Last week Rick invited me to respond to a post by Christopher Kaczor at First Things about last year's opinion on the role of conscience in reproductive medicine from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. I agree that the College's opinion is unduly one-sided, elevating patient autonomy as an absolute value. My own work tries to focus more broadly on whether there is a functioning marketplace for contested goods and services. The focus should be on access within the market, not on ensuring that every provider conforms to the party line. Since most MoJ-ers will presumably share my skepticism toward the College's opinion, let me raise a couple of points of disagreement with Dr. Kaczor and with Fr. Araujo, who thoughtfully commented on the opinion as well.
Dr. Kaczor takes issue with the College's statement that “Although respect for conscience is a value, it is only a prima facie value, which means it can and should be overridden in the interest of other moral obligations that outweigh it in a given circumstance." My question for Dr. Kaczor is, if the law must treat a claim of conscience as more than a "prima facie value," does that mean that the law should treat conscience as an absolute value? If so, how could our legal system function with that understanding of conscience? The Civil Rights Act, for example, is a clear example of the law running roughshod over dissenting claims of conscience. If the law must retreat whenever conscience is invoked, the rule of law is going to encounter some serious obstacles.
Relatedly, Dr. Kaczor explains his disagreement with the College's opinion by analogizing to a soldier:
Consider someone volunteering for military service who receives all the benefits and responsibilities that come with the oath to obey superior officers. If a superior officer orders him to do something that he considers morally wrong, if we make use of the principles invoked by the ACOG, the soldier may only disobey the order if there are other soldiers available to carry that order out. Surely, however, the demands of conscience should not be gerrymandered by the availability of people who very well may be less enlightened and conscientious.
Is he suggesting that soldiers should have a right of conscience to disobey superiors' orders without suffering any discipline for that disobedience? The closest I've gotten to military service is repeated viewings of Saving Private Ryan, but it seems that Dr. Kaczor's view challenges the premises of the chain of command. It also illustrates a broader problem I have with many all-or-nothing defenses of a right to conscience. The fact that the law does not grant me a right to obey my conscience without fear of reprisal does not mean that my conscience has been snuffed out. It just means that I might have to pay a price for standing by my convictions. A soldier is free to disobey the immoral orders of a superior, but he must be ready to defend that decision in a court martial. Similarly, a obstetrician may refuse the directive to refer patients to an abortion provider, but he may need to count the cost of that refusal. To be clear, I oppose requiring a referral under those circumstances, but the law's failure to provide a blanket shield to claims of conscience does not mean that conscience is inoperative. Conscience is not costless.
And just a word in response to Fr. Araujo's criticism of the College's opinion. He writes that:
The conscience that is being sacrificed here is not one that is subjectively determined (like the autonomy intrinsic to “reproductive health rights”) but one that is designed to advance an objectively determined moral order.
The problem is that the relevant authorities (here, the College) do not agree that abortion is inconsistent with an objectively determined moral order. Now what? My fear is that when we put so much weight on the "objective" nature of the conscience claims at issue, we have set the legal argument for recognizing conscience on a pretty shaky foundation. For freedom of conscience to remain vital, it cannot rest on the demonstrable truth value of the claims for which conscience is invoked. Many of the truths that matter most are not demonstrable, or are at least not demonstrable to the satisfaction of the relevant authorities.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Perhaps because I'm currently working on a chapter on education for my book on conscience -- focusing on the potential for schools to function as venues for conscience -- this story in our local paper caught my eye. A public charter school that appears to function as an Islamic school will undoubtedly provoke a strong reaffirmation of our "religion-free" public school paradigm, but I think that reaction is misplaced. I'm not ready (or able) to articulate exactly how we should react to the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, but I do know that we should not close down the expanding (at least in Minnesota) educational marketplace just because we're uncomfortable with some of its results.
If you're interested in a broader exploration of my ideas on public education and conscience, you can read this paper.
Senator Bob Casey Jr. gave an interview to Beliefnet about religion, the presidential race, and his support for Barack Obama. On the role of faith in the campaign:
[E]very candidate has a right to talk as much or as little about their faith as they deem appropriate. Another guideline for me is that your faith can inspire and inform and sometimes enrich your public policy points of view and how you vote on a particular piece of legislation, but it should not dictate that [point of view] . . . there are some people who think that it should be dictated and I happen not to accept that way of making public policy.
I'm sympathetic with the line Casey is trying to navigate here, but I confess that I'm not exactly sure when my faith "dictates" my views on public policy and when it "inspires and informs" those views. Does "dictate" simply mean an unwillingness to compromise on a view that has its roots in my faith? If so, is it always bad to have a leader whose faith "dictates" their view on a particular policy matter? Or does "dictate" mean that I have no non-religious sources for my public policy view, suggesting that I am unable to articulate the basis for my view in terms that are accessible to those outside my faith tradition?
