The Hermeneutic of Continuity

That's not just one of Benedict XVI's catch-phrases, it's also the name of a blog that I just found out about, run by Fr. Tim Finigan, pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen, UK. My attention was drawn to the blog by Dilexitprior at Letters From a Young Catholic, who links to Fr. Finigan's photographs of a Carthusian cell at St. Hugh's, Parkminster. Check out both sites!

Sing, Choirs of Angels--But In Your Own Voice

Teófilo at Vivificat! reports on an essay from George Weigel's syndicated column, The Catholic Difference, that is available at the Catholic Education Resource Center website. Weigel, it seems, dislikes the contemporary music sung in many Catholic parishes, not so much because most of it is schlocky drivel reminiscent of a late 70s incarnation of CCR sans John Fogerty, but because the lyrics can be (a) heretical; (b) written in persona Christi; and (c) over-used.

I certainly agree that some hymns have been over-used. Certainly the four hymns that my parish has been singing over and over and over again for the past 10 years could stand to be put on the shelf for a while. And some hymns do sound a little close to heresy when read a certain way. Weigel's own example, however, illustrates how iffy the charge is:

Then there's "For the Healing of the Nations," which, addressing God, deplores "Dogmas that obscure your plan." Say what? Dogma illuminates God's plan and liberates us in doing so. That, at least, is what the Catholic Church teaches. What's a text that flatly contradicts that teaching doing in hymnals published with official approval?

If the term "dogma" here is referring to the infallible teachings of the Magisterium, then of course this is a heretical claim. But if the term "dogma" is simply meant to refer to any old hide-bound rule-of-thumb that nobody has taken a close look at in a long time--and this is the way most people use the word--then the text is hardly heretical, it's just pointlessly obscure. But hey, that's poetry for you.

For the most part I tend to agree with Weigel. I don't like much about the music written for liturgical use in this country in the last 30 years. Give me Hyfrydol or Adoro te devote every time. But the complaint of his with which I have the least sympathy is his worry that some hymns are sung in persona Christi, such as "I am the Bread of Life" or "Come to the Water." Quoting from one such hymn, he writes:

"Love one another as I have loved you/Care for each other, I have cared for you/Bear each other's burdens, bind each other's wounds/and so you will know my return." Who's praying to whom here? And is the Lord's "return" to be confined to our doing of his will? St. John didn't think so.

Although hymns such as these often do a hatchet job on the texts, one must bear in mind that they almost always are just that: texts, that is, quotations from the Scriptures. It seems a little weird to complain that hymns use Scriptural texts for their lyrics. It's a little like complaining that the readings at Mass are all taken from the Bible. As Teófilo points out:

I love "I am the Bread of Life." To sing it is to sing Scripture. Just as a reader doesn't become Christ when s/he proclaims Scripture in the divine "first person," a cantor or a congregation is not at fault when they do the same. If the hymn proclaims Scripture in a sense that agrees with Tradition, I no longer care if it is in "the first person."

Except for the "I love 'I am the Bread of Life'" part, I agree with Teófilo completely here. He also notes that hymns in persona Christi are not uncommon in the Byzantine tradition.

De gustibus non disputandum est, but in general the closer it is to 13th century liturgical chant the better, in my view.

Mel Gibson Wants His Read in Latin, and Only At Traditionalist Masses

The Catholic News Service reports that Malgorzata Bednarek, the chief prosecutor in the Polish city of Bielsko-Biala, thinks that "the Catholic Church would be well suited" for publicizing cases of drunken driving: the names of offenders could be read aloud at Masses. According to the report, a spokesman for the Polish bishops' conference said that "church leaders" were actually going to consider doing this.

Father Piotr Brzakalik of Katowice, though, said that "the pulpit shouldn't be used for stigmatizing people." He did allow as how killing somebody while in a drunken stupor would be a violation of the Fifth Commendment, however. There is apparently something of a problem with DUI in Poland, where--at least according to CNS--the number of offenses increased between the years 2001 and 2005 "by about 46,000". That's even more than we've had here in Athens since hiring Frank Solich. CNS goes on to report that "up to 20,000 alcoholics took part in a special pilgrimage...to the Marian shrine in Lichen."

I hope they walked there.

