Thomas Nagel has a new paper, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, in which he poses the question, "What, if anything, does secular philosophy have to put in the place of religion?" (Hat Tip: Solum)
Rob
Friday, October 7, 2005
Nagel on Philosophy and Religion
Thursday, October 6, 2005
Who's Zooming Who?
With apologies to Aretha Franklin, are the evangelicals getting duped by the conservative Bush Administration's failure to honor their expectations for the Supreme Court, or is the libertarian wing of the conservative movement getting duped by evangelicals' inappropriate demands for a Supreme Court justice that comports with their instrumentalist view of law? Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha latches onto our conversation on the Miers nomination and takes it in a more provocative direction, arguing that libertarian conservatives are complaining too late about their religious conservative bedfellows' expectations of identity-politics payback via the Supreme Court nomination process:
Religious conservatives--we should stop using the euphemism "social conservative" to label groups that avowedly pursue a religious agenda--have all along been straightforward and principled in the pursuit of their goals.
Libertarian conservatives, in contrast, arguably have been less than principled in one crucial respect: they have not often enough spoken out against the efforts of their religious conservative allies to impose their religious views on all the rest of us through legal means (mandating the teaching of creationism--oops, "Intelligent Design"--in public school science classes, stalling sale of day after pills, and on and on). Securing the appointment of a fundamentalist Supreme Court Justice is just one piece of this agenda. If Mill's On Liberty serves as the libertarian bible, libertarian conservatives should long ago have taken umbrage at the core agenda of their religious allies to use the law (via legislation, administrative actions, and judges) to infuse the public sphere with religion.
I'm not a libertarian and probably don't qualify as a religious conservative (except in circles where anyone who takes religion seriously is deemed inherently conservative), but I think Tamanaha overstates things considerably in describing the chasm between the two groups. As I see it, abortion is the central issue in religious conservatives' misgivings over the Miers nomination, and abortion is not easily dismissed as simply one component of a religious agenda. Yes, many opponents of legalized abortion are motivated by religious convictions, but the question of who qualifies as a person subject to the law's protection is easily accessible on non-religious grounds. Many libertarians believe that one of the few core functions of government must be the defense of life (e.g., our co-blogger Steve Bainbridge, I believe). And while I'm quite leery of teaching Intelligent Design in schools, I'm not sure why state mandates forbidding the teaching of alternatives to evolution qualify as more libertarian than an educational market in which local schools have authority to make curricular decisions reflecting community norms. Opposition to same-sex marriage, I'll grant, is difficult to disconnect from particular religious convictions, but for the most part, I think the view of "religious conservatives" plotting diabolically to expand government, intrude on our personal lives, and stamp out deviant secularists is a distraction. Many of the priorities of "social conservatives" should be opposed, in my view, because they would make bad public policy on the merits, not because they emanate from some sort of cabal bent on theocracy that needs to be rooted out by their more sane libertarian partners in crime.
Rob
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
More on Miers
I don't want to belabor the issue, but I do think the Miers nomination is an important conversation given the centrality of the abortion question to the moral anthropology's engagement with the political culture. Rick's thoughtful and appreciated response prompts a few additional thoughts and clarifications:
First, my cynicism toward the GOP's use of abortion is not meant to suggest that there was no meaningful difference represented in the choice between Kerry and Bush on "culture of life" issues. I'm a registered Democract, but could not pull the lever for Kerry given his longstanding lack of appreciation for the moral dimension of the abortion question. (Nor could I pull the lever for Bush, truth be told.)
Second, the list of pro-life actions taken by President Bush, while not to be minimized, share a common thread of not requiring much expenditure of political capital. If abortion is akin to slavery in being our generation's great moral struggle (a view held by a big chunk of Bush's religious base), doesn't the struggle require more? Can anyone imagine Lincoln saying that the subject of slavery never came up in any conversation with his closest legal aide?
