The problem had surfaced several years back, with the Inspector General’s office issuing a memorandum in November 2007 recommending clarification of the prohibition against downloading pornographic materials at work, reminders of the penalties for doing so, and a revised warning message designed to pop up on a computer screen when the filtering software made a catch. A further memorandum the following March recommended adopting new technology to keep employees from turning off the filters, and while it is not clear from the website whether either set of recommendations was adopted, the memos do indicate that viewing pornography at the SEC did not consist of isolated incidents. Of course, just because the SEC captured the headlines there is no reason to suppose that work-time pornography viewing was any more common at the SEC than elsewhere in government. There are cases in the public record of such incidents happening at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and the Treasury. The 31 probes over five years among 3,500 SEC employees hardly suggests more frequent usage than the 16% of male employees in the general population who admit to viewing internet pornography at work, according to one web security firm.

Still, it is easy to see why the report about the SEC made news: Here is an agency of government that notoriously failed to prevent serious mishap in the business it was charged to regulate, now showing itself, or at least a significant number of its leadership, not only incompetent but distracted—and not only distracted, but obsessed. No one has proven a connection between negligence and pornography use, but neither have the violations been treated as merely involving private use of computers on government time, as though someone needed reprimanding for spending too much of the day on Facebook. One redacted report available on the web shows an employee confessing to having downloaded pornography, initially saying he did so occasionally to relieve stress, then recounting his shame and lack of self-control—a typical profile, according to what I have seen of the psychological literature. No one has said, though perhaps some have thought, that it might not be accidental that those who consume the exploitation of sexuality by pornographers failed to recognize the financial exploitation which, in various ways, seems to have been responsible for the crash.

But the SEC pornography scandal should prompt us to ask the larger question: What is the role of the market in pornography? Most pornography that depicts only adults is legal or permitted in most jurisdictions in the United States today. This is due in part because the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of obscenity in the 1960s and accorded First Amendment protection to sexual expression outside those narrow limits. It is also partly due to the fact that, since the Clinton Administration, very little has been done to prosecute pornographers whose materials did not involve children. Despite these facts, there is still enough shame and secrecy attached to the business that reliable estimates of its size are hard to discover. One recent study suggests that the market for internet pornography alone sustains a $2.5 billion per year industry—and this when upward of three-quarters of pornography users report they access only what is available for free. There are several peculiarities to note about the pornography market. If illegal child pornography is sold alongside permitted porn, then the whole marketing arrangement probably includes some elements of “black market” behavior. At least it can be noted that, unlike many other markets, there is little in the way of a “mixed market” in pornography, where government subsidies or incentives structure what is bought and sold. In some respects the market apparently operates like other markets where the product induces addictive behavior—and thereby gives rise to a secondary market for materials that can break the addiction.

Curiously, perhaps because free market ideology reemerged in the immediate aftermath of the sexual revolution, modern market libertarians tend to take a laissez-faire approach to pornography. Ludwig von Mises himself had written, “Economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgment of value,” and for such economists it is a standard exercise to calculate how a market in sex, i.e. prostitution, would operate. In America that market is, except in a county or two in Nevada, still suppressed, but the market in pornography is the closest thing. Indeed, regarding the internet, a sort of lore has grown up that, from its beginnings, the market for pornography has driven technology’s pursuit of better images and hence of quicker and more powerful computers and more extensive bandwidth. It certainly seems as though, in the individuals accustomed to seeking all sorts of gratification through their computers, the use of pornography to “relieve stress” is a perfect, if perverse, denouement.

Coincidentally, during the week that saw the announcement of the report on pornography use at the SEC there also surfaced a comment from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, defending his company’s ban of pornography “apps” for iPhone and other Apple products. Apologizing to a user for mistakenly rejecting an app with a controversial political cartoon, Jobs added, “However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone,” (Android is the comparable product of his new competitor, Google). The Wired article relaying the comment interprets “Jobs’ opposition to porn [as] loud and clear,” but adds no reasons from Jobs for his opposition: Is his a moral objection to pornography, a purely aesthetic distaste, concern about his company’s branding, concern about its market with the parents of young teens getting their first phone, or some combination of all these? The response of many geeks was instantaneous and predictable: Don’t tell me what I can and cannot watch, that’s why I’ll never buy Apple, “The web is about openness. It’s about freedom.” For whatever reason, Jobs seems unyielding and his company vigilant. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition passes muster, even Playboy without nudity and a reader for the iPhone that allows downloading of the ancient Kama Sutra are allowed, but try to sneak pornographic images into an approved app and iTunes will cut you off.

What are we to make of all this? First, the report of heavy pornography use at the SEC is an important reminder that the vices to which human nature is subject do not dissolve when a person enters government service, and thus that the temptation to respond to every problem with a call for expanded rules and regulations ought to be resisted. There is not today a separate culture of government, devoted to virtue, while the market is flooded with vice. Second, one can applaud the SEC Inspector General for his investigation, and particularly for the clear condemnation of downloading pornography or other sexually explicit materials as a specific wrongful use of government computers, not only a generalized waste of time. Third, one can commend Steve Jobs for steadfastly refusing to allow Apple to become a platform for easy access to pornography, and commend him as well for showing that this can be done through determined business leadership, without recourse to government regulation that can threaten legitimate freedom and impose its own social costs.

