Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

O’Rourke (ed.), “What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre”

Here is another excellent looking new festschrift circulating in an orbit MacIntyreproximate to the law and religion galaxy, What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame Press 2013), edited by Fran O’Rourke.  I have long thought that it would be useful and interesting to include selections of Alasdair MacIntyre’s writing in a course in legal ethics; both his criticisms of contemporary moral discourse and his descriptions of what a “practice”–like a legal practice, for example–consists in would be excellent issues to think about in Professional Responsibility.  Happily, I’ll be teaching the course in spring 2014–students, prepare for MacIntyre.  The publisher’s description follows.

What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? is a volume of essays originally presented at University College Dublin in 2009 to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Alasdair MacIntyre—a protagonist at the center of that very question. What marks this collection is the unusual range of approaches and perspectives, representing divergent and even contradictory positions. Such variety reflects MacIntyre’s own intellectual trajectory, which led him to engage successively with various schools of thought: analytic, Marxist, Christian, atheist, Aristotelian, Augustinian, and Thomist. This collection presents a unique profile of twentieth-century moral philosophy and is itself an original contribution to ongoing debate.

The volume begins with Alasdair MacIntyre’s fascinating philosophical self-portrait, “On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the Twentieth Century,” which charts his own intellectual development. The first group of essays considers MacIntyre’s revolutionary contribution to twentieth-century moral philosophy: its value in understanding and guiding human action, its latent philosophical anthropology, its impetus in the renewal of the Aristotelian tradition, and its application to contemporary interests. The next group of essays considers the complementary and competing traditions of emotivism, Marxism, Thomism, and phenomenology. A third set of essays presents thematic analyses of such topics as evolutionary ethics, accomplishment and just desert, relativism, evil, and the inescapability of ethics. MacIntyre responds with a final essay, “What Next?” which addresses questions raised by contributors to the volume.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Ward & Ward (ed.), “Natural Right and Political Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert”

One of the best, most helpful, and most lucid treatments that I have read of theNatural Right and Political Philosophy difficult thinker Leo Strauss was written some years back by the political theorists Catherine and Michael Zuckert.  I am therefore excited to take a look at this new collection of essays honoring the work of the Zuckerts, Natural Right and Political Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert (Notre Dame Press 2013), edited by Ann Ward and Lee Ward.  The publisher’s description follows.

Inspired by the work of prominent University of Notre Dame political philosophers Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, this volume of essays explores the concept of natural right in the history of political philosophy. The central organizing principle of the collection is the examination of the idea of natural justice, identified in the classical period with natural right and in modernity with the concept of individual natural rights.

Contributors examine the concept of natural right and rights in all the manifold and interdisciplinary dimensions associated with the Zuckerts’ oeuvre. Part I explores the theme of natural right in the ancient and medieval political philosophy of Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and St. Augustine. Part II examines the early modern break from the classical tradition in the work of Montaigne, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Locke, and Hegel as well as the legacy of the modern natural rights tradition as explored by Leo Strauss and Pope John Paul II. Part III treats the theme of natural rights from the Puritans through the Founding period in such figures as Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris and up to the Progressive era with Booker T. Washington and Theodore Roosevelt. Part IV addresses questions of natural justice in literature, including works of Euripides, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Edith Wharton, and Tom Stoppard.

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Covington, McGraw, & Watson (eds.), “Natural Law and Evangelical Political Thought”

This month, Lexington Books will publish Natural Law and Evangelical Political Thought edited by Jesse Covington (Westmont College), Bryan McGraw (Wheaton College), and Micah Watson (Union University). The publisher’s description follows.

Natural law has long been a cornerstone of Christian political thought, providing moral norms that ground law in a shareable account of human goods and obligations. Despite this history, twentieth and twenty-first-century evangelicals have proved quite reticent to embrace natural law, casting it as a relic of scholastic Roman Catholicism that underestimates the import of scripture and the division between Christians and non-Christians. As recent critics have noted, this reluctance has posed significant problems for the coherence and completeness of evangelical political reflections. Responding to evangelically-minded thinkers’ increasing calls for a re-engagement with natural law, this volume explores the problems and prospects attending evangelical rapprochement with natural law. Many of the chapters are optimistic about an evangelical re-appropriation of natural law, but note ways in which evangelical commitments might lend distinctive shape to this engagement.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Mahoney on Tocqueville on Democracy and Religion

