In his reply to my Public Discourse piece on conservatives and capitalism, Robert T. Miller critiques my argument that conservatives need to articulate principled, as opposed to simply utilitarian, cases for capitalism. I thank Miller for his careful outline of where we agree and disagree as well as for his criticisms. But I also thank him because this is precisely the type of discussion that conservatives should have more often.

Let me begin by noting where I agree with Miller’s observations. First, he maintains that “capitalism is consistent with Aristotelian-Thomistic moral premises, but it is not obligatory given those premises.”

Obviously much depends on what we mean by “capitalism.” Those arrangements often described as “crony capitalism,” for example, systematically violate many prohibitions (such as the proscription of theft) articulated by natural law. But if “capitalism” means the particular set of activities and institutions affirmed (albeit with many qualifications) by, for instance, John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, then it is broadly consistent with natural law premises.

That said, I agree with Miller that capitalism is not obligatory given these premises—indeed, I have never claimed that it is. Natural law theory has always maintained that humans enjoy considerable creativity within the framework provided by natural law when determining many political and economic positions.

On many such matters, as Robert P. George observes, “A number of possible schemes—bearing different and often incommensurable costs and benefits, risks and advantages—are consistent with natural law.” In many cases, the legislator cannot, on natural law grounds, identify political or economic arrangements that are uniquely correct. Yet he can identify several options that meet the test of right reason, even if some of the options may be incompatible with each other. This is the kind of activity of the practical intellect that Aquinas called determinatio.

To illustrate the point, George uses the example of building a house. Assuming the basic criteria of usability and safety are met and certain constructional elements (such as roofs of a certain height) are in place, several acceptable, albeit sometimes incompatible, options exist for building the house.

To a certain extent, the same holds true for political and economic life. No one can claim, for instance, that today’s American economy (or the Australian or German economy) is somehow uniquely correct in its capacities for promoting human flourishing.

But I begin to part company with Miller when he writes:

In principle, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are all morally permissible political systems (which is not to say that every exercise of governmental power in such systems is morally permissible) and capitalism, corporatism, and socialism are all morally permissible economic systems. Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy does not, by itself, imply much about political or economic arrangements.

Much hinges here on what Miller means by “by itself.” I would argue that natural law does suggest a great deal about the proper ordering of political and economic arrangements. Aquinas himself states that while institutions such as contracts and property are a question of positive law, they are so necessary for a just society that they can be deduced immediately from natural law principles.

Moreover, we can identify political and economic systems that systematically infringe the broad principles indicated by natural law. Totalitarianism exemplifies such a political order, not least because of its complete violation of the principle of subsidiarity and its refusal to accept natural law as a check on state power.

Likewise, natural law’s insistence upon the legitimacy of private property and freedom of exchange would normally exclude, for example, arrangements that involve the state’s outright and permanent collectivization of all property. That is no small thing, not least because it appears to rule out socialist (democratically endorsed or otherwise) and command economies.

Moving beyond the negative, I also think natural law broadly affirms several activities and institutions that are usually difficult to realize outside those economic arrangements based on, to cite Miller’s description, “private property, freedom of contract, and minimal governmental regulation of the market” (I would add a free price system and rule of law to his mix).

Natural law does not regard private property as an absolute. But natural law does suggest that private property arrangements are acceptable and even to be generally preferred, and not just on grounds of superior utility. One of the reasons Aquinas offers (following Aristotle) is that it encourages personal responsibility and thus helps facilitate a condition for human flourishing in ways that collective ownership struggles to replicate.

Likewise natural law thinkers ranging from Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius to Emer de Vattel have broadly affirmed (again, without absolutizing) free trade as a derivation of natural law’s affirmation of freedom of association. Similarly, natural law has generally regarded the normal measure of the value of an economic good to be the price it would be accorded, to cite Aquinas, “in the market” (secundum communem forum).

Again, none of this means that natural law mandates market economies. It is simply to suggest we can identify certain economic practices and institutions as normally just and others as likely to be unjust on natural law grounds, and that many of the normally just practices and institutions are indispensible to the workings of free markets.

On the subject of human flourishing, Miller argues that while entrepreneurs can certainly engage their reason and free will in creative ways, “exactly the same thing could be said of the central-planning bureaucrat in a socialist system: He too uses his reason and free will to participate in creative work.”

As a straight comparison of two individuals, Miller is correct. There is, however, an important difference between the two situations. Command economies are premised on what natural law would suggest is an injustice: a regime’s choice systematically to undermine most people’s ability to exercise reason and free will in their economic choices and thereby participate in goods that include but also go beyond creative work. Reading accounts of life in communist and hardline social democratic systems soon brings home their crippling effects on the potential for human flourishing in the economic realm.

Granted, such things sometimes occur in more-or-less free economies. One thinks of businesses in which employees are treated as mere objects. These cases, however, are not a direct result of free economic arrangements. They usually flow from unjust individual choices by employers. Moreover, in a free economy and society, there are many possibilities for employees to exit and/or challenge these situations. Under socialist arrangements, such possibilities are far fewer because of unjust restrictions on freedom of association and liberty more generally.

Finally, I would like to address Miller’s own arguments about how to make a moral case for free markets. He suggests, for instance, that “we should expect that any moral argument for capitalism that abstracts from capitalism’s effects on people’s lives will fail.”

When it comes to the business of persuading people, I tend to agree with Miller. But then I have never suggested that such an abstraction be made. Indeed, as John Finnis writes in Natural Law and Natural Rights, there are many contexts in which we may reasonably calculate, measure, and weigh the consequences and efficiency of alternative choices. An obvious example, Finnis notes, is a market for those things that may legitimately be exchanged and in which a common denominator (i.e., money) allows comparisons of profits, costs, and benefits to occur.

To that extent, we can and should make legitimate comparisons between the market economy’s effects upon a society’s material wellbeing and those of, say, socialist arrangements. Natural law doesn’t exclude consideration of these matters. What it would resist is making such comparisons the primary or only basis for settling the moral validity of a given economic system. For that would take us into the realm of consequentialism (and thus irrationality).

Miller also maintains that it is in fact a moral argument (as opposed to a utilitarian claim) that free markets take people out of poverty and thus provide them with many of the resources and opportunities they hitherto lacked with which to pursue moral goods that are central to human flourishing. Again, I generally agree.

But I would add that this line of reasoning appears to track closely a natural law conception of the common good insofar as natural law reasoning regards the common good as the sum total of conditions that allow people to fulfill themselves. To that extent, free markets may be legitimately construed as constituting one subset of those conditions.

This brings me to Miller’s last argument. Thinking about the moral case for markets, he suggests that “The solution . . . lies not in abstract philosophical arguments. Such arguments do not in fact work, and, even if they did, most people would never understand them anyway.”

This is my strongest point of disagreement with Miller. Over the centuries, many people—great and ordinary—have understood natural law arguments. Until relatively recently, they were part and parcel of public discourse throughout much of the world. And if natural law is simply the truth about good and evil inscribed on human reason itself, then we should have some confidence that natural law arguments will resonate at some level with people who might not know how to explain a concept like determinatio but who have little difficulty comprehending natural law’s affirmation of private property.

Then there is the fact that many people can be convinced by what Miller calls abstract philosophical arguments—for better and for worse. It is difficult, for instance, to find more philosophically abstract contentions than those expressed in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice.

Yet Rawls’s opinions have over time managed to convince many intellectuals and public officials (including, I suspect, President Obama) that highly social democratic arrangements that relegate economic liberty and its associated institutions to (at best) a fourth-level concern of the political community are just. In these and other cases, abstract reasoning with immense implications for political and economic life has in fact “worked”—albeit to the detriment of the common good, a coherent conception of justice, and societies that take human flourishing seriously.

Indeed, the very success of the Rawlsian agenda underscores the need for more conservatives to get serious about making principled arguments for economic freedom—arguments that embrace and highlight the empirical evidence about the capacity of markets to resolve many economic problems but that also integrate these data into a convincing and principled exposition of the nature and ends of human flourishing. Until they do so, I fear that conservatives will remain at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace of morality and economics debates.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, and most recently Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future.

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For all of their intelligence, sophistication, and cosmopolitan ways, Westerners are increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from.

I realize it’s a humorous and ironic claim to suggest that moderns—who dwell in an over-sexed, over-sensualized world—might actually be uncomfortable with the subject matter of sex. But I’m serious. They’re growing increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from.

Confused?

While over 98 percent of babies are still generated by vaginal sexual intercourse—the clinical term I use so that everyone understands what I’m saying—it’s become increasingly commonplace to disassociate sex from babies in the mind.

Birth control is widely practiced, and almost an assumption. Surrogacy is surging. Artificial reproductive technology (ART) is too, and not just due to rising reliance on in vitro fertilization. Additionally, alternative forms of heterosexual sex—in which ejaculation occurs outside the vagina—are increasingly common in accounts of sexual relationship behavior (and in porn are normative). In step, reported use of “withdrawal” as a contraceptive method has actually increased over time—from 41 percent in 1995 to 59 percent in 2008. Homosexual sex doesn’t involve ejaculation at all—in the case of women—or, with men, is not poised to fertilize anything.

Thus “sex” is an inclusive word. In that sense it’s a bit like “hooking up,” a catch-all term that leaves to the imagination the details of what did or did not happen between a couple. Unless, however, such sex is “unprotected.” We know what that means.

In other words, what we mean when we think of sex has shifted—and expanded—rather dramatically. Some celebrate this, concurring with Huxley’s Brave New World character that “fertility is merely a nuisance.” Some lament it. Others struggle to have it both ways, echoing the words my wife and I heard one physician’s assistant utter: “Isn’t it strange how we spend our twenties trying our best to avoid pregnancy, only to spend our thirties doing the opposite?”

Yes, we are increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from, no doubt about it. Our lingo betrays us. And it doesn’t take a social conservative to perceive it.

Anthony Giddens is a premier social theorist from Britain, a leading intellectual figure in England’s Labour Party, and one of the most famous sociologists alive today. Before retiring, he was director of the London School of Economics. He wrote a book called The Transformation of Intimacy, published a full twenty-one years ago already. Although not chock full of statistics or even original data analyses of any sort, it’s nevertheless excellent as a masterful work of prediction.

Giddens asserts:

Effective contraception meant more than an increased capability of limiting pregnancy . . . [It] signaled a deep transition in personal life. For women—and, in a partly different sense, for men also—sexuality became malleable, open to being shaped in diverse ways, and a potential “property” of the individual. Sexuality came into being as part of a progressive differentiation of sex from the exigencies of reproduction. With the further elaboration of reproductive technologies, that differentiation has today become complete. Now that conception can be artificially produced, rather than only artificially inhibited, sexuality is at last fully autonomous.

Fully autonomous. In other words, free from embeddedness in relationships. By extension, having little to do with moms, dads, and babies. See what I mean? We’re ambivalent about the procreative aspect of sex. Sex is rather all about pleasure, or, to use the lingo of a public-health friend of mine, all about the f***ing. (Forgive my being blunt and crude, but if the shoe fits . . .)

Indeed, the very word procreative is typically met with eye-rolling, guffaws, and LOLs.

Our reticence about where babies come from is also reflected in a new children’s book—ironically titled What Makes a Baby—that’s generating plenty of attention, including over at The Atlantic Monthly where Noah Berlatsky describes its unusual approach to explaining the birds and the bees:

Indeed, the book doesn’t even mention the word “mommy” or “daddy.” Instead, What Makes a Baby explains that “Not all bodies have eggs in them. Some do, and some do not”; and that “Not all bodies have sperm in them. Some do, and some do not.” Similarly, sex isn’t so much tip-toed around as it is relegated to one unspecified option among many. “When grown ups want to make a baby they need to get an egg from one body and sperm from another body. They also need a place where a baby can grow.”

We’re becoming boosters of both outsourcing babies—aided considerably by its association with gay rights—and treating ART as if it’s as plausible and natural as intercourse. As Giddens puts it:

[W]hat used to be “nature” becomes dominated by socially organized systems. Reproduction was once part of nature, and heterosexual activity was inevitably its focal point. . . .

Even though nearly 99 percent of human reproduction remains of “nature” by this definition, it makes a big difference that we no longer automatically associate the two, since naming something in the social world—unlike in the natural world—not only classifies it but often acts back upon the social world, changing how people navigate it. Giddens wrote about that, too—the double hermeneutic—as did sociologist James Hunter, who notes that “to classify something in the social world is to penetrate the imagination, to alter our frameworks of knowledge and discussion, and to shift the perception of everyday reality.”

Done.

ART cycles have increased 37 percent between 2001 and 2010. Live-birth deliveries from ART have jumped 60 percent in the same time, constituting just under 62,000 babies. That may or may not sound like a large number, but it works out to be just under four babies per state per day (to put things into time-and-space perspective).

Together with birth control and rising familiarity with diverse sexual acts, the social result is a univocal shift in our thinking about sex and where babies come from. Instead, sex is primarily about pleasure—something with which even our most distant ancestors were no doubt acquainted—secondarily about bonding, and somewhere down the list are the babies that were once equated with consistent paired sexual expression.

Great (infertile) sex is now a priority, a hallmark of the elusive good life. Hence the rise in talk of “needs” and even “rights” when discussing sex. You’d think that quality sexual experiences were as pivotal to human flourishing as clean air, potable water, edible food, and ample shelter. To many today they are. Giddens asserts that our new approach to relationships has introduced the idea of sex as an art form

into the core of the conjugal relationship and makes the achievement of reciprocal sexual pleasure a key element in whether the relationship is sustained or dissolved. The cultivation of sexual skills, the capability of giving and experiencing sexual satisfaction, on the part of both sexes, [has] become organized reflexively via a multitude of sources of sexual information, advice and training.

Even when sex becomes about reproduction, we presume—incorrectly, given rising ART rates—that we retain complete control over the when, where, and how we have children. Popular cultural author Wendell Berry recognizes this, but has chosen to tag it with less optimism than many as constituting an element not of the organic and virtuous life but as a synthetic compound of our penchant for more, larger, and cheaper—a postmodern intersection where Wal-Mart meets Dan Savage. Berry writes:

…our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of “sexual partners,” orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex . . .

Meanwhile, the most organic citizens in our midst are portrayed as the most restrictive, misogynist, and backwards. Among all the ironies that greet us in the domain of human sexuality, this is one of the most profound. Our language about sexuality is dominated by public health, with its talk of risk, “protection,” health, choice, and rights. It’s not natural and productive. It’s mechanical and consumptive.

And hence we scoff at babies—the crowning glory of natural human creativity—and where they come from.

We are not a rational people. We are a strange people.

Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Here at Public Discourse, Samuel Gregg graciously notes my exchange in First Things with R.R. Reno (see here, here, and here) about economic freedom, and he observes that neither Reno nor I address what he takes to be a more important question: Leaving aside merely utilitarian considerations such as dramatically rising living standards, what are the principled, moral arguments for economic freedom?

Gregg argues that economic conservatives should base the case for economic freedom on a robust moral account of human fulfillment and that, until they do so, they are unlikely to overcome the common perception that capitalist systems are morally dubious.

Gregg is right that few economic conservatives argue for economic freedom in moral terms, and he is also right that, for many such conservatives, their reluctance to do so stems from the philosophical view that morals are subjective or, at any rate, insufficiently objective to ground the kind of argument that Gregg thinks ought to be made.

I also agree with Gregg that capitalism gets a bad rap because its friends generally argue for it in terms of its material benefits, while its opponents argue against it in moral terms, contending that it encourages greed, promotes inequality, and so on. Moreover, Gregg and I agree about moral philosophy. Like him, I am an Aristotelian-Thomist in morals and think of morality, as he does, in terms of human fulfillment.

But here Gregg and I part company. Gregg wants to show that Aristotelian-Thomistic moral premises about the human good imply the defining ideas of capitalism, such as private property, freedom of contract, and minimal governmental regulation of the market. I am quite sure, however, that no tight connection between morality and capitalism can be shown.

Indeed, it would be extraordinary if the correct moral philosophy implied that the economy should be organized on capitalist lines: It would follow, for example, that every society in the history of the world except for a handful of societies existing in the last few centuries had immoral economic systems. It would follow too that the greatest minds in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, including Aristotle and St. Thomas, had failed to notice the economic immorality of their own societies. Such conclusions are very implausible.

In my view, capitalism is consistent with Aristotelian-Thomistic moral premises, but it is not obligatory given those premises. Indeed, Aristotelian-Thomistic moral theory does not, by itself, tell us much at all about how society should be organized, either politically or economically. In principle, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are all morally permissible political systems (which is not to say that every exercise of governmental power in such systems is morally permissible), and capitalism, corporatism, and socialism are all morally permissible economic systems. Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy does not, by itself, imply much about political or economic arrangements.

There is an important reason for this. Aristotelian-Thomistic morality is based on the idea that there is an objective human nature, which implies an objective final end for human beings, so that actions are morally right or wrong depending on whether they are ordered as means to that end. Being based on objective human nature, Aristotelian-Thomistic morals apply to all human beings, wherever and whenever they may be found.

This great generality comes, however, at a cost. For, leaving aside a very few actions that by their nature are incapable of being ordered to the final end of this life—human flourishing—and so are always and everywhere wrong (such as intentionally killing the innocent), all other actions are right or wrong depending on whether, in the actual circumstances in which they are to be performed, they are in fact ordered to the final end.

In some circumstances, such actions will be right; in others, they will be wrong. Intercourse with one’s lawful spouse is right if done in the marital bedroom, wrong if done in church. For most actions, determining whether they are right or wrong requires looking at whether the action conduces to the final end in the actual circumstances.

Given the immense variety of circumstances in which human beings may live, there are very few absolute moral conclusions about how society should be organized. Yes, there are some political or economic arrangements that are incapable of being ordered to the final end—such as a law requiring people to worship idols or, perhaps, a law authorizing a named individual to take the property of anyone he pleases, without paying compensation—but these are extreme outliers. Most political and economic arrangements fall into that large category of actions that may be morally right or wrong depending on the circumstances.

To evaluate them, we have to determine whether, in the actual circumstances of the society in question, its organizing principles are appropriately ordered to the final end for human beings—that is, are they helping human beings lead good lives as far as circumstances allow.

For example, in early medieval Europe, when the collapse of the Roman Empire and extreme and pervasive poverty made governments very weak and societies were regularly exposed to invasions by barbarians commanding superior military forces, organizing society on feudal lines may well have been moral. Feudalism, for all its faults, was likely the best available way to maximize the probability that people could lead good human lives.

Under current conditions in the United States, however, imposing a feudal system would be obviously immoral, for our current arrangements—liberal democratic capitalism—are clearly doing a much better job of allowing a diverse, educated, and peaceful population to lead good human lives than would feudalism. It’s not a question of one system being inherently more or less moral than another; it’s a question of which arrangements are likely to produce the best overall results in the circumstances—where best means most likely to allow people to live good human lives.

This brings us back to Gregg’s demand for a purely moral case for economic freedom. Since capitalist economic arrangements are sometimes right and sometimes wrong depending on the circumstances, we should expect that arguments for economic freedom will turn on the effects of such arrangements on people’s ability to lead good human lives in the circumstances in which such arrangements are adopted.

In other words, the only arguments we can expect to find will be the kind that Gregg dismisses as merely utilitarian. They are not, however, utilitarian in either the philosophical or the colloquial sense. If capitalism improves the lot of the poor—which it most certainly does—then this is just as much a moral argument in favor of capitalism as is the argument that almsgiving is moral since it too improves the lot of the poor. In fact, since capitalism has done much more to help the poor than almsgiving ever has, the moral case for capitalism on this basis is vastly stronger than that for almsgiving.

If I am right about this, then we should expect that any moral argument for capitalism that abstracts from capitalism’s effects on people’s lives will fail. That, I think, is what we find. For example, Gregg says that economic freedom helps human beings participate in moral goods and fulfill their final end: The entrepreneur not only creates a new product or service but also “shapes himself interiorly by engaging his reason and free will in an act of self-determination that allows him to participate in some distinctly human goods (such as creativity and work) that lie at the heart of human fulfillment.”

I agree with that, but exactly the same thing could be said of the central-planning bureaucrat in a socialist system: He too uses his reason and free will to participate in creative work. Of course, entrepreneurs tend to get better results than bureaucrats, but that’s a factual argument of the kind we’ve currently taken off the table.

As a philosophical matter, Gregg’s argument shows not that entrepreneurial activity is essential for human flourishing, but only that it is one way in which human beings can flourish. A form of economic organization that left citizens only minimal opportunities to engage in creative work would make human flourishing very difficult, and for that reason would likely be immoral (only likely, because there could be exigent circumstances, such as war or natural disaster, that required such strictures to preserve the life of the society—again, think of feudalism in medieval Europe). But a form of economic organization that cuts off only one class of such actions—entrepreneurial ones—but leaves many others open (as would socialism, in its democratic form) is not necessarily immoral, at least not on the basis of the argument Gregg gives.

The futility of abstract moral arguments becomes even more apparent when we turn to particular cases. Suppose an entrepreneur develops a drug that cures some form of cancer. He soon finds that his economic freedom is significantly limited by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which requires that he seek the approval of the Food and Drug Administration before marketing his product. On the issue of whether the FDA’s procedures are moral, or even whether regulation of drugs in general is moral, it advances the argument not at all to say that, in order to fulfill their final end, human beings need to be able to use their intellects and wills to engage in creative work. True though this is, it does not imply that the entrepreneur gets to market his drug free of all restrictions by government. The moral quality of the regulation in question turns, rather, on its particular costs and benefits. Moral principles do not settle such particular cases.

Gregg is concerned that many people see no moral basis for a capitalist economy. I share that concern. The solution, however, lies not in abstract philosophical arguments. Such arguments do not in fact work, and, even if they did, most people would never understand them anyway. The solution lies in making clear how capitalism creates immense material prosperity—a relatively simple matter well-understood in economics—and then arguing that this prosperity is not merely a material benefit but a moral good, for it frees people, especially the poor, to get on with the more important activities that constitute good lives.

Robert T. Miller is a Professor of Law and the F. Arnold Daum Fellow in Corporate Law at the University of Iowa College of Law.

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Behold, from the organization’s own website, the full statement from Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, on the conviction of Kermit Gosnell. The emphases are mine:

Justice was served to Kermit Gosnell today and he will pay the price for the atrocities he committed. We hope that the lessons of the trial do not fade with the verdict. Anti-choice politicians, and their unrelenting efforts to deny women access to safe and legal abortion care, will only drive more women to back-alley butchers like Kermit Gosnell.

From the lack of funding available for low-income women to access abortion services, to the sharp decline of reputable providers in Pennsylvania, to the gross negligence of authorities to enforce the law after complaints were filed against Gosnell, each aspect of this case must be a teachable moment for lawmakers: until we reject the politicization of women’s medical care and leave these decisions where they belong—between a woman and her family and her doctor—women will never be safe. The horrifying story of Kermit Gosnell is a peek into the world before Roe v. Wade made legal a woman's right to make her own choices.

NARAL Pro-Choice America's annual Who Decides? publication has given Pennsylvania an ‘F’ grade precisely because it has passed medically unnecessary laws that restrict access to safe and legal abortion care. It is my sincere hope that the women in Gosnell's clinic did not suffer in vain and that Pennsylvania, and every state, will step up and join us in making the protection of women’s ability to get, safe, high quality, and legal abortion care a top priority.

Where to begin?

First, what atrocities can Hogue possibly be talking about? Kermit Gosnell was not convicted of committing atrocities, specifically. He was convicted of murdering three babies, and of manslaughter in the death of a woman he had overdosed with anesthesia. We need to shout this verdict from the rooftops. He was convicted of murdering three babies.

His defense lawyer says that Gosnell is not a murderer, and that the man really believes “that he never killed a live baby.” Thus does language crumble into incoherence with our morals. What kind of a baby is it possible to kill, if not a live baby? Let us suppose that Gosnell is right, and that the three babies, now outside the womb, were dead already, before he snipped their spines. That might keep him within the bounds of legality, but how on earth can it make a moral difference, indeed, so great a difference as to transform, for Hogue, what is a “right” to be defended, not merely into something dubious, but something downright atrocious?

What kind of moral magic is performed by a twelve-inch shift in location? Is what is right, if it is done on North Main Street in Bryn Mawr, suddenly wrong, and horribly so, if it is done on South Main Street? Cross the street: On one side, you are the marshal in the Abortion Rights Parade, and Hogue is granting you a gold medal; on the other side, you have committed atrocities, and Hogue says she is glad you will be spending your life in prison.

Well, it’s not a street we cross, but a back alley. That thoroughfare has figured in every conversation about abortion since I was a boy. My town didn’t have any back alley. I wonder whether certain cities needed to pave a back alley on the quiet, just so that abortions could be performed there. Let us shout this from the rooftops also. It is a lie, and the abortionists have known for decades that it is a lie, that most abortions before Roe were performed in some back alley, by greasy predators, with coat hangers and dirty forceps. Most were performed in doctors’ offices.