In the end, though, these policies need to be defended by reasons—in light of the clear exploitation involved in the creation of pornography, of the harm done to individuals who use it and to their families, and of the larger social costs—even when the policies result in the voluntary action of private companies rather than in government coercion. And their defense will draw on the same ideas that defend human freedom itself: an account of the integrity of the human person, of his status as an intelligent and therefore moral being, and of the enhancement of human prospects when people live in a community and share in its civic life. If this is right, then the repair of the breach between social conservatives and libertarians is not just a matter for coalition-building and negotiation, but an occasion for serious reflection and theoretical development. The recovery of a healthy market and the restoration of healthy public morality are not two separate aims but two dimensions in the quest for human freedom. To form the capacity to choose is not to suppress freedom, but to empower it.


James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

So what is public and what is private about health care? Let me start with what is private. Although an infant, newly born and especially unborn, has an interest in his mother’s health, and children an interest in the health of their parents, spouses in each other’s health, and so forth, one’s own health—that is, the condition of one’s body—is about as private a matter as there is. Viewed negatively, a threat to one’s health is a threat to one’s life. Viewed positively, health is generally an element of personal well-being. American law does not accord individuals absolute ownership of our bodies—there is no right to suicide, for example—but we recoil from physical coercion except to punish or prevent crime. Control over one’s own body is almost a matter of inalienable right, something that cannot be taken away from a person. Common sense suggests that, at least in the long run, no one can be made healthy who does not desire health, and if this is so the implications are well worth pondering. As long as people are at liberty, they will risk their health in various ways and for various reasons: from engaging in dangerous forms of work or play, to eating, drinking, and smoking things they enjoy but that endanger their long-term health, to neglecting their health when in thrall to some other activity, such as love or study. Some of these reasons are better than others, and some might be downright irresponsible, but it is undeniable that choices about health are intertwined with the most important choices we make about how to live our lives, the choices that shape our identity. Americans’ insistence on a substantial element of choice in any health policy thus is not a matter of arbitrary preference or consumer taste; it derives from our sense of the intimately private or personal character of concern for the health of one’s own body and for liberty in its use.

What, then, is the public dimension of health? In part, it arises from the obligations we have to one another, which can be undercut if the health of one party fails. The unborn child dies with his mother if not delivered; the newborn and all young children need constant attention to insure healthy development, and no small part of family life is devoted to providing this. I mentioned the interest of spouses in each other’s health—the traditional wedding vow is explicit about this—but the circle of interest extends throughout the world of human relationships, beyond family and friends. Indeed, employers have an interest in the health of their employees, and, if the media attention to Steve Jobs’ condition is any indication, investors have an interest in the health of those who manage enterprises that bring a good return. In large part, public health involves those matters in which our private health is commonly affected; many diseases are communicable, and the conditions of the physical environment—the availability of clean air and water, of healthy food and of medicine—have always been recognized as matters in need of public attention. In other words, if no one can be made healthy without his own consent, no one can achieve health all by himself, unless in extremely fortunate circumstances. Besides, everyone is utterly dependent on others in childhood, and few even of the generally healthy go through life without ever needing to place themselves during moments of illness in another’s hands. And this indicates a third reason for public involvement: the responsibility we have towards the communities of which we are a part.

If health—and so, by extension health care—has both a private and a public dimension, is there anything universal about it? There is, I think, and it is rooted in universal human nature. On the one hand, there is a universal human right to treatment, recognized in the duty of health professionals not to refuse care to those in need. On the other hand, medical knowledge itself is in principle universal, something proven in practice when doctors and nurses jet across borders to serve those in need. There is a delicate reciprocity between a universal right to health care and the knowledge it takes to supply it. It is, after all, only after the advances of modern medicine have become plain to all that the movement for public provision of health care has arisen; what value is there in a right to a medical guess? But it is essential to modern medicine that its knowledge is experimental and dynamic; even for persistent diseases, new treatments are always being developed and tested, and it is now recognized that diseases themselves change to escape the remedies that attack them. It is not as though health care comes packaged as a fixed supply that can be rationally distributed to those in need; any demand of a right to care must include consideration of how to develop the knowledge to supply that care. Except for the very young and the severely disabled, doesn’t any claim of right to care entail a duty to acquire basic knowledge about how to care for oneself? To what level of knowledge does that duty extend? Does it go beyond knowledge of avoiding disease—basic hygiene, for example—to include knowledge about how to enhance one’s strength?

But if modern medicine and a right of access to medical care have a universal dimension, there is much about health and care that is inevitably local. Different cultures and communities have different diets, and these have various consequences for people’s health, sometimes in surprising ways, that are not readily transferable. The French taste for wine with daily meals has been shown to explain their low incidence of heart disease. Leaving aside the question of forming and reforming people’s tastes, it would prove difficult to transfer French eating and drinking habits to an automobile-based culture like the American without creating new risks. Climates and terrain vary, with direct effects on human health and indirect effects through differences in agriculture and commerce. We know enough already about genetically based disease to suspect that different populations need supple and adaptable medical care that is attentive to individual characteristics. Moreover, dietary rules and practices are governed or at least influenced for vast populations by religion, which of course varies across the globe and even around our country; this is just one way in which religion affects health care and health. From invasive examination to various forms of treatment, what counts as standard medical practice in one community may cross religious strictures in another. All religions address questions of life and death, and since a large proportion of modern medical expense is associated with care of the dying, it makes no small difference how a people understands death and its inevitability. And religion, through its encouragement of charity, often provides the motive for individual service in professions like nursing and the spark that distinguishes mere treatment from genuine care. Indeed, whether or not religion is the motive, it is generally true that steady care over the course of a lifetime depends on a particular community in which there are human bonds. A merely universal right to treatment invites bureaucratic indifference, not personal attention.

