Many observers have commented that much conventional economics has failed empirically, in that it ignored themes such as financial instability or the possibility of multiple equilibria leading to sub-optimal outcomes. Such prominent figures as Paul Krugman have joined in the orgy of recrimination and castigation (though rarely self-castigation).There is no doubt about the extent of the empirical shortcomings, and that many prominent economists followed the maker of the rational choice revolution, Robert Lucas, in erroneously claiming that improved economics made financial crises an impossibility. Consequently, many people, including many economists, have complained that “economic theories failed just when we needed them most.”

As a result, the crisis has led to a battery of worrying policy initiatives. Will temporary surges in state spending to deal with the aftermath of banking crises lead to permanently higher levels of government spending and indebtedness? How can they be financed? Is there a danger of inflationary developments as a consequence of ballooning public sector deficits? Citizens should ask precisely what is worrying in the new policy initiatives: only with an articulation of that concern will it be possible to formulate legitimate policies. Often, complaints about the inadequacy of economics are linked to advocacy of some policy position in response to the crisis. Such policy positions are fiercely contested, and many of them appear linked to particular and powerful interests: banks and financial services, lawyers, automobile producers and automobile trade unions are all groups that have tried to assert that a general good depends on the subvention and rescue of their particular kind of activity.

Most recently, the issue of executive compensation has dominated national and international debates. What sorts of compensation level are appropriate, and how should these levels be determined? What criteria can be used in setting levels of compensation? Or is this an activity which the state should not be involved in at all, and which should be left as the outcome of market processes? The most divisive issue at the G-20 Pittsburgh meeting concerned precisely the appropriate response to the problem of remuneration in the financial sector. Most Americans are prepared to argue that high pay levels are not appropriate where losses mean that financial institutions need to be bailed out with public money. Some others argue that a distorted incentive system in the past led bankers to take inappropriate risks, and that consequently, for pragmatic reasons, the incentives should be better adjusted to mirror long-term performance (and also long-term social or general gains). By contrast, some European governments and thinkers suggested that excessive pay levels were in themselves wrong—regardless of whether they led to losses and inappropriate gains or not.

None of these controversies really address the causes of the perceived failure of conventional economics. The question remains whether this is simply a technical failure, or whether it derives from some more basic problem. Is there a more general failure because of an unwillingness among economists to discuss fundamental questions concerned with value?

What are the value of public goods such as currency stability? Why should we place a value on open markets? For what reasons should people have the opportunity of undertaking employment?

Sometimes discussions of such motivations revolve around concepts of natural rights: a right to employment, to a fair income, or to access to markets. What is the source of such rights, and how can conflicts of rights be arbitrated?

It is not surprising, then, that there is a new concern of some economists with justice and with ways of interpreting justice that do not necessarily involve the clash of two or more conflicting rights but rather as a way of developing potentials that are inherent in human beings. One interesting consequence of this new concern has been a revived interest in how different cultures have handled the problem of clashes of interest, as in Amartya Sen’s new book The Idea of Justice. Often the idea of precepts that can be derived from reason is traced back to Greek philosophy, especially to Aristotle, and especially as mediated in medieval philosophy in the writings of Averroes and Aquinas. But Sen has pointed out how Indian thinkers evolved a rather parallel discourse to that of Aristotle; Arthur Waldron has identified the same debate in China over two millennia ago.

It is reasonable to think that the crisis in empirical economics and the broader crisis in values are connected. This is where natural law thinking can be a powerful corrective. For in the natural law tradition, a body of guiding principles can be derived from the application of reason. But integrating the natural law tradition with contemporary economics may prove difficult.

One outstanding problem is that differing traditions of analysis have no way of speaking directly to each other. Moral philosophy is normative, while economics self-consciously avoids the creation of norms, and instead analyzes the relationships inherent in empirical data. The different approaches look as a consequence like endless parallel bars, inviting impossible intellectual and moral gymnastics between is and ought.

Both disciplines in consequence have their own very distinct version of a crisis. For moral philosophers, the world of the market does not behave as they hold it should, while economists have discovered that the market does not behave as they think it will.

There are also different views of the time framework for analysis, each of which presents its own peculiar problems. The concepts of justice are eternally valid, with the result that many will ask how they should adjust to a world which is constantly changing and generating new problems that require new analyses. By contrast, the problem of utility is that it may be a very short-term concept. Indeed, much of the literature on happiness has been devoted to showing that many forms of consumption generate only a short term surge in happiness without leading to a long-term increase in wellbeing. As a result, many argue that a truer measure of felicity would need to examine long-term contentment. Latin distinguishes very clearly between the short-term state of happiness (felix) and the longer-term state (beatus).

The most basic issue in the debate on the contribution of natural law thinking to economics is the question of the realization of human freedom. Over the past thirty years, a prominent theme of much analysis has been that political and economic freedom produce benefits, in particular gains in well-being. Sophisticated measures such as those provided annually by Freedom House are used to establish the empirical veracity (over fairly narrowly defined time periods) of this social-science claim. A parallel stream of thought tried to make the claim that religious practice was desirable and beneficial because—again as demonstrated empirically—it was associated with gains in income and wealth. The social-science analysis of religion in this kind of way goes back at least to Max Weber’s famous identification of the Protestant ethic with the “spirit of capitalism.”

The empirical argument for faith and freedom can be deeply distorted and quite destructive. Freedom has a value—or represents a truth—in itself. Religious values are not derived from their potential material benefits but from a transcendent order. Even though it may be true that faith and love represent a powerful tool in tackling poverty, they do that because of their intrinsic value as expressions of what is truly human. The greatest contribution that the natural law tradition provides is its powerful insistence on a hierarchy of value, in which value as such is recognized, rather than appearing as an instrumental tool for some other purpose.


Harold James is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, where he is also the Director of the Program in Ethics, Culture, and Economic Development. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Ten months have passed since the inauguration of President Obama for a four-year term. However, President Obama has not so much as even nominated a candidate to fill the vacant position of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research indicates that religious freedom appears to be a positive factor in enabling societies to be prosperous and stable, and individuals to be happy. The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index, which ranks countries on how well they support combined factors of wealth and human well-being, found that countries that attain well-rounded success – economic prosperity and happy citizens – treat a bundle of freedoms all together like a prix fixe meal, not like a pick-and-choose visit to a cafeteria. “Freedom,” according to a key finding of the report, “cannot be divided. While some nations seek to allow one aspect of freedom while restricting other aspects, prosperous nations respect freedom in all of its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and personal.” Also, “The highest levels of overall life satisfaction are reported in countries which score best in the areas of health, safety, personal freedom, and social capital.” So, Finland, which offers economic, political, religious, and political freedom comes out on top, while by contrast Saudi Arabia, a foe of religious freedom if there ever was one, may have monetary wealth but scores in the lowest quartile of human prosperity (81^st out of 104) when considering well-rounded human flourishing.

In 1998, Congress enacted the International Religious Freedom Act establishing and requiring appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and creating an Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) in the State Department.

Yet, in this effort to advance religious freedom the State Department’s IRF office faces several challenges. To begin with, it is structurally and culturally isolated inside the State Department bureaucracy. Outside of the IRF office itself, the Department of State IRF Fan Club is, alas, not vast. To correct this, the IRF office needs to establish long-term working partnerships with other sections in the State Department, such as Public Diplomacy, in order to extend integration of religious freedom into U.S. foreign engagement.

In addition, the IRF office needs to increase awareness inside the State Department about the positive contributions of religious freedom to human well-being. The nearly exclusive focus of the IRF office on highlighting and seeking short-term intervention in cases of religious persecution and oppression has led some in the powerful regional bureaus of the State Department to flee the moment they see IRF staff coming. The IRF office would do well to expand its efforts to highlight and expand programs supporting the advantages offered by religious freedom, so that the regional bureaus will pursue rather than repel IRF engagement.

This is not just a matter of promoting a nice-sounding ideal to make the world a better place. There is also a national security imperative in supporting religious freedom. At a time when Muslims who advocate for peaceful pluralism face crushing censorship and devastating intimidation in many volatile areas of the world such as Egypt, creating and protecting freedom for constructive Muslim voices to participate freely and vigorously in public discussion is vital.

Support for religious freedom needs to be “translated” into concrete steps forward.

The area which offers the most potential for fruitful expansion is more robust incorporation of religious freedom into U.S. public diplomacy. Public diplomacy, the Cinderella of the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the abolition of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, is an underfunded and underestimated asset in our foreign engagement toolbox—including for advancement of international religious freedom. And other U.S. government-funded foreign engagement efforts also could be potentially fruitful allies for expanding religious freedom.

To its credit, Department of State Public Diplomacy has some efforts related to religious freedom. So too, though on an even lesser scale, with the radio and television programs of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). However, these tend to be sporadic at best, and at any rate not a priority or an area with long-term dedicated funding and staff.

With an eye to concrete action, I would like to suggest some avenues for supporting religious freedom. No one of these ideas is a “silver bullet.” Rather, these suggestions are meant encourage creative thinking about ways to foster engagement with Muslim and other voices on multiple fronts, leveraging already existing programs in the U.S. government. Perhaps this may spark other ideas in both foreign policy circles and the private sector that will expand religious freedom.

1. Book translations. The Department of State’s Public Diplomacy Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) office facilitates translation and publication of American books overseas. Fund an effort to include books about religious freedom in the IIP Book Program. This could include American books by Muslims about religious freedom. But don’t just print paper books; make the translated books available online in both text and audio versions.

2. Speakers Bureau. The Speakers Bureau run by the Department of State Public Diplomacy sends Americans overseas to engage foreign audiences. Establish long-term funding and develop a Speakers Bureau program dedicated to sending experts on religious freedom and religious leaders with experience in religious freedom issues overseas.

3. Exchange programs. Expand access to exchange programs offered by State Department Public Diplomacy Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) for religious leaders, seminary students, academics, and others with an interest in religious freedom so they can participate in foreign exchange programs.

4. International visitor programs. Boost the budget of ECA in order to enable ECA collaboration with the Department of State Office of International Religious Freedom to bring academics, civic leaders, seminary students, and religious leaders to the U.S. to learn about what religious freedom is and how it benefits society at large in the U.S.

5. Films. The American Film Program of ECA lists support for, among other values, religious freedom. Collaboration with the IRF office and dedicated funding could expand this effort, for example supporting the dubbing and subtitling of films about religious freedom into key foreign languages. This should not be limited to documentaries; include feature films.

6. Polling. Understanding perceptions and misperceptions of foreign populations regarding religious freedom is essential if one wants to identify hurdles as well as opportunities in the expansion of religious freedom. When we say, “religious freedom,” what do people in Egypt, China, and Iran think this means? Which aspects of religious freedom are least understood in key target audiences? Understanding this would help us best determine how to use limited resources wisely in promoting religious freedom.

7. Radio and television. Provide funding specifically for programming about religious freedom on the radio and in television broadcasts, such as Voice of America and Al-Hurra, funded by U.S. tax payers, overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

8. Arts. Develop a Religious Freedom and the Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts which would support development, translation, and distribution of creative media, such as plays and novels, that explore the role of religious freedom, and the social consequences of the lack thereof. To begin with, translate Akbar Ahmed’s play The Trial of Dara Shikoh and the novel The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout into Arabic and other languages.

9.  USAID. Expand USAID support for inclusion of religious freedom promotion in development projects, and establish long-term mechanisms for collaboration between USAID and the IRF office.

10.  U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). Designate funding for collaboration between IRF and USIP to examine and foster ways in which protection of religious freedom can support peace and stability.

On Thursday, November 19, the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, part of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, plans to hold a hearing on, “The State of Political and Religious Freedom in the Middle East”. Hopefully Congress will support not only the Congressionally mandated Office of International Religious Freedom, but also a variety of other efforts to expand religious freedom.

As for President Obama, the clock is ticking. He has only three years and two months left before this term is up. If his administration is to make a difference for religious freedom, he needs to appoint an ambassador for religious freedom. The president will need to move quickly to set attainable goals to support international religious freedom and stand behind implementation of them before the window of opportunity in this term of the Obama administration ends.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

As time passes, more people may recognize that the financial crisis owed much to factors that had little to do with markets as such. As several scholars illustrated in the 2009 monograph Verdict on the Crash, the causes included regulations that encouraged irresponsible behavior by banks, imprudent central bank policies, not to mention outright collusion between politicians and government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Unfortunately for promoters of free markets, knowledge of these facts will take time to counter the widespread perception that economic liberalism—manifested in financial liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and increased competition—contributed significantly to the 2008 crisis.

In the meantime, those committed to economic liberalism have a chance to rethink and reformulate the case for markets. Certainly the efficiency arguments for economic freedom will be revisited, refined, and rearticulated. But it’s also an opportunity for economic liberals to reexamine what is often a weakness in their position—the principled case for markets.

As David Henderson comments in The Changing Fortunes of Economic Liberalism (2001), economic liberals have encountered several recurring problems in advancing their views. First, unlike socialist and nationalist movements, economic liberalism has never acquired mass support. Second, Liberalism requires counter-intuitive reasoning (such as the notion that free markets create economic order) that isn’t easy to grasp and which doesn’t lend itself to sloganeering. Third, economic liberalism threatens many established interests. These include over-mighty unions, guilds, politicians who use welfare programs to create tame electoral constituencies, and businesses who like corporate welfare and resent competition.

Another obstacle, however, faced by economic liberals are the difficulties they often experience in making arguments not based primarily on efficiency and utility. Even the most econometric economist would probably admit that man does not live by efficiency or utility alone. Yet the number of economic liberals willing to stray outside this territory when arguing for markets remains small. The truth is that economic liberalism has long been largely detached from “thick” conceptions of human flourishing and too often unnecessarily associated with rather flimsy notions of the good.

One reason for this is that free marketers have invested enormous intellectual energy in policy debates. Policy engagement was critical to the successful economic reforms that saved many Western countries from the stagflation into which they collapsed in the 1970s. But the cost may have been neglect of the deeper arguments that intellectually nourish the very same policy positions.

This does not fully explain, however, why many economic liberals are tongue-tied at best when it comes to principled defenses of markets or, in some cases, positively hostile to such reasoning. Surveying the literature on this subject, one most commonly encounters unapologetically utilitarian arguments. In crude terms, these amount to the following: free markets maximize economic utility; hence they are morally superior to inefficient non-market arrangements.

Examining the historical record, there’s no question that economic liberalization has helped lift ever-increasing numbers of people from poverty. Millions of contemporary Indians and Chinese can attest to this. Some conservatives—especially those presently exploring non-socialist alternatives to markets—are far too quick to dismiss these realities. Nevertheless, if humans are creatures with more than material interests and aspirations, then economic utility-maximization arguments are necessary but insufficient in building a normative defense of markets.

More thoughtful economic liberals have long recognized this. Some, such as John Stuart Mill (who eventually moved away from economic liberalism), tried to ground economic liberalism upon a type of utilitarianism. But as scholars from a host of different philosophical schools have noted, all forms of utilitarianism are deeply flawed because they assume the impossible: that humans can somehow foresee and weigh all the known and unknown consequences of particular actions or rules.

Then there are appeals to “progress.” This was central, for example, to Friedrich Hayek’s case for economic liberty. Progress, Hayek maintains, does not normally occur through people seeking to resolve problems in a coerced or collective manner. Progress comes when individuals freely act upon their abilities and particular knowledge of their unique circumstances while pursuing their own chosen purposes.

That Hayek makes an important point about economic development is not in question. Yet Hayek has surprisingly little to say about the content of progress. In his famous Constitution of Liberty (1960), he concedes that progress “in the sense of the cumulative growth of knowledge and power over nature, [progress] is a term that says little about whether the new state will give us more satisfaction than the old.” Such a question, Hayek comments, is “probably unanswerable.” But for Hayek, this is irrelevant. More important is “successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable,” or “movement for movement’s sake.”

This response leaves unanswered some very important questions. Towards what are people moving? What are we becoming in the process of doing so? In many responses to such queries, one detects Mephistopheles’ retort in Goethe’s Faust: “The future creates what is moral.”

