Recently in Political Theory (Loosely Interpreted) Category

I wrote a little a couple weeks ago about the early 1960s Supreme Court cases Abington School District v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett (and perhaps to a lesser degree Engel v. Vitale). I said at the time that I have two further posts planned, one on substantive issues that weren't central to the cases and another on the central questions the Court dealt with. This post is the first of those two. Here are four relatively independent observations from the oral arguments I listened to that affect the main argument to some degree but aren't very closely about the central issue. I have some more thoughts on the fundamental issue to come at some point.

More or Less Sectarian to Comment?

There's an interesting argument among the various lawyers and justices during the oral arguments for these cases, about whether it's more sectarian or less sectarian to read from the Bible without comment or with comment. One argument is that reading without comment is more like studying the Bible as literature, since it doesn't involve endorsement or criticism, whereas commenting on it expresses a viewpoint. On the other hand, some argued that simply reading it seems more like endorsement, since there's no room for critiquing anything in the text or showing room for interpreting in different ways, whereas commenting on it allows for critical discussion or demonstration of different interpretations. I suspect the two views have something different in mind for what the commenting would be like, but I thought it was an interesting debate. The two lawyers defending two different Bible-reading laws were making these opposite claims. One law explicitly disallowed comment, and the other allowed for it. But the justices seemed to disagree among themselves about which claim was more correct.

Absolute or Potentially-Conflicting Rights?

Two lawyers on the same side on the general questions disagreed about whether the Constitution is vague (in the following sense, anyway). One insisted that any particular policy (1) either is or is not an establishment of religion and (2) either is or is not a violation of someone's free exercise of religion. Another countered that whether something falls into either category comes in degrees. Justice Stewart joined in on this, also pointing out that the free exercise clause and the establishment clause are sometimes at odds with each other, presumably implying that it's the job of the Supreme Court to figure out which applies more strongly in a particular case. (This, I think, is a sign of what later came to be seen as his moderate approach as a swing voter on key cases in the more ideologically-diverse Supreme Court to come. But he comes across as a hard-line conservative in this case, given where everyone else on the Court was. I'm not sure Justices Thomas and Scalia differ from Justice Stewart on these questions very much.)

I received an email with the title, "How You Can Tell Obama is Not a Socialist". The basic argument is that President Obama didn't implement full-blown government ownership of the banks and industries relevant to the economic problems that it has been calling a crisis. A true socialist, so goes the argument, would have seized the opportunity to, you know, implement socialism or something. A few instances of the government seizing control of something that's belonging to the private sector, trying to control your media appearances, and painting the opposition media as illegitimate nevertheless don't amount to taking over industry and the media entirely. So President Obama isn't really a socialist.

There's certainly something to the argument in this email, but it's not as straightforward as that, and there are ways that I think it's fair to describe President Obama's views as socialist.

1. A committed socialist might think we should engage pragmatically in incremental steps to reach an eventual socialist goal. If President Obama has a socialist theory of justice (as I think he does) and a pragmatic and incrementalist approach to realizing it (as I also think he does), then he's picking his battles so he can do as much as he can to move in that direction without trying to accomplish too much in a way that will end up just frustrating his final goals too much. So this at most shows that he's at most a pragmatic, incrementalist socialist. But hardly anyone who is informed and honest is claiming that he's more than that, and lots of people are claiming exactly that.

2. There are also distinguishable components of socialism. President Obama might have a socialist theory of justice in terms of what counts as a just, equal world without having a socialist view of who should own property or the means of production. I'm not sure what his view is about the ideal government and ownership of the means of production. So I don't know if he's a socialist in that sense, although at most he'd be a pragmatist, incrementalist socialist about such matters. But he could be completely a capitalist about those issues and be a socialist about justice in thinking there's a moral imperative to equalize pay and benefits of employees to a point where complete equalization is an eventual goal. That's a socialist theory of justice, and the way he uses the term 'just' makes the most sense if he thinks merely unfair or unequal distribution is unjust (as opposed to saying that it's unjust to implement policies or practices that ensure such unequal distribution, which a much greater number of people would agree with). Since he does seem, to my mind, to hold such a view, I do think he's working from a socialist theory of justice.

Surely there's a sense in which Obama isn't a socialist, but there's also a sense in which he arguably might well be.

Philosopher Peter Ludlow presents the motivation behind Wikileaks to show that ways to resist it won't work, because they assume things that aren't true about why people are doing this. It's basically absolutism about the availability of information. The principle is that if there's information, then we should all have access to it. It's not remotely about calling people toward being more accountable or trying to promote a particular political agenda (aside from the absolutism about freedom of information, anyway, which is a political agenda).

The argument reminds me an awful lot of the kind of mindset Michael Crichton was arguing against with Jurassic Park. It's absolutism about the dissemination of information, without regard to any moral principles about whether it's good to do so or even wrong to do so in particular cases. In that way, it's highly parallel to those who pursue scientific research merely because they can and regardless of any of the ethical objections to doing so.

When European Crusaders retook Jerusalem and some of its surrounding cities during the First Crusade, they had intended to restore it to Byzantine hands, but the Byzantine emperor had betrayed them at the last minute, and that led to the Europeans setting up their own states in these cities. Rodney Stark calls these the Crusader kingdoms in God's Battalions, and on one use of the term "colony" it does seem appropriate to call these European colonies. But he points out that there are two different ways people use the terms "colony" or "colonial":

a. There's what academics often mean, which involves the colonizer economically taking advantage of the colonized or forcing them to convert to their religion

b. Then there's what most people mean, including some historians who regularly refer to the Crusade kingdoms (the political structures set up in Jerusalem and nearby by the crusaders when they overthrew the Muslim colonizers), which is simply one group of people setting up camp in another location, without thereby implying anything like definition a.