Where are politics and economics in the midst of all these considerations? Of course most of the current debate is about these in one way or another, and addressing everything that is being said would exceed the confines of this short essay. Even here, however, a few basic points can be made. Because individuals take such an interest in their own health and in the health of their loved ones and families, it makes sense to recognize the nexus of interest in health provision. Of course, this is complex: When a doctor’s fee is dependent on satisfying the patient, there is an incentive to care, but also an incentive to please in a situation where genuine care often requires administering unpleasant medicine. Markets are famously adept at matching consumers’ needs and choices with suppliers’ products and skills—and notoriously clumsy about weeding out those who prey on short-term fears or make fraudulent offers in situations where consumer knowledge is scarce. In medicine, genuine need and ability to pay are often mismatched, and the traditional supply of the deficit by charity—in terms of service and monetary gift—probably does not fit most economic models. The current crisis is not exactly a crisis of care—Medicaid pays for the poor, and laws forbid the denial of treatment—but a crisis of cost and insurance. As economist Arthur Laffer has recently suggested, there are policy proposals that can address these issues while respecting the principles discussed above. Of course the dynamic state of medical knowledge introduces further wrinkles into economic calculations, for experience shows that monetary incentives often succeed in summoning the creativity that devises new treatment, but providing these incentives is something few markets can bear. Isn’t it an open secret that the American market for new drugs, and the willingness of our current system to sustain their prices, is an important engine of medical advancement in recent years—and a sort of gift of American largesse to medical health throughout the world?

As for politics, it is inevitable in the formulation of policy, especially when consensus not only has not congealed but in many respects seems unlikely to any time soon. Americans are not agreed on whether abortion is the unjust taking of a human life or an acceptable medical procedure like any other—and, especially when seen in relation to a whole range of issues concerning human reproduction and the character of death and dying, this means we have fundamental disagreements about what constitutes health and well-being that no merely technical solution can paper over, whether it is bureaucratic or market-based. Since modern health care costs encompass so great a percentage of all economic activity, decisions about the health system necessarily entail decisions about the structure of the whole economy, so even on the question of ends more is involved than health alone. And in the complex structure of American federalism and constitutionalism, where attention to health is traditionally a matter for the police power of the states and receives no mention in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, and where even today medical licenses are issued by the states and most laws defining legal duties are state laws, the politics of health care reform will necessarily be complicated, as indeed should be the case if all voices are to be heard and all interests considered.

These last remarks suggest why the debate over health care in America has proceeded in the way it has, to the frustration of many of the parties directly involved and perhaps to the American people as a whole—but I don’t think they negate the need for some clarity of principle on the issue. Indeed, I think that many of the debates taking place involve one or another of the principles I’ve tried to sketch—the value of individual choice, for example, or the justice of some sort of universal coverage, or the need to preserve the dynamic of medical progress—but “inside the Beltway” the principles get hidden in the instrumental details and are not openly expressed. I don’t suppose that greater clarity about principles will resolve the debate; indeed, it might have the opposite effect of exposing the depth of disagreement. But I think it would help reestablish an atmosphere of good faith, in which each side can acknowledge the legitimacy of the concerns of the other and openly challenge their errors. That, it seems to me, is the precondition for healthy political deliberation.


James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Relations between the disciplines have not always been so distant. Scholastic natural lawyers trained in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas developed defenses of private property and free trade that influenced authors such as Grotius, who in the seventeenth century laid the groundwork of the modern law of nations and thus the basis of modern trade. John Locke subsequently wrote an incisive account of the natural right to property as the source of economic prosperity, and Adam Smith, who wrote a treatise of moral philosophy before authoring The Wealth of Nations, described what he called a system of natural liberty as the matrix of genuine wealth. Although in the nineteenth century both moral philosophy and economics in the English-speaking world developed under the influence of utilitarianism, contemporary theory in both natural-law moral philosophy and economics emphasizes the centrality of the human person and the practical choices he makes concerning human goods or values. In this regard, the question of the relation of natural law to economics is on the one hand the extent to which economic calculations can be based on notions of objective good established by practical moral reason, and on the other hand the extent to which practical judgments by individuals about their good can be informed by an awareness of global consequences.

While conference participants did not arrive at a consensus on these issues, I think it is fair to say that the conversations identified an intellectual space defined by three dimensions. The first involves the question of the rational foundation of inquiry, announced by the opposition between natural law and utilitarianism. Is the measure of good intrinsic to human activities as known by experience and critical reflection, or is the goodness of human actions determined by the sum of their consequences, that is, by their utility? To the natural law philosopher, the utilitarian is needlessly vague in identifying the good, or supposes a commensurability among various goods that does not in fact exist, or defers too readily to subjective claims of good that can be shown with a little reasoning to be mistaken. To the utilitarian, the natural lawyer is peremptory in his pronouncements and inattentive to genuine differences among persons in their subjective experience of goodness. Besides, too complex an account of incommensurable goods precludes analysis of aggregate effects before it begins, though such analysis is obviously needed to explain, for example, the establishment of price equilibria or the behavior of markets. If the distinction between natural law and utilitarianism is fundamental in principle, though, it may not always be unbridgeable in practice. Natural lawyers agree that knowledge of the probable consequences of one’s actions is crucial to sound moral decision-making, denying only that the measure of consequence can guide choice without first examining whether the preferences at issue are morally acceptable. Utilitarian economists, on the other hand, while able to explain the behavior markets in crime and contraband, nevertheless admit the distinction between a legitimate and an illegitimate market based on the nature of the supposed good in the exchange.

