[Thanks much to Robby for this, in response to my post.]
May I venture some thoughts on the questions you posed about judging positions without judging persons holding the positions? You ask:
Can
we disagree with one another, sometimes fundamentally about important
issues (the morality of same-sex unions, e.g., or the prudence of using
the criminal law in this society at this time, to deal with the moral
tragedy of abortion), without our "judging" one another--judging the
position, yes, but not one another? Should we even aspire to do so?
The answers, I think, are "yes" and "yes." "Yes" we can; and "yes" we should.
On
the question whether we should aspire to avoid judging others, we have
an express teaching from the highest of all authorities. Jesus's
command that we "judge not" (lest we ourselves be judged) is recorded
in St. Matthew's Gospel. On the question whether it is possible to
fulfill the command, it seems to me that Jesus would not give us a
command if it is impossible (even with God's grace) to comply with it.
Obviously it is challenging command, because our emotions, and not just
our rational faculties, are inevitably engaged when we argue and
debate--especially when our arguments and debates concern profound
issues of right and wrong. But I suppose that is just the way things
are in this vale of tears. So we must all do out best, and try to
support each other--across the lines of division--in doing it.
But
things do get dicey when we think about extreme cases. Let's use the
standard example, and consider Hitler. He advocated, then committed,
genocide. We rightly judge that to be unspeakably wicked. In doing
so, do we not judge Hitler himself to be unspeakably wicked? I've
always found this a bit puzzling. Surely we cannot avoid judging
Hitler to be a genocidal murderer. That's what he was; there is no way
around it. Surely we would, and should, have supported punishing him
for his crimes, had the allied forces captured him at the end of World
War II. But Jesus's command is categorical. There is no "except in
the case of . . . " clause in Matthew 7:1. There is, then, some
meaningful sense in which we are not supposed to judge even Hitler.
What could that sense be?
Gaudium et Spes
of the Second Vatican Council teaches that "God alone is the judge and
searcher of hearts; for that reason he forbids us to make judgments
about the internal guilt of anyone." But, of course, we do make
judgments of guilt in the context of the criminal justice system, and
plainly the fathers of the Council are not enjoining us against
doing so. As I said, certainly we could legitimately have supported
trying and punishing Hitler for genocide, just as we punished his
collaborators and henchmen. So, again, what does "not judging" mean?
Well,
one thing it means, I suppose, is that we must recognize that it is not
for us to judge the ultimate condition of anyone's soul -- even
Hitler's. That's God's job, and we must not purport to usurp it. The
Church teaches solemnly and authoritatively that no one -- not even the
Pope -- can say whether any particular human individual -- even Hitler
-- is damned. As Germain Grisez puts it, commenting on Matthew 7:1 and
Gaudium et Spes 28, "perhaps, due to invincible ignorance or
lack of freedom, they are not internally guilty; perhaps they are." At
the same time, plainly we sometimes have an obligation to defend what
we believe are moral truths, even if in defending them we offend those
who believe and act contrary to them.
Of
course, Hitler was not a person of goodwill. The kinds of disputes
that prompted your question are disagreements among people of
goodwill. It is a lot easier to avoid judging people when one
acknowledges that--however misguided one judges their positions to
be--they are people who are sincerely seeking the truth and trying to
act in accordance with it. This in itself provides a certain kind of
"common ground" between the interlocutors. And it generates certain
norms of conduct for them. Above all, I think, there is a norm of
reciprocity which requires debaters to treat each other with civility
and respect.
I published a piece in the Harvard Law Review
a few years ago in which I explored the application of this norm in the
context of great moral debates in our national history, especially the
debate over slavery in the 19th century and abortion in our own time.