The Crusade kingdoms in fact couldn't fit definition b, according to Stark, because (1) the flow of money and resources went there other way (the Crusades were expensive, and all the money to operate the Crusader kingdoms came from taxes paid by Europeans to maintain the European presence in that religion and (2) they didn't force conversions or even treat non-Christians as second-class citizens the way their Muslim predecessor colonists had. If you do want to count them as colonists in the bad sense, then they're just the successor colonists to the Turkish colonists. Those who criticize the Crusades as part of European colonialism rarely apply the same reasoning to the Muslim conquerings that the European Crusades were a response to.

Stark is right so far as all that goes, I think, but he leaves out one crucial sense in which most academics will use the term "colonialism" that may well apply, and that's cultural or social colonizing. One culture is ruling over another and dominates. You might call it cultural imperialism. That certainly was true of the Crusader kingdoms. They allowed Jews, Muslims, and others to remain and practice their religions freely, for the most part anyway, but they ran things in a European feudal way, and the socio-cultural, including religious, perspective of the Europeans certainly dominated.

I think Stark misses that when arguing against the two components of colonialism that he says aren't present. But I'm also not convinced of the view of many academics that such cultural dominance and control is in principle bad. Isn't it what we do whenever we pass a law by majority consent that a minority might disapprove of (or in the case of Obamacare a majority doesn't even consent to). I don't see why that's in principle evil. Leaders should do what they thinks is best, and sometimes they may get it right when the people they're leading don't agree. That shouldn't necessarily stop them. If the different viewpoints happen to coincide with different cultural perspectives or tendencies, it still doesn't seem to me to make it wrong to enforce it. Other factors might make it wrong, e.g. if it's not good policy to begin with. But I've never been convinced that the consent of the governed or the cultural similarity or connection between governing and governed should be in-principle required for a government to be moral and just.

[Technically, "consent of the governed" is multiply ambiguous. It could be a requirement that the governed is required for every little thing, or it could mean they just have to approve of the representatives making the decisions, who are held accountable every so often. The U.S. only has the latter kind of consent of the governed, and it would be crazy to do much more, although there are ways that there could be more consent. It could mean consent of all the governed, a general consensus of the governed, a majority of the governed, etc (and any actual government usually requires a much more complex procedure for calculating it). I mean to say that I don't think any of these things is required for a just and morally good government, which I understand is a pretty radical view nowadays, but I think it's true.]

Matt Skene has a very thoughtful post on the intersection of issues related to rights and obligations and recent health care debates. I disagree with a number of Matt's assumptions. I think we do have positive obligations, and I do think they simply are there without our taking them on. I don't think rights determine obligations but the other way around. Perhaps most salient, I don't think we can distinguish between obligations and moral goodness. I think we simply have an obligation to do what's morally best (and yes, I know that that means that pretty much everyone on this planet is thoroughly immoral, but that's not exactly a new view; it's historic Christian doctrine).

But I think there's a lot worth thinking about in Matt's post. His general approach is libertarian. He starts with natural negative rights and argues for no positive rights. In other words, certain things are wrong to do to me, because I have a right for you not to do them, but I have no rights for you to do positively good things on my behalf, just for you not to do bad things to me. But such a view doesn't imply that there aren't moral reasons to do positive things on behalf of other people.

In particular, there are reasons why it might be the morally best thing to do to help those who are less fortunate to obtain good medical care. Matt doesn't think I have an obligation to alleviate the suffering of people I have no other connection with, but he does think it's morally good to do so. It's also self-interestedly good for me to develop the character traits that such acts help develop in me. He's open to, but not convinced by, the argument that it would be in our best interests to contract with one another to institute such obligations by common consent, as we do with building highways. It depends on whether we'd all be better off with it.

Matt suggests an interesting possibility, though. You can donate money to your utility company to offset the costs of low-income utility customers. Presumably this goes to heating assistance aid, which is given to recipients of food stamps once a year and paid directly to the utility company. I'm not sure how else the utility companies would know who counts as low-income. But if we did a similar thing with insurance companies, there might be enough money from those who, like progressives on this issue, think they have an obligation to pay for others' insurance and from some of those who, like Matt, think it's a morally good thing to do. Could that cover everything Medicaid and other public health insurance does? It's worth seeing how much it covers.

I tend to doubt it, since most people who think the government should tax us more to pay for benefits to low-income people are not inclined to give money when it's voluntary (consider our current president as a prime example), but maybe enough people who don't share such views will give the money voluntarily while resisting it when it's government-controlled (as, apparently, Dick Cheney does with a huge percentage of his income). But it's being done with utilities. Why not try it with health insurance and see where it goes? There might even be enough votes in Congress after the 2010 election.

Deuteronomy insists on relating, not just classifying. Poor and needy people belong, [sic] they are not just social statistics. They are part of "your" community and are not to be marginalized, excluded, and victimized as an underclass. Alienation is incontrovertibly one of the worst effects of poverty and dependence. Social policies that increase, and even institutionalize, that alienation (even in the name of "welfare" or "charity") are fundamentally contrary to the relational language and community-preserving intention of the biblical vision. -- Christopher Wright, Deuteronomy (NIBC) pp.191-192.

One of the things I really like about Wright's commentary (unlike the work of another biblical scholar of the same last name) is that he says things chastising people on both sides of the political spectrum in the same breath and rarely picks on just one side. [I can't help but mention the one puzzling statement so far that might be an exception to this, though.] His concern to draw out the social justice implications of the text is impossible to miss. If you're not paying attention, you might respond the way Glenn Beck would and think he's claiming Deuteronomy supports socialism. He isn't offering any particular economic model, however, and one thing he says here is quite interesting if you're tuned into it.

He doesn't say the issue is whether the poor are fed and supported in some way. He doesn't here get into any issues about whether people should do so privately, through their taxes via government assistance, or simply as a function of the church. What he does say is that there are ways of doing this that come across as welfare and charity that in fact increase and even institutionalize the alienation of poverty.

