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This is the seventh and, as it turned out, last post from my Right Reason series on Augustine, faith, social philosophy, and political participation that I've been re-posting here due to the demise of Right Reason. At the end I write about the next intended post in the series, but I never wrote it. When I sat down to think about what I'd say, I didn't think I had a lot to say that was very interesting. It's possible that I'll continue this now, but I don't have any strong intentions to do this.

So far in my Christianity and Politics series, I've discussed some principles I find in Augustine's socio-political thought that I generally agree with and explained why, based on those principles, I think Christians have a moral obligation to participate in political matters in a setting something like the one I find myself in in the contemporary U.S. context. Because of the moral requirement to love one's neighbor, the privileges and responsibilities assigned to a citizen of my nation require me to use those privileges and meet those political responsibilities in a way that best seeks the interests of my neighbor, i.e. everyone else in this nation. This is so even, as I believe, if my primary citizenship is in heaven.

But that just explains why a Christian would be motivated to seek the good and why Christian views about what is good will be at least part of that motivation. It doesn't provide a motivation for why secular citizens, citizens of other religions, or other Christians who have different views of what is good to go along with the particular policy proposals that I would support. It's fairly common nowadays to hear someone complaining that it's wrong to enforce religious convictions by means of law when other people who don't agree with them shouldn't have to follow them. Several questions arise. First, is it morally ok to have religious justification for one's political views? Is it morally ok for a society to allow people to use such justifications? Then there are also the legal questions about whether this sort of thing is currently legal under a particular system of law, in my case under the U.S. Constitution, which includes the First Amendment's famous Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause. I'm tackling the moral issues in this post, and the legal issues will follow in a separate post.

The main argument I've heard against religious motivations amounts to fear at how such a practice could be abused. If we allow people to use religious reasons to support laws and policies, then they may use religion to support really bad laws and policies. That's true. But people can also use really bad secular arguments to support really bad laws and policies, so it doesn't prevent that sort of thing to require people to use secular arguments. So I don't find that argument very convincing. Perhaps we could require really good reasoning for any argument supporting a law or policy, but how do you require that by law, and who is going to enforce it? If we're going to do that, we'll need some experts on good arguments who are making the call, and that would take something like Plato's ideal government as presented in the Republic, which even he admitted was impossible (partly because no one who isn't an expert could ever identify who the experts are, because they aren't the experts and can't make such distinctions).

This is the sixth post from my Right Reason series on Augustine, faith, social philosophy, and political participation that I've been re-posting here due to the demise of Right Reason.

Having presented the Augustinian background to my approach to Christian political interaction, I want to move now to an application of Augustine's principles to contemporary American politics. I should say that I write as an evangelical, with particular views on what Christianity amounts to and what the church is. But these are views that I believe I share with Augustine, and thus those who are not evangelical may well agree with me on enough of them to arrive at similar conclusions.

I want to keep two kinds of questions separate. First, there are Christian motivations for certain views on how Christians should seek interact politically with the rest of society. Second, there are political reasons that might appeal to people who are not Christians regarding how much role religion should play in political decision-making. I want to focus on the first question in this post. For now I'm ignoring questions about what Christians (or members of any religious group) have a right to do politically, to what extent it is legitimate politically, morally, legally, constitutionally, etc. In other words, I'm leaving aside what sort of role religion should have in the public sphere as a general question that people of different faiths and people of no faith could all agree upon. I'm simply considering what a Christian should be motivated to think about these issues.

I am not ultimately going to ignore such questions, however. My next post will focus on exactly those questions. For now, I want to restrict myself to why I, as an evangelical Christian, should be motivated to play a role in the political process in a largely secularized society and what sort of role my Christian convictions should lead me to want to have. I'll begin with a very quick review of some of the general principles from Augustine that I agree with, which I've covered in more detail in previous posts in this series.

Augustine recognizes that Christians have two overriding principles that summarize all Christian teaching. One is love for God, and the other is love for neighbor. The New Testament clearly teaches that you cannot do the former without doing the latter. (It also teaches that you cannot truly do the latter without doing the former, although that isn't important for what I want to say now.) The highest calling of the Christian, indeed the Christian's most important moral obligation, is to love God, and that requires loving one's neighbor. In applying this point, Augustine insists that loving one's neighbor involves seeking what is good for those around us, including those who are not themselves Christians. To put it in terms of the Two Cities model, those who are citizens of the City of God have a moral responsibility to seek what is best for the earthly city.

Posted by Jeremy Pierce on July 20, 2007 3:15 PM

This is the fourth post from my Right Reason series on Augustine, faith, social philosophy, and political participation.

This is the third post from the Right Reason series I did last year.

In my last post, I presented some background views of Augustine that will inform his views on the relationship between Christians and civil government. Before I move on to his specific treatment of that issue from City of God chapter 19, I want to look at two other related background issues in this post.

First, it's always worth remembering that for Augustine the ultimate governor of all things is God. In City of God 4.33, he dwells on the significance this has. If God is the governor over all creation, and God is omnipotent and has exhaustive foreknowledge (as Augustine thought), then nothing happens without at least God's permission. There's an ordering of events. This strong view of God's sovereignty required him to come up with something to say about the problem of evil, which he does spend a great deal of time on in other sections of City of God, but even without that additional work it's clear that Augustine doesn't think God sees everything that happens as morally good. It's just that it all somehow fits into a larger plan that God is in control of.

What political relevance does this have, then? God distributes worldly power irrespective of whether people are good or bad. We could tell that by just observing the world. Why would this be? One reason is that if only good people got it, then people would begin to expect such gifts from God, and that involves seeing worldly power as important. Augustine says it's not of any real importance, so it wouldn't do for God to promote it as if it is. So it gets distributed among people of various sorts to diminish the likelihood of people drawing that kind of conclusion.

Augustine thinks the Old Testament promises of land and other physical things to Israel have a hidden meaning of a spiritual reality, i.e. to be in the spiritual land is to be in God's kingdom as a citizen of a higher reality, etc. Those in the City of God, i.e. Christians, are not citizens of the earthly kingdom and do not primarily identify with it in terms of its mindset or desires (as I discussed in the last post).