James Burtchaell, in his magisterial Rachel Weeping, documents the paths the arguments and the fabricated statistics took, over the course of a couple of decades. Those who advocated a liberalization of abortion law, in the 1950s, argued that the procedure was already safe, because it was performed by doctors who had access to antibiotics. The rhetoric changed when it became politically expedient for it to change.

Kermit Gosnell’s clinic was not in the attic of a condemned tenement. It was in a handsome brick building with gabled windows and Victorian trim, right out in the open, at the corner of two prominent streets, 38^th and Lancaster. He was not alone there, either. The signs on the building advertise Dental Care, Family Planning, Family Practice, Gyn and Geriatrics, and Physical Therapy. So Gosnell worked right beside at least one dentist, dental hygienists, at least one family doctor, a gynecologist, a gerontologist, and a physical therapist.

But what moral difference does that make? Does it change the nature of what he did to the babies—for remember, he was not convicted of running a clinic on a bad street, but of murdering three babies?

Much has been made also of the blood-spattered walls in the clinic, and the flea-bitten kitty who roamed the place. Police who visited Gosnell’s home found fleas in the basement, too, and plates of food on the floor, and clutter in the bedroom so messy that one could not see the bed. Well, there you go—a guy who keeps cats and doesn’t bother to bomb his basement with flea killer—what more can we say?

I do not make light of the unsanitary conditions in his clinic. Apparently complaints were made in the early 1990s, but Gosnell then enjoyed a sixteen-year reprieve, while the four terms of pro-abortion governors Tom Ridge (R) and Ed Rendell (D) were in full swing. Hogue’s own organization would defend to the death Gosnell’s “right” to run his clinic, and she herself gives the game away when she denounces, in the very same statement that professes dismay over Gosnell’s atrocities, the law that convicted him of the atrocities in the first place!

For Kermit Gosnell was not sentenced to life imprisonment for running a dirty clinic. He was not sentenced to life imprisonment for fleas. He was not sentenced to life imprisonment for clogging up the garbage disposal with the bodies of aborted babies. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.

We must keep that fact foremost in mind. It is true that the sheer ugliness of the clinic lays bare the neglect of Pennsylvania officials, truckling to aggressive pro-abortion lobbies such as the one headed by Ilyse Hogue. We should not simply brush those matters aside. Gosnell kept the feet of aborted babies in a refrigerator. The gorge justly rises at the gruesomeness of it all. But Gosnell was not convicted of having bad taste in keepsakes. He was not convicted of whistling while he worked. He was not convicted of enjoying abortion. He was not convicted of being disreputable.

Suppose his walls were as white as lilies, and suppose he turned demurely away while the babies died. Suppose he did not snip their spines, but just left them in a comfortable room nearby till they ceased to breathe, as do many other late-term abortionists from Seattle crosswise down to Miami, all of them defended by Hogue. Suppose he had finer style. Suppose he did not only play Chopin while the police investigated his home (as he did), but while the women in his clinic were waiting to see him and his instruments of baby-death. What would be the moral difference?

We do not scruple to kill the children. Why then should it be not only wrong, but atrocious, to keep their feet as mementos? It is as if a policeman were to show up at the door of a wicked man, on information that he had beaten his son senseless.

“I did no such thing,” says the man indignantly. “I’m no beast. I shot him in the head.”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” says the officer.

Notice, finally, that Ilyse Hogue, crocodile-in-chief, cannot even squeeze out one tear for the babies that Gosnell murdered. No mention is made of them. Everything remains in grammatical suspension—Gosnell committed atrocities, but the atrocities are not named; just as a woman is to choose, but what she chooses is not named. Hogue dearly hopes that the women won’t have suffered in vain—but Gosnell was not given a life sentence for making a woman suffer. He was given a life sentence for making babies die.

Suppose, again, that he was clean as a whistle, and suppose that no woman ever came to know that hers was the baby that one minute was breathing, and the next, snip snap, was dead. Should we then say, “Well, that’s all right, then,” because the murder was done out of sight?

That’s what President Obama believes, and what Planned Parenthood and NARAL believe, because they most stridently opposed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, the federal law which the Pennsylvania law in question resembles. Had then-Senator Obama and Ilyse Hogue had their way, it would be quite legal for a Gosnell to do what he did, or for a Spic and Span Gosnell to do it in a manner less likely to offend the taste of the more sophisticated. They believe, after all, that choice trumps all.

Obama was but following the evil to its conclusion when he reasoned that a woman who enters an abortion clinic does not want to leave with a child, so that if the baby survives the abortion, it should not matter; and the allies of Hogue believe the same. That’s what abortion care is, after all, and with that phrase we see language itself crumbling into dust.

No, we must shout out the verdict in Pennsylvania. Kermit Gosnell was not sentenced to life imprisonment for sloppiness, for insensitivity, for bad keepsakes, for a backed-up drain, for fleas, or even for making women suffer. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering three babies. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for doing just what his perhaps slightly more presentable colleagues do every day, in every large city in the nation.

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Dante's The Divine Comedy.

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The conviction of murderer Kermit Gosnell reminds us of the horror of cruelly mauling helpless young people to death, as Matt Franck argued here at Public Discourse last week. Yet the coverage of the event uncovered a revealing confusion on the part of the press—many accounts referred to the infants murdered by Gosnell as “fetuses,” unconsciously recognizing the continuity of life from one minute to the next, from the beginning to the end of the miracle of life.

Of course, in this second decade of the twenty-first century it is perfectly legal, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to kill a 168-day-old fetus, provided she has not yet emerged from her mother, but a moment after she does the legal panorama is transformed and snipping her neck to make her stop crying is defined as murder.

But how different is the child? What transformation has come over her in the half dozen or so sweeps of the second hand around the clock on the wall of the abortionist's abattoir that take her from unwanted appendage to little girl? While the legal code of Pennsylvania notes a cosmic difference, the ability of the small vulnerable child to feel pain, fear, or joy is the same—ten minutes before she is born the fetus is just as human as she will be ten minutes afterwards, yet the law is blind to this.

Why need the law be incapable of recognizing the humanity of all of us? Each of us passed through gestation and birth, each of us was human from the moment of conception. Each of us was already a person. Does the law’s failure to recognize this simple reality stem from the impossibility of writing clear legislation to protect new life? No. That's easy enough. When I was born out of wedlock to a vulnerable young mother in Maryland, a jurisdiction not known at the time for producing particularly enlightened legislation, the laws were nevertheless sufficiently grounded in reality that atrocities such as killing helpless young people were illegal, ten minutes before birth as well as ten minutes after.

The problem is not linguistic. Nor does the lack of sensible legislation stem from uncertainty. Jurors and courtroom observers in the Gosnell case were driven to grief and tears at the heartrending evidence of his heinous crimes. Thanks to ultrasound technology, we can see fetuses kick, squirm, and react before they leave the womb with virtually the same clarity as witnesses observed and recounted the slaughter of the innocents in Gosnell’s killing chamber.

It is neither the impossibility of writing clear laws, nor our inability to witness the nature of abortion that stops us from making it illegal. Instead it is the will to kill for convenience that drives some—let us refer to them as “birthers”—to sustain the fiction that human life begins at birth.

To be sure, the Supreme Court of the land, ruling in 1973, found that a parent’s right to privacy allowed one to kill one’s daughter right up to the moment of birth. But this was tantamount to judicial murder, and it remains so. If any were then uncertain about the grisly shredding of a helpless human being that takes place in an abortion, that tatter of ambiguity has long since been rent asunder by the increased viability of people at earlier and earlier stages of gestation, by the clarity of in vivo tomography and ultrasound images, and by simple common sense.

Would we tolerate a Supreme Court ruling that resulted in the killing of 1.1 million people every year, including disproportionately many girls and minority children? Would we shrug our shoulders and declare the question to be “above our pay grade”? Apparently yes, as this is precisely what our society is doing as it permits abortion with a cynicism so transparent it would have made Pontius Pilate blush.

Ten years ago the Supreme Court accommodated political pressure to rule in favor of a constitutionally protected right to gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas. In so doing the court reversed its nineteen-year-old ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick that the Constitution vouchsafed no such right. So much for stare decisis, the legal doctrine that holds that even flawed rulings should be left in place to provide legal certainty.

Yet it is exactly the stare decisis excuse for preserving the forty-year-old Roe ruling that “birthers” often raise when they sense that their other arguments highlighting the convenience of killing “inconvenient” human beings have worn thin. Faced with the political embarrassment of overturning Obamacare, Justice Roberts’s ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius rewrote the law in order to avoid overturning it. Sufficient political pressure will change the Supreme Court’s misreading of the Constitution as mandating legal abortion, just as enough constituent pressure on Congress will lead to effective pro-life legislation.

It is past time we abandoned the “birther” myth that we are transformed magically through the process of birth from being tumorous growths within our mothers into fully human infants. The uncivilized confusion on the part of abortion advocates about whether newborns are fetuses or infants highlights the artificial nature of making birth the definition of humanity.

By abandoning its defense of helpless young people just before the moment of birth, society energizes those who favor killing the young, the helpless, and the infirm. Abortion advocates recognize that society is sanctioning barbarities as cruel and heartbreaking as the murders committed moments after birth by Kermit Gosnell, and they will continue to push for “euthanasia,” for “assisted suicide,” and for other forms of “post-birth abortion.” The rest of us need to highlight the humanity of all of us before we are born, and to insist that all humans, especially the most helpless among us, be protected for our entire lives.

John Londregan is a professor of politics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.

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Yesterday on Public Discourse, Michael W. Hannon posted a vigorous critique of a thesis I have defended about the nature of the political common good. I will reply, but before doing that I want to thank Mr. Hannon. Although he did not manage to persuade me of the error of my ways, I was gratified and impressed by the intelligence and moral seriousness of his essay. When criticism is this thoughtful, one needn’t be persuaded in order to appreciate and even learn from it.

In my article “Ruling to Serve,” published in the April 2013 issue of First Things magazine, I argued “that the common good of political society is fundamentally an instrumental good and that this entails moral limits on justified governmental power.” Please note two things about this claim. First, I do not deny that life in political society provides many opportunities for the realization of human goods that are not merely instrumental. Second, I do not claim that the only moral limits on the scope of governmental power are those entailed by the nature of the common good of political society as fundamentally an instrumental good.

What does it mean to say that the common good of a community or form of association is fundamentally an instrumental good, as opposed to an intrinsic good?

It means that the community in question is primarily a means to the realization of valuable ends by members of the community; it is not an end in itself. Participating in the life of the community as one of its members does not immediately instantiate a basic aspect of our well-being and fulfillment as human persons.

Let’s begin with a clear case: a commercial business firm. When people cooperate to produce and deliver goods or services and generate profits, the primary point of the association is not the association itself. Although in the course of cooperating to make the business flourish, those associated with the firm have many opportunities to realize the good of friendship and other intrinsic goods, the point of the firm is not “to be the firm,” considered as something valuable in itself. On the contrary, the primary point of the firm is supplied by the ends to which the creation and flourishing of the firm are means. Those ends are the reasons the parties have for cooperating to establish and maintain this particular form of association.

This will become clearer if we contrast the common good of commercial enterprises with the common good of communities or associations whose common good is fundamentally an intrinsic good—the family, for example, or the church. To be sure, families and churches do many instrumentally valuable things for their members and others. But the point of being a family (and a member of the family) or being the church (and a member of the church) is not exhausted by ends extrinsic to the family or the church to which these communities are means. By participating in the life of the family or the community of faith, a person immediately realizes a basic aspect of human well-being and fulfillment. The most fundamental reason people have for participating in the life of the family is the inherent (i.e., constitutive) fulfillments of being part of the unique community of mutual obligation and care that is the family. Similarly, the most fundamental reasons people have to be members of the church are the inherent fulfillments of participating in the life—the communio, the koinonia—of the community of faith.

So the question arises: What about the political community? Is its common good like that of a commercial business firm, or is the political common good like that of the family and the church? It is on this matter that Hannon and I part ways. As I mentioned in my essay, however, “[t]here is, in what Sir Isaiah Berlin referred to as ‘the central tradition of western thought’ about morality a powerful current of belief that the common good of political society is an intrinsic good.” So, although I reject it, there is nothing odd or idiosyncratic about Hannon’s position; nor is my opposing view obviously and unquestionably correct.

Following Aristotle, Hannon maintains that there is a distinctive form of intrinsic value in the activity of ruling and being ruled, and in developing and practicing the virtues necessary to participate in this reciprocal activity. But here, I would suggest, we need to be as precise as possible and very careful. As I observed, it is certainly true that participation in the life of a political community (like participation in the life of a commercial business firm) provides many opportunities for the realization of intrinsic goods (and, let me add, the cultivation and practice of virtues of the sort necessary for the fulfillment of one’s roles as a member of the political community or the business firm). The decisive point, as I see it, however, is that there is no good pertaining to the political community that is alike in kind to the constitutive good of being a member of the family or the community of faith. If more efficient means than those provided by political organization and authority were available for realizing the ends government characteristically secures, nothing intrinsically valuable would be lost if the political order were to be dissolved and those ends were to be secured by other (more efficient) means. (Of course, as a practical matter this is not possible; that is because political authority is in fact the best—and sometimes the only—means of achieving certain ends that are central to the common good. This is why John Finnis, who shares my belief that the common good of the political community is primarily an instrumental and not an intrinsic good, also affirms, as I myself cheerfully do, Aristotle’s teaching that the political common good is “great and god-like” in its ambition to secure the vast ensemble of conditions—including all the forms of cooperation and collaboration—necessary for the flourishing of the polity and the people comprising it.)

Hannon says that “an essential perfection of the social nature of man is political virtue.” Now, I do not doubt that virtues of various types are required for the proper fulfillment of persons’ civic duties, just as various virtues are required for properly carrying out one’s tasks as a worker in a commercial enterprise. Nor, as I have already suggested, do I deny that there are frequently opportunities for the realization of more-than-merely-instrumental goods in connection with one’s activities as a citizen or worker. I certainly agree that among the human goods whose intelligibility we grasp as providing more than merely instrumental reasons for action are intrinsic goods (such as the basic human goods of friendship and marriage) that are realized precisely by participating in relationships of certain types. This is the evidence that man’s nature is indeed, as Hannon says, “social.” The fundamental and essential point of entering into a friendship is the friendship—not ends extrinsic to the bond of friendship itself to which the relationship is a means. The fundamental and essential point of entering into a marriage is conjugal union itself, and not extrinsic ends to which the marital bond is a means. (That is why it is incorrect to view marriage as merely instrumental to the admittedly profound good of procreation and the nurturing and educating of children.)

The rub, however, comes when we ask if the same can be said for a decision to enter (or establish or maintain) the political community. Is the fundamental and essential point of forming the polity the polity itself, or is the polity primarily a means of protecting and achieving many other valuable ends (some of which, to be sure, will themselves be inherently social and not “individualistic”)? Here, to me, is where the political community much more closely resembles the commercial business firm in a way that distinguishes them both from the family and the church.

What determines the intrinsic or instrumental nature of the common good of any community is the set of reasons people have for forming and maintaining the community. The reason we need political communities is not that the political community is valuable quite apart from the many profoundly important ends to which it is a valuable and often even indispensable means; it is, rather, because families and other institutions of civil society are not self-sufficient. They cannot by themselves accomplish all that needs to be accomplished for their own flourishing and the flourishing of their members. At a certain level, they require assistance. What they cannot do, yet needs doing, must in some cases be done by political authority—and that is why political authority exists and is justified.

It is here, of course, that the doctrine of subsidiarity (on which I placed great emphasis in my First Things article) enters the picture: When government seeks to do for individuals, families, churches, and other institutions of civil society what they could do for themselves, it unjustly trespasses on their authority.

If I have understood Hannon correctly, his view eliminates that possibility of a distinction between (a) a form of association’s being necessary for realizing our all-round flourishing as human persons, and (b) a form of association’s being a constitutive aspect of such flourishing (i.e. an intrinsic good). But the distinction is real and important. It is a mistake to assume that (b) is entailed by (a). This can easily be shown by considering the legal-economic category of contracts for trade. Contractual relationships (or something very much like them) are indispensable to the all-round flourishing of political communities. They are practically necessary even in primitive tribal societies. Abolishing the category of contract would deeply damage the common good of just about any community. Yet, obviously contracts are of instrumental, not intrinsic, value, and the common good of contractual partners is primarily instrumental rather than intrinsic.

A serious error I must point to in Hannon’s critique of my view is his suggestion that it reflects, or presupposes, or somehow entails “egoism” and “atomistic individualism.” There is simply no basis for this suggestion. This error is related to another: namely the identification of my view with “Lockeanism.” It is tempting but often misleading to slot ideas and arguments into pre-existing categories or schools of thought, such as “Lockeanism” or, for that matter, “Aristotelianism.” Because someone rejects an important feature of, say, Aristotle’s thought about politics (for example, the idea that the political common good is fundamentally or primarily an intrinsic good, like the common good of the family), it doesn’t follow that he or she necessarily accepts Lockean individualism (much less a view that could justly be labeled “egoism”). It is a mistake to imagine that these are the only options. In the case at hand, they are false alternatives.

Nor is it sound to suggest that in my own thought “the common good of the political community is merely the proper setting of the stage for its constituent members to attain individual goods.” The role of the political community, as I view it, is to enable individuals and communities of various sorts (the common good of some of which is an intrinsic and not merely an instrumental good) to achieve or more fully realize their goods—many of which are inherently social (i.e., not reducible to individual benefits).

Collectivism and strict libertarianism, though opposing views, are alike in their tendency to see only the individual and the state in thinking about the terms and conditions of social and political life. They tend to leave out of the picture the many—and profoundly important—institutions of civil society whose cultivation and flourishing is crucial to the preservation of both liberty and social solidarity—the “intermediate” institutions that are, in a sense, a buffer between the central power of the state and the life of the person, and that play the primary role in transmitting to persons in their formative years the virtues that are essential to meaningful lives and successful polities.

So, although I do indeed, understand the common good of political society primarily in terms of conditions for the realization of a range of other goods, Hannon inadvertently misrepresents my view when he describes it as a set of conditions “for the undisturbed attainment of individual goods.” And it is on the basis of this misunderstanding that he slots me into a school of thought for which I have no sympathy and against which I have contended forcefully, namely, what he calls “the social-contract perversion of philosophical anthropology.”

Moreover, it is on this basis that Hannon seriously overstates my position (in the Lockean direction) by saying that it “no longer understand[s] political authority as natural, necessary, and proper to man, but instead view[s] it as a contractually created restraint on our individual autonomy.” On the contrary, I hold that political authority is (1) “natural” precisely inasmuch as it is necessary—in practice, always and everywhere—for the realization of the overall common good. Authority is necessary because (i) unanimity in decisions required for the coordination of human behavior for the sake of the common good is practically impossible, and (ii) the alternative to authority and consensus is brute (unauthoritative) force, which is unjust. Perhaps it is worth noting here that the fact that there is a practically impossible but conceptually conceivable alternative might support the proposition that political authority—while a practical necessity—is not actually constitutive of our flourishing. If we all regularly reached consensus we could avoid coordination problems without any serious privation or harm to the human good. The same is not true of the family or the church, however, revealing that the common good of these communities is indeed primarily intrinsic and not instrumental. I hold that political authority is (2) “necessary” because it is the best and often the only way of securing certain important aspects of the overall common good; and that (3) it is proper because it serves the interests of members of the community who, as human persons, are the ends to which social systems of every type—political, economic, legal—are means. What is more, I deny that political obligation and authority require a social-contractual basis, and that the primary purpose of authority is to restrain individual autonomy. Its primary purpose, rather, is to coordinate human behavior for the sake of serving the overall common good of persons—individuals, to be sure, but individuals who find their fulfillment in significant part in being in relationships with others of types that are intrinsically fulfilling and not merely instrumentally valuable.

Another problem with Hannon’s critique is that he supposes—quite wrongly—that my view of the common good of the political community as fundamentally an instrumental good is driven by an antecedent desire to find a secure basis for limitations on the scope of the power of government. It isn’t. If anything, things are the other way round: The contours of my views about the proper limits of government have been shaped significantly (though not exclusively) by my conviction that the common good of the polity is fundamentally an instrumental good. This is not to say that I would abandon belief in the importance of limited government or the validity of the set of norms comprising subsidiarity if I were to be persuaded that the common good of political society is fundamentally an intrinsic good. It is merely to say that I arrived at my view of the nature of the political common good (and its implications for limited government) “on the merits,” and not because I was fishing around for the best justification for limiting government.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University.

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There is little dispute among conservatives that government is limited in its authority and ought to act accordingly. In the April issue of First Things, Robert P. George presents a philosophical foundation for this view, offering what he describes as “a fundamental argument for limited government.”

George argues that the reach of governmental authority is constrained by nature, because “the common good of political society is fundamentally an instrumental good.” According to George, the polis offers us nothing that is valuable in itself, but merely assists us in the attainment of other goods that are intrinsically worthwhile. It is this fact of political society’s merely instrumental nature that he believes “entails moral limits on justified governmental power.”

I have great appreciation for George and his work, but I worry that this case against totalitarianism grants far too much ground to the egoists with whom George has done battle elsewhere.

When political community is reduced to the status of an instrumental good, the anti-authoritarian spirit of the Enlightenment gains a powerful foothold in the popular imagination. When the community’s common good is taken to be merely, as George puts it, a “set of conditions” for the undisturbed attainment of individual goods, the social-contract perversion of philosophical anthropology is all but cemented: We no longer understand political authority as natural, necessary, and proper to man, but instead view it as a contractually created restraint on our individual autonomy.

This Lockean break with the Aristotelian tradition of political philosophy is incorrect, since political society turns out to be intrinsically good for man. But thankfully for conservatism, it is also unnecessary for the success of George’s larger project of justifying political limitations, since even an inherently valuable polis would be a limited polis. I’d like to propose an alternative “fundamental argument for limited government,” one sensitive to the truly communal nature of the common good.

At the outset, trying to show the intrinsic goodness of political community presents something of a procedural problem. For by definition, an intrinsic good gives no further reasons for its goodness beyond itself. In that sense, the buck stops here. Human nature inclines us toward what is intrinsically good, so we don’t await syllogisms to want what is good for us.

At the same time, rational analysis about the nature of the good is the essence of human nature at work. In this vein, I hope to show that political excellence is one of human nature’s component virtues, and that the value of government is not exhausted by the leg up it gives to its citizens’ attainment of their own individual goods.

George suggests that government supplants our autonomy by “[doing] things for people[ ]as opposed to letting them do things for themselves.” Echoing Chapter VIII of Locke’s Second Treatise, George imagines a state enacted over the citizenry in order to secure rights or capacities they antecedently possess.

The polis of the Politics denies this division, marrying the virtues necessary for good government to the act of government itself. Aristotle instructs that citizens should “rule and be ruled in turn,” cleaving citizen to civic leadership.

George dismisses this model of self-rule as fanciful, which makes sense of his anxiety about growing state power imposed on us from the outside. But he can divorce rulers from the people only by acquiescing in the nationalization and professionalization of politics that characterizes the modern era.

Far removed from these contemporary peculiarities, Aristotle teaches that government is fundamentally an activity—an action rather than an institution—that the people pursue together on the local level. And as Tocqueville notes, it is a ubiquitous action performed naturally and spontaneously: “The township ... is the grouping so close to man's nature that wherever men gather together township automatically comes into being.”

This picture is dramatically different from the one offered by George: In the classical view government isn’t a structure set up after the fact to help citizens pursue other intrinsically valuable activities, but is itself one of the many intrinsically valuable activities that people engage in.

Understanding the unique contribution of political community to human flourishing requires rethinking the nature of the common good. For George, the common good of the political community is merely the proper setting of the stage for its constituent members to attain individual goods. But in reality, the common good is common in a far more robust sense. As the great Thomist Charles de Koninck put it in his watershed essay “On the Primacy of the Common Good,” “the common good is essentially one which is able to be participated in by many.”

In this Aristotelian-Thomistic account, the common good is not simply the accidental coordination of my own singular good with those of my neighbors, but is rather the one good of us all, shared in common by the entire community.

This common good described by de Koninck is not, to predict an objection, the good of the whole abstracted from the good of the individual citizens that comprise it, as that would likewise reduce it to the status of being common only accidentally.

He writes, “The common good does not formally look to the society insofar as the latter is an accidental whole; it is the good of the substantial wholes which are the members of the society. But”—and here is the relevant sticking point—“it is the good of these substantial wholes only insofar as the latter are members of society.” So the common good is indeed the good of the parts, but it is the good of these parts precisely insofar as they are parts, constituent members of the whole, rather than atomistic individuals amputated from the community to which they belong.

Perhaps this reorientation toward political society can shed some light on its intrinsic value, on the unique goodness it contributes that proves essential to human flourishing.