There are plenty of conservative critiques of the U.S. welfare system as it stands or as it was before the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reforms of the late 90s (and I note that Wright is not an American, so he probably doesn't have the American system in mind). Some of them are, I would say, inapt. One of the better critiques, one that was at least partially mitigated by the Gingrich-Clinton reforms, is that the welfare system, not by design but by unintended effect, actually perpetuates the conditions that it's designed to mitigate. I've in fact seen this sort of complaint from conservatives and socialists alike. It's mostly progressives/liberals who don't go as far as socialism who try to underplay this kind of argument, but it's mostly conservatives who make this point in the public sphere. Academics (and most on the far left are either academics or revolutionaries) tend to make these arguments in the privacy of their own intellectual circles, i.e. academic journals.

It strikes me that Wright, who is spending quite a lot of effort motivating social justice concerns, something hard not to do when commenting on Deuteronomy, is also quite insistent on something that conservatives who have serious problems with the U.S. welfare system are insistent on. Those on the left who disagree with conservatives on these issues are often too willing to act as if the only resistance to the safety net of a welfare state comes from those who don't honestly care about poverty. But what I think Wright is saying here illustrates something that became pretty clear to me very early in my political awareness that so many on the less-than-socialist left don't see.

At least a notable strain within conservative resistance to what they call the welfare state is motivated specifically by concern for the dehumanizing, alienating, motivation-sapping, dependence-creating effects of a government safety net with no or not enough strings attached. Some of this is probably still inordinately obsessed with how such things indirectly affect the rest of society rather than having actual love for those who are badly off. But it's always struck me that a significant strain within opposition to certain forms of welfare and certain ways of engaging in charity is motivated not by contempt or disinterest but by love, in the same way that parents love their children by depriving them of things they want very much but that will be harmful or pedestrians refusing to give money to homeless people might be (but probably often are not completely) motivated by concern for that person and the harmful effects of simply giving them money.

I read this after writing this post, but it captures several elements of what I've been thinking about, completely outside any political ideology sorts of issues. It's difficult to evaluate a system that does actually help immediate problems and in some ways makes things better but at the cost of the crucial elements that a more ideal way to handle things would have, and the current foster care system certainly is alienating in the extreme and almost certainly does institutionalize some of the problems it's supposed to solve, perpetuating them from generation to generation.

John Mark Reynolds' response has helped me to clarify where I think he and I are disagreeing on the torture question.

JMR defends his view based on his argument that torture is worse than killing. Of course, I can easily concede that torture can be worse than killing. But I can't accept that it always is. In 8th grade, a fellow student of mine used to give me wet willies at pretty regular intervals throughout the day. I consider that torture of a very weak sort. It was evil for him to do so, and how I responded was also evil. I got so fed up that I kicked him in the family jewels (or maybe I kneed him). I also consider that to be a kind of torture. Neither is worse than killing someone. Both inflicted pain of a particularly excessive sort. Both involve using someone as a mere means to an end, in his case to take delight in someone else's pain, in my case to satisfy my desire for revenge. Both are wrong, but both are less wrong than killing.

A police officer might cause severe psychological pain by lying to someone in a way that leads to a confession. A police officer might cause physical pain, as long as it's not severe and permanent. Both are perfectly legal in law enforcement, although they are not for military interrogators, who aren't allowed to lie or even touch a suspected terrorist, which was why the Bush Administration wanted more allowed for CIA interrogators, since standard military interrogations were ineffective against al Qaeda. I count such things as mild torture, and they don't seem all that wrong to me, even if one might argue that they are wrong. They certainly aren't worse than killing the suspect.

The key issue is that torture comes in degrees. Killing does too but not in the same sense. What makes an act of killing worse is how you do it, why you do it, and so on. But killing is killing. Torture can be fairly weakly torture, or it can
be pretty awful torture. Killing can be worse because it also involves torture, but the killing itself is not worse. It's the torture that adds to the badness of the killing. Killing is all-or-nothing, and torture comes in degrees in a way that
begs for an analysis that's more complex than simple right and wrong. It's at least a spectrum from not as bad to extremely bad, and it may well be a spectrum from morally required to significantly evil.

I think Mark Olson's question is helpful, so I'll repeat here my comment on his post:

If you only consider consequentialist principles, you can't get an absolute prohibition on anything except the principle that we should seek the best consequences. So to get a moral ban on all torture, there better be some deontological principles at stake. The question is whether those deontological principles themselves are absolutist.

I happen to think the only deontological principle that is absolutist is the moral claim that we ought to give due honor to God and follow him in whatever ways are best for doing so. There are many ethical principles beyond that, and most of them apply most of the time. Some of them apply almost all the time and would require crazy hypotheticals to find exceptions (or very weak cases with moral principles about matters that involve vague concepts occurring along a spectrum, such as consent and coercion, harm, or what someone's motivation and desires are in doing an act).

But to answer your question, I think the deontological principle behind JMR's opposition to torture is his principle that it's always wrong to coerce someone, a principle I've questioned. He doesn't think it's always wrong to cause pain or to cause pain that someone remembers. He doesn't think it's always wrong to cause harm, even permanent harm, knowing full well that one is doing so. He does think it's wrong to cause harm for the sake of causing harm without some higher purpose, but he doesn't think such a higher purpose can be merely getting information that will lead to better consequences when the causing of harm is done to violate someone's ability to consent to giving up that information. So it's mainly an issue of consent to choose to speak when one wants to and to refrain from giving information when one doesn't.

As I've said along the way, I think the problem with that argument is that consent and coercion come along a spectrum, and weaker versions of coercion undermining consent can be morally correct under the right sorts of circumstances. When the consequences increase in their badness, avoiding them might require undermining consent to a stronger degree than is normally moral. That's why I think torture isn't in principle wrong. JMR has a more absolutist view about that principle. We both take it to be deontological, because neither of us thinks slightly better consequences for a serious undermining consent are enough to justify it. But he takes it to be absolutist, whereas I think there could be circumstances where undermining someone's consent via coercion to a great degree can be morally all right, as long as those consequences are extremely serious.

