What Marriage Is . . . and What It Isn't - by Robert P. George

In CERC

Marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully participated in only by people who have at least an elementary understanding of it and who choose it with that understanding in mind.

Marriage is an all-encompassing sharing of life.  It involves, like other bonds, a union of hearts and minds — but also, and distinctively, a bodily union made possible by the sexual-reproductive complementarity of man and woman.  Hence it is ordered to the all-encompassing goods of procreation and family life, and it calls for all-encompassing commitment, one that is pledged to permanence and sexual exclusivity and fidelity.  Marriage unites a husband and wife holistically, not merely in an emotional bond but also on the bodily plane in acts of conjugal love and in the children such love brings forth — for the whole of life.  Marriage is a form of relationship — indeed, the form of relationship — in which a man and a woman unite in a bond that is naturally ordered to, and would be fulfilled by, their conceiving and rearing children together.  And those who enter into this form of relationship — the human good of marriage — are truly and fully participants in it even where their bond is not blessed with the gift of children.

To be in such a relationship — a bodily as well as emotional union whose distinctive features and norms are shaped by its orientation to, and aptness for, procreation and the rearing of children — is intrinsically, not merely instrumentally, valuable.  So marriage, though it bears an inherent (rather than incidental) link to procreation, is not properly understood as having its value merely as a means to the good of conceiving and rearing children.  That is why, historically and rightly, infertility is not regarded as an impediment to marriage.  True bodily union in acts fulfilling the behavioral conditions of procreation is possible even where the nonbehavioral conditions of procreation happen not to obtain.  Such union can provide the foundation and matrix of the multilevel sharing of life that marriage is.

These insights into the nature of marriage as a human good require no particular theology.  They are, to be sure, consistent with Judeo-Christian faith, yet ancient thinkers untouched by Jewish or Christian revelation — including Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Musonius Rufus, Xenophanes, and Plutarch — also distinguished conjugal unions from all others, as do many nonbiblical faiths to this day.  Nor did animus against particular persons or categories of persons produce this conclusion, which arose in various cultures long before the modern concept of "sexual orientation."

Nevertheless, today many are demanding the redefinition of marriage as something other than a conjugal partnership.  Indeed, several jurisdictions in the West, including a number of European nations and several American states, have redefined marriage to eliminate the norm of sexual complementarity.  In truth, what they have done is abolish marriage as a legal category and replace it with something quite different — legally recognized sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership — to which the label marriage has been reassigned.  So, strictly speaking, we are talking not so much about a redefinition as an abolition of marriage.

When marriage is understood as a conjugal relationship — that is, as a comprehensive (emotional and bodily) union oriented toward procreation and the providing of children with both a mother and a father — it is easy to make sense of its core features as historically understood in Western and other cultures.  But eliminating the norm of sexual complementarity removes any ground of principle for these features.  After all, if two men or two women can marry, then what sets marriage apart from other bonds must be emotional intensity or priority.  But nothing about emotional union or intensity requires it to be permanent, as opposed to deliberately temporary.  Nothing beyond mere sentiment or subjective preference would require it to be sexually "closed" as opposed to "open," or limited to relationships of two persons, as opposed to three or more in "polyamorous" sexual ensembles.  There would be no ground for understanding marriage as a sexual partnership, as opposed to one integrated around any of a range of possible nonsexual shared interests or commitments (for example, playing tennis, reading novels, supporting a certain sports team).  Nor would there be any basis for understanding marriage as a relationship that is inherently enriched by family life and shaped by its demands.  Yet these have always been defining features and norms of marriage — features and norms that make marriage unlike other forms or companionship or friendship (and unlike in kind, not just in degree of emotional intensity).

These considerations buttress my point that what is at stake in contemporary debates about the definition and meaning of marriage is not whether to "expand" marriage to enlarge the pool of people "eligible" to participate in it.  What is at stake is whether to retain and support marriage in our law and culture or to jettison it in favor of a different way of organizing human relationships.

Marriage law shapes our actions by promoting a vision of what marriage is and, therefore, what its norms and requirements are.  In almost all Western jurisdictions, marriage has been deeply wounded by a culture of divorce, the widespread practice of nonmarital sexual cohabitation, the normalization of nonmarital childbearing, and other practices.  None of these had to do with same-sex partnerships or homosexual conduct, nor were or are people who are attracted to persons of the same sex responsible for them.  It was the impact of these practices on the public understanding of marriage that weakened people's grasp of marriage as a conjugal union and made the otherwise inconceivable idea of same-sex "marriages" conceivable.  Still, abolishing marriage as a legal category and reassigning the label marriage to sexual-romantic domestic partnerships would complete the rout, making it all but impossible to carry out the reforms needed to restore the conjugal understanding of marriage and with it a vibrant and healthy marriage culture.  The more we equate marriage with what amounts to a form of sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership, the more difficult it will be for people to live by the stabilizing norms specific to true marriage.  This is the lesson of the past forty-five years.  Unless we restore a sound understanding of marriage and rebuild the marriage culture, the erosion of marriage ideals will continue to harm everyone — children, spouses, societies as a whole — but especially the poorest and most vulnerable.  By rewriting the parenting ideal, abolishing conjugal marriage as the legal norm would undermine in our mores and practice the special value of biological mothers and fathers.  Moreover, by marking support for the conjugal view as "bigotry," it would, as we are already seeing in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, damage religious liberty and freedom of speech and association.