After Augustine discusses the material I'm going to turn to in the next post, he looks at one issue that I wanted to have in front of us at the outset. In City of God 19.24, he looks at the expression "a people" (or at least the Latin expression translated as "a people"). He defines 'a people' as a group united by common goals, purposes, and loves. In part, he's responding to Cicero's definition that a society is a group united for the sake of serving justice. Augustine doesn't want to define it that way, because you can evaluate a people based on what its goals, purposes, and loves are. If it loves good things, it makes it a good people. If it loves bad things, it is a bad people. So you can't define a society as a group with good goals, as if other groups aren't societies. Any group with shared interests is a society. It's just that some societies are united by justice, while others are not.

Rome in its most corrupt state was still a people. True justice isn't present unless reason triumphs over what's not excellent. Ultimately for the best sort of justice, a people must love God, but it might make sense to speak of lesser forms of justice that involve something more virtuous than another people, even if neither truly loves God. So his distinction between (a) true peace that only the City of God looks forward to and (b) a semblance of peace in the earthly city corresponds to a distinction between (c) true justice that can occur only when fully and completely motivated by love for God (and won't appear fully even in the still-sinning members of the City of God here and now) and (d) a semblance of justice in the earthly city.

In City of God 4.4, Augustine defended the claim that unjust regimes are no more than criminal gangs on a large scale, and this account of what it is to be a people helps shed some light on that earlier passage. As Augustine sees it, an unjust government is nothing more than a bunch of criminals. The fact that they have much power and get to be called an empire makes no difference. The thing they have in common is that they are both groups organized around a common purpose, and in these two cases it's a bad purpose. His emphasis here is that empires can be no better than gangs. But the assumption behind this also means that gangs are like small scale societies, because they have the kind of common association that a society has. Just because the organizing principle doesn't line up with what's right doesn't mean that it's not a society. It's just a bad society.

So enough of the preliminaries. In the next post, I'll move to his main discussion of this issue in City of God 19.14-17.

Posted by Jeremy Pierce on July 16, 2007 6:41 PM

[This post had no comments at the original Right Reason posting, so there are none to reproduce here.]

This is the second post in my Right Reason guest series from last year at the now-defunct Right Reason blog.

I want to begin this series looking at Augustine's views on the topic I'll be discussing, but before I get into his views on the direct issue I'd like to present a few of his background views that will be relevant to the more direct discussion of religious motivations in public life and civil government.

Augustine doesn't ever (to my knowledge) discuss the best form of government. He's not really interested in political questions for their own sake. He is interested in God's role in history, in individuals and among nations and rulers, including both good and bad rulers. He does think there are ethical questions about how to govern, and he's interested in how Christians as part of a political entity should live and participate, but his ultimate concern is the relation between what he calls the City of God and what he calls the early city. This does include those in government, and thus he does have some things to say that affect political matters.

The City of God is an important enough concept that he named what's considered by many to be his most important work after it. The City of God is not actually a city or political entity but rather a spiritual reality, manifested by people who follow Jesus Christ. Christians compose the City of God, and their primary identity is in that relationship, not in any political, cultural, social, ethnic, or whatever other identity-forming relations they may have. The stark contrast between the City of God and the earthly city is crucial for understanding Augustine's views on Christians and civil government.

Each group has its own mindset and what we would now call its own value system or worldview. Augustine sees the City of God as valuing what God would value (or at least valuing to move toward valuing those things more). The earthly city, on the other hand, is largely self-interested. It's not that all ethical theories developed by those in the earthly city are hedonistic. Augustine is well aware that that's not the case. He discusses Plato and the Stoics at great length in City of God, and he acknowledges the difference between their views and those of the Epicureans, who were genuinely hedonistic in their explicit normative theory.

But even the views of Plato and the Stoics are self-interested, even if they aren't selfish. All the ancient philosophers were concerned with the good life, i.e. a life of flourishing, a life of well-being. But this mindset takes the good life to be merely what's a good life for me to have. For Plato and the Stoics, the good life is an internal matter. It's what sort of inner state is good for me to have. For Epicurus, it's also internal to me. It's about avoiding pain. The ancient skeptics sought to avoid having beliefs. Even Aristotle, who recognized external goods, was primarily concerned with how such goods help the individual to flourish, to lead a fulfilling life.

In contrast, Christianity places primary value outside oneself, in God, and in the concerns of a God who is directed by the concerns of his creation. He does say that such a life is the most fulfilling, the life with the most value for me. But what gives it that value is not merely that it's the best life for me to have. This is why he thinks those outside the City of God are in a sense merely self-directed. Without a divine purpose, he sees nothing but what kind of life you want for yourself, even if the life you want for yourself involves doing altruistic deeds.

It's also worth being aware of Augustine's views on human motivation. He sees all human beings since the fall as having disordered desires. We don't want what's best, at least not in a way that reflects how good different things are. We want things that are less good more than we want things that are more good. He sees virtue or excellence as having rightly-ordered desires, having your desires organized in a way that your highest priorities are the things most worth desiring, with other things occupying a lower priority level. Disordered desire is a consequence of the fall, and only those whose priorities are reordered by God in conversion to following Christ can begin the process of moving in a direction of excellence. This is ultimately his explanation of why the earthly city doesn't have the most important good (i.e. God) as its highest-motivating factor, and the City of God does (at least when its members are not sinning). That allows him to form such a stark contrast between these two mindsets. There's a metaphysical difference between the two groups.

Posted by Jeremy Pierce on July 14, 2007 8:48 AM

I just discovered that the Right Reason blog is no longer online at all. It was a politically conservative philosophers' blog hosted at the same server that hosts this blog, and I knew that it had stopped producing new posts, but I didn't expect all the archives to disappear. I managed to recover all the content from the guest-posting I did toward the end of that blog last year, including the whole comment thread on each post. I didn't know about archive.org, but it apparently saves the content of any web page at various intervals so you can go back and check what was once there. So I'm going to be posting that series here on days when I have less time to blog new stuff. Here's the introductory post. I'll put the comments below the fold since this initial post led to quite a lengthy discussion despite its brevity.