So I'm not sure the disagreement is really meta-ethical. It's more on the level of normative ethics, I think.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

I wanted to make one observation about John Mark Reynolds' recent posts on torture at Evangel. One of the things that has struck me over several years of considering this question from a Christian point of view is that arguments against torture are either (a) implausible and conflicting with actual biblical allowances and endorsements or (b) non-absolutist and allowing for some exceptions, even if the burden of proof and extremely strong cause for hesitation should always be present. (By absolutism, I mean the view that something is always wrong with no possible exceptions.)

For ease of reference, here are the posts:

One Bad Argument in Favor of Torture
Cicero not Nero!
On Pacifism and Torture
A Conservative and Pragmatic Argument Against Torture

Arguments Against Torture

Consider the image of God argument. This is the same reasoning used against killing, and yet the scriptures make it very clear that capital punishment is not just allowable but mandated by God, at least in a certain context. (I'll leave it open whether it should be used today. What matters for my point here is that God not just allowed it the way he allowed divocrce in the Mosaic law. He commanded it in the Torah, and Paul seems to affirm the use of the sword in carrying out justice in Romans 13, so there's not even a plausible argument that the new covenant removes this allowance.) So I don't think the fact that we're made in the image of God is going to rule out all torture, since it doesn't rule out all killing and it's the explicit biblical reason not to kill people.

Aristotelian virtue arguments point out how bad it is to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to torture someone. Of course this is right, but it's also bad to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to kill someone. The argument that we ought to find the right mean, that we ought to be moderate, does not imply that we won't sometimes do something that is usually on one of the extremes. Aristotle, for example, saw honesty and truth-telling as virtues between the extremes of lying and betraying confidences. But there might be some occasions when lying to save someone's life is morally necessary (as God instructed Samuel to do when he anointed David) or betraying a confidence is morally necessary (as happens in courts of law all the time in the pursuit of justice, with the only significant exceptions being attorney-client, spousal privilege, and medical/psychological practitioner/client relationships). Just because the mean is the best spot doesn't mean the actions usually on the extremes always will be. Occasionally you'll find actions that are usually on an extreme ending up as the mean. So Aristotelian golden mean arguments will never rule out an action in principle, since that's not how the view works.

The coercion argument strikes me as mistaken, also. There are certainly occasions when it's right to coerce someone. For example, we put criminals in prison. We threaten to imprison or fine people to get them to testify or to serve on a jury. We impose severe penalties to those who won't pay their taxes. We have on occasion drafted people to serve in the military and kill other people, and when that's a just and popular war most people don't think it's as problematic as in wars that are very unpopular or obviously unjust. We require people to work or show progress toward improving employment capability if they're to receive government benefits of various sorts. It strikes me that the case of torture is most analogous to other kinds of coercion to get testimony, and the major difference is in the method of coercion, not in the principle that it's wrong to coerce people to tell the truth.

I'm enjoying reading Christopher Wright's commentary on Deuteronomy. He's especially insightful on ethical matters, and he's been excellent at defending against positions that I think have needed some careful argument to address (such as the claim that the Mosaic law treats women as property). But the following quote is puzzling.

It is not surprising, then, conversely, that a whole culture that systematically denies the transcendent by excluding the reality of God from the public domain, as Western societies have been doing for generations, also turns covetous self-interest into a socioeconomic ideology, rationalized, euphemized, and idolized. Knowing full well that you cannot serve God and mammon, we have deliberately chosen mammon and declared that a person's life does consist in the abundance of things possessed. [p.86]

I'm not interested in ignoring the role that covetous self-interest plays among those whose lifestyle is all about accumulating material wealth or the fact that such self-interest might attract someone to political views that they might expect to serve that self-interest. But he's talking about a systematic denial of God that turns covetous self-interest into an ideology, so it's got to be much more thoroughgoing than just the fact that people for self-interested reasons might like views that they see as serving their self-interest. It's as if the ideology itself is caused by self-interest and would have no existence otherwise. So what ideology does he mean? Capitalism? Libertarianism? Mainstream economic conservatism? Randianism?

If any of the first three, I think he's simply mistaken. The arguments in favor of those are not selfish pursuit of mammon, at least not in the ideal case, and the view itself is not the same thing as declaring that a person's life amounts just to the abundance of things possessed. Such views are at work in our culture, but what Wright says here is confusing two separate things. It would be more on the mark if he's targeting Ayn Rand, because she explicitly did ground her view in ethical egoism, but even she wouldn't treat human nature as if it's just about material possessions, and her view isn't exactly the mainstream socioeconomic view on the right.

Recently several seemingly-independent sources came up with a series of new recommendations for cancer screenings, saying that new research shows that we should no longer be screening for certain kinds of cancer at the ages we've been doing so, that it should be fine to wait until later on and save the expense that earlier screenings cost.

These recommendations have led to an interesting debate between those who think the cost of prevention is worth it even if more money gets paid than would otherwise happen and those who think cost-cutting is more important than the number of lives saved, because the number of lives saved isn't worth the cost.

A number of voices on one side in the debate, though, has repeatedly made what seems to me to be a terrible argument. They complain that those who object to the new recommendations are simply ignoring the new data. It's as if they stomp their foot and say that the numbers support their position, so the other side should back off. As I said, this is a terrible argument. If this were an empirical debate, that would settle it, but that's not what the dispute is over, so that argument is simply irrelevant. The very interesting debate that I've seen play itself out, as I pointed out above, is between the following two groups:

A. those who think that, even though it might cost more money in the long run, it's still worth screening earlier because it saves enough lives to be worth the extra cost even if it costs more than it would to catch the cancer later and not pay the cost for a lot of people who didn't need the screenings

B. those who think that the cost of screening all these people who didn't need it isn't going to be worth it in the long run, even if it means some people who would have found their cancer and been able to treat it will die because they didn't catch it soon enough

That's a moral debate, not an empirical one. View A places more value on people's lives (which they insist is still enough, even if smaller than we thought) than the financial cost (and that cost's effect on society). View B places more value on the financial cost (and its effects on society) than the number of lives that would be saved (which they say is too low to be a huge factor). Both views can agree on all the facts and still disagree on what we should do. So it doesn't help to keep insisting that the change in recommendations comes from new data from new studies with hard numbers to back it up. The disagreement still occurs even given the new data.

