Posts tagged: Catholicism

Eastern Orthodoxy as Evidence for Catholic Integralism

I’m in the odd position of being a liberal and an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Eastern Orthodoxy is the least liberal of the strands of Christian thought, and indeed is the Christian Church friendliest to monarchy and a heavy mixing of church and state. In my attempts to engage Catholic integralism as both a Christian and a liberal, I have often reflected on what we might call Orthodox integralism, a view that the state should recognize the truth of the Christian faith as taught by the Orthodox Church, not the Catholic Church, and that the church and state should cooperate, but through national patriarchs rather than the Pope. It’s a different model of church-state governance than the integralist model, but it arguably predates the integralist model by several centuries. It was the Byzantine Emperors who called the original ecumenical councils, not the Roman Pontiffs. Popes in the first millennium seldom had the power they did after the schism and the subsequent Gregorian Reforms, which considerably increased papal power, as the Pope became the leader of an increasingly distinctive Latin Christendom without other historical patriarchal thrones as competing centers of ecclesiastical power. So if Christians really want to mix church and state again, there are different kinds of integration.

On top of this, I now think Catholics integralists must pay some respects to Orthodox integralism, not only because of the Orthodox model’s prominence in Church tradition, but because Catholics, including integralists, tend to think that the Orthodox have valid sacraments, especially a true Eucharist and valid confession. Orthodox priests are validly ordained, even if the orders are not “licit” because Orthodox priests are not in submission to the Pope (and indeed, tend to regard the Pope as a heresiarch). In contrast to Protestants, then, Catholics think the Orthodox have the means of grace.

Here’s a novel implication of the Catholic integralist position: when Orthodox mix church and state, they are capable of establishing a “graced” nation-state, even if the mixture of church and state is sub-optimal from a Catholic point of view. Remember that a key feature of integralism is that only a graced state can exercise the coercive power of the state in such a way as to help a society recognize the content of the natural moral law, which should help to stabilize such a regime based on an ongoing agreement about what the natural law requires.

This suggests that we can evaluate the integralist prediction that graced states more effectively coordinate (impose?) agreement on a Christian moral code than liberal states by looking at the history of Orthodox integralist regimes, the prime case being Russia, but also Greece, Romania, etc. Now, it is critical to remember that the Soviets ruthlessly oppressed and murdered Orthodox Christians for decades, so they are a Church still reemerging from one of the most monstrous captivities in the history of Christianity. But it is notable that people in Orthodox countries are often more socially conservative, and so more in line with natural law as integralists see it, than people in Roman Catholic countries, and in some ways prouder of it. Russia is an integralist state. It prioritizes the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin is a member and has used state funds to build tens of thousands of churches and monasteries and has supported a massive growth in the number of Orthodox seminaries and priests. Indeed, he is arguably one of the most successful integralist rulers in history. He is a bloody, murderous dictator, but so was Justinian and most of the Byzantine Emperors that Church tradition sometimes lauds.

So I think the Catholic integralist must say that the Russian state is a partially graced state. It is imperfectly graced because it is not in submission to the Pope, but it is graced because the Russian Orthodox Church has valid sacraments, and is united with the Russian state in a way that American Catholic integralists can only dream of.

This suggests to me that the “successes” of Orthodox states in maintaining traditional Christian moral views on social issues should be seen as partial evidence in favor of integralism. Orthodox integralist states are highly imperfect, but they are graced all the same, and so we can get a sense for how integralism might work by looking at those states.

Perhaps, then, Catholic integralists should look upon the Putin regime with some fondness, and even tout its religious successes.

Does this make Catholic integralism more or less plausible? I’ll let you decide.

Assess Common Good Constitutionalism With One Question: What Happens to Dissenters?

One of the remarkable things about Adrian Vermeule is that when he speaks, people listen. They even when, perhaps especially when, he shocks the moral conscience of his reader by rejecting traditional liberal pieties about the purpose of government. I endorse most of those liberal pieties, but liberals cannot approach those who dissent with mockery and scorn, which I’m seeing all over Twitter. So here I’d like to try to provide a sober assessment of Vermeule’s alternative to conservative originalism, common good constitutionalism (CGC). [I’ve assessed integralism here and here and here and here and here and here.]