Certainly without political community, human beings would miss out on many of the individual benefits made possible by belonging to it.

But these extrinsic profits do not give society its intrinsic value. At the most basic level, the good the polis offers to man is simply itself: the opportunity to belong to and participate in political community. It is true that this good cannot be appreciated as necessary to human flourishing if one considers man merely as an individual. But man is not merely an individual; he is social by his very nature.

An essential perfection of that social nature is political virtue. For to an even greater degree than marriage and particular friendships, political citizenship invites man to achieve beatitude, to step outside himself and to subordinate his own desires to the good of the communion to which he belongs.

George worries that this admission of the intrinsic goodness of political society will undercut the conservative project of defending limited government, ushering in instead a totalitarian state whose reach is expansive and which crowds out individual happiness for the sake of the alleged well-being of the collective.

This concern is unfounded. It is true that government will always be essentially necessary for human flourishing in an Aristotelian account, since politics is itself an integral feature of such flourishing, whereas it is necessary only accidentally in the Lockean vision, required only because the world is such that the things that really matter are dependent upon government’s continued existence. But essentiality does not entail omnipotence.

Even for Aristotle, government is not man’s final end, and thus there are limits inherent to its rightful operation. Ergo Aquinas: “Man is not ordered to political society according to all of himself and all of that which is his.” This is not to deny man’s orientation to the polis, of course—quite the contrary. But while the Aristotelian tradition teaches that man is essentially a citizen, it also, with a nod to hierarchy and subsidiarity, notes that his civic hat is but one of many that he wears—or better, that it is but one of many identities that he bears.

Therefore, our theoretical justification for the natural limitations on governmental authority should not be based on the accidental importance of political community, as in George’s system. Instead, we should defend limited government using the relation of political society to other goods that are also intrinsically valuable.

No natural good is comprehensive to the point of excluding all others. Friendship is limited; health is limited; marriage is limited too, despite being a one-flesh union and thus comprehensive in a certain narrow respect. Yet marriage is limited not because it is a merely instrumental good, but rather because it is one of many intrinsic goods, a particular non-exhaustive facet of human wellbeing. The same is true of civics.

It is an odd totalitarian mistake to forget that man is more than his citizen status, but it is not a mistake of the Aristotelian tradition. As de Koninck writes, “Though man, the individual, the family member, the civil citizen, the celestial citizen, etc., are the same subject, they are different formally. Totalitarianism [wrongly] identifies the formality ‘man’ with the formality ‘citizen.’” Aristotle, to the contrary, respected the limited nature of even intrinsically good objects of the human will, including government. All of these natural goods contribute to man’s wellbeing, but none realizes it alone.

To see political community as intrinsically good offers a more stable foundation for limited government than to reduce political community to a merely instrumental good. By demarcating government as one of many intrinsic goods in the created order, we can see where political community ends and other goods pick up. This picture gives politics naturally defined bounds. Government gets a realm of its own, and that realm is an inherently limited one.

Political community understood merely as an instrument to realizing individual goods, however, opens the doors to state encroachment wherever the government believes it can lend a hand. And as recent history shows all too clearly, the state tends to think it can assist with just about everything; even our government of clearly defined bounds oversteps them at every turn. When government is denied its own realm of importance as an intrinsic good, it overtakes whatever territory it can claim for itself.

De Koninck is further vindicated: “By their false notion of the common good, the personalists”—those who would subordinate the common good of the political community to the singular good of its individual members—“are fundamentally in accord with those whose errors they suppose they are fighting.” Despite George’s hope that denying the intrinsic goodness of governance will curtail its expansion, in practice the instrumentalization of the state has extended its reach drastically.

These practical consequences should hardly surprise us. After all, the same theoretical foundation that George holds up as the basis for constraining government has been held by so heinous an enemy of political limitations as Thomas Hobbes. Even his throbbing Leviathan is understood as merely instrumentally valuable, good simply because of its ability to safeguard men by keeping them from killing each other in the “war of all against all.”

We should look elsewhere than Hobbes for a sure foundation of limited government. My contention is that we need look no further than the thinker who pronounced man a political animal in the first place.

Michael W. Hannon is a first-year law student at NYU and a graduate of Columbia, where he triple-majored in Philosophy, Religion, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is a contributing editor at Ethika Politika.

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Listening to a discussion about same-sex marriage can be like watching two ships pass in the night. Proceeding from different but all-too-often-unarticulated conceptions of what marriage is and why it matters for society, advocates on both sides tend to lock into patterns of reasoning that seem impervious to opposing arguments.

Proponents of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples point to the lack of fair legal accommodations for those who choose to live together and commingle their assets but who are not legally married. Exhibit A is the current Supreme Court case regarding the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which arose because Edith Windsor was required to forfeit over $360,000 in federal estate taxes upon the death of her lesbian partner. To many this seems unjust, especially when assets inherited from a legally married spouse are exempt from the estate tax altogether.

Advocates of the conjugal definition of marriage point to the tremendous impact on a child’s wellbeing of the circumstances of his conception. Decades of social science have confirmed that, all else being equal, children fare best when raised by their biological parents in a stable home. Yet children cannot barter for the privilege of being born into such circumstances; and so, as is the case with other externalities, it falls to higher rungs of civil society to promote norms of long-term commitment, comprehensive sharing of life, and sexual exclusivity among those who engage in the kind of activity that can result in conception.

Part of what can make the marriage debate seem so intractable is that both these aims are eminently reasonable as starting points for public policy. Adults who choose to share a life together do deserve fair treatment under the law, and children do deserve the benefits afforded by a loving mother and father in a stable home. Where those who call for the redefinition of marriage go wrong, I will argue, is in proposing to achieve both aims through a single policy instrument, thereby setting them in competition with each other. Because they allow space for policies that fit the contours of both aims, advocates of the conjugal definition of marriage are able to offer the better solution.

Historically, societies have addressed the problem of child-rearing by institutionalizing, in the law as well as civil society, the integration of conjugal intercourse with long-term commitment, comprehensive sharing of life, and, in at least some societies, sexual exclusivity. Up until recently, the term “marriage” referred unambiguously to this institution.

In our society, this same institution also became associated with certain privileges, including an exemption from the estate tax. The problem, according to advocates of redefining marriage, is that it seems unjust not to grant some of these privileges more broadly.

Just how broadly, of course, may vary from privilege to privilege, and in some cases may be a matter of dispute. Some, for example, argue that we should abolish the estate tax altogether (I would be inclined to agree). What is important here is the general claim that at least some of the privileges currently associated with marriage fall under the heading of what is owed in justice to (at least) all who cohabit and commingle their assets.

Suppose for the sake of argument that this claim is true. If so, proponents of redefining marriage are right to challenge the status quo. The policy aim of guaranteeing fair treatment under the law to those who cohabit and commingle their assets applies to a population that is broader than the population to which the aim of integrating conjugal intercourse with long-term commitment, comprehensive sharing of life, and sexual exclusivity applies. As a result, a policy instrument tailored to achieve the second aim is doomed to be too narrow as an instrument for the first.

What proponents of redefining marriage miss is the fact that this problem will always remain as long as a single policy instrument is tasked with achieving both ends, for the simple reason that it cannot be tailored to both simultaneously. This is why simply expanding the scope of marriage to include same-sex couples is an inadequate solution. Far from being fitted to both policy aims, marriage redefined in this way would be fitted to neither: It would be at once too narrow and too broad.

It would be too narrow because it would continue to exclude polyamorous groups, as well as couples in a platonic relationship—bachelor brothers, say—who live together, care for each other, and share property. Yet who would say that the fairness of the estate tax levied on Edith Windsor hinges on whether she engaged in sexual acts with her longtime friend and roommate?

It would be too broad because same-sex couples cannot engage in the kind of activity that can result in conception, and hence there is no need for social norms that integrate sexual activity between persons of the same sex with an arrangement suitable for raising a child.

Indeed, redefining marriage would likely hamper its capacity to achieve the child-centric need at stake in the debate. Precisely insofar as they persuade us to conceptualize marriage in terms of shared living generally, proponents of redefining marriage will have rendered it incapable of shaping attitudes toward any particular kind of shared living. Yet to protect the wellbeing of children, the institution of marriage must set apart the particular kind of shared living best suited to child-rearing from the range of alternatives so as to promote it as an ideal among those who choose to engage in conjugal intercourse.

The best response to the two needs at stake in the marriage debate is to acknowledge that both are important and craft a solution that fits the contours of each. This does not require defining out of existence the only legal category whose purpose is precisely to integrate the kind of act that can result in conception with the kind of environment best suited for a child’s development. Instead, it merely requires disconnecting from marriage any privileges currently associated with it that are in fact owed in justice to a population broader than those who can become biological mothers and fathers.

In this way, not only could marriage continue to play its normative role in addressing the second policy aim at stake in the debate, but any injustice in tax policy, or policy regarding hospital visitation, could be eliminated for everyone, not just romantically involved same-sex couples.

The truth is that each of these policy needs is too important to be given short shrift. Reinforcement of the conjugal definition of marriage in the law combined with comprehensive reform in areas such as the estate tax would address both. Unfortunately, redefining marriage in a way that eliminates its child-centric focus, combined with denying fair treatment to those whom the new definition continues to exclude, would address neither.

Charles F. Capps is a management consultant based in Chicago, IL. A graduate of Stanford University, he will begin a joint JD/PhD program at the University of Chicago this fall.

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In his famous speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, given in Peoria, Illinois in the fall of 1854—the speech that relaunched his moribund political career by attacking the opening of new western territories to the spread of slavery—Abraham Lincoln addressed part of his argument to his southern fellow citizens. He was convinced that their own social customs gave evidence of a moral principle against slavery half asleep in their souls:

[Y]ou have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the “slave-dealer.” He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.

Of course, if the right to own and traffic in slaves was protected by the Constitution—as the Supreme Court was to assert in 1857—then the slave-dealer was doing absolutely necessary work. But Lincoln was right: Decent people instinctively recoiled from contact with someone whose business was the despoliation of others’ human dignity.

Who but the abortionist is the slave-dealer today? On whom does the traffic in abortions entirely depend? Who else gives practical effect to the “right to choose” an abortion proclaimed in Roe v. Wade?

But our own social customs are not so different from what Lincoln saw in the antebellum South. We “shrink from the snaky contact” with the abortion provider, and even people who call themselves “pro-choice” avert their eyes from the grisly reality of what it means, in practice, to exercise the “right to choose.”

Barack Obama, on April 26, was the first sitting president of the United States to give a public address to a convention of the slave-dealers of our age. That morning he gave a twelve-minute speech to the annual conference of Planned Parenthood, an organization responsible for more abortions than any other provider in the country.

Evidently he is not afraid to come into contact with our own “class of native tyrants,” who carry on the despicable business of destroying hundreds of thousands of human lives each year, and have the audacity to say they are serving “women’s health.” But then this is, after all, the same politician who voted against an Illinois law to protect the lives of newborns who survived failed abortions.

There is a limit even to Obama’s audacity, though. The president mentioned the “right to choose” four times in his brief speech, but somehow this transitive verb never took an object. Choose what? He never uttered the word “abortion,” though it was plain that the entire speech was about the centrality of abortion to the president’s notion of women’s “health.” Is there any other constitutional right, real or invented, that does not go by its true name when its defenders speak of it?

And far be it from the president to utter the name of Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist now convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for “snipping” the necks of babies who survived their abortions, as well as manslaughter in the case of a pregnant woman who did not survive his ministrations.

Gosnell, whose clinic was shut down by the Philadelphia authorities who charged him with murder, is the ne plus ultra of the abortion trade. Not because of the filth, the squalor, the jars of amputated keepsake baby feet, the employment of unlicensed incompetents, the promiscuous use of narcotics on unwitting patients, or the poisonous racism of a physician who preyed upon women and babies of his own race—although all of these are no surprise at all in America’s most unregulated branch of medicine.

No, Gosnell is the “slave-dealer” par excellence because, even if he had run the cleanest, brightest, most professional clinic in the country, he was simply following out the remorseless logic of the abortion regime installed forty years ago by the Supreme Court.

Women came to him for the very latest of late-term abortions, and he made sure their children were dead. Whether he accomplished their deaths in utero or ex utero—before or after their births—didn’t really matter to Gosnell. And, as we have heard from Planned Parenthood officials, from then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama, and from “pro-choice” politicians like Senator Barbara Boxer, it doesn’t matter to them, either.

Their insouciance about infanticide, moreover, is given intellectual respectability when a leading academic publication like the Journal of Medical Ethics publishes a symposium on infanticide in which the majority of the contributing scholars cannot bring themselves to condemn it.

And there is something inexorably logical about this attitude. How can it really matter where an innocent human being’s life is deliberately snuffed out? If it’s a legally protected “baby” after birth at 24 weeks’ gestation, but only an unprotected “fetus” before birth at 25 weeks’ gestation, how does that make any sense? Yet this is the kind of gyration the law produces, just as it was shot through with contradictions and inanities under the regime that sanctioned slavery.

It mattered a great deal whether Gosnell’s tiny victims were born dead or alive to his defense counsel, attorney Jack McMahon, for it meant the difference between capital crimes and the facilitation of women’s “constitutional rights.” McMahon mounted no affirmative case for his client, calling no witnesses and entering no evidence into the record. Instead he counted on pure argumentative obfuscation to induce the jurors to acquit.

Of the seven first-degree murder charges on behalf of the babies whose spinal cords were severed in Gosnell’s clinic, three were thrown out by the trial judge at the conclusion of the prosecution’s case, apparently on grounds urged by the defense that babies seen to breathe or to move “just once” after delivery could have been dead before the scissors were applied to their necks. McMahon seemed to be soliciting a similar conclusion from jurors in the remaining four cases, and perhaps they reached it in one of them. But in three cases, they could not deny that living human beings emerged from their mothers’ wombs and were killed by Gosnell, and so they convicted him of murder.

The defense counsel urged jurors to avert their eyes from Gosnell’s filthy practice and his profiting on others’ misery, instead seeing the doctor as supplying an essential service: “He provided those desperate young girls with relief. He gave them a solution to their problems,” McMahon said in closing arguments. Just like the slave-dealer, the abortionist “watches your necessities” and profits from them.

And like the slave-dealer, the abortionist is someone whose acquaintance we don’t want to make. This is more true of abortion’s defenders than of its opponents. For the defenders, the truth about the men and women who make this judicially-protected commerce possible is not something they want to know, much less to tell others about. This accounts for the dearth of media coverage during most of the Gosnell trial, which improved only slightly after the persistent criticisms of journalists Mollie Hemingway and Kirsten Powers.

When Gosnell passes from the scene, the liberal media blackout will resume. This is why it is incumbent on legislators, state and federal, to inform themselves and the public to the best of their ability.

We have been here before, of course, in some of our legislatures. The most under-reported aspect of the Gosnell case is that he was charged with more than twenty counts of illegal abortion under Pennsylvania law, merely by virtue of having aborted unborn children at 24 or more weeks’ gestational age. This law, passed by the state legislature in the late 1980s under Governor Robert Casey, Sr., was an effort to put the Kermit Gosnells of the abortion industry—the worst of the worst of the slave-dealers—out of business.

The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act provides that unless a physician can establish that he “reasonably believes” an unborn child is younger than 24 weeks, or, if the child is older, he can establish that continuing the pregnancy will result in either the death of the mother or “the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” the physician cannot perform a late-term abortion.

If he knowingly commits a post-24 weeks abortion, based on such stringent life and health criteria, the doctor must certify his judgment about the threat in writing; acquire the concurrence of a second doctor in that judgment based on a “separate personal medical examination” of the woman; perform the abortion in a hospital; employ procedures designed to maximize the unborn child’s chances to survive; and have a second physician present, ready to consider any surviving child his primary patient.

The purpose of this Pennsylvania statute is, in substance, identical to that of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA), and state laws similar to the latter. Whereas BAIPA protects the right to life of the child who survives an abortion, the Pennsylvania act protects the child who could survive an abortion, making it criminal in most cases to abort the child and, where an abortion is permissible within narrow limits, requiring doctors to treat the child as a second patient who should be brought into the world alive and unharmed if possible.

Gosnell did not conform his actions to any of these regulatory strictures. Still, the Pennsylvania authorities failed to enforce the law to the point of malign neglect—which is why Gosnell continued to prosper after its passage, until he came to the Philadelphia district attorney’s attention in a way that couldn’t be ignored, following a Drug Enforcement Agency raid on his clinic for reasons unrelated to abortion. He has now been convicted on 21 counts of illegal late-term abortions.

As the jury heads into the next phase of the trial—for the DA has indicated an intention to go for the death penalty on the first-degree murder charges—we can already see the inevitable appeals taking shape. Pennsylvania’s near-total ban on late-term abortions, after all, flies in the face of the forty-year-old precedents of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. The Roe decision said that states could prohibit post-viability abortions, with exceptions for the sake of a pregnant woman’s “life or health,” and the companion case of Doe said that “health” could be defined as “physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.”

Thus the “health exception” swallowed up the apparent ruling that states could ban late-term abortions, with the predictable result that abortionists could guarantee any pregnant woman the death of her child—if they could accomplish its death before it was born. Gosnell was evidently not skilled enough for this, and so he made the guarantee good by infanticide instead. Under the Roe and Doe precedents, Gosnell’s convictions in the 21 cases of late-term abortion could be overturned on appeal—unless the Supreme Court is willing to reconsider the moral failure for which it has been responsible.

But assume for a moment that those late-term abortion convictions are overturned. Why should he not win the same result in the three murder cases? We have it from some of the world’s leading medical ethicists, after all, that “after-birth abortion” is as permissible as “pre-birth abortion.”

In statements issued immediately after the Gosnell verdict, the slave-dealers’ lobby—Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—reacted as though the real problem with Gosnell is that he preyed on women and endangered their health. To be sure, he did just that. But Gosnell victimized these women as the logical extension of these groups’ moral reasoning and public policy goals, which they have advocated for decades. They have devoted themselves to teaching American women that their unborn children simply don’t count in any moral calculus, and horrors like Gosnell’s clinic are the fruit of their diligent work.

There is no alchemy, no magic spell that can tell us how to distinguish, in terms of their moral claim on us, between the children aborted in Gosnell’s Philadelphia abattoir and the ones who were delivered and then killed. In certain respects, Kermit Gosnell has a right to be the most surprised man in America right now. We, on the other hand, who have not wanted to notice the slave-dealers in our midst, have no such excuse.

Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.

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I want to thank Christopher Tollefsen for doing a lovely, thoughtful, penetrating reprise of the argument in my book, Natural Rights & the Right to Choose: namely, that as people have talked themselves into the “right to choose abortion,” they have had to talk themselves out of the logic of natural rights.

James Wilson raised the question, if we have natural rights, when do they begin? And the answer was that they begin as soon as we begin to be, which is why, as he said, the common law casts protection over human life from the first stirring in the womb—which is to say, as it is known that the offspring is there.

One way or another, the partisans of abortion have had to talk themselves out of the notion that the human being inside the womb has any intrinsic moral worth, the source in turn of rights of intrinsic worth. But if that is true for the child in the womb, it is true for the rest of us as well. If we have rights then, we can get them only when they are conferred by the people with the power to confer them. And so even if there were such a thing as a “right to abortion,” it is a right stripped of its moral logic. It would be a right conferred by the powerful, and it could be withdrawn by the powerful when it no longer serves their interest.

But Tollefsen raised the issue of the book in a timely way because of Kermit Gosnell’s trial. For the book also contained a memoir of that “most modest first step” in legislating on abortion: the move to protect simply the child who survived an abortion. That was our bill, cast in that awful legislative language, as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act in 2002.

Tollefsen’s piece is especially timely because of an unfolding scandal, not among liberals, but among conservatives and even pro-life organizations.

Fox News started twitting the liberal media for their pervasive refusal to cover the Gosnell trial and what it revealed about the logic of “abortion rights.” But the conservative media—and most unaccountably of all, the pro-life organizations—have filtered from their own accounts any reminder that we have indeed passed a federal law to bar the kinds of killing carried out in Dr. Gosnell’s “clinic.”

I posted a piece in the Weekly Standard to point out this screening by conservatives—and what we are losing now, in a critical teaching moment, by not using this crisis at hand to bring attention back to the Born-Alive Act.

Two critical “hooks” would bring us back to that act.

First, we thought at the time we were pressing for the act that we were dealing with only a handful of cases, and we were simply seeking to plant in the law this cardinal premise: even the child marked for abortion has a claim to the protection of the law, a claim that cannot be contingent on whether he is wanted or whether his presence serves the interest of anyone else.

But we discovered that this situation occurs far more often than even we had suspected. One recent account cited over 1,200 of these cases “reported” in 2010. The most frequent instance seems to be the “live-birth abortion”—delivering the child alive and then putting him or her in the Refuse Room to die.

Second, for the sake of averting a veto from President Clinton, the managers of the bill removed the civil penalties from the bill, and made it a pure “teaching” bill, planting key premises. And yet, even without penalties, that act stands as a powerful lever now, because any hospital or clinic that houses the “live-birth abortion” could conceivably lose all federal funds and tax exemptions.

But now, with the Gosnell case, we have the perfect moment in Congress to hold hearings on experiences under the act: Why has the act been so hard to enforce? What has been done under the Bush and Obama administrations to enforce it? Given the findings of the Gosnell case, why should we not restore the civil penalties that were in the original bill?

Not a single Democrat in Congress finally voted against the bill, though many were clearly uncomfortable voting for it. But vote for it they did, and the question may be aptly put now: If the Democrats agreed that it was “wrong” to kill a child who survived an abortion, what kind of penalty should be measured to that wrong? How serious a wrong did they think it was?

The word has come to me that there is some movement afoot in the House to schedule hearings on the Born-Alive Act. But word came late last week, through a pro-life group, that Senator Mike Lee has introduced an amendment calling for “immediate congressional action.” Toward what end? In the words put out by his office: to “investigate and correct abusive, unsanitary, and illegal practices”; to gather information about interstate referrals for “dangerous or illegal second and third trimester abortions”; and to conduct hearings on abortions performed at or near the point of vulnerability.

Lee has been touted as one of the young, emerging talents in the Senate, joined often by Ted Cruz. Are these brilliant friends of ours—or their accomplished staffs—paying attention? There is no need for a “resolution,” Senator Lee, for in case you haven’t noticed, we already have a federal statute here. And this is not about second or third term abortions; this is about killing a child who has already emerged from the womb.

Of course we were raising from the beginning the question of what was different about that same child five minutes, five days, five weeks, five months earlier. But the teaching cannot take place when our most accomplished young legislators on the pro-life side either have no clue about how to teach, or seem not to understand the premises we planted in the law, the premises that Chris Tollefsen has explained again in such a luminous way.

And as for the pro-life groups: Why are you suffering such a distraction of mind? Why aren’t you weighing in now to add your voice to a call for those hearings on the Born-Alive Act?  This is our moment; we should have the wit to seize it.

Hadley Arkes is Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College. He is the author of many books, including Natural Rights and the Right to Choose.

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Imagine a society, all of whose laws were just, and in which no law essential to the protection of the natural rights of its citizens was absent or deficient. In this society the law is also fairly and efficiently administered.

Then imagine the very opposite sort of society, one whose laws systematically favor some over others, allow unjust discrimination, even to the point of unjust killing, rape, or enslavement of some disenfranchised class of persons, and in which even good laws are unfairly or only occasionally enforced.

And imagine both societies not just at one time, but as they exist over several generations, as children are born and raised under such legal regimes, coming to accept and internalize the demands made or not made, the values recognized or not recognized, by the legal fabric of their society.

Such thought experiments make clear that the law does not simply create a stable pattern of behavior—just or unjust—over time, although it does do that. Rather, the law also creates a culture, and it does this precisely insofar as it instructs citizens about the moral code that will govern them and therefore constitute its cultural outlook and framework. The law, that is to say, teaches.

A legal regime that permits the killing of innocent human life, then, does more than simply permit an injustice against some class of persons: As we have seen in the case of Kermit Gosnell, now awaiting a verdict in Philadelphia on multiple charges of murder and illegal abortion, the law teaches the legitimacy of this injustice, and thus erodes its citizens’ understanding of the nature of justice.

In the Gosnell case, of course, the primary “lesson learned” concerns the denial of the moral claims that all human beings are equal, and are not to be treated as things. Thus, the wrongness of the law is not simply a matter of its practical consequences; a permissive abortion law that—somehow—resulted in fewer abortions would still express precisely the wrong lesson to a nation’s citizens. And a citizenry whose culture is founded on a radical misunderstanding of justice is, to that extent, a weakened, and even, for reasons that I will explore shortly, an unfree people.

Modest First Steps

In the face of this double travesty—the wrong done to the unborn, and the misshapen moral norms inculcated by the law to its subjects—what can be done? Hadley Arkes has, over many years, advocated a strategy of “modest first steps” that addresses both of these difficulties.

In Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes details the progress of two different, and limited, challenges to abortion law: the effort to pass a ban on partial-birth abortion and the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act (BAIPA). In partial-birth abortions, the body of the child is delivered and the head left in the birth canal. The skull is then punctured and the cranial matter suctioned out before the head is removed. The ban on partial-birth abortion was to put an end to this procedure. The primary purpose of BAIPA, meanwhile, was to ensure that infants born alive after a failed abortion were to be treated as full persons before the law, and given the protections due to persons.

For Arkes, problems inherent in the partial-birth abortion strategy justify favoring the Born Alive strategy. Partial-birth abortion is, after all, an abortion, and it was only to be expected that judges with a vested interest in maintaining the abortion license would find fault with a law that proposed no principle, but only the grotesquery of a means, as a reason to restrict one procedure out of many.

By contrast, BAIPA was grounded in a principle that could only be rejected at great peril; yet that principle did indeed have consequences for the wider abortion license. The principle was this: A living human being, exposed to the world, whether born because of a failed abortion or because of a successful birthing, is no less a person for the circumstances of his or her arrival, or the desires of his or her parents and their doctors, than any other; thus such living human beings—in this case infants—are entitled to all the legal protections which it is the fundamental purpose of the state to offer.

This principle could be rejected only at the expense of the full-bore acceptance of the moral and legal legitimacy of infanticide, a step for which few judges, legislators, or citizens, pro-choice or not, were ready. The law thus had a much more secure path to passage and judicial security than the partial-birth abortion ban.

Yet the principle at work in BAIPA was the same principle that shows legally permitted abortion to be a grave injustice at law: the principle, that is, that all human beings are created equal and are possessed of equal natural rights. So while BAIPA could not be easily rejected, its conceptual implications could not be easily avoided.

This modest first step, therefore, moved the law in a direction that would, as a practical consequence, perhaps save lives. But it also created a conceptual impetus that might conceivably move the law in a different direction altogether from its prior track. The modest first step was thus also an eminently teaching moment of the law: It showed the tension in the thought of those who both deplored infanticide and applauded abortion, a tension that the Gosnell case has now once again vividly brought to our attention.

Law in Crisis

Today, just as before, we see another opportunity to introduce a principle both for practical and conceptual effect. For we can easily see a different understanding at work in contemporary abortion jurisprudence than the principle that all human beings are created equal, and possessed of equal natural rights. Rather, the dominant understanding is one that rejects the ideas of natural rights, of human nature, and of moral knowledge.

This new understanding holds that protected status, as Arkes has put it, “must turn entirely on the positive law, for there are apparently no objective standards that yield an answer objectively true. . . .The question, ‘What is a human life?’ becomes a question for political authority, and the question will have to be answered then without the consultation of any standards of moral judgment outside of the opinions held by those who exercise power.”

But this is an inherently unstable situation, for if this is the understanding that undergirds the right to abortion, or any other right at all, then these rights, like the rights of the unborn, and, indeed, like all rights, are in reality incapable of moral vindication. The deep assumption that only judicial or legislative decision (or, for that matter, the votes of a majority, or the edicts of kings) grounds rights means, in the end, that there are no natural rights at all.

Pro-life legal scholars have thus argued that contemporary abortion jurisprudence undermines the very notion of natural rights. But in doing so, that same jurisprudence likewise undermines the ideas of law, of political society, and of constitutional government. For all these ideas are tied precisely to the fundamental task of the law, namely, the protection of those natural rights of man that precede, in their existence, political authority, and serve as that authority’s ground and end.

This point about the corruption of law might be put as follows: As Aristotle noted, the end of constitutional government is a rule of law, not men. For the rule of law, where the law is guided and shaped by and around the natural rights of men, is a law for men, though not created by men. In its limitation by objective moral norms, the law provides a standard against which the desires, wants, and power-plays of mortal men are to be judged, and against which those desires may on occasion be found wanting and called to account. Such a rule of law is thus an order of liberty for human persons, for no human being is made subject, as such, to the rule of another, but only to the rule of law and right.

But this order is subverted in contemporary jurisprudence, and in any politics that takes as its axiom the Protagorean claim that “man is the measure.” For the “man” in question is always some particular man or men, and it is the lives of others that are measured by these particular men. But that, unlike the rule of law, is in fact a form of servitude, of subordination, to the will of others, a subordination known in our own day by the unborn, as in another day it was known by African slaves and their descendants.

But it is a subordination built into the contemporary understanding of law; no human being is thus, in principle, untouched by this understanding; the citizenry of a polity whose laws are built on this understanding is thus, to that extent, no free people at all.

The stakes of the abortion debate are thus of overwhelming significance. For the problem of abortion is, in fact, not one problem. It is, on the one hand, the problem of a massive injustice done to the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human community, but it is also a challenge to the existence of our own—or that of any comparable society’s—political community, the fabric of which is undermined by an unsustainable and manufactured “right to choose.”

Kermit Gosnell’s clinic, with its stench and decay, is here both a symptom and a metaphor for a culture, legal and moral, that has lost its principled grounding in human dignity and human rights. It is only in the legal recognition of the moral rights—the natural rights—of the unborn, that this two-sided tragedy of law, politics, culture, and morality, can finally be exorcised and the promises made in our nation’s founding documents on behalf of the rights of all human beings finally be realized.

Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. This essay is adapted from his contribution to A Second Look at First Things, a Festschrift in honor of Hadley Arkes, which will be released next month.

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In recent contributions to First Things, theologian R.R. Reno and legal scholar Robert T. Miller have debated several questions concerning conservatism, capitalism, and the government’s economic role. Obviously the discussion is complicated by the inexactitude of words like “conservative” and “capitalism.” But fundamentally, their debates address the present-day scope of economic freedom in America and throughout the world.

Are we, as Reno claims, living in the age of the market economy’s triumph? Or are we, as Miller maintains, in fact witnessing significant erosion of freedom throughout much of America’s economy? But could it also be that this discussion, as important as it is, doesn’t engage one area of debate about the market that some conservatives seem quite reluctant to address?

One of Reno’s contentions is that capitalism generally has no significant rivals today, unlike, say, the situation that existed before communism’s collapse. In that sense, he argues, markets have triumphed.

But Reno also holds that capitalism’s very success means that the turmoil of creative destruction, unleashed on a global scale, is harming America socially and economically. For Reno, this means conservatives should accept the necessity of politically limiting “economic freedom, whether directly through regulation, or indirectly, through taxation.”

In response, Miller points out that economic conservatives aren’t generally against regulation per se as a tool for addressing economic problems. Economic conservatives have, however, usually studied regulation’s effects very carefully and, while sometimes willing to affirm it in particular areas, are consequently attuned to regulation’s far-too-often counterproductive results.

Miller also notes that “in the United States today we have vastly more economic regulation than at any time in the past.” He stresses, for example, that the financial sector is now subject to literally thousands more pages of regulation than thirty years ago—and that’s not even including the pages of Dodd-Frank (not to mention all the interpretive glosses by courts and regulatory authorities that will emerge). Likewise Miller underscores that government programs that were supposed to have some of the tempering effects that Reno thinks we need have been in place in America for a very, very long time.

Some fiscal conservatives are certainly too sanguine about creative destruction’s unintended negative effects on our lives. But these side effects are not sufficient reasons to try to slow or even stop the process, let alone assume that higher taxes and the welfare state (which itself breeds plenty of dysfunction) are the appropriate response.

Still, it doesn’t seem wise to play down these negative impacts. Given the conservative commitment to limited government, it would seem that the authentically conservative response would be to investigate and apply Tocquevillian “civil society” solutions to such problems before looking to the state for remedies.

One reason conservatives should take such proposals more seriously is that Miller is surely correct about the growth of regulation and its impact on economic freedom throughout America. Besides his evidence on the financial sector, there is also the train-wreck otherwise known as Obamacare (though, as Reno observes, the pre-2010 American healthcare situation was far from being a free-marketer’s dream) presently unfolding before our eyes.

Then there are the trends highlighted in the comprehensive indices of economic freedom compiled by the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute. The multiple indicators gathered together in these surveys indicate that economic freedom in America has been declining for several years, both by way of comparison with other nations and in absolute terms.

Nor can anyone who has read Heritage’s Index of Dependence on Government really doubt how much the American economy has moved in significant, albeit uneven ways in social democratic directions. Among other things, this index details the steady increase in the number of Americans (both in raw terms and as a percentage of the population) receiving some form of direct government financial assistance.

In many ways, the Reno-Miller debate gives us important insights into divergent patterns of thinking among American conservatives about the market economy. But their discussion doesn’t address another question about conservatism and the market that, in the long term, may well be more pertinent to capitalism’s triumph or downfall: What principled (as opposed to a merely utilitarian) case for economic freedom and its associated institutions can conservatives make?

Considerable obstacles face anyone wanting to make such an argument. One impediment, for example, is our culture’s negative view of modern industrial capitalism’s rise and effects—a perspective profoundly influenced by Marxist and other left-leaning accounts of economic history but long since part of popular culture and absorbed by much of the academy.

To be sure, the Industrial Revolution was not all sweetness and light. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, was disturbed by some of the scenes he saw in Manchester during his second visit to England in 1835.

Yet as the Oxford economic historian Max Hartwell showed in his debates with Eric Hobsbawm (the unapologetically Marxist historian who stated in a 1994 BBC interview that twenty million deaths would have been a price worth paying to create a communist utopia), the evidence suggests strong correlations between industrial capitalism’s development and the overall steady growth in living standards (as measured by indicators like life-spans and nutrition levels) and significant diminutions in poverty in Britain and Western Europe.

Hartwell may well have been correct about these facts. But does anyone doubt that decidedly negative accounts of modern capitalism’s emergence and its effects remain the prevailing wisdom in many people’s minds?

Moreover, even if the historical arguments could be won, this would not in itself compensate for some conservatives’ perceptible unwillingness to advance robust principled cases for economic freedom. In some cases, this reluctance seems to flow from pre-existing commitments to philosophical skepticism and positivism and/or a general reluctance to make arguments that go beyond utility, sociology, and positive economics, perhaps due to a fear of appearing “unscientific.”

The result is that, as even some modern liberals quietly concede, fiscal conservatives are very good at developing policies that positively transform people’s lives. But they seem far less able to articulate these market-oriented policies within an overall vision of the good that goes beyond efficiency and effectiveness.

Sadly enough, this is not a new problem. In his book The Great Persuasion, the historian Angus Burgin illustrates that from the late 1950s onward, efforts in Western free-market circles to make “thick” moral cases in favor of markets were gradually supplanted by “a relentless emphasis on the superior efficiency of laissez-faire” and an abandonment of a “language of values.”

There’s also a very practical difficulty with viewing normative questions as somehow hopelessly subjective and therefore irresolvable. The problem is that while many people might agree, for example, that markets are more efficient than other alternatives for wealth creation and economic development, the same people remained unconvinced of the moral case for economic liberty.

If this is true, it should radically reshape the ways in which conservatives seek to address America’s economic challenges. Changing policies is important. But equally important is the need to develop defenses of economic freedom that flow from a coherent set of principles that have been carefully developed, critically analyzed, and rigorously defended.

There have been some efforts to do so. Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is one example, as is John Tomasi’s more recent Free Market Fairness. Though it is primarily a critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (which, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, has significant problems) was another attempt.

Unfortunately, however, most people defending free markets today shy away from discussing the ends of human free choice and the content of human flourishing—at least in ways that avoid the circular autonomy-for-the-sake-of-autonomy arguments regularly encountered in free market circles.

I would maintain, though, that until fiscal conservatives start grounding the full canopy of activities and institutions associated with economic freedom in robust accounts of human fulfillment, they will struggle to make headway against the widespread skepticism concerning the morality of free markets. Arthur Brooks, with his emphasis upon “earned success,” has made some steps in the right direction.

Far more, however, could be done by exploring how economic liberty and its institutions can facilitate the process whereby humans participate in moral goods and thereby transform themselves. Take, for example, the idea of entrepreneurship. When a person creates a new product or refines an existing service, he doesn’t just change the world around him. He also shapes himself interiorly by engaging his reason and free will in an act of self-determination that allows him to participate in some of the distinctly human goods (such as creativity and work) that lie at the heart of human fulfillment.

Such arguments are, however, somewhat removed (to put it mildly) from most contemporary debates about the economy. Their development also involves the type of sustained investment in the formation of ideas that would, most likely, have long-term impacts rather than immediate payoffs. But until more conservatives choose to engage in this type of defense of market economies, they will, I fear, continue to find themselves losing much of the moral debate to those who want to take America further down a social democratic path. And that would certainly be a triumph of sorts—but for mediocrity and national decline.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, and most recently Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future.

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As an educational nonprofit dedicated to the classical and humanistic tradition in public art and architecture, the National Civic Art Society (which I direct) believes that our most important monuments play an essential role in defining our national identity and crystallizing our historical memory. Civic art and architecture are the mirror in which the civilization sees itself.

In 1999 Congress authorized the creation of a national Memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and created the Eisenhower Memorial Commission to plan and build it. In 2009, after a closed “competition” that some believe was rigged, the commission selected Frank Gehry, arguably the world’s most famous and fashionable architect, to design the Memorial. His grandiose, deconstructionist proposal—now estimated to cost a staggering $142 million—would fill a four-acre square just south of the Air and Space Museum. His plan is so big it would fit two Lincoln Memorials.

One year ago it was conventional wisdom that the design was a done deal, a fait accompli soon to be cemented with quite real facts on the ground. But what has been groundbreaking is the surge of attention from Congress and the public, and the ensuing barrage of opposition. Even an article in the New Yorker, that indicator of sophisticated opinion, last month called for “rebooting” the Memorial and explained, “in true bipartisan spirit, almost everyone hates it.”

How did we get to this turning point? The bipartisan Eisenhower Commission—comprising four senators, four House members, and four presidential appointees—does not contain a single connoisseur of art and architecture. (By contrast, the commission overseeing the Jefferson Memorial included architect Fiske Kimball, a renowned scholar of American and Jeffersonian architecture.) This lack of expertise left the Eisenhower Commission vulnerable to the influence of architectural high priests and mandarins who have an agenda antithetical to the taste and values of the American people.

The commission made a fateful error by choosing to use the General Service Administration’s Design Excellence Program for the competition. That program was created to select architects for federal office buildings and courthouses, not memorials. The very creator of Design Excellence, former GSA chief architect Edward Feiner, strongly urged the commission not to use the program.

The decision to use Design Excellence represents an utter reversal of our tradition of competitions for national monuments and memorials. Whereas formerly we held competitions of designs, the commission ran a competition of designers. At no point in the competition was an entrant required to submit an actual proposal for the memorial. Instead the emphasis was on the entrants’ previous works and reputations—all factors that favor the architectural elite.

But one does not need to be an established architect to come up with a brilliant design for a memorial. One can be a student, a sculptor, an amateur. The winner of the 1902 open competition for the (superb but overlooked) Ulysses S. Grant Memorial was Henry M. Shrady, a self-taught unknown who went on to become one of the leading sculptors of his time. Likewise, when Maya Lin won the open, blindly reviewed competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she was a mere college student. A present-day Shrady or Lin could not even have entered the Eisenhower competition.

Not only was the competition limited to architects with substantial portfolios, it was a closed competition that garnered a mere 44 entries. This is hundreds fewer than the numbers of entries in open competitions for previous national memorials. The process was also secretive. To this day we do not know the identities of all the entrants; we have never seen what Gehry submitted; and we do not know who sat on the evaluation boards. However, so far we have been able to determine that the process violated GSA’s own acquisition rules. For instance, the evaluation board was stacked to give the client more weight than usual, which would have helped the commission achieve a pre-arranged outcome.

At the very first meeting of the commission, all the way back in 2001, its chairman Rocco C. Siciliano said it should choose someone like Frank Gehry. And lo and behold, eight years later Gehry won the “competition.” This is the same Gehry who has repeatedly said he does not like entering competitions since he does not like losing. Also note that Siciliano, who serves with Gehry as a trustee of the architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, had hired or worked with Gehry on three prior occasions.  Informed of such red flags, Representative Darrell Issa, in his capacity as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has been investigating the propriety of the competition.

The former chief architect of GSA is not the only distinguished opponent of the selection process. Another is Paul Spreiregen, who is perhaps the leading expert on design competitions and author of a book on the subject. Spreiregen served as an adviser for design competitions in Washington, D.C., including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the World Bank Headquarters. He wrote in the Washington Post:

Why weren’t all American designers given the opportunity to submit proposals for the Eisenhower memorial? The method for doing that is a very well-organized and well-managed open-design competition. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, the 9/11 Memorial in New York City and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis are ample evidence of the reliability of open-design competitions. The design process for the Eisenhower memorial should have been open to all. It still can be, if the Gehry design is rejected.

In the 1990s, when the commission overseeing the National World War II Memorial competition held a closed competition nearly identical to the one for the Eisenhower Memorial, there was widespread public outcry and the original competition was scrapped in favor of an open one. The Eisenhower competition has ended up in exactly the same situation. Failing to understand the past, the Eisenhower Commission was condemned to repeat it.

The result of the poorly run, undemocratic Eisenhower Memorial competition was the bizarre choice of Frank Gehry, an architect known for his subversive deconstructionist style, project-cost overruns, and prior design flaws. Putting aside aesthetics, his poor performance record alone ought to have weighed against him, according to GSA’s own standards. In the 1990s, before the Design Excellence Program went into effect, Gehry said, “My name was put up for a courthouse, and the General Services Administration . . . just laughed at the idea.” On another occasion he said, “The American government won’t even hire me to do anything. In fact we submit for courthouses every once in a while, and we get funny letters back, and people on the selection committee, the GSA guys, just guffaw to think of someone like me doing the project.”

Gehry has well summarized his deconstructionist philosophy:

Life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising. Buildings should reflect that.

***

I try to rid myself and the other members of the firm of the burden of the culture and look for new ways to approach the work. I want to be open-ended. There are no rules, no right or wrong. I’m confused as to what’s ugly and what’s pretty. [emphasis added]

To be clear, this relativist, if not nihilist, philosophy constitutes a positive feature in the Design Excellence Program, which is explicitly intended to favor “innovation” and “creativity”—buzzwords meaning avant-garde and radical architecture—and to disfavor tradition, the classical American style, and anything “too rooted in the past.”

As one might expect, the style, materials, content, and scale of Gehry’s proposal are totally antithetical to and discordant with the National Mall and the Monumental Core. Indeed, Gehry has repeatedly stated his rejection of harmony as a principle of architecture and urban planning. The largest element of the Memorial’s ugly design is a gargantuan “tapestry” of industrial steel cables. The screen is larger than the iconic Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. Viewed close up, the twisted steel resembles Medusa’s serpentine head. We fear that the tapestry would come to be called the “iron curtain.”

Eisenhower Memorial Tapestry Mock-up

Close-up of Eisenhower Memorial Tapestry Mock-up

The main tapestry and two secondary ones nearby are supported by ten enormous pillars (so-called “columns”) 80 feet tall and 11 to 12 feet in diameter. They are bare cylinders without any capitals or decoration. Conjuring visions of an incomplete highway overpass or Soviet missile silos, the oppressive pillars would make visitors feel like ants.

Eisenhower Memorial looking south across Independence Avenue

Eisenhower Memorial looking northeast up Maryland Avenue

Criticism of the memorial has come from architects, pundits, and critics of all political and architectural orientations. Opponents include the entire Eisenhower family, George Will, George Weigel, Roger Scruton, David Brooks, John Fund, David Frum, Stephen M. Walt, Ross Douthat, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shribman, and former National Endowment for the Humanities Director Bruce Cole.

Newspapers that have come out against the design include the New York Post, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Washington Examiner, and the Kearney Hub (of Nebraska). Articles in opposition have appeared in The New Republic, the Wichita Eagle, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, and Human Events.  (A 190-page compilation of articles critical of the Memorial can be found at our website, www.civicart.org.)

As if this criticism were not enough, the durability of Gehry’s experimental structure—a cable wire mesh suspended in tension—has been called into question by the government’s own materials experts. The Department of the Army’s expert, for instance, recommended that an identical set of duplicate tapestries be built to serve as enormous spare parts when the tapestry becomes degraded or damaged. This would be so costly as to be unfeasible.

In short, the memorial design and process have been wrong in their aesthetics, wrong in their economics, and wrong in their physics. And perhaps Rep. Issa will find that the competition was wrong in its ethics.

Since Gehry and the Eisenhower Commission show zero willingness to back down, Congress has no choice but to go back to the drawing board and pass a bill to ensure that President Eisenhower gets the memorial he deserves. We must keep in mind that the client here is not GSA, not Gehry, not the commission.  It is Congress, and ultimately the American people. Nothing could be more democratic than an open competition that provides opportunity for comment from both political leaders and the public. At the same time, it is essential that there be guidance from refined judges of taste and learned experts of the caliber of Fiske Kimball.

Regrettably, the legislation must make explicit what used to be assumed without question. Consider the bill that created the national memorial commemorating the passengers and crew killed on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. Congress explicitly stated, “For the purposes of this Act, the terrorists . . . shall not be considered passengers or crew of that flight.” That Congress felt the need to insert this language shows that something has gone terribly awry among the artistic and architectural elite.

What then are the universal requirements of a monument? Monuments are civic art that cause us solemnly to reflect on who we are and what we value. They are heroic in scale, timeless, and possess dignity, even grandeur. They present an ideal to which we aspire rather than warts-and-all reality. Sacred and transcendent, they inspire instead of demoralizing us. They must honor, not merely remember, their subjects. They must be made of noble materials—such as marble and bronze—that have proven their durability over millennia, not industrial materials such as steel and concrete.

Monuments are permanent and must appear permanent, unlike a scrim or a shroud. Monuments ought to be clear and unequivocal in their meaning: They should evince a few simple ideas in a way accessible to ordinary Americans. They must be legible without a guide or key, and certainly without a visitor center or iPad.

Monuments speak to us even without signage. You can be inspired by a monument even if you do not know who is represented or what that person did. Monuments are not museums and they should not try to tell stories. They are not inkblots that leave things to the interpretation of the visitor. Monuments are statements, not question marks.

In addition to satisfying all of these requirements, the Eisenhower Memorial must continue our founders’ classical vision for the nation’s capital as embodied in the L’Enfant and McMillan Plans and the design of our core buildings of government, as well as the best of our tradition of presidential memorials. There is no better way to honor Eisenhower the general, the president, and the man than in the unmistakably American idiom that we love and cherish.

A traditional man of old-fashioned virtue, President Eisenhower disdained Modern art and architecture, which he did not believe represented the taste and values of the American people. He warned in 1962, “We see our very art forms so changed that we seem to have forgotten the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. . . . What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?”

America can and will build Eisenhower a monument that will prove his fears unfounded. The talent is there. Now is the time to find it.

Justin Shubow is president of the National Civic Art Society.

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How appropriate that Justice Alito brought up cellphones in the recent Supreme Court hearings on the marriage cases. Because these days it seems like it is easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a cellphone contract.

It is no secret that marriage is in a state of severe crisis in America. And while academics, statisticians, and pundits may quarrel about the exact divorce rate or its causes, no one would deny that the widespread legalization of no-fault divorce beginning in the early 1970s saw an explosion of divorce in this country.

Yet as social conservatives, and even many liberals, wring their hands about marital and familial breakdown, few seem to question whether our experiment with treating marriage like a restaurant experience—order what you like and send it back if you change your mind—is worth reconsidering.

Instead, no-fault divorce has become an assumed feature of the landscape of unbridled American freedom. Whereas once freedom in this country meant the right to live a good life, the ability to be a moral agent in the human enterprise, the chance to chase happiness, it now increasingly appears to mean the right to do whatever you want whenever you feel like it, regardless of whom you destroy in the process.

No-fault divorce is destroying women, children, and men. More precisely, divorce destroys marriage, and the destruction of marriage harms every party involved. The legality of no-fault divorce just makes it infinitely easier to hurt people. There are no two ways about it. No one comes out of a divorce a happier and more whole person.

Particularly offensive no-fault divorces are those where one spouse is protesting. In these cases, one spouse is literally abandoning the other (and frequently the children as well), despite having made public vows and having signed a contract before civil and religious officials stating their lifelong commitment to his or her spouse.

In this country you can come home from work and tell your spouse the marriage is over and he or she can do nothing but cry, and fight for the best financial payout possible. Try doing that with Verizon. Or while under contract to buy a home. Or with your gym membership. You’ll get laughed at.

Eighty percent of divorces are unilateral. The legal sanctioning of human abandonment must end.

The Feminist Case against No-Fault Divorce

It’s true that we can thank women for no-fault divorce laws. They fought hard in the 1960s and 1970s for the right to be freed from that terrible, hierarchical construct that is marriage. In 1970, California was the first state to fall, triggering a nationwide no-fault domino wave. Feminists like Betty Friedan, who once called marriage a “comfortable concentration camp” from which women should be freed, were jubilant. And they got their wish. Each state that subsequently enacted no-fault divorce laws saw immediate spikes in divorce rates. Surprise!

