But Father de Lubac knew that optimism and hope are very different creatures. In real life, bad things happen. Progress is not assured, and things that claim to be “progress” can sometimes be wicked and murderous instead. We can slip backward as a nation just as easily as we can advance. This is why optimism—and all the political slogans that go with it—are so often a cheat. Real hope and real joy are precious. They have a price. They emerge from the experience of suffering, which is made noble and given meaning by faith in a loving God.

A number of my friends have children with disabilities. Their problems range from cerebral palsy to Turner’s syndrome to Trisomy 18, which is extremely serious. But I want to focus on one fairly common genetic disability to make my point. I’m referring to Trisomy 21, or Down syndrome.

Down syndrome is not a disease. It’s a genetic disorder with a variety of symptoms. Therapy can ease the burden of those symptoms, but Down syndrome is permanent. There’s no cure. People with Down syndrome have mild to moderate developmental delays. They have low to middling cognitive function. They also tend to have a uniquely Down syndrome “look”—a flat facial profile, almond-shaped eyes, a small nose, short neck, thick stature, and a small mouth which often causes the tongue to protrude and interferes with clear speech. People with Down syndrome also tend to have low muscle tone. This can affect their posture, breathing, and speech.

Currently about 5,000 children with Down syndrome are born in the United States each year. They join a national Down syndrome population of about 400,000 persons. But that population may soon dwindle. And the reason why it may decline illustrates, in a vivid way, a struggle within the American soul. That struggle will shape the character of our society in the decades to come.

Prenatal testing can now detect up to 95 percent of pregnancies with a strong risk of Down syndrome. The tests aren’t conclusive. They can’t give a firm yes or no. But they’re pretty good. And the results of those tests are brutally practical. Studies show that more than 80 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome now get terminated in the womb. They’re killed because of a flaw in one of their chromosomes—a flaw that’s neither fatal nor contagious, but merely undesirable.

The older a woman gets, the higher her risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. And so, in medical offices around the country, pregnant women now hear from doctors or genetic counselors that their baby has “an increased likelihood” of Down syndrome based on one or more prenatal tests. Some doctors deliver this information with sensitivity and great support for the woman. But, as my friends know from experience, too many others seem more concerned about avoiding lawsuits, or managing costs, or even, in a few ugly cases, cleaning up the gene pool.

In practice, medical professionals can now steer an expectant mother toward abortion simply by hinting at a list of the child’s possible defects. And the most debased thing about that kind of pressure is that doctors know better than anyone else how vulnerable a woman can be in hearing potentially tragic news about her unborn baby.

I’m not suggesting that doctors should hold back vital knowledge from parents. Nor should they paint an implausibly upbeat picture of life with a child who has a disability. Facts and resources are crucial in helping adult persons prepare themselves for difficult challenges. But doctors, genetic counselors, and medical school professors should have on staff—or at least on speed dial—experts of a different sort.

Parents of children with special needs, special education teachers and therapists, and pediatricians who have treated children with disabilities often have a hugely life-affirming perspective. Unlike prenatal caregivers, these professionals have direct knowledge of persons with special needs. They know their potential. They’ve seen their accomplishments. They can testify to the benefits—often miraculous—of parental love and faith. Expectant parents deserve to know that a child with Down syndrome can love, laugh, learn, work, feel hope and excitement, make friends, and create joy for others. These things are beautiful precisely because they transcend what we expect. They witness to the truth that every child with special needs has a value that matters eternally.

Raising a child with Down syndrome can be demanding. It always involves some degree of suffering. Parents grow up very fast. None of my friends who has a daughter or a son with a serious disability is melodramatic, or self-conscious, or even especially pious about it. They speak about their special child with an unsentimental realism. It’s a realism flowing out of love—real love, the kind that forces its way through fear and suffering to a decision, finally, to surround the child with their heart and trust in the goodness of God. And that decision to trust, of course, demands not just real love, but also real courage.

The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is never between some imaginary perfection and imperfection. None of us is perfect. No child is perfect. The real choice in accepting or rejecting a child with special needs is between love and unlove; between courage and cowardice; between trust and fear. That’s the choice we face when it happens in our personal experience. And that’s the choice we face as a society in deciding which human lives we will treat as valuable, and which we will not.

Nearly 50 percent of babies with Down syndrome are born with some sort of heart defect. Most have a lifelong set of health challenges. Some of them are serious. Government help is a mixed bag. Public policy is uneven. Some cities and states provide generous aid to the disabled and their families. In many other jurisdictions, though, a bad economy has forced very damaging budget cuts. Services for the disabled—who often lack the resources, voting power, and lobbyists to defend their interests—have shrunk. In still other places, the law mandates good support and care, but lawmakers neglect their funding obligations, and no one holds them accountable. The vulgar economic fact about the disabled is that, in purely utilitarian terms, they rarely seem worth the investment.

That’s the bad news. But there’s also good news. Ironically, for those persons with Down syndrome who do make it out of the womb, life is better than at any time in our nation’s history. A baby with Down syndrome born in 1944, the year of my own birth, could expect to live about 25 years. Many spent their entire lives mothballed in public institutions. Today, people with Down syndrome routinely survive into their 50s and 60s. Most can enjoy happy, productive lives. Most live with their families or share group homes with modified supervision and some measure of personal autonomy. Many hold steady jobs in the workplace. Some marry. A few have even attended college. Federal law mandates a free and appropriate education for children with special needs through the age of 21. Social Security provides modest monthly support for persons with Down syndrome and other severe disabilities from age 18 throughout their lives. These are huge blessings.