The Centerpiece of our Worship

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I attend Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish whenever I'm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and that I was excited to find that they had recently placed a new Tabernacle right behind the main altar. For your infotainment I've managed to find a photo of the setup that I thought I would share. It's from the parish website, and the photo credit is actually on the photo. As you can see, the parish is located in the lush rain forests of southeastern Michigan.

A Strange New Affect(at)ion

There is a preternaturally bizarre item in the 4 September issue of The New Rpublic. It is an open letter from Edward O. Wilson, of sociobiology, consilience, and biophilia fame, "to an imagined Southern Baptist pastor". In this letter, Wilson rehearses all the usual crimes against nature that have been committed by evil old humankind, putting into vintage John Denver-era language all the damage that has been done to the "biosphere" and how only we can prevent forest fires, industrial pollution, mass extinctions, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, etc. etc. etc. The alleged purpose of the "letter" is to enlist the support of "the larger evangelical community" in averting ecological disasters that would otherwise be certain to occur. An alliance between "scientists" and "evangelicals", however, would be equally certain to be helpful:

Religion and science are the two most powerful forces in the world today, and especially in the United States. If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem might soon be solved.

You've got to love that reification of "science" and "religion", as if they are these monolithic entities that, once united in a Justice League-style alliance, will rule the world in peace and harmony. It's nice to know that a 77 year old Harvard biologist still has a little of the 15 year old in him.

There is certainly nothing new in a biologist wringing his hands over the environment--some might even say that it goes with the territory. What is surprising is the putative audience for this open letter. Although it is addressed "Dear Pastor", no serious reader can be expected to take that at face value. If Wilson had really wanted to enlist the support of evangelicals in his environmentalist crusade, he could quite easily have sent the letter to a genuine pastor, or dozens, if not hundres, of genuine pastors. Or he could have sent it to some newspapers in the Bible Belt, or to Christianity Today or any number of other, similar places. Instead he chose to send it to The New Republic, surely a journal that is not very high on your typical Southern Baptist Pastor's "must read" list. Add to this the fact that Wilson himself notes that the very audience he is presumably targetting with this letter has already "begun to move care of the Creation back into the mainstream" of political discourse, and that "this evangelical interest in the environment is part of a worldwide trend among religions". The religious folks, it would seem, are already with the program. So what is the real purpose of this letter? Perhaps without quite meaning to, Wilson himself tells us in rather Machiavellian terms:

It may seem far-fetched for a secular scientist to propose an alliance between science and religion. But the fact is that environmental activists cannot succeed without you and your followers as allies. The political process in American democracy, with rare exceptions, does not start at the top and work its way down to the voting masses. It proceeds in the opposite direction. Political leaders are compelled to calculate as precisely as they can what it will take to win the next election. The United States is an intensely religious nation. It is overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian, with a powerful undercurrent of evangelism. We secularists must face reality.

I think you've got the real agenda right there in a nutshell. The phrase "we secularists" is beautifully ambiguous. Its deixis might be second person ("Unlike you religious folks, we secularists..."), which is presumably how it is meant to be taken on the surface. But since this letter is not likely really directed at a Southern Baptist pastor, one is tempted to take that phrase as having first person deixis, that is, one is tempted to say that this letter is really a political appeal to fellow liberal environmentalists. It's a letter that says "Look folks, if you can't beat them--and we found out in 2004 that we can't--then you'd better join them, or better yet, get them to join you". This is a letter of political advice to other like-minded environmentalists, explaining to them that the best policy, in terms of accomplishing an environmentalist agenda, is one of appeasement. If you can at least act like you share some values with evangelical Christians, you will find that together you will have the political base to get things done.

This might seem like a rather cynical reading of a letter that ends with the cordial "Warmly and respectfully, Edward O. Wilson." But this is the same Edward O. Wilson who wrote in Consilience:

To share reverence is not to surrender the precious self and obscure the true nature of the human race. We should not foget who we are. Our strength is in truth and knowledge and character, under whatever sign. Judaeo-Christians are told by Holy Scripture that pride goeth before destruction. I disagree; it's the reverse: Destruction goet before pride. Empiricism has turned everything around in the formula. It has destroyed the giddying theory that we are special beings placed by a deity in the center of the universe inorder to serve as the summit of Creation for the glory of the gods. We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little. Humility is better shown to our fellow humans and the rest of life on this planet, on whom all hope really depends.