Third, while Bush has been very careful not to call for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, he has consistently implored our nation to "set a great goal that unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law." If unborn children are going to be protected in law, from my understanding that will either require a constitutional amendment or the reversal of Roe v. Wade. President Bush, while not shy about pushing amendments on other divisive culture war issues that are doomed to fail, hasn't talked (to my knowledge) at all about an abortion amendment.
Finally -- and here is the crux of the matter, in my view -- I'm not sure that the political calculation undertaken by many Catholic and evangelical voters accurately reflects reality. Many of the Catholics and evangelicals I know who voted for Bush went through some sort of cost-benefit analysis: the cost of supporting Bush's policies on taxes (or the environment, war, etc.) were deemed to be outweighed by the benefit of supporting his policy on abortion. Sometimes the benefit side was supplemented with gay marriage, religious expression in public, or school choice, but abortion was always the dominant factor on the benefit side. And at least for my acquaintances, when they voted based on Bush's abortion stance, they weren't pinning their hopes on reinstatment of the Mexico City policy.
Rob
UPDATE: My colleague Elizabeth Brown informs me that:
Bush has spoken about a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, but he has not done so consistently. When he was first running for Congress in 1978, he didn’t support such an amendment on the grounds that the decision on whether to have an abortion should be left up to a woman and her doctor, although he was personally opposed to abortion. When he ran against Ann Richards in 1994 for Governor of Texas, he refused to discuss abortion and his campaign literature stated, “The United States has settled the abortion issue.” When running for President in 2000, he stated in his debates with John McCain that he supported the GOP platform, which advocated a constitutional amendment against abortion, although he would prefer that exceptions be made in case of rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother. The GOP plank does not include those exceptions. He also indicated to the Economist that he would not work to get such an amendment passed. Given this history, it is not surprising that he is not interested in spending political capital on the abortion issue now, particularly when his political capital is at an all time low for his presidency. The majority of his actions on abortion either had bipartisan support or could be done unilaterally by him with little fanfare. For example, I doubt most Americans know what the Mexico City policy is.
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
More Cause for Cynicism
My cynicism toward the GOP's use of abortion as an election issue is gaining traction. Consider this exchange between President Bush and reporters today:
When he was asked if he had ever talked to Ms. Miers about her views on abortion, the president did not answer directly at first. "I have no litmus test," he said. But after a moment, he said that to the best of his recollection, he had never discussed abortion with her.
Hugh Hewitt defends the nomination with "Wake up people: Do you really think W is going to elevate a friend who doesn't agree with him on the crucial issues of the day just because she's a friend?" Well, apparently President Bush doesn't believe that abortion rights are one of the "crucial issues" of the day. Given her lack of a paper record, how else was he supposed to ascertain her views? Her past opposition to the ABA's pro-choice policy does not mean that she opposes legalized abortion; it could simply mean that she supports pluralism. Even if he wasn't planning on nominating her, what does it say about the centrality of legalized abortion to Bush's worldview that the subject never came up throughout his long and uncommonly close working relationship with Miers?
Note that I am not suggesting that abortion should be the defining issue driving the selection of Supreme Court justices. I am simply pointing out that abortion seemed much more prominent in the campaign rhetoric of President Bush and his surrogates than it does in the decision-making process by which abortion rights could actually be impacted.
Rob
UPDATE: While abortion may not be the only issue that led evangelicals to embrace Bush over Kerry, it was arguably the most widely compelling one. Needless to say, abortion is central to most evangelicals' criteria for the Bush Administration's Supreme Court appointments. Check out the level of expectations over at Evangelical Outpost:
Make no mistake, if Miers is appointed to the bench and refuses to overturn Roe we will have only ourselves to blame. If after spending a quarter of a century in the church, a Christian woman can uphold the most unjust ruling since Dred Scott, then we have failed as a church. If the best we can say about an evangelical is that she “brings donuts” rather than that she brings a passion for justice, then the blood of the innocent will be on our hands. We will have failed to fulfill the calling of the church.
