Today over at Public Discourse, Helen Alvare responds to Linda Greenhouse's critique of the Witherspoon Institute's challenge to the Obama Administration's proposed rule on contraceptives. I feel compelled to supplement Prof. Alvare's response to a particularly troubling dimension of Greenhouse's critique. Greenhouse argues that government clerks should not be able to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples, then she makes an eyebrow-raising leap:
More common are pharmacists who assert religious reasons for refusing to dispense emergency contraception, the “morning after” pill that prevents pregnancy after unprotected intercourse. What are we to make of public health workers who use the power of their state-issued licenses to impose their own version of morality on those they are licensed to serve?
I do not support a right of conscientious refusal for government employees tasked with providing certain morally contestable services to the public. If the government chooses to accommodate current office-holders by having a co-worker handle a particular case, that's fine. But, particularly in defining the role going forward, the government is justified in requiring its agents to act consistently with government policy. It's not simply a question of public access, but a question of the message to be communicated to the public on the government's behalf. If a state has decided to extend marriage to same-sex couples, then the government has a legitimate interest in ensuring that its employees responsible for issuing marriage licenses embody that policy decision. Same for police officers and firefighters -- you do not have a right not to protect abortion clinics.
But using the existence of a professional license to convert millions of private sector workers into government agents is another matter entirely. Professional licenses ensure competence; they should not be turned into a mechanism of uniformity, especially when it comes to morally contested services. That's a huge jump that would eviscerate the vitality of a morally diverse marketplace and wipe out the capacity of individual providers to act consistently with the dictates of conscience.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Kansas City bishop Robert Finn has been indicted for failing to report suspected child abuse:
The indictment is the first ever of a Catholic bishop in the 25 years since the scandal over sexual abuse by priests first became public in the United States.
Bishop Finn is accused of covering up abuse that occurred as recently as last year — almost 10 years since the nation’s Catholic bishops passed a charter pledging to report suspected abusers to law enforcement authorities.
Not sure why the concluding paragraph was necessary to include:
Bishop Finn, who was appointed in 2005, alienated many of his priests and parishioners, and won praise from others, when he remade the diocese to conform with his traditionalist theological views. He is one of few bishops affiliated with the conservative movement Opus Dei.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Frank Pasquale has an interesting post on the moral authority of Occupy Wall Street. An excerpt:
In many chilling ways, old social contracts are being broken, with nothing provided in their place. Old models of cooperation between the state and the market are breaking down, as incidents ranging from prescription drug shortages to food safety failures show. The global financial system teeters on the brink of meltdown thanks to a potential "Lehman style event" that regulators still have not managed to adequately monitor, let alone circumvent. These are urgent problems that an entrenched business-government elite has addressed listlessly, if at all. (This is not meant to criticize many well-intentioned front-line personnel, just to note that revolving door dynamics for political appointees and woefully inadequate funding often render their work a mere pantomime of effective enforcement action.) Occupy Wall Street has moral authority because it is addressing these problems. Its critics ought to be joining that process.
As with many other issues, I can't help but wonder about the extent to which being Catholic should inform my view of this movement. Put differently, should my identity as a Catholic lead me to distinguish in any meaningful sense between the moral authority of the Occupy Wall Street movement versus that of the Tea Party movement? Or are my views on this more accurately captured by my choice between Fox News and MSNBC than by my embrace of Catholic social teaching? At a minimum, does CST provide us with a set of questions by which to evaluate the two movements that are not otherwise being asked?
Sunday, October 9, 2011
I think Steve Jobs was brilliant, creative, innovative, etc. I'm grateful for the ways he enriched our everyday lives. And yet. I have a hard time articulating my discomfort with the global outpouring of grief without sounding downright curmudgeonly (or worse), but there has been something gnawing at me since I saw the various slide shows of the shrines springing up in his memory at Apple stores worldwide. His death -- and our reaction to his death -- says as much about us as it does about him. And I'm not sure that it's all good. What does the death of Steve jobs say about our reliance -- not just in a practical sense, but in a spiritual sense -- on technology? Andy Crouch has written an essay that says it better than I every could. An excerpt:
Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.
That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Paul Horwitz flags a fascinating story from his university regarding the continuing racial segregation of most fraternities and sororities on campus. The university president does not seem to be too bothered by this fact. This is a good case for testing the limits of our commitment to institutional pluralism. My own quick reaction is that, even though the university (apparently) owns the land on which the fraternities and sororities are located, it would be too damaging to associational autonomy to compel certain membership decisions. At the same time, I would think that university leadership would want to take a much more proactive and assertive stance in persuading students that integrated membership is both the morally right thing to do and an essential step for ensuring the continued vitality of the associations themselves.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
The Obama administration is expanding its use of drones in the battle against terrorism. Meanwhile, technology appears to be headed toward a time when the human role in the use of drones is dramatically reduced. I'm not categorically opposed to the use of drones, but I am concerned that this is an instance in which a program's political popularity (Who doesn't like the idea of eliminating terrorists with zero risk to American troops?) tends to push ethical questions to the margins. Among other concerns, putting one's own troops at risk tends to focus the public's attention on the moral legitimacy of the justifications offered for the armed conflict in a way that is unlikely to happen when machines do the fighting for us.
