Author: SDG

Elections, Part 6: The Zippy Argument

Continued from Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

UPDATED: Part 6 comments link (page 4) (TypePad, this is getting old)

SDG here (not Jimmy).

In my last couple of installments, I’ve argued for the moral legitimacy of voting for the candidate you regard as the least problematic viable candidate. Given two viable candidates X and Y, to believe that the common good would be better served by a Y administration than an X administration more or less entails hoping that Y wins rather than X, which in turn more or less entails hoping that other voters like oneself who share the preference for Y over X (“Y-friendlies”) actually vote for Y in greater numbers than those on the other side who prefer X vote for X. And what we hope to see others like ourselves do, we ought to do ourselves.

I have also argued that an individual vote for candidate Y can always be seen as contributing something worthwhile, not only if one lives in a toss-up state, but even if one lives in a solidly Y-friendly or even X-friendly state. An election is not entirely a threshold event; the popular vote and the margin of victory does matter insofar as it may contribute to a sense of mandate or realignment around a candidate’s agenda. This is not to deny that there might also be good to be pursued voting for a third-party candidate; my case is that both voting quixotic and voting pragmatic (by, um, different voters of course) may be seen as morally licit ways of attempting to do good.

This point of view has been vigorously resisted by some, including Mark Shea and Zippy Catholic. Mark and Zippy are both — in the sense previously defined — “McCain-friendly,” not meaning that they like McCain at all, but that they prefer him to Obama. Mark has said that he would vote for McCain if he thought there were proportionate reason to do so, and Zippy has said that if one could push a button and make McCain president by fiat, as opposed to casting a negligible vote for him, it would be legitimate to do so.

However, Mark and Zippy argue that the actual negligible impact of any one vote does not constitute a proportionate reason to cast a vote for a candidate who supports direct killing of the innocent, as McCain supports embryonic stem-cell research.

Note, incidentally, that even if McCain were to have a Damascus-road experience on ESCR, Mark and Zippy might still be obliged to oppose him, on the grounds that McCain’s opposition to abortion allows for exceptions for rape and incest, which is still killing the innocent. And even if he changed his mind on that, they might still have to oppose him if he allowed for abortion only to save the life of the mother, but failed to differentiate between direct and indirect abortion, since Catholic moral theology generally considers direct abortion to be killing the innocent.

For those refuse to vote for any candidate who fails to condemn all killing of the innocent, there is no major-party candidate since Roe v. Wade, including Ronald Reagan, they could have supported. I’m not sure they could even vote for Chuck Baldwin (I don’t know whether Baldwin distinguishes direct abortion from indirect).

The issue is further complicated by the fact that Mark and Zippy are not merely voting quixotic, but campaigning quixotic — actively discouraging voters from choosing either major-party ticket, encouraging them to vote quixotic instead. Here their potential contribution to the outcome becomes much harder to calculate. Mark’s blog is widely read; his ideas reach tens of thousands of readers, and ripple out to innumerable others. There is no way to know how many votes next week could be affected by quixotic advocacy from Mark and others like him. In principle, it is not impossible that such advocacy could play a significant role in undercutting support for McCain and clearing the way for an Obama victory.

That said, if Mark and Zippy believe that voting for either of the major-party candidates is morally unjustified by any proportionate reason, it may be reasonable for them to seek to discourage their fellow Catholics from engaging in unjustified behavior, however inconvenient the consequences may be. The fundamental question is: Are their concerns warranted? Is their reasoning sound? Does voting for a candidate who supports any form of killing the innocent involve remote material cooperation in evil in a way or to a degree disproportionate to the good of trying to defeat an even worse candidate?

Continue reading “Elections, Part 6: The Zippy Argument”

Election novena

I agree with Mark Shea in echoing Fr. John Corapi’s call for nine days of prayer, from Monday, October 27 through Tuesday, November 4.

If you’d like a set prayer for the novena, Fr. Corapi has one for you.

I would also humbly recommend fasting, and the rosary.

Note: Please, for this one post, absolutely no electioneering, partisan or otherwise divisive comments in the combox. Thank you!

