened, I recommend Bruce Frohnen’s recent review of Tom Monaghan’s biography in the current issue of the American Conservative. It contains some details that you would have learned if you had taken the time to talk with any of us. (It will be available on-line on December 10.)
You seem to have gotten your understanding of the Michigan faculty mostly from blog posts by anonymous sources that even you admit were prone to making false and misleading statements. So, I am surprised and disappointed by your blog post, which warns of the dangers of calumny while itself making such unsubstantiated and unreliable claims.
More significantly, your post is potentially injurious to many people and most particularly to Ave Maria School of Law. As I noted, it has been many years since I left Ave Maria and several years since the Law School settled the lawsuits brought against it by faculty members who claimed to have been wrongfully denied tenure and wrongfully terminated. It is now possible, through a FOIA request to the United States Department of Education, to look at the ABA Report on Ave Maria School of Law that resulted from the faculty complaint. I have a copy of that Report. I will not go into the gory details of the ABA findings to refute the many inaccuracies of your blog post. I have no desire to rehash the case or its outcome in public. It is in no one’s interest to do that, and it is certainly not in the interest of the School of Law.
One point made by the ABA Site Investigator should be emphasized, however. In the Report he likens the situation at the Law School to “a bitter divorce.” That, I think, is in fact a sad tribute to the close and nurturing community that we once had in Michigan, before all the troubles began. It was like a family, and when it ended, it was like a family being torn apart. Having lived through the break-up, and knowing first-hand the trauma that it caused my colleagues, friends, family, and the innocent students who were its victims, I can only agree with that assessment. The Ave Maria School of Law and the Michigan faculty have parted ways, and the break-up is irreconcilable.
I think its time that both sides of this old dispute move on with their lives. Mostly we have done so. Personally, I pray daily (and I hope others do too) to find room in my heart to forgive as we are called to do as Catholics; to remember that bitter disputes among us are literally wounds in the body of our Lord. I have sought to make peace with Ave Maria and try to remember the very good things that we all did there, together as a community. I wish the Florida Ave Maria very well, indeed, as I believe that their mission of providing legal education in the Catholic intellectual tradition continues to be of vital importance.
Mr. Ruse, these events are in the past: half a decade for me and several years for the litigants. It is time for this sad chapter in Ave Maria’s history to be put to rest. That is part of the healing process when a great trauma, like the breakup of a family, has been suffered. And, as with a bitter divorce, there is little to be gained at this point by opening old wounds.
In the interest of all concerned, I respectfully request that you cease making such blog posts and public statements.
Very truly yours,
Kevin P. Lee
Friday, November 30, 2012
Richard Wilkins passes away at 59
The pro-life and pro-family causes suffered a great loss earlier this week with the untimely passing of BYU Law Professor Richard Wilkins. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865567647/BYU-law-professor-well-known-Utah-stage-actor-Richard-Wilkins-passes-away-at-59.html He will be sorely missed.
Richard M.
Fred Gedicks responds to John Breen
[Fred writes:]
John Breen, Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, recently criticized on the Mirror of Justice blog my ACS Issue Brief defending the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, and several of his points require a response.
[For Fred's response to John, click here.
I have found my highest, best use: facilitating to-and-fros, such as this one between Fred and John.]
Gerson on Austerity and Morality
Here's a thoughtful column by Michael Gerson on what leaders must display in a time of austerity: a sense of proportion, the courage to take on large interests, and a sense of humanity. Wherever you think the balance should be, these orientations are right. And Gerson continues his compassionate-conservative defense of foreign aid against attacks like those by Sen. Rand Paul:
There are many substantive responses to Paul’s critique of aid. U.S. foreign policy would not be particularly American if a commitment to universal human dignity did not play some role. And acting according to that commitment has traditionally been an important element of U.S. influence — shaping our image and serving our interests.
But Paul’s crusade against aid is most notable as a failure of leadership. It lacks proportion, since the total of humanitarian assistance amounts to less than 1 percent of the federal budget — an expenditure irrelevant to the United States’ long-term, structural fiscal challenge.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Subsidiarity
I have a new paper on subsidiarity here. The paper is a chapter in what I believe will be the first English-language, book-length, comparative study of subsidiarity. My topic is subsidiarity in Catholic social doctrine, the place where the neologism "subsidiarium" originated. Subsidium, meaning help, is a Latin word in use since Roman times, but the new word subsidiarium denotes a plural social order that is derivative of social justice. Subsidiarity is the way the common good is to be achieved.
Talk of the common good "seem[s] unintelligible (even proto-fascist) to many contemporary Westerners" (John Rist, Real Ethics [Cambridge, 2002], 207), but subsidiarity, one of the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine, is about how the common good is to be achieved. Subsidiarity is not about smallness per se, devolution, or even "mediating" institutions that balance power or perhaps limit the state. It is about respecting the ontology of group persons: respecting associations, and helping them as necessary, as they refer their internal common goods to the overall common good.
Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control
The historian of political ideas, Joseph Hamburger, who spent nearly all of his long and distinguished professional career in the Yale Department of Political Science, was an expert in 18th, but particularly 19th, century British intellectual history. My little essays on Sir James Fitzjames Stephen as well as some book-related research on Edmund Burke have brought with them the great good luck of an introduction to the writing of this immensely thoughtful and erudite scholar. Fairly recently, I picked up Professor Hamburger's book on John Stuart Mill: John Stuart Mill on Liberty
and Control (1999).
The thesis of the book is that the strong and unqualified libertarian understanding of Mill -- the view that Mill was an unadulterated champion of freedom for its own sake -- is very much mistaken. Relying on the major works (the Logic, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, etc.) as well as on many less well-known writings and letters, Hamburger argues that what interested Mill was liberty and control, and fairly substantial and intrusive types of state and social control at that:
[A]n explanation of Mill's overarching argument in On Liberty must explain the coexistence of these two apparently opposite positions. This is made necessary because the provisions for controls were not small exceptions to a general presumption that in most circumstances an expansive liberty ought to prevail . . . . [T]he range of cases in which [Mill] would punish, his approval of punishments for mere dispositions toward conduct that would injure others, and above all, his explanation of his purposes to [his friend] George Grote indicate that his rationale for liberty in combination with control requires a different explanation. It is also necessary to explain how, for Mill, the provisions for both control and liberty were not contradictory, but in fact were compatible means of implementing a coherent plan of moral reform. (18-19)
Professor Hamburger proceeds in the following chapter to discuss the movement of Mill away from an interest in institutional reform (something which always greatly interested Bentham) toward a more ambitious plan for cultural and moral reform (in tandem with and inspired by his wife, Harriet). He then spends several very interesting chapters discussing Mill's aim to vanquish Christianity as the de facto social morality and replace it with a "religion of humanity" -- the new moral system which would strike the balance between liberty and control properly:
The real task of religion was to direct emotions and desires away from low objects and to be "paramount over all selfish objects of desire." Moreover, it ought to make us disinterested: "It carries the thoughts and feelings out of self, and fixes them on an unselfish object, loved and pursued as an end for its own sake." Christianity, however, in Mill's view, did anything but this:
The religions which deal in promises and threats regarding a future life, do exactly the contrary: they fasten down the thoughts to the person's own posthumous interests; they tempt him to regard the performance of his duties to others mainly as a means to his personal salvation; and are one of the most serious obstacles to the great purpose of moral culture, the strengthening of the unselfish and the weakening of the selfish element in our nature. (43, quoting "Utility of Religion")
Deneen responds to Munoz on "our Founding liberal principles"
Following up on yesterday's post, here (at Public Discourse) is Patrick Deneen's reponse to Phillip Munoz's discussion of liberalism. A bit:
What Muñoz neglects is that the liberal invocation of individual rights, voluntarism, and self-ownership—while useful as an appeal against practices such as slavery—unavoidably also undergirds the tendencies and practices that are at the heart of my critique, namely the tendency toward the expansion of voluntarism into all spheres of life and the effort to conquer nature so as to satisfy all human appetites and intentions that arise from an unconstrained human will. It should also be pointed out that liberalism invites the pro-choice conclusion, inasmuch as its basic understanding of the human person as “self-owner” leads to the conclusion that a fetus can be regarded as an intrusive “other” that impinges upon a woman’s sovereign self. . .
Ought one to be a “conservative” and a “patriot” toward our liberal inheritance? The contradiction is breathtaking. The liberal tradition institutionalizes mistrust of the “ancestral” or the inherited, asking each of us to assess whether or not it is in our individual interest to accept the inheritance of our patrimony, and if not, to make our own choices as free and independent individuals. This basic impetus is the ground condition of liberalism—by accepting its basic premise, one begins as a liberal, no matter whether one accepts one’s patrimony or not.
Every human relationship and institution comes under liberalism’s radicalizing and disruptive logic, requiring every aspect and moment of our lives to be subject to the logic of choice based upon calculations of individual advantage. This logic shapes our marriages, whether we are open to the birth of children, whether we remain with our families, whether we accept the teachings and remain members of our church, whether we remain loyal to our places and people, and even whether we continue to view ourselves as Americans. Ironically, it is in the nature of liberalism finally to undermine the very notion of patriotism, inasmuch as our patria—our fatherland—is one of those memberships that is subject to our constant reconsideration as free and independent individuals. The modern move toward trans-national, borderless cosmopolitanism is not a contradiction of Lockean liberalism—it is its culmination.
I consider myself a grateful patriot, but not to the abstract liberal principles of America. America has historically been much better than its principles . . .
I enjoy noting that both Munoz and Deneen are my colleagues at the University of Notre Dame.
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