It is important to bear in mind that under any marriage policy some bonds, some types of intimate relationship, will remain unrecognized, and thus some people will remain legally unmarried (however much they would like their relationships to count as marriages under law).  So we need to be able (and ought) to meet people's concrete needs apart from civil marriage.  Moreover, if we reject equating marriage with companionship — and marriage licenses with generic approval — we will see that conjugal marriage laws deprive no one of companionship or its joys and mark no one as less worthy of fulfillment.  True compassion means extending authentic community to everyone, especially the marginalized, while using marriage law for the social goal it serves best — the goal that justifies regulating such intimate bonds in the first place: to ensure that children know the committed love of the mother and father whose union brought them into being.

Just as compassion for same-sex-attracted people does not require redefining marriage, neither does preserving the conjugal view mean making them scapegoats for its erosion.  It certainly isn't about legalizing (or criminalizing) anything.  In all fifty of the United States, two men or women can have a wedding (if they happen to believe in same-sex marriage) and share a domestic life.  Their employers and religious communities are legally free to recognize their unions.  At issue here is whether governments will effectively coerce many other actors in the public square to do the same.  And also at issue is whether government will expand.  Robust support for marital norms serves children, spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor.  Family breakdown thrusts the state into roles for which it is ill-suited: parent and discipliner to the orphaned and neglected, and arbiter of disputes over custody and paternity.

Redefining Means Undermining

Advocates of redefining "marriage" as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership to accommodate same-sex relationships are increasingly confirming the point that this shift erodes the basis for permanence and exclusivity in any relationship.

University of Calgary philosophy professor Elizabeth Brake, for example, supports what she calls "minimal marriage," in which "individuals can have legal marital relationships with more than one person, reciprocally or asymmetrically, themselves determining the sex and number of parties, the type of relationship involved, and which rights and responsibilities to exchange with each."

Judith Stacey, a prominent New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure, testified before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act.  During her testimony, she expressed hope that the redefinition of marriage would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours...[leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek...small group marriages."

In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT and allied" scholars and advocates called for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.  Such relationships are by no means unheard of: Newsweek reported in 2009 that there were more than five hundred thousand in the United States alone.  In Brazil, a public notary has recognized a trio of people as a civil union.  Mexico City has considered expressly temporary marriage licenses.  The Toronto District School Board has taken to promoting polyamorous relationships among its students.

What about the connection to family life?  Writer E.  J.  Graff celebrates the fact that recognizing same-sex unions would change the "institution's message" so that it would "ever after stand for sexual choice, for cutting the link between sex and diapers."  Enacting same-sex marriage "does more than just fit; it announces that marriage has changed shape."

What about sexual exclusivity?  Andrew Sullivan, a self-styled proponent of the conservative case for same-sex marriage, has now gone so far as to extol the "spirituality" of "anonymous sex."  He welcomes the fact that the "openness" of same-sex unions might erode sexual exclusivity among those in opposite-sex marriages.

Similarly, in a New York Times Magazine profile, same-sex-marriage activist Dan Savage encourages spouses to adopt "a more flexible attitude" about sex outside their marriage.  A piece in The Advocate, a gay-interest newsmagazine, supports my point still more candidly: "Antiequality right-wingers have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of 'traditional marriage,' and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response has long been 'No, it won't.' But what if — for once — the sanctimonious crazies are right?  Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter marriage as we know it?  And would that be such a bad thing?"

Other advocates of redefining marriage have explicitly proclaimed the goal of weakening the institution.  Former president George W.  Bush "is correct," writes journalist Victoria Brownworth, "when he states that allowing same-sex couples to marry will weaken the institution of marriage....It most certainly will do so, and that will make marriage a far better concept than it previously has been."  Michelangelo Signorile, another prominent advocate of redefining marriage, urges people in same-sex relationships to "demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution."  He says they should "fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake...is to transform the notion of 'family' entirely."

Those wishing to overturn the traditional understanding of marriage as a male-female partnership increasingly agree that redefining marriage would undermine its stabilizing norms.

A Culture of Marriage

A standard revisionist response to the defense of conjugal marriage like the one I am here proposing is the claim that, even if the traditional position is, from the moral viewpoint, true, it is nevertheless unfair for the law to embody it.  For example, my friend and colleague Professor Stephen Macedo argues that if disagreements about the nature of marriage "lie in...difficult philosophical quarrels, about which reasonable people have long disagreed, then our differences lie in precisely the territory that John Rawls rightly marks off as inappropriate to the fashioning of our basic rights and liberties."  So Macedo and others claim that law and policy must be neutral with regard to competing understandings of marriage and sexual morality.

This claim is deeply unsound.  The true meaning, value, and significance of marriage are fairly easily grasped (even if people sometimes have difficulty living up to its moral demands) in a culture — including, critically, a legal culture — that promotes and supports a sound understanding of marriage.  Furthermore, ideologies and practices that are hostile to a sound understanding and practice of marriage in a culture tend to undermine the institution of marriage in that culture.  Hence it is extremely important that governments eschew attempts to be neutral with regard to marriage and embody in their laws and policy the soundest, most nearly correct, understanding.

The law is a teacher.  Either it will teach that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate but whose contours people cannot make and remake at will, or it will teach that marriage is a mere convention that is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, goals, and so on.  The result, given the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce the very practices and ideologies that cause them.

The Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, a liberal who does not share my views regarding sexual morality, is rightly critical of forms of liberalism, including Rawlsianism, that suppose law and government can and should be neutral among competing conceptions of moral goodness.  He has noted, for example, that "monogamy, assuming that it is the only valuable form of marriage, cannot be practiced by an individual.  It requires a culture which recognizes it, and which supports it through the public's attitude and through its formal institutions."  Of course, Raz does not suppose that, in a culture whose law and public policy do not support monogamy, a man who happens to believe in it somehow will be unable to restrict himself to having one wife or will be required to take additional wives.  His point, rather, is that, even if monogamy is a key element in a sound understanding of marriage, large numbers of people will fail to understand that or why that is the case — and therefore will fail to grasp the value of monogamy and the point of practicing it — unless they are assisted by a culture that supports, formally by law and policy, as well as by informal means, monogamous marriage.  What is true of monogamy is equally true of the other elements of a sound understanding of marriage.

In short, marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully participated in only by people who have at least an elementary understanding of it and who choose it with that understanding in mind.  Yet people's ability to understand it, at least implicitly, and thus to choose it, depends crucially on institutions and cultural understandings that both transcend individual choice and are constituted by a vast number of individual choices.

Conscience and Its Reviewers: A Response to Kevin Doyle - by Robert P. George

 In TPD

Kevin Doyle, a Catholic lawyer and death penalty opponent, has published a review in America magazine of my new book Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism. I’m grateful for the kind things Mr. Doyle said about me and my work. Still, there is an error at the heart of the review, and it goes to a central matter: the meaning of conscience. So I want to address that error. Before that, I’ll comment on some less significant shortcomings of Doyle’s review.

The Death Penalty

First, Doyle says that “the death penalty wins mention in [George’s] case against Mario Cuomo but draws no condemnation.” Let me say plainly what I have said before: I believe that all direct killing of human beings—that is, deliberately bringing about death, whether one’s own or another’s, as the precise object of one’s act—is morally wrong. So I am opposed to the death penalty.

I did not address the substantive moral issue of capital punishment in this book because support for the death penalty scarcely qualifies as a dogma of liberal secularism. Most liberal secularists oppose the death penalty. I think they are right about that, albeit right for the wrong reason. The subject came up in my chapter on Mario Cuomo and other politicians who claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion yet “pro-choice,” because Cuomo had advanced an absurd argument trying to square his opposition to the death penalty with his support for the legalized and taxpayer financed killing of unborn babies. Here’s what I wrote:

Cuomo claims that when he speaks of the death penalty, he never suggests that he considers it a “moral issue.” Then, in the very same paragraph, he condemns the death penalty in the most explicitly, indeed flamboyantly, moralistic terms: “I am against the death penalty because I think it is bad and unfair. It is debasing. It is degenerate. It kills innocent people.” He does not pause to consider that these are precisely the claims pro-life people make against the policy of legal abortion and its public funding—a policy that Cuomo defends. . .

Subsidiarity and Solidarity

Second, Doyle says that in my analysis “subsidiarity eclipses the counterbalancing imperative of solidarity.” This claim rests on the mistake—a common one, to be sure—of supposing that subsidiarity and solidarity “counterbalance” each other. To suppose so is to misunderstand the principle of subsidiarity (which, among other things, restrains government action in some areas and authorizes or even requires it in others) as well as its relationship to solidarity.

Subsidiarity and solidarity are distinct principles, and respect for both is required as a matter of justice. But they do not pull in opposite directions. They do not need to be “balanced.” Nor, strictly speaking, can their normative demands be in conflict. They do not require tradeoffs. Both are to be applied and respected fully—all of the time. To suppose otherwise is to start heading down the wrong path from one’s first step.

Health Care

Third, Doyle says that, for me, “health care as a human right becomes merely something of which it is ‘certainly not unreasonable to speak.’” Doyle’s “merely” is extremely misleading, as the context of the quoted line from my book makes clear:

Human rights exist (or obtain) if principles of practical reason direct us to act or abstain from acting in certain ways out of respect for the well-being and the dignity of persons whose legitimate interests may be affected by what we do. I certainly believe that there are such principles. They cannot be overridden by considerations of utility. At a very general level, they direct us, in Immanuel Kant’s phrase, to treat human beings always as ends and never as means only. When we begin to specify this general norm, we identify important negative duties, such as the duty to refrain from enslaving people. Although we need not put the matter in terms of “rights,” it is perfectly reasonable, and I believe helpful, to speak of a right against being enslaved, and to speak of slavery as a violation of human rights. It is a right that we have not by virtue of being members of a certain race, sex, class, or ethnic group but simply by virtue of our humanity. In that sense, it is a human right. But there are, in addition to negative duties and their corresponding rights, certain positive duties. And these, too, can be articulated and discussed in the language of rights, though here we must be clear about by whom and how a given right is to be honored.