Introduction: Christianity and Politics (Guest Posting)

Posted by Jeremy Pierce on July 12, 2007 9:56 AM

On Thomas Aquinas' view of natural law, law is written into the fabric of the universe. On one level, everything that happens is part of divine law, since God's plan of providence includes every single event that happens across all time. Aquinas calls this eternal law. On a second level, certain things are good for us or bad for us according to our nature, according to what kind of thing we are and what would make for contributing to our welfare and the internal purpose within us as organisms and as God's creations. That's the natural law. Then human beings can issue legitimate rules that fit with what's best for us and seek the general welfare. If it meets all these criteria, then it's a human law. If it's issued by someone without care for those it includes or if it's not for the general good or reasonable, then it's a real law. Otherwise, it's just a rule. He's got high standards for when a purported human law really is a law.

One of the aspects of this that I hadn't seen until this summer, when I covered a more extensive part of his treatment of this in what's called the Treatise of Law (but is really just a section of the Summa Theologiae, and he gave it no such title) is that he also allows for custom to generate laws. When he introduces the notion of legitimate authority to make laws, he says there are two ways this can happen. One way is that someone (singular or plural) God has placed in care over a group issues a rule that really is for the common good. The other way is that people issue a regulation over themselves. In contemporary times, we hear that and think he's talking about democracy. He surely knew of the ancient democracies, since he education would have included quite a bit about the ancient world. But that turns out not to be his primary concern when he says this. He actually means custom.

We have lots of rules by custom rather than by what we ordinarily call law. I'm pretty sure there were men's and women's restrooms before there were any laws about who can go in which in public buildings. If I'm wrong, there are lots of examples that are like that. It's not illegal in the U.S. to call people ordinary insults, but it's often immoral, and it's against custom if it's a certain kind of insult or a certain kind of context (in the middle of a job interview, say). We as a society have standards not to do things that aren't illegal. They're just frowned on, and you get ostracized or socially penalized if you do them.

What I found interesting about Aquinas on this subject is that he thinks this can go the other way too. If a certain action is worth prohibiting for the common good and is made a law (a genuine law) but then becomes against the common good, what was a law becomes merely a rule. But what about when no one follows a law, and those in authority tolerate such behavior? The movie theater in the mall near us hasn't allowed backpacks in the theater since a little after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. At least that's their official policy. But no one enforces it, and lots of people don't keep it. I think Aquinas would see that as custom determining what the real human law is, and I think that's a very interesting view. It also has implications for speed limit laws in a jurisdiction where the police don't stop people for going 5 over or 10 over, and everyone drives that fast because they know where the threshold for being stopped is. On Aquinas' view, it's as if the law really is where they practice it as being, not where it's written to be. (Of course, all this depends on the custom's practice being consistent with the common good. If not, then custom couldn't modify written law in this sort of way.)

A while ago (June 5, to be exact), NPR's All Things Considered had a piece on punishing kids in school by making them learn Robert Frost. It was intended partly as a way to make the kids learn more. They included several responses to the policy. One response caught my interest. It said that such a policy ends up agreeing with all the high school dropouts that education is bad. After all, it can't be a punishment unless it's bad. The problem with this punishment is that education isn't punishment.

This is a common enough view, and it has interesting implications for theories of punishment. In particular, it seems to undermine restorative, rehabilitative models of punishment. It doesn't undermine the view that we should seek to restore and rehabilitate criminals. It does undermine the view that we should call it punishment when we do so. It seems to me that the main assumption lying behind this slogan is that education isn't punishment, because education isn't retribution.

Given some of the stuff Wink is working on, I thought this was an interesting presentation of a popular intuition about punishment that runs counter to how he's trying to think about punishment.

It's pretty common to hear that Plato was a totalitarian who thought that philosopher-kings ought to be given the decision-making power in government (e.g. here, for a pretty prominent mention at a top blog), so that the ordinary joes who don't know any better won't be doing what's bad for everyone, including themselves. No laws should restrict these benevolent tyrants, since laws just get in the way of allowing them to make the best decisions. Laws are too sweeping and won't apply as well in every case, and philosopher-kings would be wise enough to see when a given principle does or doesn't apply.  As I said, this is a common mistake. This isn't actually Plato's view, even though someone reading only the Republic might be excused for thinking Plato did hold to something like this (although I think you do have to ignore some clear signs even in the Republic if you want to take Plato to be advocating the model of the city he sets up there).

In Plato's careful political philosophy (e.g. in the Statesman and the Laws), he distances himself from this view. He does think an ideal government would function something like that, but he acknowledges that this is only the ideal government. If you really had an expert who not only knew all the relevant information and could predict exactly which policies would be best but also had the best interests of everyone involved and were willing to do what's right all the time, then the best form of government would be to let that person rule, and those who resisted would be revealing that they don't know what's best for them.

Many will still bristle at this, but I think they ought to do so only if they recognize that Plato was highly skeptical about whether anyone could possibly be like this. Even if there were such experts no one could ever be shown to be such an expert, because the masses who aren't experts of that sort won't be able to recognize that the expert's views are correct (because they're not themselves experts). Therefore, most people wouldn't be able to tell the expert from the corrupt imposter. Therefore, to guard against that eventuality, it's best to have the inferior form of rule, which is rule by many who are not experts. Plato outright admits this in the Statesman, quite plainly repudiating the view that so many attribute to him because of their misreading of the Republic.

As I said, many will still disagree with him about what the ideal state would be like, but they ought to do so not in terms of his faux view put forward in the Republic, which is mostly intended to be a model that serves as an analogy for what he thinks the just person will be like. They ought to take his mature presentation of political discussion in his later dialogues, which are unambiguously about politics as a own subject of its own rather than the moral philosophy and exploration of human nature that the Republic carries out.

A little while ago I had lots of things to say about the judicial nominee battle going on in the Senate and the claims by some of the Democratic senators, most prominently Senator Schumer, about the process of confirming the newest two Supreme Court justices. I didn't have the time to type up any of my thoughts, and it feels a bit late now. However, one thing I did want to say something about is the interesting reversal of roles that we see when the Senate shifts leadership and each party complains about the tactics of the other side. See Jan Crawford Greenburg's post here for some nice examples.