Elections, Part 5: Thresholds, fuzziness and realignments

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

UPDATE: new comments link for Part 5 (TypePad says they’re working on this!)

New comments link for Part 4 (TypePad says they’re working on this!)

SDG here (not Jimmy) with more thoughts on voting.

In Part 4 I proposed what I called the “intuitive and obvious” claim that “you vote for the candidate you hope to see win.” The first point in need of further consideration is what is meant by “the candidate you hope to see win.”

Whatever the merits of voting any way at all, in the end any election will produce a winner whose administration will have practical implications for the common good. Such implications, it should be noted, are broad-based, extending not only to the implementation or non-implementation of specific policy initiatives, but also to such effects as public advocacy of or opposition to key principles on public discourse and cultural sensibilities, the stamp of a candidate’s administration on the party and the nation, and of course the long-term effects of a candidate’s judicial nominees.

Let’s suppose two major-party candidates X and Y. Candidate X strongly supports several intrinsically immoral policies — virtually every such policy on the market, let’s suppose — while candidate Y is largely opposed to most of them, though with various qualifying asterisks and footnotes. (For example, let’s suppose that Y favors embryonic stem-cell research, though not as robustly as X, and while Y is anti-abortion he allows loopholes that may not be compatible with Catholic teaching, and so forth. What? It’s a thought experiment.)

Candidate X is highly likely to vigorously reinforce and strengthen the culture of death in various ways: legislative support for intrinsically evil policies, increased public funding for abortion, evil-activist justices to the Supreme Court as well as lower-level judges, and so forth.

In virtually all of these respects, we recognize that candidate Y is highly likely to be an improvement on candidate X, even if Y still has significant problems. Y will oppose most intrinsically immoral policies, though he may advance some, if not to the extent that X would. It seems likely that Y’s judicial nominees would be an improvement upon X’s, though far from certain that they would be particularly good. The country would be spared the corrosive cultural effects of X’s public advocacy of intrinsic evils.

Of course X would accomplish some good things in office; so presumably would Y, or so would any candidate. It could even be that the implications of a victory for X would include some positive effects on the very issues where Y advocates intrinsically immoral policies. Almost any catastrophe will include some good effects. It doesn’t change the fact that a victory for X is a catastrophe, and that Y would be significantly preferable.

At this point it seems fairly clear that we may say we do not want to see X win — that, of the two possible outcomes, an X administration would be the more undesirable outcome for the common good. Thus it would seem that, of the two possible outcomes, a Y administration is the preferred outcome.

Yet if candidate Y supports even one intrinsically evil policy, can we speak of “hoping” that he wins? Is that “hoping” for evil?

In almost any race there are assorted candidates flying well below the radar — Chuck Baldwin, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney. If we could, many of us would pick one of these marginal or quixotic candidates to send to the White House. Many do in fact cast votes for such candidates, or if necessary even write in the candidates of their choice. Why shouldn’t the rest of us follow suit? Why settle for the lesser of two evils if there is a better choice?

Continue reading “Elections, Part 5: Thresholds, fuzziness and realignments”

What reduces abortions?

The usual hat tip to AmP for highlighting the USCCB website’s brief but important essay by Richard M. Doerflinger, Associate Director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. bishops:

What Reduces Abortions?

Sometimes election years produce more policy myths than good ideas. This year one myth is about abortion. It goes like this: The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision is here to stay, and that’s fine because laws against abortion don’t reduce abortions much anyway. Rather, “support for women and families” will greatly reduce abortions, without changing the law or continuing a “divisive” abortion debate. …

Various false claims are used to bolster this myth. It is said that over three-quarters of women having abortions cite expense as the most important factor in their decision. Actually the figure is less than one-fourth, 23%. It is said that abortion rates declined dramatically (30%) during the Clinton years, but the decline stopped under the ostensibly pro-life Bush administration. Actually the abortion rate has dropped 30% from 1981 to 2005; the decline started 12 years before Clinton took office, and has continued fairly steadily to the present day.