And, just as some people resent the imperfection, the inconvenience, and the expense of persons with disabilities, others see in them an invitation to learn how to love deeply and without counting the cost.

Hundreds of families in this country—like my young friends in Denver, Kate and JD Flynn—are now seeking to adopt children with Down syndrome. Many of these families already have, or know, a child with special needs. They believe in the spirit of these beautiful children, because they’ve seen it firsthand. A Maryland-based organization, Reece’s Rainbow, helps arrange international adoptions of children with Down syndrome. The late Eunice Shriver spent much of her life working to advance the dignity of children with Down syndrome and other disabilities. The Anna and John J. Sie Foundation committed $34 million to the University of Colorado to focus on improving the medical conditions faced by those with Down syndrome. And many businesses, all over the country, now welcome workers with Down syndrome. Parents of these special employees say that having a job, however tedious, and earning a paycheck, however small, gives their children pride and purpose. These things are more precious than gold.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer once wrote that, “A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.” Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs; in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned, or homeless—each one of these persons is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of His love. How we treat these persons—whether we revere them and welcome them, or throw them away in distaste—shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.

The American Jesuit scholar Father John Courtney Murray once said that “Anyone who really believes in God must set God, and the truth of God, above all other considerations.”

Here’s what that means. Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others, and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics. God will demand an accounting. Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs, or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly, or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting. And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life. God will demand an accounting. As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long—but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

We live in a culture where our marketers and entertainment media compulsively mislead us about the sustainability of youth, the indignity of old age, the avoidance of suffering, the denial of death, the nature of real beauty, the impermanence of every human love, the oppressiveness of children and family, the silliness of virtue, and the cynicism of religious faith. It’s a culture of fantasy, selfishness, sexual confusion, and illness that we’ve brought upon ourselves. And we’ve done it by misusing the freedom that other—and greater—generations than our own worked for, bled for, and bequeathed to our safekeeping.

What have we done with that freedom? In whose service do we use it now?

John Courtney Murray is most often remembered for his work at Vatican II on the issue of religious liberty, and for his great defense of American democracy in his book, We Hold These Truths. Murray believed deeply in the ideas and moral principles of the American experiment. He saw in the roots of the American Revolution the unique conditions for a mature people to exercise their freedom through intelligent public discourse, mutual cooperation, and laws inspired by right moral character. He argued that—at its best—American democracy is not only compatible with the Catholic faith, but congenial to it.

But he had a caveat. It’s the caveat that George Washington implied in his Farewell Address, and that Charles Carroll—the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence—mentions in his own writings. In order to work, America depends as a nation on a moral people shaped by their religious faith, and in a particular way, by the Christian faith. Without that living faith, animating its people and informing its public life, America becomes something alien and hostile to the very ideals it was founded on.

This is why the same Father Murray who revered the best ideals of the American experiment could also write that “Our American culture, as it exists, is actually the quintessence of all that is decadent in the culture of the Western Christian world. It would seem to be erected on the triple denial that has corrupted Western culture at its roots: the denial of metaphysical reality, of the primacy of the spiritual over the material, [and] of the social over the individual . . . Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism . . . It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for. And its achievement may be summed up thus: It has gained a continent and lost its own soul.”

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in—not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now—is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral—the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called—is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God.

A friend of mine has a son with Down syndrome, and she calls him a “sniffer of souls.” I know him, and it’s true. He is. He may have an IQ of 47, and he’ll never read The Brothers Karamazov, but he has a piercingly quick sense of the people he meets. He knows when he’s loved—and he knows when he’s not. Ultimately, I think we’re all like her son. We hunger for people to confirm that we have meaning by showing us love. We need that love. And we suffer when that love is withheld.

These children with disabilities are not a burden; they’re a priceless gift to all of us. They’re a doorway to the real meaning of our humanity. Whatever suffering we endure to welcome, protect, and ennoble these special children is worth it because they’re a pathway to real hope and real joy. Abortion kills a child; it wounds a precious part of a woman’s own dignity and identity; and it steals hope. That’s why it’s wrong. That’s why it needs to end. That’s why we march.

Never give up the struggle that the March for Life embodies. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many times you march—it matters, eternally. Because of you, some young woman will choose life, and that new life will have the love of God forever.

The great Green Bay Packer theologian, Vince Lombardi, liked to say that real glory consists in getting knocked flat on the ground, again and again and again, and getting back up—just one more time than the other guy. That’s real glory. And there’s no better metaphor for the Christian life. Don’t give up. Your prolife witness gives glory to God. Be the best Catholics you can be. Pour your love for Jesus Christ into building and struggling for a culture of life. By your words and by your actions, be an apostle to your friends and colleagues. Speak up for what you believe. Love the Church. Defend her teaching. Trust in God. Believe in the Gospel. And don’t be afraid. Fear is beneath your dignity as sons and daughters of the God of life.

Changing the course of American culture seems like such a huge task; so far beyond the reach of this gathering today. But St. Paul felt exactly the same way. Redeeming and converting a civilization has already been done once. It can be done again. But we need to understand that God is calling you and me to do it. He chose us. He calls us. He’s waiting, and now we need to answer him.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, is the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life. This essay is adapted from a lecture Archbishop Chaput delivered this past weekend at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life.

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Copyright 2012 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Second, it seems clear to most that Jones did not himself kill any innocent persons, nor did he, strictly speaking, cause the rioters to kill anyone. Those rioters are responsible moral agents, and there is something demeaning in the suggestion that the behavior of Jones is at the root of their actions; such a thought borders on an accusation of moral immaturity. It appears that justice requires that the rioters be treated as fully responsible for what they did.