You might classify the views on such matters in terms of two pure positions. One is the view Senator Chuck Schumer (D, NY) has been consistent in holding (although his application of it leaves much to be desired, in my view). According to him, there is absolutely nothing wrong with expecting nominees to violate the current norm among judicial nominees not to comment on potential future cases or on issues one expects might come before the court one will be seated on. In the Roberts and Alito hearings, he pressed for details on whether they believe certain rights are established in the Constitution, whether they would be willing to overturn certain precedents, whether they thought particular cases were wrongly decided, and so on. They refused in many of these cases to go beyond the standard they both believed to have been presented by now-Justice Ginsburg's nomination process a decade-and-change earlier. Their reasoning is that commenting on what may be central to forthcoming cases will threaten their perception as unbiased judges, since those whose cases will be heard will think the justices' minds are already made up and will not give them a chance. But this is not the reasoning of the other pure view on such matters.

The alternative view is not merely that there is a convention among judges not to engage in such prediction out of fairness to parties in future cases. The alternative pure view is that it is simply not the business of the Senate in confirming judicial nominees to engage in partisan politics. That is for the president to be concerned with, since it is his election that determined who would nominate judges for any vacancies. The Senate's role is merely to safefuard the president's choices against serious corruption and ethical issues and to ensure that the nominees are qualified to carry out the tasks required of them. Deference is given to the president's nominee. The primary objection to this view is that the Senate is also an elected body, and they are elected for partisan reasons to present partisan considerations for or against what the Senate might do, including for or against judicial nominees in their role of advising and consenting. It is thus within their authority to question nominees who are both qualified and not corrupt simply because they disagree with the nominee on issues of legal philosophy.

I think the latter issue is an interesting debate in constitutional interpretation. The Constitution's text merely says that the Senate will advise and consent to the president's nominees. It doesn't give a reason why. It doesn't indicate what process the Senate will engage in before giving their consent or their advice. It doesn't say if the advice and consent are different stages of a two-step process. Those things are all not in the text of the Constitution but are in the Senate's current practice of carrying out this role. I don't know anything about the legal background to this sort of thing and whether English common law explains it. I don't know anything about the debates in the constitutional committees over this language and what light that sheds on it. I don't know anything about whether the federalist papers explain what some of the founders were thinking of as they argued for this kind of wording. In short, I am woefully unqualified to have much of a view about what the Constitution really means by saying this. If I were to go by what I take from it merely by reading the words, I'd be inclined to think that the Senate ought to give advice to the president and then confirm whoever the president selects.

Ilya Somin nicely clears up some confusions about what's commonly called the unitary executive. There are two issues: the scope of executive power and its distribution. The unitary executive view is that the president's authority over the executive (an intra-executive issue) is absolute. I would have thought this to be absolutely clear in the Constitution, but apparently some disagree. A separate issue is about the scope of executive power. How much authority does the executive has with respect to the other branches (an inter-branch issue)? In other words, unitary executive allows the president sovereign control over what happens within the executive branch, but this other view sees the executive power as expansive in a way that many find controversial. The problem is that many people keep calling the latter view by the term "unitary executive".

Somin says:

As Alito explains, one can consistently support a unitary executive with a narrow range of powers (which is roughly my position). One can also consistently support a unitary executive with very broad, almost unlimited powers (John Yoo's view, and also that of the Bush Administration). You could - also consistently - endorse a nonunitary executive with broad powers. The latter was the position of liberal Democrats during the New Deal and for many years afterwards, when they endorsed both broad executive power and the creation of numerous executive agencies outside presidential control.

Is there an example of someone who both denies the unitary executive and thinks the executive has a limited role? Given that both positions serve to limit the president, perhaps hardly anyone seeks to try both ways at doing so, but I'm curious whether someone has tried.

I've finally gotten back to continuing my series at Right Reason with Religious Motivations in Politics. Given the Augustinian framework I've already presented, Christians have a motivation to seek the good of our neighbor around us by participating politically based on what we believe to be good, which does in part come from religious motivations. The post spends most of its time responding to objections that this is immoral because it forces a moral view on those who don't have it and that a secular society (or a religiously plural society) should not allow such a thing.

As I was posting my latest post in my Christianity and Politics series at the conservative philosophy blog Right Reason, I thought it might be nice to put together a post here linking to all the posts in the series. I will update this post as I add posts there. Posts 7 and 8 are tentatively titled, and I may even restructure what I hope to cover in remaining posts.

1. Introduction: Christian and Politics (Guest Blogging)
2. Augustine on Civil Government: The Two Cities
3. Augustine on Civil Government: Two Further Preliminaries
4. Augustine on Civil Government: Authority
5. Augustine on Civil Government: The City of God and Compromise
6. Christian Political Political Participation
7. Religious Motivations in Politics
8. Religion and the First Amendment

My final Augustine post is up at Right Reason, Augustine on Civil Government: The City of God and Compromise. The foundation is now laid for me to apply these general principles in a contemporary setting in my next post.

The next post in my series at Right Reason is up, entitled Augustine on Civil Government: Authority. This post moves a little more into socio-political issues. The next post will be my last on Augustine's own views, finally getting to the main question of Christians and civil government, and then I'll move on to a contemporary focus and how I'd extend the basic Augustinian view to the sitution of an evangelical Christian in the United States today (i.e. my own case).

My second post on Augustine and Civil Government is up at Right Reason. It's entitled Augustine and Civil Government: Two Further Preliminaries, for lack of a better name. It looks at two more background issues, one related to divine governance and the other on the subject of what kind of collection of people counts as "a people", both of which will be relevant for his more concentrated treatment of the primary subject I'm interested in, which is how Christians should relate to civil government. 

My next post in the series on religion and politics is up at Right Reason. It's called Augustine on Civil Government: The Two Cities, and it provides some of the background on Augustine's general views before I launch into his direct treatment of the issues I'm going to focus on.

In two previous posts, I first presented an account of deontological ethics in which it is sometimes ok to go against moral principles in order to previous seriously grave consequences. Moral principles are not all absolutes. Many of them have thresholds, and if the consequences are bad enough the principle is no longer in effect. I then argued that this kind of deontological view allows a pro-life voter to vote for a pro-choice candidate who is not as bad (to a pro-lifer) than a more strongly pro-choice candidate (and who is better in the voter's mind on other issues).

