It's been interesting to watch strip clubs and the rest of the "adult entertainment" industry go from shady and disreputable to mainstream and acceptable. (Is there any sitcom that has not featured a "visit to the strip club" episode?) Now, apparently, our fascination with strippers has spawned a new cultural phenomenon: pole dancing parties. I'll be the first to acknowledge the warped view of gender and sexuality reflected in a previous generation's expectation that women's social lives could flourish around the quest to keep leftover food fresh. But I'm not sure that this is an improvement.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Culture Watch: The New Tupperware Party
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Equality, Privacy, and Roe
Yale law prof Jack Balkin argues that, in light of rapidly expanding genetic technology, it is important to interpret Roe as being grounded in gender equality rather than reproductive privacy. Here's an excerpt:
If Roe is about reproductive choice in the abstract, about the rights of people to reproduce (or not reproduce) without interference from the state, future litigants will demand that courts insulate new reproductive technologies from regulation on the grounds that individuals should be free to have children by any means that science permits. Currently, there is no clear boundary that makes a generalized right to reproductive autonomy inapplicable to new reproductive technologies like cloning or genetic engineering. One might argue that only traditional methods of reproduction are protected, but such arguments may be unavailing precisely because the technology never existed before. The question will be whether the privacy principle applies in the new technological context, just as courts have asked whether the free speech principles apply to the Internet, or whether the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches applies to infrared sensors directed at people's homes. Nor can we easily draw lines between "natural" methods of reproduction protected by the right to privacy and technologically assisted methods that are not. By now, the process of reproduction for many couples is thoroughly imbued with various forms of medical and technological assistance, including fertility clinics and in vitro fertilization. Assuming for the moment that the right to reproduce extends to using fertility clinics and in vitro fertilization, it will be difficult for courts to draw lines. The privacy interpretation of Roe may have a stopping point, but it may not be the one we now imagine, or it may simply be unprincipled and ad hoc.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Wolfe on Religious Identity
The average Wheaton College student might struggle to recognize Boston College or Brandeis as meaningfully religious institutions. Nevertheless, Alan Wolfe argues:
[E]vangelical colleges have much to learn from Catholic universities such as Boston College (BC) or the Jewish Brandeis. Each of these schools worries about losing its religious identity, since each has become remarkably successful, and success brings with it faculty and students who at BC have never been to mass and at Brandeis read their e-mail on Yom Kippur. For those who grew up in a world of strong religious attachments, the increasing religious diversity at BC or Brandeis represents a serious loss of community. Yet both BC and Brandeis recognize that in today's world, religion has gone from being an ascribed status to an achieved one; more and more Americans choose their religious identity rather than having it chosen for them.
In today's world, religious diversity is a fact of life, and the only choice for a college or university grounded in one faith is to open its doors to others. No doubt it will, in the process, lose some of the communal understandings that once informed it. But it will gain in return a religious identity made stronger by being exposed to, and having to defend itself against, other claims to truth, wisdom, justice, or the spirit. The community protected by faith statements at evangelical colleges can be a stifling one because it is so closed to challenge and disagreement.
Over at Touchstone, David Mills responds.
The New Speech Code
While I'm sympathetic to the argument that committed same-sex relationships warrant some sort of legal recognition, I have never been particularly sympathetic to the argument that marriage between a man and a woman should be viewed simply as one among an infinite number of self-defining options. Once we head in that direction, we just might end up in bizarro-world:
Nurses and other health care professionals should avoid using the terms ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ to refer to family relationships since the terms could be offensive to homosexual couples with children, a new directive published by Scotland’s National Health Service recommends. . . .
The booklet calls for a “zero-tolerance policy to discriminatory language” among Scotland’s health care system. Included in discriminatory language is the use of terms that assume a traditional family structure of mother, father and children, according to the NHS directive. . . .“Individual circumstances lead to varied family structures and parenting arrangements. It is important to be aware of this. When talking to children, consider using ‘parents‘, ‘carers’ or ‘guardians’ rather than ‘mother’ or ‘father‘.
Along the same lines, the directive points out, use of the terms ‘husband’, ‘wife’ and ‘marriage’ is not acceptable since such terms exclude lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Instead, health care workers should use the terms ‘partners’ and ‘next of kin’. Since ‘next of kin’ is often understood to mean nearest blood relative, however, the booklet recommends that it may be preferable to use ‘partner, close friend or close relative’ to avoid confusion.
Friday, February 16, 2007
The Lessons of Homo Economicus
I just read an interesting new paper by UCLA law prof Lynn Stout titled "Taking Conscience Seriously," in which she laments the failure of economics, law, and business professors to recognize the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in our society. She begins with this everyday example:
Imagine that you see a dozen pedestrians walk by a sleeping homeless man who is lying next to a sign that reads, "Please Help" and a cup that contains a few dollar bills. Many people might conclude they are observing selfish behavior when no one puts any money in the cup. Few would recognize that they are witnessing multiple acts of unselfishness as person after person walks by without stealing from the helpless homeless man.