Yet twenty-seven years later, even Friedan admitted, “I think we made a mistake with no fault divorce,” recognizing that no-fault divorce had led to “unintended consequences” that adversely affected women. That same year, the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, founded by Friedan, made the case against no-fault divorce in the pages of the New York Times. New York was the last state where it had not been legalized. New York fell four years later, making our country a fully no-fault nation.

The reason for feminists’ about-face on no-fault divorce has largely to do with the reality that no-fault divorce, especially unilateral no-fault divorce, has a disproportionately negative economic impact on women.

Often, men can use custody of the children as a weapon against women. In a perverse game of mental manipulation, the man will agree to forgo a custody battle if the woman agrees to a smaller financial settlement, leaving the woman torn between seeing her children or supporting her children.

One study found that only 37 percent of women retained ownership of the family home under no-fault divorce, versus 82 percent under fault divorce. Another study, conducted by Professor Betsey Stevenson of the Wharton School of Business, found that in states that allow unilateral no-fault divorce, spouses tend to show a lower level of willingness to make financial sacrifices that invest in the future of the other spouse, such as helping to put that spouse through school for a higher degree.

So if you’re a married women, under unilateral no-fault laws your husband is statistically less likely to support your decision to go to law school or get your masters degree. Another study at the University of Michigan found that divorced women are more likely than men to lose their health insurance after a divorce, and to live in poverty more generally, with 22 percent of post-divorce women falling into poverty versus just 11 percent of men.

Perhaps most significantly, no-fault divorce laws reduce female choice when it comes to work-life balance. Women are far and away more likely to be second-earners, and women overwhelmingly want to be second-earners, especially when children come. Yet under no-fault divorce, a woman can find herself essentially a single mom, drained of family resources by court costs and lawyer fees, and suddenly required to work against her will and sacrifice time with her children. Her former spouse can direct money that was rightfully hers, even if she did not work outside the home full-time or at all, toward a mistress and her children.

Many women hedge against finding themselves in such a situation by working outside the home even when they do not want to, so that if they find themselves abandoned by their husbands, they at least have professional skills that are current.

By making it harder for a man to abandon his wife and children, eliminating no-fault divorce lowers a woman’s odds of winding up alone and poor, fighting for the right to tuck her children into bed each night. But it also increases the odds that her husband will invest in her passions and interests outside the home, even as children make pursuing those passions more challenging.

Eliminating no-fault divorce laws increases women's wellbeing as well their spectrum of choices. It is the feminist thing to do.

The Pro-Father Case against No-Fault Divorce

The rights of fathers are a frequently overlooked part of divorce. This is unfortunate because currently, divorce (especially unilateral no-fault divorce) is largely used against men. In Stevenson’s words, “On balance, unilateral divorce favors those who most want out of the marriage, which more often than not are women.” Women are more likely to be worse off economically as a result of divorce. But men are more likely to be the disadvantaged party protesting the divorce.

A full two-thirds of divorces are initiated by wives. Among college-educated couples, 90 percent of divorces are initiated by women. In child custody cases, mothers are awarded custody 70 percent of the time. Joint custody is granted 20 percent of the time. In 40 percent of all child custody cases, the father is completely barred from seeing his children. This certainly includes cases where the father has been abusive and there are good reasons to keep him away. But the courts are heavily biased toward women in custody battles.

No man should ever be deprived of the right to see his children solely because the woman wants to leave and the man has done nothing wrong. And no man should have to support a woman who abandons him when he is not at fault. It’s a disgrace to feminism and equal rights to demand anything otherwise.

If men began to demand that their rights be reflected in family law, the results could be tremendous.

Men account for more than 75 percent of state legislators. Take down no-fault divorce. It is the manly thing to do.

The Pro-Child Case against No-Fault Divorce

The pro-child case against no-fault divorce can be summed up in two sentences, because really we all know that divorce wreaks havoc on the lives of children. Divorce makes children worse off emotionally and economically, in addition to raising the odds that children from broken homes will break up their own homes as adults (and fall into crime, drugs, become a teen mom, get sick, pick up smoking, have a stroke…and die young). By making it easier to break up a home, no-fault divorce only makes it more likely that parents will commit this injustice against their children.

Above all, divorce strips children of their human right to a mother and a father bound in a permanent bond to each other and to them.

Stand up for the young and vulnerable. End no-fault divorce. It is the loving and compassionate thing to do.

Conclusion

So there we have it. No-fault divorce helps no one and hurts everyone. So why is it still legal? This is not 1960. Women do not “need” marriage anymore, at least for financial stability, so they don’t need to enter prematurely into marriages that they then won’t be able to get out of. Couples who want out of a marriage because the spouse is abusive or unfaithful would still be able to get a legal divorce. And maybe, just maybe, if you make it harder to end a marriage on a whim, people will approach marriage with the gravitas it, and especially the children it produces, deserve and need to thrive.

Let’s gut our nation’s no-fault divorce laws. It’s the human thing to do.

Ashley McGuire is editor-in-chief of the online women’s magazine AltCatholicah.

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Dr. Robertson, President Campo, members of the board of trustees, distinguished faculty and staff, graduating students, and the families and friends who supported you to this happy morning: It is an honor to share this moment with you.

A graduation is a time of celebration. To acknowledge your hard work, to recall fond memories, to honor your accomplishments. But it is also a time to consider what comes next. To ask what you are going to do with your Regent University education.

We live in trying times. Horror stories come out of Philadelphia about the abortionist Kermit Gosnell; terrorists strike across the globe, and here at home; unemployment plagues our nation; the Supreme Court may redefine marriage; religious institutions are being coerced into violating their consciences; our entitlement programs put us on the brink of bankruptcy.

Our world, our country, and yes, our churches and our families, are in crisis. And these communities desperately need what Regent University graduates have to offer.

You graduate into a society of widespread individualism and relativism, where man is the measure of all things. You will hear people speak of human rights, but rarely of human nature, or nature’s Author. You will hear people appeal to natural rights, but rarely to natural law, or the Natural Lawgiver.

You will hear some claim a right to do whatever they want, provided it doesn’t harm others, by which they mean others who can complain about it. (Notice where this leaves the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the unborn.) You will hear others claim a right to fulfill their desires without consequence, without judgment, but with subsidies. (Just think of the Life of Julia.)

Many believe that they have no responsibilities to others except those that they choose. But what if you have unchosen obligations? What if you have obligations to others by the sheer fact that you exist—and that you exist alongside neighbors, in the context of community?

What if, in addition to rights, we thought of the other R-word: Responsibilities? What if we spoke of duties and obligations?

Your time at Regent has served you well, but your education must continue. As rational beings made in the image and likeness of God, you have the responsibility to develop your minds—to embrace the best of both Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and theology.

When faced with modern skepticism, you have the responsibility to show the world the harmony of faith and reason. As C.S. Lewis taught, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” When faced with modern relativism, you have the obligation to propose with the apostle Paul the more excellent way.

We have it on good authority that each of us has a calling in imitation of the Master who gave His life bearing witness to the truth. You will face this challenge everywhere your lives take you: in government service, in the marketplace, within your families, and in service to the church. For some of you, these responsibilities will be very personal. For others, your calling will be to promote the truth publicly. For all of us, we must be prepared to defend truth as never before.

I work at a think tank. And what I have seen convinces me that our nation’s policy crises have a common root, a crisis in moral truth. Thinking in terms of responsibility might help.

Start with what is most fundamental: the responsibility to know, love, serve, and obey God. If some modern thinkers can’t understand why religion and religious liberty are so important, part of the blame falls on us. We haven’t explained—or fully lived out—the truth taught by the great nineteenth-century Christian thinker John Henry Newman, that conscience has rights because it has duties.

Our founding fathers enshrined religious liberty as our first right because while we should render that which is Caesar’s to Caesar, we must render to God that which is God’s. Caesar will never like this, for it implies that Caesar isn’t God—that there are obligations higher than those to the state; that the state is necessarily limited. When we claim to be one nation under God, we’re saying we’re a nation under God’s judgment. Man is not the measure of all things.

As a graduate of Regent University you know that the obligations we have to our neighbors are not dependent on race, or sex, or social class. Neither are those duties dependent on age, or size, or stage of development. Or whether someone is wanted or unwanted, planned or unplanned, healthy or sick, “perfect” or disabled.

This starts with you and me. We need to love our children. Graduating class, if you have a daughter with Down syndrome, love her. If your son is conceived “by accident,” love him. As my late mentor Fr. Richard John Neuhaus explained, we have the responsibility to see to it that every human being is protected in law and cared for in life.

The best care comes from the family. Some of you may have already started your families. Most of you will start one in the next decade. And as you welcome children into this world you will experience firsthand that the best way to ensure that children are cared for in life by the man and the woman who gave them life is to unite that man and woman as husband and wife in marriage.

We are created male and female. And marriage unites a man and a woman permanently and exclusively as husband and wife to take responsibility for their children as father and mother. That’s what marriage is all about. And our marriage policy should respect these truths. So, too, should our churches and our own lives. Graduating class: Live lives of fidelity and service to your spouse and your children.

Your children will be educated in this society. And as mothers and fathers you have the responsibility to care for and educate your children. Government should empower you to fulfill those duties. It shouldn’t interfere or indoctrinate. Nor should it use healthcare laws or anti-bullying programs to promote a sexual ideology at odds with the values that responsible parents try to instill in their children.

Children, too, bear responsibility, especially as parents grow old. Too many of us think it’s the government’s job to care for our aging parents and grandparents. But when scripture speaks of honoring your mother and your father, it doesn’t only mean behaving yourself when you’re a kid. It also means caring for your parents as they age: whenever possible, inviting them into your homes, rather than sending them to a nursing home. Viewing them as your responsibility, not just Social Security’s. The Psalmist implores, “Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength fails.” Regent graduates: care for your parents.

Our responsibilities extend beyond our families. One of the best ways to care for our neighbors is by serving them in our professional callings, performing quality work at a fair price. Creating wealth and value for our neighbors. Who among the Class of 2013 will be the next David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby? Who will be the next Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A? Who will improve our lives with new technology or medical devices? Who will create new jobs that pay decent wages? This is your responsibility as future business leaders and entrepreneurs.

We know that the market economy—along with families headed by married couples—has done more to lift people out of poverty and into a flourishing life than any other institution. But it only works if people of good character and upright morals are at the helm. Markets are inert apart from the values that actors bring to them—and you have responsibility for your market action.

Look at leaders like David Green and Truett Cathy. They run their businesses in accordance with their Christian beliefs. There’s a simple reason why: They know that they have duties to serve God—and not just on Sundays, but also on the other six days of the week, when they enter the workforce and marketplace. Remember, you can’t check your faith or morals at the door.

People experience hard times, and your obligations to your neighbors won’t stop in the boardroom or at the storefront. Dependence is a fact of human nature. We all enter life entirely dependent on other people, and most of us will exit life in the same condition. We should support those who depend on us—our family, our friends, our church and community. We are our brother’s keepers.

Long before the nation-state existed, Christians were caring for the sick, the widowed, and the orphaned. The early church won many of its converts by its charity. Who among the graduating class of Regent University will start a shelter with job-training programs? Who will open a healthcare clinic in our inner cities? Who will combine material and spiritual aid to the downtrodden? Remember these words: “Whatever you do for one of the least of these, you do for me.”

Now, perhaps, responsibilities, duties, obligations, don’t sound like much fun on a day of celebration when you’re breathing a sigh of relief for all the assignments done and the exams completed these last four years. But remember: Responsibilities, duties, obligations, all boil down to one thing: love.

Love isn’t just an emotion. Love is a choice. We know that God is love. And that He invites us to share in His divine nature. We are told to “Love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind; and to love our neighbor as ourselves.” And so we have the high calling to love one another as God loves us.

Authentic love is the antidote to modern obsessions with unfettered freedom and spurious rights. Authentic love is a freedom for excellence; a freedom from selfishness, and pride, and vanity, and greed. A freedom for selflessness, and compassion, and generosity, and love.

I majored in music as an undergraduate, and it offers a helpful illustration. A musician could claim a right to choose whatever he wants when he sits down at the piano, clunking out ugly, dissonant, and jarring “music.” Or he could sit down with love for beauty. He would have to take certain responsibilities seriously: practicing scales and arpeggios and chords; learning harmony and voice-leading; rhythm and articulation; phrasing and dynamics. Then he’d have the freedom to sit at the piano and effortlessly play improvised jazz. The rules of music aren’t barriers to our freedom, but the train tracks that make our freedom go places.

Authentic freedom is about fulfilling responsibilities, being free to do good, serving our neighbors in authentic love, and bearing witness to the truth.

In the world you are stepping into, when you strive to live this way, there will be naysayers. People will tell you that you’re deluded, that truth doesn’t exist, that God doesn’t exist—that you are on the wrong side of history. It’s the same thing that they told pro-lifers forty years ago, and that they told the abolitionists before that.

But history isn’t a blind force. We aren’t passive observers. History will be shaped by the actions of people like you and me. And history will judge no one. Don’t get me wrong: We will be judged. But we will be judged by the Author of Truth and Lord of History. The one who disproved the inevitability of Good Friday’s evil when He rose from the grave Easter morning.

The world may not always want to hear the truth, but only the truth will set us free. Only in the truth is authentic freedom to love possible. There is no right side of history apart from the truth.

Regent University Class of 2013: Live in truth. Love your families and your friends. Be a faithful spouse and parent. Take care of your parents as they age. Be a good employee and, one day, a good employer. Serve the poor. Welcome the stranger. Live out the truth of what you have learned at Regent, and you will set the world ablaze. Best wishes, and God bless.

Ryan T. Anderson is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the Editor of the Witherspoon Institute’s online journal Public Discourse, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Notre Dame. With Sherif Girgis and Robert P. George he is co-author of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.

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Imagine that the fine arts suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A generation consumed with rebellious passions comes to regard the works of their predecessors with varying forms of antagonism, ranging from outright hostility to an ironic suspicion of their obsolescence.

Accordingly, the workers in each respective discipline endeavor to begin their craft all over again—to make it new, as it were—by rejecting every single standard or norm of artistic creation that has obtained in all of Western history.

Painters and sculptors discover new methods to mutilate and distort the body in their representations. Not long after this, they reject the notion of representation altogether, smearing paint haphazardly over a canvas and erecting junk on a pedestal.

Authors write as if the purpose of fiction is to conceal the plot as far as possible from the reader, by eschewing coherent narrative and consecutive thought, and poets in particular disclaim the entire range of formal techniques developed by their forebears, such as genre, meter, and public symbolism.

Architects preach that any attempt to render an edifice proportional and appealing is too much “ornament,” a dishonest abuse of their craft. Instead, they erect whole metropolises filled with incongruous monstrosities, constructed out of the most sterile, repulsive materials imaginable, and devoid of a single lintel or column that might reveal an impulse to please on the part of the maker.

Meanwhile, some contemporaries of these artistic anarchists suddenly realize the great financial prospects for using emergent technologies to flood the general public with large quantities of typically mindless ephemera. Entertainment replaces art, and profit, not beauty, becomes the end of creation.

This sort of work is another revolt against the past, though one motivated by a love of lucre rather than ideology; the canon of standards derived from the masterpieces of the past has as little to do with these productions as with those described above.

Eventually, the two forms of artistic aberrancy merge into one, as subsequent generations discover they can pick the pockets of an entirely cowed public by affronting them with ever greater weirdness and vulgarity. Thousands and thousands of dollars are made by “artists” hacking up animal parts or canning effluvia; by writers composing thousand-page novels without a hint of plot, or thinly-veiled autobiographies recounting all the salacious details of growing up in various minority communities; by architects erecting lopsided buildings intended to nauseate visitors; by musicians who can barely play three chords on a guitar while assailing their audiences with varying modes of indecency.

As time passes, an increasingly stupefied public, having long since wearied of resisting this decadent trajectory, convinces itself that such detritus fully deserves the status of art, or rather, convinces itself that any question of desert in this matter is entirely meaningless.

“Who is to say what is art and what is not?” is their favorite critical nostrum. New canons are instituted, new standards decreed, locating exclusive merit in the qualities of novelty and offensiveness, and persons who have never so much as heard of Palestrina or Hölderlin in all their life assert, with perfect self-assurance, the excellence of cultural artifacts unrivaled for both their quantity and their worthlessness.

Readers familiar with After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre’s great work of moral philosophy, may recognize my attempt to mimic the opening paragraphs of that book. In order to comprehend what he takes to be the disastrous condition of moral discourse in our age, MacIntyre invites the reader to imagine a scenario in which scientific learning is destroyed through large-scale social upheaval, and then pieced together in a manner that is finally incoherent and futile.

Yet whereas MacIntyre found analogy necessary to show his readers the ruinous state of our ethical thought, in my case, desiring to convince the reader of the catastrophic condition of the arts, I find no need to resort to anything but a perfectly literal, even bald, description of the state of affairs, which, if it errs at all, errs on the side of understatement. For if our moral discourse presently betrays a severe disorder, the condition of our arts is infinitely more deplorable.

According to MacIntyre, the incoherence of modern ethical thought comes from shattering an ancient metaphysical picture, rooted in the work of Aristotle and attaining its most comprehensive elucidation in Aquinas.

It is a metaphysics of formal and final causes, a context that allows moral injunctions to be derived from the work of transforming “man-as-he-happens-to-be” (formal cause) into “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature” (final cause). It was “the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and with it the abandonment of any notion of a telos,” says MacIntyre, that represented the key conceptual misstep, which sent ethical philosophy hurtling down into the darkness of our age.

Yet it is not difficult to see how the destruction of this metaphysical picture was likely to have drastic consequences for coherent thinking about art-making too. For once man has been deprived of “any notion of essential human nature,” the creation of artifacts of a certain kind was bound to lose its status as an essential activity of human beings. Once it became common to doubt or to deny that man had any essential inclination toward beauty or truth, the purpose of making objects intended to unite beauty and truth in various ways was no longer evident.

More importantly, the dissolution of the Aristotelian picture robbed us of the way to properly understand a work of art, for it undermined the whole concept of a form. Any legitimate concept of artistic form obviously presupposes that same ancient metaphysics, for an artistic form is just that elegy-, or sonata-, or sculpture-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-essential-nature, which is formed from the raw materials of words-, or notes-, or stones-as-they-happen-to-be.

From time immemorial, some notion of form, some idea of what sort of thing the artist is making when he is making, has governed the production of art. This concept indicates to the artist not only what sort of object he should create, but also, by implication, what sort of object he must not create. An artist like Donatello sculpted with some idea in mind that guided his hand toward the depiction of a certain stance or a certain facial expression, while simultaneously guiding his hand away from piling junk in an “installment” or welding together some amorphous blob.

Like those conceptions of human nature that condition all coherent ethical thought for MacIntyre, the forms of art are never derived from some sphere of “pure rationality,” but emerge out of the practices and social habits of particular societies, and develop within those societies’ artistic traditions.

One facet of such traditions has always been an accumulation of rules or precepts intended to guide artists toward the better perfection of their craft. Such rules, which now seem entirely antiquated, made perfect sense, and were indeed inevitable, so long as the concept of form retained its legitimacy, for then a rule of art was just a deduction of practical reasoning, which stated that if such and such feature of the work was dictated by its form, then such and such methods were the best way of attaining that feature.

Once the idea of form died off with common belief in an essential human nature, such rules were bound to appear arbitrary and confining. Just as in the sphere of ethics, the abandonment of the idea of essential nature led ineluctably to the abandonment of teleology. Thus the modern artist found himself in the same condition as the modern moralist: possessed of a horrible freedom, an ability to choose that was undetermined by any higher purpose than choice itself.

A work of art, like a well-lived life, could be whatever the artist decided he wanted it to be: a urinal, a plotless drama, a pastiche of random symbols, a great deal of screeching into a microphone, a large glass box. Beauty ceased to operate as any kind of aesthetic norm, because beauty, in the context of the work of art, just means the perfection of form. What we are looking at when we cast our eyes around at the enormous accumulation of trash polluting our cultural space so thoroughly and so depressingly is just the necessary effect of artistic labor proceeding after the abolition of the concept of form, and therefore, after beauty.

There is a history to be told about the decline of artistic form, analogous to MacIntyre’s history of the decline of virtue. It will include events within the arts themselves, like the rise of expressivist theories among the Romantics, which effectively placed the artist before artwork in order of importance, and the Modernists’ fundamental revolt against tradition, which severed them and their predecessors from the great storehouse of forms built up throughout the centuries.

This history will also include the vast social transformations that have pressured the arts from the outside, such as the democratization of education, the decline of artistic patronage and the increasing susceptibility of artists to market forces, and the advent of mass entertainment, with the technologies it requires.

As in MacIntyre’s work, there is also a story to be told about where we go from here, about how we can return to that ancient metaphysics, which, in the case of the arts, means a return to the idea of form. There is a story waiting to be told about how young artists can find the path forward out of our present cultural wasteland by meditating long and hard upon the forms in their respective disciplines, and striving for the technical virtuosity necessary to bring those forms to life again.

What these narratives would serve to clarify is that in our aesthetic discourse and practice, no less than in our moral, we have long since passed the point when the prevalent ideas have ceased to serve civilized life, and when it has become time to turn away from the habits of our age. What matters at this stage is the construction of vital new forms of artistic creation, and the institutions necessary to support their flourishing.

Young artists must return now to the masterworks of ages past with assiduous attention, striving to extract from them the secret of their excellence, so that they can achieve such excellence in our own time. We are waiting for a generation endowed with the capacity—seen several times before in our history—to transform a reverence for the past into the energy required for fundamental cultural renewal. We are waiting for new—and doubtless very different—Dantes, Giottos, and Brunelleschis.

Mark Anthony Signorelli is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in the New English Review, the Front Porch Republic, the University Bookman, Arion, and the Evansville Review. His personal website is markanthonysignorelli.com.

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During the oral arguments about Proposition 8, Justice Anthony Kennedy referred to children being raised by same-sex couples. Since I was one of those children—from ages 2-19, I was raised by a lesbian mother with the help of her partner—I was curious to see what he would say.

I also eagerly anticipated what he would say because I had taken great professional and social risk to file an amicus brief with Doug Mainwaring (who is gay and opposes gay marriage), in which we explained that children deeply feel the loss of a father or mother, no matter how much we love our gay parents or how much they love us. Children feel the loss keenly because they are powerless to stop the decision to deprive them of a father or mother, and the absence of a male or female parent will likely be irreversible for them.

Over the last year I’ve been in frequent contact with adults who were raised by parents in same-sex partnerships. They are terrified of speaking publicly about their feelings, so several have asked me (since I am already out of the closet, so to speak) to give voice to their concerns.

I cannot speak for all children of same-sex couples, but I speak for quite a few of them, especially those who have been brushed aside in the so-called “social science research” on same-sex parenting.

Those who contacted me all professed gratitude and love for the people who raised them, which is why it is so difficult for them to express their reservations about same-sex parenting publicly.

Still, they described emotional hardships that came from lacking a mom or a dad. To give a few examples: they feel disconnected from the gender cues of people around them, feel intermittent anger at their “parents” for having deprived them of one biological parent (or, in some cases, both biological parents), wish they had had a role model of the opposite sex, and feel shame or guilt for resenting their loving parents for forcing them into a lifelong situation lacking a parent of one sex.

I have heard of the supposed “consensus” on the soundness of same-sex parenting from pediatricians and psychologists, but that consensus is frankly bogus.

Pediatricians are supposed to make sure kids don’t get ringworm or skip out on vaccinations—nobody I know doubts that same-sex couples are able to tend to such basic childcare needs.

Psychologists come from the same field that used to have a “consensus” that homosexuality was a mental disorder. Neither field is equipped to answer the deeper existential dilemmas of legally removing fatherhood or motherhood as a human principle, which is what total “marriage equality” would entail.

I support same-sex civil unions and foster care, but I have always resisted the idea that government should encourage same-sex couples to imagine that their partnerships are indistinguishable from actual marriages. Such a self-definition for gays would be based on a lie, and anything based on a lie will backfire.

The richest and most successful same-sex couple still cannot provide a child something that the poorest and most struggling spouses can provide: a mom and a dad. Having spent forty years immersed in the gay community, I have seen how that reality triggers anger and vicious recrimination from same-sex couples, who are often tempted to bad-mouth so-called “dysfunctional” or “trashy” straight couples in order to say, “We deserve to have kids more than they do!”

But I am here to say no, having a mom and a dad is a precious value in its own right and not something that can be overridden, even if a gay couple has lots of money, can send a kid to the best schools, and raises the kid to be an Eagle Scout.

It’s disturbingly classist and elitist for gay men to think they can love their children unreservedly after treating their surrogate mother like an incubator, or for lesbians to think they can love their children unconditionally after treating their sperm-donor father like a tube of toothpaste.