So why do we have this strange feeling in our stomachs about this nomination? Because deep down we know that being a member of a "conservative evangelical church” may make you an evangelical, but it doesn’t make you a disciple.
This level of anguish over legalized abortion stands in stark contrast, in my view, to President Bush's admission that the subject never even came up in his countless conversations with Miers.
Monday, October 3, 2005
The Supreme Court's Catholic Majority
Well, not quite. For those keeping score at home, it appears that Miers was raised as a Catholic, but did not, in her pastor's view, "totally commit her life to Jesus" until she was an adult and began attending an evangelical church in Texas, where she has now been a member for 25 years.
Rob
Miers and "Pro-Life" as Political Slogan
This Newsweek writer states it plainly:
It's no accident that White House counsel Harriet Miers, the president's choice to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, has no judicial experience. That way, Bush can feign surprise when, to the chagrin of all the voters he won over on the abortion issue alone, social conservatives are ignored once again. Who knew?
In August 2004 during the GOP convention, I asked whether, in light of the pro-choice lineup of speakers, the pro-life commitment is "an identity-defining issue for the GOP hierarchy, or is it simply a mantra that ensures the continued party allegiance of abortion-focused evangelicals and Catholics?" I don't claim to be unique in my cynicism: my mother-in-law, a cradle Catholic, has long resented the church hierarchy's encouragement to vote for the "pro-life" conservative candidate, even though, in her view, "nothing ever changes" on abortion when push comes to shove. Doesn't this nomination provide conclusive evidence that her resentment is appropriate?
Rob
UPDATE: In response to Rick's question (above) about whether the hierarchy actually encourages Catholics to vote for "pro-life" conservative candidates, I should have noted in my initial post that my mother-in-law lived in St. Louis at the time of the 2004 election. Under Bishop Burke, the "encouragement" was plain to see.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
God-Talk in the Ivy League
What happens when the Dartmouth student body president decides to talk about Jesus in a speech at the convocation for entering students? Read about the fallout here. (HT: Volokh)
Rob
Jenkins address: "Bigger and Better Than Ever"
I very much enjoyed reading Fr. Jenkins' inaugural address until I arrived at the final paragraph:
With respect and gratitude for all who embraced Notre Dame's mission in earlier times, let us rise up and embrace the mission for our time: to build a Notre Dame that is bigger and better than ever -- a great Catholic university for the 21st century, one of the pre-eminent research institutions in the world, a center for learning whose intellectual and religious traditions converge to make it a healing, unifying, enlightening force for a world deeply in need. This is our goal. Let no one ever again say that we dreamed too small.
I guess this is what any college president is supposed to say at the beginning of his tenure, but it still jolted me. Boasts of becoming "bigger and better than ever" are what I expect to hear from Harvard, but not from Notre Dame. It's a mistake, in my view, to assume that being "bigger and better than ever" will inexorably lead to a "bigger and better than ever" platform for shining Christ's light into the world. Maybe it will, but it seems just as likely that as the platform becomes bigger, Christ's light becomes more difficult to discern. And what exactly do our own big dreams have to do with following Christ? If Fr. Jenkins says "let no one ever again say that we dreamed too small," I say "let no one ever again say that I placed my own dreams above God's call." I firmly believe that God can give us a vision to pursue, but I find that usually has little connection to my own dreams, even when they are "bigger and better than ever."
Rob
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Religion and Division in the U.K.
Reflecting the modern multiculturalist's tendency to equate religious difference with divisiveness, church leaders in England have created a stir by suggesting that Muslim schools might be inappropriate for Christian children. (HT: Open Book)
Rob
Monday, September 26, 2005
Civil Society and Smoking in Public
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki has some interesting anecdotal evidence connecting smoking bans and liquor regulations with the (purported) demise of voluntary associations.
Rob
UPDATE: St. Thomas law grad Matthew Donovan points me to this apt First Things essay, "Tobacco and the Soul."
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