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I missed this the first time I read this interview with Ralph Nader in the American Conservative, but it was pointed out by Bill Samuel at his “seamless garment” weblog:

PB: Let me move to the social issues. Would you have voted against or in favor of the ban on partial-birth abortion?

RN: I believe in choice. I don’t think government should tell women to have children or not to have children. I am also against feticide. If doctors think it is a fetus, that should be banned. It is a medical decision.

What does Ralph mean by “feticide”? A fetus is defined as an unborn human eight weeks after conception. Does this mean he thinks abortion after eight weeks should be banned?

Such scrupulousness in thinking about voting might reasonably be taken to be a sign of a mind with an unbalanced set of priorities. After all, you vote and you hope for the best outcome, right? Or the lesser of two evils. Your vote isn’t even going to make much of a difference anyway!

There’s certainly something to this. As far as public actions go, voting probably holds a fairly low position in terms of its importance in terms of the effect it has on the world around us. The way we treat our spouses or co-workers on a daily basis no doubt has a much greater impact both on ourselves and on the world around us.

I think this concern to avoid cooperating with evil may be a distinctly (or at least predominantly) Christian concern. Christians have always been suspicious of consequentialist ethics and have generally favored a more deontological approach. That is to say, rather than base our actions on the calculation of consequences, Christians have tended to advocate following the moral law and letting the consequences take care of themselves (or, more accurately, letting God take care of the consequences).

One consequence of consequentialism (if you’ll pardon the expression) is to call into question the distinction between acts of commission and acts of omission. In other words, if all we’re concerned about are consequences, or net utility, refraining from some action traditionally deemed evil might actually turn out to be blameworthy.

For example, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are usually justified on the grounds that they brought the war to an end, thus saving many lives and defeating Japanese imperialism. This is a clear-cut case of consequentialist reasoning. However, traditional just war theory is usually thought to forbid such actions because they involve the direct and intentional killing of civilians. So, depending on your ethical stance, the same action turns out to be either morally laudable (indeed, obligatory) or a heinous crime.

What is less frequently pointed out is that just war theory may depend on a robust sense of God’s providence. Notre Dame theologian Fr. Michael Baxter makes this point in the course of a discussion of Christian pacifism:

Most critics of pacifism contend that it is either unrealistic or irresponsible or both. But if one takes this strict understanding of just war theory, then it too can be criticized on similar grounds. Take, for example, the argument advanced by Finnis, Boyle, and Grisez in Nuclear Deterrence, Morality, and Realism…. They argue that deterrence strategy is immoral in that it entails a willingness to take innocent life, or if not, then it entails lying. But, the question arises, if we reject deterrence strategy, what are we supposed to do? Let the Soviet Union conquer the West? In the final chapter of the book, they provide an answer to such questions by offering some “concluding Christian thoughts” including a “profession of faith” in Jesus Christ whose life, death, and resurrection shows to humanity the path of righteousness and true freedom. This path requires Christians to pay many costs, and one of those costs in the context of the nuclear rivalry of the early 1980s is a sacrifice of the notion that the fate of Christianity depends on the future of the Christian West, which must not, they point out, be confused with the kingdom of God. Christians must, in other words, have faith in Divine Providence, which calls them to greater detachment from the Christian West. A similar emphasis on Divine Providence can be found in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor by Pope John Paul II, who argues that one should avoid evil no matter what the consequences, trusting that any and all consequences will be enveloped into God’s mysterious plan. This profound belief in Divine Providence is deeply rooted in Catholic tradition which holds that God is capable of bringing forth good from any kind of horrifying evil.

Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas likes to say that Christians have to get over the notion that it’s our job to make history come out right. That’s God’s job (and, in fact, the decisive victory has already been won in the cross of Christ). Our job is to be obedient to God’s command and leave the consequences up to him.

Of course, this flies in the face of our secular politics. Politicians do not generally (however much they may profess otherwise) take Providence into account when devising military strategy, say. To take God’s sovereignty over history seriously ends up looking like quite a radical stance. It means, at the very least, that we can never “do evil that good may result.”

I’m still not convinced that voting for President Bush or Senator Kerry counts as doing evil that good may come, but I think it’s definitely a position worth taking seriously.

Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli (a wonderful blog, by the way) read the same Crisis piece I linked to earlier and responds:

What is astounding in the excerpt above is its lack of recognition that refusal to vote is NOT inaction, it is action at its very highest. Refusal of moral compromise is the most important action we can take.

I won’t comment on the political state at the moment, nor on my own view of what should and should not be done. However, not voting is rather like refusal to move when blocking the doors of an abortion clilnic. You get yourself thrown in jail, reviled and hated by the media, branded a fanatic, and ultimately probably don’t change even a single mind that day–but that steadfast refusal is a witness to a societal evil so profound that even if you witness accomplishes nothing else it is a testament of the courage that accompanies refusal of moral compromise–it charges the world with a greater good.

