Not so long ago, the language of mainline Protestantism supplied our country with its ethical vocabulary. Lutheran minister Reinhold Neibuhr guided his contemporaries’ reflection on war; Episcopal priest Joseph Fletcher promoted the widely adopted idea of “situation ethics.” The words one read in the paper or heard on the TV often first came from the pulpit—the Protestant pulpit.
I realized how much things had changed a few years back. I was watching a Fox debate over waterboarding in which one participant repeatedly invoked double-effect to defend the practice. A concept coming from Aquinas, passed down through scholastic manuals to today’s Catholic philosophers, was now at the center of ethical debate in a once self-confidently Protestant nation. After the collapse of mainline Protestantism’s public influence, it was Catholic teaching that provided what little shared moral vocabulary we could muster. The same dynamic has held in recent discussions of the budget (with national discussion of the preferential option for the poor), the size of the state (subsidiarity), and national defense (just war).
Of course, if these discussions are going to be fruitful we need to attend to the details of those traditions rather than simply invoking their terms. To this end, it might be worth finding a copy of a new book by David D. Corey and J. Daryl Charles, The Just War Tradition: An Introduction, which Nathaniel Peters reviews today at Public Discourse.
January 10th, 2013 | 11:28 am
EU Council Regulations, of all things, invariably include a reference to the principle of subsidiarity, contained in Article 5 of the Treaty of Rome
E.g. “In accordance with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty, the objectives of this Regulation cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore be better achieved by the Community. This Regulation does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve those objectives.”
January 10th, 2013 | 1:39 pm
I am really curious to know how the debate participant used double effect to defend waterboarding. It seems that the principle would clearly point in the other direction.
January 10th, 2013 | 2:22 pm
Leaving aside the preposterous idea that the “double-effect” of torturing prisoners renders it okay, I want to disagree with the Catholic-Protestant distinction being made here.
The first 1500 years of Christendom do not belong to the Roman church alone. Saint Augustine and just war theory are, for example, as much a part of the Lutheran and Episcopal traditions as the Roman Catholic.
January 10th, 2013 | 2:51 pm
As much as we Lutherans might like to claim him as one of our own, Reinhold Niebuhr was not a Lutheran. He was a member of the Evangelical Synod of North America, an American transplant of the Prussian Union of Lutherans and Reformed in Germany.
January 17th, 2013 | 1:28 am
“with national discussion of the preferential option for the poor”
Would someone please tell me where in the New Testament Jesus taught his disciples to go get government to take care of the poor?
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