Abortive Politics

May 21, 2010

If the idea of the left-wing and right-wing parties joining to form a coalition government here in the UK isn’t weird enough to us Americans, a woman at church last Sunday pointed out to me another huge disconnect between American and British politics.  In Britain, she said, it’s an open question who Christians are going to vote for; most likely, in a sizable and reasonably diverse congregation, fairly equal numbers of the members will vote for the Tories, the Lib Dems, or Labour.  But in America, so far as she could tell, it was pretty much assumed that if you were Christian, you were voting Republican.  She recounted the bizarre experience some of her friends had had of receiving emails from American friends back in 2008 asking for prayer that Obama wouldn’t win.    I regretfully assured her that her impressions of the polarization were quite accurate.  But why?  

Why is it that Christians in the US are so politically partisan compared to their British counterparts?  Is it because good and evil are so much clearer in US politics than in the UK?  I must confess that I’ve never seen anything to suggest a clear division of good and evil between the Democrats and the Republicans.  Is it because Brits simply don’t take their faith seriously enough to apply it to politics?  I suppose there might be something to that, but I don’t think that’s a fair criticism.  Let us pause to consider this, though.  A flexibility among Christians with regard to political affiliation could imply an underdeveloped sense of the Gospel’s relevance to political life; however, it may well simply imply a healthy understanding of the provisionality of politics.  In our modern societies, it is important for Christians to recognize that, although there may be in theory a robustly Biblical politics, none of the existing political options comes close to embodying it, but each of them does offer some prospects of achieving some provisional goods that Christians can recognize as genuine public goods.  In such a situation, complete abstention from voting is a legitimate route to take (and is more or less my own persuasion), on the grounds that each of the options represents a sufficiently flawed, unChristian, and untrustworthy platform that it would be wisest not to support any.  But it is also potentially legitimate to, acknowledging the essential rottenness of all the options, weigh up the provisional public goods of each option, and vote for the one that seems on balance the best, all the while granting that your Christian brother may well weigh things up a little differently, without this implying any fundamental disconnect between your ultimate values.  Such a sense of provisionality seems (so far as I have discerned in my very brief time) to dominate the thinking on politics among British Christians, but not among Americans.  American Christians, for the most part, have trouble letting go of the idea that political allegiances are matters of ultimate value, and should be a religious battleground.  

The chief cause of this religious partisanship, so far as I can tell, seems to have been the abortion debate.  Of course, that’s far from the only issue on which Christians line up with the conservative party line, but my sense is that it’s the tail that wags the dog.  Where would Christians have gotten the idea that all these conservative policies were Christian policies?  Why should love of gun rights be a particularly Christian political position?  Or opposition to immigration?  Or being perennially hawkish about military action?  Etc.  The closest thing I’ve been able to come to an explanation is simply this: when Roe v. Wade happened, the Democrats happened to be dominated by socially liberal leadership (McGovern), and so the Republicans were able to position themselves as the anti-abortion party.  Christians, fired with fanatical political activism over the abortion issue, flocked more and more to the Republican banner and began assimilating its ways, even if there wasn’t anything very Christian about them.  The abortion issue was one on which Christianity had a clear answer to give, and so it came to be the only one on which Christianity had any answer to give.  And, since Democrats are seen as the embracers of abortion, which is clearly wicked, they can be easily demonized in the popular Christian imagination--they must be wicked, filthy people, and so every political stance associated with the Democrats must be a wicked, filthy one...no need to investigate the matter much further.

In Britain, where the abortion issue never became politicized*, Christians never flocked to one party en masse, nor did they start attributing life-and-death significance to politics.  So, while we may allege that have not sufficiently put faith in politics in the sense of putting faith into politics, making their Christianity central to their political involvement, they seem to have thereby avoided our error of putting faith in politics in the sense of making an idol of politics and thus losing our grip on the Christianity that we were trying to bring into the public sphere.  

*Note: It is particularly odd, as this woman and I were discussing, that the abortion issue should have become politicized in the US and not the UK given that in the former, it was was a judicial decision, and in the latter, a legislative one.  Historically, an independent, unpoliticized judiciary has been seen as a chief bulwark of freedom, but American Christians have heedlessly chucked that ideal out the window in their single-minded pursuit of a political solution to the abortion problem, a problem that is not a fundamentally political problem.  And so, even while decrying “liberal activist jurisprudence,” we have aggressively and explicitly tried to turn our entire political process, at every election, into an attempt to stack the Court with politically-aligned judges to overturn abortion.  And so we have connived with the liberal activists for the destruction of an independent judiciary, so that we now regularly expect Supreme Court decisions to fall along partisan lines.  