Other economic liberals have employed social evolutionary arguments to bolster their position. These may be found in some of Hayek’s works and some contemporary libertarian circles. The market, it is held, reflects a type of natural selection process with which humans are wrong to interfere.

The innovation and competition encouraged by markets does of course gradually render many technologies (e.g., typewriters) and industries obsolete. This “creative destruction” is, as Joseph Schumpeter noted, how entrepreneurship improves aspects of people’s quality of life over time. But the problem with evolutionary arguments is that they cannot provide a principled reason for anything. Moreover, if, as a matter of positive science, societies simply evolve, then evolutionarily-inclined economic liberals cannot morally object to governments “evolving” to assume increasing control over the economy. For who could claim on evolutionary grounds that there is something intrinsically wrong with ever expanding government?

If this analysis is accurate, then economic liberals need to consider non-utilitarian, non-progress-for-the-sake-of-progress, non-evolutionary, principled defenses of market economies. One such argument is that economic liberty and its associated institutions provide a bulwark against unwarranted expansions of state power and thus helps minimize undue coercion—a vital prerequisite for human flourishing, moral or otherwise.

A second is that free markets have proved remarkably successful in allowing people to tackle the problem of scarcity in a peaceful manner that encourages people to consider the economic needs and wants of others. In short, markets address an issue which, if left unresolved, will facilitate tremendous social disorder. The alternatives are command economies, economies centered on theft, or economies based on altruism. Reason and history tell us that neither command nor theft-based economies are options. Likewise Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s insights that common ownership produces social tension and that people treat privately owned things better than they treat things owned in common suggest that there are limits to altruism’s ability to serve as the primary principle of economic organization in complex societies.

These are reasonable positions that illustrate how free markets contribute to key non-economic dimensions of the common good, but economic Liberalism’s case would be further bolstered if its advocates were willing to expand their arguments about how markets facilitate moral growth. The manner in which entrepreneurship fosters and requires virtues ranging from prudence to courage is one example. Another is how free trade and exchange can promote forms of human association with intrinsic value beyond their economic dimension. One could also underscore the opportunities commercial societies provide to pursue a rich variety of moral goods in ways closed to many people in pre-commercial orders.

Some economic liberals, however, resist reasoning based on more –than material concepts of human flourishing. Sometimes this reflects a utilitarian or positivistic outlook that struggles to acknowledge human life’s non-material aspects. Other economic liberals worry that attention to the good as such  opens the door to undue state coercion in the name of encouraging human moral development.

In this regard, modern advocates of economic Liberalism might consider reexamining elements of the pre-nineteenth century philosophical roots of their thought. These partly lie in the early modern natural law tradition associated with people such as Hugo Grotius and Juan de Mariana. Their market-orientated economic writings are infused with a concern for the good life. The most important philosophical tradition that undergirds the moral case for economic liberty, however, is the Scottish Enlightenment

Too often primarily interpreted through the lens of the skeptical proto-utilitarian David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment includes figures such as Gershom Carmichael, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, William Robertson, and Hugh Blair who understood and supported the economic case for commercial societies but saw no reason why this should be separated from robust accounts of the good. This is equally true of Adam Smith. Modern Smith scholars such as James R. Otteson have illustrated that the author of the Wealth of Nations was deeply concerned with humanity’s moral growth in the context of emerging market economies in ways that went beyond utility maximization.

We live in an era in which pressures to expand government intervention in the economy are enormous. Paradoxically, however, successful long-term resistance to such trends may require economic liberals to resist the temptation to invest their energies in activism. As Harold James states, “The only way of dealing with a collapse in values is to rebuild values.” This suggests that economic liberals should direct considerable attention to the difficult, long-term task of rebuilding a powerful case for economic liberalism based as much on full-bodied conceptions of the good as it is on sound economics.


Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty and his prize-winning The Commercial Society. His forthcoming book, Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy, will be published in early 2010.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Genuinely transcending the division between the sciences and humanities today would be an ambitious project, involving the entirety of the human person—body, mind, spirit—marshaled to perceive the actual order of an objective cosmos. Occasionally, a given professor or student in contemporary academe might imagine what this holistic perspective would be like. It is a temptation felt especially by those who study the Classical world or the Middle Ages, both so deeply influenced by Pythagoras. But the cosmic image of old, as C.S. Lewis once put it, was discarded. Intuitively we moderns want it back, but modernity relentlessly catechizes the educated into dismissing any proposed unity between math, art, religion, and physics as offensively presumptuous, the intellectual fare of fools. The disciplinary border police, patrolling quarantined academic sectors with punitive labels such as “dilettante” and “crackpot,” forbid any such attempts.

At most, a modern mind nostalgic for a holistic cosmos waits patiently for science to deliver a Theory of Everything, hoping that perhaps sometime in the future, physics and spirituality (never religion) might meet. But Stratford Caldecott, who heads the Center for Faith and Culture at the University of Oxford, has no such patience. His book, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education, insists that we need not pin our hopes only on some distant synthesis, for by reconstituting the liberal arts tradition, such a synthesis is available now. Should one discard prejudice against traditional faith, there is an impressive array of scholars and religious leaders who have been moving towards such a synthesis for decades. Caldecott provides us with excerpts from the best of them, fusing these authors into a manageable manifesto—with an extensive bibliography—that attempts to enter into what Caldecott calls “the Pythagorean spirit which lies at the root of Western civilization.”

Caldecott’s manifesto champions the liberal arts tradition, first grouped by the Pythagoreans and established in the great Cathedral schools of the Middle Ages.  According to this lost vision, the trivium—grammar, rhetoric and dialectic—was linguistic preparation for navigating the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music—the very disciplines that Plato believed able to distinguish the numerical harmony of the cosmos. Caldecott is critical of authors like Dorothy Sayers who defend the trivium, while ignoring the less familiar quadrivium. Still, he does not suggest that the seven liberal arts simply be taken up as they were. Caldecott advises resumption, but also a broadening and adaptation of the liberal arts tradition, one that teaches the history of given disciplines as well as the disciplines themselves. But what unites these various disciplines is beauty, understood not as a subjective perception, but as harmonious order that is complex in ways we cannot yet imagine. On this point, Caldecott quotes Socrates: “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”  Caldecott has no difficulty amassing a range of reputable contemporary scientists who insist that beauty is as central to their subject as it is, or at least once was, to fine art.  When investigating the Universe, the encounter of beauty – even “irrational beauty” – is an essential clue that one is on the right track.

Caldecott is deeply aware of how strange his project will sound to modern ears. Accordingly, he counters anticipated suspicion at every step. He quotes at length from respected figures such as philosopher Charles Taylor, physicist David Bohm, and Benedict XVI, all of whom he convincingly mobilizes in service to his vision. Caldecott repeatedly assures us that he has no desire to simply return to the medieval mindset; he only wishes to be guided by its perception of a meaningful world. Caldecott summarizes his vision in three points: First, with countless educators today, he bemoans how the fragmentation of education has eliminated overall meaning, opting for unconnected details instead; second, he proposes that renewed meaning involves educating people to perceive the form—the beauty—of the cosmos; and third, this meaning is ultimately doxological and liturgical, for “cosmology leads only to the threshold of theology.” Caldecott is unapologetically Catholic, but he has mastered his tradition enough to fathom the underestimated extent of its hospitality to outsiders. The book, which quotes Islamic and Hindu sources in addition to Christian and Classical ones, thus succeeds in addressing a wider audience, so long as that audience has respect for religion.

Caldecott’s perspective requires symbolic vision and “poetic imagination,” that faculty which unites what our minds tend to keep separate. Again wary of incredulity, he insists that such symbolism need be balanced by the logic and empirical observation emphasized by the Enlightenment. For example, we can learn from the medieval bestiary how to read the world poetically, without subscribing to its primitive zoology. Caldecott’s treatment of numerology and geometry will perhaps provoke the most initial incredulity, but to my surprise, such treatments comprise the book’s core, and were delightfully convincing. Caldecott elucidates Simone Weil’s claim that geometry is “the most dazzling of all the prophecies which foretold the Christ.” We may laugh at Dan Brown’s use of the Fibonacci sequence in The DaVinci Code, or at the spooky numerological twists to the television series Lost. On a higher cultural plain, we can shudder at Darren Aronofsky’s film Pi, where a mathematical genius discovered a numerical order to the world, and is terrified by it. Caldecott, however, goes beyond both mockery and fear, helping us to see that these are but contemporary cultural echoes of a distant, ancient synthesis. Numerical order is in fact an integral part of Western civilization—one that does not reveal a horrific reality, but a beautiful one.

Caldecott’s treatment of music and architecture is equally exciting, and anything but parochial. With the Greeks, he understands music, the “art of the muses,” to comprise the entirety of intellectual culture. He cites Daniel Chua’s lament that in the modern world, “the harmony of the spheres has collapsed into the song of the self.” Ruling out neither chant nor electric guitar (but privileging the former), Caldecott quotes C.S. Lewis, who, like Pythagoras and Ptolemy before him, believed that “music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night and in all ages.” Likewise, Caldecott summarizes the recent revival of sacred, symbolic architecture, citing both traditional architects like Notre Dame’s Duncan Stroik and experimental ones like Berkeley’s Christopher Alexander.  Regarding astronomy, Caldecott turns the tables on Johannes Kepler’s assumption that uncovering the elliptical, not perfectly circular, orbit of the planets was like discovering a “load of dung” in the heavens. “The medieval astronomers were wrong,” insists Caldecott. “There is actually nothing imperfect about an ellipse. It differs from a circle by having two centers or foci rather than one . . . Kepler’s original mistake did not lie in his Christian Pythagoreanism, but in his attempt to prejudge the mathematical forms he would find in nature.”

Caldecott is eager to challenge complacency, and he tries to provoke the modern mindset with the prod of beauty: “If you push the postmodern relativist, you will almost certainly be able to get an admission that he would prefer to look up at a gorgeous sunset than down into the latrine.” Caldecott is skeptical of the dreary skeptics who populate our disenchanted world: “While we cannot anymore accept the details of medieval cosmology, this fundamental intuition of the Logos has never been disproved. In fact . . . the most recent developments in science could be said to confirm it.” What gave us the shift towards secularism was not science, but ideology:

A popular misconception has it that medieval man thought the world was flat, and modern science gave us a round world floating in an infinite space. But the truth is almost the opposite of this. Medieval man inhabited a three-dimensional cosmos which has now been largely replaced by a flat universe with no ontological depth.

Our divided academic disciplines have been wearied by their longtime separation, and Caldecott upholds objective beauty as a powerful, but neglected, adhesive. The book is not recommended, but urged upon all. The book may baffle moderns suspicious of the analogy of being, frustrate mathematicians who see their field as an escape from religious questions, annoy artists who thought their pursuit of beauty could avoid arithmetic, and bother scientists frustrated with the growing religious ranks within their onetime secular domain—but it will delight those with ears to hear the music of the spheres which hasn’t ceased. Dostoevsky’s prediction that “beauty will save the world” is pending eschatological verification. In the meantime, Stratford Caldecott successfully argues that it can at least save education.



Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The White House has played host to its share of unusual marriages, but the Obamas have broken new ground by bringing in Michelle’s mother, Marilyn Robinson, to help care for their children. The Obamas’ stated reason for inviting Robinson to live in the White House was so that she could assist in the care of Sasha and Malia, the Obamas daughters. As baby boomers age and America becomes what the President’s Council on Bioethics called the “mass geriatric society,” more and more elderly Americans may begin to live with their adult children. As with the Obamas, the desire for improved care-giving will be the main motivation. But in this case, the elders, not the children, will be the ones receiving the care.

Our society has not always been very clear about what obligations grown children have toward their aging parents. But in the case of the Boomers, the question becomes exceedingly complex. Taking advantage of the rise of no-fault divorce laws, they sought flexibility and happiness through more negotiable romantic and sexual attachments. They had fewer children than their parents’ generation, but those they did have were buffeted by the chaos of divorce, remarriage, custody battles, and multiple Christmases.

Now, the balance of dependence is tipping. As boomers enter their second childhood, we may witness the historical irony of aged parents experiencing some of the chaos and uncertainty felt by their children. What responsibilities of care does one have toward a stepfather? Toward a parent with more than one set of children? It’s no longer a question of who gets to keep the kids but rather of who gets stuck with the grandparents.

In such an environment it is easy to see why the public provision of medicine and end-of-life care is becoming especially important. Complicated family arrangements matter less when the main caregiver for the elderly is the government. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that only 12% of parents age 65 and older report depending more on their children than their children do on them.

In another sense, America’s seniors are as dependent on their children as ever. Instead of direct child-to-parent support, government programs such as Medicare and Social Security formalize and standardize intergenerational support. The average person retiring at age 65 relies on Social Security for approximately 40% of their pre-tax income. Behind the illusion of independence there are painful fiscal liabilities. A May report from the trustees of the Social Security Administration reported that Social Security will no longer be able to pay full benefits by 2037. Things are even more dire in the case of Medicare, which is predicted to be bankrupt by 2017.

The budgetary shortfalls of Medicare and Social Security will require difficult political and economic choices. The main priority guiding those choices should be protecting the dignity of the elderly. We must remove any incentives for caregivers to hasten death. Here the principle of subsidiarity, of local care and family knowledge becomes evident. There will, of course, be exceptions, but in general family members are the most likely to understand the will and protect the interests of those entering senescence. Just as the family is necessary for the raising of children, it should be central to the process of aging and death. In the absence of easy budgetary answers, one potentially significant way to see to the care of our rapidly aging population is to make it easier for parents to live with or near their grown children.

If families are to play a greater role in the care and support of aging grandparents, we will need good laws and economic policies. We will need to promote strong and stable marriages that can support vulnerable children and care for aging elders. It will also be necessary to have neighborhoods built in order to accommodate a variety of living arrangements, including extended families. Aging parents will not want to yield all of their independence and privacy. The single-family middle-class dwelling in an auto-oriented suburb doesn’t do a good job of accommodating for aging parents or an extended family, no doubt because it was never designed to do so. People who already drive their children to soccer practice don’t want to drive their aging parents to the bingo parlor as well.

The Obama family has the benefit of a large mansion in which they can live close to an older parent while still preserving privacy. While moving into the White House is not an option for most Americans, a way to increase choice is to promote neighborhoods with a mixture of housing that includes smaller, single-person dwellings and walkable streets. Cities can also allow families to build so called “backyard cottages,” detached units that are well suited for semi-independent, aging parents, as Seattle has recently done. In some areas today, one is hard-pressed to find any old people at all other than the gentleman who welcomes you as you enter the local Walmart. He’s nice, but where are all his friends?

Opposition to euthanasia, expressed most recently in anxiety over “death panels,” should begin with a stand against the elimination of old folks from our everyday experience. The segregation of the young and the old should be a more alarming sign of how our country will deal with aging Boomers than any health-care proposal in Congress. Today, the use of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities is, of course, often necessary. But their widespread success indicates a culture that is troublingly comfortable with the absence of the old from the world of those who are young and healthy.

As we seek out broad, long-term solutions to dealing with a graying society, it will be important to keep in mind the ways that neighborhood and home design can encourage local, subsidiary, and family-friendly solutions to end-of-life care. Of course, no one type of family arrangement fits all, but it may be time to recognize that if we are to be less dependent on government interventions we may have to become more dependent on each other.


Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Moreover, it is painful for the budget-conscious public servant to contemplate how many Ohioans take day trips to gamble in the neighboring states of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan, which already permit casinos to operate. That the paychecks of Cincinnati are swallowed by Rising Sun, Indiana, and find their way ultimately to state coffers in Indianapolis, is justifiably enraging, and a desire to see Ohioans squander their money closer to home explains much of the amendment’s appeal. Regrettably, such local concerns play out on a national scale, leading to a kind of gaming arms race between the states.

Despite gambling’s broad, bipartisan support from Ohio’s political class, the issue does not poll well, and has a good chance of being voted down. While ordinary voters are not always right in rejecting the widely shared judgments of politicians and the professionally informed (the two largest newspapers in the state also endorsed the issue), in this case they should do so.

