Liberals, Conservatives, The Pope, and "Moral Consistency"

There’s been a spate of articles in the press since John Paul’s death of the form “Conservatives say they like and admire the pope, but look they disagree with him on issue x, y, or z” (For examples see here and here. Maybe there have been pieces where conservatives made a similar charge against liberals, but I haven’t seen any).

Here’s the thing, though. Unless one takes the pope to be some kind of infallible moral oracle (something that Catholics are not obliged to believe, much less the rest of us), it is perfectly consistent to a) respect and admire John Paul and b) disagree with him on some issues.

For instance, has someone who admires John Paul’s stance on abortion but disagrees with him about the death penalty or the Iraq war somehow been caught in a fatal contradiction? As it happens, I more or less agreed with the late pontiff on all three, but I can certainly understand how others might come to different conclusions. At the very least it’s not obvious that it’s inconsistent to be anti-abortion and pro-death penalty, or anti-Iraq war and pro-choice, etc.

All of these positions rest on what their adherents take to be morally significant distinctions (e.g. killing unborn children vs. executing convicted murderers or killing innocent civilians vs. the destruction of “potential” persons). Many of the arguments about consistency don’t take account of the fact that superficially similar acts can be morally evaluated in importantly different ways.

Wouldn’t we, for example, judge a starving man who steals a loaf of bread differently from a rich tycoon who steals from his employees’ pension fund, even though both are acts of stealing? Are we being inconsistent if we condemn one but not the other? Consistency requires treating like cases alike, but it doesn’t specify which are the relevant characteristics for determining what are genuinely like cases.