Daniel J. Mahoney (Assumption College) has an interesting podcast about Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  The more particular discussion of the relationship of religion and democracy in Tocqueville’s writing occurs at the 20 minute mark, where Mahoney reflects a bit on Tocqueville’s chapter on “pantheism” as a special danger in America.  Here’s a fragment from that short chapter:

When the conditions of society are becoming more equal and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens and considering only the people, of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to connect a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses man and is sought by him so generally that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself to repose in that belief. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, he is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Finnis on the Philosophy of Law and the Relevance of “Common Custom”

This is a short and highly accessible essay by the eminent John Finnis entitled, “What is the Philosophy of Law?”  Readers of CLR Forum will know that Finnis is the author of one of the most important books of jurisprudence of the last century, Natural Law and Natural Rights, which represents the keystone in the revival of natural law thought in contemporary times. 

In this short piece, Finnis explains in summary form what the philosophy of law (or jurisprudence — he believes the terms are synonymous, for reasons he discusses) is and what its tasks are to be.    Why is this relevant to religion?  Well, grossly oversimplifying (and I mean really grossly and highly incompletely), though it does not appear in this essay, one of the basic common goods described by Finnis in NLNR (see pp. 89-90 and 371-410) is the good of religion (obliquely adverted to in this essay at page 4 as one of the common goods “of other associations of society”).  And inasmuch as a society provides for freedom of religion, the philosophy of law “consider[s] precisely how far choices made today for one’s political community should be determined or shaped by choices made in the past, in the form of contracts, wills, constitutions, legislative enactments, customs, judicial decisions, and the like.”

Two little noteworthy items in Finnis’s new piece.  First, Finnis gives a very clear and easily digested explanation for why the statement “an unjust law is no law” is true (he has done this before, and this essay does it succinctly).  Again, I am oversimplifying, but the criticism has been: well of course an unjust law is a law — in fact, whether a law is really a law has nothing to do with its morality or ultimate justice.  Finnis says:

Natural law theory has no quarrel with – indeed, promotes – a distinction or bifurcation between intra-systemic [legal] validity (and obligatoriness) and legal validity (and obligatoriness) in the moral sense.  Indeed, it is not unreasonable to see such a distinction at work in the famous tag — “An unjust law is not a law.”  Such a way of speaking is not self-contradictory, paradoxical, or even remarkable: “an insincere friend is not a friend”; “a logically invalid argument is no argument”; “a quack medicine is no medicine”… So too in the famous tag or theorem: “unjust law” (lex iniusta) here refers to an intra-systemically valid legal rule or order, and “not law” (non lex) signifies that, moral limits having been transgressed, this same law lacks validity (as law) in the moral sense (i.e., legitimacy) and thus, as such, lacks moral obligatoriness.  (8-9) (footnotes omitted)

The second item to note is the conclusion, in which Finnis is discussing the philosophy of law’s tasks and its future.  I was especially struck by Finnis’s emphasis of the importance of “common custom” in maintaining a healthy legal system. 

Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Grasso & Rodriguez Castillo (eds.), Theology and Public Philosophy

Here is a very interesting set of exchanges edited by Kenneth Grasso and Cecilia Rodriguez Castillo, Theology and Public Philosophy: Four Conversations (Lexington Books 2012).  The contributors include Charles Taylor, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, Robin Lovin, Jean Porter, and many others.  The publisher’s description follows.

This volume brings together eminent theologians, philosophers and political theorists to discuss the relevance of theology and theologically grounded moral reflection to contemporary America’s public life and argument. Avoiding the focus on hot-button issues, shrill polemics, and sloganeering that so often dominate discussions of religion and public life, the contributors address such subjects as how religious understandings have shaped the moral landscape of contemporary culture, the possible contributions of theologically-informed argument to contemporary public life, religious and moral discourse in a pluralistic society, and the proper relationship between religion and culture.

Indeed, in the conviction that serious conversation about the type of questions being explored in this volume is in short supply today, this volume is organized in a manner designed to foster authentic dialogue. Each of the book’s four sections consists of an original essay by an eminent scholar focusing on a specific aspect of the problem that is the volume’s focus followed by three responses that directly engage its argument or explore the broader problematic it addresses. The volume thus takes the form of a dialogue in which the analyses of four eminent scholars are each engaged by three interlocutors.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Hammill, “The Mosaic Constitution”

Here is a very interesting contribution to intellectual, literary, and political history, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton (U. Chicago Press 2012), by Graham Hammill (SUNY Buffalo).  The publisher’s description follows.