I will not address how policy-makers and voters ought to weigh considerations about the addictive qualities of gambling. This is an important question, but it has been taken up recently and convincingly elsewhere. The social scientific evidence about the effects of opening casinos on crime and local employment rates, while frustratingly relevant to any discussion about gambling, is decidedly mixed. Some studies report increases in crime, others decreases, and most show increases in both local employment rates and problem gambling. The evidence is clouded further by an examination of the funding sources for these studies, which usually turn out to include a national group representing the interests of the gambling industry (”the gaming industry,” to be perfectly polite).

There are of course reasons in principle to oppose gambling authorizations independent of those metrics. The demand for gambling, like that for most services, is not fixed and unalterable. It is true that some portion of Ohioans who would gamble at Ohio casinos would be those who previously had been crossing the border to do so. When one state legalizes gambling, its neighbors have a strong fiscal incentive to follow suit, lest it lose a competitive advantage.

But some portion of Ohioans will start going to casinos for the first time, just because they’re closer and more convenient. Marginal incentives really do matter, and making something cheaper by increasing its supply is a sure way of increasing the total amount of it in society. Politicians who support legalizing gambling should put aside their understandable complaints about competitive edge and ask whether they want to see more of their constituency spending more time at casinos. It’s possible that this additional time and money spent at casinos would have been spent watching television and buying potato chips, but it’s equally possible that it would have been spent starting small businesses or going to night school.

More fundamentally, however, the proponents of legalized casinos are simply mistaken about what makes for the long-term health of a city and a broader polity like a state. States need money to perform essential public services, without which they will fail in their duties towards their citizens. But the honest way to go about collecting it is through transparent taxes, not by skimming from the haul collected by private casino owners. While the revenues collected from taxes on casinos might help restore the state to fiscal equilibrium (though in Ohio’s case, as in many others, the deficit was so enlarged by the recent recession that the additional revenue will be far from enough), fiscal stability is only one of many qualities that make for a healthy polity in the long term. Equally important is the quality of education at all levels, investment in infrastructure, the character of neighborhoods, and the provision of public services. Without these, even a state running a budget surplus is not only doing a disservice to its citizens, it may find itself having lost its competitive edge among other states. (Examples spring readily to mind: Atlanta, long one of the fastest growing big cities in the United States, has in the last few years seen its commercial property investment rating dramatically downgraded by Moody’s due to its inability to manage demand for scarce water resources or provide adequate transportation infrastructure.)

Providing social services costs money, it is true, some of which could be provided by casino taxes, but in many cases casinos directly and negatively affect communities in ways that additional revenue cannot counteract. Particularly disastrous in the case of the Ohio ballot issue is the placement of the casinos in the hearts of the state’s four largest cities. Three of those cities, at least, have recently been showing signs that their long period of decline is over. Young professionals are moving back into the city in droves, and families are hesitantly beginning to follow. Inner cities have seen investments in historic preservation and new development. Casinos will militate against these trends. No doubt they will attract visitors from the suburbs and surrounding regions, but they will hammer home the idea, only just beginning to fade, that central cities are places you might commute to, or visit on a field trip, but never the kind of place you’d like to live and raise a family in.

The urbanist thinker and former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa has said that children are a kind of indicator species for communities, just as certain vulnerable species can serve as indicators of an ecosystem’s health. If you can walk around a community and see children flourishing, your community is flourishing. It is not difficult to see why families with children might decide not to move downtown after all if they will be living a few blocks away from a casino, and that decision, made by a multitude of families, will rule out a future where American cities are once again safe, beautiful, and exciting.

Casinos and the associated tax revenue they bring in may look irresistible to politicians in an era when tax increases are politically unfeasible but Americans demand strong public services, but in the long term they are a bad investment. One-shot fiscal maneuvers rarely improve a state’s permanent health. What is needed instead is sustained attention to creating places, urban, suburban and rural, that will attract businesses and people. Casinos will certainly not do that.


David Schaengold is the assistant editor of Public Discourse. Previously, he researched urban policy at the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, IL.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The issue here is not, it is repeatedly stressed, a suspicion of cheating. Of course, men who pretend to be women in order to compete with women should be and are disqualified. No one believes this to be the case about Semenya.

Nevertheless, the real issue is somewhat muddled.  Is the question whether Semenya and others like her, who have, in some cases, a Y chromosome but female organs, really a man?  If so, gender testing would presumably be carried out in order to determine who could compete as a woman, who as a man.  That this is what is under dispute is suggested in a recent New York Times analysis, in which Alice Dreger writes, “there needs to be explicit rules about who is considered a woman.  But what rules?”

This concern with whether Semenya is really a woman should be distinguished from a different concern that has been raised, namely, a concern for fairness: Is it fair for Semenya, and others like her, to compete when she has some of the biological advantages typical of men? This worry need not concern itself with the question of whether Semenya is really a man, and its resolution would not be done for the sake of reclassifying a runner into male competition, but only, it seems, for the sake of disallowing competition as a woman. The goal would be to prohibit those with unfair physical advantages from competition so as to level the playing field.

I propose to address the “true gender” and the fairness concerns, both of which I think are deeply flawed.

Is it possible that Caster Semenya is really a man?  To what extent should our understanding of Semenya’s gender be informed by scientific and medical considerations unavailable to the naked eye, and unknown to Semenya herself, presumably, until quite recently?

That understanding would be expected to focus on an athlete’s genotype—the genes she possesses—rather than her phenotype—her observable physical properties.  But the relationship between the two turns out to be quite complicated. In a summary of the recent scientific literature, Nicanor Austriaco describes a case from the American Journal of Human Genetics of a female with a normal uterus and normal ovaries who nevertheless possesses a Y chromosome. How is this possible? She lacks the CBX2 gene on chromosome 17, which is apparently necessary for the functioning of the male determining gene on the Y chromosome. As Austriaco notes, the case indicates that “sexual development in mammals requires not one, but a network of functioning genes, many of which remain unidentified.”

Similarly, in Dreger’s Times analysis, different scientists propose a number of different tests, none of which seems sufficient for a determination of gender.   Such considerations raise questions, and have broad implications well beyond the ethics of sport.  For example: if, at the genetic level, gender must be understood holistically, and not in terms of a single and simple genetic factor, then our understanding of what genetic factors are relevant at least in part is controlled by our prior understanding, based on phenotypical characteristics, of what makes someone male, or female.  And, arguably, the phenotypic characteristics of gender are thought to be important precisely because of their significance for sexual acts and, by extension, marriage.  This all suggests that someone’s “true” gender might, in fact, be partly or wholly a function of what marital acts they are, in a broad sense, capable of, and this, of course, in turn raises deeply contested questions about the nature of marriage.

For our present purposes, however, we may put most of these questions aside. For the moral of the preceding considerations is that it seems highly dubious that the IAAF—the International Association of Athletics Federation—possesses the competence to make a determination of gender for its athletes in any deep sense. Rather, the likelihood is that any such “determination” would, in fact, be oriented not towards the true gender of the athlete but towards the question of whether she possesses any unfair biological advantage, whether genetic or hormonal. Of course, some criterion is necessary—it is not a matter of choice whether an athlete is to compete as a woman or a man. But the traditional phenotypical determination based on observable sex traits seems not just good enough, but perhaps the best approach in a deep sense.

Even if Semenya is not a man, is it fair for her and others like her to compete when she has some of the biological advantages typical of men? She has been virtually untouchable in recent meets and this is unquestionably in part a result of her physical circumstances.

Yet several considerations militate against the claim that she should therefore be forbidden from competing as a woman. After all, exceptional physical endowments, sometimes bordering on the miraculous, sometimes bordering on the freaky, are the stuff of which athletic excellence is frequently made. No one thinks that Usain Bolt’s body has just the same set of natural gifts as the bodies of his competitors—in fact, his gifts seem wildly disproportionate to those of every runner with which the world has hitherto been aware. That is, for him, good luck, and for his competitors, bad luck. It is not the business of the IAAF to address such natural disparities, no matter how “unnatural” they may seem.

Second, few seem to believe that Semenya, or other women like her, should be made to compete as men if they are not allowed to compete as women. Such a proposal would likely be rejected as impractical; it would almost certainly disadvantage the women involved were they to participate in the highest levels of male competition; and it would be profoundly insensitive to those who, with good reason, believe themselves to be women. Several commentators have noted the similarity of the Semenya case to that of Santhi Soundarajan, who was stripped of her silver medal in the 2006 Asian games after a gender test. Soundarajan had lived her entire life as a woman and subsequently attempted suicide.

Finally, in the absence of a genuine correlation of “fairness factors” such as increased testosterone or a Y chromosome to true gender, a set of criteria based on considerations of fairness would require a drawing of the lines that would leave some physically advantaged women within, and some only marginally more advantaged women without, the permitted boundaries. But where to draw the line would be, ultimately, arbitrary, and those on the “outside” of the boundaries would be disproportionately affected in the extreme.

The IAAF, and similar governing bodies for athletic competition, rightly concerns itself with the issue of fairness when it concerns cheating—the deliberate attempt to gain an unfair advantage by cunning means, going beyond reliance on hard work and natural endowment within the framework set by the rules of play. But beyond that, sport celebrates the disparity of natural gifts between the athlete and the spectator, and amongst the athletes themselves (Michael Sandel’s recent work on enhancement and sport is worth taking note of in this context). Those disparities are partly responsible for the eventual division of athletes, in any contest, into winners and losers. Acting as a referee for deliberate infractions is entirely within the mandate of the IAAF, but acting as a referee for the distribution of good and bad luck, gifted and less gifted bodies, or even of maleness and femaleness—all of these go beyond any authority reasonably held by an athletic organization.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Kennedy played the central role in his own care choices because he could pay for the services he received. Whether he was self-insured or carried outside insurance, the fact that those who treated him knew they would be paid through means at his disposal put him in charge of his health care.

Contrast this with an unknown taxpayer, admitted to a county public hospital or government-run clinic somewhere and added to the queue, perhaps just another Medicare or Medicaid patient with a life-threatening problem near the end of his life. Joe Taxpayer has been indirectly paying for his health care, too. Perhaps quite a bit. The difference is that he will not be the respected key component of the process and his experience will be quite different. If health care were conducted as it is in some countries, protocols for treatment of someone his age may even have denied him getting the treatment that Kennedy chose.

In America, the real health-care debate is whether Americans’ health care will look like Ted Kennedy’s or Joe Taxpayer’s. The issue, therefore, is not about reform or no reform. It is about good reform versus bad reform. How can every American’s health care look like Ted Kennedy’s? The answer is: “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

Imagine that every American has good health insurance, appropriate to his or her circumstances, and is the conduit through which payment is made. Imagine that doctors and hospitals post prices, can charge what they want but compete with one another for patients, and charge everyone who they do treat the same price for the same service on the same terms. Only then will every American be in charge of his or her own health care and be treated as the respected center of all decisions about their own bodies.

This system need not rest in the imagination. It’s possible in the here and now with just a few minor reforms. Here’s how:

Quality, affordable, good insurance will require that each “insurance generation” of American males and females pay for its own health care as a group year by year. For example, all males born in the year 1981 must pay for the health care that 1981-born males use in 2010—or in any other year. If we want the insurance to be good, it will cover all types of medical expenditures necessary for life and health while excluding optional procedures such as elective cosmetic surgery and hair transplants. Since it is insurance, everyone in the group will pay the same premiums for the insurance they buy. The deductibles plus co-insurance payments plus premiums of the 1981-born males pay for all of the care that the group gets. A handling charge that should be on the order of 12.5 percent of the premiums, possibly as little as 8 percent, depending on competition in the insurance market, goes to the insurance companies for doing the paperwork and claims processing. The system could be that simple.

Americans know that insurance companies can make money by collecting premiums and then not paying out on legitimate claims when they occur (which is illegal), or by utilization gate keeping (reviewing claims and denying some, which ought to be illegal), or by charging too much in premiums and investing the excess money in high-return investments.

Under a good reform, however, insurance companies would not make money in any of these ways that harm consumers. Instead, any 1981-born male could buy insurance from any company, at any time, pay the same premiums that any other 1981-born male pays for the same coverage, and have all of his medical expenditures except optional elective procedures covered. The insurance company’s role would simply be to verify that the medical event occurred, the service was provided, the service was on the list of covered services, and that the insured paid his deductible or co-insurance portion. In other words, there would be no utilization gatekeeping by law, and everyone’s insurance would be guaranteed issue, guaranteed renewable, portable, personal, and responsive.

Under this plan, insurance-company earnings would be based solely on payments to them for claims processing and paperwork. Because total medical expenditures for 1981-born males is known with certainty, or near certainty, a national re-insurance pool (insurance for insurance companies) could make transfers to insurance companies whose group of 1981-born males spent more than the group average, and receive transfers from companies whose group of 1981-born males spent less. Companies would compete with one another on the quality of their service, their friendliness, the speediness of their claims processing. They would earn no money from advantageous selection (“cream skimming,” issuing policies to an intentionally gathered healthier-than-average collection of insureds) or face threat of bankruptcy from adverse selection (issuing policies to an unintentionally gathered sicker-than-average collection of insured individuals). In other words, insurance would function as it should—just as described in textbooks.

You can’t make something cheaper to buy than it actually costs. But because the 1981-born males are today 28 years old, and the insurance companies that compete for their business will cut premiums to the least possible, the insurance just described will be priced at the least possible charge. As the 1981-born males age, they should expect that their health insurance premiums will rise, just as life insurance premiums rise. If a 1981 male wants to flatten his premium profile, he does so through savings that will go toward higher premiums later in life. Since anyone can save, the option of making insurance less costly later in life is available to all.

Finally, what about seniors who have not saved enough for their medical insurance premiums and no longer have the savings option? They can apply for charity, first from foundations and private sources that government can oversee, encourage, and help process payments from, perhaps through check-off boxes on federal tax returns. If these sources are not enough they can apply for government welfare payments financed through taxes.

The arrangements just described would take relatively few pages of federal legislation. A national re-insurance body would need to be formed. Utilization gate-keeping would need to be prohibited. A basic insurance policy would need to be defined, and motivation created to cause individuals to want to buy it. But presuming these are done, insurance would be actuarially fair, adverse selection and advantageous selection eliminated, guaranteed issue and guaranteed renewability would apply, and every American would be able to buy affordable insurance with targeted charity provided to those who needed money to buy their coverage.

Much of this has been described in my recently co-authored book Health Care for Us All: Getting More for Our Investment (Cambridge University Press, 2009). James Henderson and I estimate that the uninsured could all be covered at a national annual cost of about $1,555 each. Because each insurance generation covers its own health care costs, the arrangements would be sustainable, laterally expandable in a generation, longitudinally expandable across generations, and fiscally sound. No entitlement or threat to future generations would be created. On a national basis, having everyone covered with good insurance would cost less than one-half of one percent of national income. Savings through other easy-to-make changes would be on the order of 2.25 percent of income. In total the changes would appear to be free.

If good insurance is available and everyone has the income to buy it, there must be a strong motivation to do so. Part of the increased motivation derives from the lower insurance prices that will prevail for those under age 34, who account for nearly 60 percent of the uninsured. Additional motivation can be provided in different ways, but one that economic theory points to requires no budget outlay and takes the form of a carrot rather than a stick. If the general price level reflects a uniform tax such as a value added tax, anyone with health insurance can be rewarded with lower prices for all purchases by rebating the tax or not collecting it at the point of purchase. No budget outlay is needed to create the motivation and everyone with health insurance pays less for their food, clothing, transportation, and so on. We believe that a 20-percent reduction would motivate nearly everyone to buy health insurance.

In sum, a short bill that provided for good insurance, targeted income aid to those who needed it, and provided a positive motivation to buy insurance would need only a few pro-competitive features more to have government act as referee to keep competition in health care and health insurance markets strong. Prices would have to be posted, most favored customer pricing guaranteed by law (charging the same price to users of identical services), and certain protections for users of insurance such as providing by law that an individual has the right to take money spent by his employer on his behalf for health insurance and use it in the private insurance market if that results in a better outcome for him. All could be accomplished in a targeted intervention with little change for the 85 percent of us who have good insurance and good health care now.