Wilson is obviously one of those rather old fashioned scientists who still thinks that there is an uncrossable divide between science and religion. This comes across rather embarrassingly in his letter, since he seems to think it important to stress how different his worldview is from that of a Southern Baptist pastor. Much of what he says in this regard betrays a rather weak grasp of the relationship between science and religion, and it would be disastrous to say such things to a real pastor, but it is probably just the right sort of thing to say to other secular humanists.

Consider, for example, the following:

I do not see how the difference in worldview between these two great productions of human striving [science and religion] can be closed. But, for the purposes of saving the Creation, I am not sure that it needs to be. To make the point in good gospel manner, let me tell the story of a young man, newly trained for the ministry and so fixed in his Christian faith that he referred all questions of morality to readings from the Bible. When he visited the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, he saw the manifest hand of God, and in his notebook he wrote, "It is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind." That was Charles Darwin in 1832, early into the voyage of the HMS Beagle, before he had given any thought to evolution. And here is Darwin, concluding On the Origin of Species in 1859, having first abandoned Christian dogma and then, with his newfound intellectual freedom, formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection: "There is grandeur in this view of life..." Darwin's reverence for life remained the same as he crossed the seismic divide that separated his religious phase and his scientific one. And so it can be for the divide that, today, separates mainstream religion and scientific humanism. And that separates you and me.

This is clearly directed at others like Wilson, for you would never say to a Southern Baptist pastor that Christianity is to be characterized as dogmatic and contrasted with the "intellectual freedom" of science. That's something that you say to the morons who think that science disproves religion, and that if you would just open your mind and use it for a change you would see how obvious it is that religion is a virus infecting the minds of the weak. I'm sure Richard Dawkins would approve. The real purpose of a paragraph like this is to persuade not evangelicals but other environmentalists that one must be willing to be, well, not condescending, exactly, but at least benignly silent on certain questions "for the purposes of saving the Creation." Sure, we all know that "science says that, as far as verifiable evidence tells us, we are alone," but why not keep that to ourselves when we're hanging our with our Christian buddies, at least until the votes are all counted.

One phrase that is conspicuous by its absence in most of Wilson's essay is "the religious right". Clearly a liberal like Wilson is not going to want to toss that term around too much in an essay that is putatively directed at, well, the pastors of "the religious right". But he just can't contain his enthusiasm:

To be sure, some leaders of the religious right are reluctant to support biological conservation, an opposition sufficient to create a wedge within the evangelical movement....For decades, conservatives have defined environmentalism as a movement bent on strangling the United States with regulations and bureaucratic power. This canard has doged the U.S. environmental movement and helped to keep it off the agenda of the past two presidential campaigns.

If that sounds a little testy, don't be surprised, since the real audience for this letter is going to be in complete agreement, and this will really get them fired up. We can divide and conquer if we can work with those elements of the evangelical community who are not hidebound ideologues about Big Government. We must build up a coalition based on those Christians who care about "Creation", and we can marginalize the rest.

That this is really Wilson's purpose is made manifest again and again in the "letter" as he praises the virtues of science and condescendingly treats religion as a quaint reminder of our roots. This is also the Wilson who compared Christian belief to Aztec sacrifices of children to Tlaloc and the beliefs of medieval astronomers, and who wrote, again in Consilience:

Great ceremonies summon the history of a people in solemn remembrance. They showcase the sacred symbols. That is the enduring value of ceremony, which in all high civilizations has historically assumed a mostly religious form. Sacred symbols infiltrate the very bones of culture. they will take centuries to replace, if ever.

So I may surprise you be granting this much: It would be a sorry day if we abandoned our venerated sacral traditions. It would be a tragic misreading of history to expunge under God from the American Pledge of Allegiance. Whether atheists or true believers, let oaths be taken with hand on the Bible, and we may continue to hear So help me God. Call upon priests and ministers and rabbis to bless civil ceremony with prayers, and by all means let us bow our heads in communal respect. Recgonize that when introits and invocations prickle the skin we are in the presence of poetry, and the soul of the tribe, something that will outlive the particularities of sectarian belief, and perhaps belief in God itself.

In short, it is OK for the serious empiricist to attempt to pass, as they say, since there's nothing wrong with playing along just so long as you can inwardly interpret what you're doing in whatever way suits your own subjective experience and makes your action "authentic" in some way.