On the other hand, “Fr. Jape” at the New Pantagruel has some less kind things to say about the non-voter:

More on the “not voting” malady among committed Christians: What does it portend when a luminary of Evangelicaldom, a former supporter of cultural and political “engagement” among defeatist, self-disenfranchising religious rightists, publicly declares his intention not to vote? The Christian Century reprinted Noll’s declaration of his disengagement, perhaps because the Century’s typical, liberal reader will find a sign of slow progress and hope for the future regarding the housetraining of the once uppity evangelicals. A supposedly “militant” pro-lifer who doesn’t vote against John Kerry obviously isn’t very militant and may in time gather the courage to come out of the closet and cease being a crypto-liberal.

Ouch!

As I quoted below Paul Griffiths says:

[I]n the case of voting (which is also a deal: I vote, as I hope you do, in response to what a candidate advocates and has done), there are also deal breakers, which is to say actions done or positions advocated sufficient to make voting for someone improper, no matter what other good policies that person may advocate and no matter what other good things he or she may have done. …

…You might object to this line of argument by saying that there are no deal breakers in politics, that we have to look at the whole picture and make prudential, calculative judgments about what will, on the whole, be best for the country. On good days, I find this line half persuasive. But it really won’t do: if the two candidates were Hitler and Stalin, would you feel that you had to vote for one of them?

The argument here is clear enough: there are some actions that a candidate has done or proposes to do which make it categorically immoral to vote for him. In the present election, the deal-breakers Griffiths identifies are Kerry’s support of unrestricted abortion on demand and Bush’s launching of a pre-emptive war on grounds that have turned out to be false.

Now, we can dispute whether those are accurate descriptions of the candidates’ positions or actions as well as whether they are bad, or as bad as Griffiths claims. But what I’m interested in at the moment is the concept of a “deal-breaker” itself. How do we decide what policies constitute deal-breakers?

Griffiths’ remark about Hitler and Stalin should not, I think, be taken to imply that Bush and Kerry are comparable to Hitler and Stalin (though there are some who might say so!). Rather his point is to show that there are at least some cases where the candidates’ stances are such clear-cut instances of evil that we intuitively think it would be wrong to vote for either one. Thus, in principle, the notion of a deal-breaker makes sense.

What isn’t so clear, though, is precisely which cases count as deal-breakers. How would we distinguish between those policies which suffice “to make voting for someone improper” and policies which are merely imprudent or ill-advised?

Wow – it’s like this was written just for me:

This is not an article for those who are unabashedly in love with democracy, who look forward to election year with patriotic zeal directed first of all to the nation and second of all to one of the political parties. I write instead for the genuinely dispossessed: for those who feel deep in their bones that the entire political process is a sham; who think that our country, whatever its previous merits, is accelerating in a decades-long slide; who grant that Americans enjoy great blessings, but do so in the midst of self-inflicted moral and spiritual deprivations; who believe that voting for either candidate is merely a decision about the handbasket in which to ride to hell. In short, I write for those who, faced with the prospect of choosing between President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry, are nearly in despair about democracy and who are consequently planning to skip the whole sordid affair rather than soil their consciences.

The author goes on to make some of the same points I made here. For instance:

One of the most distorting errors as regards our perspective on anything is to view it from the wrong angle. We may gain the proper perspective on things political, not by going to Washington, but by taking a journey with the greatest poet, a man who, crushed by politics, turned inward and upward, and created the magnificent Divine Comedy. Dante’s ultimate perspective is revealed, not in the Inferno or the Purgatorio, but in the Paradiso, as he looks back during his climb amid the glories of heaven, and seeing below him the real smallness of earth, smiles:

So with my vision I went traversing …till this globe I saw,

Whereat I smiled, it seemed so poor a thing.

Highly I rate that judgement that doth low

Esteem the world; him do I deem upright

Whose thoughts are fixed on things of greater awe.

Dante does not look at humble earth with a cynical grin but a smile of pity at the ultimately fruitless efforts of mere mortals to redeem a fallen world, especially through the feverish machinations of politics. This was not an abstract smile won through detached philosophical speculation. Born in Florence, Italy, Dante was a prominent White Guelf in the famous political struggle with the Ghibellines. Exiled in 1302, he became a wanderer, settling finally in Ravenna where, divested of all political power and cleansed of all political ambition, he completed his Divine Comedy.

That is the proper perspective on earthly things, especially on political things. It is the view of a pilgrim, of a resident alien in the City of Man whose ultimate allegiance has been transferred to the City of God. The great moment of transformation came at Calvary, where all mere earthly patriotism was crucified, died, and resurrected, and citizenship was transferred to a kingdom not of this world.