But Senator Baucus has other ideas. He wants instead to spend over $829 billion over the next ten years ($3,900 per uninsured restored to coverage), more in years after that, while creating an unsustainable entitlement and leaving 25 million uninsured. He would make government the center of health care instead of empowering the patient.

Senator Baucus, like most of his committee, does not understand good health insurance or how to make it affordable. Not surprisingly, he seeks to place himself and Congress at the center of health care decisions in America. His proposal includes the words “establish” or “create” 312 times (as in “establish a new Federal commission called the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission” or “establish the Medicaid Quality Measurement Program”). Congress will not be a referee, but the main player on the field. Because his plan’s bad features are scheduled to phase in after 2012 so as not to harm Mr. Obama’s next election, this may not be known to the American public until it is too late.

If we aspire to Ted Kennedy-quality health-care for all, then should we restructure health care to empower patients and have government act as referee or should we empower the government to create new entitlements? The real health care debate is over which of these is the best approach.


Earl L. Grinols is a former Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Economics at Baylor University. His most recent book is Health Care for Us All: Getting More for Our Investment published in August 2009 by Cambridge University Press.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

One of the most interesting disagreements between the panelists was what the future of social conservatism should be. David Frum, a former staffer in the Bush White House, argued that a successful GOP would need, among other things, to “turn down the volume” on social issues in order to appeal to an increasingly secular electorate. Would it really be a good thing if social conservatives turn down the volume, or even tune out by disengaging from politics altogether?

What do we mean when we speak of “cultural” or “social” issues? After all, economic policy and foreign policy are as much “cultural” concerns as issues related to sex and family life. One view is that the word “social” in phrases like “social issues” and “social conservatism” is a euphemism for religious. Religion, however, informs our public life very nearly across the board, and social conservatism is only one instance of its influence. American religious zeal has animated political action as wide-ranging as the progressive economics of the social gospel, the demands for justice of the civil-rights movement, and—most recently—arguments against global warming that cite the book of Genesis. If America is indeed growing more secular, its citizens will not just lose their interest in one or two issues, but also a near-universal moral vocabulary.

Conservatives today are accused by some of focusing on only two issues: abortion and gay marriage. Social conservatism, in fact, has never been limited to a narrow range of issues. An obvious example is provided by Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage. Gallagher has led the fight for upholding the traditional conception of marriage, but has also written about the effects of no-fault divorce on children and abandoned spouses. Authors writing in Public Discourse have made socially conservative arguments in favor of public transportation and against torture. The future of conservatism, then, should be modeled on its (often forgotten) past: addressing not just one or two political questions, but a whole range of social problems, with an overriding concern for the importance of the family and the lives of the most vulnerable human beings. Even if today’s hot-button issues fade, this kind of social conservatism will still remain.

Social conservatives must press their case with hard data and principled arguments. One of the leading scholars exemplifying this approach is sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia. Most recently, he penned an article in National Affairs that marshaled social-science data to argue that liberalized divorce laws have been especially damaging to the poor and uneducated. The results of social science are rarely conclusive, but to the extent that conservatives are right about the importance of family and the nature of the human person, the data will bear them out.

Politics is not simply an actuarial science, however. It is, above all, a contest of principles. Conservatives must make principled arguments for the dignity of human life and the importance of the family as a public good. Conservatives showed the need for welfare reform—one of the major successes of modern conservatism—through the analysis of data and the use of sound sociological arguments. This data, convincing as it was, would not have gained much of a hearing had there not been politicians willing to use a socially conservative rhetoric of responsibility to make the case for welfare reform.

We should not totally dismiss Frum’s argument, however. After all, the soft voice is often the most persuasive. Does this mean that conservatives should cease from making explicit arguments in defense of life and marriage? No, but conservatives tilting into a “culture war” must remember that the most ingrained cultural beliefs often go unspoken. A major challenge for conservatives will be to foster cultural institutions that are bearers of meaning, inculcating support for family life and human dignity without explicitly arguing for them. An encouraging sign could be found in recent films like Juno and Knocked Up that contained pro-life messages. Conservatives have devoted a great deal of effort to criticizing the media and some to gaining a foothold in it. What is really needed is more basic and difficult: ways of life—simple, everyday practices and public observances—that build respect for marriage and human dignity. How to foster such institutions is a difficult question, but electioneering is probably not the answer.

Frum called for a wealthier, more suburban, and more North-Eastern Republican party. Such voters tend to see social concerns like restrictions on abortion or divorce as restrictions of their personal autonomy. These constituencies are less concerned with social issues precisely because their economic and educational privilege has insulated them from the negative effects of divorce and non-marital sex. The country’s poor Black, Hispanic, and rural White communities suffer some of the highest rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and divorce and, not coincidentally, tend to be among the most socially conservative in their political views. Frum’s proposal might appeal to those safely perched on cushions of monetary and social capital who experiences these institutions as restrictions on their personal freedom rather than as necessary bulwarks of stability. But it does little for the plight of the rest.

This brings us back to the central problem with Frum’s argument. All political positions in the end appeal to a set of moral and social and cultural concerns, even if implicitly. It is difficult to elaborate the problems with massive imprisonment of black males, and the related problem of black single motherhood, unless one is willing to talk about the importance of family. Misguided attempts to reduce the role of social conservatives in political discourse will make it more difficult to address some of the most complicated problems our nation faces. The way forward for social conservatives—whether within current political coalitions or outside them—is not to retreat on social issues, but rather to show how social conservatism is a flexible, fertile philosophy as necessary today as ever. Let’s turn the volume up to eleven.


Matthew Schmitz is the managing editor of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Both sides of today’s debate might be inclined to dismiss such concerns as silly. The intemperance of some pop music, they say, is enjoyed only in the mind of the listener and is not translated into action. Music, they point out, cannot force the will to certain actions. How often, after all, does a person run out and commit a crime after listening to a song? But this is no more than setting up and knocking down a straw man. The contention made by Aristotle and Plato is not that music can, in so simple a fashion, cause people to act a certain way. Rather, they contend that music moves the passions, and that this power, exerted repeatedly over time on people who are immature and impressionable, can produce a certain disposition under which it will be either easier or more difficult for reason to see, and for the will to choose, what is right.

Even if such music causes nothing more than a passionate reverie in the mind of the listener, the classical teaching still urges us to avoid it. This point is brought to light by the ancients’ general emphasis on human flourishing above and beyond mere social order, and more specifically by their account of the highest happiness, which results from the activity of the human mind in leisure. As Aristotle teaches, leisure is the purpose of life. For most of us work is merely the means to the goods we enjoy in the time we can be free from work. Leisure is, in contrast, the time when we are free to enjoy the things that we choose for their own sake. In sum, leisure is what most people cherish most and is where they expect to find their happiness.

For Plato and Aristotle, however, the crucial question is whether the things we enjoy in our leisure are truly worthy of us as rational beings and whether they are conducive to the happiness proper to such beings. So we must ask whether the excessive passion of some pop music, and its consequent hostility to reason, may incapacitate the young for the kind of leisure that is at once more reasoned and truly fulfilling.

We may be tempted to think that this critique places these classical voices in the same camp as today’s critics of popular music. However, the classical account provides the basis for a much more penetrating criticism of this music than its opponents today have advanced. This must give us pause, for it suggests that the basis of the classical teaching’s criticism of obscene pop differs from that of these contemporary critics. And that in turn suggests that Plato and Aristotle would find fault with pop’s critics as well as with its defenders.

For the ancients, then, conservatives are correct to take music so seriously, but they do not take it seriously enough. Put another way, in their attempt to take music seriously, the conservative critics of pop music do not aim high enough. They oppose music that fosters vice, but that limited aim does not do justice to the full flourishing of human nature or to the key role that the right kind of musical culture can play in fostering that flourishing. By failing to aim higher, modern conservatives ignore, and therefore do nothing to correct, the very social conditions that foster soul- and culture-deforming popular music. To understand this failing more fully, we need to develop the likely Platonic and Aristotelian diagnosis of modern popular music, modern culture and politics, and their effects on the human soul.

From the standpoint of the ancients, life under contemporary, secular liberalism—with its emphasis on material prosperity, its privatization of morality and hence its indifference to the highest human possibilities—must prove, in the end, to be less than fully satisfying. They argued that such a society addresses itself only to the brute in man, and thus the soul soon begins to hunger for nourishment that it cannot provide. Confronted with the prospect of life in such a society, the young react as the young Glaucon reacts, in Book II of the Republic, to what he calls the “city of sows,” a city dedicated exclusively to the needs of the body. There must be more to life than this, they think. But since they have no accurate sense of what that “more” is, they turn to the most obvious thing: overindulgence of the pleasures of the body. Bored with liberal modernity’s sober and cautious pursuit of pleasure, they turn instead to the careless and even reckless enjoyment of excessive pleasure, as well as to the music that celebrates such a life. Hence the essential correctness of Allan Bloom’s assertion, in his The Closing of the American Mind, that a certain kind of rock—at least the most daring rock of his time—is primarily about infantile sex pursued to extremes.

This is not, however, the last stage of the youthful soul’s, or of pop music’s, progress under conditions of contemporary secular, liberal culture. Sexual overindulgence proves in the end no more responsive to our most human desires than the timid bourgeois pleasure-seeking from which the soul recoiled in the first place. Once again the young seek for more, but once again, in the absence of the musical education of the ancients, they have no idea where to look. They have exhausted the body as a source of fulfillment, but they know nothing of reason. Thus they turn from bodily appetite to the far more interesting and dangerous regions of what the Republic calls the spirited part of the soul, the seat of anger and self-assertion. The satisfactions of spiritedness, at least in their coarser forms, are easily accessible. They require no refining education of the soul through orderly and graceful music. Certain spirited pleasures can be added to the indulgence of the body, and this solution appears, at least initially, responsive to the longing of the soul for more than the dominant culture has to offer. After all, that sexual excess alone is not fully satisfying need not mean that it is to be dispensed with, only supplemented.

Hence the emergence of a new, more disturbing popular music, one that adds violence to sex and is dually obscene for its celebration of both unrestrained physical gratification and the joys of uncontrolled spirited self-assertion. Indeed, the apparent summit of the new rock and rap’s perverse genius is not merely to add spiritedness to sex but actually to combine the two: intercourse itself is presented not only as a source of physical pleasure but also as an occasion for self-assertion, as a handy means of gratifying the body with the aid of another while simultaneously asserting one’s self by degrading that other.

On this classical diagnosis our sexually and violently obscene popular music appears as an increasingly unwholesome but nonetheless understandable reaction on the part of the young to the moral and spiritual poverty of liberal modernity. According to this account, though, pop music’s critics, while correctly perceiving that something of the utmost political importance is taking place in the realm of popular music, have incorrectly understood how to respond. Their critique of pop music takes the form of a call to decency and law-abidingness, rather than to virtue or excellence of character and mind. Such a strategy will be limited in its effectiveness because it does nothing to reform the cultural and moral emptiness that provoked the emergence of vicious popular music in the first place.

In contrast, the ancients would prescribe a serious attempt, including the educational use of the right kind of music, to encourage our pursuit of the highest goods attainable by man, reason’s enjoyment of moral nobility and theoretical truth. This, of course, is a daunting prospect in light of the discipline it imposes on the desires, which are powerful and inclined to resist such a project. We look with sympathy on the modern temptation—which influences liberals and conservatives alike—to dispense with the pursuit of excellence and instead to erect society on a basis apparently more reliable because more agreeable to desire: the promotion only of peace and prosperity, the conditions of comfortable self-preservation.

Yet, the classical argument indicates that such a society cannot in the long run reliably attain even the humble goal it sets for itself: instead it eventually gives rise to irrational and unruly passions that deform the soul and threaten the society itself. Thus it seems necessary to strive for the highest things identified by the ancients, from which striving a decent public order may emerge as a byproduct. To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, civilization can only be preserved by people who care about things higher than civilization. The ancients teach us that music is essential to fostering our love of those things, and hence to the preservation of civilization.

Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics and, most recently, of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press). This article is the second in a two-part series. The first can be found here.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

There was a time in America, not too long ago, when this question might have been raised. Over a period of some decades America’s cultural politics involved a debate between the left and the right over whether some popular music tended to weaken society by eroding standards of personal conduct. This controversy extends at least as far back as the rise of jazz, but it gained intensity with the rise and progress of forms of rock—and, later on, rap—that seemed to celebrate liberation from self-control, especially in relation to sex, drugs, and even violence. Some conservatives have held that such music poses a serious threat to society. Such music, they contended, glorifies and thereby encourages self-indulgent and violent behavior. Yet a free society requires citizens with a capacity for self-control. In the absence of the voluntary public order such citizens support, the alternatives are either disorder or government-coerced order. Thus the worst popular music educates the young not for free and responsible citizenship but for anarchy or despotism—or, more likely, anarchy followed by despotism. In contrast, liberals have seen the great threat to freedom not in such music but in the conservative critics’ reaction to it. Pop music, they suggested, is in fact merely harmless fun. There is, after all, no scientific proof that such music produces violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. Those who think otherwise threaten freedom by their illiberal and un-American interest in regulating other people’s private pleasures.

This argument was alive and well as recently as ten years ago, when troubled artists like Marilyn Manson and Eminem rose to prominence producing troubling music that expressed and celebrated their extreme loves and hatreds. The dispute over the moral and cultural consequences of pop music, however, was soon crowded out of the public discourse by matters of national security. The terrorist attacks of 9-11, and the subsequent American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, turned the minds of Americans away from the culture wars for a time. And, when the culture wars resumed later in the decade, they took the form of the struggle over same-sex marriage. The musical front in the culture wars, it seems, has been abandoned by both sides.

An argument, however, can be forgotten without deserving to be forgotten. In fact, the debate between left and right over the morality of popular music touches upon issues of the deepest significance and gives expression to concerns that were explored with the utmost seriousness at the very beginnings of the tradition of western political philosophy. When conservatives and liberals argued over whether pop music could transform the character of individuals—and hence, eventually, of whole generations and of society itself—they were not, as contemporary social scientists often contended, pursuing a diversionary debate about merely “symbolic” issues. They were rather disputing a question that thinkers like Plato and Aristotle had treated as inseparable from their inquiry into the best political order. To be sure, the contemporary debate was often characterized more by passion than insight. This, however, is not a reason to dismiss its central concerns as fundamentally irrational, but instead to turn for instruction to the classical political philosophers.

What, then, is the classical teaching on the moral and political significance of music? And what light does that teaching shed on the recurring (although presently suspended) American argument over popular music?

Surprisingly, to us, the ancients not only thought music worthy of serious attention, they in fact considered it an issue of supreme political importance. Plato’s Socrates, for example, suggests, in the Republic’s discussion of the political institutions of the best city, that among these the rearing in music is “most sovereign.” He later adds that the guardians of the best regime “must beware of change to a strange form of music . . . For never are the ways of music changed without the greatest political laws being moved.” Even more surprisingly, Plato and Aristotle hold the primary preoccupation of the contemporary debate to be of mere secondary importance. For they insist that the political importance of music arises not only from the message of the lyrics of a song but also from the emotional and moral power of the music itself. Hence the ancients’ constant emphasis on “rhythm,” “harmony,” and “tune.”

Plato and Aristotle attribute this great political importance to musical rhythm and harmony because of their power to contribute to the fulfillment of the primary aim of political life. This aim, as Aristotle states it, is to “produce a certain character in the citizens, namely, to make them virtuous, and capable of performing noble actions.” Yet, he continues, music obviously “contributes something to virtue” because “it is evident through many things” that “we become of a certain quality in our characters on account of it.”

