According to a forthcoming Urban Institute study, in the absense of meaningful federal health care reform, "more than 60 million Americans could be uninsured within 10 years as insurance premiums increase to unsustainable levels for individuals, families, and businesses. As a result, private coverage will fall, enrollment in public programs will increase, and the number of uninsured will rise. Middle-income families will be the hardest hit."
I don't confess to have the answer on this issue, but it is clear that our current, primarily employer-based and voluntary, system of providing health insurance coverage is failing millions of Americans. It is equally clear that this is unacceptable from the standoint of the social teaching of the Catholic Church, which views heatlh care as a basic human right, grounded in the dignity of the human person. (See, e.g., Pacem in Terris, par. 11, or JPII's 1979 Address to the Generaly Assembly of the UN.)
The Catholic Health Association has suggested that "[t]he promotion, maintenance, and enhancement of health is a social good with societal responsibility shared by individuals, families, health care providers, voluntary agencies, employers, and governmetns." How that responsibility gets allocated among those various groups so as to ensure access to health care to all Americans is something that must be confronted.
It was a beautiful day -- for me, a sad one, but also, strangely, a somewhat hopeful one -- at Notre Dame.
There will be, in the days to come, a lot said and written about the various events and speeches at Notre Dame this weekend. (Try to find the text or video of the remarks given on the South Quad, at the event sponsored by ND Response, by Fr. John Rafael, of St. Augustine High School in New Orleans, Moving stuff.) I was not able to attend the main ceremony, so I had to follow President Obama's and Judge Noonan's remarks online.
UPDATE: Here is the video of the ND Response event.
I admire Judge Noonan immensely, but wish -- on this particular occasion -- he had been a bit more direct. For the careful listener, intimately familiar with Noonan's work and American history, there were some powerful thoughts. I worry that the commencement audience, though, did not hear the challenge to President Obama's unfortunate embrace of injustice that, in my view, Judge Noonan's remarks contained.
The President said, almost word-for-word what I expected he would be advised to say, and what was politically astute for him to say, and he did so well. To my regret, he did not say "by the way, I've been a doofus when it comes to school choice, and I hereby resolve to put my popularity and charm to good use -- helping kids and promoting religious freedom -- and to appreciate the fact that I don't actually have to kow-tow to the teacher-unions. Oh, and I also now understand -- having come to Notre Dame -- that it really is not such a good thing to constitutionalize a right to private violence against the most vulnerable human beings." Maybe next time.
Over at America, Michael Sean Winters has this review of the President's address: "[t]he speech handed the President’s opponents plenty of ammunition and showed the extent to which the Obama White House is tone deaf to Catholics and our concerns." Fr. James Martin's take is more glowing.
So . . . what next? Will Notre Dame do some honest self-assessment, and ask whether it really has done the kind of things that would make true what we were assured was true, namely, that Notre Dame is entirely and unswervingly pro-life, and "everyone knows" this, so there is no danger of the public getting the wrong idea that the honors accorded the President (the thunderous, sustained applause, the rhapsodic tributes, etc.) indicate an indifference on Notre Dame's part to the seriousness of the injustice involved in our abortion-law regime? Perhaps. I hope so.
UPDATE: Amy Welborn has some thoughts and good questions, here.
In particular, and for those who are inclined to welcome, and take as sincere, the President's stated interest in "dialogue", "common ground", "civility", etc.: At some point, it is inescapable: either the unborn child is a human being, and therefore entitled in justice to the protection of the laws, or (s)he is not. The possibilities for, and parameters of, "dialogue" are, it seems to me, closely connected to the answer given this question. Another point, about the relevance of law to all this. For some of us, calls for "dialogue" and "working together" rings a bit hollow, when these calls take place in a context where the Roe / Casey regime has made it impossible for one side to secure any gains -- even "compromises" -- in politics. It is one thing to say, "let's compromise on the abortion question", and then to work out the details of that compromise in politics. In fact, President Obama's position is that "the Constitution permits hardly any regulations of abortion, and the government ought to subsidize abortion; that said, I'd love to work with you on securing increased funding for social welfare programs that I'm perfectly willing to hope will reduce abortion." For some of us, though, meaningful dialogue would have to include consideration of the possibility that law is a part of the package of abortion-reduction measures.
MoJ-ers will be (or at least should be) interested in a new paper from John Finnis titled Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics. Here's the abstract:
This address to a philosophical conference on truth and faith in ethics engages in an extended critique of the account of truth in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). For any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue. But any such theory also needs to make clear how it differs from, even when it coincides in moral judgment with, bodies of moral teaching self-identified as part of a divine revelation addressed to everyone. It also needs to show how truths of natural law provide grounds for rejecting, as well as for accepting, particular human claims to be the bearer of such a universal revelation. Parts I to III below address these issues through a critical examination of some contemporary philosophizing which, while acknowledging the warranted universality of the predicate “is true,” withhold that predicate from the principles of practical reason. Parts IV and V address another aspect of universality and particularity about which natural law theory needs to get clear: how the moral norms of natural law, properly as universal as human nature and the community of all people and peoples, nonetheless warrant strong loyalty to specific communities, above all one’s country and one’s marital family.
