Legal Enforcement of Whose Morals?
In Telecast, Frist Defends His Effort to Stop Filibusters
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Senator Bill Frist stepped up his threats to change Senate
rules to circumvent blockades of judicial nominees while
calling for "more civility in political life."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/25/politics/25justice.html?th&emc=th
..................................................................
We started our exploration of moral issues in my class this semester in applied ethics by asking 'what is the right thing to do?' and noted that four aspects of any moral investigation must be sorted out:
1) What are the relevant facts to be considered?
2) What concepts and sub concepts apply to any given moral problem?
3) What are the arguments for or against a particular moral position?
4) What are the fundamental presuppositions or starting points of the proponents of the various moral positions brought to bear on this issue?
Again, by pure chance we most recently happened to explore the traditional controversy between proponents of enforcing a particular moral code legally (moral conservatives) versus defenders of liberty (Mill and Hart -- moral liberals) who maintain that individual conscience and liberty should not be curtailed by government (legal enforcement) unless harm or extreme offense to others are involved.
Conservatives justify enforcement of their preferred moral norms on the basis:
a) that not enforcing them will cause the destruction of society
b) that any majority has the right to enforce its preferred moral code.
Liberals warn of the potential 'tyranny of the majority' that the conservative position invokes and appeal for utilitarian assessment of the relative gains and losses entailed by any particular moral decision.
"Justice Sunday" yesterday, as it was denominated, beamed a political appeal to conservative churches to punish law makers who do not enforce religious conservatives' preferred moral values. It portends a conservative drive to outlaw abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, cloning, etc. This drive to punish non conformity to conservative moral norms is being opposed by most traditional U.S. churches and civil liberties organizations.
The open question now with the recent election of Pope Benedict XVI is whether he will seek to enforce by law his moral values which he takes to be absolutes dictated by G-d and which in addition to the above also condemn the use of condoms to protect against such dread diseases as AIDS? He is reported to have urged Catholics in our last national election not to vote for Catholic office seekers who do not conform to his church's absolute moral norms.
Liberal Catholic theologians such as Hans Kung, who originally sponsored Pope Benedict for his first Tubingen university teaching position, are opposed to Benedict's absolutism and have argued that the Catholic Church must modify its moral stands to adjust to particular times and moral problems, particularly such things as allowing condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS:
http://www.speakersaccess.com/topics/politics/kung.html
http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/thought/kung.htm
Personally, as a secular humanist philosopher, I side with Kung, whose works I have read and occasionally reviewed and who, I regret, has been the loser in the struggle for moral dominance within the Catholic Church. He, as I, also trained in theology, see no religious warrant and only great harm in Benedict's opposition to the use of condoms to prevent either births or diseases. I see no legitimate warrant for interference with our Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade which defined pregnancy and its termination as a sphere of privacy rights of women impregnated in whatever circumstances to terminate an unwanted pregnancy prior to the viability of a fetus. The attack on homosexuality puts at life risk those so attacked.
Hopefully this emerging conflict in moral claims can be resolved by evaluating the relative gains and losses involved in determining what is the right thing to do and not with ad hominen (personal) attacks such as one gathers were launched by religious conservatives during their so-called "Justice Sunday" presentation. And I certainly hope that Pope Benedict XVI will follow the Kantian lead of 'respect for persons' so well enunciated in one of Pope John Paul II's scholarly theological books, which I also happened to review some years ago.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Senator Bill Frist stepped up his threats to change Senate
rules to circumvent blockades of judicial nominees while
calling for "more civility in political life."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/25/politics/25justice.html?th&emc=th
..................................................................
We started our exploration of moral issues in my class this semester in applied ethics by asking 'what is the right thing to do?' and noted that four aspects of any moral investigation must be sorted out:
1) What are the relevant facts to be considered?
2) What concepts and sub concepts apply to any given moral problem?
3) What are the arguments for or against a particular moral position?
4) What are the fundamental presuppositions or starting points of the proponents of the various moral positions brought to bear on this issue?
Again, by pure chance we most recently happened to explore the traditional controversy between proponents of enforcing a particular moral code legally (moral conservatives) versus defenders of liberty (Mill and Hart -- moral liberals) who maintain that individual conscience and liberty should not be curtailed by government (legal enforcement) unless harm or extreme offense to others are involved.
Conservatives justify enforcement of their preferred moral norms on the basis:
a) that not enforcing them will cause the destruction of society
b) that any majority has the right to enforce its preferred moral code.
Liberals warn of the potential 'tyranny of the majority' that the conservative position invokes and appeal for utilitarian assessment of the relative gains and losses entailed by any particular moral decision.
"Justice Sunday" yesterday, as it was denominated, beamed a political appeal to conservative churches to punish law makers who do not enforce religious conservatives' preferred moral values. It portends a conservative drive to outlaw abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, cloning, etc. This drive to punish non conformity to conservative moral norms is being opposed by most traditional U.S. churches and civil liberties organizations.
The open question now with the recent election of Pope Benedict XVI is whether he will seek to enforce by law his moral values which he takes to be absolutes dictated by G-d and which in addition to the above also condemn the use of condoms to protect against such dread diseases as AIDS? He is reported to have urged Catholics in our last national election not to vote for Catholic office seekers who do not conform to his church's absolute moral norms.
Liberal Catholic theologians such as Hans Kung, who originally sponsored Pope Benedict for his first Tubingen university teaching position, are opposed to Benedict's absolutism and have argued that the Catholic Church must modify its moral stands to adjust to particular times and moral problems, particularly such things as allowing condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS:
http://www.speakersaccess.com/topics/politics/kung.html
http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/thought/kung.htm
Personally, as a secular humanist philosopher, I side with Kung, whose works I have read and occasionally reviewed and who, I regret, has been the loser in the struggle for moral dominance within the Catholic Church. He, as I, also trained in theology, see no religious warrant and only great harm in Benedict's opposition to the use of condoms to prevent either births or diseases. I see no legitimate warrant for interference with our Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade which defined pregnancy and its termination as a sphere of privacy rights of women impregnated in whatever circumstances to terminate an unwanted pregnancy prior to the viability of a fetus. The attack on homosexuality puts at life risk those so attacked.
Hopefully this emerging conflict in moral claims can be resolved by evaluating the relative gains and losses involved in determining what is the right thing to do and not with ad hominen (personal) attacks such as one gathers were launched by religious conservatives during their so-called "Justice Sunday" presentation. And I certainly hope that Pope Benedict XVI will follow the Kantian lead of 'respect for persons' so well enunciated in one of Pope John Paul II's scholarly theological books, which I also happened to review some years ago.
posted by Ed Kent at 8:39 AM
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