A second dimension concerns the form of economic relations and stretches between the free market on the one hand and socialism on the other. Here things are complicated by the fact that natural law and utilitarianism have been invoked in support of both positions. The classic tradition of natural law grew out of a tradition of political philosophy that began with Platonic communism, and although Aristotle’s critique of common property (and Plato’s own recognition in his Laws of its impracticality) quickly became canonical, natural law was traditionally defined in terms of the common good, which seemed to suggest some need for authoritative distribution or redistribution of the wealth of the city, or at the very least for public provision of goods that can be shared by all. Modern natural rights thinking, by contrast, stresses the primacy of individual goods and thus the naturalness of the market, though on some accounts these natural rights prove brittle, yielding to the government instituted to protect rights plenary authority to revise them. Although the differences between classic natural law and modern natural rights can be a source of confusion, several authors bridge this gap: the later scholastics, such as Tomas de Mercado and Francisco de Vitoria, developed a tradition of natural rights based on Thomistic categories that in some ways anticipates Lockean thought, while Scottish Enlightenment authors such as Gershom Carmichael and Francis Hutcheson sought to synthesize or balance Locke and Aquinas. In brief, natural law, far from being a source of doctrinaire prescriptions, is a vital form of practical reasoning, seeking guidance for human action in an understanding of human nature itself—and is no more settled than our knowledge of ourselves.

Globalism versus localism defines the third dimension at issue. Indeed, the precipitant for the conference was a recent article in International Affairs by Harold James of Princeton University suggesting that the friends of global trade and liberalization would find in the discourse of natural law a better guide and guard than in functionalist economics or imperialist realism. Natural law offers an intellectual framework that might facilitate dialogue and exchange among peoples with different, even clashing, cultures, attending to “the fundamental values that follow from our acknowledgement of the intrinsic dignity of humans.” Precisely because it begins with human dignity, much scholarship in natural-law moral philosophy in recent years has concentrated on the rights and duties of the person, particularly those involved in sexual morality and the formation of families. No one who follows these issues will be surprised to learn that differences quickly appeared among conference participants on questions about the impact of the globalizing economy on family life or about the need for families to prepare their children for participation in the larger world. Mediating between the family and the world at large, the state and the various institutions of civil society play important roles in establishing and maintaining moral communities. They bring along, of course, their own traditions and acquire texture from their choices and their circumstances—but, again, natural law reasoning is flexible enough to recognize most of these and in fact to encourage them as the concomitants of liberty. The challenge is to ensure that amidst cultural difference genuine human rights are respected and the commerce and interaction of peoples can flourish in a condition of general peace. Questioning whether this outcome would be better assured by spontaneous market forces and evolving business practice or by expanded institutions of global governance occasioned lively debate.

Lest these latest remarks sound hopelessly utopian, one should remember that the natural law tradition includes an account of just war, not speculation about perpetual peace. Nevertheless, the mood of the conference might be described as cautiously optimistic, despite the enormous economic and political challenges of the current moment. In contrast to the pragmatism, alternately wide-eyed and grim, that seems today to reign in high councils, the natural law tradition seeks out steady principles to steer human action in the midst of rapid change and looks for balanced development rather than spectacular reversal in human affairs. It is neither tolerant of man-made disaster nor expectant of humanly engineered salvation. I have used the metaphor of dimensions that construct imagined space to indicate the room available for research, reflection, deliberation, and choice as we seek to comprehend natural law and formulate economic policy in our contemporary predicament. “No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles,” wrote the revolutionary Virginians in their 1776 Declaration of Rights, in many ways the model for the Declaration of Independence a month later and for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen a decade or more afterwards. Our circumstances and our institutions now are not a little different from theirs then, but the spirit of natural law—jealous of liberty, confident in virtue, attentive to principle—endures. Couple this spirit with evidence—also presented at the conference—of sound economic understanding in a debate among Chinese scholars dating from 81 B.C. and you get a sense of the possibilities that ought to be explored.

James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse. The papers presented at the Natural Law and Economics Conference can be found on-line at the conference website.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

It is about letting scientists . . . do their jobs, free from manipulation and coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda—and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

There is nothing terribly wrong with this formulation of the principle of “scientific integrity”—the term used in an accompanying memorandum—but it raises rather than answers the question of what is the scientist’s job, what are scientific data and decisions, and what is the proper place of politics.

Let’s start by clarifying what we mean by politics, for like most words it is not free from ambiguity. First, we sometimes talk about politics as the struggle over who gets offices and honors and benefits: politics in this sense is likened to a game in which there are players and teams, rules and game-plans, winners and losers, triumphs and defeats. Second, we see politics in deliberation about public policy, in making decisions about the best means to achieve agreed-upon ends; today we generally agree, for example, that we need an economic policy that will ensure the return of prosperity, but our political parties show characteristic differences in the sorts of policy they are inclined to endorse toward that end. Finally, political dispute sometimes reaches beyond issues involving the means to agreed-upon ends to include debate about the ends themselves: Should public policy favor excellence or equity? Should the law encourage justice or protect freedom?

All can agree, I think, that scientific integrity requires that the determination of the truth of facts and causality in matters properly within the domain of scientific inquiry ought to be free from political interference. There might be “politics” in every lab or every agency, but it is the duty of scientists to set considerations of gain and celebrity aside when determining whether a scientific paper ought to be published or whether a scientific theory is true. The standard is evidence and argument, not power and influence, and the evidence and argument ought to be such that it is publicly available and contestable, for in that way error can be discovered and corrected. In deciding whose evidence is best and whose arguments are sound, it should not matter what powerful forces in society wish the truth to be: whether the icecaps are melting; whether if so the cause is human activity (such as burning fossil fuels) or natural events (such as storms on the sun); whether intelligence can be measured and, if so, whether it varies by ethnic group; whether animal embryos are living organisms that develop on their own given favorable conditions or are clumps of cells that behave like cultured tissue. If truth is suppressed because one or the other political team finds it “inconvenient,” to use the President’s language, something has gone wrong.

