Another skirmish in the conscience wars: some Muslim cashiers at Target are refusing to handle pork. I think that this is a front-page story only because of recent controversies involving pharmacists, taxi drivers, and bus drivers. The remedy here is simple -- as with underage cashiers faced with a customer purchasing alcohol, the cashier who cannot handle pork in good conscience can call over another cashier, or in the unlikely event that no other cashiers are on duty, ask the customer to scan the pork and place it in the grocery bag. (It is more of a burden to ensure that more than one pharmacist is on duty, and customers obviously cannot help themselves to prescriptions.) My general approach in this area is to allow employers some latitude to craft a conscience policy that keeps with their own institutional mission. This example, though, shows the limits of that approach. Unlike a pro-choice or pro-life pharmacy, it would be hard to discern an institutional mission that rises or falls on the requirement that cashiers handle all products. The available accommodation is so easy that it would be reasonable, in my view, to infer that the employer simply did not want to be inconvenienced, not that it was pursuing a particular moral identity.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Conscience at the Cash Register
Defending the Survey Approach
When you make sweeping pronouncements about the value of a survey-of-religions course, you can probably expect a response from someone who teaches the survey-of-religions course. Patrick O'Donnell does not disappoint in that regard, offering a long and thoughtful email detailing his method. He first emphasizes the importance of "bracketing":
[I was taught that] one could learn about religions, learn interesting, meaningful, important things about religious traditions in a manner that is descriptively true and phenomenologically rich while temporarily 'bracketing' one's own religious and/or philosophical worldview in the sense that one withholds (value) judgments and questions of truth insofar as same might interfere with an accurate portrayal of the religion(s) under question. In Ninian Smart's words, 'it is such bracketing that lies, methodologically, at the heart of the modern study of religion. The jargon is drawn from Husserl, but the practice and message differ from his. The practice, which is somewhat dialectical, involves trying to present the beliefs, symbols and activities of the other...from the perspective of the other. The presuppositions, feelings and attitudes of the explorer of the other's world must be bracketed out as far as possible. That is, we should not bring external judgments to bear upon the other's world.' After all, 'our views are not facts about them [say, Buddhist, Muslims, Confucians, etc.], but facts about us.' Judgments and questions of truth are not dismissed, however, for 'Later, when we have found out what Buddhist Buddhism is we can shape our own [views about this tradition].'
He notes that such bracketing "is perfectly compatible with students learning some of the intra-traditional resources for possible normative critiques of views and practices within a particular tradition." He also challenges the suggestion that immersion in a comprehensive worldview is necessary to provide an authentic taste of the religion:
We study religions as 'ideal-types' because, after all, if we are honest with ourselves, it behooves us to acknowledge that virtually any worldview held by an individual (what I would term, after Habermas, a "lifeworld") is more or less a motley: 'There is not Calvinism in Scotland, but there is Scottish Calvinism (or there was!).' That is to say, 'Critical analysis will suggest that we tend to live in a certain amount of aporia. Do we, when it comes to the crunch, really have a systematic worldview? We have an amalgam of beliefs, which we may publicly characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview corresponds to the more or less official views of the Episcopal Church? How much in any case is left out by an "official worldview" which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, having a certain scepticism about nationalism, thinking that there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil or other matters. Our values and beliefs are more like a collage than a Canaletto. They do not even have consistency of perspective' (quoting Ninian Smart).
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Religious Literacy: Zoology v. Worldview
Commenting on Stephen Prothero's essay, Rick suggests that the Catholic legal theory / university project(s) need to do more than combat religious illiteracy. I agree that teaching about a religion cannot compare to teaching from within a religion, which is why I was nervous about Harvard's proposed religion curriculum. If pursuing religious literacy results in a sort of religious zoology class in which these exotic religious animals are classified and summarized for purposes of a final exam, I think I'll pass. It's the Bible-as-Literature phenomenon that many of us experienced as undergraduates: when there is no effort to enter into the tradition as a whole, rather than poking and prodding at bits and pieces of it, the effect can be unsettling for believers and a waste of time for unbelievers. At the same time, if the only way to combat religious illiteracy is to help students embrace religious claims as truth claims, the project is a non-starter on most campuses. The challenge, in my view, is to engage religion as a worldview, not as a loose collection of propositions to be dissected. If we can get students inside the tradition -- if only for a moment -- they might be able to appreciate the perspective offered by the religious lens, even if they do not adopt it themselves. I'm not entirely sure how to pull this off, but two steps seem essential: 1) having the class taught by someone who actually believes that the religion is true (or at least treats the religion as true in her life); and 2) avoiding the "survey of religions" courses, which are practically incapable of exploring a particular tradition to the extent necessary to allow the students to "get inside" the worldview.
Monday, March 12, 2007
What Evangelicals Owe Catholics
Leading evangelical blogger Joe Carter acknowledges the debt today's evangelicals owe to Catholics, focusing on three areas: Mary, the sanctity of life, and ecclesiology.
Personhood
Larry Solum's "legal theory lexicon" series turns its attention to the meaning of "personhood." An excerpt:
And person is sometimes defined as a "human" or "individual". But "person" has another meaning, one that distinguishes the concept of person from the concept of human. Suppose, for example, an intelligent alien species were to arrive on Earth (or humans were to encounter them elsewhere). If the members of the aliens displayed evidence of human-like intelligence and could communicate with us (e.g. were able to master a human natural language, such as English), then we might be tempted to treat members of this species as morally and/or legally entitled to the same rights as humans.