I don't imagine very many people will be fooled by this "open letter"--certainly not evangelical pastors, and probably not many "scientific humanists". The attitude on display in this little morsel is very much on the wane. More and more scientists and humanists are coming to realize that the alleged conflict between science and religion is an invention of the ideologues. Indeed, the idea that the two are in conflict at all is a perfect (though ironic) instantiation of what Nietzsche called the Will to Truth--the desire of the psychologically craven to coerce others to view the world in a certain way by means of belittling and dismissive analyses of the beliefs of those to be converted. There are still a few such folks about--Richard Dawkins is everyone's favorite example, but there are others--but they are being increasingly marginalized by humanistically sensitive scientists such as Robert Pollack, Michael Ruse and John Polkinghorne, on the one hand, and by scientifically astute humanists, such as Keith Ward, David Knight, and David Bartholomew on the other. These folks realize that the allegedly vast gulf that Wilson thinks separates him from religious believers is a mirage, an ideological, a priori metaphysical assumption that drives everything before it.

There is no rational reason to suppose that science precludes rational religious belief or that religious belief makes the scientific endeavor either impossible or even difficult. Wilson rightly notes that "we are products of a civilization that rose from both religion and" science. He doesn't put it quite like that, acutally. What he says is that our civilization arose "from both religion and the science-based Enlightenment", but that is a rather serious misreading of our intellectual history. Our scientific worldview has its roots not in the Enlightenment, but in the skeptics and natural philosophers of ancient Greece. It's true that Wilson's brand of science has its roots in the Enlightenment, but that is an intellectually bankrupt kind of science, grounded as it is in ideology rather than reason. The rest of us can, like many, many others before us, take an interest in the natural world, investigate its physical, material properties, and draw inferences about the regular operations of mechanistic systems, while having a firm and robust knowledge about matters that are not discoverable by empirical means. People were doing the same long before the so-called Enlightenment, and they will continue to do so long after the ideologues have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Michael Walzer on Fighting the Middle East War(s)

Michael Walzer is known principally among philosophers and other moral theorists for his work on just war theory. His 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York, Basic Books; second edition 1992; third edition 2000) was widely heralded as "one of the remarkably few books of lasting significance to have emerged out of the Vietnam War and its aftermath" (according to Thomas Pangle of Yale University). The book, while condemning the Vietnam War, argues in favor of the possibility of an ethically waged, just war. He explicitly draws upon the work of such writers as Maimonides, Aquinas, Vitoria, Suarez, and Hugo Grotius while working hard to keep political theory in the realm of the particular rather than the merely abstract. It is fair to say that his own politics are on the left: he is the co-editor of Dissent and a contributing editor of The New Republic.

In light of his politics, two recent articles of his are of note. One of them, "Regime Change and Just War", appeared in the Summer 2006 number of Dissent (available online here). The other, "War Fair", appeared in the 31 July issue of The New Republic (available here only by subscription). The Dissent piece is taken from the newest (2006) edition of Just and Unjust Wars and argues that the U. S. intervention in Iraq is a mistaken policy and that the use of what he calls "force-short-of-war" or "indirect approaches to regime change" would have been preferable to full-fledged war.

In light of this, the position he stakes out in "War Fair" is rather interesting. The topic in that piece is not the U. S. intervention in Iraq, but the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Walzer notes that the situation in that conflict is of a different nature than most situations involving just war analysis:

Israel is now at war with an enemy whose hostility is extreme, explicit, unrestrained, and driven by an ideology of religious hatred. But this is an enemy that does not field an army; that has no institutional structure and no visible chain of command; that does not recognize the legal and moral principle of noncombatant immunity; and that does not, indeed, acknowledge any rules of engagement. How do you--how does anyone--fight an enemy like that?

Well, presumably the quickest answer to that question is: "Within the bounds of the moral law", which means that "there cannot be any direct attacks on civilian targets (even if the enemy doesn't believe in the existence of civilians)".