1. What is Common Good Constitutionalism? What Makes It Unique?

Common good constitutionalism holds, roughly, that the constitution of the United States should be read such that it permits and even requires the state to promote the values emphasized by Catholic social thought, though in the article Vermuele does not put it this way. CGC is a kind of supra-Catholic integralism [where integralism can be understood as the view that the state is to promote the common good as understood by the Catholic Church and in tandem with the Catholic Church]. CGC leaves the content of the common good a bit more open than integralism does, but CGC is clearly meant to pave the way for integralism.

CGC is simple. It combines a substantive Catholic conception of the common good, a political perfectionist principle that society should be organized so as to promote the common good, and a principle of constitutional interpretation. The interpretive principle is that the constitution should be reinterpreted so as to gradually conform the state to promote the common good, that is, to become a kind of perfectionist state.

Many on the left adopt a left-wing version of CGC, where the common good is given by, say, the moral system advanced by John Stuart Mill, which prizes autonomy and collective flourishing. There are plenty of left-wing CG constitutionalists; they just don’t think of themselves in this way. Where Vermeule is unique is in boldly claiming that Catholicism provides the best account of the common good.

2. What Happens to Dissenters Under Common Good Constitutionalism?

To assess CGC, we must first ask what happens to people who reasonably disagree with the account of the common good that Vermeule endorses. It is unclear how dissenters will be prevented from disrupting the common good constitution, though Vermeule does endorse some pretty dramatic means of establishing Catholic integralism. And you can see similar ideas in the piece. Vermeule wants to co-opt the power of the administrative state to serve the common good rather than limiting that power. So he is prepared to use rather heavy-handed means to establish the common good, which presumably required the suppression of dissenting voices where necessary to ensure that the state can successfully promote the common good. This includes, I think, considerable restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and most importantly on freedom of religion. Any religious or secular organization that has an opposing view of the common good, and is a genuine threat to state power must be monitored and controlled before it can metastasize.

Vermeule does not address the treatment of dissenters in the piece. But once we ask the question, we can challenge CGC with what I shall call the dissenter trilemma. 

3. The Dissenter Trilemma

Catholic integralist states were prepared to use severe legal means to preserve the common good, from fines and imprisonment, to execution, and even burning heretics alive. In a way, this is all rather cooly rational. The human good is on the line, perhaps even the eternal good, and so threats to the good must be contained however possible. To be fair to Vermeule, however, he would surely use the minimum amount of harm necessary to protect the common good, and he obviously thinks that there are some ways of protecting the common good that are intrinsically evil.

For this reason, I will assume that Vermeule adopts a limiting principle that forbids certain methods of securing the common good even if those methods were known to succeed. Vermeule will not permit the killing of the innocent to realize the common good, or any means that requires people to sin.

The dissenter trilemma arises when we ask what the limiting principle is. The first question is this: is the limiting principle is adequately just? That is, does the principle forbid means of realizing the common good that the vast majority of reflective persons agree are unjust? For instance, does the limiting principle permit burning heretics alive? It is our settled considered judgment that no one should be burned alive for any reason. Similarly, I think nearly everyone, including theologically orthodox Catholic intellectuals, will think that executing people for heresy is unjust.

The second question follows from the first: assuming the limiting principle is adequately just, what relationship does it bear to the common good? In particular, is the limiting principle an external constraint on the common good or a proper part of it?

This leaves us with three options.

A. The limiting principle is inadequately just.

B. The (adequately just) limiting principle is external to the common good – an independent moral principle that limits how the common good may be pursued.

C. The (adequately just) limiting principle is internal to the common good – the common good fails to be the common good when the principle is violated.

Here are the problems with each horn of the trilemma.

On (A). If the limiting principle permits extreme acts of violence like burning heretics alive, then CGC will violate very deep considered judgments about justice. It seems unjust to imprison or execute people who dissent from the common good, even if the dissenters may lead others into deep moral confusion. This is a severe demerit for CGC, and is probably sufficient reason all by itself to reject CGC. Perhaps a few integralists are willing to take extreme measures, but the vast majority of people who might adopt CGC will be unsympathetic, to put it mildly.

On (B). If the limiting principle is adequately just, but operates as a constraint on the common good, as a principle of respect for rights might, then we don’t really have CGC. We have a common good + rights constitutionalism. But the whole point of CGC is that the common good is the master normative concept for how the constitution should be interpreted and applied. If we include an additional principle, we’ve violated the spirit of CGC.