Sometimes it is said, for example, that education or health care is a human right. It is certainly not unreasonable to speak this way; but much more needs to be said if it is to be a meaningful statement. Who is supposed to provide education or health care to whom? Why should those persons or institutions be the providers? What place should the provision of education or health care occupy on the list of social and political priorities? Is it better for education and health care to be provided by governments under socialized systems or by private providers in markets? These questions go beyond the application of moral principles. They require prudential judgment in light of the contingent circumstances people face in a given society at a given point in time. Often, there is not a single, uniquely correct answer. The answer to each question can lead to further questions. The problems can be extremely complex, far more complex than the issue of slavery, where once a right has been identified, its universality and the basic terms of its application are fairly clear. Everybody has a moral right not to be enslaved, and everybody an obligation as a matter of strict justice to refrain from enslaving others; governments have a moral obligation to respect and protect that right and, correspondingly, to enforce the obligation.

The context reveals that Doyle’s characterization of my view, served by his use of the term “merely,” completely fails to do it justice to my point—an analytical point about a key difference between claims of negative and positive rights. It is a point that Doyle ignores. I doubt that he or anyone else would contest my claim that for assertions of positive rights to be meaningful, the types of questions I mentioned must be addressed.

Marriage

Fourth, Doyle’s treatment of my arguments about what marriage is—and isn’t—is odd. He doesn’t offer any criticism of my arguments or even address them in any substantive respect. Instead, he dismisses them—and dismisses them in a curious way, especially (as we shall see) for someone who dedicates himself to fighting against the death penalty.

Doyle allows that I’ve put the advocates of redefining marriage to include same-sex partners in a tough spot by challenging them to, among other things, identify a basis of principle consistent with their rejection of the conjugal conception of marriage for understanding marriage as inherently involving two persons, as opposed to three or more in polyamorous sexual partnerships. And he notes that those advocates have “side-stepped” the problem “until now.” But he doesn’t suggest how they might actually respond to my challenge. Nor does he offer any criticism of my philosophical defense of the conjugal conception of marriage or my criticism of the revisionist alternative conception of marriage as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership.

Instead, he says this:

For many Americans, George’s marital metaphysic will stand up poorly next to the reality—just down the block or a few family relations away—of a committed gay couple with children. So take or leave George’s argument that a same-sex marriage cannot be a genuine marriage.

This simply will not do. My actual arguments either are successful or they are not. Doyle vaguely suggests that they are not, but he does so without taking a clear position, much less defending it. That this is unsatisfactory in a review would be clear enough to Doyle if we switched the topic from marriage to the death penalty. Doyle has devoted his career to making arguments—serious and well-informed arguments—against capital punishment. But whatever their ultimate merit, it would simply not do for a critic to say something like this:

For many Americans, Doyle’s metaphysic of the inalienable dignity of the life even of a wanton murderer will stand up poorly next to the reality—for some right in the neighborhood, and sometimes even in the family—of young men who have been gunned down in the streets and girls who have been brutally raped and then killed by their assailants. Most Americans fully accept the death penalty for such crimes, and there are countless family members for whom the execution of the perpetrator is essential to emotional well-being and a sense of justice and closure. So take or leave Doyle’s argument that the death penalty is morally wrong.

Conscience and Its Protections

Fifth, let’s turn to that big error I mentioned at the beginning. Doyle claims that while I “plead powerfully for the claims of conscience” of those with whose judgments in conscience I agree, I am “non-committal” or “send signals in different directions” when it comes to consciences that I believe are formed incorrectly. But that is the reverse of the truth—manifestly so. In fact, I do not think I could possibly have made clearer my view of the importance of respecting and protecting the rights of conscience even of those with whose judgments of duty I disagree.

Let’s take an example. I am, to say the least, not especially sympathetic to atheism. Still, here is what I say about the conscience rights of atheists in Conscience and Its Enemies:

Respect for the good of religion requires that civil authority respect (and, in appropriate ways, even nurture) conditions or circumstances in which people can engage in the sincere religious quest and live lives of authenticity reflecting their best judgments as to the truth of spiritual matters. To compel an atheist to perform acts that are premised on theistic beliefs that he cannot, in good conscience, share, is to deny him the fundamental bit of the good of religion that is his, namely, living with honesty and integrity in line with his best judgments about ultimate reality. Coercing him to perform religious acts does him no good, since faith really must be free, and dishonors his dignity as a free and rational person. The violation of liberty is worse than futile.

I make clear here and elsewhere that I utterly reject the “error has no rights” view in the name of which radical traditionalist (“rad trad”) Catholics reject the robust conception of religious freedom set forth by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in the great declaration Dignitatis Humanae. In fact, I make my view on this point so clear in so many places, that I was initially puzzled at how Doyle could suppose that I was “non-committal” on the rights of people with erroneously formed consciences.

Reading on, though, the basis of Doyle’s error came into focus for me. He must have missed, or in any event he clearly missed the point of, Chapter Ten, entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty . . . and Conscience.” Evidently failing to notice my distinction—drawn from Newman—between the traditional conception of conscience as a “stern monitor” imposing duties we must fulfill whether they are in line with our preferences and desires or not, and the modern autonomy-based liberal idea of conscience as “self-will” grounding a right to do as one pleases, whatever one pleases, so long as there is no direct or palpable harm to others, Doyle supposes that I should be on the side of the liberals concerning the legal regulation of allegedly self-regarding immoralities.