I remember reading an interview with J.J. Abrams during the writers' strike, when he was supposed to be working on Star Trek XI. Abrams said he was coming up with great lines every day that he couldn't use in the film, because the union was on strike, and that would count as working.

One of Marx's underlying principles for thinking capitalism is bad is that capitalism alienates workers from the product of their labor. They work for someone else on a project that belongs to someone else and don't own anything to do with their project. One of the nice features of some jobs in a capitalist system is that you can identify with your project. Moviemaking is one of those jobs. J.J. Abrams has written, produced, and directed quite a number of successful productions, including Mission Impossible III, Lost, and Star Trek XI. Sometimes a writer doesn't own the characters or the story, but the writer gets credited and gets royalties from how many copies sell. There's a kind of ownership that's there even if some corporation owns the rights to the franchise.

But when the writer's union strikes, and members of the union have to refrain from using some of their best ideas, they get alienated from their work in a way that I think does count as an anti-Marxian effect of the strike. Maybe what that particular union was fighting for on that particular occasion was so important that it would be worth it to most of their members to sacrifice that kind of thing, but it does seem to be an unfortunate sacrifice, and I'm sure the Star Trek film would have been better in small but noticeable ways if he'd been able to use all those ideas.

Rey Reynoso wrote a post a few months ago on Christians and civil disobedience that I'd wanted to respond to in a post of my own, but I never did. I wanted to put a link up to it before it gets too far distant in time, even if I can't respond in depth.

The one thought that I will say is that I think Rey has an interesting proposal, but I don't think it gets around the Rosa Parks problem. The gospel wasn't at stake for her, so I think on Rey's account she still comes out as immorally violating the law. That's the biggest problem case for the Christian view of submission to authorities, since so many people think what she did was not just good but heroic. But I do think the biblical view is that it was wrong, despite being well-intentioned. (The second-biggest case I can think of for contemporary Americans is the American Revolution, which I also think was immoral on biblical grounds but is certainly supported by most Christians in the U.S.)

A friend of mine on Facebook left a comment in response to a status update to the effect that there's an inconsistency in much of the rhetoric from the left when it comes to our attitude toward the next generation. I think this is a problem for both sides, actually. You can often find people who will issue very harsh criticisms of those on the other side for ignoring the devastating consequences of either inaction or a particular course of action on a certain issue, while the same people will ignore the devastating consequences of inaction or a certain course of action on a different issue.

You hear a lot about how we're failing in our responsibilities to the next generation if we allow climate change to continue at the rate it's going. Yet the same people who make these urgent calls to think about the next generation are happy to spend massive amounts of money that we couldn't hope to pay for in several generations, even if (as is likely) President Obama has to settle for significant departures from his campaign promises about taxes. (See note 1 below for more on this, which I decided was too intrusive to my argument to keep here.)

I would add that they're also happy to impose regulations that will almost certainly generate hardships for lower-earning wage-earners both in making it more difficult to buy new houses and cars with something like the cap-and-trade proposal currently at work or providing health insurance for people who don't have it, at the cost of making health care much worse on the whole for many people, including lower wage-earners whose employer currently does provide health insurance but who will be forced to move to worse health insurance as a result. (See note 2 for my own situation with respect to this, which I wanted to say something about but was also becoming too intrusive to my argument.)

But on the right, you can have similar inconsistencies. Some conservatives favor significant environmental regulation, but most want it limited. Some reject it entirely. Some of those who reject it are nevertheless environmentally conscious, taking it to be a problem we should do something about. For example, Dick Cheney, who is very generous with his money with regard to charitable donations, gives quite a lot of money every year to conservation-related charities, a good portion of of which (I believe) goes toward exploring technologies that will help deal with environmental problems more effectively than regulation could ever do. But there are conservatives who are simply not interested in environmental concerns, who nevertheless put a lot of effort into criticizing the Obama Administration and the current Democratic-led Congress for not caring about the future generations with their ridiculous levels of spending and regulation that will certainly have a negative impact on the next generation.

There's an ongoing debate about exactly what role senators should have in the process of confirming judicial nominees. The Constitution gives the President the role of appointing people to certain positions, including "Judges of the Supreme Court", but this role is qualified. It is to be done "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate".

At this point there are two main views about what that advice and consent is supposed to be. Some senators have consistently maintained that ideology can play a role. If a senator disapproves of the ideology or perceived ideology of the nominee, it's perfectly fine to vote against the person's confirmation. Other senators have consistently maintained the view that senators should give significant deference to the president, voting to confirm any mainstream nominee who is qualified enough, even if the person tends significantly to the other side of the political spectrum or to a contrary judicial philosophy.

There are reasons for each view. Deference to the president makes some sense. When we vote for president, we do so while knowing what sort of judges the candidate is likely to appoint. Anyone who voted for Barack Obama while thinking he would appoint judicial conservatives to the bench is an idiot. Anyone who voted for George W. Bush while expecting him to appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court wasn't paying attention to the kinds of justices he said he admired and would appoint. Mistakes can happen (as with Justice Souter with Bush's father), but you shouldn't expect your preferences to be fulfilled with judicial appointments if you vote for someone for president who has opposite preferences. Senators on the other side might say that elections have consequences and that presidents are owed some deference due to the political process. On the other hand, elections have consequences. Senators are elected. They represent the preferences of their constituents, and isn't the function of senators in judicial appointments part of what you should consider when you vote for someone for that office? So even on the democratic process argument, you might think it cuts both ways.