Things get complicated when we have to deliberate about which means to choose in the formulation of public policy. Here science often has a useful role to play. Sometimes it takes the form of scientific studies that document otherwise uncertain dangers to the public, for example the health risks of tobacco use. Sometimes scientific instruments and technology provide the government with essential tools for important services, for example weather forecasting or space exploration or a thousand military purposes. Sometimes social science evidence informs policy-making, for example economic analysis or the assessment of student achievement. In all these matters it can never be said that science dictates rational policy on its own without additional human judgment.

Whether tobacco harms human health is a scientific question, but whether government should ban its use, ban its advertisement in certain venues, or merely warn the public of its dangers is not a question that can be answered scientifically, only politically. The risks of air or water pollution might be scientifically calculated, but how much risk is acceptable and who should have to bear it are political issues. It is not a political question whether a scientific instrument measures what it is supposed to or executes the operation for which it is designed, but the use to which it should be put and whether its cost is worth its benefit can only be answered by politics. Here the temptations to compromise scientific integrity may be great, but they can in principle be resisted by scientifically literate administrators and an informed public, able to distinguish judgments of fact from judgments of value. When the question involves the social sciences, fact and value are inevitably tangled, requiring even more vigilance to distinguish empirical findings from political interpretations; perhaps the best that can be expected is that scientific results be kept in perspective and not be asserted by political figures to prove more than the researchers who discover them can scientifically claim.

What makes science inadequate to settle debates over means is the fact that human goods are plural and incommensurable. Usually for any individual, and always for complex communities, there are many competing goods and no simple or universal formula by which they can be weighed against one another. Disputes over ends need not be irresolvable in principle, however. There is a long tradition in philosophy that aims to do precisely that, and religion and other forms of culture have often claimed and sometimes succeeded in fostering a widespread consensus on fundamental things that limits political disagreement. The reason that these disputes become political in our society is because by embracing religious freedom and free speech, we have accepted heterodoxy on first principles and thus have left to political ingenuity the forging of public opinion even on matters of fundamental concern. Much more can be said on this score—pointing, for example, to the role of constitutionalism in holding society together, or, as Tocqueville pointed out, to the unofficial but nevertheless tyrannical pressure of democratic majorities over thought. For our purposes here what is essential is to note that modern science has nothing, or almost nothing, to say about the human good.

This bears underlining. Whereas classical science asked about the essences of things and about their ends, modern science is empiriological, classifying and measuring phenomena in their observed relations. Its form is logical rather than ontological; rather than asking what things really are or what they are for, modern science typically aims to describe reality mathematically. Modern science answers how events happen, not what is the substance of things. Its spectacular achievements come as a result of its narrowed scope. But even that is only part of the story, for practicing scientists are usually convinced that they have made discoveries about the way things really are, not just that they have described mathematically the relations of appearances; except for the sake of maintaining an argument, no practical physicist believes that “physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world,” as Nietzsche said. Scientists confidently acquire real knowledge by limited but effective means, and sometimes claim that what they know is all that can be known about the things they study. To them—and, frankly, to our culture at large—all claims to knowledge are either ‘scientific’ or ‘unscientific,’ the latter including everything from ethics to prejudice. Perhaps for peace in the university scientists concede some dignity to nonscientific disciplines, but it is hard not to think that, except for those who draw on resources of personal faith, they consider it all to be nonsense and treat it with silent contempt.

On the other hand, humanists and other non-scientists lazily rely on Nietzsche’s adage or on Nietzschean philosophers of science, thinking they can treat scientific knowledge as optional in itself and not essential to their own concerns. They rarely understand science or what drives it and so are surprised when scientists ignore their concerns. To the humanist, science should pause before ethical imperatives, or at least human experience, which includes, as Levin and Krauthammer remember, harrowing tales from the twentieth century of science going horribly astray. But to the scientist, the humanist himself treats ethics or religion as interpretation, not knowledge, so proposed restrictions on scientific research seem arbitrarily imposed. As a physicist friend has pointed out to me, to a modern biologist the embryo is today what the atom was to physicists a few generations ago: the central, most powerful thing within their field of study, and just beginning to be truly understood for the first time. This is why, as scientists, they consider it irrelevant that pluripotent stem cells can be produced by other means: they want to know what makes the embryo work and resent anything that stands in their way, confident that the knowledge gained will in the long run yield the greatest benefits to well-being.

Hence our current predicament: scientists who want to really know, but are only half aware of the limits of their empiriological method; humanists (not to mention religious believers) who have abandoned claims to comprehensive knowledge even of their appointed spheres; and politicians eager as ever to exploit the opportunities that ambiguity creates. Though laws remain in place that still restrict the grasp of science—for example, regulating the composition of federally mandated boards to review research on human subjects—the problem is more fundamental and not to be resolved without serious intellectual work. It is not enough, for either liberals or conservatives, to rest democracy on “values voters” as able to resist the authoritarian claims of modern science. Not unexplained values, but genuine knowledge, is needed to establish that the “rightful place” of science in its modern form is not above the people and their faith and their Constitution, but in their service, for the questions of substances and ends retain authority over instrumental questions concerning processes and systems. In other words, the inconvenient political fact is that law must restrain scientists within ethical boundaries so long as their method itself is amoral, but the better way in the long run is toward recovery of a serious science of human being.