Doerflinger points out that current laws restricting abortion, though inadequate, are effective:

In 1980 the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde amendment, and federally funded abortions went from 300,000 a year to nearly zero. With its decisions in Webster (1989) and Casey (1992), the Court began to uphold other abortion laws previously invalidated under Roe. States passed hundreds of modest but effective laws: bans on use of public funds and facilities; informed consent laws; parental involvement when minors seek abortion; etc. Dr. Michael New’s rigorous research has shown that these laws significantly reduce abortions.

Obama’s stated #1 priority would put an end to all this:

By contrast, a pending federal “Freedom of Choice Act” (FOCA) would knock down current laws reducing abortions, and require public programs for pregnant women to fund abortion. No one supporting that bill can claim to favor reducing abortions.

Doerflinger’s conclusion:

Many women are pressured toward abortion, and they need our help. The pressures are partly, but only partly, economic in nature. Women are influenced by husbands, boyfriends, parents and friends, and by a culture and legal system that tells them the child they carry has no rights and is of no consequence. Law cannot solve all problems, but it can tell us which solutions are unacceptable – and today Roe still teaches that killing the unborn child is an acceptable solution, even a “right.” Without ever forgetting the need to support pregnant women and their families, that tragic and unjust error must be corrected if we are to build a society that respects all human life.

GET THE STORY.

To Kmiec, Cafardi, Kaveny et al: Are you listening? At all?

To my quxotic voting pro-life friends: Two unassailable truths to bear in mind.

1. John McCain does not deserve your vote.

2. If Obama loses — to anyone — it will be a victory for life.

The comments are back… sort of

SDG here with an administrative blog note. Some of y’all noticed that a bunch of the comments in the "Elections, Voting and Morality, Part 4" combox seemed to disappear mysteriously yesterday.

Well, it turns out that they were still there… but you couldn’t get to them, because TypePad changed how the combox handles long lists of posts. There is now a 50-comment limit per page, and to see additional comments you have to click "Next / Previous" links at the bottom of the combox. (But you couldn’t see the "Next / Previous" links before either, because the blog needed template updates to display them.)

You can also just go directly to the url for the last page in the combox. For example, the "Elections, Voting and Morality, Part 4" combox currently ends here. (Don’t be fooled by the late-breaking "Hegelian Mambo" reference — this is the current end of the combox!)

In which Mark Shea and SDG try to clarify

SDG here with two clarifications, one from me and one from Mark Shea.

In a blog post entitled "Steve Greydanus takes Exception to my Choice to Go Third Party," Mark Shea writes:

I don’t believe I’ve ever said that voting for McCain would be a mortal sin. If I somehow inadvertently gave that impression (as I have somehow managed to give people the impression I’m not voting despite my repeated statements to the contrary), then please know I think no such thing. What you are hearing here is how I am doing the moral calculus on my own voting. Since mortal sin requires not just grave matter but freedom and knowledge (which are unknowable to me in the case of other people) I make no judgement here as I make no judgement in other matters. I can’t see a way to find a proportional justification for voting for McCain and I say so. But I freely grant that others might see what I cannot.

Here is my clarification: I haven’t taken exception to Mark’s "choice to go third party," or anyone else’s. On the contrary, I have said over and over that voting third party is within the scope of legitimate prudential judgment.

My view is that both voting pragmatic (in this election for McCain) and voting quixotic (for some third-party candidate) are in principle valid ways of seeking to accomplish good. This is in contrast to voting for Obama, which I do not believe is a valid way of seeking to accomplish good in this election.

What I took exception to was what I took to be Mark’s express opinion that voting for McCain is objectively wrong. But does Mark acknowledge saying this?

Mark slices the pie at a different angle by saying that he doesn’t believe he’s said that "voting for McCain would be a mortal sin." "Mortal sin" is not the same as "objectively wrong," since, as Mark himself notes, "mortal sin requires not just grave matter but freedom and knowledge," which I take it for granted that Mark doesn’t judge.

In fact, I explicitly said so all the way back in my initial post on the subject:

Some caveats here are necessary. In leaning toward such views, Mark naturally means to express an opinion, not a definitive fact. It is an opinion about objective right and wrong, but still an opinion, and Mark would certainly acknowledge that it is an area of permissible dispute, and in principle he could be wrong. Second, I take it for granted that Mark makes no judgment about the culpability of McCain advocates, any more than either he or I judges Kmiec’s culpability for his Obama advocacy. Third, Mark clearly doesn’t put McCain advocacy on a par with Obama advocacy, either regarding plausibility or degree of evil. Still, it does seem that Mark feels or has felt that there are two unequal but objectively wrong choices — voting for either of the two major candidates — and only one morally legitimate course, not voting for either one.