But other considerations have been offered against giving presidents a lot of deference on judicial nominations. One problem is that you still need to decide when to defer and when not to defer. How far outside the mainstream counts as sufficiently outside? Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito were both presented by Democratic senators as being outside the mainstream of conservative thought on evidence that's actually pretty similar to the evidence being used to argue that Judge Sotomayor is not outside the mainstream of judicial thought. It turns out, then, that this view isn't really a coherent, unified position. It's not about whether to give the president deference but about how much deference to give the president.

No one wants the Senate to rubber-stamp whoever the nominee is no matter what, so qualifications must matter, but it's not clear the ideological considerations are really separate from qualifications. Some would argue that an ideology that's very extreme actually disqualifies someone from being a good judge, because a good judge would interpret the law accurately and fairly, and extremist judges of certain sorts do not. But according to a judicial conservative, liberal jurisprudence then counts as a lack of qualifications. Any nominee who is ideologically liberal in terms of judicial philosophy is not a qualified nominee, and senators can vote against them on that basis and call it a matter of the nominee not being qualified.

So I'm no longer sure that the distinction between qualifications and ideology really explains much in terms of what senators should pay attention to, at least not in any way that will be agreed upon by a significant number of senators. Several other considerations also might favor looking to ideology. Some have argued that too much deference to the president leads to extremist judges on both sides, since presidents will get away with as much as they can if the Senate just defers.

One common complain on the left about conservative political views is that conservatives favor legislating morality. One thing they mean by this is the conservatives favor certain kinds of laws about certain kinds of issues that rely on a moral conception that differs from liberal moral views. For example, conservatives tend to favor laws that restrict abortion. Those who find abortion morally unproblematic complain that legislating morality is a bad idea, because legislators shouldn't declare what people should do on such issues.

I've always hated the expression, for a number of reasons, but one is that most laws legislate morality. Laws against murder enforce a moral standard that it's generally wrong to kill people. Laws against larceny enforce the moral standard that it's generally wrong to steal from other people. Laws against homosexual sodomy may pick out acts that not as many people think are wrong, but it isn't any more or less a legislation of a moral view than the uncontroversial laws that legislate morality.

It's another matter to restrict laws to outlaw harmful activity or to require consent for certain behavior that affects others. Some people mean just that when they say they oppose legislating morality. In other words, they oppose legislation against activities merely because those activities are morally wrong, and they require a further explanation of why they should be illegal: violation of consent or causing of harm. But harm and consent are moral reasons for favoring laws against such things, so it's still legislating morality. It may be that only certain moral reasons are the sort to justify laws, while others are not, but it's not entirely helpful to make this point by saying you oppose legislating morality. It's a confused way of making the point, and clarity would be served by making clearer distinctions among different aspects of morality.

To be consistent, such a view requires major revisions to our laws. We'd have to remove motorcycle helmet laws, unless it could be argued that the only purpose of such laws is to protect anyone who crashes with a motorcycle from greater liability for the greater amount of damage caused by not wearing a helmet. But that can be more easily achieved by holding those without helmets more liable for damage to themselves rather than fining them for not wearing a helmet. Helmet laws are designed to protect people from themselves, not to protect them from harming others. Even if we expand the legitimate class of laws to include such paternalistic laws, we'd still have lots of laws that might be called moralistic beyond harm to others, harm to self, and consent.

For example, laws against cannot be fully justified by the harm they cause to potential offspring or the fact that minors can't legally or morally consent. A brother and sister who want to have sex with each other can sterilize themselves to remove the possibility of harm to offspring, and they can consent if they're old enough. Why should we have laws against such sexual acts if the only issues that should affect legislation are harm and consent? One might argue that there's psychological harm from incestuous sex, but we don't outlaw everything that might cause psychological harm, and I think the argument that it causes harm might depend on the prior moral view that it's wrong to engage in incestuous sex. After all, there's a parallel argument that gay sex or even heterosexual pre-marital sex causes psychological harm. These are just a few examples. Our legal system would need some serious revision if we want to apply this approach to moral justifications for laws in any consistent way.

It occurred to me, though, that there's another reason the political left should generally resist speaking in terms of legislating morality. The left tends to favor a view of the role of judges that conservatives often call "legislating from the bench". Once you look at what's going on, you might even be willing to call it "legislating morality from the bench". Rasmussen conducted a poll during the election last fall that correlates views on the role of judges with votes for Obama and McCain. The question read: "Should the Supreme Court make decisions based on what's written in the Constitution and legal precedents or should it be guided mostly by a sense of fairness and justice?" 82% of McCain voters and only 29% of Obama voters took the first option, while 29% of McCain voters and 49% of Obama voters took the second option. For the record, President Obama himself has said that in the cases where the justices disagree strongly it should be the second option (but he strangely thinks this is only 10% of the cases that they disagree strongly, when it's a lot more than that).

Insofar as a judge's role is to interpret the law, the judge should indicate what the law means and enforce it even if the judge disagrees with the law. Justice Thomas exhibited such a role in his dissent to Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that banned laws prohibiting homosexual sodomy. Justice Thomas thought such laws were stupid. He wrote a separate opinion from Justice Scalia's dissent just so he could say that. It was a short opinion. His opposition to the majority wasn't because he thought it was a good idea on policy grounds to have laws against homosexual sodomy. It was just that he didn't think the Constitution prohibited such laws.

Insofar as a judge's role is to administer justice, on the other hand, it seems that the judge's obligation is to administer morality and enforce it in the cases where the law is not clear or is indeterminate, and what that amounts to is basically legislating from the bench, in particular legislating morality from the bench. If the standard liberal complaint is correct that it's bad to legislate morality, it becomes extremely hard for me to see how a judge should do exactly that by determining the just outcome when the laws don't settle what should be done. Even though this isn't strictly speaking legislation, it's equivalent to legislating in its effect, which is why the term "legislating from the bench" has seemed so apt to so many. It certainly does seem equivalent to legislating morality as far as I can tell, and it's a highly-regarded role for judges among those on the leftward side of the political spectrum. It gives me even less reason to be patient with those who complain about legislating morality.

