Over at the Mirror of Justice, Greg Vischer righly criticizes the New York Times invoking the authority of science to make the editorial claim that a human embryo is a "mere cluster of cells." I wrote him on this and he kindly posted my E-mail there. Out of loyalty to the Ethics and Culture Forum, I thought perhaps I should post them here as well, with a few minor changes.

One ought to criticize the NYT editorial on cloning, and the claim
that scientists consider these "microscopic entities" "mere clusters of cells
in a petri dish." It is worth noting that there are philosophers and scientists
out there who would say the same thing of you and me. But "mere cluster of
cells" is not a scientific judgment, even if uttered by a scientist, no more so
than if a scientist were to look at a painting, Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande
Jatte" for example, and utter the claim "that is a mere cluster of pigments."
We call people like that ignorant, however much specialized training they may
have in some field. While the painting consists of pigments, it has a certain unity as a work of art that is not captured by the simplistic claim that it is a "mere cluster of pigments." What we want to know is why it is in fact more than just
"a mere cluster of pigments," an inquiry that pursues its reality as a social object. But being a social reality is not a kind of unreality. Paintings are no less real than dollar bills, chairs, buildings, marriages, and petri dishes.

With regard to living things, the reality of which is natural, not social, it stretches the bounds of credulity to imagine praticing scientists doing their jobs in their labs walking around talking about the "mere clusters of cells in my petri dish." In fact, I do not believe many at all would say this. Look at their practice. The mere fact that these "clusters of cells" are in their petri dishes at all presupposes they are not "mere clusters of cells." If they were mere clusters of cells, why are they in their petri dish? Why are they so interested in this "mere cluster of cells" and not some other one? Why as a part of good scientific practice do they attempt to use sterile petri dishes in their studies, the sterility of which requires that they eliminate any "mere clusters of cells" from the environment of the petri dish? No. They know that they are studying no "mere cluster of cells," but a certain kind of cluster of cells exhibiting a biological unity ordered toward a certain kind of physical development. The reality of that biological unity is not determined socially like the painting, but proceeds according to biological principles of life intrinsic to it. In their actual scientific practice, they want to know why it is in fact more than just a "mere cluster of cells." One will learn nothing specific about the cloning of human beings by studying a "mere cluster of cells" that happens to be a labrador embryo, and even less from a "mere cluster of
cells" that has no biological unity to it. Indeed, that is why it is even silly
to refer to this supposed "mere cluster of cells" as "potential life." It is
identifiably a certain kind of life undergoing biological processes of life
distinctive of the kind of being it is in the stage of development it is in. If
it were not such an identifiable kind of life, the scientist would not be
studying it. If it is but a "mere cluster of cells" how does the biologist even manage to identify it as a human embryo?

If someone who happens to be a biologist says that what he is studying is a
"mere cluster of cells," he is not speaking or acting as a biologist when he
does so. No biologist studies "mere clusters of cells." He is speaking and
acting politically. And the history of our culture tells us that when someone
starts saying that a living human being is "a mere X" we should watch our wallets, and even more so our backs.

John
ndethics@nd.edu

It may well be that because we live in a culture where the emotions more and more serve as the criteria of moral and political judgment, that the great cultural challenge is to find ways to bring unruly emotions to heel. After all, isn't the effect of so much of mass contemporary art the same dangerous one that Plato long ago ascribed to poetry?--namely, that art "waters [the emotions] when they ought to be dried up, and sets them up as rulers in us when they ought to be ruled so that we may become better and happier instead of worse and more wretched" (Republic X, 606d).

But while Plato advises that we "dry up" the emotions by severely restricting the influence of art, C.S. Lewis, in his assessment of modern ills in The Abolition of Man, advises that one of our principal cultural challenges is to "irrigate" the emotions precisely through the influence of great art. Many modern educators, Lewis writes: "have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda--they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental--and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." And again, Lewis indicates that one of the chief ways in which the modern educator irrigates the emotions is through the arts.