Red Tories or Blue Liberals?

May 12, 2010

Here on the tea-drinking, Marmite-spreading side of the pond, everyone has been in a tizzy for the past few days about the sensational outcome of the General Election last Thursday--no less sensational for having been widely predicted.  With the voting public of the UK having developed a thorough contempt of Gordon Brown and Labour’s dismal record of nine years of licking America’s boots, yet unable to forget the deep hostility to the Tories that they contracted in the ‘90s, they found themselves seeking to steer between Scylla and Charybdis.  Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat party set out to occupy that strategic position between the two monsters, and thought they were poised for a breakthrough election, but failed dismally, winning only 57 of the 650 seats despite 23% of the popular vote.  The result, generally anticipated but still quite disconcerting when it happened, was a Hung Parliament, the first in 36 years--meaning that no party had a majority, even though the Conservatives had managed to beat out Labour by a margin of 305 to 258.  The options at this point were four: 1) the Tories could form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to form a solid majority government; 2) Labour could form a coalition with the Lib Dems and a couple other minor parties to form a slight majority government; 3) no coalition would be formed, but Labour would defiantly cling to power until it became too unpopular to continue to do so; 4) no coalition would be formed, but Gordon Brown would resign, and David Cameron, the Tory leader, would become Prime Minister and run a minority government until it became too unpopular to do so.  

Clearly option 1 was the most desirable, and yet seemingly quite difficult to achieve, since the Lib Dems and the Tories occupied rather opposite ends of the political spectrum.  And so an odd drama played out over the last five days, as both parties grovelled at the feet of Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, despite his terrible showing in the election.  Finally, last night, having wrung generous concessions from the Tories (the deputy prime ministership for himself, and five other cabinet positions for the Lib Dems), Nick Clegg threw his lot in with David Cameron, giving the UK its first coalition government since WWII and its youngest prime minister in 198 years.  

As someone who has just been reading with interest Philip Blond’s Red Tory [I should clarify to American readers that, everywhere outside the US, “Red” equals left-wing, and “Blue” equals right-wing], I can’t help but be intrigued and excited by this outcome, and disposed to be much less cynical than normal.  Does this coalition of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives suggest the possibility of a genuinely Red Tory agenda, the best of both left and right--social conservatism and fiscal responsibility combined with anti-nationalism and anti-corporatism?  Or will it mean rather a Blue Liberal agenda, the worst of both worlds that we saw with Labour--market libertarianism and social libertarianism, expensive welfarism co-existing with unprincipled corporatism?  Only time will tell.  Of course, more likely than either is that the alliance will prove impossible to maintain, and will break down within a year or two.  

In any case, however, as an American who is accustomed to the unseemly spectacle of Republicans and Democrats refusing to ever even vote for the same bill, it is an exciting and refreshing prospect to see such historically-opposed parties uniting to actually form a single coalition government!  It’s as if McCain had won the election and then invited Al Gore to be his vice president!  So, although opportunities for cynicism abound, I insist on seeing the bright side, at least this once.

Taking Ramsey to Task on Just War

May 4, 2010 
I’ve been suspicious of Just War theory for quite a while now.  Some of it has to do with the pacifistic inroads Hauerwas and others made on my thinking, and some of it just has to do with the theory’s terrible historical track record.  The Just War theory has much more often served as a way of providing a justification for desired wars than as a criterion for refusing wars.  By reducing the requirements of justice in war to a convenient little list of criteria, the just war tradition has made it all too easy for politicians to spin the facts and stoke up the rhetoric so as to give a passable imitation of having met the criteria.  And so the most absurd prideful bloodbaths get whitewashed as “just wars”--the Civil War, World War I, the Iraq War.  

And so, as I said, I’d become suspicious, skeptical--not hostile, mind you, just dubious as to whether the theory actually enabled us to fight just wars and refuse unjust ones.  And so I thought, in all fairness to the tradition, I ought to hear its ablest defenders speak, and I planned to read Paul Ramsey’s The Just War and O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited.  I haven’t gotten to the latter yet, but we were assigned portions of the former to read for class this past term.  I was, I am afraid, sorely disappointed--my hopes in the abilities of modern just war theorists to effectively challenge our warmongering societies were quite dashed.