A lot of people think it's irrational to vote if your vote isn't going to have an effect on the outcome. I live in an extremely blue district of a slightly red county in a very blue state. In local and statewide elections, my vote has so little an effect that it's not worth voting if the only point of voting is for my one vote to have an effect on the outcome. New York is overwhelmingly going to continue to support Senators Schumer and Clinton, and they tend to vote Democratic in governor elections except when there's a very moderate Republican like George Pataki on the ballot. County-wide races are closer, and so is the U.S. House district, which was almost a toss-up in 2006. Things were even more one-sided when I lived in Rhode Island.

But it simply isn't true that voting is only worth doing if you're going to be the deciding vote. There are other reasons people give for voting, some better than others. One that often occurs to me when it seems hopeless for my candidate is that if everyone voting for the other side thought it wasn't worth voting because the outcome is assured then my candidate might have a chance. Other reasons include that it helps you psychologically to feel like you're contributing and that it's simply your obligation to do what you can to influence things for the better even if what you can isn't by itself going to make the difference in who wins the election.

Any of those responses would be sufficient by itself, except perhaps the psychological benefit one (at least if that involves self-deception, and if it doesn't then it's not a distinct reason but depends on one of the others). I think there's an even better reason to vote, and I think it might actually be what motivates me most, but I hadn't actually thought about it in these terms until today. It takes a page from Calvinist responses to the objection that if the future is already determined then there's no point in praying.

Calvinists come in several varieties, but the most common sort of Calvinist (which isn't the same as being the most noticed kind on the internet) is compatibilist about human freedom and divine predetermination. If God has a plan that includes everything I'm going to do, everything every other person is going to do, and an outcome for every prayer I ever pray, then is it worth praying? My prayer isn't going to change anything, after all. Of course, my prayer would also be in this plan, and if I didn't pray then a different outcome may well have been in the works. Compatibilists about divine predetermination and human action are going to insist that God works through our choices and doesn't just force things outside our control. Our prayers are part of how God's plan works itself out as history unfolds.

One thing Calvinist sometimes say is that praying is not so much for the outcome but for us. God wants us to pray because of what God will do in us because we pray. I don't want to deny that, but it's certainly not the emphasis in scripture on reasons to pray. The emphasis seems to be on two things. One is that prayer does affect things. It doesn't change them, because the future can't be changed anymore than the past or present can. If the future is a certain way then it can't be changed. Even open theists don't think the future can be changed. Why should someone who thinks there's a definite future think it can be changed? But for the reasons in the previous paragraph, the future can be influenced. It can be caused by things in the present, and I can be part of that process of bringing it about. A compatibilist should have no trouble saying that sort of thing.

But there's another reason in scripture for why we should pray, even though God has worked out the end from the beginning, and this one (unlike the previous one) does have some relevance for voting. God wants us to communicate our dependence on him and to express our desires to him. He wants us to see him as the Father who cares for us and meets our needs and our wishes, provided that our wishes are righteous and as long as there isn't some other reason beyond our ken for why God wouldn't grant a particular wish (as there may well be). As Jesus points out, what father when presented with a request from a child for bread or fish will give a snake? God wants to bestow good things on his children and delights when we come to him with requests, for the same reasons a giving parent delights in such things. Given that, it's a privilege to call him Father, which is why it's a big deal that Jesus starts out the Lord's prayer with "our Father". Those who don't avail themselves of that title in addressing him are missing out on something great. Those who don't address him at all are missing out on even more.

The same dynamic plays out in a smaller way with voting. I'm privilege to live in a country that seeks my opinion on who should occupy certain offices. Even if my vote doesn't have an effect in putting someone in office, it's a privilege to be able to contribute my thoughts in the process of the communal decision that an election involves. I don't believe voting is a moral right. But I think I'd be wasting an opportunity to express my opinion if I didn't vote, and wasting a privilege is at least unfortunate (and I would even argue that it's immoral). This seems to me to be a much better reason to vote than any of the more common ones that I hear, even if most of them are good enough reasons.

Legal scholar Steven Calabresi, in a generally accurate discussion of what Obama could do to change the federal courts, offers the following very strange argument:

This raises the question of whether Mr. Obama can in good faith take the presidential oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" as he must do if he is to take office. Does Mr. Obama support the Constitution as it is written, or does he support amendments to guarantee welfare? Is his provision of a "tax cut" to millions of Americans who currently pay no taxes merely a foreshadowing of constitutional rights to welfare, health care, Social Security, vacation time and the redistribution of wealth? Perhaps the candidate ought to be asked to answer these questions before the election rather than after.

Aside from the issue of whether Obama meant to be saying the Constitution should be amended to change this (See this post and its comments for discussion of what Obama really meant), I find this argument extremely strange. The Constitution gives provisions for when it can be amended. If I swore an oath to uphold it, one of the things I would be upholding would be the legitimate amendment process that the Constitution specifies. A president could come along and advocate an amendment to the Constitution that changes it in extremely significant ways, but as long as due process for amending is followed it doesn't seem as if anything has been done to undermine the Constitution. What's been done is to undermine the moral principles behind why the Constitution is as if currently is, but it's not a violation of the oath to uphold the Constitution if you use the Constitution's own method of amending it to propose a change that's pretty drastic. It itself envisions that possibility.

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple weeks over whether Barack Obama is a socialist. I think the two main events that have spurred this on are the revelation of his past association with a social democratic party called the New Party, which is openly left of the Democratic mainstream, and redistributionist talk from him both at the last presidential debate and from a particularly explicit quote from 2001 about how the pretty leftward Warren Court didn't go far enough in overthrowing the founders' intent in the Constitution.