It is a common belief that scripture has no place in modern, secular politics. Graham Hammill challenges this notion in The Mosaic Constitution, arguing that Moses’s constitution of Israel, which created people bound by the rule of law, was central to early modern writings about government and state.

Hammill shows how political writers from Machiavelli to Spinoza drew on Mosaic narrative to imagine constitutional forms of government. At the same time, literary writers like Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, and John Milton turned to Hebrew scripture to probe such fundamental divisions as those between populace and multitude, citizenship and race, and obedience and individual choice. As these writers used biblical narrative to fuse politics with the creative resources of language, Mosaic narrative also gave them a means for exploring divine authority as a product of literary imagination. The first book to place Hebrew scripture at the cutting edge of seventeenth-century literary and political innovation, The Mosaic Constitution offers a fresh perspective on political theology and the relations between literary representation and the founding of political communities.
Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Inazu on Hauerwas and Dworkin

CLR Forum friend John Inazu has posted a sophisiticated piece on Ronald Dworkin’s legal and political theory (they are distinct but related), The Limits of Integrity.  John relies on the writing of Stanley Hauerwas to ground his critique of Dworkin.  The article is of a piece with some of John’s other efforts at integrating theological and legal argument.  An excellent read.  The abstract follows.

This article draws upon the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas to demonstrate how Ronald Dworkin’s theory of law as integrity relies upon secular liberal presuppositions. Dworkin’s constraint on “religious convictions or goals” not only inhibits theological argument in our discussions about law and legal interpretation, but also neutralizes what may be the strongest objections to Dworkin’s normative views. The juxtaposition of Hauerwas and Dworkin is particularly apt because both hold similar interpretive commitments that hang in the balance between a fixed textualism and an unbounded pragmatism. Both justify their epistemic practices by a kind of faith — they do not and cannot know what comes next in their interpretive traditions.

Part I sketches Dworkin’s interpretive theory, and Part II notes its limitations. Part III introduces Hauerwas’s views on interpretation and suggests commonalities between Dworkin and Hauerwas. Parts IV and V illustrate the exclusionary effects of Dworkin’s premises on Hauerwas’s arguments by comparing the ways in which both thinkers approach the abortion controversy. Hauerwas’s arguments show that Dworkin has either imported his own normative commitments into his interpretive premises or failed to distinguish law as integrity from the constraints of public reason. Put differently, either Law’s Empire or Life’s Dominion has overreached. Dworkin hasn’t told us which it is, but Hauerwas shows us why the question cannot go unanswered.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Rosen, “Dignity”

An important looking new book by Michael Rosen (Harvard, Government), Dignity: Its History and Meaning (HUP 2012).  From the description below, Professor Rosen’s understanding of dignity does not appear follow the Christian understanding, and I am looking forward to reading his reflections on this question, which are sure to be penetrating.  The publisher’s description follows.

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal.

Drawing on law, politics, religion, and culture, as well as philosophy, Rosen shows how modern conceptions of dignity inherit several distinct strands of meaning. This is why users of the word nowadays often talk past one another. The idea of dignity as the foundation for the universal entitlement to human rights represented the coming together after the Second World War of two extremely powerful traditions: Christian theology and Kantian philosophy. Not only is this idea of dignity as an “inner transcendental kernel” behind human rights problematic, Rosen argues, it has drawn attention away from a different, very important, sense of dignity: the right to be treated with dignity, that is, with proper respect.

At the heart of the argument stands the giant figure of Immanuel Kant. Challenging current orthodoxy, Rosen’s interpretation presents Kant as a philosopher whose ethical thought is governed, above all, by the requirement of showing respect toward a kernel of value that each of us carries, indestructibly, within ourselves. Finally, Rosen asks (and answers) a surprisingly puzzling question: why do we still have a duty to treat the dead with dignity if they will not benefit from our respect?

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Perreau-Saussine, “Alasdair MacIntyre”

Mark beat me to the punch about Perreau-Saussine’s new book, so instead I will recommend his superb intellectual biography of Alasdair MacIntyre from a few years ago, which, so far as I know, has not been translated.  That ought to be rectified immediately.  American readers would appreciate his thoughtful and penetrating remarks — an illuminating take on MacIntyre that is distinctively French in certain ways (I believe, but am not certain, that Pierre Manent was a teacher, or at least a colleague, of Perreau-Saussine, and it seemed to me that one could sense the influence here and there).