Music, the ancients contend, is an “imitative” art. That is, it depicts the various passions and states of character of which human beings are capable. Again, Aristotle: “in rhythms and tunes there are likenesses particularly close to the genuine natures of anger and gentleness, and further of courage and moderation and all of the things opposite to these and of the other things pertaining to character.” Such images do not merely present themselves to the soul but in fact impress themselves upon it. In the case of the extremely impressionable souls of the young, moreover, the mark left by such images is apt to be lasting. Indeed, the ancients attribute this character-forming power to artistic images generally. Hence Socrates’ concern in the Republic that the young, by “grazing” on “licentious, illiberal, and graceless” works of art, will create some great evil in their souls, and his hope that, in contrast, they will, if surrounded by graceful images, be led to “likeness and friendship as well as accord.” Of all such images, however, music is by far the most powerful. Rhythm and harmony, Socrates contends, “most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them; and they make a man most graceful if he is correctly reared, if not, the opposite.”

The ancients appear particularly interested in using music to foster a kind of moderation. Music’s ability to engage the passions, it seems, includes a capacity to calm them. Thus Aristotle’s concern to exclude from education those forms of music that are “frenzied and passionate” and instead to emphasize music capable of putting us “in a middling and settled state.” The calm disposition of the passions fostered by the proper rearing in music prepares one for the activities of virtue because, as Aristotle points out in the Nicomachean Ethics, one’s capacity for moral reasoning and choice is disrupted by excessive passion. Aristotle argues that living virtuously requires prudence, the twofold ability to discern the first principles of action, the moral virtues, and to discover by calculation how, in particular circumstances, these virtues can be realized by particular actions.

With regard to the former capacity, Aristotle notes that the Greek term for moderation literally signifies “preserving prudence.” This is so, he argues, because moderation in fact preserves our understanding of what is good, since pleasure and pain, which accompany the passions, tend to pervert or destroy our beliefs concerning moral virtue. Aristotle also indicates that the latter capacity is likewise impeded by passion. In the Ethics he contends that there are those who see the goodness of the virtues but who nonetheless fail to live them in their particular circumstances because when under the influence of passion they, in a sense, forget their principles, like men who are asleep, mad, or drunk. It is in this light that we can understand Aristotle’s comment, in the Politics, that the proper rearing in music makes one capable not only of judging noble tunes, but even of judging the noble things themselves.

Looking even higher, the ancients go so far as to suggest that the proper rearing in music can prepare the soul for philosophy. How can music accomplish this? Plato and Aristotle both suggest that excessive passion is an impediment to philosophic activity no less than to moral activity. Hence their moderation-inducing music paves the way for philosophy by quieting the desires that distract the soul from the search for truth Moreover, and more positively, music can foster in the soul an attraction to the truth that philosophy seeks. The graceful music of the best city presents the young soul with a kind of intelligible and beautiful order, and, by its grace and the natural pleasure that accompanies it, such music fosters a lasting taste for such beautiful order. Yet this ultimately is the object of philosophic longing, according to the Republic: the philosopher, Socrates says, keeps company with the divine and orderly, the beautiful order of the cosmos.

What, the modern reader might wonder, does all this have to do with politics? The ancient account offers two answers. To begin with, Plato and Aristotle contend that the kind of character fostered by the proper rearing in music tends to support a decent and free public order. The Republic’s music education is said to produce gentlemen, men who are attracted to virtue and repelled by vice. Thus a city with good music education will not have to bother with a multitude of laws regulating conflicts among the citizens. Absent the moderate and gentlemanly disposition fostered by the right music, however, the preservation of peace is very difficult. One of the themes of both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics is the close connection between immoderation and injustice: the man with excessive passions eventually must turn to unjust means to satisfy them. Thus the character formed by the lack of passion-taming music, or, worse, by a rearing in passion-inflaming music, leads necessarily to widespread injustice, thence to conflict among the citizens, and thence to the multiplication of laws in a futile attempt to solve these problems.

Furthermore, the concern with musical character formation is political to the ancients because to them the political is above all not so much that which conduces to public order (as important as that is) as that which conduces to human excellence, both moral and intellectual, and hence to human happiness. This is an important point, because it reminds us that the music education they offer moderates the passions not by artificially constraining them but instead by eliciting other longings, for moral nobility and philosophic insight. Such longings are, for the ancients, not only natural but at the core of human nature. Intellect, with its capacity to contemplate and to act in the light of the true and the noble, is our “true self,” says Aristotle. But this true self can only come into its own with the assistance of music. Thus for the ancients music, no less than politics itself, is essential to our becoming fully human, and fully humanly happy.

Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics and, most recently, of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press). This article is the first in a two-part series. Read the second installment here.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Our public life is riven by significant moral and political disagreements. From issues like health care and immigration reform, to debates over war, abortion and the nature of marriage, our common life as a people suffers from the strains of conflict. These disagreements cannot simply be avoided by being relegated to the private sphere: their resolution is crucial to the common good, to the set of conditions that we, as a people, work together to provide for one another and ourselves, so that we may all flourish as human beings.

Nor are these issues “merely political”—they are not simply issues of policy to be “solved” by appeals to prudence, or efficiency, or pragmatism. Rather they are issues calling for public principles, the sorts of principles whose recognition shapes a people’s moral character. For this reason they are, additionally, matters not just of public importance, but matters for the public, for the people of a nation to come to grips with so as to shape the course of their politics, their self-understanding, and their social life.

Consideration of these issues is thus a matter of public importance; it is likewise a project that must be carried out by the public and in public. But how is such a project to be carried out?

“Discourse” indicates the crucial means by which this project is to be pursued. Proponents of competing positions must communicate—not just to those who already share their views, but to those who don’t; they must be part of a public conversation. This conversation is not just, however, an exchange of views. It must be an exchange of reasons. It must have the character of a public argument.

Of course, that conversation can go badly. If, for example, it is carried out without mutual respect, then the fabric of our common life will be further rent. So there need to be norms—ground-rules, as it were, for that conversation, and yet, even the character of these rules is a subject of debate. Two erroneous accounts of those rules in particular should be mentioned.

One such erroneous account banks too much on a denuded notion of civility. It is clear that a lack of manners, or the presence of downright rudeness, is a failure of civility in public discourse. This failure is a form of disrespect which is not justified even if the offending party is correct on the substance, and the offended party in error. Civility thus really is a virtue of public discourse. But the presence of good manners and politeness is far from a sufficient condition for genuine civility in public discourse. To reiterate, such a discourse is all about a competing class of claims which, to be well grounded and deserving of public consideration, must be backed by reasons and arguments. A civility which merely politely asserted, or politely listened, without engaging in argument, would be a bogus form of public discourse, a sham. It would come nowhere towards an adequate address of the real weight of our public disagreements.

Are there other restrictions on our giving of reasons and arguments in public discourse? A second error draws the boundaries on what counts as public discourse too narrowly, holding that only “neutral” reasons, or reasons that can be disengaged from conceptions of human good and well-being, or from substantive “world-views” may be raised, considered, and addressed in public discourse.

These demands for neutrality, many people have noted, are themselves far from neutral. They rest upon a particular conception of the human person and of human freedom, according to which it is an affront to human dignity to be “coerced” in accordance with reasons that are not one’s own. This conception is not shared by those who believe, for example, that freedom is valuable for persons only insofar as it is oriented towards the truth, and that the freedom of unreasoned self-assertion is, in fact, damaging to human character and welfare. But if the demand for neutrality depends upon a particular substantive view, then it cannot be carried out without falling afoul of its own requirements.

Nor, on their own merits, are such requirements reasonable. To refuse to listen to reasons—evidence put forth to defend a claim as true—is unreasonable, and to refuse to allow such reasons to be put forth in the public square is unjust—it unfairly restricts some citizens’ participation in the public conversation on arbitrary grounds. So our public conversation on matters of public weight and importance should be unfettered, as regards the kinds of reasons that are permitted.

The requirement that reason be “public” in the limited sense is thus not sound. But reasons are rightly thought of as “public” in a variety of other ways. They must be reasons for thinking that the advocated position is true. They must be reasons that are available in principle for others to recognize as true. They must, again, be reasons bearing upon issues that genuinely are a matter of public importance. Finally, they must be reasons that are put forth in a relevantly public forum.

This last point is of critical importance in this day and age. While a lack of civility might strike many as the most prominent feature of our public discourse, this is perhaps only to be expected to the extent that citizens are increasingly unable or unwilling to engage in the mutual giving, understanding, and criticizing of reasons characteristic of genuine public discourse. If citizens and politicians believe that victory is to the loudest, or to the most dramatic, then loud and dramatic they will be. The process of public discourse, by contrast, is often deliberative, difficult and slow; its participants must, on occasion, “dare to be boring” (an expression I have heard attributed to a colleague of mine who teaches English literature).

And, crucially, they must have a public space within which they can carry out the tasks of public discourse, a space in which the sort of public conversation necessary for a reflective opinion on public matters can develop. This common space was made possible in the eighteenth century by the developing print media, in the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers. At the heart of this common space, in turn, was a form of impersonal communication of ideas and arguments. But such a public space is at risk in an era of instantaneous communication and reaction, and competition to be heard above the din.

Public Discourse has, as I understand it, been an attempt in part to recreate part of that public space, to recreate the context in which the impersonal communication of ideas and arguments can be carried out. It is not, of course, the entirety of that space, nor could it ever be: the essays of Public Discourse, while manifesting various internal disagreements amongst its contributors, nevertheless share to a generally high degree a common set of values, presuppositions, and standpoints. But this is not a failure of Public Discourse or of public discourse—those shared ideas must be communicated in a reasoned, civil fashion so that those who disagree can come to grips and engage with their fellow citizens. By doing so, our fellow citizens help us at Public Discourse in our task of creating that public space; thus, even when we do not successfully come to consensus, we—those at Public Discourse, and those with whom we critically disagree—are all nevertheless still engaged in a communal task. Our bonds of citizenship are thereby strengthened by our reasoned disagreement rather than weakened.

Further, when Public Discourse carries out its task effectively, it brings those citizens who might, in fact, agree with our contributors’ views into that same wider community of reasoned discussion in ways that might not otherwise happen. No reasonable person on any side of an important dispute can be pleased with unthinking or unreasoned support for their position. Public Discourse thus seeks to engage not only those who disagree, but, just as importantly, those who do agree, in the common project of a public conversation about our days’ most pressing issues. It attempts to do this with genuine civility, of the sort that acknowledges all our fellow citizens as equal partners in the search for moral and political truth. Such acknowledgement requires not just the manners so often lacking today, but also the mutual giving and criticizing of reasons that marks us as rational beings.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

These arguments depend, of course, on some account of what marriage is that welcomes same-sex couples without qualification. Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that same-sex marriage is mainly about adult satisfactions—love, affection, intimacy, mutual support—just as (they say) it is for most opposite-sex couples. In these proposals, children are strictly optional, a matter of private judgment. Children have nothing to do with the definition of marriage, or with those features of marriage that attract the law’s attention and earn marriage the law’s protection and support. Make no mistake about it: any such account as this is normative, a claim (or set of claims) about what marriage as such and properly understood is really and essentially about. Anyone who makes a pro- same-sex marriage argument dependent upon the state’s obligation to be morally neutral about the meaning of marriage misunderstands the nature of the argument.

A successful counterargument depends therefore on a valid understanding of marriage which implies that same-sex couples are not suited to marry. (For reasons I shall not discuss here, I think that any successful argument must have to do with the nature of marriage itself. Denying persons who may in moral truth marry the legal opportunity to do so for extrinsic reasons of policy or prudence is, I think, unjust.) Almost everyone on both sides recognizes that there is one sure winner here: if marriage can be shown—coherently, reasonably—to be a procreative relationship, then same-sex couples cannot marry. For whatever else they can do, no same-sex couple can produce fruit of their union. They cannot bring into being children of their own.

Courts, commentators, and activists have made several arguments against the procreative understanding of marriage. Some of these arguments are silly or disingenuous, or both. Others deserve (and have received) careful and cogent responses. In this essay I wish to take up one gap in this set of responses. Here I aim to answer two questions: Why is it morally significant that children come to be as fruit of their married parents’ sexual acts? And, why is it legally important? In other words, on what grounds does public authority base marriage law upon the procreative understanding of marriage?

The most important moral truth about the family is the radical equality and mutuality at the heart of family relationships, which relationships have an unbreakable foundation in the way children come to be within marriage. When the spouses’ marital acts bear the fruit of children, the children are perceptively called (in law) “issue of the marriage.” For children embody in a unique way their parents’ union. Just as the married couple is often referred to as two-in-one-flesh, so too each of their children is the two-of-them-in-the-one-flesh. Each child just is their union, extended into time and space, and thus into human history and into the whole human community. The parents can see in each of their children an unsurpassable reflection of them as a unity, that is, of their identity not as Jack and Joan but as the two-of-them-as-one flesh—literally.

Because all the married couple’s children come to be in and through the same act—separated only by time and perhaps by space—each child is equally and wholly the image of his or her parents’ unique union. All the children are, one compared to the others, equally and wholly the offspring of the same parents. Mother and father are equally and wholly parents of each child, in whom they see (literally) so many unique (but nonetheless identical, in the way just described) expressions of their own union. The siblings’ family identity is just that: a matter of identity. In an extended but profound sense, all of the couple’s children are (as it were) twins.

This matrix of familial equality, mutuality, and common identity is the wellspring and ground of love, duty, loyalty, care-giving—the whole moral culture of family life. The lifelong and unbreakable chords of fealty and relatedness which family members possess, one for the others, and which even distance and alienation never quite erase, depend upon it.

This biological common core is reflected all across our everyday lives. We see it in action every time someone announces the resolve to re-connect with his or her long-gone father. We see it in the face of every person who is reunited with a sibling long separated. We see it in our language. One to whom we become especially close is “like a brother” to us. The aunt or even an unrelated family friend who raised us is like “a mother,” and may even be called “mommy.” We see it in perhaps the most arresting image delivered to humankind, that of God as “Abba,” “our Father.”

The sublime equality and mutuality endemic to the family is neither mysterious nor dreamily metaphysical, and it surely is not so speculative as to be somehow beyond the state’s ken. It is no more subtle or beyond the state’s concern than is the correct judgment that the factor of equality of marital friendship lies at, or very near, the heart of the state’s legitimate judgment that polygamy is not supportable, even to the point of making criminal a person’s attempts (indeed, rendering their acts merely attempts) at plural marriage.

We can now see why the law has recognized marriage as morally normative for having children. The law has also recognized that marriage is normative for sexual activity, precisely in order to protect and preserve the valuable relationships that constitute the family. Incest is forbidden to protect the sibling relationship from ruin by sexual attraction and activity, and to forestall the grotesque prospect of there someday being “issue” of the issue. Legal bans on marriage within certain degrees of consanguinity enforce this taboo: if there is no possibility of sibling marriage (for example) then there is much less prospect of sibling sexual attraction and activity. Adultery is forbidden (though such prohibitions are not, as a rule, enforced) to promote the fidelity that defines spousal love. Fornication has historically been forbidden as a crime against marriage, and not for the sake of meddlesome moral paternalism, but because fornication breeds illegitimacy.

The metaphysical and philosophical structure of the family is a standing moral corrective for the cultural (and legal) distortions of the family which are all too familiar to students of history and current events: subordination of wives to husbands; parents’ treatment of children as extensions of their own plans and desires, almost as their property; children’s indifference to their parents who vouchsafed them life and whose marriage they (the children) embody. Recovering and burnishing the truth about the family is the sure first step towards genuine reform of family practices.


Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, where he is the Director of the Center on Religion and the Constitution. Professor Bradley sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 The Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The blurb hints at the most obvious (and most marketable) answer: perhaps Simon can help us evaluate recent American military engagements in the Middle East. The book is said to offer “an interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory and preemptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern political climate.”

Simon makes several points that are of definite relevance to the moral evaluation of any invasion. All these points, it should be noted, seem to count against supporters of America’s recent military actions.  For instance, Simon critiques the then-popular argument that Italy had the right, even the duty, to bring a higher civilization to Ethiopia. He grants that much about Ethiopia is deplorable, but points out that “it is always easy to move people by describing…what is most unhappy about a country, without saying anything about the favorable sides of the situation” (which, it goes without saying, are jeopardized by war); that there are low odds that a conquering nation can effect deep and lasting changes among a people “strongly ensconced in the double citadel of its mountains and age-old customs;” that efforts at pacification and reform will be “necessarily burdensome” to the natives, involving violence—perhaps on a larger scale than before.