And on reconciling his support for Obama with his pro-life beliefs, particularly in light of Obama's opposition to the federal partial-birth abortion ban and the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act, Casey explains:
I disagree with that in a very fundamental way, and I’m sure they’ll be other things I disagree with that are serious. I do think, though that he’s the kind of public official . . . who takes the time and puts forth the effort to understand people who disagree on the issue of abortion and other issues. . . .
There’s a common ground on the issue of abortion that doesn’t get much attention, but there’s growing consensus on both sides of the issue—even with extremes on either end—that we want to reduce the number of abortions. We can debate on how to get there, but there is consensus about that. I think he would try to enhance that consensus.
Q: Has Obama or Clinton signed onto your abortion reduction legislation?
A: They haven’t, but I’ve just begun to dialogue with individual senators. [Obama] will be among the senators I’m talking to.
It will be interesting to see if Obama supports this legislation; sad to say, it will probably occur after he secures his party's nomination.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Cathy Kaveny has an interesting essay in the new Commonweal marking the 20th anniversary of John Paul II's Mulieris dignitatem, the apostolic letter on the dignity of women. Kaveny explains that many (most?) Catholic women greeted the letter with wariness because the pope "makes claims about the nature of women that were in fact used in the last century to argue for what most of us would consider to be unjust political, economic, and social subjugation." For example, the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia asserts that:
[T]he political activity of man is and remains different from that of woman, as has been shown above. It is difficult to unite the direct participation of woman in the political and parliamentary life of the present time with her predominate duty as a mother. If it should be desired to exclude married women or to grant women only the actual vote, the equality sought for would not be attained. On the other hand, the indirect influence of women, which in a well-ordered state makes for the stability of the moral order, would suffer severe injury by political equality.
Both the Encyclopedia and John Paul II, according to Kaveny, "strongly defend a divinely ordained difference and complementarity between men and women," and both "are worried about the baleful effects of blurred gender lines." John Paul II cautions that "women must not appropriate male characteristics contrary to their own femine originality." But what, Kaveny asks, are those characteristics? Are they the same as those that were identified in 1912 -- impacting women's claims to equality in the educational, employment, and political spheres? If they're not the same, on what basis does John Paul II accept the traditional anthropological claims regarding gender, yet resist the traditionally espoused implications of those claims? As Kaveny puts it, "We know that Pope John Paul didn't endorse [the Encyclopedia's] view. We just don't know why he didn't."
I realize that there will be an entire conference dedicated to Mulieris dignitatem this fall, but I'm wondering if anyone has initial thoughts on Kaveny's important questions.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
In the New Republic, Brink Lindsey explores why low-income Americans tend not to go to college. Based on his review of the relevant studies, it's more about culture than money:
A lack of money is the most common explanation for why lower-income children don't go to college, and it's the impetus for proposals, like those put forward by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to increase tuition subsidies. But James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago, is convinced that additional subsidies would do little good. Heckman recognizes the strong correlation between family income and college matriculation, but he argues that income is just a proxy for more fundamental differences in family and environmental conditions — like parental education — that ultimately show up in test scores and scholastic achievement. In a 2001 study co-authored with Stephen Cameron from Columbia University, Heckman tested the attendance gap between blacks, whites, and Hispanics, controlling for academic ability using scores from the Armed Forces Qualification Test (afqt), and found that family income did not really matter when it came to getting kids into college. In fact, "at the same afqt level Blacks and Hispanics enter college at rates that are substantially higher than the White rate," regardless of how much money their families made. The problem was that relatively few blacks and Hispanics reached a sufficiently high afqt level in the first place. In other words, the main reason fewer African Americans and Hispanics go to college isn't that they can't afford it. It's that they lack the skills to do the work.
And here's where culture comes in:
To put it in a nutshell, the upper-middle-class kid grows up in an environment that constantly pushes him to develop the cognitive and motivational skills needed to be a good student; the low-income kid's environment, on the other hand, pushes in the opposite direction.
Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley have tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children. After observing several dozen families with toddlers over the course of a couple of years, they were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting: Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for workingclass parents and only 176 for welfare parents. The quality of those utterances was also very different: Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one. The consequences were predictable: By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.
There is a lot more -- read the whole thing here.
William Saletan discusses new evidence that sex selection is occurring in the United States:
What's old is sex selection. What's new is the combination of ease, safety, and privacy with which you can now do it. This is a fundamental dynamic between technology and culture: Technology can coax cultures one way or the other by making it easier to do what you want to do, with less difficulty and without other people knowing about it.
