![\"moral22\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/292\/2009\/02\/moral22.gif?w=300\")
The biography of Hadley Arkes, the conference\u2019s final speaker:<\/p>\nThe biography of Hadley Arkes, the conference\u2019s final speaker:<\/p>\n
\u201cHadley Arkes has been a member of the Amherst College faculty since 1966. He was the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence, and was appointed, in 1987, as the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions. He has written five books with Princeton University press: Bureaucracy, the Marshall Plan, and the National Interest<\/em> (1972), The Philo The following is my summation of Arkes\u2019s closing remarks.<\/p>\n Introduction Quoting Samuel Johnson: \u201cgeometricians by accident, but moralists by necessity.\u201d\u00a0 The very mark of the polis<\/em> was the law.\u00a0 This binds our private preference in favor of a public concern.\u00a0 To come to moral judgment is to speak in the voice of command, which forbids<\/em> the torture of children or the killing of a baby.<\/p>\n Yet the most curious thing is that many elites have denied this fundamental principle.\u00a0\u00a0Robby\u2019s book stands as a notable marker to restore the classic connection between morality and law.\u00a0 It\u2019s impossible to have law without morality.\u00a0 It\u2019s like asking for coffee without syntax.\u00a0 We now see legislators who work extremely hard to avoid any notion of morality in their legal language.\u00a0 This is ridiculous.\u00a0 When David Souter, for examples, encounters the issue of topless dancing, he moves to the secondary issue of how an establishment featuring this activity will draw pickpockets.\u00a0 This is bankrupt.<\/p>\n Laws Are Not Invitations<\/strong> A part of what I want to bring out today is that the logic of morals is anchored in the logic of reason.\u00a0 From the left, with the homosexual lobby, first the left denied the presence of morality in laws, then brought morality back in to silence those who oppose gay marriage.\u00a0 First, we heard that one could not legislate \u201ctaste\u201d on sexuality any more than one could legislate taste for frozen yogurt.\u00a0 So there was no grounds for casting judgments\u2013but wait!\u00a0 There was a wrong: casting judgments!\u00a0 So those who barred gay couples from adopting needed to have judgments cast against them.\u00a0 It also becomes fine for people to be prosecuted when they dare to preach about the homosexual lifestyle, which is \u201cjudging.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Purpose of the State As we can see, all people do indeed make moral judgments.\u00a0 The preceding\u00a0shows that there is a moral dimension built into the very fabric of politics.\u00a0 It is in the very heart of it.\u00a0 One cannot avoid it.\u00a0 Arkes pointed to a law that argued that the discrimination against blacks was hurting the inter-state commerce in meat.\u00a0 He pointed out satirically that the abortion industry, with 1.3 million babies killed, hurt the sale of bassinets.\u00a0 There is something wrong with this rationale that the federal government is using to legislate morality.<\/p>\n Being Clear About Right and Wrong It requires one Kantian insight to make sense of this matter.\u00a0 There is nothing that we can name, no activity, so prosaic that it cannot be part of a means-end chain that cannot inflict harm.\u00a0 An ambulance can either help save lives or kill a street-crossing pedestrian.\u00a0 As we have seen, even the most local of subjects could handle issues that bear on matters of the Constitution.\u00a0 My argument is that there is no way that one can make law without moral arguments.\u00a0 The effort to finesse moral questions on secondary grounds fails.\u00a0 Laws must be made through the substance of moral thinking itself.\u00a0 The notion of a national government of limited powers falls into a fallacy if we think that we can write a list of subjects that the federal government cannot reach.\u00a0 The example of Roe v. Wade, among other laws, show us that the national government will readily reach into all areas.<\/p>\n In closing, then, the notion of a limited government makes eminent sense.\u00a0 I would suggest that a limited government does not require a Constitution.\u00a0 Restraint may be found, I think, in the very idea of the self, the human person.\u00a0 Limits come upon human autonomy; there are certain wrongful things that people must forgo in living in the state.\u00a0 To put it differently, they are thus encouraged to concentrate their full range of powers on good things.\u00a0<\/p>\n Plato: the person with the well-ordered soul, governed by reason, had a constitutional ruler within himself.\u00a0 A government under constitutional restraint takes its model from the person who controls himself and rules his appetites by the power of reason.\u00a0 The person with self-control is not the weaker person, but the stronger.\u00a0 So it is with government.<\/p>\n Conclusion Remarks on Neuhaus My Take<\/strong> Arkes left the logic of the left exposed like the emperor marching in his parade.\u00a0 He showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the left plays an ideological shell game to advance its ideas.\u00a0 First, it says that we shouldn\u2019t legislate morality; then, it creates a case for its positions; then, it invokes the language of morality to ground its positions, claiming unassailable moral territory; finally, it brings the hammer, enacting its laws and excoriating and judging all who go against its views.\u00a0<\/p>\n This process, furthermore, has the effect of creating cultural impressions.\u00a0 People\u2019s minds change as this process develops, such that in the beginning they disagree and by the end they end up thinking, \u201cYeah, this issue (gay marriage, abortion as choice, etc.) really isn\u2019t my business.\u00a0 It really is a matter of choice, and I don\u2019t want anybody impinging on my right to choose.\u201d\u00a0 But Arkes shows us that this thinking is off-course from the start.\u00a0 We have to legislate choices.