What I wrote has direct relevance, I believe, to the questions you have
posed:
"People
ought to respect the principle of reciprocity whenever they find
themselves in disagreement with people of goodwill, regardless of
whether they find the position (or even the arguments) advanced by such
people to be worthy of respect. It is not the worthiness of a position
(or argument) that makes this principle applicable. Rather, it is a
matter of respecting people's reasonableness (even when they are
defending a view that one can only judge to be fundamentally
unreasonable) and their goodwill (even when they are defending
practices and policies that one can only judge to be gravely unjust or
in some other way immoral). By observing the principle of reciprocity
in moral and political debate, one is not necessarily indicating
respect for a position (which one perhaps reasonably judges to be so
deeply immoral as to be unworthy of respect), but for the
reasonableness and goodwill of the person who, however misguidedly,
happens to hold that position. The point of observing the requirements
of reciprocity is to fulfill one's obligations in justice to one's
fellow citizens who are, like oneself, attempting to think through the
moral question as best they can."
Now
this analysis raises a question about how it is that reasonable people
of goodwill can embrace policies and practices that are profoundly
unjust or immoral. That turns out to be a very complicated question,
indeed. As a brute matter of fact, however, it is all too easy for any
of us to fall into moral error; and our basic reasonableness and even
our goodwill cannot provide a guarantee that we won't. Most of us (at
least those of us who are not black) imagine that we would have been
abolitionists in the days of slavery; yet the truth is that only a few
of us actually would have been. How could otherwise decent
people--folks very much "like us"--have supported so horrific an evil?
I offer some reflections on that, and on the question of how reasonable
people of goodwill can today support abortion, in the Harvard Law Review article I mentioned. Citation: 110 Harv. L. Rev. 1388-1406 (1997).
Best wishes,
Robby
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Can we disagree with one another, sometimes fundamentally about important issues (the morality of same-sex unions, e.g., or the prudence of using the criminal law in this society at this time, to deal with the moral tragedy of abortion), without our "judging" one another--judging the position, yes, but not one another? Should we even aspire to do so? A thought prompted by the following, which I found my way to through dotCommonweal:
September 18th, 2006
Jeremy
Driscoll, OSB, is a most unusual monk. He’s a poet, patristics scholar,
and professor who teaches both in Rome and at Mount Angel Abbey in
Oregon, his monastery. He’s also the author of A Monk’s Alphabet,
one of the most unusual books of this publishing season. The book
consists of 196 short essays, reflections, and ruminations, arranged
alphabetically from Airplane to Zerr. (Bonaventure Zerr was the seventh
abbott of Mount Angel. Father Driscoll’s moving account of his death
concludes the book.) He is a writer of exceptional talent and insight.
Great writers such as Pascal and Marcus Aurelius employed the genre
of short, provisional essays, loosely organized, and Father Driscoll
makes good use of the freedom the form offers. Here, for example, is
his opinon of “Smugness:”
“God so hates religious smugness and self-satisfaction and the
certainty that the other is a sinner and will go to hell that he would
empty hell completely of the sinners who deservedly belong there and
place the smug one there all alone to pass an eternity of painful
astonishment, learning that God has mercy on whom he will. Should some
faint sense of desiring to adore the One who is so merciful crack even
slightly the bitterness of this terribly misused virtuous one, maybe
then even hell would be emptied of him.
“In short, it is not for me to judge, not for me to presume to
pronounce on others. ‘The last shall be first, and the first last.’”
[For the source of this post, click here.]
Gene Steuerle and I attended two terrific Catholic schools in Louisville, Kentucky, way back in the Dark Ages: Saint James Grade School, 1952-60, and Saint Xavier High School, 1960-64. Gene lost his wife--Norma Lang Steuerle--when the American Airlines plane on which she was a passenger hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Gene and his two daughters--Kristin and Lynne--took the money they received in consequence of Norma's death and founded an organization called Our Voices Together: Building a Safer, More Compassionate World. (Some of you may have seen Gene interviewed about the organization on This Week With George Stephanopoulos on September 11, 2006.) I recommend that you take some time to browse the organization's website. Maybe you'll want to add your name to the e-mail list and receive the periodic newsletter. Click here.
