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The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden — that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. — C.S. Lewis

An interesting idea from Paul Contino, a professor at Pepperdine University, writing in the LA Times:

“We can do better. And help is on the way.”



When I heard that refrain in Sen. John F. Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, it reminded me of why I am a Democrat at heart. In my lifetime, the Democratic Party has stood consistently on the side of the poor, the weak, the vulnerable.



But I have not cast my vote for a Democratic presidential candidate in 12 years because the Democrats have refused to extend their protection to the weakest and most vulnerable — unborn children.

Given the terrible number of abortions that are allowed each year, each day in our country — “1.31 million pregnancies were terminated by abortion in the U.S.” in 2000, the most recent statistics available, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute — we surely can do better. And Kerry should make just such a proposition part of his campaign. I am not suggesting that Kerry commit himself to overturning Roe vs. Wade — although I think it should be overturned. But I am suggesting that he challenge those who are considering abortion to “do better,” and that he challenge the United States as a nation to “do better” by them.



Which brings me to Kerry’s other rhetorical flourish: “Help is on the way.” I am confident that the Democrats could create a policy that the Republican Party, for all of its pro-life rhetoric, has to my knowledge never offered. Kerry could offer a guarantee that any woman with an unwanted pregnancy would be assisted by the federal government, perhaps in league with faith-based initiatives, and that she would be granted the kind of support that would help her consider her options. That means financial aid, adoption counseling and, most important, should she decide to raise her child, continuing material support after the birth.



I think if Kerry adopted something like this the Dems could go a long way toward neutralizing the Republican advantage among evangelicals, Catholics and others who consider themselves “pro-life,” but who also have a strong “social justice” streak. And nothing in Contino’s proposal is inconsistent with a strict “pro-choice” position. If anything, a proposal like the above would expand the range of choice.

Many people in the debate about cloning curiously assume that “reproductive” cloning is monstrous and immoral, while “therapeutic” cloning is perfectly fine, or at least less morally objectionable than reproductive cloning. I say “curiously” because it seems to me that the truth of the matter is almost exactly the reverse.

Think about it. Reproductive cloning, whatever else might be said about it, would, in theory, produce a human being with all the dignity and rights that you and I enjoy. Why should the act of bringing a human being into existence, no matter however extraordinary the means, be thought immoral? I think part of the reason is the “ick” factor – the shudder most normal people have at the thought of a person being created in such an artificial way. More substantively, it appears that the process of cloning, which is far from perfected, would have a high failure rate – that is, there would likely be several short-lived and/or deformed early models before we were able to clone a healthy, normal human being. This alone would seem to rule it out.

But suppose we did have a fail-safe method of cloning. Imagine a cloning machine where a person could step into a chamber and their clone would appear in an adjoining chamber (I’m imagining something like the matter transporter in Star Trek). Would it still be immoral to clone?

Now, you might say that having a clone of yourself running around the world could have all kinds of weird psychological effects on both you and him. Fair enough. So imagine that somehow you are unaware of the clone’s existence and he’s unaware of yours. Is there anything immoral per se in the mere act of bringing a human being into existence in this way? As I said, we all assume (rightly) that once a clone exists he or she would have all the same rights as anyone else. Biologically, psychologically, spiritually, etc. he would be indistinguishable from a non-cloned human. So, it’s hard (though perhaps not impossible) to come up with a compelling reason why it’s wrong to bring this person into existence.

On the other hand, so-called therapeutic cloning involves the creation of nascent human life solely for the purposes of exploitation. Proponents actually trumpet the fact that cloned embryos will never be brought to term. Rather, they will be harvested and destroyed long before they ever get to that point.

And this is supposed to be reassuring? It just reaffirms that therapeutic cloning is the creation of life that exists solely as a means to the well-being of others, not as an end in itself. Whatever we think about reproductive cloning, at least the person produced would still have to be treated as an end in himself. In the case of therapeutic cloning we are facing the prospect of turning human life into a mere commodity that can be bought, sold, experimented on and destroyed at will.

If reproductive cloning is wrong, it seems to only be wrong contingently. That is, it’s wrong only because there’s no way to do it that wouldn’t entail morally unacceptable risks. But we can imagine a method that avoided these risks, thus making it permissible. Therapeutic cloning, on the other hand, appears to be wrong in itself.

The obvious rejoinder here is that the cloned embryo is not a “person” and therefore doesn’t merit moral consideration. But this, I think, misses the point. Even if you are pro-choice on abortion, there are still good reasons to worry about human embryos (cloned or otherwise) being turned into a commodity.

Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall puts it this way:

Unlike abortion, ESCR [embryonic stem cell research] involves neither a conflict between two physically interconnected lives nor the rare, unplanned and deeply regrettable destruction of incipient human life. When advocates of ESCR rhetorically evoke prior debates on abortion by presenting ESCR as a choice between a living person and an early human embryo, we are distracted from the broader context of ESCR.

A multimillion-dollar medical industry surrounds the supposedly simple “which of these two entities matters more?” approach. Endorsing ESCR means endorsing an elaborate, systematic, routine industry of embryo production and destruction, an industry not likely to limit itself to therapies for chronic disease. To suggest that we will not also see the emergence of more generally applicable, and more widely lucrative, products defies common sense.

I think even those who support abortion rights would balk at saying that nascent human life (and that’s indisputably what an embryo is) has no moral worth whatsoever. But if it has any worth whatsoever, then surely that is a reason for saying that we can’t simply do whatever we like with it. Otherwise, what does it mean to say that it has moral worth?

And if embryos have no moral worth, then there would properly be no limits to what we could do with them. Suppose we found that human embryos could be used to make a face cream that would get rid of wrinkles. Botox without the injection! Would there be anything wrong with that?

Therapeutic cloning is ultimately about reducing human life to its scientific, research and market value. This makes it far more morally questionable than merely bringing a new life into existence by unusual means.

Calvin College has a nice virtual library of Christian Philosophy. In browsing it I came across this article by Richard Mouw, an evangelical philosopher, called “On Letting Chickens Strut Their Stuff.” Mouw rejects the view of the likes of Peter Singer who say that an animal might have greater moral worth than a newborn infant, but he nevertheless thinks that the Bible has important lessons to teach us about how we should treat animals:

I keep remembering a lesson that a devoutly Christian chicken farmer taught me many years ago….



“Colonel Sanders wants us to think of chickens only in terms of dollars and cents,” he announced. “They are nothing but little pieces of meat to be bought and sold for food. And so we’re supposed to crowd them together in small spaces and get them fat enough to be killed.”



And then he moved toward his theological lesson: “But that’s wrong! The Bible says that God created every animal ‘after its own kind.’ Chickens aren’t people, but neither are they nothing but hunks of meat. Chickens are chickens, and they deserve to be treated like chickens! This means that we have to give each chicken the space to strut its stuff in front of other chickens.”

When chickens or pigs – social, sentient animals – are stuffed into factory farms, they’re denied the possibility of living the kinds of lives that they’re suited for. Surely this is a frustration of the creator’s design. Animals have their own kind of dignity, appropriate to their place in creation, and recognizing this doesn’t require putting them on the same moral plane as human beings.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types–the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. — G.K. Chesterton

Earlier I suggested that the moral law is the means God provides us for restoring our broken relationships with him and each other. Let’s explore the implications of this a little more. One consequence is that the moral law is not an end in itself. It is the route we take back to God, but it isn’t the destination.

What does this mean?

One common account of morality, derived from Kant, stresses the opposition between duty and inclination. Duty is what I ought to do in a given situation. Inclination is what I’d like to do if I had my druthers. Only those actions that involve choosing duty over inclination have moral worth, according to this view.

I think the conflict between duty and inclination certainly describes a common feature of our moral experience. However, according to Christianity, this is not our natural state. Ideally we would be inclined to do the good. The fact that there is a fissure in our moral selves indicates that we’re in need of healing. This fissure is the symptom of our sin, our alienation from God.

Because of sin, we need an external standard to direct us toward our true good. This is one of the functions of the law. It shows us where we need to resist inclination for the sake of duty.* But Christianity teaches that this shouldn’t be our permanent state.

A saint could be defined as someone in whom the conflict between duty and inclination has been fully healed. This is what Christians mean by sanctification. If union with God is the goal of human life, the saint is someone who has traveled so far down that road that he spontaneously does what the moral law requires. He has no further need of it. In heaven there will be no law because all the saints will spontaneously love God and one another without needing to be directed by the law.

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*We also, according to Christianity, need God’s grace in order to resist disordered inclinations and do what is right.