Here's what I think is going on here. Obama is an incrementalist. He hasn't always been. His change is actually chronicled in his first book. Alinsky-style community organizing is very close to an implementation of a socialist agenda to undermine the capitalist system. There's every indication that Obama was in the thick of Alinsky-style work, even if he never agreed with everything Alinsky followers thought. He identified with the kinds of things they were trying to do in community organizing. It was Alinsky followers who trained him and then recruited him to train others in the same techniques. But Obama's community organizing was a failure. He was disappointed at every turn, according to his book. He eventually gave up on that method of change and turned to politics, where he knew he could try to get at least something done, even if it was only a little bit of a change at a time. I'm not sure he's really moved from that attitude. The New Party is exactly what you'd expect of someone with such a view. He was willing to run as a Democrat with an additional New Party endorsement in order to indicate that he's to the left of mainstream Democrats while seeking their support anyway. It was an attempt to mainstream a left-of-Democrat candidate, and it was an effective strategy until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

But this in itself shows that Obama is at least practically not a socialist. The distinction between socialism and European-style social democrats is that socialists seek to undermine and overthrow the system, and social democrats seek to work within the system to reform it gradually. The New Party was basically a bunch of former socialists who had become social democrats. Their goals had become more pragmatic. They were going to change what they could by moving the Democratic party to the left. The only way their candidates could win is if they also had the Democratic nomination, so they opted for double-billing to get their candidates more votes. (I'm not sure how New York still does it with parties like the Conservative Party, the Independence Party, and the Working Families Party. Does anyone know how those function differently from what the New Party was trying to do? What they do is obviously not the same, or it would have fallen under the same Supreme Court ruling.)

I'm convinced that Obama hasn't changed his ideals all that much. There's no way someone could say that the Warren Court didn't go far enough in overthrowing the founders' intent in the Constitution (alongside redistributionist language) unless there's a strong socialist steak still present, at least in terms of what he thinks the ideal government would look like. Even if that socialist streak has been toned down since, Obama said this after his conversion to being a social democrat. He does seem to be a redistributionist of sorts in the classic socialist mode, at least in his ideal government. How much he'd be willing to try to do depends, of course, on how much he expects to be able to get done. The scariest thing about an Obama victory for an economic conservative is that he'd almost certainly have at least two years of a Congress who would basically give him everything he wants, except on the few occasions when the Blue Dogs in the House might join with Republicans to prevent any particularly repugnant bills, but their influence seems to be about to diminish at least somewhat after this election. (It still amazes me that Democrats are running to replace minority Republicans in Congress by arguing for change. Giving the party in power more votes is change?)

So I don't think it's quite right to call Obama a socialist. He seems to be something closer to a European-style social democrat, at least in what he will try to do. But that just means he won't try to implement socialist ideals if he doesn't think he can. With a Congress entirely willing to grant their new Leader whatever he wants, I'm not sure that difference is as much as it might seem. Conservatives who keep calling him a socialist do seem to me to be on to something, even if I'd hesitate to apply that label straight out, and I think it's sufficient reason even for moderate Democrats to be very wary about casting a vote for him given that there won't be any divided government to reign in what he might try to do. I can understand why my friends who are themselves left of the Democratic party love him. I can understand why a lot of people are delighted to play a role in putting the first black president into office. I can even understand a mainstream Democrat who would have preferred Hillary Clinton but might still think Obama is closer to their views than McCain is. What I can't fathom is conservatives and moderates who think they're going to be getting a moderate Democrat who will vote for him just because they think McCain is too much like Bush, figuring Obama seems harmless enough because his proposals sound pretty centrist. That's what explains most independents' and moderates' support for Obama, and it strikes me as either ill-informed or irrational.

Update: Be sure to read the comments. The (first?) Nov 2 comment in particular has links to some much more detailed discussion that seems to me to confirm my general thesis that Obama holds that a socialist theory of justice would be good for the Supreme Court to endorse at some point but might be pragmatically worth getting to at most incrementally.

Conservatives need to understand the language of the left if they're going to criticize what people on the left say. William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have a new book coming out. Here is the publisher's blurb about the book:

Race Course Against White Supremacy By: William C. Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days--and that it is still very much with us--the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

Tommy Oliver summarizes Ayers as saying, "we are a nation of white supremacists". He then quotes an LGF post that says Ayers claims, "the dominant political system in the United States is white supremacism". Both of these claims are gross misunderstandings of what that blurb says, and it takes only the little familiarity I have with Marxian-style racial critiques to see this.

White supremacy, according to the Marx-style critique, consists of two things. First, the social structure of race relations is such that white people do in fact dominate much of the time. Second, there are structures in place that serve to perpetuate that dominance. Such a view can range from the most radical end to a much more minimal version. The radical extreme claims that white people have set up such a system deliberately and intentionally perpetuate it to serve their own interests. A much more minimal version, in my view, is very close to the truth, and that claims only that there are factors in place that, often unintentionally or at least for motivations other than race, have the effect of continuing the influence that white people disproportionally still have most of the time.

White supremacism is an ideology. It holds that white people ought to be in power because white people are better than those of other races. It claims that any structures in place that might be called white supremacy are good and worth extending to make white control even stronger. It's not hard to see, then, that white supremacy is not the same thing as white supremacism. One is a set of social structures. The other is an ideology.

What the blurb for the Ayers/Dohrn book actually says is "that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days--and that it is still very much with us". That simply is not a claim that white supremacism is dominant in any respect, as the LGF post says. It is not a statement about the prevalence of white supremacism among Americans, as Tommy Oliver's post asserts. It is a statement that white supremacy, the fact of white predominance and structures that continue it, has been more influential in American history than any other political structure. I think it's a highly questionable claim, and I'm sure there's a great deal in this book that I'd disagree with, but it doesn't do to pretend the claim is something much crazier than it really is. There's enough to criticize about the book that there's no need to make it out to be making an accusation that's much more serious than what the blurb actually attributes to the book.

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