Expecting a response like Eduardo’s, I almost didn’t include in my post the reflections on the complicated family situations of the two young men. Yes, at first blush and without being snarky, the reaction is maybe those creating the complicated family situations should have used birth control. But, at second blush, maybe the answer is that they should have exercised self-control.
Here are the questions. Has widespread acceptance of birth control contributed to a general lowering of moral standards in society as Paul VI predicted? Has it contributed to a rise in infidelity? Has it contributed to a lessening of respect for women by men? We might rephrase this last one: Has it contributed to an objectification of persons, both men and women? If the answer is “yes” to any or all of these questions, then might it be conceded that possibly, just possibly, the Church has an insight into the human condition that has been overlooked by much of the rest of society, including many within the fold?
* * *
I’m not sure that looking to Europe undermines the modest connection I attempted to make between human development and contraceptive use. First, I think it is way too early to tell whether Europe’s social safety net (human development) is sustainable given a declining and culturally changing population. (As an aside for another day, I am not sure why the phrase "demographic suicide" has “some extremely unfortunate eugenecist overtones.”). Second, although it appears that Europe has been more successful – maybe too successful for its own long-term good – in avoiding the “risk” of pregnancy in an era of sexual revolution than the United States, what is point to be drawn from this fact?
Can’t we concede that a sexually and relationally “liberated” society with high divorce rates, high rates of children born out of wedlock, high rates of personal and material absenteeism by fathers, is bad for human development? Aren’t these conditions related to a general atmosphere of self-indulgence predicted by Paul VI? And, isn’t it possible that the widespread acceptance of artificial birth control with its illusion of giving us control over sexual lives has contributed to this atmosphere of self-indulgent autonomy where a 21 year old fathers three children by at least two women and a 17 year old has six siblings with four different last names?
* * *
Eduardo concludes his post with this: “I think I'd be willing to accept our president's current policy of official hostility to contraception (e.g., abstinence-only sex education, etc.) if the trade-off were a serious governmental commitment to human development among the poorest Americans. Unfortunately, that deal has never been on the table, at least not during my lifetime.”
In friendship, I offer two critiques of this statement. First, if widespread acceptance of contraception is problematic, then why not embrace “abstinence-only sex education, etc.” regardless of what other people are doing or whether the government is serious about human development? In other words, if “abstinence-only sex education, etc.” is a social good why condition acceptance of it on a trade for some other good? Second, I want to note the state-centric nature of Eduardo’s concluding lines. Whether or not the state is involved in the contraception business or abstinence business, we as individuals, professors, Catholics, spouses, parents, members of various communities, can acknowledge that today’s hook-up culture made possible by wide-spread acceptance of contraceptives is not healthy for many reasons. Can’t we?
Maybe I am naïve about this, but there shouldn’t be a left/right, liberal/conservative divide here. We ought to be able to take a common sense look at society and acknowledge that Paul VI had some important insights into what would happen to a society that artificially uncoupled sex from the possibility of procreation.
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza reviews society through the lens of "The Dark Knight." In the middle of his column, he says: "The fight between Batman and the Joker is not a fight between good and evil, but about something more fundamental than that: the question of whether good and evil exist at all. Is there order, including moral order, or chaos?"
Brian Bix has posted Will Versus Reason: Truth in Natural Law, Positive Law, and Legal Theory. (HT: Solum) From the abstract:
It seems probable, and perhaps inevitable, that theorists about the nature of truth in morality must choose between reason and will - that morality, at its core, is either one or the other. What makes law distinctive is that it is, as a practical matter if not by conceptual necessity, a mixture of both. And it is this intertwining of reason and will, of normative system and practical reasoning, which makes assertions about the nature of legal truth, and theories about the nature of law, so difficult.
The arguments about truth in law are as much disagreements about what it means to say that a legal proposition is truth as they are about what makes legal propositions true. Are declarations of truth in law statements about legal norms and legal sources, or are they statements about the results of particular disputes or particularized inquiries?
And from the text:
I would not purport to resolve debates within the natural law tradition that go back many centuries. I would note that Finnis is right to raise David Hume’s is/ought problem to traditional voluntarist natural law theory (Hume’s argument, it will be recalled, is that one cannot deduce a normative [‘ought’] conclusion from purely descriptive [‘is’] premises). However, rationalism escapes Hume’s is/ought problem only by entering its own foundational conundrum: what can replace God’s will as a foundational axiom, as a justification for following all the specific norms that natural law will offer as part of a moral code?
The volume in which this paper will appear, Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence (Catholic UP 2009)should be a must-read for MoJers with an interest in philosophy.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Michael S. ponders:
The other day, I read the obituaries of a
21 year old male with three children bearing two different last names
and an unrelated 17 year old with six siblings carrying four different
last names. (May they rest in peace). As
I read, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection between
the lack of human development (flourishing), the predictions of Paul VI
concerning the widespread acceptence of contraceptives, and the
complicated family situations of so many people, including these two
young people.
Of course, my first thought when reading Michael's post was that, given the number of children/siblings involved in his examples, the problem in these young men's tragically short lives might not have been contraception but rather the lack of it, but his question is a serious one and deserves more than my snark.
I think it's very difficult as an empirical matter to attribute the poor showing of the U.S. on the human development front to contraception. As one MOJ reader correctly observed to me in an email, Europeans consistently do quite well on human development, and their widespread use of contraception is well noted among defenders of HV. (Whether Europe's declining population, which is no doubt related to European use of contraception, is really a problem in a world projected to hit 9 billion people shortly and whether the notion of Europe's "demographic suicide" -- to use George Weigel's phrase -- has some extremely unfortunate eugenecist overtones is a discussion for another day.) On the other side of the coin, use of contraception in Central America is more limited than in both Europe and the United States, and Central American countries do particularly badly on human development measures.
Rob Vischer's observations in his most recent post are also relevant to Michael's query. If one reads the social encyclicals during the roughly 70 years before HV, one finds very rich discussions from Rerum Novarum on about the many social and cultural maladies that result from poverty and inequality, including things like the breakdown of the family, the rise of immorality, and spiritual despair. Unlike the claims made on behalf of contraception, there are actually a number of studies that have found a connection between, for example, economic inequality and failure of the poor to invest in human capital. I suspect that, if there's a connection between contraception and the U.S. problem with human development, it is the one Rob's post obliquely highlights -- our poverty policy discussion has, since the 1980s, been dominated by people who are ideologically far more interested in combating the spread of contraception than in investing in the development of the human capital of the sorts of people in Michael's example.
Personally, I believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the responsible use of contraception within marriage, and that it is usually not appropriate to judge something (whether it be guns, cars, alcohol, or contraception) solely on the basis of its least responsible (or most oppressive) uses. Nor do I think the evidence remotely supports Eberstadt's view that virtually every sexual, marital or cultural dysfunction that has emerged in Western societies since the 1960s can be attributed to the widespread use of contraception. Nevertheless, I think I'd be willing to accept our president's current policy of official hostility to contraception (e.g., abstinence-only sex education, etc.) if the trade-off were a serious governmental commitment to human development among the poorest Americans. Unfortunately, that deal has never been on the table, at least not during my lifetime.