This includes attacks on the economic infrastructure, and Walzer notes that the case for avoiding such attacks is "prudential as well as moral":

Reducing the quality of life in Gaza, where it is already low, is intended to put pressure on whoever is politically responsible for the inhabitants of Gaza--and then these responsible people, it is hoped, will take action against the shadowy forces attacking Israel. The same logic has been applied in Lebanon, where the forces are not so shadowy. But no one is responsible in either of these cases, or, better, those people who might take responsibility long ago chose not to. The leaders of the soveriegn state of Lebanon insist that they have no control over the southern part of their country--and, more amazingly, no obligation to take control. Still, Palestinian civilians are not likely to hold anyone responsible for their fate except the Israelis, and, while the Lebanese will be more discriminating, Israel will still bear the larger burden of blame. Hamas and Hezbollah feed on the suffering their own activity brings about, and an Israeli response that increases the suffering only intensifies the feeding.

This leaves Israel in a precarious position. Just war theory, Walzer points out, rules out many ways of fighting but does not rule out fighting itself. The proportionality of Israel's reaction, he says,

must be measured not only against what Hamas and Hezbollah have already done, but also against what they are (and what they say they are) trying to do.

Both groups have made it quite clear that "what they are trying to do" is destroy the state of Israel. That may be an unrealistic goal--I doubt very much that either of them, alone or together, could ever hope to accomplish such a thing without the complicity of rogue states such as Iran--but given the fact that they have access to powerful weaponry and the financial support to put together a remarkable public relations campaign, what they say they are trying to do must be taken fairly seriously.

For Walzer, writing, it must be pointed out, in mid-July, there is a pragmatic side to Israel's response.

The most important Israeli goal in both the north and the south is to prevent rocket attacks on its civilian population, and, here, its response clearly meets the requirements of necessity. The first purpose of any state is to defend the lives of its citizens; no state can tolerate random rocket attacks on its cities and towns. Some 700 rockets have been fired from northern Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal a year ago--imagine the U.S. response if a similar number were fired at Buffalo and Detroit from some Canadian no-man's-land. It doesn't matter that, so far, the Gazan rockets have done minimal damage; the intention every time one is fired is to hit a home or a school, and, sooner or later, that intention will be realized.

As Walzer points out, Israel has waited a long time for the Palestinian Authority and the government of Lebanon to do the right thing with regards to these rocket attacks, and nothing has happened--the attacks continue. Even a Security Council resolution calling for the disarming of Hezbollah has been ignored, and one wonders what Israel is supposed to do about this situation.

The crucial argument is about the Palestinian use of civilians as shields. Academic philosophers have written at great length about "innocent shields," since these radically exploited (but sometimes, perhaps, compliant) men and women pose a dilemma that tests the philosophers' dialectical skills. Israeli soldiers are not required to have dialectical skills, but, on the one hand, they are expected to do wverything they can to prevent civilian deaths, and, on the other hand, they are expected to fight against an enemy that hides behind civilians. So (to quote a famous line from Trotsky), they may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in them.

The difference in the intentions of the Israelis and their enemies is significant: no Israeli soldier, one presumes, deliberately targets civilians without justification or, at the very least, if it were discovered that he did, that person would be removed from service and punished. Among the fighters of Hamas and Hezbollah, by contrast, such targeting is deliberate and indiscriminate. It does not matter so much that the partisans of Hezbollah are lousy shots--if they had better weapons and better training, they would be killing more Israeli civilians than anyone could imagine, since that is their stated goal. The israelis, who do not intend to kill civilians, do so principally by accidents caused by the willful negligence and malicious behavior of their enemies.

[The use of civilian shields] works, because it is both morally right and politically intelligent for the Israelis to minimize--and to be seen trying to minimize--civilian casualties. Still, minimizing does not mean avoiding entirely: civilians will suffer so long as no one on the Palestinian side (or the Lebanese side) takes action to stop rocket attacks. From that side, though not from the Israeli side, what needs to be done could probably be done without harm to civilians.

Tiro Strikes Back

You know you've hit the big time when you become both an object of derision and a paradigm of philosophical obtuseness in the international blogging scene. That's what has happened to me, albeit both references are restricted to the Italian blog Cantor, one of the few blogs to get even less traffic than An Examined Life. I'm not sure what the name "Cantor" is supposed to conjure up, although after reading around in it I'm fairly certain it's not Georg, whose reasoning skills were markedly better. I will say this, however: I looked long and hard for something to make fun of as payback, but in the end I found myself agreeing with much of what is written there. Maybe if my Italian were better I would have had better luck, but them's the breaks....