For those who are considering not voting or voting for a third-party candidate he says:

For different reasons, both parties and both candidates thus seem unappealing. All too many with whom I have spoken—including my wife!—are either not voting or throwing away their votes on no-win, third-party candidates. To all the politically dispossessed, aliens in their own land, I offer the following consolations and admonitions….

…We shall be judged on how well we acted amid the political imperfections into which we are cast, the very imperfections among which we are called to vote. Voting is a sloppy, ineffective way of setting and resetting the political order, supremely subject to manipulation, flattery, and demagoguery. That is why the partisans of extreme democracy generally avoid it, preferring to use the courts, misuse the legislative process, and abuse executive power. But voting is still the way that we’re called to exercise what political power remains in the hands of ordinary folk, and it’s our duty to use this power as best we can.

Not voting means handing power to those in either political party who make us feel so uncomfortable about voting.

What he doesn’t address, though, is whether there might be particular cases where both candidates take positions that render one unable to vote for either one in good conscience, what Paul Griffiths, in his essay from the Commonweal symposium, called “deal-breakers.” Might there not be cases where abstaining is the only honorable option? Even if we concede (as surely we must) that politics will always be imperfect, does that mean that some situations might not call for conscientous objection? As Griffiths puts it:

A deal is broken if one of the parties to it does something that makes it improper for the other party to continue in it no matter what the ancillary circumstances. If one spouse uses physical violence against another, this breaks the deal of living together: you don’t go on living with someone who hits you on a regular basis, no matter what other virtues they might have. If someone starts screaming insults at you during a conversation, that deal is broken: the conversation is at an end until they’ve calmed down. And in the case of voting (which is also a deal: I vote, as I hope you do, in response to what a candidate advocates and has done), there are also deal breakers, which is to say actions done or positions advocated sufficient to make voting for someone improper, no matter what other good policies that person may advocate and no matter what other good things he or she may have done. …

…You might object to this line of argument by saying that there are no deal breakers in politics, that we have to look at the whole picture and make prudential, calculative judgments about what will, on the whole, be best for the country. On good days, I find this line half persuasive. But it really won’t do: if the two candidates were Hitler and Stalin, would you feel that you had to vote for one of them?

It’s not so clear says former congressman Bob Barr (R-GA).

I have to say, I get nervous at the idea of this guy whispering things in Karl Rove’s ear:

“Any discussion of America and human rights must begin with the recognition that this country was created in a revolutionary period and that the democratic revolution — of which America is but one element — is, by its nature and of necessity, universal,” Ledeen declared. “. . . It is crucial for us to remember that the 18th-century revolutionaries and statesmen who created this country recognized that it is impossible for [democracy] to flourish if it is limited to a small corner of the world. The revolution, in other words, must be exported.”…



…The call for the United States to be at the forefront of a global crusade to spread democracy became one of the defining features of neoconservative ideology, a heady brew of American nationalism and an internationalist crusade for democracy that transcended traditional left-right divisions.



But there is another, less ringing, strain in Ledeen’s thinking. “To be an effective leader, the most prudent method is to ensure that your people are afraid of you,” Ledeen wrote in “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership.” “To instill that fear, you must demonstrate that those who attack you will not survive.”

Ledeen is especially contemptuous of leaders he regards as weak and corrupt, such as Bill Clinton. In a 1999 article in the scholarly journal Society, he warned of dire consequences if Clinton were not impeached. “New leaders with an iron will are required to root out the corruption and either reestablish a virtuous state, or to institute a new one. . .,” he wrote. “If we bask in false security and drop our guard, the rot spreads, corrupting the entire society. Once that happens, only violent and extremely unpleasant methods can bring us back to virtue.”

In a March 2003 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen dismissed worries that the American public would lose heart if there were too many casualties in the then-imminent Iraq war. “All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .,” Ledeen declared. “What we hate is not casualties but losing.”



(via Mark Shea)

One persistent criticism of President Bush is that he has eroded the “wall of separation” between church and state by his attempts to legislate “private” religious views. The most common examples are his limitations on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR), support for measures limiting abortion, and his so-called faith-based initiative offering federal money to religious charities.

Leaving aside the question of constitutional interpretation, what is at work here, it seems to me, is the longstanding liberal suspicion of embodying substantive moral positions in government policy. None of the above mentioned policies need have specifically religious justification. There are secular arguments against ESCR and abortion, as well as secular arguments for providing federal dollars to religious charities that help lift people out of poverty.

Rather, the idea seems to be the government must remain neutral, not just among religions, but among moral positions. To do otherwise is to “legislate morality” and to force one set of views on the entire populace.