On (C). If the limiting principle is adequately just and does not constrain the common good, then it must be internal to the common good, specifically by helping to determine what counts as the common good. If that is correct, we don’t know what CGC comes to because the proper understanding of the common good involves an appeal to a deeper principle. My hunch is that the limiting principle must appeal to the dignity of the human person. For instance, a society does not realize the common good if it sacrifices the one for the many because the individual has God-given dignity. And indeed, I think this is how modern Catholic theologians often think about how the dignity of the person and the common good are related: respect for the dignity of the person is a proper part of the common good.

But now one wants to know whether the dignity of the person grounds other rights. Contra Vermeule, most Catholic theologians think the common good requires respect for a robust right of religious freedom, including for baptized persons. In that case, reading the constitution so as to allow for violations of religious freedom would mean that the constitution can no longer be understood as advancing the common good, because respecting the right of religious freedom is part of the common good.

And unhappily for Vermeule, we’re now engaged in a thoroughly modern rights discourse that he wants to supplant.

4. Resisting the Dissenter Trilemma and the Originalist’s Reply

The best way out of the dissenter trilemma, in my view, is to adopts a theory of rights that includes a right to, say, nutrition and basic healthcare, but not a right to choose one’s own religion or to be free from state interference if one fails to contribute to the common good in other respects. This will involve an appeal to a theory of personal virtue, but in Catholic social thought, you can’t formulate a complete theory of virtue for the individual without attending to the person’s social context and the good of the community as a whole. Unfortunately, that means the best way out of the dissenter trilemma is to formulate a theory of rights by appealing to … the common good.

But now we have a difficult circularity to resolve, and I don’t know how Vermeule can resolve it. That’s not to say there’s no resolution; I’m sure Catholic theologians have tons of stuff on how the common good and rights are compatible and flesh out each others’ ambiguities. But I don’t know the tradition well enough to guess where Vermeule would fall. But I suspect this will be tricky business for him because most Catholics who theorize on the matter think the dignity of the person entails rights that Vermeule rejects.

In light of all this, here’s how originalists should respond to Vermeule. Yes, the common good is important, but the dignity of the person is a proper part of the common good, and the dignity of the person grounds extensive rights against state interference. The goal of originalism is to read the constitution in such a way as to limit government to protect those extensive basic rights. In this way originalism is a kind of common good constitutionalism because it protects proper parts of the common good: basic natural rights.

 

 

Is Integralism Unreasonable? Yes. Should Integralists Care? Well …

Micah Schwartzman and Jocelyn Wilson’s recent article on the unreasonableness of integralism led to much integralist criticism on Twitter, and even criticism from non-integralist Catholic conservatives. It’s important to recognize that Schwartzman and Wilson expressly state that they’re not trying to engage integralists on their own terms, but to use integralism as the paradigmatic case of an unreasonable doctrine in the Rawlsian sense.

In this post, I want to address whether integralists should care if they’re reasonable. I think there are some ways in which they should care, but it takes some effort to demonstrate. Let’s begin by quickly reviewing the Rawlsian account of reasonableness and asking whether integralists satisfy it.

I. Reasonableness

Very roughly, a person is reasonable in Rawls’s sense when they meet two conditions: (1) They are prepared to propose reciprocal terms of social cooperation, ones that can be endorsed by different worldviews and perspectives, and (2) they recognize the fact of reasonable pluralism, meaning they believe that the free exercise of practical reason leads naturally to disagreement about many important matters. In traditional political liberalism, disagreement primarily concerns the good rather than justice (though I argue in Must Politics Be War? that dissensus about justice runs just as deep).

II. Integralists are Unreasonable

Integralists deny both conditions. They are not prepared to offer mutually endorseable legal and political proposals because their first goal is to prose true, authentically good forms of social cooperation. Second, integralists seem to deny that the free use practical reason leads to dissensus, but rather that sin leads to disagreement and that it can be limited if practical reason is exposed to God’s grace in an integralist regime. So, Schwartzman and Wilson are correct. The paper succeeds on its own term.

III. But They Probably Shouldn’t Care

Now, should integralists care whether they are reasonable in the Rawlsian sense? The most straightforward answer is no, they shouldn’t. Why? Because integralists have a different conception of the person than Rawlsians do. Rawlsians draw their conception of the person from liberal democratic practice, and expressly refuse to go outside of it for the purposes of political philosophy, but integralists are trying to determine whether liberal democracy is a good idea in the most ultimate sense, and they think not. So in one way, the Rawlsian approach to personhood is a total non-starter for integralists. The two conceptions of the persons we not developed to serve they same purpose. It’s not even obvious that their conceptions of the persons are conceptions of the same concept.