Are Plato and Lewis at cross-purposes here?

I don't think so. It seems, rather, that they are talking about different aspects of the same phenomenon. Emotions unguided by reason are in one sense unruly jungles, insofar as the emotional pursuit of pleasure and flight from pain is disordered. But relative to the appropriate pursuit of pleasure and the appropriate flight from pain, emotions unguided by reason are like deserts, desperately in need of irrigation by truth.

Plato of course is notorious for his suspicion of the arts. He knows well that works of the imagination often incite the emotions to respond in ways that are contrary to virtue's demands. Thus in the Republic he ushers all but the most moralistic of poets to the gates of his ideal city. While we, too, might feel the urge to show the makers of teen gross-out movies and contemporary sitcoms to the door of decent society, we might also feel that banishing all but the most moralistic artists a poor resolution to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Our disapproval of Plato's resolution, however, should not blind us to the fact that Plato hits upon a truth: works of the imagination must aim to reflect the truth of how things are, so that the pleasure and pain we feel as we appreciate them is not in conflict with the pleasure and pain we should feel as virtuous agents. The value of the arts, in short, must at least in part be ascertained by how well they measure up to the reality of man's moral destiny, and above all his supernatural destiny.

In his essay "Religion and Literature," T. S. Eliot defends the claim that literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. "The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards." The claim applies not just to literature but to all the arts. The greatness of any work of art must in part be judged by its conformity to the moral and theological truth about man, as well as by how well the work measures up to the canons of the kind of art it exemplifies.

Just yesterday, November 16, Pope John Paul II, with special reference to contemporary mass media, sounded the same theme before a meeting of the Italian Association of Television Viewers and Radio Listeners. "In our media society," the Pope said, "more insistence and courage is necessary to cultivate a taste for the beautiful, accompanying it with sensibility for the good and the true." He added, "it is indispensable to help the users, especially families, to make a mature use" of the television "to discern with balance and wisdom the programs that are in harmony with the Christian view of the world and man."

This is not a call for baldly didactic art, an artless art that instructs but does not move. Nor does it mean that the arts must conform to static prototypes. It is, rather, a call for the arts to once again take up the beautiful--the "true-as-delightful"--for their object. Which is not at all the same as a call for "pretty" or for "pleasant" art. Reality often confronts us with rather disturbing truths, the kinds of disturbing truths that we learn in Dante's Hell or among the Southern grotesques of Flannery O'Connor's fiction.

Beginning tomorrow, and running through Saturday night (November 18-20), the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture hosts its annual Fall conference, a conference which this year is devoted to the challenge outlined above: of re-envisioning art as the manifestation of the beautiful, the "true-as-delightful." The title of the conference is "Epiphanies of Beauty: The Arts in a Post-Christian Culture," a title inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1999 Letter to Artists. In some 120 presentations by artists, theologians, philosophers, literary critics, educators, students, business and other professionals, the conference aims to show how the arts can only flourish, and by flourishing make their contribution to the renewal of culture, when they serve to delight us with the truth of man's moral and supernatural destiny.

Information about the conference, including a full program of events and works of art to be displayed, can be found here on the Center's website. If you cannot make it to Notre Dame this weekend, please revisit our website in the coming weeks as papers from the conference will be posted.

Daniel McInerny

Here is a review of a recent book on Liberalism. What I found interesting in it is the contrast between Mill's Liberalism as a "fleshed-out" liberalism and what is identified as the "hollowed-out" Hobbesian liberalism of the Thatcher era in Great Britian. The phrase "hollowed-out" reminded me of a theme in Walker Percy. I can't quite recall where, but I think he talks of our "hollowed-out" age, and perhaps one of his protagonists describes himself as being all "hollowed-out." Any readers recall where that might be in Percy? In any case, I suspect Percy would identify "altruism," which according to the author characterizes Mill's "fleshed-out" liberalism, as actually a sign of being "hollowed-out" in those who have not yet come to realize it. For some reason, it also made me think of Chesterton's poem The World State:

Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that's nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens-

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.