So, to repeat, there is a strong tendency to separate the two wrongs—the burning of the Koran and the lethal rioting. When, recently, Senator Lindsay Graham expressed a wish to hold Jones “accountable,” this was quickly interpreted as a weak and foolish assertion of moral equivalency and/or responsibility. Yet, at least from a moral standpoint, Graham’s desire for accountability is quite justifiable: Jones is, I shall argue, guilty of much more than simply an offense against a particular religion. Rather, he is guilty of a degree of recklessness that is morally criminal.

To see this, we need to recognize that the rioters’ actions were either intended by Jones—that is, he burned the Koran precisely in order to induce Muslims abroad to act irresponsibly—or the rioters’ actions were foreseeable side effects of Jones’ deed. In neither case, of course, were the rioters’ deeds caused by Jones’ actions, but in neither case is this necessary.

Take the first option, that Jones intended these lethal reactions. We frequently intend to achieve a goal by relying on the expected actions and reactions of others. My intention to have flowers delivered to my wife in the hospital depends, for its success, on deliberate cooperation from some other agents, but also on some actions that are not cooperative but merely predictable, such as the willingness of hospital staff to provide room information to the flower company. It does not appear to be impossible that Pastor Jones engaged in the burning of the Koran precisely because he intended—in a surely delusional way—to provoke a civilizational conflict between the Christian and Islamic “worlds.” If so, then Jones’ intention was, in fact, homicidal: he intended to provoke those whom he could to murderous violence, and in so doing, he shared their murderous intention. If so, Jones is himself morally guilty of murder, even if such a charge is impossible to sustain legally.

More plausible is the second option, that Jones merely foresaw that there would likely be lethal consequences of his actions. That such consequences were foreseen is very likely, since US officials had repeatedly warned Jones of this possibility. Jones had, on this more charitable interpretation, the intention of making a statement of some sort about the moral failings of Islam, and he made this statement by a public burning of the Koran, foreseeing that there was a real risk of death for some unspecified persons around the world.

Does the lack of a causal relationship between Jones’ actions and those effects mean that the riots and deaths were not side effects, willingly risked, of his deeds? It does not. We do, of course, include among the foreseen side effects of an action causal consequences: when I go jogging, the wear and tear on my sneakers is caused by my run, though it is not intended.

But not all side effects are caused. Consider the actions of a teacher giving just grades to her students. She foresees various reactions: joy, anger, resentment. And she can sometimes foresee actions arising from these emotions: she foresees that Smith will give up at this point and fail the class; that Jones will renew his visits to her office, cutting into her time with other students; and that Robinson will complain to the Chair, thus setting in motion a painful set of meetings and deliberations about how to respond. Yet she does not, strictly speaking, cause any of these effects.

Is our teacher morally responsible for these negative side effects? More accurately, is her acceptance of these side effects morally wrong? In most cases, we would say no. But what is crucial here is the justice of our teacher’s actions. She is carrying out her appropriate responsibilities, doing what she must in accordance with her professional role and her upright commitments. Under such circumstances, we think that the demands of her role justify the acceptance of a certain amount of negative side effects (although, in some cases, she might have additional responsibilities to alleviate, where possible, such side effects).

In some cases, our judgment is even more strongly in favor of the acceptance of bad side effects. Historically, the effect of refusing to deny one’s faith in the face of lethal threats has been death, to oneself and one’s family. Yet many religious believers have thought it absolutely impermissible to ever deny their faith. They thus willingly accepted lethal side effects to themselves and others, and seem to have been entirely justified in doing so: no amount of bad consequences is such that it “outweighs” the wrong of deliberately foreswearing one’s religion.

So in two cases, accepting bad side effects is, or can be, permissible: when the alternative is the violation of an absolute moral norm, and when the alternative is failure to perform an action one rightly takes to be obligatory.

By contrast, the foreseeable negative side effects of morally wrong acts are not only never morally acceptable; there is a strong sense that an agent who accepts such side effects accepts responsibility for those side effects in deliberately performing the morally wrong act. The agent who intends his bomb to terrorize but not to kill nevertheless is held responsible for “accidental” deaths that were foreseen as possible and accepted.

We should grant, for the sake of charity, that Pastor Jones is ignorant of the fact that, objectively, his actions in burning the Koran were morally offensive and wrong. To deliberately offend against the tenets of a religion is usually wrong, absent some overwhelming justification; to do so by committing sacrilege is generally gravely wrong.

Pastor Jones no doubt disagrees. Yet he clearly did not think that burning the Koran was obligatory, nor that failure to burn it would have violated an absolute obligation. This is clear by the history of events leading up to the burning, in which Jones threatened to burn, decided against burning, and then once more changed his mind. It is further confirmed by the appearance that Jones acted as he did primarily as a form of symbolic expression—he certainly did not think that he was bringing some form of cosmic justice to Islam by declaring it guilty of crimes against humanity.

On the best possible interpretation, then, Jones believed that what he was doing was permissible in itself, but optional—something that, absent all other considerations, would have some expressive value, but not something that he was compelled to do by his role or responsibilities. Yet Jones judged further, against the known risk that Islamic anger would lead to deadly consequences, that the lives of any innocent strangers lost as a consequence of such anger were proportionate to the good he would gain by his actions. That is, he judged it reasonable to accept any lives that might be lost as collateral damage to his goal of expressing forceful condemnation of Islam.

Such a judgment is appalling. The UN workers who were killed as a result of the Afghan riots were innocent in every way, and indeed were working to bring about peace in a troubled region, at risk and cost to themselves. It was a violation of the kind of fairness invoked by the Golden Rule for Jones to privilege his own desire to express himself above the safety of innocent human beings abroad, assuming, as I have argued, that the danger to those innocents was foreseeable as a risked side effect of Jones’ actions.