It’s also racist and condescending for same-sex couples to think they can strong-arm adoption centers into giving them orphans by wielding financial or political clout. An orphan in Asia or in an American inner city has been entrusted to adoption authorities to make the best decision for the child’s life, not to meet a market demand for same-sex couples wanting children. Whatever trauma caused them to be orphans shouldn’t be compounded with the stress of being adopted into a same-sex partnership.

Lastly, it’s harmful to everyone if gay men and lesbians in mixed-orientation marriages with children file for divorce so they can enter same-sex couplings and raise their children with a new homosexual partner while kicking aside the other biological parent. Kids generally want their mom and dad to stop fighting, put aside their differences, and stay together, even if one of them is gay.

In my family’s case, my mother was divorced and she made the best decision given our circumstances. Had she set out to create a same-sex parenting family in a premeditated fashion, I would probably not feel at peace with her memory, because I would know that my lack of a strong father figure during childhood did not result from an accident of life history, but rather from her own careless desire to have her cake and eat it too. I am blessed not to contend with such a traumatic thought about my own mother. I love her because I know she did everything possible to give me a good life. Still, what was best in our specific circumstances was a state of deprivation that it is unconscionable to force on innocent children if it’s not absolutely necessary.

Justice Kennedy alluded to the views of children being raised by same-sex couples as if our desires and concerns are identical to and uncritical of the decisions made by our parents. The reality is far more complicated than that.

Putting aside all the historical analogies to civil rights and the sentimental platitudes about love, the fact is that same-sex parenting suffers from insurmountable logistical problems for which children pay the steepest lifelong price.

Whether it’s by surrogacy, insemination, divorce, or commercialized adoption, moral hazards abound for same-sex couples who insist on replicating a heterosexual model of parenthood. The children thrown into the middle of these moral hazards are well aware of their parents’ role in creating a stressful and emotionally complicated life for kids, which alienates them from cultural traditions like Father's Day and Mother's Day, and places them in the unenviable position of being called “homophobes” if they simply suffer the natural stress that their parents foisted on them—and admit to it.

Same-sex marriage would pose no problems for me if it were simply about couples being together. As a bisexual I get that. But unfortunately the LGBT movement decided that its validation by others requires a redefinition of “marriage” to include same-sex partnerships. So here we are, stuck having to encourage problematic lives for children in order to affirm same-sex couples the way the movement demands.

That’s why I am for civil unions but not for redefining marriage. But I suppose I don’t count—I am no doctor, judge, or television commentator, just a kid who had to clean up the mess left behind by the sexual revolution.

Robert Oscar Lopez, PhD, is the author of Johnson Park and editor of the website English Manif: A Franco-American Flashpoint on Gay Rights Debates. He is launching CREFA, or Children's Rights and Ethical Family Alternatives, a new project to discuss the ethics of LGBT family-building, with Doug Mainwaring.

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In Pennsylvania, liquor privatization grabs the headlines. A bill is winding its way through the state legislature that would privatize the commonwealth’s monopoly on the retail sales of wine and spirits. Passage would result in an historic change in Pennsylvania consumers’ experiences and habits in purchasing alcohol.

Another less celebrated “privatization” proposal, however, promises an even greater impact on Pennsylvanians. Governor Tom Corbett (R), amid charges of opaqueness and political patronage, has asserted executive authority to outsource management of the Pennsylvania Lottery to Camelot Gaming, a British firm. Essential to the proposal is the expansion of traditional lottery offerings, and the introduction of a novelty: video keno.

Keno is a relatively simple numbers-based lottery game. Players select a collection of numbers from 1 to 80, and then the game pulls out 20 numbers from that range. Payouts are based on the likelihood that the chosen numbers will match the player’s selections.

The traditional form of the game popular at casinos is live keno, in which winning numbers are selected at regular intervals, usually once every 5 to 20 minutes. It is a slow-paced game that can be played simultaneously with others. Video keno, on the other hand, can be set up to coordinate with regular drawings (usually at 5 minute intervals), but most commonly it is subject to no limitations but the will and ability of the player.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the governor’s proposal would facilitate the slower-paced video game at first. Yet experience of other states (and the history of gambling expansion in Pennsylvania) indicates that the player-driven game is inevitable. The game presents the opportunity for swift, massive losses—the house edge is as high as 12 percent, and the game can be played a dozen times per minute. It is this perpetual lottery that I will consider here.

The video keno proposal validates the most cynical notions about Republican policies and politicians held by the electorate that rejected the party in November. Video keno supercharges the lottery, raising money for bureaucratic programs on the backs of precisely those whom those programs are designed to support. Moreover, video keno is a uniquely socially corrosive and alienating form of gaming—one that seems almost tailor-made to accelerate the atomization of society and the growth of the state.

We mustn’t be timid about describing keno accurately: It is a tremendous and highly-regressive tax largely on the lower and working classes. Faced with a state budget increasingly difficult to balance, the governor has discerned that revenue to Pennsylvania’s treasury needs to increase. Rather than making a public case for taxes, fees, or some other traditional form of revenue generation, he has selected this backdoor mechanism.

Keno offends neither the donors and other establishment supporters whose wealth insulates them from the temptation of the game, nor the bitter ideologues who track down “tax raisers” with a zeal that would embarrass Torquemada. Moreover, the proposal appeals to libertarians of all stripes who bizarrely see freedom in a fresh government monopoly. It is, to the establishment Republican mind, the perfect revenue generation mechanism. But it also bolsters criticisms of the party that allege a greater concern for the vested interests of the rich and powerful than the quotidian struggles of the middle and working classes.

More than that, video keno would place electronic agents of state revenue collection in corner bars and chain restaurants across Pennsylvania. This is well beyond local health regulations or even state alcohol regulations; this is the tentacles of Leviathan using local establishments to feed its insatiable appetite for our dollars. It is the co-opting of one of the foundational institutions of free civil society: the bar.

The keno proposal raises weighty considerations of justice, but this social corrosiveness militates just as strongly against it. The bar—whether the family-owned neighborhood establishment or the suburban chain—is a primary locus of American society; it is where communities come together, friendships are made, plans are hatched, and disputes are settled (and sometimes commenced). It is defined by its penchant for fostering sociability. The solitary man at the bar (think distraught George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life) is our cultural motif for lonely despair.

Now consider video keno, which isolates the player in a tiny universe, where all that exists is the player, the machine, and the fleeting-though-intoxicating thrill of the game. The game is to be a commonplace in bars across Pennsylvania, and yet it is the antithesis of the organic social atmosphere of the bar; it is a temptation to recede from the world to a domain of private pleasures. In all of these respects—ubiquity, instant gratification, social alienation—video keno reminds one of nothing so much as internet pornography.

In the final National Gambling Research Study Commission (NGRSC) report to Congress, Las Vegas clinical psychologist and gambling specialist Robert Hunter is quoted as describing this type of gaming as “the distilled essence” and “the crack-cocaine of gambling.” According to Hunter, players “escape into the machine and make the world go away. It’s like a trip to the Twilight Zone.” In Pennsylvania’s biggest competitor for gambling dollars, West Virginia, video keno accounts for two-thirds of calls to the Problem Gamblers Help Network of West Virginia, whose representative explains: “Our callers often say they're trying to forget about something negative in life. They're in a zone when they play.”

This experience is not freedom; it is bondage masquerading as freedom. The proposal is more than that; it is the state exploiting this misapprehension, building a lucrative monopoly for itself upon the despair and escapism of its citizens. Make no mistake about it: The success of the program depends on enticing as many players as possible to that Twilight Zone where all that exists and matters is oneself and the screen glowing with possibility.

But what is that possibility? In what—or in whom—is that player placing his hope for financial salvation? Into whose arms does the player lunge to escape from despair? Not the family, or the neighborhood, or the church, or any other organic community or structure of civil society, but the state! It is a microcosm of the civilizational trend described by Robert Nisbet in his classic The Quest for Community: the alienation of the individual from intermediary social institutions, whose social and economic functions are centralized in the omnicompetent state.

Keno preys on the powerless. It is an overwhelmingly cynical attempt to tap into the hope that Lady Luck will deliver a payday—necessarily more common among the lower classes, the unemployed, and those on fixed incomes—in order to make a buck for the Harrisburg bureaucracy. In so doing, the game perpetuates cycles of poverty and government dependency that ought to be anathema to conservatives and libertarians alike.

And yet those of a libertarian bent will recoil at the basis for that last paragraph. How dare I patronize the poor by suggesting that they lack agency? How dare I imply that I know better than another how one’s money should be spent?

Here, I ask for an honest engagement with reality. Unshackled liberty is not a resource that is evenly distributed in our society. It is easy for one who has never experienced privation to wax poetic about the freedom to put one’s private resources to use in whatever way one sees fit. To such fortunate people, keno is seen with clarity as low-stakes entertainment at best, idiotic pastime at worst.

But to one who is beset by financial responsibilities he cannot meet, whether due to negligence and sloth or misfortune and structural injustice, that clarity is obscured by anxiety, despair, and duty. To an unemployed father who cannot make rent, taking a stab at a jackpot might seem to be not just a sensible option, but a moral obligation. Which is to say: Freedom—especially financial freedom—is not an abstract concept that can be considered apart from the realities of our society and economy.

It is not an attack on rationality, agency, or freedom to comprehend and grapple with structural constraints on those concepts in practice. We know that lottery expansion and keno in particular will attract those who can least afford the games. That fact cannot be made to disappear with a blithe appeal to “individual liberty”; we must consider it an essential aspect of the proposal as public policy.

The libertarian account further fails to cope with the reality of addiction. The NGSRC found that gambling addiction disproportionately affects the poor, the uneducated, and black Americans. The effects of gambling addiction ripple through the family and community, both financially (it puts at risk more resources than other forms of addiction, such as substance abuse) and socially (it is associated with divorce and abuse, and
generally cultivates anger and distrust). Moreover, the proposed keno program is peculiarly suited to fostering addiction due to its ubiquity, delivery of instant gratification, and alienating tendencies.

These factors combine to make lottery expansion the “biggest government” way to raise money. In introducing keno, the state sets up an alternative path to financial security—ultimately a teasing mirage—other than the dynamism of the market or the solidarity of the family and community. The game is a government monopoly that entices the economically vulnerable out of the market and onto the dole, increasing the demand for funds that keno was meant to fulfill to begin with. It is a vicious positive feedback loop.

And so not only does Gov. Corbett’s proposal reinforce cycles of privation and dependency that he and his party in theory despise, but more abstractly it is a significant expansion of the state’s imperial maneuvers against the institutions of civil society that limit its scope and power. Video keno targets those for whom the organic structures of society are most important, but for whom the allure of the state is most magnetic, and introduces yet another terribly appealing temptation to rend social bonds and embrace the state.

Against a clear-eyed assessment of Pennsylvania’s video keno proposal, appeals to personal liberty are misguided and trite. There is no right to lose oneself in a game of chance for the state’s benefit, and more than that there is no good in it. Video keno enhances neither liberty nor virtue; it contracts both while abetting the state’s accelerating colonization of civil society.

Brandon McGinley is the field director for the Pennsylvania Family Institute.

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Last Friday, Barack Obama became the first president of the United States to offer an address at Planned Parenthood’s National Conference. While his appearance at the event and the rousing welcome of the organization is historically and culturally significant, his address proved to be out of sync with current trends in health care, the pro-life sentiment of Americans, and contemporary feminism.

During his address, Obama promised his fidelity to the group in the “fight against the war on women” that he and Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, have staunchly opposed. This supposed campaign against women’s rights and equality is largely characterized by the passage of state-level restrictions on abortion, as well as legislative proposals that challenge particular requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act.

Obama fervently opposed these laws, calling them “absurd.” By implication, he called into question the moral, legal, and scientific soundness of the laws when he said, “When you read about some of these laws, you want to check the calendar. You want to make sure you’re still living in 2013.” He also rallied his supporters by saying,

As long as we’ve got to fight to make sure women have access to quality, affordable health care, as long as we’ve got to protect a woman’s right to make her own choices about her own health, I want you to know that you’ve also got a president who’s right there with you, fighting every step of the way.

His inaccuracies were numerous, given scientific and cultural shifts in this generation. But more troublesome are the assertion that quality health care includes unrestricted access to abortion, the sweeping statements about the moral pulse of the nation on the issue of abortion, and the assumption that all persons who advocate for women’s interests, health, and flourishing support the services that Planned Parenthood supplies and the government funds.

“The thing that’s incredible to me—North Dakota being case in point—is the thought that ... there are now states where it’s not safe to be a woman,” Cecile Richards recently claimed. Richards was responding to the passage of laws in North Dakota, which have proposed to restrict abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, in the case of gender preference, and in the case of certain genetic conditions.

Arkansas has passed a similar fetal heartbeat law, while other states continue to enact restrictions including waiting periods, mandatory sonograms, parental notification, and banning abortion after 20-24 weeks (since science and top neonatal care can now gauge viability much more accurately).

In direct contrast to Richards’s pontification, it’s never been clearer that women’s safety is actually advanced by banning late-term abortions. The trial of Kermit Gosnell, the late-term abortionist in Philadelphia who is being prosecuted for four counts of
first-degree murder of babies who survived late-term abortions, and one count of third-degree murder of a woman fatally injured at his abortion clinic, shows that abortion after twenty weeks simply cannot be sweepingly labeled “quality health care.”

In fact, the president’s silence on the Gosnell trial could be viewed as a wariness to condone an absolute, unrestricted right to abortion at all stages of a pregnancy, despite the implications of his speech. Many people in the scientific and health care communities have published about the health risks related to abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Even Planned Parenthood informs its clients of adverse health effects related to their services.

If ensuring women’s quality health care is important, then Planned Parenthood and the president might think about how better to regulate and standardize the health code expectations of abortion clinics across the country. One only needs to skim the newspaper to find headlines detailing the health code violations of a number of abortion clinics in the United States.

A Planned Parenthood clinic in Delaware, for example, is facing charges of unsafe and unsanitary conditions. Five of its employees, including one doctor and four nurses, recently quit their jobs, allegedly due to the serious health risks that the patients were routinely exposed to. In Delaware, the responsibility for ensuring that the clinic follows suitable health care codes falls on the shoulders of Planned Parenthood, as the Department of Health and Human Services says that it does not have the capacity to carry out inspections. The clinic essentially went unregulated for years, by an organization that claims to be the official advocate for women’s rights in our country.

The Gosnell trial is also revealing a lack of regulation in private clinics. The Pennsylvania Department of Health halted its inspection of abortion clinics in the mid-1990s, even when they were sent complaints from Children’s Hospital in Pennsylvania about Gosnell.

Moreover, the Department of State in Pennsylvania, which is responsible for overseeing individual physicians, failed to report any of the violations taking place. The investigator assigned to oversee Gosnell and authorize his medical license never inspected the clinic after meeting with him.

Live Action began its campaign against late-term abortion this week, bringing to light the blurred line between abortion and infanticide, and raising questions about regulation and the line between medicine and murder.

The New York Post covered some of their investigations, particularly at a late-term abortion clinic in New York, where an employee advised a “client” who was curious about what would happen if her fetus was born alive. The employee’s responses repeatedly indicated that infanticide would likely follow. These proposed practices are direct violations of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, and in no way could be characterized as “quality health care” for the woman or her child.

Establishing regulations and penalizing those who do not follow them or meet them seems to be a standard for medical care that our nation upholds for other medical facilities. It is difficult to understand why there is a lack of oversight for abortion providers. It seems counter-intuitive for advocates of quality health care for women to be infuriated when states like Virginia require their abortion clinics to meet the same standards as their hospitals.

Abortion procedures involve chemical, surgical, and suctioning techniques performed by a licensed physician. If abortion-rights activists want women to be provided the best possible care, how can they argue against meeting top-notch medical standards?

Beyond Obama’s characterization of quality health care, one should also question his suggestion that to support any type of restriction on abortion access is a sign of moral ignorance. If there has been an evolution or awakening of people’s consciences about abortion, as he indicated in his reference to “checking the calendar,” it is in the opposite direction.

Abortion-rights activists assumed in 1973 that their victory in the courts was the final, irreversible, and infallible judgment on the issue. Yet they have repeatedly been flummoxed by the forty-year culture war that has ensued.

The results of a 2009 Gallup poll demonstrated that for the first time in decades, the majority of American people identify as “pro-life.” Statistics show that more people believe abortion should be illegal than believe there should be no legal restrictions on it. Presumably there are people who would consider restrictions based on fetal development, the health of the woman, and other factors—like genetic conditions or gender preference—to be reasonable as well.

Genetic science, better studies of fetal development, and more advanced sonogram technology and neonatal care have contributed to the cultural shift in the abortion debate. The scientific community has demonstrated with certainty that the embryo is an individual member of the human species with self-directed epigenetic development.

There is no ignoring the fact that Americans are uncomfortable with a woman’s unrestricted autonomy since her choice involves another member of the human family. Sweeping statements about how restricting a woman’s access to abortion will send us back to the dark ages fail to account for the moral awakening of the majority of the nation’s citizens.

Lastly, the president risks alienating a growing population of feminists who do not support unrestricted access to abortion or contraception. Groups like Women Speak for Themselves and Feminists for Life represent advocates for women’s reproductive health and equal standing in the social and economic sphere without provisions for abortion on demand. The number of their supporters is not negligible. Women Speak for Themselves circulated a petition against the HHS mandate boasting over forty thousand signatures of women around the country, and the letter is still gaining momentum.

Feminists for Life educate women of all ages on the principle that no woman should have to choose between her own future and the life of her child. They also point out that early feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and Susan B. Anthony staunchly opposed their contemporaries like Margaret Sanger when it came to the question of whether or not women’s equality necessitated abortion and contraception. This idea that there is a one-size-fits-all character to feminism is historically and culturally inaccurate.

The distortions in the president’s speech at Planned Parenthood’s National Conference are clear. What needs to become clear moving forward, if we as a nation are committed to the welfare of women, is how to define and ensure quality health care for them, particularly in the area of reproductive health.

A natural starting point for this discussion necessarily involves the population of Americans who do not think, because of scientific developments and a fresh moral perspective, that unlimited access to abortion actually benefits women. If there is a war on women, it is a civil one, and its resolution rests in an honest look at what we are offering them under the guise of equality.

Elise Italiano teaches bioethics in Washington, DC and is a contributor to Breaking Through: Catholic Women Speak for Themselves, edited by Helen Alvaré.

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College life has long been seen as a kind of debauch: “To understand all is to forgive all,” an intoxicated Etonian tells Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, and in Animal House John Belushi’s monosyllables echo agreement. Yet these days, something new is taking place. Scholars and journalists offer their takes on the hookup culture: the deflowering of American youth that takes place every weekend (and many weeknights) on university campuses.

With the exception of Hannah Rosin—whose The End of Men argued that hooking up empowers women—these writers largely agree that the hookup culture hurts those who participate in it. In 2008, Donna Freitas, then an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, published Sex & The Soul. She described how students at secular, Catholic, and evangelical universities understand their faith, their sexual mores, and the reconciliation (or lack thereof) between the two. The book was based on many interviews with students, as well as Freitas’s own time in the classroom, and offered concrete suggestions to parents, faculty, and clergy for helping students think about sex in a healthier and more meaningful—even spiritual—way.

Over the course of five years, Freitas—no longer a full-time professor—has lectured extensively and expanded her research. The result is The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy. Aimed more at popular audiences, this book leaves aside the soul and focuses on the sex. Specifically, it examines the hookup culture at secular and Catholic universities, the roles that culture trains men and women to play, and how students can opt out of hooking up.

What exactly is “hooking up”? The students Freitas asked offer three criteria. First, “a hookup, as far as sexual intimacy goes . . . is broadly understood to include just about every type of activity imaginable.” From kissing and oral sex—which, in many quarters, is the new kissing—to going all the way, the term “hooking up” covers a multitude of things. This ambiguity helps students look more or less sexually involved in front of their peers, depending on the perception they need to create.

Second, a hookup is brief, lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. It is one event during the course of an evening, not necessarily the main event.

Third and most important, “a hookup is intended to be purely physical in nature and involves both parties shutting down any communication or connection that might lead to emotional attachment.” Eliminating both reproduction and emotional attachment, hooking up is the ultimate form of contraceptive sex.

But emotional contraception is extremely ineffective. Try as they might, students regularly fail to remain detached as they look for physical pleasure, flouting the unwritten social code.

Why do they engage in sex that doesn’t make them happy? For starters, relationships take time. College students are busy and competitive. They need to fit the sex they’re supposed to have into their schedules, along with the classes and meetings they’re supposed to attend. It’s just what everyone else does—or seems to be doing.

Of course, there’s also alcohol, a prerequisite of the hookup culture. Students drink to put themselves in a state where, wanted or unwanted, sex “just happens.” That some of the resulting sexual encounters are more like assaults should not be surprising.

The ubiquity of pornography also shapes the sex lives of college students, particularly when it comes to the social roles they are encouraged to play. Most pornography depicts a male sexual fantasy in which the men are always in positions of power and authority. By contrast, women are dependent on and subservient to men. Freitas elaborates that

the woman “suggests” this by taking the uniform of whatever submissive role she’s in—maid, cheerleader, secretary, schoolgirl—and turning it into an outfit that reveals all. . . . Above all, her “job” is to visually become the ultimate male fantasy. But instead of standing before him as an unreachable pop star or porn star in a video, now she’s the girl from his American Lit class and she’s standing right in front of him at a college party.

College theme parties allow these porn dynamics to meet reality. The paradigm of male power and female promiscuity remains constant: As one student put it, the themes are “pretty much anything and hos.”

College theme parties might seem like a man’s paradise, but Freitas found that when she spoke to them in private, many men expressed dissatisfaction with the hookup culture:

In all of my research and visits to campuses in the past several years, I have found that men are the most talented actors of all within the hookup culture. They have been taught to appear sex-crazed and reckless, even if what they feel is something else.

Since the hookup culture hurts both men and women, how can concerned students, pastors, faculty, and parents help students opt out of it? Freitas offers three suggestions, all of which involve reinterpreting traditional mores or structures.

First, she addresses virginity: More students are virgins than their peers think. Virginity makes students in the hookup culture feel “humiliated, alone, and unwanted,” she argues. Yet, because most equate virginity with not having had vaginal intercourse, virginity can be a marker that allows students to be part of the hookup culture while not going farther than they choose.

Whereas some progressives discourage virginity altogether, Freitas argues that students should be encouraged to define it as they see fit. For some, virginity can serve as “one of the only boundaries left within the hookup culture . . . And whatever helps students expand their sense of rights around sex in the middle of the hookup culture is valuable indeed.”

Second, Freitas argues that we should bring back dating, a practice in dramatic decline. It used to be that couples met, dated, got more serious, and then became sexually active. Students today are much more likely to hookup and then, maybe, get to know each other, but many speak privately of a desire for old-fashioned romance. Freshman orientation teaches students how to use a condom, but no one offers tips on who pays for dinner.

Eight years ago at Boston College, Kerry Cronin, associate director of the Lonergan Institute, decided to tackle this problem head-on. She gave the students in her one-credit capstone seminar a simple assignment: Ask someone out on a date—no booze, no physicality, no gossip afterward, and you pay. Only one of her eleven students had the courage to complete it. Now that the assignment is mandatory, the class is a legend on campus, and students routinely take it so that they will be forced to try dating at least once.

Third, what about abstinence? Freitas argues that promoting chastity before marriage is not an effective response to the hookup culture: “It is an extreme to the point that students cannot imagine living it, nor do they wish to.”

Paradoxically, though, she admits that “there is a growing, vocal minority of sexually conservative college students at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities who are standing up for exactly this—saving sex for marriage.” She offers Princeton’s Anscombe Society and its offshoots through the Love and Fidelity Network as primary examples of this increasingly popular phenomenon.

On the one hand, Freitas recognizes that the Anscombers do exactly what she is looking for: “These groups represent the only organized, visible effort to directly and explicitly address student unease about hookup culture on college campuses so far. It is student-generated responses that have the greatest potential to help ease the strains that young people feel within hookup culture.”

On the other hand, she is troubled by their “right-wing veneer of heterosexist, antigay leanings.” It’s logical that such anti-hookup groups would be anti-liberal, she continues, and it’s a pity that the university didn’t help them do some “serious rethinking” to broaden their scope and definition of abstinence “beyond right-wing religious politics.”

Instead, she argues, we should reclaim abstinence from “a single, politically interested, religious group” and teach students that abstaining from sex could be a healthy temporary decision for them. Pressing pause on your sex life “could become one of the most subversive, profoundly effective tools” students have. “It is abstinence within reason. It is abstinence that makes sense, given the sexual activity that young adults already engage in.”

But, one might ask, what are the reasons? According to what criteria does such abstinence make sense? Freitas admits that the Anscombe Society gives reasons for its views on its website, but she doesn’t reproduce them or bother to engage them. She calls for them to rethink those views, but makes no sustained argument about why they are wrong and what they should espouse. Instead, she labels them right-wing, then condescendingly dismisses them.