The "rational maximizer" known as Homo Economicus "does not worry about morality, ethics, or other people. Instead, Economic Man worries only about himself, coldly and calculatingly pursuing whatever course brings him the greatest material advantage." This is an unrealistic view of the human person, but it is a view that takes root in part because we "tend not to notice common forms of unselfish behavior." One problem she flags is the absence of altruistic behavior in law school pedagogy:
Formal law is usually brought into play when cooperation breaks down and individuals become embroiled in conflicts requiring outside resolution. This makes it easy for law students who spend hours studying case law -- the documentary debris of crimes, horrible accidents, difficult divorces, and bitter contract disputes -- to conclude that selfish behavior is the rule.
I rarely grapple with this question, but I should: what are the unspoken lessons about the human person imparted by the cases I teach?
UPDATE: Patrick O'Donnell recommends some additional resources for those interested in these questions:
Amartya Sen long ago addressed her principal concerns in 'Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,' Philosophy and Public Afffairs, 6 (1977), reprinted in his book, Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982). See too Sen's Ethics and Economics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987). Indeed, a better picture of the state-of-the-art (and science) on this question is Sen's recent Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). What is more, her characterization of economics strikes me as rather tendentious: see, for instance a work well-versed in neo-classical economics: Partha Dasgupta's An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitituion (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1993). Two excellent titles treating these questions in a fundamental manner are missing from her bibliography: Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, eds., Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006 ed.) and Elizabeth Anderson's Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Not unrelated to these topics are questions broached in Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994).
Law and Religion at BC
After attending Lisa's symposium here in Minneapolis, hop in the car to start the cross-country drive to Boston, where BC is hosting its inaugural law and religion symposium on March 20. The theme is "Matters of Life and Death: Religion and Law at the Crossroads." Panelists include friends-of-MoJ Michael Moreland (Villanova) and Carter Snead (Notre Dame), and the keynote will be delivered by Leon Kass. For more information or to RSVP, please contact Paige Renaghan at [email protected].
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Getting Real About Realism
Is the dominance of Legal Realism an obstacle for the Catholic legal theory project, or does Legal Realism simply represent a more accurate portrayal of law-making than the formalist alternative? Brian Tamanaha tries to set the record straight about Realism by contrasting the Realists with the Crits. Here's an excerpt:
There is a fundamental reason why is wrong to see the Realists as early day Crits: the Realists believed in the law (keeping in mind that this was an amorphous and disparate group). Their goal was to improve the law. Llewellyn professed his love for the law and his pride in being a lawyer. One could hardly be more un-Critly (to coin an ugly neologism) than that. No Crit would have drafted the Uniform Commercial Code to match business practices—which Llewellyn did with great satisfaction. Moreover, while several Realists were New Dealers, their overarching emphasis on enhancing the efficiency of law and on making the law conform more closely to ongoing social behavior had a deeply conservative thrust—again, most un-Critly.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Subjectivism & Suffering
Jonathan Watson responds to my posting of the Richard Rorty quote connecting Christianity to a Nietzschian view of truth:
I believe that I see the connection that Rorty is making - that an insistence on the pragmatic relief of physical suffering as opposed to an other-wordly philosophy could lead (and in many cases has lead) to subjectivism insofar as the means that lead to relief of suffering are often categorized as “good” to the extent that suffering is relieved thereby. Indeed, this is certainly a pragmatic or utilitarian, ends-based, philosophy. (It connects in, I think, with a feeling-based judgment of actions, whereby outcomes that we feel ought to be better are judged as “right,” even if the means used to reach those outcomes often tread the fine line between licit and illicit.)
I would argue that this has most often occurred when the founding scriptures for social justice, especially in the Catholic movements based on social justice, are taken only in the most reductive sense. With no firm foundation in scriptural interpretation, Christ’s emphasis on relief of the brother’s suffering becomes simply a means of decreasing physical suffering, rather than a spiritual basis. I theorize that the disconnect between the need to minister to the poor in all manners (spiritual as well as physical) may result in a reductive reasoning in any such project, whereby the project itself becomes spiritually impoverished, disconnected from the right reason and conscience that holds the Natural and / or Revealed Law as the normative basis, thereby attaching itself to the only normative thinking left to it, the will to power. What results thereby is a thinking that doesn’t take thought for the eternal, but confines itself to the immediate, and thus, pragmatic or utilitarian. It often gets the questions right, but often for the wrong reasons.
Christian Fascists on the March!
I'm not sure where the line is between a healthy skepticsm toward the role of Christianity in politics and a Christian-phobic paranoia that leads to a total disconnect from reality, but author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has found it. An excerpt from his essay, The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy:
The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" -- where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens -- awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance.
OK. So our first step to protect ourselves against "the most dangerous mass movement in American history" is to "reincorporate" those who are currently in Christian schools and end the "indoctrination" of Christian media? Who's the fascist now?
Monday, February 12, 2007
Richard Rorty Quote of the Day
I've been pondering this assertion from Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (p 33):
Pragmatism seems to me . . . a philosophy of solidarity rather than of despair. From this point of view, Socrates' turn away from the gods, Christianity's turn from an Omnipotent Creator to the man who suffered on the Cross, and the Baconian turn from science as contemplation of eternal truth to science as instrument of social progress, can be seen as so many preparations for the act of social faith which is suggested by a Nietzschean view of truth.
As a descriptive claim that Christianity's emphasis on the humanitarian here and now prepared the ground for a more subjective view of truth, is Rorty on to something?
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