Such side effects were foreseeable and extremely grave, yet Jones did not reck them; his actions were reckless, and lethally so. And in consequence, while he did not cause the deaths of those innocents, and while his own culpability does not mitigate the responsibility of those who did cause those deaths, he bears a not insignificant moral responsibility for those deaths.

Senator Graham is, I believe, absolutely right to wish that there were some way for Jones to be held accountable. There appears not to be, legally, however, and perhaps this is for the best: upholding and applying a law that forbade the burning of holy books might be overly intrusive, and might be in tension with constitutionally protected rights. But Jones should not be allowed to hide behind his right to free speech to shield him from moral blame, nor should he be allowed to hide behind the only apparent gap in gravity between what he did, and what was done by the rioters. Willingly to accept the risk of such great damage to innocent human life for such a meaningless bit of self-expression is a morally grave wrong, even if it is not the wrong of intentionally killing the innocent.


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

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Obama’s speech, however, points to an even deeper danger to American republicanism than that posed by weakness or naïveté in foreign policy. This danger resides not only in the president’s mind, or in the dispositions of his administration, but in our very political culture. The danger I have in mind is illustrated by the utter vacuity of the West Point address, which in turn reflects a general argumentative emptiness in our political discourse.

Aristotle, in his great work the Rhetoric, distinguishes between two kinds of political discourse: epideictic rhetoric and deliberative rhetoric. Epideictic rhetoric is essentially ceremonial. It seeks to identify and praise certain persons or ideas in light of the community’s commonly held beliefs about what is good and bad, noble and base. Deliberative rhetoric, in contrast, is about choosing a course of action. It articulates the policy ends upon which citizens generally agree and then makes the case for the means best adapted to those ends.

Much of Obama’s West Point speech—about the first half—is given over to epideictic rhetoric. He praises the cadets and teachers for their dedication, the parents for their support, and the American military in general for its honorable traditions of courageous service. There is, of course, no shame at all in this. Ceremonial rhetoric is perfectly appropriate to a commencement address. Moreover, all political leaders, and especially those who occupy the highest offices, must make use of ceremonial rhetoric. Binding the community together through the affirmation of shared principles is no less an important task of the statesman than discovering and publicly defending specific actions that should be taken. Accordingly, some ceremonial speeches are considered to be among the greatest examples of excellent political rhetoric. Here we may call to mind Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address. Such efforts demonstrate Lincoln’s mastery of epideictic discourse, while his speeches in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and his First Inaugural show his no less impressive skill at deliberative rhetoric. In the former addresses Lincoln praises America for the justice of its principles and praises certain Americans for their heroic commitment to them. In the latter he identifies problems that confront the country and explicates the reasons for particular courses of action.

The problem with Obama’s West Point speech, then, is not that its first half is so ceremonial, which is in fact perfectly appropriate to the occasion and to his duties as a leader. The problem is that the second half of the speech aspires to be deliberative rhetoric but fails to do so. And, of course, there is a long history of presidents offering substantive foreign policy arguments in commencement addresses. Obama aims for this, but misses terribly.

President Obama begins the second half of his speech by promising a foreign policy “strategy.” This is essentially the language of deliberative rhetoric. After all, the aim of strategy is to identify certain achievable ends and then discover the means best adapted to realizing them. Immediately after recognizing the need for a strategy, however, the president veers back in the direction of ceremonial rhetoric, praising Americans for their ability to surmount challenging circumstances. He reverts to such themes, in fact, at several points in the remainder of the speech. Along the way he does, admittedly, speak of the ends and means of his policy. The apparent ends he identifies are American strength and influence and a more peaceful and prosperous world. The proper means to these ends, he suggests, are such things as economic vitality, an active diplomatic corps, effective collaboration among intelligence agencies, and a willingness to cooperate with other nations.

The problem with Obama’s speech is that the means he identifies are just as non-controversial as the ends. If it is serious, however, deliberative rhetoric must engage what is controversial, because the possible means to given ends are always more or less subject to doubt and disagreement. There would be no need for deliberation, after all, if what is to be done is obvious. Recall Lincoln’s most excellent deliberative rhetoric. That rhetoric clearly took the form of an argument with others about important disputed questions, such as whether federal policy should forbid slavery in the territories (the Lincoln-Douglas debates) or whether disunion was a legitimate and prudent response to deep divisions over slavery (the First Inaugural).

What is at stake here, however, is not just a deficiency in the current president’s (or his speech writers’) rhetorical skills. Rather, the reception of the speech points to a deeper public pathology. For, as noted above, the speech has been received in the media as an important policy speech, as a call for a specific policy, as an act of deliberation. One fears on the basis of such a reception that our public culture itself is marked by an inability to recognize, much less object to, the absence of deliberative reasoning in a president’s policy speech. Indeed, the easy invocation of non-controversial—and hence unhelpful—ideas is to be found in much of our political discourse.

This tendency is a serious problem for at least three reasons. In the first place, we cannot entirely discount the possibility that such empty rhetoric truly reflects our leaders’ empty thinking about political problems. We are tempted to think otherwise, to believe that deliberative rhetoric (or at least deliberation) must be taking place in the cabinet if not on the stage. That is, we are tempted to believe that our public officials have engaged in a rigorous argument about the proper means to desired ends in private with their advisors, but that they choose not to present that reasoning in their public speeches. This is certainly a possibility, but not one on which we can absolutely rely. After all, political leaders—and especially presidents—are often surrounded by advisors who are already predisposed to agree on what is to be done, who are ideologically inclined to a certain set of policies over others. In such an environment it is all too likely that genuine deliberation will not take place because everyone will believe that the solutions to public problems are obvious. In this case, policy speeches that avoid deliberation are reflections of a prior failure to deliberate. Needless to say, this exposes the nation to all the risks of policy error and miscalculation.