James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse. He gratefully acknowledges his reliance on the writings and conversation of Anthony Rizzi of the Institute for Advanced Physics in developing this essay.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The question of pornography is precisely such an issue ripe for reevaluation. Thoughtful scholars from a variety of disciplines are engaged in the task of reviewing its purported benefits and dangers and recalibrating the implications for sound public policy once its social costs are weighed. The technological change here is evident to everyone: as a result of widely available high-powered computing, expanded cable television, and the development of the internet, pornographic images and videos are readily accessible in almost every home and now indeed on almost every cell phone and portable device. The numbers are alarming, with estimates that as much as 35% of all content on the internet is pornographic; that two-thirds of college-age men view pornography with some regularity; that a majority of high school students visit pornographic websites, some trading obscene images of themselves electronically. Even those who make no use of these “services” experience the cultural effects of saturation, as ordinary television, respectable magazines, and popular songs regularly include provocative images, situations, and lyrics that a generation ago would have been labeled “soft porn.” Reports from those who have looked describe what now counts as “hard-core” in terms that would astonish the imagination and shock the conscience of anyone who is not a hard-core pornography user himself.

Less well known, but in some respects even more impressive, are the scientific discoveries concerning the effects of pornography use on the chemistry and physiology of the brain. As neuroscience maps the workings of memory and desire and explores the brain’s plasticity—as the power of habit and addiction, long experienced, is now explained, in short—it is becoming clear that pornography use can physiologically impede normal sexual function. At least in the case of men who use pornography to stimulate sexual release, it appears that, as with most addictions, something like increased dosage is needed to achieve the same effect—in this case, usually images of increased perversity or violence. Meanwhile, the connection of sex and violence—of pleasure and pain—that is a noted feature of hard-core pornography, seems amenable to neuroscientific explanation in terms of synapses formed by early experience or repeated practice. From the perspective of neurochemistry, it is even unclear whether the distinction between virtual and actual experience is a matter of kind, not merely one of degree. In short, the more we know about the brain, the more suspicious we become that it traps the images that cross its screen. That pornography is harmless to its consumers can no longer be presumed.

While the technology of the internet and the advanced science of the brain are new phenomena, research on the old question of whether pornography use promotes sexual violence remains as unsettled as research on the deterrent effects of the death penalty. Recent claims attributing the decrease in reported rapes to easy access to pornography have not been disproven, but they can hardly be said to be established. While feminist arguments in the 1980s that pornography should be redefined in law as depiction of sexual violence against women did not succeed in overcoming the constitutional protection granted soft-core pornography on First Amendment grounds, they did reorient people’s thinking, and in practice the pornography industry has apparently made the definition true by its increasingly brutal products. One consequence has been a focus of research attention on the general effects of pornography use on marriages and relationships, where both statistical evidence collected by sociologists and case reports from professional counselors suggest that ready access to pornography on computers has brought the social effects of pornography in from the margins of society to the heart of married life, with predictably devastating effects.

It would not quite be fair to say that all of this has happened so fast that there was no time to reassess the pre-internet consensus reached in the 1980s that the Constitution allowed legislatures to suppress only child pornography and hard-core pornography, though they could regulate where and when indecent materials might be purveyed. Congress passed several laws in the 1990s regulating indecency and obscenity on the internet, intending to protect the young, only to find the laws struck down or confined by the courts. Even the prohibition against child pornography has been weakened by giving constitutional protection to animated images of children so long as no acts are performed by real children in making the films. But it is not only the courts. At times, the political will has been lacking to pass statutes forbidding the pornographic content that courts do permit government to suppress. Frequently, government won’t even enforce the statutes that exist on the books. Constitutional doctrine remains a genuine obstacle to sound policy, I think, but often public sentiment seems more permissive or more resigned than the courts.

While I for one am not ready to propose a comprehensive public policy on pornography—not least because constitutional considerations suggest that any reform needs to be carefully navigated—I am persuaded that all that has been learned in the last couple decades about the personal and social costs of pornography should impel thoughtful Americans to take a fresh look at the subject. For some this may mean becoming informed about the latest findings of neuroscience; for some it will mean facing the facts we already half-know (and our children all-too-fully know) about sexual materials that are easily at hand electronically; for some it might mean pausing to reflect upon what is now a forty-plus year experiment with the sexual revolution and what it may have taught us about the nature and meaning of human sexuality and love. What does not seem plausible to me is that anyone who is informed can insist that the pornography all around us contributes to human liberation rather than degradation, nor that those who are involved in its production, purveyance, or even its defense are the friends of freedom.

James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

What, then, is good about free markets?

First, free markets generate and spread wealth—not by redistributing what people have, but by providing the conditions that reward individual effort and foster human enterprise. To speak broadly, ancient policy emphasized the distribution or redistribution of a city’s wealth among its people (not to mention acquisition by imperial conquest), but modern policy has promoted the development of commerce among peoples with the promise that the fortunes of all are raised. In tandem with the progress of global science, which it catalyzes and by which it is in turn transformed, the free market has generated unprecedented prosperity and previously unimaginable technological achievement. While tolerating inequalities beyond what were prescribed by ancient writers, modern market society has made available to the least well-off levels of nourishment, comfort, education, and health care that were once out of the reach even of society’s elite. This effect, evident in the rise of the middle class in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, has been repeated in the latter half of the twentieth century, as domestic barriers fell for those previously excluded from full participation in market society—witness the growth in the U.S. of the African-American middle class—and as whole countries like China and India gradually introduced free market reforms and earned economic growth. While it is easy to see the shortcomings of global progress—not least because of electronic media that the market has enabled—the real accomplishments of global capitalism in improving the standard of living of masses of people should not be taken for granted.