Now I want to apply the same kind of reasoning to a situation within the Republican primary. A commenter on this post said the following:

Actually, it is NOT the federal government's purpose to protect our life, liberty, and property. The federal govt's job is much narrower than that, and is spelled out clearly in Article 1, Sec 8, for anyone who can read. If you insist on giving the feds more powers than those granted by the Constitution, you promote lawlessness and open up to the Congress and Executive a boundless field of power, no longer subject to definition.

The Bill of Rights doesn't say, "Congress shall make laws protecting our freedom of speech" (for example.) No, rather it's a negative, "Congress shall make no law..." Congress is prohibited from infringing on our rights. The Constitution should be viewed as a restrictive document, defining and restraining federal power.

The only crimes Congress has a right to punish are piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Murder, jaywalking, rape, embezzling do not fall under federal jurisdiction, therefore may not be punished by the feds. Abortion is murder. But even if abortion were "healthcare" it would still be without federal jurisdiction, as healthcare is not listed among the enumerated powers.

To insist that the feds must prosecute abortionists is to trash the whole Constitution in letter and spirit. If we amend the Constitution to prohibit abortion (in order to restrain the out of control courts) then we are also putting the nail in the coffin of federalism, and altering the spirit of the Constitution.

Ron Paul is the most principled and consistent opponent of abortion in DC today! He is principled rather than pragmatic; ends do not justify means.

One issue is the original meaning/intent of the Constitution as opposed to all that's been added in how courts have interpreted the Constitution and how the government now functions as a result. The U.S. Constitution does give a very narrow purpose for Congress's role. But two things might be said for rejecting such a narrow view today, and neither involves the idea of a living Constitution that typifies judicial liberalism.

Does the Constitution set up the judiciary branch to interpret the law and the Constitution? The Constitution never speaks of judicial review (although the Federalist Papers do). The Supreme Court is never given any task at all in the Constitution itself, although it is said to have power extending to all cases in law and equity that arise under the Constitution. But power to do what?

A few days ago I posted about the differences between deontological and consequentialist views in ethics. Consequentialists think consequences are all that matters in terms of evaluating the moral status of an action. Deontologists think other factors can sometimes trump consequences, and thus you'll end up with situations when doing the right thing requires doing something that doesn't lead to the best consequences.

My main point in the post was to defend a moderate deontological position in one respect. Absolutists think the moral principles that are more important than consequences are always more important than the consequences. In other words, absolutists hold that deontological moral principles always apply, and consequences are irrelevant. A moderate deontologist in this respect will argue that deontological principles are not always absolute in that sense. Sometimes consequences will be so much more important that the principle doesn't truimp the consequences in that case. These deontological principles will then have a threshold. If the consequences are serious enough that they surpass the threshold, then the principle no longer holds for that action. If they are below that threshold, then they hold.

An example of how this works comes from Plato. It's usually wrong to steal, and if you borrow something it's usually immoral to refuse to return it. But what if you borrow your friend's sword, and your friend returns to you asking for the sword after you've discovered that your friend intends to use it to commit a great evil? Plato argues that it would be wrong to return the sword, even though normally you ought to do so. The moderate deontologist explains this in terms of this particular action being above the threshold for the immorality of stealing (or more precisely of refusing to return borrowed possesions).

In the rest of this post, I'd like to apply this line of thought to the first case I presented at the outset of my previous post. I want to say that in those cases a deontologist can say what I want to say without being a consequentialist. The first case was a pro-life voter who shudders at pulling the lever for someone as pro-choice as Rudy Giuliani, even if the consequence of pro-lifers taking such an attitude is that the even more pro-choice Hillary Clinton would be guaranteed to become the next president. Two things matter here. One is that Rudy Giuliani really is preferable to Hillary Clinton according to pro-life criteria, even if both are much closer to the not preferred end of the spectrum. The second is that the moral principles at stake here are not absolutes, and in certain situations above the threshold the principles no longer apply.

As a fiscal conservative with federalist tendencies, Giuliani doesn't think the federal government is the place to further such an agenda. He didn't even further it at the local level when he was mayor of New York City. He simply retained the status quo. Hillary Clinton would much more militantly pursue a pro-choice regime.

I've just finished Jorge Gracia's Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century, which I've blogged about briefly before. Overall, it's an excellent treatment of the metaphysical issues about race, ethnicity, and nationality. Gracia's primary focus is defending the existence of all three, explaining what they all are, distinguishing amongst them, and responding to objections against using such categories.

It's carefully argued and very clear. I can't see how someone can think through the ethical and political issues involving these three categories without having first thought about these more fundamental issues, and this is the best treatment of them that I've seen. It's treating an issue usually covered by continental philosophers but with the tools of analytic metaphysics, which is a breath of fresh air for me, since I'm trying to do the same thing.

I'm actually a little worried about what sort of positive view I'm going to end up with in my dissertation, because he's already come up with a similar enough view, and I think he's basically right. I'm sure I'll come up with something distinctive as I go, but this is the best discussion of the metaphysical status of race that I've seen yet, and I've been immersed in this literature for some time now. The other issues aren't my area, but I found his discussions of them helpful, particularly his arguments for what the differences are and why it's important to distinguish them.

I came across a nice little quote near the end that doesn't relate at all to my dissertation, but I found it both insightful and intriguing, and I thought readers of this blog might find it interesting as well:

The common idea that colonialism is responsible for the conflicts that afflict some parts of the Third World because colonial powers carved out states without regard to racial and ethnic differences assumes that it is a good thing to have states that are ethnically and racially homogeneous and divided along ethnic and racial lines. I am not going to defend colonialism, or the way colonial powers created states in the territories that once they controlled. I do not believe these are defensible causes, and their defense appears to be morally repugnant. It is quite clear that colonial powers created artificial states without nations. But their mistake was not neglecting ethnic or racial boundaries, but rather forming states without regard for nationality. Instead of helping to develop nations out of disparate ethnic and racial groups based on a common will to live under a system of laws with the aims of justice and the good of their members, they mostly drew lines on a map based on expediency and their own national or state interests.