Second, and on a deeper level, such non-deliberative political speech undermines our ability to meaningfully live out our commitment to representative self-government. Public political speech is the vehicle of democratic deliberation. If that speech is void of genuine argumentation, then democratic deliberation and self-government itself will be a mere show. Representative self-government requires that the people get to choose the basic direction of the country. They cannot truly choose, however, unless public political speech is marked by genuine argument that identifies and examines the various means that might be employed in public policy. If it instead takes the form of mere affirmation of non-controversial ideas, then the campaign for political power will take the form of a contest to see which party or which politicians can most enthusiastically and convincingly affirm ideas on which everyone already agrees. Such a contest cannot foster rational choice, because it cannot bring to light the actual alternative policies from which our leaders will have to select. Such rhetoric renders the process of winning public approval completely unrelated to decisions made while governing. As a result, it seriously attenuates the sense in which the people can be said to be governed by their own consent.

Finally, the prevalence of empty political speech strikes indirectly at the public affection that holds the political community together. By invoking and implicitly praising only non-controversial concepts, such empty deliberation comes to resemble ceremonial rhetoric. It does not seek explicitly to explain the usefulness of certain policies but implicitly to celebrate their value, as if that value were beyond reasonable dispute. We see this all the time in politicians’ claims to stand for “common sense solutions.” In reality, however, politics—or the choice of proper policy means—is by its nature inherently controversial, no matter what anybody says about it. Accordingly, there will inevitably be dissenters from whatever set of policies a leader chooses to celebrate rather than to defend. Such celebratory rhetoric, however, inevitably implies that those who dissent are bad people. The implication of such speech is not that those who disagree have reasoned incorrectly about possible means to agreed upon ends, but that they have chosen to reject things that are (supposedly) commonly recognized as valuable. For their part, in the absence of the discipline of deliberative rhetoric, the dissenters will be unable to explain the miscalculations of their opponents, but will have to resort to the invocation of other (supposedly) common values, thus implying that the other side does not recognize them. Simply put, the effect of ceremonial rhetoric is to bind the community together around a set of shared principles. Therefore, to substitute ceremonial rhetoric where deliberation is appropriate tends to imply that those who disagree are not members in good standing of the community. And this marginalization of dissenting voices is not conducive to our political vitality.

We too often associate the word “argument” with confusion, weakness, and division. On that contrary, if our public policy is to be effective, if our commitment to self-government is genuinely to be lived out, and if our sense of community is to be preserved, we need not to avoid but to insist on public argument, properly understood as the pursuit of deliberative rhetoric in its proper sphere.


Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

There is something to this. A person’s failure to live up to his stated moral code need not call either the validity of that code nor his belief in the code in question. In fact, given the inevitability of moral failure in our lives, it is similarly inevitable that those with strong moral convictions will sometimes fail to act in the way they publicly identify as morally appropriate.

But is hypocrisy really nothing more than the inability of persons to live up to their own moral code? No. Hypocrisy does not just involve disconnect between word and deed; it involves dissimulation, falsity in how one acts. The hypocrite does not merely make assertions he believes to be true about morality while failing to abide by them. He also makes false assertions, often by his deeds. He deceives others by creating the appearance of virtue while succumbing to vice. Creating this appearance may, of course, take a great deal of work; consider what is involved in maintaining the illusion—to one’s spouse, one’s children, and others—that one is being faithful in marriage, if one is actually having an affair

This makes hypocrisy, just in itself, morally bad for the hypocrite. For, an important and basic aspect of human well-being entails our striving to achieve a unity in the various aspects of our practical lives and selves. Our practical judgments must be harmonized with our choices, our choices with our actions, and all with our feelings. Otherwise we are at war within ourselves, agents who know what is good but choose what is not, or who choose what is good but rebel internally because desire prods us in some other direction. Integrity is a matter of bringing all these aspects of our practical life into line with one another.

But it is also a matter of what we could call the inner and the outer aspects of ourselves. All of us are aware of the internality and privacy of our thoughts, our intentions, and our character. These aspects of ourselves are expressed through our assertions and actions. That the outward assertion should express the inner person is natural in the sense that assertion—stating that such and such is the case—is the natural way to communicate what one believes to be true, even though one’s primary purpose in such communication is not typically self-disclosure but the disclosure of truth.

The truth of our assertions is particularly important because communication forms a partial basis of any community. There can be no shared purposes without communication, and in the absence of shared purposes, no forms of the good of sociability, and no virtue of justice to structure social life and lives. Moreover, all the substantive basic goods—life and health, knowledge, art and aesthetic experience, work and play—would suffer insofar as cooperative action for their sake would be impossible without communication.

Assertions, accordingly, play a central role in the moral life, insofar as they are necessary for communication and communication is necessary for cooperation, sociality, justice, and the pursuit of all the substantive goods. It thus seems that the “natural” relationship between assertion and truth is not enough; rather, the character of the asserting agent must be properly ordered as regards his acts of assertion by a virtue, which Aquinas calls truthfulness. It is this virtue that is instantiated in an agent’s character by a particular type of intrapersonal unity, integrity, or authenticity, a harmony of the inner with outer aspects of the person.