It is striking that a majority of Americans consider themselves "pro-life" (though, like Rick, I'm not exactly sure what that means). Two aspects of the results are less cheery: no uptick in the percentage of Democrats identifying as "pro-life" and no significant difference in "pro-life" self-identification among Roman Catholics versus the general population (52% vs. 51%).
Patrick Deneen has a bracing critique, here, of the modern "multiversity." It's something of a gut-check for people (like me) who have a lot invested in the "Catholic university" project. Are we on the wrong track entirely? (HT, again: Phil Bess). A bit:
Our current universities no longer undertake what they were designed to achieve, and hence have become largely dysfunctional institutions whose activity - classical liberal education - exists in profound tension with their role - conveyors in the global meritocratic marketplace. It should be recognized that a vast chasm has arisen between what today's colleges and universities are for - the bestowal of credentials - and what they were designed to achieve - a liberal education. The truth is that our colleges and universities are palimpsests - a helpful word that describes a kind of recycled medieval parchment, so rare that it was used and re-used, with old writing often being removed for new and more updated text. Our institutions of higher education are most visibly palimpsests in their buildings: the ancient gothic structures recall a form of education that stressed religious training and vocation, just as the names of the offices of the university - professors (those who "profess faith"), deans (short for "deacon") and provosts (once, a high-ranking church official) - point to the older roles that were once religious and traditional. It is easy to deceive oneself that the universities have not fundamentally changed when one concentrates on the remnants of an eviscerated culture, but the truth is that the old writing has been erased and a new text determines the course of modern education.
Traditionalists and conservatives may decry the decline of liberal education at the heart of the modern university - and its replacement by a Left-wing agenda - but the deeper truth is that liberal education has been more fundamentally and powerfully displaced by demands of global competition. While traditionalists and conservatives might wish to apportion blame to the vast Left-wing conspiracy - particularly those increasingly irrelevant faculty whose postmodernism has become a form of stale institutional orthodoxy - the truth is that the rise of the Left faculty was a response to conditions that were already making liberal education irrelevant, a sort of pathetic and ultimately self-destructive effort to make the humanities relevant and "up to date." These purported radicals - mostly bourgeois middle-class former hippies - were not agents of liberation, but a deeper reflection of the reality of the irrelevance and neglect of the liberal arts in a dawning new age of global competition.
UPDATE: Archbishop Wuerl on Catholic universities and the Church, here, at "The Catholic Key."
The New Hampshire governor has conditioned his support of the state's same-sex marriage bill on the inclusion of robust religious liberty protections, borrowing from a proposal made by our own Rick and Tom (along with three other law profs). As Dale Carpenter puts it, "Make no mistake: a baseline is being established in New England."
Congratulations to Michael Simons, who has been named dean at St. John's, succeeding the late Mary Daly. This should be especially welcome news for MoJers, as Mike has shown a keen interest in the ongoing articulation of what Catholic legal education can and should mean. He has also been a guiding force behind the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. St. John's is in very capable -- and mission-friendly -- hands.
Check out this essay, at Huffington Post, by Prof. Ronald Colombo, connecting the credit crisis (and related downers) with the development of (or failure to develop) the virtues. A taste:
Unfortunately, since morality and virtue are developed over time, via repeated decisions to choose what is right and to forego what is wrong, there is no quick fix to our present problems. Moreover, law can do very little to make people virtuous. Indeed, "coerced virtue" is oxymoronic.
But law can help foster an environment in which virtue can be developed and exerted more readily. We would do well to reconsider our abandonment of "values" education in primary and secondary schools, and should bolster the ethics training of M.B.A. and J.D. candidates in business and law schools. Corporate and securities law could be revised to enhance disclosure of, and shareholder input on, issues of moral concern. Directors and officers could be empowered and encouraged to take moral considerations into greater account, and unshackled from the constraint to operate their corporations with an unwavering focus on maximization of shareholder value. By providing instruction on basic moral principles, by sensitizing market participants to the moral implications of their choices, and by creating more opportunities where moral choice can be exercised, the law can play an important role in helping individuals grow in virtue.
Some, of course, will argue that it's too difficult to cultivate virtue. Simpler and more effective, they will suggest, would be more corporate regulation, stricter enforcement of antifraud legislation, and heavier penalties heaped upon wrongdoers. Such suggestions are certainly worth considering. But even under the best of laws, our resources and ability to prevent and detect wrongdoing will always be limited. Moreover, law's reach is itself quite limited: for regulation has an unfortunate tendency of preventing only a repeat of yesterday's wrongdoing; it oftentimes does little to forestall the wrongdoing of tomorrow. And this is inevitable, given the creativity and persistence of wrongdoers.
We need and can enjoy better protection from future corporate corruption, fraud, and the general dereliction of duty that lies at the heart of the economic calamities we are now facing. This protection lies not simply in a fine-tuning, an overhaul, or even a paring of our regulatory regime. It lies in a more virtuous markeplace. We ought to think seriously about ways in which to bring this about. For when no one is looking , and when no can catch us, or when there is no law to hold us accountable, or no other means of chastisement, the only thing that compels us to do what is right is virtue.
