Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
One of my favorite online journals is Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good. Every day, there's a fresh essay designed to enhance general public understanding of the moral foundations of free societies. The essays themselves are frequently written by academics and philosophers but in such a way that anyone can enjoy them. It's a great exercise for both the academics and the audience.
The topics are always on hot-button issues but this week the good folks at Public Discourse have started a symposium about how voters should think about issues as opposed to the pragmatic way we think about candidates in the voting booth.
Today, Public Discourse launches a ten-day symposium on “Liberty, Justice, and the Common Good: Political Principles for 2012 and Beyond.” With a view to the next election, we’ve commissioned ten essays, each covering one of the major policy areas that scores of Public Discourse pieces have examined, to give us a survey of the landscape as we scrutinize the candidates who inhabit it. We also hope these articles will prompt the candidates themselves to think through these issues more thoroughly, as they look to enact good policy and not just curry favor with various factions.
What a great idea, no? Today's essay is on the primacy of the life issue but the editor notes that social issues aren't the only ones that require focus on the common good:
Developing a coherent conservative political philosophy can be difficult. Fiscal conservatives can seem at odds with foreign policy hawks, and both are at odds with social conservatives; but this symposium’s essays make one extended argument that a conservatism concerned to foster the common good—with limited government understood as effective government acting in proper ways, in the proper spheres—can unify and justify all three dimensions of contemporary conservatism.
O. Carter Snead begins his essay today:
Why should it matter whether the 2012 candidates for president are pro-life, especially given the vast array of other pressing issues facing the United States, including (though certainly not limited to) crushing national debt, widespread unemployment, existential fiscal strains on the social safety net, multiple wars, and the continuing menace of terrorism? Aren’t the American people tired of the intractable bickering of a handful of extremist combatants in what seems to be an endless culture war? Unless you’re a radical leftist or a right-wing Christian, why should any serious person in the public square waste time on these issues when there are so many real matters at stake at this moment in our nation’s history?
These questions reflect an attitude that seems to be widely shared in certain circles of our polity. But I would respectfully submit that such questions reflect a badly misguided and inadequate understanding of the moral, cultural, legal, and political dispute of which the pro-life movement is a part.
At bottom, the “life issues”—including especially the conflicts over abortion and embryo-destructive research—involve the deepest and most fundamental public questions for a nation committed to liberty, equality, and justice. That is, the basic question in this context is who counts as a member of the human community entitled to moral concern and the basic protection of the law? Who counts as “one of us”? Equally important is the related question of who decides, and according to what sort of criteria? These are not narrow concerns commanding only the attention of a small number of highly motivated activists at the fringes of our society. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a public matter that is more important than this “question of membership.”
I'm sure Ricocheters will want to follow this symposium.
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Dec '10
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
Thank you, Mollie! I know what I will be doing during the down time at work tonight.
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
Yes, thank you so much for bringing this symposium to my attention, Mollie. It's refreshing to approach political discourse from the starting point of noble and desirable end goals like promoting a culture of life, tending to the sick, fixing the economy, ending child pornography, and combating human trafficking rather than from the usual shallow and muddy political horse race stuff I find myself so often caught up with.
Jan '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
Alas, my experience tells me that moral relativism is something far too many conservatives are only really opposed to when it entails matters of cultural assimilation. Outside of wanting to assert the principles underlying American exceptionalism, many people who call themselves conservative are all too willing to turn a blind eye to moral questions, seeing them as unanswerable, or worse, too exhausting to deal with.
Edited on August 22, 2011 at 8:37pmFeb '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
I remember having a professor in college who introduced me to Walker Percy's 'Thanatos Syndrome' and the haunting phrase 'tenderness leads to the gas chambers'. Another great read is his short, unpublished letter to the NYT in which, using the example of Weirmer Germany he suggests, in the same way as the novel, that the devaluation of life, for whatever noble social ends, eventualy consumes a society.
Jul '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
I guess I am one of the conservatives that wants the fiscal issues handled first and foremost. I understand the intertwining of the two issues of fiscal and social conservatism but I am scared to run a Thomas More as a candidate and have our country reject them at the most critical financial moment of our country's life.
I have many friends who disagree with me and insist that both are needed right now. I just want a country left to quibble over family value issues.
Jan '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
DocJay: I guess I am one of the conservatives that wants the fiscal issues handled first and foremost. I understand the intertwining of the two issues of fiscal and social conservatism but I am scared to run a Thomas More as a candidate and have our country reject them at the most critical financial moment of our country's life.
I have many friends who disagree with me and insist that both are needed right now. I just want a country left to quibble over family value issues.
What shall it profiteth a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?
Saving a country from financial ruin only to find the people in it are no longer worth saving would be awfully tragic, would it not?
Edited on August 22, 2011 at 9:52pmJul '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
BThopmson, it would indeed be horrible to further diminish the values that reflect best on our country. I would expect that a unified country fighting for its economic life may well find improved moral values along the way. I consider our immediate survival to be a fiscal one and our long term survival to be a moral one and while the two are intertwined does it necessarily mean they should always be in parallel?
Jan '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
If you truly believe that I don't think it's rational to be so worried about the viability of a candidate that espouses both the importance of moral behavior and fiscal responsibility. I would suggest that there are always short term problems that seem like they need our immediate attention more than the moral issues which are ever-present and in some ways ineffable.
We have ceded too much of the debate on moral issues already. The illegitimacy rate in our country has skyrocketed to over 40% in a very short time, and we have a rapidly increasing population who has no moral qualms in abusing the social services we offer, and free riding. How long do wait to tackle such daunting problems?
I guarantee, that like the fiscal problems, the longer we wait, the harder they will be to deal with. If there aren't enough people out there right now who support both fiscal responsibility and moral responsibility to form a majority, I'd submit we're already doomed.
Edited on August 23, 2011 at 5:33pmJul '11
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
You may be right. I will counter that removing those fiscally inane programs that encourage dependence will help with morality and family values.
Either way though, i really do appreciate the loss of something precious every time another stone step is carved in our descent in to the abyss or moral relativism.
Dec '10
Re: Protecting the Vulnerable and the Primacy of the Life Issue
Mollie, I'm not sure if my experience is the result of accidental associations or statistically insignificant antidotes, but, close to 100% of friends and family who are wartime veterans are pro-life - friends from Vietnam and family from WWII. An interesting side bar, the stronger the warrior qualities, the stronger the belief in life. Don't know if this is universally true, I like to think it is.