Now the hypocrite seeks to appear in a certain way that is at odds with at least part of what is true of him: while sinning, he seeks not merely to assert what he knows to be true, but to appear not to be a sinner in the relevant respect. This suggests that hypocrisy is possible only where there is a repetitious character to the wrongdoing, for the wrongdoer must now try to maintain the virtuous image that is usually the consequence of upright behavior. Hypocrisy thus creates an ongoing tension between the agent’s inner and outer self that would be solved by a frank admission of failure, repentance, and a resolution to do better. This tension is intrinsically bad—it involves a privation of the good of integrity—and can obviously be corrupting in further ways, as agents who experience such tension can be led to rationalize the wrong they are doing, resulting in self-deception at best, and a deep turn towards vice at the worst.

Even hypocrites who attempt to deceive may have some moral motivation if the deception is done for the sake of others. For example, an adulterous father genuinely can be concerned about the effect of his adultery on his children. Here again, hypocrisy pays a kind of tribute to virtue: the agent maintains an awareness of the right and a kind of commitment to it, even while the moral structure of his life begins to crumble.

But there can be a further wrong in hypocrisy, and it is this wrong, I will argue, that creates special problems for at least some figures in public life.

The form of hypocrisy that seems most especially egregious is that in which the “tribute” paid to virtue is entirely specious. The agent simulates virtue in this case not because of a recognition that the appearance of vice can corrupt or harm others, or because he is still somehow allied with virtue, but because the appearance of virtue brings with it certain rewards. These might be merely the maintenance of personal reputation, and the goods that go with that; in a worse case, it might be the ability to obtain or wield power, goods, or influence; and in the very worst case scenario, it might be for the sake of corrupting others and eventually undermining the very values to which the hypocrite pays lip service. This last end is especially important in considering the wrong that hypocrisy does, for, as so much recent history suggests, a side effect of hypocrisy can be to bring the values trumpeted by the hypocrite into disrepute. I will return to this below.

Few people’s lives will go as well as they should if they cannot preserve their reputation. But a politician’s work is built in large part on a foundation of reputation; how their constituents see and think of them will affect whether they are re-elected; how their colleagues and others think of them will affect considerably their political efficacy and their political power. Not all aspects of reputation will be equally important, of course, but a politician whose relationship to his constituents and colleagues is based in part upon the moral claims he is willing to make—claims about the sanctity of the marriage vow, or the social importance of marriage and family, for instance—has a deep need to maintain the appearance of virtue, lest his political career crumble.

Political life thus significantly increases what would be the ordinary temptation accompanying wrongdoing: hypocrisy engaged in not out of charity but for the sake of reputation and external goods. Continued engagement in political life by a morally erring politician is thus a grave threat to that politician’s moral welfare, a threat that continues even after the inevitable discovery and public confession—after all, the need for an appearance of penance can swamp, even in a good person’s heart, the need for genuine and deep conversion of heart.

But some politicians, no doubt, can overcome, internally and in their pursuit of moral uprightness, the temptations to hypocrisy which wrongdoing and scandal create for them. And of course it is not for any other person to judge of some particular politician to what degree that politician’s repentance is genuine or not. But the fact that I pointed out above remains: even for those public figures whose hypocrisy is motivated by charity, or a desire for external rewards, as opposed to those motivated by a desire to bring down the values that their actions contravene—even for these less despicable hypocrites, the side effect of hypocrisy where crucial moral concerns are at issue is grave. Pro-family or pro-life politicians who abandon their families, pro-reform leaders who violate the law, or even church leaders who fail to protect their flock all bring to their causes a crisis of faith when their dissembling is made known, a crisis they must grieve at if they are as truly committed as they claim.

The conclusion is clear. F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong in asserting that there are no second acts in American life, but there should be no public second acts for public figures who have fallen and now need to pick up the pieces of their moral lives. Both for the sake of their own character and for the sake of the values they claim to hold dear, immediate resignation from public life seems, in almost every case, to be the best course.


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

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

I hope this finds you well, though no doubt exhausted from the long period of campaigning and commentating leading up to the recent elections. Most people on this side of the ocean think only of the presidential contest. More than once I have had to explain that in addition to the race for the White House there have been senate, congressional and gubernatorial contests going on, along with a number of state referenda and local elections. Britons can easily forget, if they ever really understood, the federal character of the Union, and when this and the electoral complexity are explained they either respond by saying, “but the presidential election was the one that mattered, wasn’t it?” or else, “so what does that mean?”

Still, some of us are fairly knowledgeable when it comes to American politics, and I’d like to offer an account of how things look from the perspective of one British observer. It is based on a close following of the campaigning and on general knowledge of the United States gathered over 20 years of visiting (some 35 states of the Union) and two periods of residence (in Pennsylvania, and in Virginia). While the political race has sharpened many issues, I am primarily focused on matters of moral and social outlook. Indeed, one point I would like to emphasize is that it looks to have been a mistake to identify these matters too closely with political parties and their presidential tickets.

Some American conservative commentators have been eager to press the idea that rather than the Democrats winning the White House election on the strength of their candidates and policies, the Republicans lost the contest because of the defects of the McCain-Palin campaign. While this view has the comforting advantage of simply requiring a better communicator of unchanged positions in order to win the next election, such an idea is distorted to the point of self-deception. Viewed from afar, and I would think that viewed from nearby through a clear glass in broad daylight, it is apparent that voters chose the Democratic ticket on the basis of preferred policies. Voters were tired of what they regarded as a discredited administration led by a confused and ineffective executive that had drawn them into an unnecessary and costly war while yet neglecting domestic needs.

Even many social conservatives felt let down by the administration’s failure to pursue favourable policies regarding marriage, family, education, and the economy. Some may suggest that plans to implement a positive domestic agenda were derailed by the “war on terror,” but even if true it remains the case that the administration put the invasion of Iraq ahead of securing the status and well-being of home, school, family, and the economy.