John
ndethics@nd.edu

Some might be interested in this reflection upon values in our last election.

Thanks to an Irishman at Princeton.

John O'Callaghan
ndethics@nd.edu

There was a fascinating discussion of the issue of Stem Cell research over at the Mirror of Justice last week. In case you missed it, it started with this post.
http://www.mirrorofjustice.com/mirrorofjustice/2004/11/the_stem_cell_c.html

John
ndethics@nd.edu

Thanks Brad for your thoughtful reflection upon the ways in which people think about "moral values," particularly in their political judgments. It provides a framework for denying that these "values" can simply be exchanged one for another by a calculus of value. I confess, however, that I'm uncomfortable with the Kantian language of perfect and imperfect duties. It strikes me that what Kant calls "perfect duties" are more first principles of common life. Though I don't think he quite meant this, calling them "perfect duties" and tying the sense of "perfection" to our "success" in fulfilling them can suggest to many that the moral life is primarily worked out in their fulfillment, while one ought not to hope for success or perfection in the realm of "imperfect duties." On the contrary, the dignity of human beings consists in being rational animals who freely pursue life in common as friends. So I would be inclined to call "perfect" goods those duties that Kant calls "imperfect," because it is in pursuing them in common that we achieve the perfection of our human dignity. The measure of our "perfection" in pursuing those goods in common should not be conceived of along the lines of success in following a universal rule, but in reasonably and creatively fashioning our common life as in a way artisans of human life. As Josef Pieper puts it, an act proceeding from the virtues, particularly as integrated in and by prudence, is good not because it exemplifies a rule of duty, perfect or imperfect, but because the virtuous man or woman makes it so. There are first principles of any art that must be observed, but fulfillment of such principles is not the perfection of the artisan's craft. Indeed fulfillment of such principles isn't really an expression of the virtues of that craft at all, but the condition for the development of the craft. Thus they are necessary conditions for the possibility of developing those virtues, and pursuing perfection in that craft. In human life there are certain goods that form the first principles of our common life; they must be protected not because they are the most perfect, but because without them there is no hope of perfection, living in common as friends in pursuit of the perfection of human dignity. Still our perfection consists in creatively making of our common life a kind of work of art. (Is blogging an imperfect duty, or a creative perfection of human life? Discuss.) If we lived in a just society we would not even consciously think of the first principles because they would so ingrained in our craft of being human, just as good artists ask themselves what they want to create, not how to wield a brush or chisel. The great hockey player does not ask himself how to wield a hockey stick, but, rather, how to win. That many people think of these first principles of our common life as the realm of morality more than those goods of perfection we pursue in common is a sign of our injustice as a community.

So I think you are right in focusing upon the different concerns of voters, those who are concerned not to tolerate attacks upon what I am calling the first principles of our common life as friends, and those who from a concern for the goods of human perfection are willing at least to tolerate such attacks if not to positively promote such attacks. I think the concern of the former is that without fundamental protection of those first principles, our common life is formed according to the whim of the will or advantabe of the stronger. Too often the weak hold the strong back in their pursuit of perfection, so they are destroyed. The concern of the latter is that too often while the weak may not be destroyed they are left out of the pursuit of perfection. Both laudable concerns. But, I think, one more fundmanental than the other. Those who are subject to destruction are without human hope. There is no human chance of our living in friendship with them.

War, it strikes me, is interestingly different. Prima facie it does not strike one as one of the goods of friendship that one pursues in human perfection. If anything, it can only be seen as consisting in actions designed to protect but not promote those goods. Then one has to ask to what extent it is morally justified by attacks upon the first principles of our common life versus attacks upon the ways in which we try to fashion the perfection of our common life. In the case of an attack upon these first principles, as a last resort one might think it a strict obligation of a society to protect itself. In the case of an attack upon the ways in which we pursue the goods of common life, it is more likely a question of prudence. I don't know quite how to think about it.