There is an even more striking passage, which may titillate some of those who opposed the war in Iraq on moral or religious grounds: “The question which then confronted the Christian conscience was this: Would the teaching of the Catholic Church on the war be taken seriously? . . . A dishonest conscience is never embarrassed. . . Greedy merchants will always have plenty of good reasons that their profits conform perfectly within the laws of just price. . . Likewise, why bother to openly declare that one rejects the teaching of the Church on the conditions of a just war . . .? It is much cleverer to profit by the obscurities which inevitably accompany the application of a necessarily abstract doctrine. Using the cover of darkness as a means of protection is a deceptive method familiar to all marauders, pickpockets, and assassins.”

Still, as gratifying a pastime as proof-texting is, it would be perverse to enlist Simon as a partisan in such a complex contemporary debate. The man who wrote that “true morality demands, when confronted with every new situation, a new effort at analysis, adapted to all the particularities of the situation” would surely be the first to suggest a large number of relevant disanalogies between Mussolini’s Italy and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia on the one hand and the contemporary United States and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the other. The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought deserves to be read, but not as a work of prophesy or as a hornbook that saves us the trouble of wrestling with unique facts. We should read it with attention because it provides an inspiring and challenging model of citizenship.

A gifted philosopher, Simon was obviously comfortable with abstractions and rigid formal systems. But The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought reveals a man who also energetically absorbed and synthesized the concrete, multifarious, ever-changing facts of politics and history, generating subtle and incisive analyses.

In part, this habit seems to have been characteristic of his generation. According to James McAdam’s forward, most educated Parisians of the interwar period sought to “combine the hard facts of politics with the highest human ideals.” Consequently, “thorough immersion in the political and social questions of the day was a way of life.” Although no society can hope to mass produce men of Simon’s stature (and it was France’s tragedy that men like him would prove too rare in subsequent years), his moral and intellectual grandeur is a credit to the literary and political culture that nurtured him—a culture that stands as a grim judgment on our own, sadly decayed public discourse.

But Simon was remarkable, even among his contemporaries, for his focus on political deliberation as a moral, not merely intellectual activity that demands exacting self-criticism from the individual citizen. It is crucial to recognize that The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought is not a just another salvo in an ongoing public dispute. Simon certainly has a settled and undisguised view of the Italian invasion (he thinks it clearly unjust), but his object in writing his book is not to defend that opinion. Instead, he seeks what he terms the “rectifying of French consciences.”

He proceeds by surveying the public writings of French intellectuals during the Ethiopian crisis and subjects them all to searching analysis. He attempts to lay bare errors of logic and judgment on all sides of the debate. These errors, he argues, are born of partisan passion undisciplined by firm adherence to truth. He writes, “Anything that might come to trouble our lucidity of judgment would give another chance to the most immense evils that threaten us. Silence then for the party spirit, silence for nationalist passion, for anti-Fascist passion; silence for hatred, even hatred that takes as its object indisputable criminals. All political agility will be powerless if it is not ruled by a clear-seeing and honest interior attitude.” In short, Simon thinks that the sickness afflicting French (and, more broadly, European) politics is fundamentally spiritual, and he offers this book as a spiritual exercise. His attitude represents that supremely admirable political stance that is usually mistaken for glib “beyondism.”

The geopolitical situation has been almost totally transformed since 1935, but Simon’s exhortation to rectify consciences is as urgent as ever. There is much to be said in favor of the structural cynicism (the justly celebrated “checks and balances”) that is such a notable characteristic of the American system, but such provisions can only temper the effects of widespread vice and dishonesty—and only some of the time. To prevent the corruption of public thought that leads to corrupt acts, citizens must recognize political debate as a thoroughly moral enterprise. They must see it as a mutual discernment of a good, just life in common, and they must understand that this exploration that is spiritually taxing, requiring the painful subjection of passion and personal interest to truth and justice.

It is difficult to see how such a high conception of politics, with its attendant corporate and personal disciplines, can arise or long endure, unless most citizens view truth and justice as sacred. In Simon’s case, his intense focus on rectification of conscience was inseparable from his belief that the author of all reality, searcher and judge of hearts, shared his priorities. Simon therefore stands not merely as a model of citizenship in the abstract but also as proof that societies need—or, at least, can gain much from—religiously informed public philosophies.


Stefan McDaniel is an assistant editor of First Things.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

This letter has reopened the policy argument over whether Holder’s decision is consistent with the public interest. The former CIA heads contend that such an investigation will foster undue caution in current CIA officers, who will inevitably fear that their actions might be prosecuted by a later administration, and will undermine intelligence cooperation on the part of foreign powers, who will inevitably fear that such cooperation might be publicly revealed in a subsequent investigation.

In contrast, supporters of Holder’s decision argue that such an investigation will bolster the reputation of the United States and hence enhance its security by demonstrating to the world that it rejects and will punish unlawful and inhumane methods of interrogation. The controversy over the letter has also, however, revealed a widespread and highly placed misunderstanding of the nature of the attorney general’s duty and his relationship to the president. And while the debate over the prudence of Holder’s investigation will rightly continue, this constitutional misunderstanding should also be addressed.

In effect, the seven former CIA heads contend that Holder should not have made the decision that he made and that the president should accordingly intervene and overturn that decision. In response, the supporters of the interrogation investigation not only defend it on its merits but also advance a kind of procedural argument that holds, remarkably, that neither the attorney general nor the president, two of the highest ranking public officials in the United States, has any choice in whether to proceed with such an investigation. For example, in responding to the CIA chiefs’ letter, Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s National Security Project, argues as follows:

The suggestion that President Obama should order Attorney General Holder to abort the investigation betrays a misunderstanding of the role of the attorney general as well as the relationship between the attorney general and the president. Where there is evidence of criminal conduct, the attorney general has not just the authority but the duty to investigate. The attorney general is the people’s lawyer, not the president’s lawyer, and it would be profoundly inappropriate for President Obama to interfere with his work.

This defense of the investigation  reveals a serious misconception of the authority and duty of both the attorney general and the president—and hence of the very rudiments of America’s system of constitutional government.

Let us leave aside the astonishing confidence of Mr. Jaffer’s assertion that a bipartisan group of seven men who served capably at the highest level of the executive branch have fundamentally misunderstood the character of the president’s authority and that of the attorney general. Let us instead examine, first, his claim that the attorney general has a “duty” to investigate where there is “evidence of criminal conduct.” This statement, while true in a general sense, nevertheless mischaracterizes the specific nature of the present case. To begin with, Attorney General Holder did not simply order an investigation into the legality of some past CIA interrogations; he in fact went so far as to appoint a special prosecutor to conduct that investigation. To be sure, the United States has seen numerous special prosecutors over the last four decades, and there is nothing necessarily improper in an attorney general’s decision to appoint one. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that such investigations are rare and a departure from the manner in which almost all federal crime is investigated and prosecuted. Ordinarily, inquiry into alleged criminal conduct is handled by divisions of the Justice Department that are charged with the investigation and prosecution of certain kinds of violations of federal law. In contrast, a special prosecutor is charged with the investigation of a certain set of specific possible violations alleged to have been committed by a certain set of specific individuals. While such an extraordinary method of investigation may be justifiable in some cases—and while it could even be appropriate for the interrogation inquiry—the decision of whether to adopt it is the free decision of the attorney general and not something he is required by law to do.

For a time in American history there was a statutory mechanism by which an attorney general could be legally required to appoint the equivalent of a special prosecutor: the Independent Counsel Provision of the Ethics in Government Act, which was created in response to President Nixon’s firing of a special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. In the wake of the independent counsel investigation of President Clinton, however, Congress allowed this provision to lapse, and it is no longer a part of federal law. Attorney General Holder’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor, then, is properly understood as an exercise of his discretion and judgment and not as something he is simply duty-bound to do.

Moreover, contrary to Mr. Jaffer’s suggestion, Eric Holder has no official obligation to order even an ordinary investigation into CIA interrogations. Mr. Jaffer contends that the attorney general “has not just the authority but the duty to investigate” when there is “evidence of criminal conduct.” This is accurate as a general statement of the attorney general’s job. It is not necessarily true, however, as applied to any specific case, and it cannot be an adequate justification for authorizing any particular investigation. No government prosecutor has sufficient resources to investigate every alleged criminal act that is brought to his attention. Prosecutors therefore have, and have always been understood to have, a legitimate discretion to decide which cases to investigate and which to leave alone. They must use their own judgment to answer this question, usually by asking which cases involve more serious violations of law and which ones carry a good chance of successful prosecution should the matter come to trial. Either of these considerations could reasonably justify a decision not to pursue the interrogation investigation.

Indeed, a prosecutor may sometimes have good reasons not to pursue a case even when it involves serious wrongdoing and has a good chance at trial.  Any criminal act is presumptively a harm to the public good. Yet it is equally true that some investigations can be more harmful to the public good than the crimes into which they inquire. Such an argument was understood and publicly defended by no less a proponent of the rule of law than John Locke, who, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, noted that those charged with the execution of the law may sometimes choose to leave a crime unpunished for that sake of the public welfare. This is precisely the kind of argument being urged by the former CIA chiefs, and it is certainly one that the attorney general could properly consider.

Mr. Jaffer errs not only in contending that duty compels such an investigation, but also in claiming that “it would be profoundly inappropriate for President Obama to interfere with” the attorney general’s decision to launch it. This error has also been propounded by White House officials, who reportedly have claimed that the president “has no right to interfere with the Justice Department’s work,” and even by Senator John McCain who, while criticizing Holder’s decision, has nonetheless conceded that the “attorney general has a unique position in the cabinet” such that he “obviously . . . can’t be told what to do by the president.” This misunderstanding has been advanced for several decades by various highly placed figures, but it is no less incorrect for all that. When President Nixon fired his attorney general and several top Justice Department officials in order to get rid of the special prosecutor pursuing the Watergate affair, some in the news media presented his action as creating a “constitutional crisis.” During the recent Bush administration, some commentators spoke as if the president acted illegitimately when he rejected the legal findings of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and preferred instead the advice of the legal advisers to the vice-president, or when he dismissed some U.S. Attorneys for failing to pursue some cases. Such presidential decisions may have been mistaken, and in some cases they might even have constituted abuses of the president’s power, if they were motivated by personal or partisan considerations. Yet none of these actions can reasonably be considered inappropriate in the sense of being beyond the President’s power, for the simple reason that they all manifest the president’s undoubted command of the executive branch of government. Under the Constitution, the president is the nation’s chief executive. He is the head of the executive branch, that part of the government that executes or enforces the law. Accordingly, it is the president, and not the attorney general, who is the country’s chief law enforcement officer. And while all officers charged with the enforcement of the law possess the discretion discussed above, that discretion is subject to the control and correction of their superiors in the executive branch who must also exercise their own discretion in supervising the work of their subordinate officers. That is why the president has a perfectly unobjectionable authority to remove Justice Department officials for what he regards to be their mistaken judgments about what cases to pursue or not to pursue, and why he can properly choose to reject the legal advice of the Justice Department if he thinks it is erroneous. It is also why, in the present case, Attorney General Holder had a right to reverse the decision of subordinate officials not to pursue the interrogation investigation, and accordingly why the president could properly, if he thought it best, order the attorney general to reverse himself.

Finally, Mr. Jaffer’s argument is inconsistent not only with the basic structure of the executive branch, but is also inconsistent with itself. Again, in defending the investigation, he contends that the “attorney general is the people’s lawyer, not the president’s lawyer, and it would be profoundly inappropriate for President Obama to interfere with his work.” Once more, this is a true remark that is irrelevant to the matter at issue. Of course the attorney general is a public official, and no one would think it proper for the president to use him for his personal legal business. Taken in the sense Mr. Jaffer intends it, however, his remark becomes incoherent. How can one claim that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer and, at the same time, insist that he is in no way answerable to the sole executive official, the president, who is himself answerable to the people? It would be strange indeed if the people’s lawyer were so perfectly insulated from any political—that is, popular—influence as Mr. Jaffer’s theory seems to hold. The only way the attorney general can reasonably be presented as the people’s lawyer is if he is selected by, subordinate to, and answerable to, someone who is himself the people’s elected servant. That person, again, is the president of the United States.

Those pressing these strange arguments—about the nature of an executive officer’s duty, and about the relationship of the attorney general to the president—have been educated at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions and all now occupy positions of considerable public responsibility and influence. They either misunderstand the basic structures of American constitutionalism, or they are willing to misrepresent the Constitution in order to defend policy choices that they approve on other grounds. Both explanations are possible, and both are disturbing. The maintenance of free and responsible government depends upon the people’s accurate understanding of the nature and extent of the government’s powers. Such popular understanding is impossible to sustain, however, when the nation’s leadership class fosters, whether intentionally or unintentionally, public belief in fictional constitutional principles.

Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author most recently of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Embryology and developmental biology are familiar fields of the life sciences. Scientists study the development of various organisms, seeking to understand the mechanisms by which organisms will change from one state of development to another, the conditions that will prevent such developments, and whether those conditions be internal, such as a gene mutation, or external, such as an environmental factor. These scientists study the conditions that bring about the transition from something that was not a new organism (a gametic cell, for example) to something that is a new organism (a zygote, for example). More recently, as part of the so-called evo-devo program of research, scientists study both embryonic development and evolution in light of one another.

What does philosophy add to this picture? Philosophical embryology is a branch of theoretical philosophy. So it does not, in itself, seek to answer any practical questions about the appropriate treatment of embryos, human or otherwise. Indeed, to be reasonably pursued, philosophical embryology must rigorously refrain from using moral or practical considerations to answer questions appropriate to its domain. Some thinkers, however, such as Ronald Green and Jane Maienschein, have suggested that theoretical questions about embryos require choices, and choices must be guided by practical values and desired states of affairs. This strikes me as inappropriate, and I’ll explain why shortly. But first I need to identify some general characteristics of philosophy, especially theoretical philosophy.

First, philosophy operates at a level of generality greater than that appropriate to the empirical sciences. St. Thomas’ introduction to his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a good example of this. Aquinas identifies four “orders” that he thinks roughly divide up the ontological terrain that human beings inhabit: the order of nature, which exists independently of us, the logical order introduced into human intellection by thought, the practical order introduced into our actions through intelligent deliberation and choice, and the order of making introduced into the material of the world by our work. This fourfold categorization is extremely broad. In each category of order, more specific but still quite abstract categories can be discussed profitably by philosophers, such as those of substance and accident, subject and predicate, act and intention, or of purpose and function.

Second, philosophy involves the sorts of questions that, as Thomas Nagel puts it, “the reflective human mind finds naturally puzzling.” Such questions attempt to get beyond what is given in experience, to find the what-is-it of something, the why-is-it of something, or to find the relationship between apparently dissimilar realities. Some such questions, of course, do not require philosophical answers; the empirical sciences can identify certain realities (“that is a liver cell”), or explain how they got to be as they are (“a particular set of signals induced a particular set of changes”), or identify the relationship between two otherwise similar or dissimilar entities (“this cell’s division gave rise to that cell,” or “this earlier healthy cell is identical to that later diseased cell”).

But other questions, and sometimes the very same questions prosecuted to a further degree, require answers that take on the shades of generality just discussed. For example, philosophers will query what it means to say that something is a biological substance, or that one biological state of affairs causes, but is not identical to, another, or what it means to say that biologists know what they claim to know. And here, it is worth noting, at least at certain initial stages of inquiry, the concepts used in philosophy will overlap, perhaps considerably, with the concepts used in science. Thus, the question, “what is that,” and the answer, “it is a living organism of such and such a species,” will raise philosophical questions: “What is an organism? What is it for something to be alive? What is a species?”

