It was a pleasure to participate in the conference at St. Thomas last week on "Can the Seamless Garment be Sewn? The Future of Pro-Life Progressivism". I only wish we had had more time to talk with the participants. As a philosopher, I am used to going to three and four day conferences where there is plenty of time to talk outside of the formal presentations. On the other hand, I do not often come back from those philosophy conferences with presents in hand, coffee cup, candies, cookies, etc., as I did from St. Thomas. There seems to be something to this legal profession. Everyone at St. Thomas involved in putting the conference on should be proud of their accomplishment. They were gracious hosts. More importantly they are contributing to the common good by getting us to talk with one another about how best to pursue justice. One of the more impressive features of the day was that it didn't share the banality of so many of the "panel discussions" that animate our academic culture, where people express their views but do not genuinely engage one another or their audience. Against a shared commitment to our faith, one had the experience here of genuine engagement with particular positions that disagree with one's own in certain ways, but about which everyone was willing to listen and wrestle.

Over at the Mirror of Justice Mark Sargent, the dean of the Law School at Villanova, posted a brief summary. It is helpful. But as it touches upon my contribution, I thought it might be useful here to register two objections, however mild, to his characterization of what I argued. It also provides me with the opportunity to expand a bit on topics of interest.

In the first place, Mark characterizes my presentation as a critique of the "CE of L". (Consistent Ethic of Life) I did not take myself to be doing that. In fact I took myself to be affirming the "CE of L" when I said "The seamless garment is a beautiful metaphor taken from the Gospel and designed to capture the fullness of Catholic teaching about the common good, and to inspire Catholics as they live out their lives as citizens of this nation," and "[unforunately] instead of being a self-standing approach [as it should be] to legal and policy issues informed by Catholic faith that treats the different [political] parties as instrumental goods in service to it, [the "CE of L"] often becomes [no more than] a rhetorical instrument enslaved to the goals of the parties, more often than not the Democratic party," as well as "Catholics ought to take seriously in their political lives such teachings as are given on abortion, torture, slavery, economic exploitation, as well as the death penalty, Just War, health care, economic development, and welfare, among others."

I would have thought a better way to characterize my presentation was as a critique of one way of formulating the "CE of L," unless of course one insists that what I was critiquing is the only way of understanding what a Catholic "CE of L" could be. In particular, I took myself to be critiquing the way in which the "CE of L" often plays out in practice in our political discourse. I'm not making a relativist point here, as if there are many ways of having a "CE of L", and one just has to choose willy nilly as suits one's fancy. I was no doubt arguing that one way of pursuing it is a wrong way of formulating it. Certainly those who would formulate it in the way that I critiqued would claim that I am wrong. But I took myself to be providing an account of what the "CE of L" should look like. If I am wrong about what the "CE of L" should look like, then I am wrong, and I will adhere to what it should be and abandon my erroneous version of it. But that seemed to be part of the point at issue up at St. Thomas. So to summarize the conference in such a way that I am understood to be posing a critique to the "CE of L" rather than arguing about what it should look like strikes me as begging the question and contentious.

In the second place, by association with an earlier argument of Mark's, he suggests that my discussion of the prudential arguments that must be made about the various goods pursued in Catholic social teaching is a way of "dismiss[ing]" them. That is very contentious indeed. I suppose some do dismiss the issues involved under the guise of "prudential decisions," but that is a rhetorical abuse of prudence. In an earlier post here, I discussed the nature of political prudence at length. And of course the response to the abuse of prudence is not to reject it. The danger, when we reject prudence for fear of its abuse in our moral and political judgments in pursuit of the common good, is that we create something worse than the abuse of prudence. We create modes of self-interested utilitarian calculation in pursuit of public policy, in which it is all too easy to put our own self-interest ahead of the poor and suffering, or we create dehumanizing rules and obligations with which we seek to command our fellow citizens rather than persuade, rules and obligations that often appear to become political idols. (Mill or Kant, but God forbid not St. Thomas) Often in practice such idols are put forward as if they were a priori self-evident truths. When the community fails to grasp their self-evidence, it often acts in a self interested way, not even bothering to consider them at all as a way to pursue the genuine goods of social justice. Thus, treating them as self-evident, not subject to prudence and persuasion, actually undermines our ability to pursue them.