It should be remembered at this point that concern about the moral legitimacy of the second Gulf War was felt across the range of political positions. Not everyone who judged that the securing of sanctions, the decision to invade, and the conduct of hostilities involved systematic immoralities was a ‘leftist’ or a ‘liberal’. In 2003 I wrote in opposition to the idea of launching a war against Iraq in the introduction to a reprinting of Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay on the Second World War, “The Justice of the Present War Examined.” It would be presumptuous to say what her verdict on this current conflict might have been. Yet, someone who followed her reasoning, and was informed of the circumstances of going to war in Iraq—and the subsequent conduct of it—would at least be drawn to the conclusion that grave, extensive, and enduring injustice had occurred.

Anscombe’s statements on other matters challenge a conventional notion of political alignments. Many of you share my high regard for her intellectual insight and rigour, as well as her dedication to the discernment and practice of truth. Consider, then, an essay she wrote entitled “Philosophers and Economists: Two Philosophers Objections to Usury,” which is relevant to the recent conduct of American Banks and investment agencies. In her essay, Anscombe explores the practice of earning interest on the mere strength of a loan, in effect securing an income from renting out money or increasing one’s wealth out of the ownership of debts. Near the article’s conclusion she states:

These considerations appear to me to throw some light on the necessity of communism, as I might call it. The capitalistic system—to put it in a nutshell—necessarily leads to things like a housing shortage: that is an epitome of its consequences, which I will leave to your imaginations to expand in accordance with my thesis.

Whatever one thinks of her position, it should be noted that Anscombe was a by-word for Catholic orthodoxy, for the sanctity of life, for exclusive, life-long marriage and for chastity within it, and for various other Christian and traditional moral values, yet she could denounce U.S. (and allied) war policies as murderous and accuse the capitalist system of structural injustice and injury to the common good.

Today we face a danger of oversimplifying the structure of political thought to the point of dividing policies between left and right, and then associating these positions with particular political parties. In truth, one may be a social welfarist or socialist and a moral conservative, or equally a free-marketeer or classical liberal and a moral radical: pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and aggressively secular.

The fact is that some voters chose against the Republicans not just for pragmatic reasons, and not because they had bought into a general liberal package, but because they took moral exception to some of the policies pursued by the Bush administration, and I believe that in this their judgment was correct. The Bush years were marked by policy immoralities of omission and commission. Not all of those who voted for Barack Obama did so because they favoured every major element of his policies. Rather, as is generally the case, people made an overall judgement of past performance, of the strength and weaknesses of the candidates, and of likely future performance.

The opponents of John McCain and Sarah Palin did not tend to depict them as bad people, but rather as flawed or ill-equipped politicians. But the critics of Obama often sought to represent him as evil. My judgement is that the American people not only did not share that opinion, but that they drew conclusions about those who pressed it, and in fact came to regard Obama as a generally admirable character.

Here let me suggest a parallel between two examples where Republican critics have represented leading figures as damnable only to have that verdict rebuffed in a way that its rejection injured their own cause. One is that of Obama, as we just witnessed. The other is that of President Clinton. I was in the U.S. for periods during the Lewinsky scandal and when the case was being pressed for impeachment. There were those on the side of that policy who took a sober and dignified view of the matter, saying that by his conduct with a junior employee in the setting of the White House the President had disgraced his political office and should resign. Alongside these, however, were others who simply hated Clinton with feral intensity and who delighted at the thought of heaping public humiliation on him.

What they thought might ensue was less clear. What was evident, however, was that the prosecution of this policy led to the degradation of media news and commentary to the point where it was impossible to listen to radio or television news or read a newspaper in the company of children (I have four and so felt that degradation at every turn).

What began as an effort to unseat a President by exposing and denouncing him without qualification or consideration for collateral effects led to extensive damage being done to standards of public discourse and harm to the reputation of his political critics. I fear that something similar may already have happened to the cause of social conservatism through some of the attacks on Obama, which have also proved ineffective. My advice to those involved in this strategy would be that when you have worked yourself into a hole, stop digging and start thinking about how you might get out of it.

It has been a mistake for moral conservatives to associate their concerns with opposition to one candidate and one party. Not only has the previous administration proved itself unworthy, but the state of the Republican party continues to be divided over values such that, had it won the White House and Congressional elections, it would not have delivered a range of policies that would have addressed moral concerns about the conduct of war, the management of markets, the securing of marriage, or the protection of the unborn.

While it would be wrong to abandon the political parties, it would be equally mistaken to side with one of them. The fact is that elections will always be fought and decided on a range of issues and the balance will sometimes favour one side, then another. Social conservatives who look to politics should be seeking to work within both parties, and in the case of the Democrats, seeking to return them to a historical position that was once more in line with Christian moral values and Catholic social teaching than was that of the Republicans.

There is also a further reason to be wary of confusing moral concerns with the fortunes of a political party. Those within a chosen party whose primary interest is pursuing electoral victory may prove fiercer enemies of one’s moral position than political opponents in other parties.

A sobering example is that of the British Conservative Party as it has re-branded itself in response to electoral defeat. Tony Blair brought Labour to power with the promise of renewing Britain, rendering it a contemporary country for contemporary times. The superficiality and near vacuity of the language belied a definite programme of social reformation initiating civil partnership, gay adoption, publicly funded stem-cell research, and other policies designed to ‘modernise’ the values of British society. Opposition from orthodox Christians was as it should have been, but the Conservative Party responded to defeat by associating itself with the very same policies, seeking to overcome its self-described reputation as ‘the nasty party’ by adapting enthusiastically to the need for ‘changed values’ for a ‘forward-looking society.’ There is reason to believe that the Republican Party will now follow the very same trajectory with the ironic consequence that those who invested their hopes in it as a vehicle for pursuing moral values will be encouraged to stay quiet and perhaps even be denounced.