What level of generality or reflectiveness is sufficient for a question or its answer to be philosophical? Answers to this will be contestable, and a familiar dialectic of objection, defense, distinction, and argument will ensue as regards the boundaries between philosophy and the disciplines it abuts. However, although there are disagreements here, it is important to get the boundaries correct: When a question can be answered by science, it should be; and philosophy should take that answer as its datum. Likewise, when a question cannot be answered by science, it should be recognized that the attempted answer belongs to a different discipline such as philosophy. And some questions, perhaps, should be seen as inevitably mixed in character.

The importance of this point can be illustrated in the following way. Pointing to a broad swath of embryological and developmental biology textbooks, writers such as Patrick Lee, Robert P. George, and myself have claimed that there is a general consensus among biologists as to when the life of an individual human being begins, viz., at fertilization, unless the individual is a monozygotic twin, or a product of human cloning. Yet, in a recent essay, the eminent biologist F. Scott Gilbert attempts to refute the “error” that there is a consensus among scientists “as to when life begins.” Gilbert identifies five different views, ranging from fertilization up to birth.

But it is worth noting some important features of Gilbert’s refutation of the alleged consensus. Many of the sources he cites for views other than fertilization are not scientists, but rather are philosophers, political theorists, or theologians. More importantly, Gilbert shifts very quickly from speaking of a consensus on when an individual human life begins to speaking of the onset of “personhood.” And this is surely a failure to respect disciplinary boundaries. “Personhood,” while potentially an important philosophical concept for the discussion of the embryo, is no biological concept at all. So no attempt to answer the biological question, “when does the life of an individual human being begin,” should be answered by reference to the concept of “personhood.”

It is further worth noting that even when Gilbert does quote scientists it is often in a context that makes clear that they too are making this mistake. Thus embryologist Marilyn Renfree is quoted as saying “Assuming that monozygotic twins have separate souls, it follows that ensoulment must occur after cleavage.” Here “soul” is a stand-in for “person” and is every bit as non-biological a concept. Maienschein denies that there is scientific consensus about when there is the beginning of a “meaningful” life. But scientists should not, qua scientists, be expected to reach consensus on what counts as “meaningful.” Philosophers, as a result, in orienting their inquiries into the embryo, should begin by identifying what biologists say about the embryo insofar as they are speaking from a biological standpoint.

Still, as mentioned these philosophical claims about the appropriate boundaries of philosophy will not go uncontested. Neither, once boundary questions are settled, will the substantive questions of philosophy will themselves be accepted without objection. So a third general characteristic of philosophy is, in fact, the inevitability of argument. And reflection on this feature leads to a fourth characteristic of philosophy, perhaps the one considered most important by its early practitioners, namely that it is pursued out of a love of truth. The dialectic of philosophy shorn of this motive is, in fact, the dialectic of sophistry, a description concerned as much or more with a moral failing at the root of one’s vocational commitment to philosophy as with a failure to successfully prosecute that vocation.

Now, philosophical embryology abuts the scientific disciplines of embryology and developmental biology. It must therefore have three concerns: First, a concern to describe the realities discovered by embryology and developmental biology at a higher level of generality than is achieved by those disciplines, with a view to integrating this more general representation of the realities studied by these disciplines with philosophy’s own more general concepts and representations (e.g., philosophical embryology will attempt to integrate the discussion of organism with that of substance). Second, it must be concerned to answer those reflective philosophical questions raised by the study of embryological development if, as I believe, there are any (what is it, for example, for an organism to exist as a whole, as a “this something,” as a substance?). And third, it must be prepared to engage in a philosophical dialectic with those whose general representations work with a different set of concepts, or who answer philosophical questions differently, or who dispute the boundaries between the scientific and the philosophical, whether on some local matter, or more globally (e.g., those who think “personhood” is the initial ontological point of departure for philosophical embryology).

Through it all philosophers interested in the philosophical questions of embryology must be concerned for the truth as such, no small feat when matters of great practical weight can turn on the results of embryological and philosophical investigation. But this is why it seems so inappropriate to frame the initial philosophical, and even scientific, questions in terms of our values, interests, or pragmatic concerns, as do Green and Maienschein. To do so abandons both philosophy and science in this area by presupposing that there really are no answers to the questions of interest, just interests in particular answers.

Of course, this is not to say that our interest—that of the authors for Public Discourse, its readers, and others engaged in philosophical embryology around the world—is disengaged from practical concerns. Far from it. For the very concerns that are raised theoretically in philosophical embryology—“What is an embryo? When does an embryo come to exist? What does the phenomenon of twinning imply about the individuality of the embryo?”— have clear bearing on practical issues of tremendous personal and social importance: “Is the cloning and destroying of embryos permissible? Is destructive research on spare embryos from in vitro fertilization permissible? Is abortion morally or politically choiceworthy?” These questions are insistent, and, tied up as they are with questions of justice, they make a moral demand on every person of good will to answer them as best they can.

My point, then, is not to deny these overarching practical concerns. But, insofar as those of us who are concerned to defend the embryo draw on philosophy, or seek to engage philosophically with the issue, then we and our opponents must attend to these four imperatives: First and foremost, be concerned for the truth. Second, engage in our dialectical engagements and arguments with a view to seeking and defending that truth. Third, be alert to the questions a reflective mind would acknowledge as puzzling and attempt answers to them, rather than putting them aside as threatening. And fourth, respect the boundaries between the generality of philosophy and the empirical detail of the science, on the one hand, and between theoretical and practical investigation on the other. Consensus in philosophy is rare but possible; and, in this area, it is a necessary step towards resolution of important moral and political issues. It is only by being true to what philosophy is, however, that such a meaningful resolution will come about.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

From 2001-2003, I spent nearly 16 months conducting interviews with more than 150 people in the Haitian communities of Miami, Montreal, and Paris. I traveled twice to Haiti to learn Haitian Creole and gathered important background historical and cultural information about Haiti in preparation for my sociological study of Haitian immigrants. I was interested in learning more about the social and spiritual work being done by the Haitian Catholic mission of each of the cities I studied, and how those Catholic missions interacted with other Haitian organizations and government agencies. The book based on this research, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, was recently released by the University of California Press.

A few vivid examples from my fieldwork in Miami, Montreal, and Paris demonstrate how religious narratives—especially Christian narratives about transformation and redemption that are largely lacking in secular discourse—provide Haitians with real meaning and hope in the difficult circumstances in which they find themselves. The Haitian proverb that states “faith makes us live” captures the power of religious narratives in many Haitians’ lives. Many people I interviewed had little money, couldn’t find a job, or faced a medical problem, but they nonetheless affirmed that “my faith makes me live. I would be dead if it were not for my faith.”

Immigrants’ faith and the parishes, prayer groups, and social groups they form to share their faith constitute what I call cultural mediation. By relying upon belief in the incarnation of Christ, by serving the church, and by assisting the broader Haitian community, Haitians find psychological relief in the difficult adaptation process—including experiences of discrimination, poverty, unemployment, and awaiting the adjudication of political asylum claims.

For example, Marie, a 40-year old Haitian mother-of-two in Montreal described how her faith helped her cope with intense loneliness when she first arrived in Montreal. Echoing many other Haitians across the three sites, she said, “God lives in me all the time. I can call on him when I want.” Her personal faith led her to become an active member in her parish and to join a weekly prayer group. In contrast to the social isolation she felt in Montreal, belonging to a prayer group made her feel like she belonged somewhere, and she explained how “when you feel that you are somebody, [that] you are a person, [that] you are important, you can move mountains, and that is faith.”

Numerous other examples illustrate how even immigrants from the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere go beyond being needy newcomers who are passive recipients of state social support and become agents of their own successful adaptation just by praying for others and volunteering to help with church activities. Many clergy and lay leaders explained that getting people to see themselves as agents in their own lives was desperately needed before trying to assist them in some material way. Although many Haitians are convinced that their faith can literally move mountains, they also firmly believe that authentic faith requires action. Illustrating the close connection between faith and action, the second part of the Haitian proverb that begins with “faith makes us live” ends with “but misery divides us.”

Cooperation with state agencies and access to government funding are crucial to the success of such missions. Mark Chaves, a professor of Sociology at Duke University and one of the nation’s leading scholars on religious congregations and their social service agencies, stated that my research shows that “when immigrants are religious—and so many are—pragmatic cooperation between church and state can hasten their acculturation and improve their well-being.”

Although this point may seem rather uncontroversial in the Unite States, such pragmatic cooperation between the church and the state faces many obstacles in Quebec and France. In fact, despite the fact that Haitian Catholic clergy and lay leaders in Montreal and Paris attempted to runsocial service agencies similar to those of the Haitian Catholic community in Miami, the governments of Quebec and France have largely refused to cooperate with these faith-based mediating institutions, thereby cutting off contact with one of the most important institutions in immigrants’ daily lives. Haitian community leaders in Paris say they felt “invisible” to the government and hence they felt that their initiatives to support their community were weakened. In Quebec, the government passed a resolution favoring cooperation with secular community associations over faith-based ones, which led the most important association in the Haitian community to remove the word “Christian” from its title to avoid what its director called “misunderstandings.”

The models of church-state relations in the three countries could best be described as cooperation in the United States, conflict in Quebec, and invisibility in France. While both first- and second-generation Haitians in Miami, Montreal, and Paris face tremendous challenges to their successful assimilation, it is only in the United States that the Catholic Church’s efforts to support that assimilation—what I call institutional mediation—are likely to have a large impact because the state welcomes the church’s initiatives rather than ignores or hinders them.

Several decades ago, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus argued that religious institutions and community organizations mediate between individuals and the state by providing meaning, personal identity, and fulfillment. Similarly, faith-based institutions like those created by Haitian Catholic leaders in Miami, Montreal, and Paris, can be more effective at meeting the needs of the communities they serve than state agencies precisely because of their close connections to religious institutions, where so many immigrants turn for personal fulfillment and guidance on assimilating into their new home. The Haitian Catholic missions of Miami, Montreal, and Paris, and their affiliated social-service centers, work together to meet Haitians’ spiritual and social needs. Especially for hard-to-reach, vulnerable, and excluded populations like immigrants, prisoners or ex-prisoners, and the poor, government partnerships with faith-based and community organizations make sense.

Some claim that mediating institutions are necessary in the United States only because of a relatively weak welfare state. Indeed, one Quebec official told me that the church only helps immigrants in the United States because the state is absent. In Quebec, he explained, the provident state takes care of everyone so the church has no need to do social work. But my fieldwork showed me that the perfectly provident state is nonexistent. No matter how dense the social-safety net, some members of our societies—immigrants among them—will always need charity to meet their human wants and they will also need institutional mediators to stimulate debates about justice.

Haitian immigrants in Miami, Montreal, and Paris all struggled to find jobs, secure adequate housing, and support their children through school. In such situations, should we be surprised they simply turn to those who they trust the most—their religious leaders—for help? Too often, interactions with state agencies are one-way exchanges from the more powerful to the less powerful. Faith-based mediating institutions can often provide necessary charity that goes beyond both what an individual’s family can do to support him and also the services offered by the state. Perhaps more importantly, because these institutions are most often a central part of people’s daily lives, people who receive help are also asked to give something back to the community, even if all they can give is their volunteer time, a smile, or a prayer for someone else.

Debates about church-state relations cannot end with principles of “neutrality” or “secularism,” terms that too often mask an attempt by the state to largely the church’s social work (as in France) or to refuse to cooperate with faith-based service agencies (as in Quebec). As Raphaël Liogier argues in “Legitimate” Secularism: France and its State Religions, (published in French in 2006 as Une laïcité “légitime”: La France es ses réligions d’Etat) the French government in theory claims neutrality toward religion, but in practice state agencies use secularism as a straight jacket for freedom of thought and speech. Thus, French secularism essentially grants the government the authority to pick and choose which religions and which religious expressions of those religions are “legitimate,” a practice which leads to decisions that baffle many North Americans, such as the 2004 ban on women wearing the Muslim headscarf in many public places in France, including public schools.

Our conception of religious freedom should encompass the right of individuals and groups to practice their religion by founding associations with spiritual as well as social and educational purposes. The situation of the Haitian immigrants shows that such an approach is not only right on the grounds of principle, it carries with it real practical benefits.

For millions of immigrants past and present to the U.S., the principle of religious freedom has created a society in which being religious serves as a kind of currency, a valuable token that provides a kind of social identity. Religious associations abound and flourish in the U.S., thus helping newcomers integrate into the broader society from a position of strength. In contrast, not only for Muslim but also for devout Christian immigrants to France and Quebec, being religious forms a barrier to integrating into secular society. As we debate how best to integrate immigrants, we should focus not only on socio-economic mobility, but also on how immigrants create a sense of moral order in their new homes, for the two are inextricably linked.


Margarita Mooney is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. You can read more about her book and see pictures from her fieldwork at www.faithmakesuslive.com. Contact information and more details about her other articles and books on immigration, religion, and education can be found at www.margaritamooney.com.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

No reasonable conception of the good can be limited to the economic realm, let alone utility. Unfortunately many contemporary economists do not see this, precisely because they are more-or-less utilitarian and positivistic in their outlook. In this regard, they differ from the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith. This much is evident from reading the corpus of Smith’s works, which traverse jurisprudence, philosophy, astronomy, and rhetoric, as well as economics. But while prepared to countenance particular forms of protectionism in a very small number of instances, Smith was not convinced that significant restrictions of trade within and between nations would help facilitate human flourishing within communities. Neither am I.

McDaniel suggests that there are good reasons derived from considerations for both utility and human flourishing to insulate economies partially from movements in international markets. One is the concern that, in an interdependent world, such insulation may diminish the impact of significant global market failures upon those economies that choose one or more forms of protection. He also maintains that there would be other benefits, such as the innovation he associates with craftsmen who pride themselves on producing locally made quality products. The same partial insulation, he suggests, may even place some nations in a position to help those negatively affected by global economic downturns.

Several difficulties mar each of these arguments. First, there is no evidence that various forms of insulation, ranging from tariffs to subsidies, do much to mitigate the effects of global recessions upon countries adopting such measures. If anything, they inhibit countries from quickly responding to the new circumstances and thus prolong the downturn’s negative effects.

Nor does it seem to be the case that partial insulation from the global economy fosters much innovation or productivity. History suggests that efforts at partial economic insulation tend to encourage economic insularity. This is exemplified by guilds. As a form of economic and social organization, guilds often began with a concern to produce a certain product of a certain quality. But they invariably became preoccupied with determining who could and could not engage in certain occupations or produce certain goods and services. Being what we would call today “closed shops,” they disliked free trade and competition—domestic or foreign—because it threatened their monopolies and often made available to consumers better, newer, and less-expensive products than those produced by guilds. A similar logic was recently at work with the recent effort of organizations such as the United Steelworkers to persuade the Obama Administration to raise tariffs on Chinese-made tires for the next three years.

The same insularity encouraged by various forms of protectionism also actually discourages nations from worrying about other countries’ economic problems. A good example is the fierce resistance of European and American farming lobbies to permitting developing countries wider access to European and American markets. Many developing nations would escape their poverty far more quickly if the highly protected American and European agricultural markets were “de-insularized.” But this would mean removing the legal and economic privileges presently accorded to many American and European farmers. They will never give up these privileges without a fight, no matter how much such measures impede developing countries’ emergence from poverty.

More significantly, however, McDaniel asks us to reflect upon the consequences for economic decision-making if political reasoning was concerned with “integral human development” or “all-round human flourishing.” McDaniel correctly observes that it would radically change the way that most present-day policy-making occurs.

I myself would welcome a shift in this direction. First, it accords with the demands of reason. Second, it holds out the potential for the development of an understanding of politics that provides the workings of government and law with a far more coherent rationale than that provided by Millian or Rawlsian Liberalism.

I am less convinced, however, that a politics committed to promoting integral human flourishing means that governments should implement policies that significantly inhibit free trade. Naturally there are some things whose nature provides strong reasons to inhibit or completely prohibit their trading. Legitimate national security considerations, for example, should significantly limit the trading of certain forms of sophisticated weaponry or military technology. Likewise human trafficking is an evil in itself and ought always to be prohibited.