Second, markets achieve a kind of rough justice in establishing prices for goods and services, rewarding sustained effort and prudent venture while correcting their opposites. As Friedrich Hayek showed, it is impossible that any central authority could gather as much information about what is plentiful and what is dear as is conveyed by prices established in an open, competitive marketplace. If the equilibrium of compensation often seems less than satisfactory, I think it is an open question whether that represents the failure of the market or a distortion caused by the presence of large corporate and state bureaucracies, which cushion market pressures at the top and suppress them throughout. If opportunity remains open, markets ought to correct for unjustly high prices or low compensation, not only on the model of the rational actor, but in the context of common sense: though customers like low prices, they want a good product from a firm with a reputation for just dealing. Effort and prudence can be justly rewarded only if sloth and recklessness are allowed to fail.

Third, free markets are valuable not only for the wealth they generate and distribute, but for the opportunities they make possible and the activities they enable. Here I refer not only to strictly economic opportunities for material gain and physical benefits, but to the whole range of institutions and practices that constitute civil society. Families, churches, schools, and many other institutions of culture cannot be adequately understood on a market model or supported as mere market entities, but they thrive when property rights are safe and self-direction is permitted. Indeed, they moralize the market, so to speak, often supplying the true ends of economic activity and forming persons who are not mere wealth-maximizers but well-rounded human beings. It is nobler to make that extra gain to support one’s family than to indulge oneself. Many a successful entrepreneur turns to philanthropy when his fortune exceeds his needs. The market itself teaches certain virtues—self-discipline and civility, self-control and the deferral of reward, fair-dealing so as to secure a customer base—and it is further humanized and refined when surrounded by other virtues. The institutions that promote these and the practices that reinforce them often depend on internal forms of authority that are different from those anchored in the law of supply and demand, but a free marketplace and the plenty it promises give these forms the conditions to thrive.

Fourth and finally, the freedom of the market is valuable in its own right, not only for its consequences for material wealth or cultural development. As many have remarked, the ability to choose one’s own way in the world—to develop and share one’s skills or services, or to make and market a product or a work of art—is a mark of human dignity, a basic human right. Free markets are not the only locus for the development of talents, and not all talents are readily or rightly marketed, but many are served by access to the marketplace, and the freedom to choose how to develop one’s gifts is essential to the gifts themselves and only possible in a society with substantial market freedom.

Now each of these justifications of the market suggests market limitations as well as freedoms and so can guide regulation. All agree that sound markets need just courts, willing and able to protect the rights of property and the obligations of contract. Numerous other rules have evolved through the practice of merchants and have been ratified by law; maintaining a proper balance between fairness and freedom is essential, as well as a balance between openness to innovation and security for the tried and true. Though “24/7” is handy when the work is done by computers and robots, markets often need regulations that establish their days and hours, permitting an equilibrium between time for trade and activity and time to pause and reassess—not to mention time to remember that there is more to every balanced life than work and trade. Because society should protect non-economic goods as well as economic ones, some sorts of trade should be suppressed, for example in sexual favors or stolen property. A sound sense of the value and limits of markets is a better guide concerning when and how to regulate commerce than an aimless pragmatism that lumbers from crisis to crisis or than ideological blinders, either those that see nothing that cannot be marketized or those that would collectivize all. “Two cheers for capitalism” seems to me to get it just about right.

What about government? Government provides, literally and figuratively, the public space where all citizens can gather, and it superintends the whole. Its responsibilities include not only regulation of the market and correction of its failures, but also protecting society against threats to its safety from outside and from within, supporting the rule of law, and maintaining the basic moral order or culture that underlies social trust and makes possible human freedom. In a free society, government has to be circumscribed in its overall extent as well as specifically restrained from interfering with certain basic rights, but the size of government is not the only relevant question to be asked about it. The American Founders spoke of “good government,” by which they meant government that was capable and just, even “energetic,” in its exertion of public power, while limited in what it can rightly do: lean and fit, not meddlesome and clumsy. There is a scandal of government waste both when government undermines market efficiency and when government fails in the tasks to which it is rightly appointed. In an era of burgeoning demand for government solutions beyond the bounds of government competence, “less government” is a good rough-and-ready rejoinder, but “good government” is the true principle and one that conservatives should not be ashamed to embrace.

One failing of conservatism in recent years has been the tendency to think of politics itself in market terms: political scientists have developed a whole “economic theory of democracy;” politicians grant access and measure influence by campaign contributions, even to one another, and voters expect representatives to bring home federal projects and programs as well as pass laws. It is not that politics can or even ought to proceed without consideration of real interests—as James Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “the regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation”—but that building political organizations as ever more efficient machines for the aggregation of majority interests undercuts the ambition to articulate the public interest. Such a view has had disastrous effects, from the failure to recognize genuine corruption—witness the Abramoff scandal, which cut closer to the heart of modern conservatism than most Republicans have been willing to admit—to the squandering of the idealism of the young, whose interests are not yet fixed and who naturally long to test their talents in and become a part of something larger than themselves.

The cause of the free market is paradoxical in a way that is rarely recognized by its advocates and regularly exploited by its enemies: free markets require a public-spirited defense, but they generally reward private-spiritedness. In the debates ahead, the friends of freedom need to make their case in public, explaining the virtues of market society, acknowledging its vices, and focusing on those things that government can rightly do—and how it can do them well.