In that chapter—which contrasts the conceptions of liberty and conscience held by John Stuart Mill with those held by John Henry Newman—I go to great lengths to explain the competing views and say why I think it is a mistake to conceive conscience as licensing conduct rather than imposing obligations:

Conscience, as Newman understood it, is the very opposite of “autonomy” in the modern liberal sense. It is not a writer of permission slips. It is not in the business of licensing us to do as we please or conferring on us (in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court) “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Rather, conscience is one’s last best judgment specifying the bearing of moral principles one grasps, yet in no way makes up for oneself, on concrete proposals for action. Conscience identifies one’s duties under the moral law. It speaks of what one must do and what one must not do. Understood in this way, conscience is indeed what Newman said it is: a stern monitor.

Contrast this understanding of conscience with what Newman condemns as its counterfeit. Conscience as “self-will” is a matter of feeling or emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with the identification of what one has a duty to do or not do, one’s feelings and desires to the contrary notwithstanding, but rather with sorting out one’s feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn’t feel bad about doing it—or at least one doesn’t feel so bad about doing it that one prefers the alternative of not doing it.

I’m with Newman. His key distinction is between conscience, authentically understood, and self-will—conscience as the permissions department. His core insight is that conscience has rights because it has duties. The right to follow one’s conscience, and the obligation to respect conscience—especially in matters of faith, where the right of conscience takes the form of religious liberty of individuals and communities of faith—obtain not because people as autonomous agents should be able to do as they please; they obtain, and are stringent and sometimes overriding, because people have duties and the obligation to fulfill them. The duty to follow conscience is a duty to do things or refrain from doing things not because one wants to follow one’s duty but even if one strongly does not want to follow it. The right of conscience is a right to do what one judges oneself to be under an obligation to do, whether one welcomes the obligation or must overcome strong aversion in order to fulfill it. If there is a form of words that sums up the antithesis of Newman’s view of conscience as a stern monitor, it is the imbecilic slogan that will forever stand as a verbal monument to the so-called me generation: “If it feels good, do it.”

Now, Doyle has every right to disagree with me about the superiority of Newman’s conception of conscience as duty-imposing to what, following Newman, I argue is its counterfeit: “conscience” as “self-will,” licensing the subject to do as he or she pleases. But he should be clear that what I oppose is conscience-as-license—and not respect for the good-faith conclusions about duty of people whose moral or theological judgments and beliefs I reject.

Doyle seems to have missed the critical distinction between these two conceptions of conscience altogether. But it is a distinction that is at the heart of Conscience and Its Enemies. Had he noticed it, he would not have supposed I was “non-committal” on the need to respect the consciences of those with whom I disagree. He would have seen that I am committed to an understanding of conscience, and the rights of conscience, that is very different from the one he himself, I gather, holds.

Why We Should Respect Someone Else’s Conscience - by Anthony Esolen

In Crisis 

The scene is from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.  The callow young sociology professor, Mark Studdock, an atheist and a social climber, has been detained in a cubicle deliberately fashioned with odd annoying angles and not-quite-right pictures on the wall.  His detainers aim to break down in him any last sense of the inner harmony between beauty and the moral good, or even between ordinary presentability and decency.  The fight is for the man’s soul.

His instructor presents him with a crucifix and asks him to tread upon it.  It’s a meaningless act, he says.  It isn’t a man, only a cheap piece of carved wood.  There is no moral import to it.  But something in the young man recoils.  He does not believe there was anything special about Jesus.  As far as he knows, Jesus was only a man condemned to a shameful death by his enemies, on a trumped-up political charge.  And all of Jesus’ friends abandoned him on Calvary, and all of the intellectual people that matter to him in England have long abandoned him too.  But for that very reason, to tread upon the crucifix seems base.  Why add that last small act of shaming to all the rest?  The still small voice speaks to him, saying, “This would be foul, petty, ignoble.  You must not do this.”  If he complies, as far as he knows, his career is made.  If he refuses, his career is shot.  He’s a married man, and he’s ambitious, and he needs the money.  It’s only a piece of wood.  The meaning of his life hangs in the balance.  Nor can we ever be sure that a man who betrays so clear a prohibition issued by his conscience will be given that choice again, to undo the evil.

He refuses.

These days in our political and even ecclesiastical battles we hear a great deal about the primacy of the conscience, but almost nothing about what the conscience is and why we should care, not about our own conscience, but about someone else’s.  Robert George, in his new book Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (ISI Books), aims to supply the lack.  He reminds us that conscience is, to use Newman’s words, a “stern monitor,” not, as David Hume asserts, much to the comfort of adolescents everywhere, the ratiocinative faculty by which we construct “justifications” for what we wanted to do (or to get out of doing) in the first place.  Rather, the conscience warns us of what we must do and of what we must not do.  “The duty to follow conscience,” George writes, “is a duty to do things or refrain from doing things not because one wants to follow one’s duty but even if one strongly does not want to follow it.  The right of conscience is a right to do what one judges oneself to be under obligation to do, whether one welcomes the obligation or must overcome strong aversion to fulfill it.”

In other words, as George notes, conscience is not a “permissions department.”   It commands and proscribes; and that’s why we spend so much effort trying to circumvent it, muddle it, or stifle it altogether.  Mark Twain gives us a humorous instance of it when Huck Finn must decide whether to rat on the runaway slave Jim or to protect him.  Huck “knows,” in an exterior way, from common chatter, that the “right” thing to do would be to betray his friend and profit by it, but something deep inside him tells him no, and so he too refuses, even though he figures that he’ll probably end up in hell for it.