It is an old saw that when America sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. By the same token, if America holds fast to that which is good and implements it in its public policies, then the rest of the West might be improved. Now we see an administration coming to power that is predicted to promote policies inimical to many of our shared vales. What are you, and we, to do? The answer can only be to go on as we have learned to do already, arguing the case, fighting the battles, seeking to influence policy, but not investing our hopes in political parties that are more like one another than they are like us. Perhaps American social conservatives might reflect on that experience and prepare themselves for what are likely to be very difficult times ahead.

The common need is for a serious and sustained reflection on the content of a conservative social philosophy that can be advanced within all major political parties: Democrat and Republican in the U.S.; Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat here in the U.K.

From the window in my study I have a view across lower college lawn to the 15th-century tower of St. Salvator’s, through which generations of masters and students have passed. One such was John Mair, friend of Erasmus and teacher of Jean Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola when in Paris. Another was James Wilson, who in 1765 set off for North America and subsequently became a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Committee of Detail, which produced the first draft of the United States Constitution in 1787.

In the course of his academic and judicial career Wilson developed a number of important ideas about the relation between personal morality, public policy and political service, at the core of which lay the idea of integrity or truth to one’s deepest convictions. That has long been celebrated and taught in America, but now it has to be reapplied to the context of current political circumstances. It may be that the conclusion is uncomfortable, suggesting that the existing political alignments offer no easy home for those adhering to traditional morality.

With every good wish, yours faithfully,

John Haldane

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Visiting Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Virginia, and Vice-President of the Catholic Union of Great Britain. He is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the Editorial Board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

We are not a Journal. We are not a Blog. Our aim is to provide a venue where readers can find out what our associated scholars are thinking about or working on—whether in their own academic scholarship or in informed commentary on contemporary events. Our hope is that by benefiting from these scholars’ perspectives, readers will be better equipped to form their own.

We call it Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good for three simple reasons. First, the topics we cover all center on public life. Second, we approach these topics using methods of discourse that are inherently public, open and accessible to all fellow citizens. Third, we contend that at the heart of our public debates are ethical questions—questions about good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust. As to our approach, we rely on neither revelation, emotivism, nor majoritarianism. Rather we aim to address these questions rationally through critical reflection on man’s nature, his personal and communal flourishing, and the ethical principles that should guide his conduct.

Aristotle taught that the central question of political life is how we ought to order our lives together. This is an inherently ethical question. Whatever the pressing question of the day may be—debates surrounding economic policy, biotechnology, international relations, marriage and the family, constitutional law and religious liberty—they all entail ethical positions. Any judgment, for example, about which taxation policies work best assumes an answer to the question: best for what end? Does this end contribute to human well-being? Do the means detract from our well-being? The same is true of any new biotechnology. Evaluating its desirability necessarily involves a consideration of the ends it will serve as well as the means it will require. Will they promote authentic human flourishing? Do they respect the dignity of the person? When you stop to think about it, these same questions can—and should—be asked about most any contested question of our public life today. Certainly, these issues also entail technical questions: questions about empirical facts and the expected outcomes of each proposal. But at its core, the question of whether the effects of competing proposals are desirable is a moral one: Which among competing courses of action best serve the common good—the flourishing of individuals and the communities they form? These are the questions that Public Discourse aims to address.

Public Discourse is well-equipped to this task because of the depth and breadth of intellectual expertise at the Witherspoon Institute. Leading professors at some of the top universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, these scholars find themselves uniquely positioned to provide carefully reasoned arguments that are well researched, firmly grounded in the academic literature, and well suited to our national discussions. The Fellows of the Witherspoon Institute include experts in the fields of economics, history, law, medicine, social science, political theory and moral philosophy. Our goal is to get their research to you, and in a way that is useful to you.

To best serve these ends, Public Discourse publishes several different types of pieces. We’ll run short essays by Witherspoon scholars reflecting on the burning issues of the day. We’ll also run short essay-length abstracts of their scholarly articles—making the key arguments of these papers available to expert and layman alike, and providing access to the full—length article for those who wish to wrestle with the argument in its entirety. From time to time, we will also highlight the research of outside scholars as it relates to the vision of Public Discourse and the Witherspoon Institute.

Matthew Schmitz, a recent graduate of Princeton University, will serve as our managing editor. Our Editorial Board consists of:

Hadley Arkes – Political Science, Amherst College
Gerard V. Bradley – Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Jean Bethke Elshtain – Government, Georgetown University; Divinity, University of Chicago
Thomas D’Andrea – Philosophy, Cambridge University
Robert P. George – Politics, Princeton University
John Haldane – Philosophy, University of Saint Andrews
Kevin Jackson – Business, Fordham University Business School
Harold James – Economic History, Princeton University
Byron Johnson – Sociology, Baylor University
Robert Koons – Philosophy, University of Texas
John Londregan – Politics, Princeton University
Daniel N. Robinson – Philosophy, Oxford University
James R. Stoner – Political Science, Louisiana State University
Christopher O. Tollefsen – Philosophy, University of South Carolina
W. Bradford Wilcox – Sociology, University of Virginia

We plan to publish new material every Tuesday and Friday, but as events dictate we’ll publish more frequently, so check back often. Enjoy.

Ryan T. Anderson is the editor of Public Discourse.