I suppose the problem might be that this Stephano fellow, who appears to be the owner of the blog, is something of a conservative/classical liberal, and so our politics tend to run fairly close. But there is a trend among some classical liberals to look at issues such as abortion, human cloning, stem cell research, and other issues connected to medical ethics and scientific research, in a markedly utilitarian way. Regular readers of An Examined Life are already familiar with my views about utilitarianism, but I'm happy to admit that many conservatives are also utilitarians, as are many Libertarians and other classical liberals, and I make it a point not to judge the intentions of such folks. Indeed, in some ways utilitarianism seems quite apt for the classical liberal approach to things, and one can't expect everyone to have the same respect for the posizioni dogmatiche di filosofi, especially in a country where the last genuine philosopher was Cicero.

In the spirit of international cooperation, I've decided to include Cantor in my blogroll, if for no other reason than to make it easier to keep an eye on him.

Robert Lanza Has (Human) Egg on His Face

An update to my Wednesday post on stem cell research: CNS is carrying a story that claims that, in point of fact, the method announced in the journal Nature does not avoid the destruction of the embryo in most cases--and this is in addition to several other problems still associated with the procedure. Check out the full story here.

Must Be Running For Office

A story at CNS reports that Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna thinks that his OpEd piece in the New York Times last year may have been "too much crafted with a hatchet." It turns out that, in his opinion, "the church does not support creationism", and "the church teaches that the first page of the Book of Genesis is not a page of science." He now says that his article "might have been more nuanced."

While this is a salutary development--it's good to know that prominent Church leaders are not Silly Persons--one still wonders just how nuanced the Cardinal's position could get. On the one hand, he wants to claim that there is a distinction to be drawn between what he calls "the science of Darwin" and "ideological Darwinism", but on the other hand he criticizes those who ignore what he claims is the "overwhelming [scientific] evidence for design in biology" and goes so far as to propose "a metaphorical image: Darwin's scientific ladder of rising evolutionary development on one hand, and on the other the biblical Jacob's ladder, from which angels descended from heaven to earth."

It is difficult to see how one could further nuance such manifest ignorance of the nature of evolutionary theory, but I suppose it's a step in the right direction: he at least admits that "Darwinian theory and the faith can coexist". But scientific evidence of design in biology? Rising evolutionary development? Come on.

One almost gets the impression that the Cardinal's remarks were somehow a response to certain kinds of criticisms from certain quarters.

According to the CNS story,

The cardinal was one of several scholars invited to join Pope Benedict XVI at his summer villa in early September for a private two-day symposium on "Creation and Evolution." The encounter is an annual one in which the pope meets with his former doctoral students from his teaching years in Germany.

Oh.

No Rational Reason to Take Robert Lanza Seriously

The New York Times reports today that there is now a method for utilizing stem cells that avoids destroying embryos. According to the author of the story, "if confirmed in other laboratories, [the research method] would seem to remove the principal objection to stem cell research." That is, it would seem to avoid the destruction of the embryo. And get this:

“There is no rational reason left to oppose this research,” said Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of Advanced Cell Technology and leader of a team that reported the new method in an article published online by the journal Nature.

Nothing like attempting the old end-run. What a surprise to find someone who probably didn't think that the earlier objection was rational now saying that there are no rational objections left!

The principle difficulty before, obviously, was that the destruction of a human embryo is the unjustified killing of an innocent human. Even with the removal of that objection, however, plenty of "rational" objections remain, including the standard objection to the use of humans in scientific research without their consent. That is an objection that is not only rational, but it is one that cannot possibly be overcome in the case of stem cell taken from human embryos, and that is why stem cells derived from embryos can never be used in scientific research.

Stem cells for scientific research ought to be taken only from umbilical cords in cases where parents can give consent. Present data suggest that this is a far richer and more promising source for such materials anyway.