I don't know that there is a substantive disagreement between us here, but your post was a great opportunity for me to think through this.

John
ndethics@nd.edu

I thought some readers of the Forum might find the following interesting.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005873

John O'Callaghan
ndethics@nd.edu

In the wake of the election there has been a great deal of discussion about the fact that a plurality of voters sampled in exit polls chose moral values as the most important issue in their decision about voting. Many have gone rather further than the evidence warrants to claim that the election was mainly about values; others have reacted angrily to what they take as a misidentification of what values were at stake in the election. Among this latter group are many on the left (including the Catholic left--I'm thinking especially of E.J. Dionne) who ask why poverty and war are not moral or values issues? The media have concentrated on such issues as abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage as the preeminent moral issues and, indeed, the marriage question was on 11 state ballots, including Ohio. But why should these issues exhaust moral considerations about voting, many ask?

In fact, I think most people who took moral issues to be paramount in the campaign were thinking of abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage. Are they right not to have been thinking of poverty and war also? Aren't those, as many liberals claim, also moral issues? Well, yes, they are. Actually, from a certain perspective, any genuinely human action, that is, one freely chosen, has a moral dimension. However that moral dimension is not always brought sharply into relief. I don't think most voters would deny that poverty and war are closely related to moral considerations, but I think many would affirm these two qualifications: (a) that they agreed more with President Bush's moral choices with respect to war and poverty than they did with Senator Kerry's moral choices with respect to abortion, stem cell research, and same-sex marriage (although on this point Bush and Kerry are closer than on the others. Their main difference concerns the desirability of amending the Constitution to define marriage in the traditional way); and (b) this is partly because they think of those latter issues as morally more basic than the former. Moreover, I think there are plausible reasons for thinking this.

Kant famously distinguished between perfect and imperfect moral duties. Perfect duties tend to be negative and can be satisfied completely by discrete acts. The duty to respect the life of another can be perfectly fulfilled by not harming her. The duty to tell the truth can be perfectly satisfied by not lying. Imperfect duties cannot be completely satisfied by discrete actions and tend to be positive in nature. Kant, for example, thought that there was in imperfect duty of benevolence requiring us to help others. But just how that duty is satisfied cannot be fully explained in advance since much depends on circumstances. The perfect duties have a certain overlap with the Thomistic account of common precepts of the natural law. Such precepts are very basic and are expressed in the municipal law of most countries as well as in the revealed law of the Decalogue. I think it's these precepts or the perfect duties that most people explicitly identify with morality as an everyday matter. It isn't that most people would deny the imperfect duties as moral in nature, but they tend to concentrate on the more strict and determinate rules. This is understandable, I think, since such rules are clearer and they are very basic. A violation of one of them is easy to spot and particularly disruptive of the larger fabric of morality.

It is for this reason that people tend to think of abortion, stem cell research and same sex marriage as moral issues, but not so much poverty and war. The former issues seem more basic to the moral fabric of human society. The latter are more complex, allow for greater scope in prudential application and thus admit of less certainty and thus more potential reasonable disagreement. One could plausibly argue that alleviating poverty is best done by promoting economic growth as distinct from policies that emphasize redistribution. And one can argue about the justification of particular uses of military force. But many think of the more commonly discussed moral issues as entailing the violation of very basic moral norms, like that prohibiting the intentional killing of the innocent.

There is no reason to deny that poverty and war are also moral issues, but there does seem to me good reason to take note of the distinction between those sorts of moral issues and the more basic sort discussed by many election commentators.

Many of my pro-life friends supported Bush for one reason more than any other -- he would appoint judges who would interpret the constitution as intended by the framers and not use it as a blank writ to impose on America abortion and same-sex marriage.

Now this prudential judgment will be put to the test.