I was simply making the point that the Pope makes in Veritatis Splendor about the pursuit of positive goods versus the avoidance of genuine evils. One can succeed in simultaneously avoiding all intrinsically bad acts that one could commit. To the best of my knowledge I am doing so right now. Thus, so called negative norms involving intrinsically bad acts can and do forbid always and everywhere. However, prudence is involved in the pursuit of genuine goods precisely because they are good. As the Pope argues in Veritatis Splendor, in the case of positive norms of action there are many ways to do good, and one cannot simultaneously do all the good that is possible to one taken individually good by good. As I am writing this, I am not feeding my children, or educating them, or reading the Summa Theologiae, or giving alms to the poor. These are all good things. But I cannot do them all at once. Thus, so called positive norms involving acts that are good cannot oblige always and everywhere precisely because one cannot succeed in simultaneously engaging in all of them. So prudence is required to figure out when, where, and why to pursue a particular good or goods rather than others given the situation.

Mark made a good point in his presentation that one has to make prudential decisions as well about how to pursue, in our pluralistic democracy, limitations on such intrinsically bad acts as abortion and euthanasia. I agree with this claim. I had a section in my presentation on prudence that I cut for reasons of length. But I did talk at the end about the toleration of evil to avoid a proportionately greater evil. Presumably such toleration must commit itself within the context of its judgment of prudence to the gradual elimination of what it is tolerating. But I also pointed out that part of the need for recognizing the difference between acts that are bad in their kind and acts that are not, is that quite often the prudential toleration of acts that are bad in their kind becomes complicity in those acts, as happened with slavery. That isn't a particular danger that generally threatens prudential decisions about acts that are good in their kind.

It is true that there is no prudential judgment about whether the goods of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, ministering to the sick, and comforting the dying ought to be pursued. They simply ought to be pursued. But it is a prudential judgment about how they should be pursued, where, when, and so on, because one cannot specify always and everywhere according to a dehumanizing mechanical rule how to pursue them. If we do not recognize this fact about the positive goods of social justice to be pursued versus the evils to be avoided, we end up with an intolerable conflict between goods, where one is inevitably sacrificed for another. It seems that if I give everything I have to the poor as I ought, then I cannot educate my children as I ought, I cannot care for my parents as I ought, I cannot contribute to my Church as I ought, and so on. If I am to devote all my time and resources to alleviating the material poverty of those around me as I ought, I will not have time to alleviate the spiritual poverty of my students as I ought. If all of our national resources are to be devoted to the alleviation of hunger, we will have none for health care, economic development, and so on. So faced with this conflict between our obligations, what will we do but sacrifice one or another for those that are more obviously in our own interests, while feeling guilty about those we have sacrificed. But these are conflicts for us because we fear the virtue of prudence, and prefer to live our lives in pursuit of goods of social justice according to mechanical rules. It is the failure to recognize the role of prudence that invites us to dismiss the views of our fellow citizens with whom we disagree.

Political prudence, on the contrary, is the invitation to persuade our fellow citizens. Provided that they do not involve intrinsically bad acts, the first question about particular public policies is whether they actually work in the pursuit of all the public goods we ought to be pursuing. Prudence is the virtue that we exercise together when we craft for our community the form that our pursuit of these goods will take. I don't think a disagreement with me about a particular public policy decision, even as I think it will not work in pursuit of these goods and is thus a bad policy, is sufficient evidence for me to conclude that those who promote it reject the underlying obligation to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, minister to the sick, and comfort the dying. To conclude otherwise would be to make idols of my own judgments.

I don't want to suggest that Mark himself falls prey to what I have described here. But I do fear that in the actual practice of public discourse that animates our politics, the flight from prudence does in fact lead to these problems.

I hope this helps clarify what I was and was not arguing at St. Thomas.