1. US Catholic bishops and abortion - part 2
continued from:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/101988973/US-Catholic-Bishops-and-Abortion
quote:
Originally posted by Phil:
Oh, I surely do recall Charles Curran's visit to LSU and the controversy
around all that. It was the beginning of the end of our campus ministry
team.
I remember when his critique of the bishops approach you linked to
came out a couple of years ago. That, too, stirred things up quite a bit. I
think we might have discussed it here. All in all, I find it a good
summary, but I find a few things to quibble about. E.g.,
quote:
Recently the bishops have made the argument that since abortion
is an intrinsic moral evil, it thus differs from all other legal issues
such as immigration, death penalty, human rights, or the first use
of nuclear weapons. This is a faulty argument. The primary
problem is that intrinsic evil is a moral term and not a legal term.
The fact that something is an intrinsic moral evil has nothing to do
with law or legality. Aquinas himself following Augustine was
willing to accept no law against prostitution, which according to
Catholic teaching is a morally intrinsic evil. Many states in our
country do not have criminal laws against adultery, but Catholic
teaching insists that adultery is an intrinsic moral evil. No
Catholic bishops have campaigned to have criminal laws against
adultery. Thus the very fact that something is an intrinsic moral
evil does not mean there should always be a law against it.
That point seems disingenuous, insofar as the intrinsic evil is more akin
to murder than anything else, and no country approves of the intentional
destruction of innocent human life, which the bishops maintain a fetus
is. And they are correct on this point; a fetus is indisputably a human life,
and an individual human genome, at that, after the 3rd week of life, for
sure. Questions about ensoulment, personhood, etc. are another matter,
and I think you and Curran are correct in pointing out that excessive
reliance on essentialistic approaches to establishing such status are as
weak (and as strong) as the philosophical approach. Without rehashing
old discussions, here, I don't think they need to go down that road;
biological individuality is a strong enough point to build an argument
on, imo, and they're on completely safe ground there. All that's left to
discuss is the right of that biological individual genome to its proper
future versus a woman's right to carry such life (or not) to term. Pro-

2. choicers give more weight to the mother's right to decide; the bishops
claim that the fetus' right to life trumps, and that to terminate such a life
is an intrinsically evil act more akin to murder, which every society
loathes and punishes.
If one follows the links at the bottom of those NCR pages, there was some give
and take between Curran and other responders that clarifies this matter.
Curran was stipulating to the magisterium's position regarding the moral
reality of abortion, merely pointing out that being an intrinsic evil, alone,
would not be a sufficient reason to criminalize an act (over against some
poorly nuanced statements by bishops). That point, when coupled with the
speculative doubt regarding personhood, could contribute to a reasonable
argument against criminalization and precisely because nothing tantamount to
murder is in play, consistent with the observation that most societies, in fact, do
not criminalize abortion. I suspect Curran described such doubt as speculative
in order to distinguish it from empirical doubt, the former being a doubt of
law , where probabilistic systems may apply, the latter, a doubt of fact , where
probabilism would not apply if human life and justice are at stake, although
there is some evidence in church tradition that this is not always the case.
quote:
Originally posted by Phil:Shasha's post #5 from the top expresses the
precise sentiments I think the bishops hope that Catholics will hold to,
and I strongly empathize with this. I can even go along with Rev. Jay
Scott's statement quoted above (minus the threat of mortal sin and
damnation), that Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible
pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic
evil. That's really true! Of course, one must define what is meant by
"plausible pro-life alternative."
What gets lost in the conversation is prudential judgment, which strategies will
probably work the best to achieve the consensus goal of reducing abortions,
the pro-life goal of eliminating them. A plausible pro-life alternative must be
based on results not rhetoric. Even the who, what, when, where and how of
criminalization is subject to prudential judgment. They seem to ignore such
common sense calculus as weighing, for example, the likelihood of abortion
law being changed by one POTUS candidate against the likelihood of an
imprudent war being waged by another.
quote:
Originally posted by Phil:
Johnboy, you seem convinced that the gap between the bishops'
teaching and Catholic voting behavior has less to do with what you
called "an unreceptive audience" than with poorly reasoned or