For the background to the story read Timothy P. Carneys article in the National Review Online. It begins

Rick Santorum and George W. Bush told us that the GOP needed Arlen Specter. We needed Arlen Specter to deliver Pennsylvania for Bush. We needed Arlen Specter to boost the party in the Keystone State. We needed Arlen Specter to keep the Senate majority. Santorum and Bush were wrong. They were wrong morally, and they were wrong politically. These men saved the man who saved Roe v. Wade, and now the costs to the pro-life cause, the conservative movement, and the Republican party -- for so little benefit -- could be deep and long-lasting.[The full article is here: http://www.nationalreview.com/carney/carney200411031005.asp]

Yesterday, at a press conference, Senator Specter explained (according to a transcript provided by his office):

ODOM: Is Mr. Bush, he just won the election, even with the popular vote as well. If he wants anti-abortion judges up there, you are caught in the middle of it what are you going to do? The party is going one way and you are saying this.

SPECTER: When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v Wade, I think that is unlikely. And I have said that bluntly during the course of the campaign and before. When the Inquirer endorsed me, they quoted my statement that Roe v Wade was inviolate. And that 1973 decision, which has been in effect now for 33 years, was buttressed by the 1992 decision, written by three Republican justices - O'Conner, Souter, and Kennedy - and nobody can doubt Anthony Kennedy's conservativism or pro-life position, but that's the fabric of the country. Nobody can be confirmed today who didn't agree with Brown v. Board of Education on integration, and I believe that while you traditionally do not ask a nominee how they're going to decide a specific case, there's a doctorate and a fancy label term, stari decisis, precedent which I think protects that issue. That is my view, now, before, and always. [For the full transcript, go to: http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp]

So, we could wait around and see what Specter will do or we can join the campaign launched by National Review Online editor, Kathryn Jean Lopez, who wrote:

The more I think about it, this election is not over -- there is unfinished business. As you know, Arlen Specter warned the president yesterday, in the press, that he will have a litmus test for judges if Specter is judiciary chair, a foregone conclusion as far as most are concerned. Fact is, folks, HE IS NOT JUDICIARY CHAIR, but there will be elections in the Senate in the coming days which could very well make him judiciary chairman. Conservatives, as we have seen, won this election. Many of you personally played no small role in that. Why should Republicans stifle their conservative base by putting Arlen Specter in as judiciary chair? There is no reason. If there was some deal cut that he would be judiciary chair, it seems to me he broke it yesterday.

If you agree -- if you agree that good men and women cannot be kept off the Supreme Court because they are against abortion (disqualifying, for starters, any faithful Catholic, many evangelicals, Muslims, automatically) -- call and e-mail Bill Frist (and your Republican senators, if applicable) today. I am pretty certain an overwhelming outcry from conservatives in the next few days is the only way Arlen Specter can be kept from becoming a huge obstacle.

Senator Bill Frist can be reached

By e-mail at http://frist.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=AboutSenatorFrist.ContactForm
DC office number is 202-224-3344
Fax is 202-228-1264
Nashville office number is 615-352-9411
Majority Leader office number is 202-224-3135
If your a Tennessee resident, call the Nashville office

What follws are some reflections on tomorrow's election and the act of voting occasioned by reading many of the posts here as well as on the Mirror of Justice blog.

Some have asked about the character of voting as an act and some have emphasized the privacy of voting. While a vote can certainly mean many things in various contexts and circumstances it would also seem to be an acknowledgment that one participates in some kind of common enterprise. This is why the conscientious decision not to vote is serious: it indicates a kind of exit or suspension of one's participation in or acknowldged membership in the community that comprises the electorate. Voting is private in the sense that one casts a vote out of view--others are legally prohibited from watching one vote. It was not always so. The classical Greek verb that means "to vote" literally means "to raise one's hand." This was done openly in public. In the Laws Plato describes the process by which citizens of his imaginary city, Magnesia, choose their magistrates. Two things are striking: first, the whole process takes place in public view; second, the act of voting is surrounded by religious ceremony. The election itself takes place in a temple and the voters offer prayers as they vote. Secret voting is a relatively recent innovation, part of a whole package of electoral reforms that have their origins in nineteenth-century liberalism. The connection of voting understood as secret and private with liberal political thought and practice has never been better described than by Leo Strauss in his essay, "Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time":