I've always just accepted this argument whenever I've heard it. There really have been all manner of problems appearing in parts of the world where the boundary lines have been redrawn by colonial powers, separating ethnic groups down the middle and forcing them into states with other ethnic groups. But the solution wouldn't be making ethnic groups line up exactly with nations. That's a recipe for making every ethnic disagreement an international disagreement, and it makes outsiders of anyone who happens not to be in that ethnic group who is in the state. But as Gracia notes, the problem isn't arbitrary dividing lines, as if different ethnic groups couldn't form a nation and thrive. The problem is that those who colonized and drew the lines didn't engage in nation-building, i.e. they didn't work toward bringing these people to be part of a nation seeking a common system of laws to govern them for their own best interests.

Civil libertarianism is a general emphasis on individual rights as opposed to government interference in how people choose to live their lives. Some people hold to civil libertarianism purely as a political philosophy, and others base it in a kind of moral libertarianism about there being nothing morally wrong with most of the things they favor allowing people to do legally. Someone like Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, had better take the latter view when it comes to sex-related acts that he wants legal, at least unless he's going to admit to being a thoroughly immoral person. So I suspect that what's grounding his advocacy of first-amendment free-speech rights for the porngraphy industry that he's part of is a moral libertarianism. There's nothing wrong with what his magazine publishes, so there should be no laws against it.

What he doesn't like is social conservatives who speak out against sex-related acts of certain sorts and then commit acts privately that many of their constituents would disapprove of. This is what's called hypocrisy, provided that it's not just a moment of weakness but a regular pattern of saying one thing and doing another, with full realization that their words apply to themselves and just no willingness to let that affect their life. We just heard Flynt on the radio talking about his campaign to catch politicians doing this sort of thing by paying anyone a million dollars if they can come up with photographs of politicians in the act.

Something seems funny about the position Flynt is taking. He denies that this is revenge against those who have caused him legal trouble in the past. So what is his motivation? Would you expect a civil libertarian who thinks people should pretty much be able to do what they want to be concerned about what these politicians are up to? It's not as if he thinks those acts are immoral or anything. So it's not the acts that he has a problem with. The only things left that he could complain about are (1) their public stance and (2) the disconnect between their public stance and their private behavior. I'm not sure either justifies what Flynt is doing, at least not unless you add some additional moral premise that might move in the opposite direction of the moral libertarianism that often undergirds civil libertarianism.

Flynt has a legitimate complaint against the policy recommendations of social conservatives, given his civil libertarianism. On his view those policies are terrible. He objects to restrictions that prevent people from getting married to other people of the same sex, mutilating their fetuses to death, using chemicals (i.e. drugs) to destroy themselves and the kids in their neighborhood that they deal them to, taking advantage of desperate people in order to have sex with them (i.e. hiring prostitutes), taking advantage of desperate people in order to photgraph them nude (i.e. running a porn magazine), and so on. He wants people to be free to do those things, and he thinks he has a moral objection to stopping people from doing such things. So the views of social conservatives are, on his view, wrong.

In a discussion on the Trinity, Trent Dougherty at Prosblogion rasies the question of whether President Bush is his own president. There's a sense in which Bush is the president of those who voted for him, i.e. they (at least at one point) identified with him as the person they wanted to be president. There's a broader sense in which he's the president of every U.S. citizen, i.e. he's the president who governs over them. That's the sense Trent has in mind. In that sense he is Ralph Nader's president as much as he is James Dobson's.

But is he his own president? Trent thinks yes, and I agree. Mike and Dale in the comments say no, and they offer two reasons. First, he can't pardon himself, which means he doesn't have that particular authority over himself. Second, he's not under his own authority, because as the top executive he's not under anyone's authority. I've adapted what follows from my comment on that post.

Suppose we're convinced that a certain issue is more important than any other, and it's on the level of urgent moral necessity to do whatever we can to make progress on that issue and that issue, even if it sets us back quite a ways on other issues. I don't think that's true of the issue of abortion. Having pro-life leaders on the national level isn't better than having pro-choice leaders if the pro-life leaders are going to do things that are even worse than the status quo on abortion. I wouldn't vote for someone who thinks abortion is wrong if the person also thinks we ought to put the majority of the population in machines for eight hours a day that cause intense pain and shorten their lives conserably, merely to make the lives of a few elite people comfortable. While I think abortion is evil and unjust, I'd rather make little progress or even move backward on that score if it's a choice between that and moving into a society that's so bad that the abortion status quo pales in comparison. Those who tolerate grave evil are still better than those who would deliberately perpatuate a greater evil.

But even if we consider a certain issue to be so all-defining that we think we should care very little about anything else, I think we have a moral obligation to prefer someone who is closer to us on that issue than someone else who is further from us on the issue, even if we think both of them hold immoral views and are too tolerant of evil. This may well end up being the case with the 2008 presidential race for pro-lifers if it turns out that the two frontrunners get their respective party nominations. Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice. So is Hillary Clinton. According to the pro-life view, both of them are willing to tolerate serious evil, and that is immoral. However, even given the false premise that abortion is the only morally relevant issue, it simply doesn't follow that pro-life voters ought to stay home or vote for a third party if those two candidates receive their party nominations.

Even if abortion is the only issue under consideration, Hillary Clinton is far worse from a pro-life perspective than Rudy Giuliani is. When he was mayor of a very liberal city, he did virtually nothing to increase women's rights to have abortions, and the abortion rate went down. Some of that may have been just part of a national trend going on at the same time, but it doesn't seem as if he cared enough about the issue to promote abortion rights, never mind to expand them. Rather, he seems to have been expressing a pro-choice view mainly because he's not too motivated by pro-life concerns and not because he holds Hillary Clinton's view that the right to abortion is so inviolable that we should never restrict it under any circumstances.

He seems open to letting states decide, as is his general view on many issues. He worked in the Reagan Justice Department, which suggest some kind of judicial conservatism, and he has gone on record supporting judicial nominees like Roberts and Alito, as opposed to those like Kennedy, O'Connor, or other Republican appointees who have safeguarded Roe v. Wade. Even if the pro-life voter can't trust how faithful he'd be to that, he obviously isn't so dedicated to the pro-choice view that he'll let it affect anything else he does as if it's one of the most important rights one might poseess, which is exactly what Hillary Clinton would do.