3. presented teaching. Do you really believe most Catholics are that tuned
in to what you list as inconsistent arguments, erroneous presuppositions,
flawed metaphysics, poor epistemology? I only wish they were that tuned
in and reflective about this matter. You also find hope for a more
effective pedagogy on this and related issues in our social teachings.
Maybe you could say more about that sometime.
We can distinguish between being epistemologically competent and being
schooled in epistemology. The former combines common sense and love in a
wisdom experienced in one's bones. People are indeed tuned in to what I list
because such a tuning is moreso intuitive, experiential, existential, aesthetic,
moral and practical, what I have often distinguished as arising from our
participatory imaginations rather than merely our conceptual map-making.
People "know" through the way they live and move and have their being that
the procreative dimension to marriage is more than an isolated physical act,
that the unitive dimension of conjugal love is important. They don't have to
jump through metaphysical hoops to figure out that masturbation and murder
are not equally grave. They "know" that distributing condoms to prevent AIDS
in Africa is a no-brainer that doesn't require a panel of bio-ethicists to
deliberate. They "know" that the procreative values to be realized in a
marriage are not threatened by the use of contraception because openness to
generativity is a disposition oriented toward the lifetime of the relationship
more than any individual act. They "know" that the sacerdotal roles of a priest
are not inextricably tied to her gender. They "know" that, given an unfortunate
choice, it is infinitely more morally compelling to rescue a single baby from a
fire at a preschool than hundreds of frozen embryos in the cryobank next door.
Of course, every value-realization involves an axiological holon of epistemic
warrant, normative justification, evaluative eco-rationality and interpretive
impetus, in other words, including both our participatory imagination and
conceptual-mapmaking, our reason and intuition, our rational, pre-rational,
nonrational and supra-rational dispositions. But human deliberations are far
more informal than formal. A casuistry immersed in metaphysical abstractions
and deductive rationalism apart from concrete lived experience loses its
relevance to the faithful, who sniff out such a flawed metaphysics and poor
epistemology as true philosophers, who are people who have simply lived life
well. The erroneous presuppositions needn't be articulated formally, as they
can be dismissed reductio ad absurdum for what they are, patently absurd. All
it takes to spot an inconsistent argument is, well, inconsistency, a reality about
which the magisterium is hypersensitive, so often disingenuously maintaining
that thus and such has been the so-called constant tradition. This is one reason
given for not changing the teaching on contraception: What about all the
faithful we've already sent to hell? or The faithful would be scandalized if we
changed our position!

4. In the old days, both our social justice and sexual morality teachings relied on
approaches based in classicism, natural law and legalism. Nowadays, our
social justice theory employs three new methodologies, respectively, historical
consciousness, personalism and relationality-responsibility. Modern Catholic
social justice teachings enjoy widespread credibility due to these updated
methodologies, which are eminently transparent to human reason. Catholic
Ethics in Tension: Sexuality and Social Justice by Rev. Charles Curran
All that said, the magisterium has been decidedly on the side of all that is true,
beautiful, good and unitive, even if often fallibly making its way in walking
alongside and ministering to the pilgrim people of God. It, among other
ecclesial magisteria, is an indispensable witness to revelation and deserving
of deference and engagement in one's conscience formation. Regarding the
moral reality of abortion, because I find the arguments compelling that both
probabilism and prudential judgment are in play, it seems to me that people of
both large intelligence and profound goodwill can disagree regarding - not
only the legal and political dimensions, but - its morality, making vilification,
demonization and ad hominem characterizations (eg you therefore,
definitionally and necessarily, have a poorly-formed conscience) of others
totally off limits. It also means that I believe that - not only can one vote for a
pro-choice candidate, but - one can be Catholic and pro-choice, if sufficiently
nuanced. Even those who are quite confident that ensoulment is variously
delayed should take into account both their own and others' moral
sensibilities, feelings and aesthetics playing an important role in moral
evaluations, and couple those with an appreciation for other probable
(authoritative) opinions as exist in probabilistic systems, along with some
speculative self-critical doubt, and concede that no human life or being,
person or not metaphysically, lacks moral significance, even if that
significance is less than absolute, and that, therefore, no decision to abort
should be made casually or cavalierly, that no gift should be returned
dismissively or without consideration.