 

When someone says, “I may do this, because my conscience doesn’t forbid me,” he is treating an absence as a presence.  He feels no command or proscription, and transmutes that insensibility into a proof that what he wants is permissible.  But that doesn’t follow.  It may be morally permissible; it may be downright virtuous; but it may be wicked.  Many an SS officer’s conscience was comfortably silent on the issue of slaughtering Jews.  People steeped in evil may even hug themselves for the benefits their evil confers upon mankind.  So it is that snuffing out the lives of unborn children, in the minds of some, is more than permissible: it is a great and glorious good, to be celebrated with cake and icing.  Conscience can be unformed or deformed; conscience does not determine what is good or evil, but must hearken to the truth of the matter, even if the person cannot articulate just why he must do what he would prefer to leave undone, or why he must not do what he would dearly like to do.

We are not obliged to respect a man’s permission slips.  We are not obliged to throw the hedonist his party.  We are not obliged to buy the adolescent’s toys, or even to stock our shelves with them.  Indeed, when someone asserts that he ought to be allowed to do something because he wants to do it, and because he doesn’t hear the voice of conscience warning against it—he wants to use cocaine, he and his enemy want to engage in a duel, he likes pornography—we needn’t give much standing to his feelings.  His permission slip puts the matter on the table, that’s all.  We need to ask about the nature of what he wants, whether it is indeed morally neutral, or virtuous, or vicious, whether allowing it conduces to the common good.  But it is a different matter entirely when that man’s monitor does speak, “Thou shalt!” and “Thou shalt not!”

Why is that?  Is it because then his preferences or repugnancies are especially strong?  Your dog may have a strong desire to snitch food from a guest’s plate, but we aren’t overriding his conscience when we keep him from doing it.  He may have a strong aversion against going outside in the pouring rain to do his business, but we aren’t shackling his moral sensibility when we make him go out anyway.  That’s because the dog is not a moral agent.  He does not apprehend the good and internalize it, making it his own, allowing it to inform his choices, to build his personality.  We might say that he knows “rules” but not law.

But man is a moral agent.  That isn’t just something accidental to man, as for instance that he has five fingers on a hand and not six.  It is essential to his being.  It isn’t just Christians who believe that.  All the great pagans did also.  It’s why the poet Hesiod says that the Muses, daughters of Zeus, grant to the man they favor the wisdom to craft straight judgments—we might say beautiful judgments, right verdicts—and the eloquence to persuade others of their rightness.

To forbid someone to do what his conscience commands him to do, or, worse still, to compel him to do what his conscience instructs him he must not do, is thus to work violence upon him at the core of his being.  It is not the same as when we restrain people from the evils that their consciences, dormant, silent, do not tell them they must not do, or when, more rarely and with a heavier burden of justification upon us, we compel them to do something which their consciences do not tell them they must do.  For then we are not violating an express decree of the conscience; we are supplying the lack of one.  We may even, but most rarely and with an extraordinarily heavy burden of justification, overrule another man’s conscience, not by compelling him, but by taking the reins ourselves and doing what he will not do; that’s the case when we give blood transfusions to infants in imminent danger of death, over the wishes of parents who object.

But no man has the right to require another to be less than a man, to demote him to the status of a non-moral agent, like a beast, or a cog in a machine.  No man may steal my humanity, by demanding treason against that stern monitor, my conscience.  But this is exactly what is happening before our eyes, in what used to be a free country.  We are demanding obeisance to and participation in things that until eleven o’clock last night almost everyone (and all Christians and observant Jews) believed to be evil, and believed it with strong reasons prescinding from the nature of man and from revelation.

The “enemies of conscience,” as Professor George calls them, simultaneously and incoherently deny the existence of moral truths that bind the conscience—other people’s consciences, while they reserve for themselves a moral right to bind and loose those other people, mechanically, pragmatically, to bring about some vague ideal society.  In such a world, everyone is a god or an ant, but not a man.  More to follow.

Courageous MP thrown out of Irish government for refusing to back legal abortion - by Peter Saunders

July 13, 2013 (PJSaunders) - Ireland's Europe minister quit last Thursday over plans to legalise abortion as Prime Minister Enda Kenny pressed ahead with legislation that has polarised the country.

Kenny has provoked a strong backlash by pushing for access to abortion when a woman threatens suicide, a move that opponents say could easily open the floodgates to abortion on demand.

Lucinda Creighton, once tipped as a possible leader of the Fine Gael party, was automatically expelled from its grouping in parliament for voting against an amendment to the new law and will now lose her role as minister for European affairs.

‘When it comes to something that is essentially a matter of life and death, I think it is not really possible to compromise,’ Creighton told state broadcaster RTE after the vote.

Ireland’s lower house of parliament passed the bill by 127 votes to 31 and acceptance in the upper house is considered by many now to be a formality.

Under the new bill abortions will be legal if ‘there is a real and substantial risk of loss of the woman’s life by way of suicide’ and if an abortion is the only way of averting the suicide. Three doctors must sign off on each case. No time limits are mentioned in the legislation.

Ms Creighton objected vehemently to this clause. She argued that it was unworkable and ‘has the potential to normalise suicidal ideation by enshrining suicide on our statute book for the first time’.