Elizabeth Anscombe, however, was a serious philosopher. Like her, the society that bears her name makes arguments—serious, thoughtful, and rationally accessible arguments that demand an engagement Freitas never attempts to provide.

Perhaps that’s because Freitas doesn’t argue from a set of clearly proposed truths, but from an unelaborated mixture of contradictory assumptions. To start, her whole book is premised on the argument that sex is “a big deal” and that the hookup culture is harmful because it makes many students have bad sex. Moreover, she thinks that when hooking up is the only form of sexual intimacy, “students learn to treat others as objects existing for the sole purpose of providing them a certain good, to be disposed of or put aside once they are done.” This instrumentalization, she continues, will spill over into other aspects of their lives.

But given these arguments, the instrumentalization doesn’t come from the fact that hookups are the primary kind of sexual interaction. It comes from the fact that hooking up, as Freitas has defined it, inherently instrumentalizes another person. Further, to argue that instrumentalizing other human beings is bad implies that there are objective standards of right and wrong by which we can judge how we treat people—including how we treat them sexually.

Unfortunately, Freitas’s underlying principles contradict this line of argument. She claims that her ultimate goal is “to help make available a set of diverse structures through which students can make the best, most informed choices they can about their bodies and their lives.” But that “best” has no deeper foundation than how people feel. What about those who instrumentalize others in sex and feel good about it?

In short, Freitas wants to encourage students to think about the meaning of sex. But that meaning will vary from person to person such that sex has no real meaning at all. She wants students to have good sex, but this goodness is based only on changing sentiment. And therefore, her primary criterion for whether something can help counter the hookup culture is whether it will work, not whether it is true.

In other words, Freitas fails to offer a robust alternative to the hookup culture. She founds her solutions on the same relativism, emotivism, and pragmatism behind the problem she seeks to combat.

This is not to say that Freitas is all wrong. She offers a clear account of the dynamics of the hookup culture, and her solutions are in many ways helpful. We should teach today’s young adults how to date and cultivate intimate friendships. We should encourage students to pause their sex lives and ask what the truth about sex is, but we should argue that there is real truth to find.

We should also explore the moral and historical underpinnings of romantic ideals that many still hold. For example, Notre Dame’s David O’Connor offers the popular course “Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love,” which is also available for free on iTunes. Kerry Cronin has her dating assignment. And professors, parents, and pastors alike can ask questions and have an ear to listen. As Cronin says, “You are only about three or four questions away from finding your students’ pain, and most likely only one good question.” The best way to combat the hookup culture is to help students seek not just what feels good, but what is good. Therein lies the path to sexual and, more broadly, human flourishing.

Nathaniel Peters is a doctoral student in theology at Boston College.

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Total brain death—the complete and irreversible cessation of functioning of all parts of the brain—has been widely accepted in ethics and law as a valid criterion for pronouncing the death of a human being. But in the last fifteen years, some philosophers and neurologists have advanced arguments that challenge this criterion. D. Alan Shewmon, a neurologist from UCLA, has advanced the strongest case so far. In our judgment, Shewmon has shown the unsoundness of the usual argument for the total brain death criterion, but we think—on different grounds than the standard rationale—that the criterion is a valid one for death.

The usual argument for the total brain death criterion has been that, once a human individual’s brain has developed, it is the primary integrator of all the body’s tissues and organs into a single organism. It seems to follow that, when all parts of the brain irreversibly cease to function, what remains is no longer a single organism, but an aggregate of tissues and organs.

However, Shewmon presents what appear to be counter-examples that disprove this criterion. Shewmon’s evidence seems to show that some individuals have survived total brain death. In such cases, there are many functions that seem to belong to the individual as a whole. Among these are: homeostasis of a variety of mutually interacting chemicals and physiological parameters, detoxification and recycling of cellular wastes throughout the body, maintenance of body temperature (albeit at a lower than normal level), wound healing, and, of course, respiration and nutrition (though assisted). Shewmon describes an individual called “TK” who continued to manifest all those functions for more than twenty years, even as total brain death was confirmed by repeated clinical tests.

Shewmon argues that, contrary to what has been widely assumed, the brain is not the integrator of the various systems of the body. The unity of the human organism, Shewmon argues, is an emergent property arising from the interaction among the parts of an organism. So, Shewmon argues, the total loss of functioning of the human being’s brain need not result in the loss of integration of the human organism and thus death.

Those who suppose that brain functioning is required for the integrated functioning of the organism as a whole usually have assumed that nothing more than an aggregate of disintegrating organs and tissues survives an individual’s total brain death. We think that Shewmon has disproved that assumption by showing that TK and similar individuals are living individuals. However, it does not follow that the living individual after total brain death is the same individual who suffered brain death. Nor does it follow that the living individual after brain death is a whole human organism—that is, a rational animal. We hold that in the case of TK and others like it, what is alive after total brain death is neither the individual whose brain died nor a whole member of the human species.

Suppose a human being, John, is decapitated and that both the head and the decapitated body are kept alive (fatal bleeding is prevented, a heart-lung machine is provided for the head, ventilator support for the decapitated body, and so forth). Some have thought it obvious that the headless body would not be a human being, and that brain death is analogous to such decapitation (since in both cases the brain cannot integrate the body), and so, like the decapitated body, the brain-dead body is dead. But Shewmon correctly points out that it is only obvious that the head and the headless body could not both be identical to the human being who was decapitated. It is not obvious that the headless body would not be a human organism.

However, suppose that eventually it becomes possible to salvage everything from the waist down of youthful accident victims and to sustain that living unit for weeks pending transplantation to a suitable recipient. Suppose, too, that pending transplantation, such units manifest some internal organization—some organic unity arising from the interaction of their parts. The waist-down unit would be human in the sense that all of its cells would have the human genome, and they would constitute human tissues. But, clearly, it would not be a whole human organism; it would not be a rational animal. In fact, it would not even be an animal—that is, a sentient organism.

By contrast, if someone in an accident survived despite eventually losing everything below the heart and lungs, that individual would remain a rational animal and a human person, even though severely disabled. But the decapitated body and the totally brain-dead individual are similar to the waist-down unit rather than to the individual who has lost everything below the heart and lungs, because the headless body and the brain-dead individual are no longer sentient organisms. Neither of them is an animal, and so neither can be a human being.

The living individual after brain death (for example, the totally brain-dead TK described by Shewmon) is similar to a sustained torso and thus is not a human being. Since a human being is a rational animal, anything that entirely lacks the capacity for rational functioning is not a human being. Since rational functioning presupposes sentient functioning, anything that entirely lacks the capacity for sentient functioning also lacks the capacity for rational functioning and so is not a human being. Since the human being is a mammal, a brain, or the capacity to develop a brain, is necessary for its capacity for sentient functioning. (We refer to mammals because some animals are sentient without a brain, but the brain plainly is necessary for mammals’ sentience.) Therefore, any entity that entirely lacks a brain and the capacity to develop a brain is not a human being. That brief argument may be clarified by the following considerations.

In daily life we recognize beings of distinct types, centers of specific types of actions and reactions, and we treat each type of being according to its nature. Thus, we deal with a lion and a lamb differently, because they have distinct tendencies to act and distinct ways of reacting—different natures. An individual with a particular nature is a stable entity with an inherent tendency, or unified set of tendencies, to act and react in certain ways.

Bodily living things (organisms) have capacities—tendencies to grow, nourish themselves, adapt to environmental conditions, maintain inner balance, and reproduce. A living thing can possess a capacity and yet be impeded, by external or internal factors, from exercising it. For instance, even a mammal with good eyesight cannot see in pitch darkness (an external blockage), and an anesthetized patient cannot feel pain (an internal blockage).

Moreover, a living being has a radical capacity for a function if it has within itself a material constitution that disposes it, given a suitable environment, to develop sufficiently to perform that function. Cuttings from many species of plants, although without an immediately exercisable capacity to reproduce, have the internal resources to develop themselves to the stage at which they will have all the exercisable capacities of a complete plant of their species, including the capacity to reproduce. Thus, natural kinds are defined not only by their first-order capacities, but also by their second-order capacities—radical capacities to develop first-order ones.

A human being is a rational animal. An animal is a sentient organism. In human beings and other mammals, sentience includes such functions as seeing, hearing, feeling pain and pressure, perceiving, desiring, fearing, being angry, and so forth. Embryonic mammals do not actually perform such actions but they have within themselves the resources to develop themselves so that they do have the capacity, and so are sentient organisms.

The rationality that differentiates human beings from other animals includes such functions as conceptual thought, reasoning, and making deliberate choices. An organism that has the capacity for these types of actions is a human individual.

Human embryos and fetuses are human organisms because they too have the internal resources to develop themselves to the stage where they will be able to perform the actions characteristic of the human kind (for support of this point, see Chapter 4 of Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics by Patrick Lee and Robert P. George). By contrast, even when the cells in teratomas or complete hydatidiform moles have the human genome, such disorganized growths are not human beings since they lack both first- and second-order capacities for specifically human functions.

Conceptual thought, reasoning, and deliberate choices are not directly observable. So, human individuals can perform such actions without providing evidence that they are doing so. However, to be a rational animal, an organism must be an animal; and to be an organism of that kind, it must have either the capacity for sentience, or the capacity to develop the capacity for sentience. Moreover, because the conceptual thought, reasoning, and deliberate choices of rational animals bear upon experienced things, those rational functions presuppose sensory functioning. Therefore, if an organism lacks the capacities for sentient functioning and the capacity to develop those capacities, it cannot be an animal (a sentient organism); and if an organism entirely lacks capacities for sentient functioning and is not an animal, it cannot engage in conceptual thought, reasoning, or deliberate choices, and is not a rational animal.

There also is common agreement that no mammal can sense without brain functioning—a mammal’s sentience requires either a brain capable of functioning or the capacity to develop a brain. But a totally brain-dead individual neither has a brain capable of functioning nor the capacity to develop a brain. It follows that any mammalian individual that undergoes brain death is no longer a sentient being, and thus not an animal. An individual such as TK, therefore, that has undergone total brain death, is not an animal and so not a rational animal, a human being.

One might object that a totally brain-dead organism might have a radical or second-order capacity for brain functioning inasmuch as it still has the genetic-epigenetic constitution that oriented it toward the development of a functioning brain. However, the appropriate genetic-epigenetic constitution within the cells of a multicellular organism is not a sufficient condition for a second-order capacity for brain functioning. The developing cells also must be of certain types or structures, and those cells must be arranged in a certain way if the organism is to develop a functioning brain. So, while a human embryo has a second-order capacity for brain functioning, a totally brain-dead organism has no such capacity.

It might also be objected that the argument for the total brain death criterion implies that all of those who are in permanent comas, or even many in persistent vegetative states, are dead, and that is false, since such people are still warm and pink, and may be breathing on their own. However, our position that the irreversible loss of specifically human capacities is the human being’s passing away does not entail that everyone who is unconscious and will never regain consciousness is already dead. Many unconscious people who will never regain consciousness would regain it if they were given appropriate care. Our position only entails that the loss of the capacity for consciousness is death.

We think it is beyond reasonable doubt that brain-dead entities entirely lack the capacity for the sentient functioning that is presupposed by human consciousness; but it is not beyond reasonable doubt that individuals who are warm and pink and breathing but not totally brain-dead lack that capacity. Reasonable doubts follow from several considerations.

To start, patients confidently judged to be unconscious after careful and repeated examinations sometimes later recall undergoing those examinations. The immediately exercisable capacity to respond to stimuli is one thing; consciousness is another. Then too, patients confidently judged to be permanently comatose or in a permanently vegetative state sometimes recover, and attempts to treat such patients have recently met with some success. Pathological unconsciousness is one thing; the loss of the capacity for consciousness is another. Thus, the fact that a patient has lost the capacity for consciousness is extremely difficult to establish beyond reasonable doubt.

Some argue that the capacity for consciousness can be lost without total brain death, and conclude that it is too stringent a criterion for death. But such arguments depend on identifying parts of the brain required for sentient functioning, and several recent studies have made it clear that such identifications are problematic. Moreover, this essay has been concerned exclusively with the adequacy of total brain death as a conceptual criterion for the death of a human individual. We have not addressed the adequacy of current clinical tests to establish beyond reasonable doubt that total brain death has occurred. But when it has occurred, a human organism has died.

Patrick Lee is the John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Germain Grisez is Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary’s University. This article is adapted from their journal article "Total Brain Death: A Reply to Alan Shewmon,” Bioethics 26 (2012): 275-284.

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In November 2008, after a contentious political battle, the voters of California approved an amendment to their state constitution restoring their historic definition of marriage. “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognized in California,” read Proposition 8, California’s Marriage Protection Act.

A populist response to a California supreme court decision redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships, Prop 8 merely codified (like similar statutes adopted by nearly thirty states) what had always been the case in custom and practice in California—marriage is between a man and a woman.

The one-sentence amendment was meant simply to protect the definition of marriage from social (and judicial) revisionists. It was challenged in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, where plaintiffs Kristen Perry and Sandra Stier claimed they were denied a marriage license based on their sex and sexual orientation.

US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker agreed: “Perry is prohibited from marrying Stier, a woman, because Perry is a woman. If Perry were a man, Proposition 8 would not prohibit the marriage. Thus, Proposition 8 operates to restrict Perry's choice of marital partner because of her sex.”

Walker upended Prop 8 in August 2010, claiming that it “singl[es] out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license,” thus preventing the state “from fulfilling its obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis.” He reasoned:

The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples . . . Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification, Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

At the heart of Perry, and the issue now before the Supreme Court, is whether or not marriage is discriminatory. Does Prop 8 unfairly discriminate against gays and lesbians, as Walker claimed, by denying them marriage licenses?

First, it’s worth asking what it means to discriminate. Is it always wrong to discriminate?

We have to admit that discrimination is part of daily life. Most of our decisions involve discriminating choices—from the food we eat, to the shops we patronize, to the movies we watch. A loving mother who forbids her children from watching certain television shows discriminates against those shows. A concerned father who refuses to let his daughter date certain shiftless young men discriminates against those men. Discrimination is a daily exercise that can serve us well if practiced well. In an Aristotelian sense, it is a virtue, the sharpening of which assists human flourishing.

So, when is discrimination wrong? Generally, when it is applied to persons who are unfairly treated as persons. Slavery, that great sin of our young republic, was morally wrong because it treated a class of persons as less than persons.

Race, nationality, and skin color are properties irrelevant to one’s personhood. There is nothing in skin tone that could restrict one from the rights and equality enjoyed by all citizens. That is why the Supreme Court struck down the “miscegenation” laws against interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia.

According to Black's Law Dictionary, unfair or invidious discrimination is the arbitrary granting of certain privileges to a particular class of persons within a larger group where “no reasonable distinctions” can be found between those favored and those unfavored. In other words, it means treating equals unequally.

There are at least two reasons to think that Prop 8 does not discriminate wrongly—that it does not treat equals unequally.

First, it does not target the sexual activity of gays and lesbians, nor does it purport to harm them. Prop 8, like other marriage amendments, is neutral on the question of whether the parties requesting a marriage license are heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual. A homosexual male may marry a heterosexual female. A lesbian may marry a straight male. The amendment only stipulates that the parties be of opposite sex.

As the Family Research Council noted in an amicus curiae brief to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,

The fundamental flaw with the district court’s holding that Proposition 8 discriminates on the basis of sex is that “the marriage laws are facially neutral; they do not single out men or women as a class for disparate treatment, but rather prohibit men and women equally from marrying a person of the same sex.” . . . “[T]here is no discrete class subject to differential treatment solely on the basis of sex; each sex is equally prohibited from precisely the same conduct.” . . . Other courts have also rejected the claim that “defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman discriminates on the basis of sex.”

The “other courts” referred to above are many; the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy lists at least ten such federal and state high court decisions.

Second, to make a point that has perhaps been overlooked, same-sex marriage advocates (including Walker) presume that same-sex couplings are substantively equal to marital unions; they conflate discrimination against particular partnerships with discrimination against persons.

This is the fallacy of composition: One claims that what is true of the parts is also true of the whole. A basketball team may have five outstanding individual players, each capable of double-digit goals. But it would be a mistake to think this guarantees the team will have a winning season, unless they are coached well, learn to defend well, and work together as a fluid unit. In other words, the team is greater than the sum of its players.

Likewise, a marriage is greater than the sum of its two members. A same-sex coupling of two individuals cannot achieve the comprehensive union that makes a marriage—a union of hearts, minds, and bodies that is oriented toward sharing of family life—and is therefore something vastly different from, and hardly the equivalent of, a marital union. Thus, it’s false to say that Prop 8 codified unfair discrimination if marriage, by definition, cannot include same-sex relationships.

An individual who wishes to become a member of a club, society, or institution must meet the necessary conditions for entry. Boy Scouts are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, cheerful, and friendly, exhibiting these virtues to all persons equally and indiscriminately. Nevertheless, girls cannot join their institution because they are not boys. Of course neither can boys join the Girl Scouts.

The point is that while discrimination against gays and lesbians as persons is inappropriate, discrimination against same-sex couplings may be entirely appropriate if the coupling does not meet the necessary conditions of marriage. If reasonable distinctions are found between a same-sex coupling and a marital union, such that the coupling does not qualify to enter matrimony, then Prop 8 does not discriminate unfairly.

Of course, to make a coherent case that Prop 8 does not discriminate wrongly requires us to consider further the definition of marriage. Walker regards marriage as something malleable—something that has evolved over time such that “gender is no longer relevant” and “no longer forms an essential part of marriage.”

But if that’s true, then, as Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George have argued persuasively, we may rightly ask just what remains relevant in marriage if gender is no longer relevant. In this view marriage is a social convention; there is nothing intrinsically valuable in it beyond its construction by human beings at any point in history.

By contrast, in the historical view of marriage, it is a pre-political institution, an intrinsically valuable, basic human good rooted in human nature, not human will. As the Minnesota Supreme Court said in Baker v. Nelson, “[t]he institution of marriage as a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of Genesis.”

Indeed, Aristotle noted that the very foundation of the polis is the coming together of man and woman to create a family—the first fruits of society. Conversely, he was highly critical of homosexual conduct, believing it to be harmful to individuals and to the public good.

Among the late classical pagan writers, Plutarch perhaps expresses best the intrinsic goodness of marriage. In the Solon, he notes the public good of marriage and has high praise for laws that encourage love, honor, equality, and chastity between the spouses. And in his Erotikos (Dialogue on Love), he elevates the qualities of marital love: the heterosexual reciprocity, the equal status of the spouses, and the unitary aspects of the marital union.

It should not be lost that the ancients in no way regarded marriage as a social convention. They recognized marriage as the cornerstone of civilization. Greg Koukl states it well: “The truth is, it is not culture that constructs marriages or the families that marriages begin. Rather, it is the other way around: Marriage and family construct culture. As the building blocks of civilization, families are logically prior to society as the parts are to the whole.”

What is prior to society, then, cannot be changed, reinvented, or redefined by society. Walker may view same-sex unions as a social construct, but his view of marriage as a social convention is at odds with history.

Girgis, Anderson, and George have thoughtfully and thoroughly defended a sexual complementarity view of marriage; that is, the bodily joining of husband and wife, sealed in consummation and oriented toward children. They argue that marriage includes bodily, emotional, volitional, and intellectual shareholding unique to the institution.

Whether or not a marriage produces children, the inherent goodness of marriage remains whenever husband and wife become “one flesh,” coordinated toward the one biological ability they possess only incompletely without the opposite sex: reproduction. While gays and lesbians can form loving, monogamous, and emotionally supportive relationships, what they cannot achieve is sexual complementarity and its procreative potential.

As Girgis, Anderson, and George also point out, if gender is no longer relevant to marriage, by what normative principle can we exclude polygamous or polyamorous relationships? Suppose Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier were joined by Jane Smith? Could not three lesbians in a union be just as loving and committed to one another as a couple? By what principle can Perry exclude a threesome (or more) from obtaining a marriage license? At what point does the definition of “marriage” become so malleable that it becomes irrelevant altogether?

Whatever same-sex partnerships are, they cannot be called marriages because they do not meet the necessary conditions. They do not naturally form families, nor have they built civilizations or stabilized societies. A same-sex coupling is a social construction that shares little with the essence of marriage, and is therefore categorically distinct from a marital union. Where reasonable distinctions apply the charge of discrimination is unfounded.

The Supreme Court should recognize that Prop 8 does not discriminate against gays and lesbians, or any individual for that matter. It is facially neutral concerning sex and sexual orientation. Where it does discriminate, and properly so, is in preventing same-sex couples from obtaining marriage licenses, not because they are gays or lesbians, but because they cannot, as a couple, enter the institution of marriage as that term has always been defined.

John Crandall, a supervisor for the US Postal Service, is currently pursuing a graduate degree at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

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In the March issue of First Things, theologian David Bentley Hart was highly critical of natural law theory. The piece got a lot of attention, some positive, some negative. R. J. Snell responded critically here at Public Discourse. I was another of Hart’s critics, and replied to him in an online article for First Things. In the latest issue of First Things, Hart has responded to my criticisms—quite aggressively, though not, it seems to me, effectively.

Before I respond to Hart’s mistakes, let me first clarify several things.

First, natural law theorists make a very limited, but very important claim—that there is common ground among all human beings, and particularly between religious believers and non-believers, on which moral disagreements can be rationally adjudicated. For there are, the natural law theorist claims, objective moral conclusions that can be derived via purely philosophical arguments from premises that in no way presuppose any special divine revelation, religious tradition, or scriptural or ecclesiastical authority.

Second, natural law theorists nevertheless in no way deny that their arguments are controversial, especially in a society that is religiously and philosophically pluralistic. Nor do they deny that religious, aesthetic, and cultural sensibilities shape most people’s moral thinking and practice more than philosophical arguments do.

Third, natural law theorists don’t deny that some moral truths might only be knowable through revelation; nor do they deny that grace may be needed for some to grasp moral truths; nor do they deny that revelation, religious tradition, and ecclesiastical teaching may be necessary to correct some people’s erroneous moral thinking.

That said, allow me to turn to Hart. In my first piece, I claimed that Hart was guilty of several fallacies. His new article repeats some of the same (though he pleads innocent). Worse, where Hart’s arguments are non-fallacious, they are also nonexistent. The article is full of unsupported assertions, put forward in prose so purple that its imperial gravitas is evidently supposed to stand in place of argument.

But assertions without arguments to back them up are like spitballs: Anyone can make them; anyone can fling them; and while they can annoy their target, they draw no blood whatsoever.

Whose Natural Law? Which Revelation?

Perhaps the most glaring of Hart’s fallacies is equivocation. As I noted in my initial reply to Hart, two crucially different approaches today bear the “natural law” label. There is, first, the traditional or “old” natural law theory, which grounds ethics in an Aristotelian metaphysics of formal and final causes and rejects David Hume’s fact/value dichotomy (where one supposedly can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”).

And there is, second, the “new” natural law theory, which doesn’t appeal to a specifically Aristotelian metaphysics and accepts the modern Humean dichotomy. To which approach does Hart object? The old? The new? Both?

In his original piece, Hart referred to “a long, rich, varied, and subtle tradition of natural law theory.” It would seem then that he targeted all natural law theorists.

But then he claimed as his specific targets those natural law theorists who have “attempted in recent years . . . particularly in America, to import this tradition into public policy debates, but in a way amenable to modern political culture” and in “the context of the modern conceptual world.” Naturally, then, we might suspect that he has in mind “new natural law” scholars such as Robert P. George and John Finnis, who have recently been the most visible proponents of natural law in America, and who have accepted aspects of modern philosophy that “old” natural law theorists do not.

Yet Hart also focused his criticisms on those natural law theorists who emphasize that “nature is governed by final causes,” and whose position is at odds with Hume’s fact/value dichotomy—a characterization of natural law theory that fits the “old” approach but not the “new” one. So who exactly was Hart targeting? He assured us that “names are not important,” but for the reasons I gave in my original response, names are in fact crucial, because Hart’s objections seem to have force only if one ignores the differences between the “old” and the “new” approaches to natural law.

Unfortunately, Hart fails to clarify things in his latest piece. Since he says his earlier piece was directed at “a modern form of natural law theory,” it seems he is critiquing the “new” natural lawyers. But he also tries again to critique those accounts of natural law that “require a picture of nature as governed by final causality”—clearly a description of “old” natural law theory. In short, rather than disambiguate his position, he simply reiterates the ambiguity.

Here’s another fatal equivocation Hart makes. As I have said, natural law theorists (whether “old” or “new”) hold that some moral truths can be known via philosophical arguments, apart from special divine revelation.

By “special divine revelation,” I mean truths revealed by God through supernatural means, such as a prophet whose authority is backed by miracles. This is often contrasted with “general revelation,” which is what we can know about God and his will by inference from the natural order, including philosophical arguments for God’s existence.