\u00a0 Unless we desire a law-less state in which anyone can do anything that they want, we must realize that we already desire a state driven by law, which is of course driven by morality (the basic moral questions, remember, must make their way into our legal code).\u00a0 In addition, all who affirm a doctrine of sin (and even those who don\u2019t!) must remeber per Arkes that it is not wrong<\/em> to mark actions as wrong, but right.\u00a0 We Christians must not buy the left\u2019s logic on morality, both because it is disingenuous\u00a0and also because we must restrain sin and evil.<\/p>\n Arkes\u2019s taxonomy of liberal activism was itself worth the time of the lecture.\u00a0 But his talk was much richer than that.\u00a0 He is a deeply profound thinker.\u00a0 I commend his thinking and writing to all.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The biography of Hadley Arkes, the conference\u2019s final speaker: \u201cHadley Arkes has been a member of the Amherst College faculty since 1966. He was the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence, and was appointed, in 1987, as the Edward Ney Professor of American Institutions. He has written five books with Princeton University press: Bureaucracy, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1217,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[521,1474,1551,1914,2083,2509,2557],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aristotle","tag-hadley-arkes","tag-homosexual-marriage","tag-making-men-moral","tag-moral-judgment","tag-robby-george","tag-same-sex-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"arkes-150\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/292\/2009\/02\/arkes-150.jpg\")
sopher in the City<\/em> (1981), First Things<\/em> (1986), Beyond the Constitution<\/em> (1990), and The Return of George Sutherland<\/em> (1994). His most recent book, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose<\/em>, was published by Cambridge University Press in the fall of 2002. Professor Arkes has been the founder, at Amherst, of the Committee for the American Founding, a group of alumni and students seeking to preserve, at Amherst, the doctrines of \u201cnatural rights\u201d taught by the American Founders and Lincoln.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>I am breathing the fresh air of a red state!\u00a0 This is quite the joy, coming from Massachusetts, the people\u2019s republic.\u00a0 They wouldn\u2019t take my currency down here, with it\u2019s picture of Dukakis on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nWhen we make laws, we do not invite <\/em>people to obey, we say that we are displacing their personal choice.\u00a0 The rule of action will shape all subsequent conduct in this realm.\u00a0 Every great political philosopher has considered this question.\u00a0 We must explain the principle of \u201crightness\u201d so that we can make laws that are \u201cright\u201d and \u201cvalid\u201d for others.\u00a0 If something is wrong, it\u2019s wrong for everyone.\u00a0 In the Lincoln-Douglas debate, Douglas professed to have no moral judgment.\u00a0 Lincoln retorted rightly that this was a moral judgment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>With these steps, we move closer to Aristotle\u2019s understanding of the state: to inculcate moral sense and good judgment in the people.\u00a0 The law teaches that we will move from the domain of private preference to a matter of moral consquence.\u00a0 In Massachusetts in November 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional rules on marriage.\u00a0 The judgment of the Court produced \u201cnatural recoil of shock.\u201d\u00a0 However, several years later, the people had changed their mind.\u00a0 Where once most opposed same-sex marriage, now there seemed to be a slight majority for <\/em>it.\u00a0 This was what Machiavelli called \u201ca new regime\u201d with new laws.\u00a0 Schoolchildren were now taught from as early as the first-grade what sexual acts between men look like.\u00a0 School budgets would now pay for gay and lesbian-friendly programs.\u00a0 Money came into play; legislators were bought off.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>We need to be clearer about the wrong<\/em>.\u00a0 In the past, state governments and local governments took responsibly for moral matters.\u00a0 The federal government was thought to have a far more limited scope of concerns.\u00a0 John Marshall once mused on what would happen if a state desired to dissolve marriage without the consent of the couple.\u00a0 Here he showed that something could arise that could bring marriage within the reach of the federal constitution.\u00a0 So Dred Scott would have to come back to Missouri, because it didn\u2019t recognize marriage between slaves.\u00a0 This has happened more recently as well.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Again: geometricians by accident, but moralists by necessity.\u00a0 We must face moral questions either well or badly.\u00a0 We cannot escape them.\u00a0 It is time to reconcile ourselves to the notion that this is the life we lead, and the life we must learn to do well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>His persistent line: we can still turn this around.\u00a0 He always saw the capacity of human beings to reach outside themselves and do something extraordinary.\u00a0 We buy up our friends, and ply others with compensation, saying, whenever you are as certain about something as I am, go forward; when you are uncertain, hesitate; if ever you go wrong, come back.\u00a0 In this way, we will make our way to the One of whom it is said: Seek His face.\u00a0 Seek His face always.<\/p>\n
\nThis was a splendid lecture.\u00a0 Arkes has a golden pen.\u00a0 He also speaks very clearly and peppers his speaking with all sorts of fun stories and practical illustrations.\u00a0 His central contention, that none of us can help<\/em> but be moralists, immediately convinced me of its aptness.\u00a0 This is surely, incontrovertibly right.\u00a0 If you sit back and think about it for a moment, and let it sink in, you\u2019ll be convinced.\u00a0 We can\u2019t avoid moral questions.\u00a0 We all face them.\u00a0 Our society cannot help but confront them.<\/p>\n