But beyond these and similar instances, policies that undermine free trade in goods and services arguably diminish opportunities for the type of flourishing that McDaniel and I value. Let me explain why using the example employed by McDaniel and myself: a fictional Scottish wine industry.

McDaniel suggests that, as part of a legitimate desire to promote a variety of moral goods, some Scots may decide that, despite the enormous economic disutility involved, they want to start a wine-growing industry in Scotland. Enough patriotic Scots may also want to support this industry by purchasing this home-grown wine and would be consequently willing to pay more than they would otherwise pay for better quality, less expensive Italian vintages.

If such an industry succeeded under its own volition, then this is all well and good. My objection, however, would be to using the state to subsidize such an industry or protect it from foreign competition. Leaving aside arguments based on utility, the price of using the state to prop up such an industry over the long term will likely be quite direct—and sometimes more-or-less intentional—damage to the ability of those in other communities to flourish.

Perhaps the damage is to those Scots who request no government subsidies for their freely chosen profession but who discover that a large proportion of their taxes, which could be used to improve, for example, Scottish education levels (and thus participation in the good of knowledge), are being directed towards subsidizing highly uncompetitive Highland vineyards. In this instance, the communal integrity (of Scotland) that McDaniel rightly values would be significantly impaired.

More remotely, the damage might be to a group of Chilean winemakers. Instead of taking government subsidies to produce Chilean whiskey, this community determines its comparative advantage lies in Chile’s soil, climate and their own wine-making skills. Through their own entrepreneurial volition, they subsequently create a self-sustaining, profitable wine industry and, in doing so, provide tremendous opportunities for all-round flourishing for many Chileans working in the business. Then they discover that barriers have been erected to inhibit their entry into the Scottish wine market—and any number of subsidized, protected Western wine markets. This limits the Chilean industry’s capacity to grow and provide expanding opportunities for human flourishing inside and outside Chile.

But even more fundamentally, such policies generally represent a significant injustice—and justice is a key precondition for any society’s promotion of human flourishing. They unreasonably compromise freedom of association and the access of all peoples—especially the poor—to the goods of the earth. Some of the early promoters of the idea that free trade was a demand of justice, such as Hugo Grotius and Francisco de Vitoria, were so insistent on this point that they actually regarded denial of free trade as a legitimate casus belli. Moreover, from the standpoint of human flourishing, the ability of all people to maximize their opportunities for integral human development often lies just as much in expanding access to opportunities that transcend and traverse national boundaries as in rootedness in local communities.

Here it is worth adding that many small and medium-sized communities actually impede human flourishing. Some such societies often embody characteristics such as provincialism, irrational hostility towards outsiders and foreigners, ignorance of the wider world, and customs that unjustly restrict opportunities for integral development by some individuals and groups belonging to these communities. Some of globalization’s positive effects are to broaden horizons, diminish prejudices, and provide opportunities to pursue integral human flourishing in ways that often cannot be accommodated in relatively isolated groups.

Similar critiques could be made of some of McDaniel’s other specific suggestions. But let me conclude by stressing my agreement with McDaniel that much contemporary economic science and economic policy-making fails to do justice to the reality that human flourishing is about far more than utility-maximization. Many economists and economic policy-makers effectively cut themselves off from consideration of such matters. This partly reflects the present hyper-specialization of much higher education, but also the influence of positivism and what the economists Wilhelm Roepke and Friedrich Hayek called “scientism”—the indiscriminate application of the methods and concerns of the natural sciences to the humanities and social sciences.

This contrasts with Adam Smith’s outlook. Smith was deeply conscious of the moral challenges posed by the emerging commercial society of his time. Rather than seeking to resolve real and imagined conflicts between human flourishing and market-oriented economic development through government intervention, however, Smith sought to achieve a similar end through infusing this new society with a synthesis of commercial, classical, and Christian virtues. As Ryan Patrick Henley illustrates in his excellent book, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (2009), Smith was convinced that human flourishing was possible for people living in modern commercial societies that embraced free trade with relatively few caveats. So am I.

To be sure, not everything for which Smith argues is completely consistent with the vision of integral human development that McDaniel and I advocate. But I would suggest that Smith—in whom we certainly find significant streams of virtue ethics and non-utilitarian argumentation—is one starting point for rethinking questions of political economy such as free trade in a manner that takes both the demands of integral human flourishing and the insights of modern economic science seriously.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty and his prize-winning The Commercial Society. His forthcoming book, Wilhelm Roepke’s Political Economy, will be published in early 2010.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Second, and more provocatively, freedom to trade goods and services is a defeasible but still important human right. Gregg adduces two main arguments in support of this: Francisco de Vitoria’s argument that the right of peoples to trade is part of a more general right to freedom of association and Hugo Grotius’ argument that the universal destination of the earth’s goods (and, it would seem, services) requires international markets. Such markets are the only reliable means to “spread the wealth around” to all the peoples of the world. Viewed from this point of view, protecting free trade is (as Gregg quotes Edmund Burke as saying) a matter of justice, not merely utility.

Gregg’s article is full of compelling good sense; I wish to offer supplementary thoughts rather than a refutation.

The least controversial part of Gregg’s argument is the (broadly speaking) utilitarian one: free trade makes us all richer. After Adam Smith, this is intuitive and seems to be amply borne out by history. But one should also consider the risk of creating a dangerous interdependence. As modern society and economy have developed, there has been a striking decline in self-sufficiency at every level of social organization. Nations, regions, cities, towns, and neighborhoods depend, for the most part, far more critically on externally provided goods and services for basic functioning than they did two hundred years ago. If the British blockaded Manhattan today, they would win in half a week without firing a shot.

This should be worrying for at least two reasons. The first is fairly straightforward: things can go suddenly and catastrophically wrong in any system, and the vaster, more complex, and more decentralized the system, the harder it is to control the damage. This is because it is harder to understand the chain of cause and effect and because it is harder for any authority to be effective in coordinating necessary remedial actions. It seems wise for communities of all sizes to insulate themselves partially from the effects of failures in larger markets, even at the price of gaining fewer benefits from participation in those markets. Maintaining such circumscribed but porous economies decreases but does not eliminate competition. Furthermore, it tends to nurture the local pride that can inspire good and creative work. We could therefore expect continuing innovation and growth in productivity within each economy, even if at a reduced rate. And such partial insulation is not merely self-interested, because, after all, one semiautonomous economic community can often provide assistance from a position of strength when another experiences internal failure. Loving your neighbor is rarely the same thing as chaining yourself to him.

The second reason hinges on a controversial judgment about the requirements for healthy polity. It is a judgment that may be risible or even unintelligible to those with very different political imaginations from mine, but it is important to propose it. Public authorities and legislators should promote integral human development. That is to say, development involving all the many, complex aspects of existence that make for a full human life. Deciding to seek integral human development does not lead automatically to any specific policies but (what is more radical still) changes the very language and patterns of reasoning followed in discussing policy options. If decision-makers chose to be explicitly responsive to all the various values in play when organizing the lives of their communities, political discourse would change almost beyond recognition.

Now, when it comes to making decisions about economics, a crucial value is generally overlooked: human beings are happiest when they belong to several concentric or overlapping communities, each with a distinctive way of life (enduring, usually, across many generations) and each enjoying a degree of organic wholeness; that is, the sense of being a demarcated ‘little world’ adequate (at least potentially) to provide the elements of a good, distinctly human life. Economies are deeply intertwined with concrete ways of life, and are crucial to establishing organic wholeness—they are not merely patterns of production to be judged only by their productivity and efficiency. Communities without somewhat circumscribed, partly independent economies of their own tend to have increasingly abstract and finally unreal existences.

Consider a household in which even mundane tasks are routinely “outsourced”—older siblings never babysit, parents never clean house or mow the lawn, no family members entertain each other on instruments or cook for each other. Although this household may be efficient and may greatly increase the Keynesian multiplier, making everyone richer, it is impoverished qua household. It will be diminished as a group of persons sharing a common good achieved in part by joint management of community resources. This is why there may be good reason to pay one’s own child to mow the lawn, even if someone else does it better and more cheaply.

There must obviously be due proportion in all things. Regions are not families, and still less are nations. The lesser degree of community will make economic relations within them less personal, less organic—and properly so. Still, even these levels of community may sometimes be given proportionate support by partly protecting their economies. Gregg points out that it is much harder to grow grapes in Scotland than in Italy. From this he concludes that it makes little economic sense for Scots to buy their own wine when they can buy Italian wine and redirect their energies. But let us say that that there were rewarding challenges and special, fascinating knowledge involved in making Scottish soil yield decent grapes; let us say that an admirable, humanly fulfilling way of life had grown up around this endeavor. An individual who esteemed the art of growing Scottish grapes and felt fondness for the famous grape-growing villages that dot the landscape, to one of which (let us say) all four of his grandparents belonged, and who thought of it as a great national institution that showed the rugged creativity of the Scottish people would not be stupid or wicked if he supported this comparatively disadvantaged industry by purchasing its produce at a higher price. If enough Scots felt this way, they might decide, after public deliberation, to collectively “pay more” for Scottish wine by subsidizing it. The ability to entertain seriously such contra-market choices is an important sign that an organic community has not devolved into a mere administrative department.

Look at the matter from a slightly different angle: Economic relationships, even when they include prices (as they often must), are most human when the law of supply and demand is not the only factor, when there is some degree of personal interest, knowledge, and concern between buyer and seller. The more open the economy, the less buyers and sellers are likely to know or care about each other in any given transaction. There will be more alienating bureaucracy and anonymity. Some such relationships seem unavoidable under modern conditions, and are, in any case, arguably worthwhile because of the benefits they provide. But surely economic life (which, lest we forget, is a large part of “Life” writ large) should not be dominated by such relationships. (It is worth noting in this connection that international trade is itself at its most comprehensively rewarding as a fully human activity when foreign goods are bought not merely because they are cheaper, but because they are associated with, and are the organic product, so to speak, of a locale and way of life that interests the buyer.)

Turning briefly to Gregg’s arguments that free trade is a right, I must agree with his points but suggest further considerations along the lines of what I have just been saying. Like de Vitoria, I think that free trade is part of free association, which is a real but defeasible right. Like Grotius, I think that international markets are vital in giving everyone a greater share in the world’s bounty. The question is, what are the full range of values that could, in theory, defeat (or at least limit) the prima facie right to free association, or defeat (or at least limit) the prima facie imperative to share the world’s bounty?

It is obvious to most people that limiting the freedom of association of prisoners is justifiable when public safety requires it. But, more interestingly, there is also general support for the limitations Amish communities place on their members’ freedom of association for the sake of communal integrity. Is it possible that a somewhat similar rationale could justify somewhat similar policies on the national level?

Because of the terrifying tendency of the modern state to abuse its coercive power, and because it is unhealthy and dangerous to compare nations too closely to religious communities, it is certainly hard to think of a case in which very strict state control of, say, travel or information would have any sane man’s support, whatever the reasons tendered for these restrictions. But creating another North Korea is not legislators’ only alternative to laissez-faire.

It may well be reasonable, for instance, to ban importation of certain foreign items, or of such items in certain quantities, or at least to put heavy duties on them, in order to prevent or limit the justly undesired social changes associated with them. After all, not everything for sale is worth having. It seems still more reasonable to use economic regulations to limit the social dislocation caused by the large movements of peoples associated with globalization. This can be done without coercion by measures such as impeding the free functioning of international labor markets through heavy duties on imported and exported labor.

My purpose here is not to support or oppose any nation’s international trade policies, and it is certainly not to propose any of my own. It is rather to insist that complex communal goods should never be ignored, even when other goods should obviously take precedence. It is crucial to do so, because by the very fact of attending to them we reinforce a properly nuanced conception of human flourishing—and therefore of the true nature of politics.

Stefan McDaniel is an assistant editor at First Things. Samuel Gregg’s response to this article will appear on Friday.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Who defines what Islam is? Even among Muslims, this is a complicated question. Some simply argue that Islam is whatever good-willed Muslims say it is; others defer to Al-Azhar (even though it has become, for the most part, a political puppet of the Egyptian regime); others to Qom in Iran; others to others, and so on. Far-reaching intra-Muslim discussions about Islam are underway today, and in the question of who defines Islam, the voices of Muslims deserve, at the very least, a hearing.

An array of American and Europeans who are not Muslims are eager to explain to you what Islam is.

For example, Robert Spencer from the United States insists, “individual Muslims may genuinely regard their religion as ‘peaceful’—but only insofar as they are ignorant of its true teachings.” He asserts, “Islam today is what it has been fourteen centuries: violent, intolerant, and expansionary” and “Islam is intrinsically violent.”

In the United Kingdom, Nick Griffin of the British National Party (BNP) has asserted that Islam is “a wicked, vicious faith.” (Recently the Muslim anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation in the U.K. issued a thoughtful analysis and refutation of such BNP claims.)

Yet when non-Muslims insist that they know better than Muslims what constitutes Islam, a key perspective is lost: namely, the views of Muslims themselves.

The issue of outsiders trying to monopolize God to set the boundaries of Islam is not just an issue for Muslims. It has implications for other religious believers who seek to articulate publicly their own perspectives on who they are, and how they understand their own faith.

Consider the position of Christians in Europe, who face more than a few opponents who are outright anti-religious. Should such anti-religionists be the ones to define what religion is and even who the “God” is whom Christians worship? Richard Dawkins attempted to do just that in his book The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Just because Richard Dawkins offers a jolting, bestselling picture of who the God of the Old Testament is does not mean that when I as a Christian pray that I pray to such a monstrosity.

This is not to say that we cannot comment on or gain knowledge of faiths other than our own. There are not only good reasons to pursue scholarly inquiry into other faiths, there is a pragmatic necessity to gain knowledge of them if we wish to have peace and meaningful toleration. There is also a role for critical challenges to faith claims. Fortunately, our society protects freedom of the press for all, Richard Dawkins included, thus assuring robust and open engagement between people of different faiths or no faith at all.

Ultimately, however, those seeking to understand other faiths need to consider how the believers themselves understand their own faith. This includes recognizing the perspectives not only of those who hold power in a faith community, but also the believers in day-to-day life trying to live out their faith.

An example of this is in a stunning new novel set in Saudi Arabia, The Consequences of Love by Sulaiman Addonia. In this story an Eritrean Muslim falsely accused of adultery sits in a Saudi jail cell, after being “convicted” with no witnesses, no lawyer, and no trial. He anticipates his punishment: having the lower part of his body buried and then, incapable of moving, being publicly stoned to death. His cellmate is a Nigerian Muslim whose circumstances suggest another miscarriage of justice. When the Eritrean resists his jailers’ attempt to force him to attend prayers at the jail mosque, the Nigerian tells him not to resist, saying, “Remember that Allah is not theirs alone.” The same could be said of those who insist they alone offer the definitive declaration of who the God of Muslims is when they do not even practice that faith.

Consider the perspective of Country-Western singer Kareem Salama, a Muslim from Oklahoma. In the song, “Rise Up,” he directly challenges those who try to monopolize by means of violence the definition of who God is. He says that they “swear they take life in the name of God / but they lie they take it in their own name.”

In Salama’s song “Get Busy Living,” Salama understands his life as a Muslim this way: “So that when the fateful day does come / When I’m six feet in the ground / The poor and the weak and the orphan and meek will miss having me around.”

Granted, Salama’s gentle, tuneful perspective is far from the lone voice of Islam in the modern world. His songs compete with the shrill cries of some of his coreligionists for suicide attacks. Salama’s voice is significant because it is one of many similar voices, all of them seemingly minor and unheard, but numerous enough to form a considerable chorus.

It would be unwise to forget that those who attacked us were motivated by religious concerns. At the same time, we should not, by adding more shrill cries to the cacophony, place hurdles in the path of the efforts of Salama, the Quilliam Foundation, and other Muslims to offer a “Generous Peace.” Indeed, the memory of the victims of September 11 attacks and our national interests will be best served if, when some Muslims tell us they worship a God who cares about the poor, the weak, the orphan, the meek, we take time to listen.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.