Freedom and Human Dignity

In another very interesting post, Chris Blosser takes issue with Mark Shea's claim that neoconservatives subscribe to a kind of idolatry of democracy. Blosser quotes Irving Kristol at some length in rebuttal of Shea's idea, and one paragraph in particular stood out for me as especially thought-provoking:

There is, however, an older idea of democracy - one which was fairly common until the beginning of this century - for which the conception of the quality of public life is absolutely crucial. The idea starts from the proposition that democracy is a form of self-government, and that if you want it to be a meritorious policy, you have to care about what kind of people govern it. Indeed, it puts the matter more strongly and declares that if you want self-government, you are only entitled to it if that "self" is worthy of governing. There is no inherent right to self-government if it means that such government is vicious, mean, squalid, and debased. Only a dogmatist and a fanatic, an idolater of the democratic machinery, could approve of self-government under such conditions.

The idea that Kristol is opposing here is something that he characterizes as "the liberal idea of democracy par excellence", namely, the idea that majority rule as such is itself the central value in any morally acceptable polity. What he proposes in its place is the idea that self-governance is a value whose moral acceptability is a direct function of the value of the persons proposing to govern themselves.

In some ways I find this way of looking at things rather congenial--at least, it appeals very strongly to the Aristotelian in me. There does not seem to be any particularly compelling reason, for example, to defend a society (such as the one that Jim Tucker is always defending) that enslaves a significant proportion of its own population merely because the majority is willing to do so, and yet this is precisely what one commits oneself to if one regards majority rule as per se the central political principle in any morally acceptable polity. In fact, it is precisely the morally base nature of such a society that some regard as sufficient justification for interference in the local practices. Similaryly, even if Nazi Germany had not first attacked the Allied nations, there may have been sufficient moral justification for a military incursion grounded in the objective of liberating the groups who were being exterminated.

There is another side to this, however. When it is suggested that the moral acceptability of a polity is a function of the value of the persons constituting that polity, it immediately raises the question of how one is to evaluate the value of the persons in question. In the examples I cited--the ante-bellum South, Nazi Germany--it is tempting to confuse the value of the persons with the values expressed by the moral choices of the persons. It is morally wretched to choose to hold people in slavery or to externimate entire groups, but the persons who make such morally wretched choices are themselves as morally valuable as anyone else. One wishes that they weren't so craven, perhaps, but that is a separate matter. Without necessarily fully endorsing Socratic intellectualism I am nevertheless drawn to the idea that vicious behavior--even the criminally vicious behavior of the Nazis--is due principally to a kind of headstrong ignorance, the kind of invincible ignorance that one is sometimes required to constrain simply in order to protect oneself.

From a religious perspective it is this freedom to choose even the criminally vicious path that makes us imagines Dei, though obviously the Proper Good for humans is not the criminally vicious but the perfectly good. Independently of religion, it is the the principle of reason that makes morality possible in the first place and, hence, is the ultimate standard by which we must measure the value of the persons in a polity. Since the rational faculty is the same in everyone (though, obviously, that faculty is not developed to the same extent in everyone) we must treat everyone as equally valuable, whether or not we like their choices.

Anyone who looks at the matter in this way will have to take a slight exception to Kristol's claim that "if you want self-government, you are only entitled to it if that "self" is worthy of governing." It may depend upon what, precisely, he means by "self", but at least the way it is put here the claim is rather banal, since all "selves" are equal, regardless of the manner of life they choose to live. A person can choose a way of life that is objectively "vicious, mean, squalid, and debased" and still be as deserving as anyone else of treatment befitting his full human dignity. It may not be possible to treat him that way, since his own behavior may work against it (think of the difficulty of bringing self-rule to certain parts of the Middle East, for example), yet he is still deserving of such treatment. So instead of saying, with Kristol, that the vicious and base do not "deserve" self-government, I would say that the vicious and base make it very difficult for the rest of us to treat them as they deserve, and it is not all that clear that our obligation to treat them as they deserve should go very far beyond treating them in the way that they appear to desire, since to treat them as they deserve is always going to be reducible to treating them as free persons. This is further complicated by the fact that I noted in the posts on torture, that it is quite possible for folks to be mistaken about what they desire, if we equate what is desirable with what is objectively best for us in the long run. We may make one sort of decision with regard to the extermination of whole groups of people, or with regard to societies that hold slaves, while we make an entirely different sort of decision with regard to a society that is not self-ruling. In one we may choose to intervene, in the other not. Or we may choose to intervene not in the one but the other, or in both, or in neither. The decision to intervene, however, must always be grounded in a desire to treat the other as a fully free person, deserving of the same respect that I would ask for my own person.