Will Saletan has a good article over at Slate debunking some of the myths and half-truths that are being peddled to drum up support for the Democrats’ position on stem-cell research. To wit:

The stem-cell movement has become political. “Three years ago, the president enacted a far-reaching ban on stem-cell research,” Kerry asserted in his radio address. Repeating a pledge made by Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention, Kerry promised twice that he would “lift the ban on stem-cell research.” But no such ban exists. Embryonic stem-cell research is unrestricted in the private sector. State and local governments can fund it as they wish. The federal government spent nearly $200 million on adult stem-cell research last year and nearly $25 million on research involving the roughly 20 approved embryonic lines. As today’s Washington Post observes, what Bush actually did was “to allow, for the first time, the use of federal funds” for embryonic stem-cell research.

Why does Kerry call it a “ban on stem-cell research” instead of a ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell lines derived after Aug. 9, 2001? Because the shorter phrase, while scientifically inaccurate in four egregious ways, is more politically effective.



Moreover, polls have found that support for stem cell research jumps when respondents are asked if they would support it to find cures for diseases like Alzheimers. Trouble is, there’s scant evidence that stem cell research holds much promise for curing Alzheimers:

The trouble is, the Alzheimer’s hype isn’t true. On June 10, the Post’s Rick Weiss reported that “given the lack of any serious suggestion that stem cells themselves have practical potential to treat Alzheimer’s, the Reagan-inspired tidal wave of enthusiasm [for stem cell research] stands as an example of how easily a modest line of scientific inquiry can grow in the public mind to mythological proportions. It is a distortion that some admit is not being aggressively corrected by scientists.” Why don’t scientists dispel the myth? “People need a fairy tale,” NIH researcher Ronald McKay told Weiss. “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”



Saletan makes the same point I made the other day, namely that science by itself doesn’t provide us with moral guidelines:

Kerry’s appeals to faith and prayer don’t end there. He asks voters to believe, on the same spiritual basis, that science will create ethical boundaries for itself. “We must look to the future not with fear but with the hope and the faith that advances in medicine will advance our best values,” he pleaded in a recent speech promoting stem-cell research. “I have full faith that our scientists will go forward with a moral compass,” he added. All we must do, he advised, is “pursue the limitless potential of science—and trust that we can use it wisely.”



I want to have faith, John. I want to hope and dream. I want to believe in the magic and the miracles and the power of prayer. But if you want to preserve trust in science, stick to the evidence.

(link via Amy Welborn)

Keith Burgess-Jackson asks what theists imagine the connection between morality and religion to be. It’s a question that deserves pondering since so many of us unthinkingly assume that God and morality must be intimately linked. Keith rightly points out that it’s quite possible to be an atheist and still believe in an objective morality. And one needn’t be a theist for moral beliefs to motivate one’s actions.

So what, if anything, is the relevance of theistic belief for morals?

My answer would be that theism (specifically Christian theism) provides the most compelling answer to the time-honored question “Why should I be moral?”

Christians believe that God has created us for loving fellowship with himself and each other. But, somehow, we have fallen out of whack in our relationships with God and our fellow man. We call this condition sin. To correct this state of affairs, God provides humankind with the moral law.* The law is a tool for putting things back in order.**

Now, it’s important to realize that the moral law, on this account, is not a set of arbitrary rules unrelated to human well-being. Rather, the moral law, from one angle, can be seen as simply a description of what human life looks life when it is lived in harmony with God and neighbor. So, the reason we should be moral, according to theism, is beacause our highest flourishing consists precisely in living the kind of life our Creator intended for us.

But as Keith says, “If I conform to God’s rules not because I understand and accept them but out of love for or a desire to please their maker, I would seem to drain my actions of moral worth. This also makes God seem vain, insecure, and selfish.”

I would suggest that the conflict here is merely apparent. Theists say that God is supremely lovable in virtue of his preeminent goodness. To love God is to love the Good. So there is no necessary conflict between acting out of love for God and for the Good. God only appears “vain, insecure, and selfish” if we suppose that his commands are abritrary or whimsical rather than being the commands of a loving God.

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*I refer here both to the “revealed” law (e.g. the Ten Commandments) and the “natural” law that humans can know by reason.

**Obviously, Christians believe that the law is insufficient for putting things back in order. For this the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is necessary. Nevertheless, most Christians maintain that the law remains a reliable guide to living the kind of life God wants us to live.

The new edition of the eclectic online Christian journal The New Pantagruel has been posted. There are two articles that look particularly interesting: “Realism Against Reality” by Eric Miller and “Christianity and Liberalism: Two Alternative Religious Approaches” by David T. Koyzis. (Incidentally, I also highly recommend Prof. Koyzis’ book Political Visions and Illusions.)

Oh, God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail. — St. Basil of Caesarea