Since natural law theorists typically hold that God’s existence can be known through such arguments, they also uphold general revelation. Many of them would hold that this “natural theology” must be a part of any complete account of natural law.

Yet this doesn’t contradict their view that much of morality can have a purely philosophical foundation, for two reasons.

First, since morality is grounded in human nature, we can draw a number of moral conclusions from human nature itself without citing God as the ultimate source of human nature—just as we can do chemistry without having to make reference to the fact that God, as cause of the world, is the ultimate source of all chemical phenomena.

Second, even where natural law references God, it references specifically what can be known about God via philosophical arguments, not special revelation. It references what is “supernatural” in the sense of that which exists beyond the natural order as its divine cause, but not in the sense of a miraculous interruption of the ordinary, natural course of things.

This brings us back to Hart, who, against natural law theory, objects that “natural reason [is] merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason’s ascent into the light of God,” and that “to encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes.”

If what he means is that God is the source of reason and of all natural causes—on which natural law theory, like everything else, depends—then like most natural law theorists I am happy to agree with him. But then we never denied that in the first place. What we denied was that natural law theory needs to appeal to any special revelation, not that it (like everything else) presupposes some truths of general revelation. Hart’s objection has force only insofar as it equivocates on the words “revelation” and “supernatural.”

“All that he had written seemed like straw”

Hart also objects that “most traditional accounts of natural law require a picture of nature as governed by final causality,” yet “in our age . . . final causality is a concept confined within an ever more beleaguered and porous intellectual redoubt.” It is hard to see what the argument here is supposed to be unless it is directed at a straw man.

For one thing, the “new” natural law theory, as I have said, does not appeal to a metaphysics of final causality in the first place.

For another, while the “old” natural law theory does rest on a metaphysics of final causes, its defenders do not assume that they can safely take for granted that such causes are real. On the contrary, they are well aware that the notion of final causality is extremely controversial and that they have to do a lot of heavy philosophical lifting in order to defend it. (That is one reason why, in my books The Last Superstition and Aquinas, the reader has to plow through many pages on general metaphysics before he gets to any natural law arguments.)

Again, when the natural law theorist says that much of ethics can be grounded in purely philosophical arguments, he does not mean “non-controversial arguments” or “arguments with widely accepted premises.” So why emphasize that final causality is controversial? Who, exactly, are the natural law theorists who deny that?

Hart also tries to make hay out of the suggestion that nature, being red in tooth and claw, the arena of mass extinctions, diseases, and the like, is for most modern people an implausible standard of goodness. But this too is directed at a straw man, for no natural law theorist claims that nature is a standard of goodness in the sense that this objection requires if it is to have any force.

Natural law theory does not presuppose that the natural world is all good cheer and gumdrops. It takes nature as the standard of goodness in a much more modest and unexciting way, though for that reason in a way that is also much harder to deny.

Consider that what is good for a tree (say), what a tree requires in order to flourish, is determined by what it is to be a tree—that is to say, by its nature. A tree needs to be able to sink roots deep into the soil so that it can absorb nutrients and hold itself erect; it needs to be able to grow healthy leaves and carry out photosynthesis; it needs to be free of termites, and so forth. To the extent that a tree realizes these ends it realizes what is good for it; to the extent that it fails to do so, it fails to realize the good.

Likewise, what is good for a squirrel is determined by its nature, by what it is to be a squirrel. A squirrel needs to be able to gather nuts, to evade predators, to have room to scamper about, and so forth. To the extent that a squirrel either realizes or fails to realize these ends, it achieves or fails to achieve what is good for it.

That any number of trees and squirrels might be wiped out by forest fires, diseases, and mass extinctions doesn’t change this at all—it doesn’t for a moment call into question that what is good for trees and squirrels is in the relevant sense determined by their natures. Even “deracinated moderns” (as Hart calls them) can see that much.

But it is in just that sense that what is good for us is determined by our nature—by what is conducive to realizing the ends that define human flourishing. We need, for example, to realize not only our basic bodily needs, but also those ends distinctive of rational animals—social interaction, knowledge, cultural expression, religious devotion, and so forth. The details are bound to be controversial, since as rational animals we are capable of rationalizing all sorts of behaviors that are pleasurable or otherwise tempting, but are nevertheless contrary to what is good for us given our nature. But the basic idea is neither mysterious nor, when properly understood, nearly as contrary to what the average modern person thinks as Hart supposes.

Let’s Not Argue

As I’ve said, Hart’s article is populated by non-arguments as well as fallacious arguments. Consider this passage:

Consistent natural law cases can be made for or against slavery, for example, or for or against capital punishment, depending on which values one has privileged at a level too elementary for philosophy to adjudicate.

To see what is wrong with this, compare the following parallel claim that one of Hart’s atheistic critics might raise against his own discipline:

Consistent [theological] cases can be made for or against slavery, for example, or for or against capital punishment, depending on which values one has privileged at a level too elementary for [theology] to adjudicate.

Would this claim be a devastating objection against theology as a discipline? I certainly don’t think so, and neither would Hart. For it is, quite obviously, entirely tendentious and indeed question-begging: Any serious defender of theology would hold that competing theological positions vis-à-vis slavery and capital punishment are either not equally consistent, or can be adjudicated at some deeper level of analysis. Certainly any critic of theology has to show that this is not the case, not merely assert that it is not the case.

But the same thing holds for anyone who would raise this criticism against natural law theory. For natural law theorists would, of course, deny that their disagreements are not amenable to philosophical adjudication. They have, after all, given arguments for their positions on capital punishment, slavery, and every other moral issue they address.

Those arguments are part and parcel of the purportedly naïve rationalism for which Hart chides them. So where, exactly, do their competing positions on these various issues reach a rational impasse?

Calling the kettle black, Hart writes: “At some crucial point, natural law argument, pressed to disclose its principles, dissolves into sheer assertion.”

But precisely who, exactly, is reduced to sheer assertion? Thomas Aquinas? Francisco Suarez? Ralph McInerny? John Finnis? Russell Hittinger? Robert P. George?

Pray tell us, Professor Hart, specifically which natural law theorists have been doing this, and where, specifically, the chain of one of their inferences reduces to sheer assertion. Pick just one of these writers, or any other well-known natural law writer you care to—any one of them, and we can go from there. “Names are not important,” Hart assures us. But they are important if one is going to back up assertions with evidence.

Worried, it seems, that his preceding claims haven’t been sufficiently sweeping or overstated, Hart decides near the end of his piece to throw caution into the wood chipper:

Feser asserts that “purely philosophical arguments” can establish “objectively true moral conclusions.” And yet, curiously enough, they never, ever have. That is a bedtime story told to conjure away the night’s goblins, like the Leibnizian fable of the best possible world or the philosophe’s fairy tale about the plain dictates of reason.

Really? Philosophical arguments have “never, ever” established objectively true moral conclusions? Every single philosophical argument anyone has ever given for any moral conclusion, even the least controversial, fails? And fails so manifestly that Hart can safely assume that his claim will elicit a shamefaced concession from his opponents?

Take just some of the many moral principles that are universally, or nearly universally, affirmed: It is bad to cause pain to a newborn for no reason whatsoever; it is good to provide for one’s children; it is bad to punish people who have done nothing wrong; it is good to hold people blameworthy when they have done something wrong; and so forth. Is Hart really suggesting that there is not a single good philosophical argument even for any of these innocuous claims? And (again) that this is so obvious that any reasonable reader will simply nod in agreement?

Since such chutzpah seems unlikely even coming from Hart, let’s interpret him charitably and assume that what he really means is that no philosophical argument has ever convinced everyone. If so, then he is probably right.

But so what? There are few arguments in any field that have convinced everyone. You certainly won’t find theological arguments that have convinced everyone, and there is disagreement even in science. But that an argument does not convince everyone does not entail that it is not a good argument—otherwise I could refute Hart, or anyone else I disagree with, merely by disagreeing with him.

In any event, as I have said, the natural law theorist is not claiming that his arguments are non-controversial, only that they are good arguments and that they do not presuppose special divine revelation.

But then, if Hart has so little faith in the power of rational arguments, it is hardly surprising when he fails to present them, or lapses into fallacy when he tries.

Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College. His webpage can be found here and his blog here.

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I see a boy.

Luke is ten years old. He sports a cowlick across his forehead, and a bright smile.

Despite the birth of a child a thousand miles away with vestigial organs of the opposite sex, and despite genetic anomalies that blunt the edge of masculinity or femininity here or there, everyone is certain he is a boy. It took the doctor in the delivery room but a moment to declare, “It’s a boy!”

Luke is outdoors a lot, running after baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He has what Marilynne Robinson happily calls “skinny boy strength.” You can see it in the muscles of his chest. His voice is pitched high, but not really—as if a flute were played an octave low.

People who pretend not to know what a boy is will scoff, but he runs like a boy, he makes boyish jokes, he shoots toy guns like a boy, he horses around the yard with a boy’s abandon, and if he helps his mother bake cookies, he does that like a boy, too. It helps that he has a father, who was a boy once, and who still has a lot of the boy in him, as most fathers do.

Consider that boy, Luke.

Look at him through the eyes of his father: that is to say, with philosophical love.

He has the boy’s body that shadows forth the body of a man. He will have sturdy shoulders, and the swelling in his throat suggests the timbre of the man’s voice. He is going to be taller than the average woman.

Fallen creature that he is, Luke stretches to the limit of what his parents allow, but already he is taking into his heart the Rules his mother represents, Rules that make for decent life among other people from day to day, and the Law his father represents, moral truths that can no more change than can the polestar fall from the sky.

He is a boy: vir futurus, a going-to-be man. Meaning: He will join other men, brothers fighting to attain or defend the common good. Greater meaning: He is made for a self-giving that is categorically impossible among his male friends. He is made for a woman. It is the orientation of his body, in its sexual form. It is the orientation of his masculine being, developing in a natural and healthy way.

None of this should be controversial, no more than claiming that the noonday sky is blue. Should someone protest, “It isn’t so! I saw it green once, when a tornado was coming,” we’d look askance, and wonder whether he had lost the capacity for normal communication. A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man. A man marries a woman, for love and for a family: That goal is stamped upon his body. Even savages without a doctorate in philosophy can figure it out.

Consider Luke, the boy, through the eyes of his father. What does he see?

He sees the vir futurus. He also sees himself, and his own father, and his grandfathers. I’m not just talking about physical resemblance. They share the same sex: They share the same mode of relating to the future of their kind. They are not the bearers of children, but the begetters. They are not the field, but the sowers. They cannot know the body-from-body bond their wives know when they bear children. Theirs is an approach from outside; and they enjoy the strengths and suffer the shortcomings of the far-sightedness that that approach implies.

Every normal and healthy and responsible father wants this for his son. It’s not like wanting the boy to go to Princeton. Such things may happen or not, and are extrinsic to the boy’s nature. It’s rather like wanting that the boy should not suffer scurvy or rickets. The father wants Luke’s bones to grow straight. He wants his soul to grow straight, too.

So does his mother. She’s suspicious of women who like to keep their boys in diapers, as it were. So she nudges Luke toward her husband. She buys them the same kinds of clothes. She admires Luke’s skill in hitting a ball, or painting, or building a tepee—whatever he sets his heart upon.

She becomes to him the best of girls, even when he doesn’t know he likes girls yet. She never ceases to be his mother and to command his respect, but she will also claim his duty as her protector. If the groceries are heavy, she asks him to handle them, knowing that eventually he will overmatch her in strength. When that day comes she’ll boast about it to her friends.

Her love for him is necessarily a love for his nature as a boy. One cannot say, “I love my terrier Whitey, but I wish he wouldn’t wag his tail.” She wants him to grow up to be a man whom a good woman would marry. She cannot encourage that by personal example. She encourages it rather by showing the love of a woman for her husband, regardless of the sparks that attend every union of the sexes. And she encourages it by expectation. She calls him to manhood by letting him practice being the man: as a mother teaches her son to “lead” her in a formal dance.

Such instruction cannot be generalized for all kinds of friendship. Nothing in nature is really like married love. Only in this love does one give of oneself, forever, to someone who stands across a divide in being: the one who begets, the one who bears.

The sex of a human being is marked in the voice, the hair, the shape of the face, the thickness of the bones, the contours of the torso, the quality of the skin, everywhere. A friend of the same sex is an image of myself, an alter ego. He echoes my voice.

But the spouse is no alter ego. The spouse complements my voice. The man to the woman and the woman to the man are suggestions on earth of the totaliter aliter, the wholly other. Well does Scripture compare the union of God with the human soul to the courtship and marriage of bridegroom and bride.

The giving, in this case alone, spans generations past and to come, not in mere intention, but intrinsically. When husband and wife unite in the act of marriage, they bear to one another precious strands of life. They do what their parents and grandparents did, and those ancestors are present in the heritage of the flesh.

The couple may act to thwart the effect of this reality. Disease or debility may thwart it also. But the reality is unalterable. When they unite, they do the time-transcending, child-making thing. They are the cause, effectual or exemplary, of children in the world.

All this they understand in their hearts, whether or not they express it in words.

In a healthy time, they could take for granted the assistance of their neighbors and of teachers at school. It’s not a healthy time. So the father must think things through.

Sometimes Luke and his father go by themselves, or with another father-son pair, for a hike in the woods, or to fish in the lake, or for an afternoon at the speedway—the boys can determine the destination. They separate from the girls, but not out of scorn. Instead the father teaches the boy to honor girls. A wife is not a playmate. Attached to this honor is a natural reticence before the mystery of the other sex.

The pure soul, the reverent soul, senses that the other sex deserves his honor. Thus there are certain things that boys do with boys, or talk about with boys, and not with girls. The occasional separation of the boys from the girls strengthens the sense that each sex is completed in the other. Indiscriminate mingling breeds indifference; but after the company of one’s own sex, the sight of the other is like a paradise upon the horizon, new, fascinating, delightful, and dangerous.

With his own sex, however, there should be naturalness and ease. So the father, on their treks alone, undresses before the boy as carelessly as he would undress before the dog, teaching the boy to do the same. The meaning is clear: You and I are alike. That is why we can do this.

If it were a healthy time, if it were a good time to be a boy, he and Luke and their boyish friends might strip and jump in a lake after a sweaty hike. But it isn’t a healthy time, so the father declines. Yet when he takes Luke to the gym, he will usher him into that man’s world as a wholly normal thing. If he’s shy, he’ll overcome his shyness for the boy’s sake, and stand free and easy in the dressing room, talking to a couple of the guys as unselfconsciously as if they had run into one another on the street. We’re all the same, son. You’re one of us.

Does he talk to Luke about sex? All the time, with words and without: when he puts his arm around his wife as they sit on the sofa together; when he digs a flower garden for a Mother’s Day present, and asks Luke to help; when he tousles the boy’s head, when he pretends to be a monster chasing him about the room, when he rolls on the grass with him and the football as if he were ten years old and not an old guy with sore knees.

He uses words too. “When you’re a man,” he says, introducing duties sometimes, and sometimes glories. “A real man has integrity,” he says. “Good men stand by their words.” “A boy makes excuses, but a man admits his fault.” “A boy thinks it’s brave to be reckless. A man knows the difference.” Sophisticates may snort. Let them, till they see what kinds of men their sophisticated sons have made.

But does he talk to Luke about sex—the mechanics? In a healthy time, he wouldn’t have to, so soon. It’s not a healthy time. So he does, gently, when the boy seems curious. He must protect Luke against wicked and foolish people, even teachers. But he grounds those discussions in reality: husbands and wives and children. He does not vaporize about “when you’re ready” or “when you really love somebody.” Pablum seasoned with poison, that.

The plain truth is that the man’s body is for the woman and the woman’s is for the man, and the child-making thing, the thing that unites them, really does make children, and children need a mother and a father committed to one another forever. Luke understands this. He is innocent, and whatever he sees, he sees clearly. Adults are not innocent, and gaze upon phantasms.

What about aberrations? When Luke asks about them, because of things he’s heard at school, the father says that certain people are confused, and do bad and unnatural things with their bodies. They become prone to terrible diseases. But when he catches Luke in a tiff calling another boy a sissy, he reprimands him severely. Since he would not complicate Luke’s passage to manhood, he grants other men’s sons the same courtesy, especially when those boys are walking a more difficult path.

He and his wife keep destructive images out of their home. No pitching the tent beside a cesspool. Luke doesn’t have a computer or a television in his bedroom. Why should Luke be taught his morals by people who dwell in a world unparalleled for its combination of depravity, stupidity, luxury, and vanity? Better to play with his little sister and brother, and talk to his parents.

Of course, Luke will not be at home all the time. Lately he has been asking to join an old group called the Boy Scouts. Luke’s father has to think about this.

In a healthy time, not so long ago, he would not have had to think about it. He’d have taken for granted that his commonsense view, that a boy is a boy, a vir futurus, meant in the very structure of his body to be for a woman, for the begetting and raising of children, would have been shared by everyone else. In particular, it was shared by the Boy Scouts. For the Boy Scouts were, to quote the pastor whose homily appears in the first issue of Boys’ Life magazine, to “quit themselves like men.”

The boy in the title was, if anything, more important than the scout. If a certain boy in the ranks were caught trying to entice others in things unmanly, and here I am including also the unmanly things that boys attracted to girls do, he’d have been taken aside, or sent to the counseling he badly needed, or quietly dismissed from the corps.

Luke’s father now asks what should happen if one of the troubled boys makes his predilections public. He remembers the tumult of puberty all too well. He remembers the confusion of feelings, the longing to be one of the boys, the fear of embarrassment, and the strangeness of girls, many of them for a brief time taller than Luke will be.

He does not want any word, or suggestion, or tale, or touch, to make Luke’s passage through the straits any more troublesome than it must inevitably be. Most especially does he not want a young scoutmaster with an eye for young men to drop a casual hint about his life, as if it were as moral as eating.

Luke’s father has a right to expect that people will not obtrude themselves into his son’s normal growth to manhood. It is wrong to lay a snare in the boy’s path. It is downright wicked to do so, when the life held forth not only frustrates the natural aims of Luke’s parents and the natural fulfillment of the boy’s masculinity, but also leaves those who are snared prone to an array of terrible diseases, both physical and moral.

He notes with wry irritation that Luke’s teachers are apt to wag their fingers at perfectly innocent things, like cupcakes in a lunchbox, but will cheer when a boy publicizes his entry into the bizarre and self-destructive.

But it isn’t just the pitfalls that the father is thinking of. It occurs to him that the Boy Scouts and he have come to an impasse. There is no reconciling them. The Boy Scouts now proclaim that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy’s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.

In other words, Luke’s father is being asked to enroll his son in a group specifically limited to boys, but one that does not recognize the nature of boyhood and its progress to manhood. Thus there is no real justification for the group; that its membership is male is accidental and not of the essence. He and they do not see the same being in Luke. He sees his boy, and the man-to-be; they see a neuter. He sees a father-in-training; they see an immature human thing, a bundle of appetites that are not in themselves subject to moral judgment.

What is the father supposed to do? He can recall that better time, that healthier time, and can name several boys he knew who, if they were boys today, would inevitably be enticed, by loneliness or a trick of the lewd or boredom or a desperate need to be noticed or a despair that they could ever become true men, into the life of the male forever seeking the male.

He knows that most of them weathered the storms, precisely because the assumption that a boy is a boy gave them protection, some breathing space, some time to sort out their feelings and to grow up. He wants for Luke some small survival of that better time.

Where can Luke’s father turn? To the only institution left standing that affirms the goodness of human nature, both masculine and feminine. Grace perfects nature, said Thomas Aquinas. In this time, grace is needed merely to recognize that there is a nature to begin with. In this time, it is impossible to raise any real man without trying to raise a godly man. This is not icing. It is of the essence of manhood and womanhood.

Luke will know, if but intuitively, that his calling as a Christian, to leave his selfishness behind, to enter what Saint Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God, implies the just use of his sexual powers: to give, if God calls him, his body and his heart forever to the woman he loves. That won’t teach him how to pitch a tent in the woods. It might teach him how to build a home in a wasteland.

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Dante's The Divine Comedy.

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Causes of terrorism: “It’s religion!” “It’s mental illness!” “It’s political grievances!” Or, “It’s America!” In the words of Ramzan Kadyrov, Head of the Chechen Republic, commenting on the two Chechens suspected of carrying out the terrorist attacks at the Boston Marathon: “They grew up in the U.S., their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of evil in America.”

Having served two years as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, worked counter-terrorism issues as a staff member in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and now as a professor who teaches future military leaders about religion and violence, I have spent years encountering how the causes of terrorism are complex and interrelated. But since 9/11, the media have been especially replete with over-simplified explanations of the causes behind terrorist violence, continually trying to peg these attacks on one particular cause or another, as if individual causes were mutually exclusive.

As we begin to learn more about the Chechens identified as suspects in the Boston terrorist attack, I suggest a tool for considering the complex causality probably at work here.

Complex causality is what we need to grasp if we are to understand how the interaction of multiple factors can escalate individual and group actions to the point of international terrorism.

This tool applies also to understanding how radical ideologies with religious elements can influence one religious believer to commit violence, while leaving unaffected other believers of the same religion. When some religious believers are not violent, people are quick to absolve that religion of any connection whatsoever to violence. Yet throughout history, across continents and cultures, from one religion to the next, religiously based narratives escalating causes to a sacred, cosmic level have been a motivating influence for violent actors (as well as for peacemakers).

I introduce this tool to help us consider how different types of information relate to each other. This is a model I borrow from plant pathology. Plant pathologists use a model they call the “Plant Pathology Triangle.”

The key to understanding this model is the notion that pathogen and disease are not the same thing. A pathogen alone does not cause a disease, and diseases are the real problem. Thus we need to understand the environment and the host that allow the pathogen to become a disease.

Consider the pathogen Phytophthora infestans. This pathogen caused the Irish potato famine in the mid-1800s. Under the right conditions it is deadly, very deadly. Under the right confluence of circumstances, it is the cause of a fatal disease called “late blight” which kills tomato and potato plants. But while this pathogen persists today, you probably ate a tomato or a potato within the past week; the disease is not omnipresent.

The pathogen Phytophthora infestans by itself is only a pathogen, no more. A pathogen only causes a disease when the environment (e.g. rain, wind) makes it possible for it to travel to a host (e.g. tomato or potato plant) that is susceptible. Disease results when there is a confluence of the right pathogen, a susceptible host, and a pathogen-friendly environment.

Variables on this abound, and another way to consider this is by adding a fourth variable of time: taking into account how long the pathogen can live, how long it has contact with the host, etc.

I view toxic ideologies as somewhat similar to pathogens.

By toxic ideologies I mean the belief systems and narratives that terrorists tell themselves about who they are and why they act. Adding elements of the sacred and cosmic level into such a narrative can increase its power, sometimes even its toxicity. Yet these ideologies alone do not result in terrorism.

For example, toxic ideologies such as those of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers do not necessarily lead to terrorism. I for one have read many texts and listened to terrorism advocates espouse such ideologies, and yet I feel no inclination to dedicate my life to acting upon them. I am not a host in which such “pathogens” adhere, plus I live and work in environments with robust countervailing tendencies.

The two suspects in the Boston attacks are from Chechnya, an area of the world packed with political, cultural, and religious complexities, and they have lived lives of international displacement. We need to consider all of this, as well as who they were as individual human beings (“hosts”), in trying to understand these attacks.

When Ramzan Kadyrov blames living in America, which he seems to consider pathogenic for leading these young suspects to terrorism, we might consider that there are millions of people raised in America who do not become terrorists. So it would seem that growing up in America is not a sufficient cause for becoming a terrorist.

Some have suggested that the cause could be solely political, blaming grievances against the highly problematic political situation of Chechnya, where Chechen nationals have carried out attacks. Yet Chechens suffered horrific injustices under Stalin without resorting to international terrorism, so again, a single issue alone does not show itself to be sufficient as a cause.

And then there is the video posted by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspected terrorist who was killed Friday morning, extolling a statement by Muhammad considered prophetic by Muslims, and especially popular among modern violent extremists using Islamist ideologies. Others may jump to claiming that Islam per se was the cause, which does not make sense because there are over a billion Muslims in the world who neither carry out nor even support terrorism.

We must get beyond inaccurate causal over-simplification and consider the phenomenon of terrorism as a complex interplay of multiple factors.

Moving beyond the over-simplification of single-causality thinking is not a way of dismissing suspected causes, but rather a means for understanding how suspected causes may have intersected with each other. This not only makes it possible to understand the partial contributions of certain causes for a particular individual; it also frees our minds to think more creatively, on more fronts at once, about future prevention.

The plant pathology triangle model was never meant to be applied to terrorism, nor do I make any claim that it is a perfect fit for explaining causes of terrorism. However, it can provide one way of visualizing causality to help increase attention to complex causality, which I would argue is the norm, not the exception, for terrorism.

Jennifer S. Bryson, Ph.D. is a Visiting Research Professor in the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.

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