So the question is not "mortal sin," but objective wrongness.

Mark goes on to say, "I can’t see a way to find a proportional justification for voting for McCain and I say so. But I freely grant that others might see what I cannot."

The first sentence seems to entail that, in fact, Mark does believe that voting for McCain is objectively wrong. The second sentence doesn’t deny this belief; rather, Mark simply acknowledges the possibility that he could be wrong in this opinion, as I already noted I assumed from the outset.

Mark may be tentative and humble about his opinion that voting for McCain is objectively wrong, but it still seems to be his opinion; and it is to that opinion — not Mark’s actual vote — that I take exception, and to which this series of posts is addressed.

P.S. This post is not an invitation to regurgitate established talking points without contributing to the discussion. (Those of you to whom I am, and am not, talking know who you are.) Thank you.

Biden flipping on same-sex marriage?

Catholic Exchange reports that Biden said yesterday "that if I lived in California, I would vote against Proposition 8," i.e., he would vote against defining marriage in California to be "between a man and a woman." (Hat tip: Ignatius Insight.)

This appears to conflict with his claims in the VP debate with Sarah Palin that "neither Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage." CE notes that Bill Dohonue has pointed out the conflict between Biden’s apparent opposition to defining marriage to be between a man and a woman and the teaching of Pope Benedict in Sacramentum Caritatis (quoted here at greater length, emphasis mine):

Worship pleasing to God can never be a purely private matter, without consequences for our relationships with others: it demands a public witness to our faith. Evidently, this is true for all the baptized, yet it is especially incumbent upon those who, by virtue of their social or political position, must make decisions regarding fundamental values, such as respect for human life, its defence from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms (230). These values are not negotiable. Consequently, Catholic politicians and legislators, conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound, on the basis of a properly formed conscience, to introduce and support laws inspired by values grounded in human nature (231).

Who gets to say what is Catholic? Part 2

Yesterday I wrote that Catholic Democrats (or Catholocrats) like Biden and Pelosi were essentially at war with the bishops — a “war of Who Gets to Say What Catholicism Is,” in which the aim is to relativize Catholic teaching (aka Pope John Paul Catholicism) as mere one Catholicism among many (“the Catholicism I grew up with” being another variety, also known as Pope John XXIII Catholicism).

This war is of course also being waged by such “Catholic” groups as “Catholics United” and “Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good,” both of whom came under fire last week by tireless and heroic Archbishop Chaput of Denver in a statement in which he also called Obama “the most commited ‘abortion-rights’ presidential candidate … since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973.”

Yesterday’s reports that multi-billionaire investor and political activist George Soros is a major source of funding to dissenting “Catholic” groups including Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good pose a potential new wrinkle of sorts in this war.

Efforts to subvert Catholic identity from within, whether from dissenting theologians like Hans Kung and Charles Curran or from lay groups like Voice of the Faithful, are bad enough.

But groups like “Catholics” United and “Catholics” in Alliance for the Common Good don’t even bother with that. They aren’t concerned with the Church — they’re out to change society, in part by fabricating a new definition of “Catholic” identity as free as possible from actual Church entanglements.

The suggestion that efforts to subvert Catholic identity are being funded from outside the Church by someone like Soros, a multi-billionaire promoter of global abortion, GLBT activism, euthanasia, is, to put it mildly, deeply troubling.

Incidentally, “Catholics” United has released a candidate comparison guide comparing Obama and McCain. Here is how CU describes the candidates’ views on life issues:

Obama: Seeks “common ground” efforts to reduce abortions by increasing education, health care, economic supports for women, children and families. Supports legal abortion and using taxpayer funds for embryonic stell cell research. Supports the death penalty.

McCain: Believes making abortion illegal is the best way to address the abortion issue. Supports legal abortion in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is in danger. Supports using taxpayer funds for embryonic stem cell research. Supports the death penalty.