This position is rooted in the dream of Enlightenment liberalism to establish a purely procedural means of resolving political disputes. The watchwords here are “reason” and “compromise,” and the aim is that all parties could come to agreement acting simply as rational agents rather than people with substantive commitments to a particular vision of the common good.

The most famous and sophisticated exponent of this view is, of course, John Rawls. To simplify greatly, Rawls contended that, in devising principles of political justice, we have to imagine people coming to agreement without any knowledge of their position in the social order, their concrete interests, or a commitment to any “thick” notion of the good life. Only thus could we be sure that we had principles of justice that were appropriate for all people qua rational beings.

A kind of popular Rawlsianism has infected much of our political debate. To appeal to any substantive view of the good is considered out of bounds since all such positions, it is said, must rest on “faith” rather than on “reason.” John Kerry very clearly articulated this position in the second presidential debate:

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I’m a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can’t do that.

One peculiar aspect of this response is that Sen. Kerry seems to imply that opposition to abortion is a peculiarly Catholic belief (though he was careful not to say whether he shared that belief), whereas he must surely know that many Protestants, Jews, atheists and agnostics also oppose abortion. Nor does he grapple with the many secular arguments against abortion.

Even more fundamentally, however, one can question the whole faith/reason dichotomy. Many critics of Enlightenment liberalism have questioned whether there is a neutral Reason-with-a-capital-“R” that enables us to stand above all particular faith-commitments. For instance, thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that all forms of reasoning are rooted in specific traditions and that there is no Archimedean point from where we can distinguish positions based in “reason” from those based in “faith.” Rationality is always and inevitably an evaluative concept. It can never be self-justifying because it rests on evaluations that are themselves not subject to rational scrutiny, since that would require begging the question of what counts as rational.

But if there is no “neutral” concept of reason, then the Enlightenment liberal’s appeal to “reason” actually masks certain evaluative claims that remain undefended. If we say that the law cannot protect fetal life, then we are making an evaluation, whether explicitly or not, about the value of fetal life. This is just as much a substantive moral judgment as its contrary. The appeal to proceduralism only works because our political traditions already embody certain substantive moral commitments such as the equality of persons. There is no getting around the need to make such commitments.

Ironically, it may be precisely this attempt to embed particular moral positions in the very framework of political debate that accounts in part for the shrillness of our political discourse. If, on the terms of acceptable debate, one position is ruled out from the get go, there will be less incentive for both parties to compromise. Only when the outcome is up for grabs will compromise and moderation begin to make sense.

This is not to defend all the positions that President Bush has taken. The point is that we should candidly acknowledge that politics involves a contest of substantive moral claims. To portray the conflict as one of “faith vs. reason” is simply disingenuous. Government simply cannot remain neutral about momentous moral issues. Whatever policies it enacts will embody a certain moral perspective. When the U.S. government outlawed slavery it was taking a moral position. One wonders if the arguments of Abraham Lincoln would carry the day if judged by the standards of neutrality about comprehensive goods. One needn’t shed one’s moral commitments to enter the public arena in good faith.

The Maverick Philosopher has an instructive post on evidentialism and the ethics of belief in light of an argument from Sam Harris that religion qua religion is evil and dangerous.

I offered a rebuttal to Harris here.

UPDATE: In my original post I mistakenly identified Sam Harris as “John Harris.” Thanks to Bill Vallicella for pointing this out. The link to the piece seems to be broken; Harris’ op-ed from the L.A. Times can be seen here.

One of the reasons I am always reluctant to support a given decision to go to war is because I believe the burden of proof must always lie on the party advocating war. And since war involves the killing and maiming of hundreds or thousands of people, it only seems just that the bar of evidence ought to be particularly high. One might steal from Benjamin Disraeli and say that if it is not necessary to go to war, it is necessary not to go to war.

In the case of Afghanistan it was clear that the Taliban was harboring and giving succor to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. So it seemed eminently justifiable to attack the terrorist camps and overthrow the regime.

In the case of Iraq, however, matters were much murkier. The evidence offered for Saddam’s possession of WMD and connections with al-Qaida seemed inconclusive. To justify a pre-emptive strike one would, I think, need a greater degree of certainty than was on offer. Certainly I think it’s fair to say that there was reasonable doubt.

Add to this the fact that governments lie. Not just occasionally, but systematically, and especially during wartime. They lie, they spin, they manipulate, they distort. I’m not saying that I know for a fact that anyone in particular lied; as I said before, I don’t have the information to say that for certain. But I do think that history should teach us to be skeptical of the claims of government officials to say the least. Given my limited access to reliable information on these matters, I remain, happily or not, unable to give my assent to most acts of war.