James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Of course Professor Haldane’s basic point is sound: Moral principles establishing what is right and wrong on matters as fundamental as the prohibition against the deliberate taking of innocent human life or as the basic goodness of the natural family ought to be beyond partisan dispute—as, in fact, they once were. It is also fair to recognize that questions of justice and injustice in the decision to go to war and in its conduct are often matters of serious dispute on which reasonable people can disagree. So it is reasonable to suppose that some Americans voted for the party out of power in the recent election based on a moral objection to the war pursued by the party that was in power. As for the economy, almost no serious moral thinker holds that capitalism is just if pursued without any limits, though reasonable people can disagree as to what those limits ought to be. Nonetheless, it is passing strange to suggest that capitalism necessarily leads to a housing shortage, when the current financial crisis has been caused instead by something closer to a housing glut, and even stranger to speak of the “necessity of communism” after the massive experiments in its name have proved to countenance unspeakable human cruelties and to issue in social collapse.

What struck me as off-balance about the letter was its tendency to find partisan excess only among its author’s friends. I haven’t seen a “content analysis” of political messages during the campaign, but it was hardly obvious to this observer that misguided denunciations of evil during the past campaign were all on one side—particularly when the Obama campaign emphasized the link of the Republican candidate to the incumbent, the denunciation of whom knows no bounds worldwide (and this is not to mention the vitriol aimed at Senator McCain’s running mate.) As Tocqueville noted long ago in his chapter on freedom of the press in the United States, Americans speak “violently” of their leaders in the course of campaigns, but on the whole they take the outcome of elections in stride, as the candidates themselves certainly did (though the losers of the California marriage initiative have not). As for the trend toward criminalizing the political opposition, so that the end of one’s term brings not only rotation out of office but something akin to the “scrutiny” in ancient republics whereby the departing official was routinely put on trial and punished for any misdeeds, I suspect we will see it continue, and this time it will not be the social conservatives who are to blame.

The election seems to me less of a repudiation of Republican morality and more a prudential judgment. Presidential elections are often referenda on the economy and the incumbent party’s economic stewardship, and although the Democrats already control Congress—as a result of the 2006 elections, the real referendum on the war, taken as a “wake-up call” by the administration, with the result of a more successful strategy in Iraq—the Republicans could hardly expect to win in November after the collapse of Wall Street and the banking crisis a month or so before the voting. As for the Clinton impeachment years ago, while I agree it was an odd political calculation, since it was obvious from the start that there would never be enough votes to convict, the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice were serious ones, and the electoral consequences were ambiguous: the Republicans lost some seats in Congress in 1998 as they were moving towards impeachment, but won the presidential election in 2000 after Clinton’s acquittal.

The most problematic aspect of the letter, though, is the supposition that social conservatism can simply remain aloof from partisan politics while expecting to have any political effect. Whatever Professor Haldane’s despair about the situation in Great Britain—about which he wrote chillingly in these pages a few weeks ago—American social conservatives have been significantly less marginalized to date, if likewise unsuccessful in turning around cultural decay in an integrated world. Any political coalition involves compromise and a calculation of likely advantages and disadvantages. It is a sign of political maturity to accept this inevitable fact of democratic politics in liberal societies, though it sometimes means having to stand by one’s political friends even as they press aspects of the party’s agenda in which one’s own interests are less acute. Social conservatives who feel short-changed by what we gained under the Bush administration should remember the work of the Kass Commission in developing sound policy on stem cell research and compare that what would have occurred in a Gore or Kerry administration (and is promised in an Obama one). Nor should we dismiss the achievement of Supreme Court appointments that permitted legislation to ban partial birth abortion, perhaps the first genuine progress in pro-life jurisprudence since the Hyde Amendment was allowed to stand almost thirty years ago.

Accommodating one’s coalition partners happens, after all, on both sides of the aisle. The wish to return the Democratic Party to its “historical position that was once more in line with Christian moral values and Catholic social teaching than was that of the Republicans” will have to overcome entrenched interests and loyalties among that party’s most active members, not to mention its financial elites. Of course it is critical for scholars who write about ethics and public policy to ensure that their arguments are sound on their own terms, not twisted for partisan electioneering; an honest dialectic among scholars on all sides ought to benefit everyone, eventually even the public at large. The goal of developing a conservative social philosophy that can attract all parties is noble, but any philosophy that returns to first principles will also carry implications that are apt to favor one or another existing coalition. The real challenge anyway, right now, is attracting the young, who are looking for truth, not neutrality. As active citizens, we don’t have the luxury to construct ideal coalitions; the socialist who is a social conservative and the classical liberal who is a moral radical have to decide which matters more when voting or joining a party, though of course each remains free to try to nudge his coalition partners closer to his own ideal.

If social conservatives in America are facing confinement to a political ghetto as apparently they are in Britain, Professor Haldane’s counsel might be sound. However, social conservatives face no such marginalization in America. There is still strong support in the electorate for many conservative positions on questions such as abortion and gay marriage, and the failures of the Bush administration in relation to the economy and even the war have not erased these views, even if some of their advocates in government have been beaten at the polls. The current economic crisis is a sign that we live in perilous times—just as the vicious coordinated attack by Islamic terrorists in Mumbai is a reminder that the global terrorist threat cannot be ignored or wished away. The need for serious and sober analysis—indeed, for thinking that is radical enough to go to the roots of things—is, I think, widely apparent, even as cautious pragmatism makes sense as a practical strategy in the short term. This is no time for social conservatives to retreat from the public square, or from addressing all its concerns.

James Stoner is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Louisiana State University. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.