Hm. Does anything, I don’t know, stand out to you about that?

No mention of Obama’s support for FOCA or partial-birth abortion, for “clone and kill,” or other aspects of Obama’s abortion extremism. No mention of euthanasia. No mention of McCain’s opposition to creating new embryos for ESCR, which Obama supports.

This is the kind of disinformation being circulated as a “Catholic” take on the candidates… reportedly, on Soros’s nickel.

The war of Who Gets to Say What is Catholic is heating up. The bishops are speaking out, and that’s good. The other side can probably outspend them, though, and they’ve got the sympathetic media on their side.

Biden pits John XXIII against John Paul II

It looks like it’s more or less official: The Catholic pro-choice Democrats are at war the US bishops.

The latest escalation: Joe Biden seeks to claim Pope John XXIII as a sort of mascot or icon of liberal pro-choice Catholocrat ideology over against Pope John Paul II. (Added: Okay, the "escalation" is a media artifact in that the interview is six months old. That’s what I get for attributing a master plan to Biden…)

Note the tacit distinction between "the Catholicism that I was raised in" (i.e., "John XXIII Catholicism") and what Biden implicitly suggests is the different Catholicism advocated by "Pope John Paul" (II, presumably) — and by extension by the U.S. bishops in recent months.

I was raised as a Catholic, I’m a practicing Catholic, and I’m totally at home with the Catholicism that I was raised in and this whole culture of social responsibility, reaction to abuse of power, the whole notion that there is collective civic responsibility. It’s the Catholic consciousness that I’m totally comfortable with. … To sum it up, as a Catholic, I’m a John XXIII guy, I’m not a Pope John Paul guy.

By now, of course, everyone knows that the first salvo in this war was fired by Nancy Pelosi in that fateful Meet the Press during the DNC convention. Her comments, in which she suggested that the Church’s stance on abortion was a novelty of the last half century and that the doctors of the Church had basically been tied in knots over it for centuries, elicited a series of episcopal corrections and clarifications.

Unfazed, Pelosi fired back attempting to back up her claims, prompting further episcopal responses including a fact sheet summing up the history of Catholic thought on the subject. Eventually Pelosi’s own ordinary, Archbishop Niederauer of San Francisco, issued a statement inviting Pelosi to meet with him — an invitation which she accepted within 24 hours. According to AmP’s ticking clock, that was 45 days ago.

The next campaign began with Biden himself backing up Pelosi in the same forum as her original comments, Meet the Press. Biden has since made subsequent comments the harmony of his views with "Catholic social teaching," etc. More and more bishops have added their voices to the chorus of clear teaching, which has been generally though not totally ignored or distorted by the MSM.

Biden’s latest comments, though, represent a new wrinkle in the war of Who Gets to Say What Catholicism Is.

So the bishops think it’s their job to authentically interpret the deposit of faith? Well, they can say what "John Paul II Catholicism" is, maybe. For a "John XXIII guy" like Biden, though, "the Catholicism that [he] was raised in" is something he’s "totally comfortable with"… whatever today’s JP2 bishops may say.

Biden also reiterates the now familiar talking points — "my church has wrestled with this for 2,000 years," yadda yadda — while floating a new claim: that "throughout the church’s history, we’ve argued between whether or not it is wrong in every circumstance and the degree of wrong" … and that "up until Pius IX, there were times
when we said, ‘Look, there are circumstances in which it’s wrong but it is not damnation," and only as of "Pius IX in the 1860s" that everything was written in stone.

How John XXIII, 100 years after Pius IX, fits into Biden’s timeline is not entirely clear to me. Is John XXIII supposed to have missed the memo from Pius IX? Or is Biden the one who missed a memo?

By now, of course, we can be pretty sure that there will be responses from bishops (unless it seems like old news), for the MSM to ignore and distort, while giving the Catholocrats headlines like "Biden balances his faith with social responsibility" (I bet you didn’t know faith needed balancing with social responsibility, did you?).

The Catholicrats are escalating. Where will the war go from here?

(Hat tip: Whispers by way of AmP.)