After the vote Ms Creighton said that she was very sad to be forced out of the party. But in a lengthy apologia, Ms Creighton told the Dail that she was not a ‘pro-life campaigner’ but that that abortion was not a ‘liberal’ cause. It was ‘a tool for the oppression of women’. She also disavowed a religious motivation for her principled stand:

‘There is an emerging consensus in Ireland which suggests that having a sense of morality has something to do with the Catholic Church…. This is deeply worrying. It is a lazy way of attempting to undermine the worth of an argument, without actually dealing with the substance. This is not just a Catholic issue, any more than it is a Protestant or Muslim issue. This is not a religious issue. It is a human rights issue… We all have the right to conscientious objection. It is enshrined in Article 18 of the United Nations, Universal Declaration on Human Rights.’

Martin Luther King Jr's argued in his influential ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ - written 50 years ago in April 1963 – that conscience was the lodestar of an honourable man.

Professor John Wyatt has defended its use in medicine saying that ‘the right of conscience helps to preserve the moral integrity of the individual clinician, preserves the distinctive characteristics and reputation of medicine as a profession, acts as a safeguard against coercive state power, and provides protection from discrimination for those with minority ethical beliefs.’

But the right of conscientious objection is increasingly coming under attack from a number of prominent ethicists and writers. According to Oxford Professor Julian Savalescu, a prominent bioethicist:

Click "like" if you are PRO-LIFE!

'A doctor's conscience has little place in the delivery of modern medical care… If people are not prepared to offer legally permitted, efficient and beneficial care to a patient because it conflicts with their values, they should not be doctors’.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine similarly stated:

'As the gate-keepers to medicine, physicians and other health care providers have an obligation to choose specialties that are not moral minefields for them. Do you have qualms about abortion, sterilization and birth control - do not practice women’s health.’  

As I have previously argued there is a strong biblical precedent for the exercise of conscience when governing authorities act to threaten innocent human life.

The Hebrew midwives when ordered by the king of Egypt to kill all male Hebrew children refused to do so and as a result we are told that God commended and rewarded them (Exodus 1:15-22).

Rahab the harlot similarly refused to co-operate with the king of Jericho in handing over the innocent Israelite spies (Joshua 2:1-14). She is later praised for her faith in so doing (Hebrews 11:31; Jas 2:25).
Moreover conscience was often exercised at great personal cost.

The prospect of death as a consequence of disobedience to state law did not stop Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refusing to bow down to the image (Daniel 4:6-8), or Daniel persisting with public prayer (Daniel 6:1-10). They were defiant.
In the New Testament when Peter and John were commanded by the Jewish authorities not to preach the Gospel they replied,  'We must obey God rather than men' and went right on doing it (Acts 5:29).

As Ms Creighton has argued, abortion is not just an issue that concerns Christians.

It also runs counter to the Hippocratic Oath, the Declaration of Geneva, the International Code of Medical Ethics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In fact the British Medical Association once called it ‘the greatest crime’.

Ms Creighton is to be commended for her courageous stand. What a shame that more did not stand with her.

Pierde empleo por rechazar investigar células de bebés asesinados en aborto

ROMA, 21 Ago. 12 / 12:15 am (ACI).- El Dr. Thomas Sardella, especialista en Ciencias Biológicas, licenciado en la Universidad de Roma - Tor Vergata, perdió su empleo en la Universidad de Glasgow (Reino Unido) como asistente de investigación, tras negarse a participar en un estudio que usaba células de un niño abortado.

En una entrevista realizada por John Smeaton para la Sociedad para la Protección de los Niños  No-nacidos (SPUC, por sus siglas en inglés), publicada el 17 de agosto, el Dr. Sardella señaló que ante el requisito de utilizar el tejido de niños abortados a los ocho meses para un estudio científico, “me decidí a perder mi empleo”.

“¿Cómo podía convencerme que estos seres humanos de ocho semanas no tenían el derecho de vivir, y que mi carrera, mi salario y mi familia eran más importantes que sus vidas?” se cuestionó.

Tras un corte en el presupuesto, el grupo del Dr. Sardella se unió a otro equipo de investigación de San Diego (Estados Unidos). El estudio conjunto le daría al científico unos seis meses más de estabilidad laboral.

“Aún recuerdo cuando leí el e-mail enviado de San Diego acerca del requisito de aborto humano en esta colaboración. Me recosté en la silla con un sentimiento de repulsa y me dije que no podía hacer esto ni lo haría”, dijo el científico a John Smeaton.

El Dr. Sardella señaló que si bien él “no iba a estar directamente involucrado en el aborto, pero ¿cómo hubiese podido mirar por el microscopio olvidando que esas células se tomaron del niño junto con la vida de él o de ella?”.

El médico recordó que en la tarde del día en que recibió la información sobre la que sería la investigación conjunta con el grupo estadounidense, consultó junto a su esposa, que estudió Bioética, textos al respecto y confirmó que su posición fue la correcta.

“Consultamos libros italianos de bioética que aseveraban que yo me hubiera hecho colaborador pasivo y remoto del procedimiento abortivo; esa es la razón por la que no podía evitar sentirme tan mal”, señaló.

“Si estamos de acuerdo que está mal matar a un ser humano, un miembro de la especie homo sapiens, entonces hemos de preguntarnos cuándo nos hacemos homo sapiens. Para cada organismo del reino animal es la misma respuesta: cuando una célula de esperma fertiliza al huevo de la misma especie, cualquier zoólogo o embriólogo afirmará que un nuevo organismo es concebido”, dijo.