I very much enjoyed Saturday Night Live's spoof of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) being interviewed by MSNBC's Chris Matthews. Most of it was terribly unfair to her (and probably to several others too), but there's a grain of truth behind enough of it for it to be funny. I'm not posting this just because I liked it, though. I found one particular segment of it to be especially interesting, and I wanted to comment on it:

CM: What about those Democratic primary voters who are still upset about your initial vote for the war?
HC: Chris, I think most Democrats know me. They understand that my support for the war was always insincere. Of course, knowing what we know now, that you could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it.
CM: Uh-huh.
HC: I mean, for heaven's sake, look at my record. I don't even support necessary wars.
CM: Well, a lot of Democrats like the fact that Obama was always against the war.
HC: Chris, let me say something about Senator Obama, for whom I have the greatest respect. He seems to take positions based on studying an issue and then following his convictions, which is perfectly alright, bt suppose he were to go to Iraq and conclude that the war was necessary after all. He might decide to support it. Do you really trust someone like that?
CM: I never looked at it that way.
HC: Whereas, with me, the Democratic base knows that I am not going to reverse my stance on the war a second time, unless of course they want me to.

I have two thoughts from different parts of this, one brief one and one that requires a little more reflection.

I've said many times before that I think anyone who is seriously worried about theocracy in the United States in the near future is basically paranoid and ignorant. This view requires being paranoid about the likelihood of theocratic extremists getting a hold even on evangelicalism, never mind of the government. It relies on gross ignorance of what evangelicals actually believe and of how remote from the center of evangelicalism the radical extremists called dominionists really are. The people holding this ridiculous view aren't really complaining about theocracy to begin with, when it really comes down to it. It's more a complaint about people who think undefended moral views can be a basis for favoring a particular public policy. Since virtually everyone thinks that, at least in practice, it's pretty silly to complain about others who do it simply because their undefended moral views are also undefended religious views.

But there is a movement in another country right now toward something that literally would be theocracy. 48 members of the Polish Parliament want to name Jesus Christ as the King of Poland. This one is also extremely unlikely to happen, but it is technically theocracy in a very grossly literalistic way. Their proposal wouldn't make Poland a theocracy in practice, just in theory, the way the United Kingdom isn't really a monarchy in practice, just in theory. But it would, technically, be theocracy, at least given the premise that Jesus Christ is indeed God, as these Polish members of Parliament surely think.

For the record, Eugene Volokh's speculation (in the above-linked post) as to the reasons why the Roman Catholic Church opposes this move is wrong. At present Roman Catholicism officially believes the historic position of Christianity that most Protestants also believe (at least in theory), which is that the church is not a political entity but a spiritual entity. It has no earthly domain, and where the medieval view went wrong was in thinking that Christianity could control certain territory to begin with. In a sense he's right that this move would serve to downgrade Jesus' authority, but it's not for the reasons he gives. It's because political authority is already all under God's sovereignty, and making Jesus just like an earthly king, even one with absolute power within a certain domain, is to downgrade someone who has in his death and resurrection been declared the king of all creation and has just yet not returned to claim that and to overthrow all realms who would oppose his reign. This move both denies the futurity of his reign and affirms a more limited, superficial kind of reign now.

Here's another argument from Jorge Gracia's recent book Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century. (See here for the first.) This argument (which I should make clear Gracia does not endorse) is against nationality on the grounds that in a nation you have conflicts between national obligations and universal duties to humanity. Special obligations to protect fellow members of your own nation will potentially (and in fact might often) lead to actions that harm or kill members of other nations. According to this argument, then, it's wrong to allow a setting for such conflicts, which means we need to remove the idea of nationality altogether.

Conflicts between general and special obligations occur all the time, and it's not a reason to remove the special obligations. If I have an obligation to provide for my family, that means I have fewer resources to use for any general obligations I have to help out the poor of my community or of the world. If I have a special obligation to defend my son from a violent attacker, that means I might have to harm or kill the attacker. In the first case, this conflict of obligations doesn't mean I should stop thinking in terms of a family in order to prevent the conflict. In the second, the conflict is only illusory to begin with. I have no general obligation not to harm someone who is trying to harm my son, if the harm I do is necessary to prevent harm to my son. I have a prima facie obligation not to harm people, but that obligation is trumped by other considerations when my son's wellbeing is severely threatened by an evil-doer. By parity of reasoning, the same is true of nations and those in nations defending their fellow members of their nation against outside attackers in the conflict is just, and unjust wars are unjust and thus not justified to begin with, so those don't raise a conflict of obligations unless you're in the military, and then your carrying out orders is usally seen as excused because of the nature of military decision-making. I just don't see how this is supposed to count as a consideration against the existence of nations or the idea of nationality at all.

I've been reading Jorge Gracia's recent book Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century. I came across a passage earlier today that, while largely irrelevant to my dissertation, caught my interest. Gracia presents a whole bunch of arguments in his first chapter against the notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. He himself doesn't oppose these terms but simply wants to distinguish among them while acknowledging the role such categories play in reality. But he begins with these arguments to show what he's responding to.

One of the arguments against nationality struck me as particularly awful. When you have nations that aren't under some higher authority there's room for abuse, and there isn't a lot that other nations can do when countries like Saudi Arabia, China, or Cuba violate what everyone else sees as human rights. National sovereignty prevents enforcement of human rights. This is all true as far as it goes (although those who think a just war can be waged on humanitarian grounds will be less affected by this). The argument establishes, then, that this view of national sovereignty prevents nations from being held accountable. But what follows is strange. Gracia summarizes the conclusion: "The argument, then, points out the need to do away with the myth of nationality and to recognize that all humans are equal and deserve an inter-national, rather than a national, government." (Gracia, p.8)

I was following along (aside from the parenthetical issue above) until this point. Just how does making one absolute authority count as removing the potentiality for abuse? Isn't this removing accountability rather than providing more? Local leaders would have less chance of abusing their authority under a worldwide government, but those at the top would have a much easier time of abusing theirs. Abuse at higher levels is often much worse and much harder to deal with. Someone defending nations as good things will need to say more than this to overcome the argument, but what amazed me was that someone might use these considerations for this conclusion. They seem to me to point more toward anarchy than a global government.