Moreover, Rawls’s conception of the person (really, his conception of the citizen) holds that we have two moral powers – to form and pursue a conception of the good, and to develop and act upon our sense of justice. But integralists arguably think that persons have one ultimate moral power – to pursue the good and spurn evil (as Aquinas says in ST IaIIae 94, 2). There’s no separate faculty for motivating just action. Just action is wholly subsumed under our pursuit of our good. Rawlsians, in contrast, have a complex story about how we reach congruence between our two fundamental moral drives (actually, they have two, maybe three stories).

In this way, Rawlsians have a kind of “two wills” or “two affections” theory of practical reason, which is actually not exclusively modern, but has antecedents in Anselm (for two wills) and Scotus (for two affections).

For Rawlsians, then, our sense of justice is a fundamental part of practical reasoning. We can take the perspective of justice, understood in terms of fairness or reciprocity, and reason and act from it, and then we can ask a separate question about whether the perspective of justice can be reconciled with the perspective of the good. That’s not going to make much sense for the integralist.

IV. Or Should They?

But let’s do something Rawlsians don’t want to do. Let’s ask whether a two wills theory is true. If one can defend a two wills theory on metaphysical grounds, that would engage integralists on their own terms. And then they’d need to care about reasonableness, especially if the arguments are made from within the framework of Catholic Christianity.

I’m working on two papers right now that do just that, but it’s hard work.

Integralist Ideal Theory and Non-Ideal Theory

Political philosophers have been discussing the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in earnest for about ten years. But they’ve tended to apply the debate to liberal and socialist theories of justice and legitimacy. What happens when we try to apply some of this literature to the new Catholic integralism?

There are lots of ways to distinguish between ideal and non-ideal theory. Here’s a rough and ready way to make the distinction for integralism. Integralist ideal theory is an account of how an integralist order will work once established, and when conditions are favorable, including people’s willingness to comply with the directives of integralist institutions (but not Rawlsian *full* compliance). Integralist non-ideal theory is an account of how to transition to an integralist order from current conditions, with actors with less inclination towards compliance.

Integralists can draw on historical integralist models for ideal theory to show how it might work today. At the very least, integralists can say that integralist regimes have existed, which is more than what can be said for most ideals in political philosophy. However, integralist non-ideal theory is more difficult because few societies have become integralist in recent memory (unless you count Russia, since Orthodoxy is pretty similar to Catholicism). In particular, no liberal democratic order has ever become integralist, and so we have little idea how to make the transition work. Vermeule has speculated, but the real theoretical work hasn’t yet begun.

Integralism supposes a strong distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory because the integralist ideal is pretty far from where we are. If your ideal is pretty close to where we are now, as it is in some forms of conservatism, the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction isn’t very important. But integralism, as its proponents know well, is not really a branch of conservatism.*

And, indeed, I think Vermuele’s exchange with Deneen in this discussion at Notre Dame shows that Vermeule is supposing a strong ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. When Deneen described integralists as “crazy,” Vermeule responded by asking whether it was crazy to think of integralism as an ideal (if I recall correctly).

Why does it matter that integralism involves a strong ideal/non-ideal theory distinction? Because it helps us to understand how to justify or refute integralism. The case for integralism will involve two broad parts. The first part is to show that integralism is an ideal, in terms of the good, justice, and its capacity to stabilize itself. The second part is to show that we can get to integralism from where we are, because if we can’t, that casts doubt on integralism as an ideal (radical socialists like G. A. Cohen can deny this connection between an ideal and its feasibility, but I think integralists cannot). We can also classify criticisms of integralism in terms of whether they target integralist ideal theory or integralist non-ideal theory. I think Deneen’s concerns, for instance, are primarily about integralist non-ideal theory.

But for now, my aim is simply to properly carve up the conceptual territory for assessing integralism. And I think my point here isn’t too controversial and will hopefully prove helpful for future discussion.

UPDATE: Vermuele has informed me that Catholic political theory has accepted a version of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction for some time, but under the description of “thesis” and “hypothesis.”

So, looks like my claim in this post is actually super obvious.

*Well, strictly speaking, I would say integralism is metaphysically conservative but epistemologically moderate; metaphysically conservative because of how integralism conceives of the place of humans in the cosmic order, its attitudes towards hierarchy, etc., but epistemologically moderate because it supposes we can identify a political ideal for us that it is pretty distant from our own circumstances, though not so distant that it would qualify as epistemologically radical, like libertarianism, or most radically, communism.