Consider, for example, the aliens Chewbacca or Yoda in the Star Wars movies. Neither Chewbacca nor Yoda is a member of the species homo sapiens, yet both are treated as the moral and legal equivalents of humans in the Star Wars universe.
Let us stipulate then, that term "human" is a biological term, which refers to all the members of the species homo sapiens and that the term "person" is a normative term, which refers to a moral and/or legal status that creatures or other bearers of human-like capacities can share with normal adult humans.
Is everyone comfortable with the terms of that stipulation?
UPDATE: As evidence of the long-term corrosive impact of blogging on brain function, my February 2006 post about Solum's "personhood" definition has apparently receded from my memory.
Generation Next
The New York Times Magazine reports on Generation Next's defiance of conventional wisdom on the two leading "culture war" issues:
Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage. Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the least Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders (with 20 percent of them professing no religion or atheism or agnosticism), it is curious that on abortion they are slightly to the right of the general public. Roughly a third of Gen Nexters endorse making abortion generally available, half support limits and 15 percent favor an outright ban. By contrast, 35 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds support readily available abortions. On gay marriage, there was not much of a generation gap in the 1980s, but now Gen Nexters stand out as more favorably disposed than the rest of the country. Almost half of them approve, compared with under a third of those over 25.
What it means is far from clear:
Liberals could take heart that perhaps homosexual marriage has replaced abortion as the new “equality issue” for Gen Nexters, suggested John Russonello, a Washington pollster whose firm is especially interested in social values; Gen Nexters may have grown up after the back-alley abortion era, but they haven’t become complacent about sexual rights. Conservatives might take comfort from a different hypothesis that [Pew Forum religion expert John] Green tried out: maybe Gen Nexters have been listening to their parents’ lectures about responsibility. Don’t do things that make you have an abortion, young people may have concluded, and do welcome everyone into the social bulwark of family responsibility.
For what it's worth, these statistics comport with my [woefully unscientific] experience with law students. Abortion is still very much a live issue; same-sex marriage, much less lively.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Giuliani and the GOP
It should be no surprise that the National Catholic Register opposes Rudy Giuliani despite his promise to nominate judges in the mold of Alito and Roberts. But the editors make a larger point about Giuliani and the GOP's future:
The power a president exerts over his party’s character is nearly absolute. The party is changed in his image. He picks those who run it and, both directly and indirectly, those who enter it.
Thus, the Republicans in the 1980s became Reaganites. The Democrats in the 1990s took on the pragmatic Clintonite mold. Bush’s GOP is no different, as Ross Douthat points out in “It’s His Party” in the March Atlantic Monthly.
A Republican Party led by a pro-abortion politician would become a pro-abortion party. Parents know that, when we make significant exceptions to significant rules, those exceptions themselves become iron-clad rules to our children. It’s the same in a political party. A Republican Party led by Rudy Giuliani would be a party of contempt for the pro-life position, which is to say, contempt for the fundamental right on which all others depend.
Some pro-life conservatives, such as our own Steve Bainbridge, are apparently not as worried.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Principled Spending
I appreciate Rick's response to my point on reallocation of existing government funds. Just two (relatively) minor additional points: First, when I wrote that we should be able to articulate our spending priorities in terms of political accountability, I mean something more than just going through the federal budget and finding items that we would want to trade for more noble causes. I mean proactively setting out an attainable objective and contextualizing the cost in terms of the myriad trivial (but enjoyable) expenditures that make up our everyday lives. I may be naive, but I do think the public can be pushed to action when the budget numbers are given real-world bite. Second, I did not bring up the $406 billion spent on Iraq as an example of an after-the-fact audit of government spending like the second-guessing of public education budgets. To me, the Iraq war is an example of an expenditure that should have been avoided on the front end as a matter of principle -- i.e., as a violation of just war theory (no imminent threat). In this context, adhering to the wisdom of Catholic social thought would have freed up resources to pursue morally urgent matters (while leaving some money for ice cream).
Helping the Have Nots -- How to Get There
Rick notes that reallocating ice cream money to immunizations would require the government to obtain the money through taxation. Alternatively, it could simply require citizens to elect officials who will rethink our national spending priorities. The point is not to get me to stop buying ice cream (though maybe I should spend less on it), but to get me to acknowledge that empowering the government to provide immunizations would not pose an onerous tax burden unless I view as onerous a tax burden that is equivalent to the amount I spend on ice cream (or pet food, etc.). I know of one enormous pot of federal money that currently is being spent with dubious justification and with very little to show in return. Susan's statistics are important because they give context to our society's spending decisions. My spending priorities should be reflected in my own lifestyle, but they also should be articulable in terms of political accountability.
GWB on JPII on Work
In his speech earlier this week on American policy in the Western Hemisphere, President Bush said:
[S]ocial justice requires economies that make it possible for workers to provide for their families and to rise in society. For too long and in too many places, opportunity in Latin America has been determined by the accident of birth rather than by the application of talents and initiative. In his many writings, Pope John Paul II spoke eloquently about creating systems that respect the dignity of work and the right to private initiative. Latin America needs capitalism for the campesino, a true capitalism that allows people who start from nothing to rise as far as their skills and their hard work can take them. So the United States is helping these nations build growing economies that are open to the world, economies that will provide opportunity to their people.
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