Monday, August 10, 2009
... to Rick Garnett and to many other MOJ readers (and to their families and friends):
Religious Freedom and Beyond:
The Right to Moral Freedom
Michael J. Perry
Emory University School of Law; University of San Diego - School of Law and Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies (2009-2012)
August 10, 2009
Abstract:
At the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the celebrated American Jesuit
John Courtney Murray played a leading role, as is well known, in
persuading the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church--the bishops
and, ultimately, the pope--to embrace the right to religious freedom.
Murray was concerned with more than just religious freedom, however; he
was also concerned with what we may call moral freedom. In 1960, the
year in which the first and, so far, only Catholic was elected to the
presidency of the United States, Murray's published We Hold These
Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Murray
wrote, in that now-famous book, that "the moral aspirations of the law
are minimal. Laws seek to establish and maintain only that minimum of
actualized morality that is necessary for the healthy functioning of
the social order." According to Murray, the law should "not look to
what is morally desirable, or attempt to remove every moral taint from
the atmosphere of society. It [should] enforce[] only what is minimally
acceptable, and in this sense socially necessary."
"But
why should 'the moral aspirations of the law' be only 'minimal'," we
may fairly ask. "Why should 'laws seek to establish and maintain only
that minimum of actualized morality that is necessary for the healthy
functioning of the social order'? Why should the law 'enforce only what
is minimally acceptable, and in this sense socially necessary'?" In
this essay I provide an answer, in the course of defending this claim:
The case for liberal democracy's affirming the right to moral freedom
is analogous to and no less compelling than the case for its affirming,
as it does, the right to religious freedom. Liberal democracy should
affirm the former right, therefore, as well as the latter; it should
affirm moral freedom as well as religious freedom.
This essay is
drawn from my book The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy, which
will be published in 2010 by the Cambridge University Press.
[You can download the paper--free of charge!--here.]
The Sixth Biennial Poverty Conference of the Vincentian Chair of Social Justice will take place on October 17, 2009. The theme for this year's conference is Extreme Wealth and Poverty and the Virtue of Enough. The conference will include plenary session talks by Drew Christiansen, S.J., Editor-in Chief of America Magazine, and H.E. Mr. Oscar de Rojas, Director for UN Financing for Development. A complete schedule and registration infromation should shortly be available on the Vincentian Center website here. In the meantime, a copy of the conference poster is here.
.