Molly Ziegler, Leaving politics aside?, looks at the media coverage of borderline evangelical Greg Boyd's recent controversy over refusing to get his church involved in politics. (I say borderline because Boyd is an open theist, and many consider open theism automatically a disqualifier for evangelicalism, while others do not.) While I agree with the general sort of view of the church and politics that Boyd is saying, I agree with the criticism of his erroneous claim that Jesus didn't push people's buttons about sex. He most certainly did. Also, I think the abortion discussion toward the end reveals that there's a distinction between the church taking a stance on the best political policies and leaders (which I'd say is contrary to the church's purpose) and the church taking a stance on moral issues that are clear in scripture (which I think is its obligation).

I've just spent a good deal of time working through Augustine on this issue, and when I get a chance to put it into post form I'll be posting my notes. I really appreciate almost everything he has to say on it, but that will have to wait.

The National Review has launched a new blog CrunchyCons [hat tip: Gnu]. This really attracts me for a number of reasons. It's a kind of conservatism that seems to me to avoid much that I don't like about conservatives (particularly the National Review types) while retaining what seems to me to be the heart of conservatism. For more detail on what they're all about, see the CrunchyCon Manifesto. I'm going to have to check this out when I get some more time (which isn't really any time soon). Most exciting for me is, perhaps, the involvement of Frederica Mathews-Greene, who can write a book arguing for a robustly pro-life position and still come out with NOW and NARAL leaders praising her (and it's not in any way because she soft-pedals the pro-life view; it's because she frames it in a way that they can understand). Anyone who can achieve that is really worth hearing out.

I do have to register reservations with several points in their manifesto. Beauty may sometimes be more important than efficiency, but I'd rather have a beat-up looking minivan than a sports car. It holds the whole family, costs a whole lot less, doesn't tend to attract police officers looking for speeders, and does what we need it to do. The primary motivation for having a sports car instead seems to me to stem from the kind of thing CrunchyCons want to distance themselves from (and #2 in the manifesto is a clear indication of this: "Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.")

I also think a Christian should have a hard time with the last two points. As important as the family is for Christians, it isn't higher than the God-appointed means of spreading the good news that is Jesus Christ. What Christians do for a culture is far more crucial, on the Christian view, than what families in isolation from what a family grounded in Christ ought to be should be for a society. The last point is good for pointing out what won't save, but it's too eager to replace it with something that also won't save. Only repentance will ultimately save. I think they're trying to be vague enough to include that sort of thing, but I don't think it does it for me. On the whole, though, I really like this list and certainly consider it far better than what your standard Republican in government is going to come up with.

People often uncarefully refer to the originalist view of constitutional interpretation (endorsed most clearly by Justices Scalia and Thomas on the Supreme Court) as strict constructionism. Most careful proponents of this view detest this term, because what it seems to convey is exactly what they don't hold. They don't think that every phrase should e taken in some hyper-literal way. This issue is pretty much parallel to those who claim to take the Bible literally in everything it says but then they don't take Jesus to be a literal door, Jesus' parables to be stories of historical events, and God really to have physical nostrils that flare up when he's angry. Being an inerrantist simply does not mean taking the Bible literally in all it says, and being an originalist about the Constitution does not mean taking every construction in as strict a way as possible. Originalism takes each construction to mean what it would have been understood to mean by an intelligent but ordinary person of the time familiar with legal issues and the background of British law. That doesn't mean taking everything hyper-literally, because such strict constructions will not turn out to match how the ordinary person would have heard it. As I've been thinking about the "advice and consent" clause, this has become quite clear. When you take that clause in a strict constructionist manner, it doesn't mean at all what the original understanding of it would have been.

I wanted to point out an interesting article at the Baltimore Sun on legalizing prostitution. The author makes a fairly good case, at least from a utilitarian point of view, that prostitution should be allowed simply because fighting it is a waste of time:

...Legalizing prostitution would not be a moral endorsement of paid sex, any more than the First Amendment is a moral endorsement of supermarket tabloids. It would just be a recognition of the right of adults to make their own choices about sins of the flesh - and of the eternal futility of trying to stop them.

Before he continues his crackdown, Mayor Daley might reflect on the wisdom of one mayor of New Orleans. "You can make prostitution illegal in Louisiana," he said, "but you can't make it unpopular."

The hat tip for this goes to Gadfly's Muse, who argues, in part:

One Hand Clapping has posted his sermon from this morning, getting into a number of themes from my post yesterday but also going in very different directions. I haven't looked at it carefully, but it looks good. Perhaps when I read it through tomorrow I'll have some thoughts on it.

Independence Day is tomorrow in the United States, and it's good timing for some thoughts I've been having lately. As my congregation has worked through the beginning of I Samuel and the founding of the Israelite monarchy in our sermons, I've had the occasion to reflect on the nature of government. I think there are two principles, which you might think of as being in tension (but not contradiction) with each other, that have a bearing on how we should think about our government today and how we should think about the 4th of July.

Posts at Jollyblogger and Beyond the Rim... also express in different ways the tension I'll develop here and how we need balanced between both principles without allowing either to remove the other.

Jollyblogger has an excellent post on being Christian and being politically involved. It's an excellent trip through the various things the Bible says relevant to why it's good to be political involved and bad to identify some political party or nation with Christianity. This is about as balanced as you can get on this topic. I agree with all his main points. Unfortunately, I find myself disagreeing with him on quite a few of his minor and tangential points, and I can't resist picking nits by mentioning those (since I can't wholeheartedly recommend a post this glowingly if it has so many things I disagree with without also registering that disagreement).

Somehow I hadn't been to Mark Byron's blog in a while. He was almost assuredly one of the first 20 blogs on my blogroll, probably even within the first 15, and I guess he got lost in the shuffle recently. I noticed two posts yesterday when browsing through what I'd missed that are worth drawing attention to.

He reflects on the moral significance of the fact that 50% of the population is of below average intelligence, with some good economics thrown in.

He's also been thinking a bit about neocons vs. paleocons as compared with unadjectived conservatives and flat-out liberals.

Be careful when using coupons. You might save money, but is it worth being arrested? I suppose it might be if you can later win a six-figure lawsuit over it. (from The Rough Woodsman)

Someone at Harvard Business School during the period when President Bush had been there (and who became a faculty member shortly thereafter) debunks the mainstream narrative of Bush's coasting through school without learning a