Personally opposed, but...
Jr, David R Carlin
OF SEVERAL MINDS David Carlin PERSONALLY OPPOSED, BUT... A MORALLY NEUTRAL STATE I am personally opposed to abortion, but...." This line has been a favorite in recent times among many...
...It allows them to conform to the church's teaching on abortion while at the same time respecting a woman's privacy in the abortion decision-making process...
...The bottom line is this...
...In particular it is reflected in its theory of politics and the state, which has taken its shape and direction from the classical theorists of law and government, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics...
...Of course the bishops could respond that abortion ought to be legislated against even on the modern theory, since abortion involves injury, indeed death, to an innocent victim, namely the unborn...
...In defiance of the new reality, the attempt was made to think of the vast empire as but an enlarged city...
...When hurling epithets, the critics often describe the intervention of the bishops as "medieval...
...But the American Catholic bishops collectively, not to mention certain conspicuous individual bishops, have been very sharp in their criticism of this "I am personally opposed...
...Not only are the bishops asking that government legislate morality...
...There have been notable thinkers who championed this view of the limited state: Locke, the American Founding Fathers, Bentham, J.S...
...and you should not hesitate to use insights provided by your Catholic religion to further this project...
...It should always be borne in mind that the Catholic church is a product of the Roman-Hellenic world of antiquity...
...This is plainly reflected in its organization and to a great extent even in its doctrine...
...We have decided that we can share a common morality even when we do not share a common religion, and we can share a common government even when we do not share a common morality...
...The politicians in question are saying in effect: "Government is one thing...
...For anyone who thinks in terms of the modern, not the classical, theory of the state, the position of the Catholic bishops is especially offensive...
...no matter how improbable the enterprise, the goal of government was still said to be the promotion of moral virtue...
...But the chances of doing this in the foreseeable future are, needless to say, exceedingly slim...
...A close reading of these theorists reveals that they were far from indifferent to the promotion of moral virtue...
...But it is a proper and important function of government to promote moral goodness...
...or a morality which undermines the very basis of morality by treating people as children, not autonomous adults...
...Equally slim, therefore, are the chances of the bishops prevailing in the abortion controversy...
...This dispute between the politicians and the bishops raises questions that go far beyond the abortion issue...
...Mill...
...and certainly it is not my job, as a Catholic who happens to be a governor or legislator, to use government to impose my Catholic morality on others, no matter how deeply I may personally feel that this morality is sound and true...
...even less is it the job of government to tell me what my religion ought to be...
...or a morality which people are incapable of receiving because of their bad habits, prejudices, or state of historical development...
...In this highly differentiated world, it is not the job of government to be my moral tutor...
...During a lull in the protracted civil war that raged throughout most of the first century B.C., Cicero, for example, was able to write that Rome was the embodiment of the Stoic ideal of the world-city, the city of God...
...The abortion debate has to do with much more than abortion, and among those other things is the question of the relationship between government and morality...
...This is not to say that government should promote a Utopian morality...
...In recent centuries, politics, morality, and religion have been differentiated from one another...
...This theory followed almost inevitably from the nature of the ancient polis or civitas (words usually rendered in English as "city-state" but which really ought to be translated "city-state-church"), a small, intimate community in which politics, morality, and religion had not yet been differentiated from one another...
...It is not the job of government to legislate morality...
...To which the bishops respond by saying: "Wrong on all counts...
...But while this is a logically sound response, it is a response which is much more readily received by one who holds the classical theory than by one who holds the modern theory...
...but their emphasis fell on pluralism, tolerance, and the limits of state power, not on morality, with the result that their historical impact, regardless of intention, has been to advance the idea of the morally neutral state...
...According to the classical theory politics is an essentially ethical enterprise, not simply in the sense that public servants ought to perform their official duties in an ethical manner, but in the more important sense that the great goal of government ought to be the development of citizens of good moral character...
...It assumes too radical a distinction, the bishops have argued, between the political realm and the moral realm...
...So goes the popular theory...
...The modern liberal-democratic theory of government is quite different from this...
...morality is another...
...for the modern theory, indifferent though it may be to morality in general, is not indifferent to injuries to the rights of others...
...Your distinction between morality and government, while valid up to a point, is too hard and fast...
...At bottom, their dispute is a philosophical disagreement having to do with the very nature of government...
...If the anti-abortion forces are to prevail, it may well be that they will first have to persuade our society to abandon the modern theory of this relationship and adopt the classical theory...
...This line has been a favorite in recent times among many American Catholic politicians...
...Well, it's more than medieval-it's positively ancient...
...Morality is one of the great objects of government...
...So deeply did the classical theory embed itself in the ancient mind that even when the Roman Empire had swallowed up all the once-autonomous cities of the Mediterranean world, this habit of thought persisted...
...A MORALLY NEUTRAL STATE I am personally opposed to abortion, but...
...Old Cicero is not likely to rise from the dead anytime soon.rom the dead anytime soon...
...It has the further merit, at least for those politicians hoping to appeal to a more or less liberal-feminist constituency, of helping win votes on election day...
...they are even asking, it seems to the critics, that government legislate religion, or at least legislate a religious morality based on religious motives...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