El científico explicó que “cuando un huevo humano es fertilizado por una célula de esperma humana no hay nada que podemos hacer para parar al nuevo embrión de ser parte de nuestra especie. El nuevo individuo debe considerarse un ser humano”.

Tras perder su empleo, el Dr. Sardella se ha dedicado a dar charlas en distintos ámbitos sobre la realidad del aborto, y se sorprendió que muchos jóvenes “verdaderamente no tenían ni idea de lo que es un aborto y de cómo se lleva a cabo”.

“Algunos alumnos también me vinieron a decir que su opinión del aborto se había cambiado totalmente, así que me dije que ‘si me he perdido el empleo justo para salvar una vida, entonces mereció la pena’”, señaló.

El científico lamentó que muchas personas, incluyendo colegas suyos, “consideran a la ciencia como una entidad superior y motor immobilis que guía las decisiones del género humano”.

“Ciencia es tan sólo una palabra, del latín scientia que significa conocimiento. El conocimiento no posee una conciencia. Es el científico el que tiene una conciencia y una ética que guía sus pensamientos y decisiones”, subrayó.

El Dr. Sardella subrayó que “primero viene la vida, y entonces en segundo lugar vienen las mejoras a la misma. Es inadmisible considerar como un consumible una vida humana y utilizarla en programas de investigación para el hipotético mejoramiento de las vidas de los demás”.

El científico, emocionado, aseguró que a pesar de las dificultades económicas que enfrentaron, “una sencilla elección vino a ser una revisión de mi vida y mis creencias, un momento de verdadera unidad con mi esposa y familia”.

“Si uno elige blanco, aunque perezca irracional en el ese momento, aunque la montaña que uno ha de escalar parezca tan alta, uno está abriendo los brazos a mucha más felicidad de lo que uno jamás hubiese podido planear”.

Para leer la entrevista completa puede ingresar a http://www.hazteoir.org/noticia/47550-perdio-su-empleo-no-querer-investigar-celulas-abortos-provocados

Itália: Il Comitato Nazionale di Bioetica ribadisce che l'obiezione di coscienza è un diritto inviolabile

di Antonio Gaspari

ROMA, martedì, 31 luglio 2012 (ZENIT.org) - “L'obiezione di coscienza in bioetica è costituzionalmente fondata (con riferimento ai diritti inviolabili dell'uomo) e va esercitata in modo sostenibile”, così conclude il documento del Comitato Nazionale di Bioetica (CNB) pubblicato in rete dalla Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri il 30 di luglio 2012 (http://www.governo.it/bioetica/pdf/Obiezione_coscienza.pdf)

L’Obiezione di Coscienza (odc), spiega il documento della CNB “costituisce un diritto della persona e un'istituzione democratica necessaria a tenere vivo il senso della problematicità riguardo ai limiti della tutela dei diritti inviolabili”. 

Nella presentazione del Documento, il Presidente del CNB, prof. Francesco Paolo Casavola, ha scritto che “col voto favorevole di tutti e un solo astenuto (…) l’obiezione di coscienza in bioetica è un diritto costituzionalmente fondato (con riferimento ai diritti inviolabili dell’uomo), costituisce un'istituzione democratica, in quanto preserva il carattere problematico delle questioni inerenti alla tutela dei diritti fondamentali senza vincolarle in modo assoluto al potere delle maggioranze, e va esercitata in modo sostenibile”.

“Perciò – ha aggiunto il Presidente - la tutela giuridica dell’obiezione di coscienza non deve limitare né rendere più gravoso l’esercizio di diritti riconosciuti per legge né indebolire i vincoli di solidarietà derivanti dalla comune appartenenza al corpo sociale”.

“Nella tutela dell’obiezione di coscienza, che discende dal suo essere costituzionalmente fondata, - ha sottolineato il prof. Casavola - si devono prevedere misure adeguate a garantire l’erogazione dei servizi, con attenzione a non discriminare né gli obiettori né i non obiettori, e quindi un’organizzazione delle mansioni e del reclutamento che possa equilibrare, sulla base dei dati disponibili, obiettori e non”.

In allegato alle conclusioni del Documento della CNB la Prof.ssa Assuntina Morresi spiega che “i contenuti del documento hanno valenza generale e riferibile a qualsiasi caso in cui può essere invocata l’odc”.

In merito alle critiche rivolte agli obiettori di coscienza in relazione alle pratiche di interruzione volontaria di gravidanza (ivg), la Morresi ha precisato che “dall’esame dei dati disponibili, a tutt’oggi, è evidente che non esistono correlazioni fra numero di obiettori di coscienza e tempi di attesa delle donne che accedono all’ivg, ma che le modalità di accesso all’ivg dipendono dall’organizzazione delle singole regioni”.

La Morresi ha mostrato chiaramente che “sulla base dei dati disponibili si vede come in alcune regioni all’aumentare degli obiettori di coscienza diminuiscano i tempi di attesa delle donne, e, viceversa, in altre regioni al diminuire del numero di obiettori aumentino i tempi di attesa, contrariamente a quanto si potrebbe immaginare”.

“In altre parole - ha concluso - cnon è il numero di obiettori di per sé a determinare l’accesso all’ivg, ma il modo in cui le strutture sanitarie si organizzano nell’applicazione della legge 194/78”. 

E' possibile consultare il testo completo del Documento del CNB cliccando sul link:
http://www.governo.it/bioetica/pdf/Obiezione_coscienza.pdf