Of course, liberal democracy means limited government, the distinction bewteen the public and the private. Not only must the private sphere be protected by the law, but it must also be understood to be impervious to the law. The laws must protect the sphere in which everyone may act and think as he pleases, in which he may be as arbitrary and prejudiced as he likes. "My home is my castle." But this is not simply true. My home is not simply my castle; it may be entered with a search warrant. The true place of secrecy is not the home but the voting booth. We can say the voting booth is the home of homes, the seat of sovereignty, the seat of secrecy. The sovereign consists of the individuals who are in no way responsible, who can in no way be held responsible: the irresponsible individual. This was not simply the original notion of liberal democracy. The original notion was that this sovereign individual was a conscientious individual, the individual limited and guided by his conscience.

Here the secret vote, discretely executed behind a curtain, is emblematic of the sovereign individual. Such a reform was, in one sense, absolutely necessary. Secrecy was a guarantee that elections could be carried out free from manipulation by any interested parties, especially by the candidates themselves, especially by the officials in power. The modern state offers to its officials powers of intimidation and oppression that dwarf the will to power of ancient tyrants. Secret voting is a necessary and salutary concession to this reality. And it originally preserved a sense of some deeper responsibility connected by Strauss to conscience. Surely that conscience meant at least two things: a will to vote with an eye to the common good and a view of that common good as constituted by the basic principles of morality.

To see one's vote as simply private, and, to use Strauss's term, a characteristic of the "irresponsible individual" is to occlude that sense of the common good, of acknowledged membership in a community whose business voting is. When pressed to the extreme it would seem to entail the obliteration of such a sense. Yves Simon, in Philosophy of Democratic Government (p. 88), describes some conditions under which democratic elections can cease to be efficacious. One is in the wake of some event that inflames popular passions to a point beyond which rational deliberation is unlikely. But another is a situation in which people simply do not see their voting as their participation in a common enterprise, but rather as purely private and individual. Even though everyone is doing the same thing at roughly the same time, the election fails to be a "social act." Perhaps our elections are approaching this. But it seems to me that we haven't simply reached such a stage yet. Nevertheless there are grave threats to the integrity of the political system, which brings me back to the issue of abortion.

Many have evinced frustration that abortion should take up so much of Catholic discussion of the election, as if no other issues matter. The other issues do matter, of course. However, at the same time, abortion is different, and the difference means that it cannot but take up the space it does. Abortion concerns the very definition of the poltical community by defining out of it a huge number of its most vulnerable subjects. I do not say citizens, since the unborn cannot, of course, vote. But they are a class of persons whose very fate hangs in the balance and no one can ignore this. That the fate of any class of persons should simply "hang in the balance" in an election is itself evidence that something gravely disturbing is afoot. The very existence of political life presupposes certain constitutive norms, foremost among which are the protection of innocent life and the representation of all those subject to the community's power. When such norms are cast in uncertainty the very nature of the community is in doubt and normal politics is difficult if not impossible. Such was the case in the United States from the founding until the Civil War and such is the case now. We are not now in a condition of normal politics and cannot be until this matter has been resolved.

Like the earlier grave defect in our politics, this one will not be remedied by elections, legal judgments, nor legislation. There will need to be a profound change of conscience. But such changes must start somewhere. Neither the thirteenth nor the fourteenth amendment nor Brown v. the Board of Education nor the election of 1964 nor the Civil Rights Act of 1965 can be said to have simply effected a change in the nation's conscience with respect to race. But they were all necessary parts of that long and painful process. When, some day in the future, we are able to look upon wide-spread legal abortion as a dreadful memory we will also see particular elections, laws and court cases as parts of the story of its abolition, not the whole story, but parts. And that story will be part of the larger narrative of the moral life of our imperfect community. It's a huge thing and casting one's vote in light of this future narrative, in the hope of ending this awful practice and healing our politics of a grave breech, is a noble and necessary thing.