_______________
mp
Friday, September 29, 2006
[This from the 9/29/06 edition of John Allen's All Things Catholic, here]
One critical reaction [to Benedict XVI's controversial talk on Islam] comes from Richard Gaillardetz, the
Murray/Bacik Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Toledo.
Gaillardetz writes:
Most commentators have
overlooked a provocative claim in his address that articulates a
fundamental - and to my view quite troubling - element of Pope
Benedict's theological vision. … The pope makes the assertion that
because Greek influence can already be seen in the Old Testament, and
because the New Testament was written in Greek, Christianity is
inextricably tied to the "Greek spirit." He rejects out of hand the
process of "de-hellenization," the history of which he maps out in
three stages. His historical schematization of that process is, I
believe, sweeping and simplistic, but that is an argument for another
day.
Particularly disconcerting is his account of the
third stage of the process, in which many scholars have differentiated
between the inherent revelatory and salvific significance of Jesus of
Nazareth, and the ways in which the Christ event was quickly
inculturated in a Hellenistic milieu. He describes this approach as
"coarse and lacking in precision." He then suggests that the early
adoption of a Greco-Roman world view is an essential and providential
development in the history of Christianity. This assertion constitutes
a huge theological leap that is in no way substantiated through careful
theological argumentation. Nowhere does he justify why this moment of
Hellenistic inculturation transcends the realm of historical
contingency to enter into divine providence. In the pope's encomium to
the "Greek spirit" one almost forgets that the Word became flesh as a
Galilean Jew and not a citizen of Athens!
The pope's
views on this topic are of great consequence for the larger church. I
recently read through three volumes of groundbreaking documentation
regarding the work of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences
produced over the past three decades. That reading, accompanied by my
recent visit to East Asia, has reinforced in me a wonderful
appreciation for "the new way of being church" that so many Asian
leaders have celebrated. I had a similar experience regarding the birth
of an authentically African Christianity emerging on that continent.
Much of what is developing theologically in those two regions is
undercut by the pope's insistence on the normativity of a Greek
philosophical articulation of the faith. The pope clearly believes that
the intellectual and cultural synthesis that was achieved in Europe
over the course of two millennia is normative for the rest of the
church. Such a view leaves little room for substantive processes of
local inculturation.
In the wake of Vatican II, Karl
Rahner famously claimed that the most important contribution of the
council was the fact that it had gently set aside that missiological
mentality which saw the church essentially as a "Western European
export firm" and began to move toward becoming a genuine world church
(Weltkirche). The pope's recent address articulated a central feature
of his ecclesiological vision, a vision far closer to the European
export firm than the world church that Rahner believed was a-borning.
I
am grateful for much that this new papacy has brought us: a more
measured wielding of papal authority, a more modest public papal
profile, a greater theological depth in papal reflections. But now, at
a time when our church is bursting with new vitality and fresh insight
in places like Africa, we have a pope who seems incapable of breaking
out of his European intellectual milieu.
Whatever
one makes of Gaillardetz's analysis - and he would be the first to
recognize the need for further discussion - it illustrates the sort of
reflection on the heart of the Regensburg address one hopes will now
emerge.
[I picked this up from the New York Times online:]
[Andrew] Sullivan dissents from [Jack] Balkin [Yale Law School] and others who have suggested that the
timidity of the Democratic opposition to the detainee bill will lead
liberal voters to stay home this fall. He says opponents of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror must vote Democrat, even if they don’t like the Democrats:
In congressional races, your decision should always take into account
the quality of the individual candidates. But this November, the stakes
are higher. If this Republican party maintains control of all branches
of government, the danger to individual liberty is extremely grave. Put
aside all your concerns about the Democratic leadership. What matters
now is that this juggernaut against individual liberty and
constitutional rights be stopped. The court has failed to stop it; the
legislature has failed to stop it; only the voters can stop it now. If
they don’t, they will at least have been warned.