Paul Ramsey, you see, chooses not merely to major on, but to pretty much exclusively deal with the ius in bello criteria, in my mind the less significant part of the just war tradition; ius ad bellum, in his mind, is essentially useless.

Let me take a moment to elucidate the distinction.  The criteria for just war that the theory has developed can be classified under these two headings, which may be translated as “justice toward war” and “justice in war.”  Under the former heading are the principles of just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, probability of success, last resort, and proportionality, principles that help us figure out whether a proposed or contemplated conflict can indeed be justly entered into.  Under the latter heading are the principles of discrimination--no intentional targeting of civilians--and (again) proportionality--using no means or targets that are likely to cause excessive suffering and death that far outweighs the envisioned benefits.  Without ius in bello, we’d be two pugilists whose friends restrained them from fighting 90% of the time, but who could haul out machine guns and chainsaws once they had a chance to duke it out.  Without ius in bellum, we’d be allowed to fight whenever we wanted, but would have to do it with one hand tied behind our backs.  Perhaps then I wouldn’t want to say that ius in bello is “less significant,” but certainly ius ad bellum has to come first.  

Why then does Ramsey want to leave it out of the equation?  O’Donovan explained it this way: Ramsey was fed up with the Church’s increasingly powerless naysaying.  By refusing to be pacifist, yet indignantly protesting every particular war that came up as “unjust,” the Church was just making itself look ridiculous.  Why?  Because the questions of ius ad bellum are hazy ones, that depend on weighing many different facts and interpreting them in ways that are ultimately somewhat subjective.  So the Church can come across as always just second-guessing the more well-informed politicians.  The questions of ius in bello, on the other hand (or at least regarding the first criterion), can be pared down to a rather sharp moral decision for every soldier and politician: “Will you intentionally target civilians?  Will you take all reasonable steps to avoid unintended civilian casualties?”  These questions the Church can insist on continuing to raise, and can hope to be heard--here, the Church has sufficient expertise to address the conscience, expertise that it cannot expect to have on the complex questions of international diplomacy surrounding ius ad bellum.  

Ramsey’s concern here is understandable, of course.  The Church can make a fool of itself when, without taking a principled pacifist stance, it instantly cries foul whenever a war is declared.  Even in a matter as important as war, we should not hastily rush to assume the worst of policy-makers, but should allow the possibility that they have accurately construed the situation, and it is one that justly calls for a military response.  

However, I am skeptical that this is really the biggest problem for us today.  In my background, at least, it is much more common for the Church to uncritically assume that the war is just than to uncritically assume that it is unjust.  But even if that were not so, Ramsey’s approach seems to leave a huge hole in our responsibility to witness Christ to our society; it leaves the Church as no more than a referee at a wrestling match, blowing the whistle whenever the combatants start fighting too dirty.  Do we really want to consign ourselves to the position of submissively nodding our heads whenever our politicians want to go to war, however unjust, and merely speaking up from time to time to try to keep the war from becoming too bloody?  Let’s look at the ius ad bellum criteria a bit more closely, with the Iraq War as a case study, to see if they are really as useless as Ramsey seems to think.  I will consider only just cause here, to try to stay concise; the other criteria, it seems to me (aside from legitimate authority), are the sort of thing that Ramsey could legitimately object that would be very difficult to judge, and on which we might to some degree have to just give our leaders the benefit of the doubt.  However, even here, the Church ought to ask hard questions of our leaders, rather than accepting vague reassuring declarations of justice--we should at least ask our leaders to make a convincing case to us that they are acting with the right intentions, as a last resort, with a high probability of success, and with proportionality--that is, a likelihood that the harm would not outweigh the benefit.  If they barely even try to make such a case, then we should immediately assume that something is not right.  

But now, let’s look closely at just cause: properly, just cause means innocent life must be in imminent danger and intervention must be to protect life.  It cannot mean merely a defense of national interest, or a defense of property, nor can it be simply for purposes of retaliation.  That is to say, the mere fact that someone else fired first doesn’t mean you can go after them with everything you’ve got--you have to be able to show that they continue to pose a threat.  The notion of pre-emptive strike is debated, but the general consensus is that pre-emption can only be just when the other party has literally pulled out theirs weapon and aimed them at you with clear and imminent intent to fire.  

Now, to be sure, it can be very difficult to ascertain for certain when there is in fact just cause, since, for example, it may look like we have been attacked first, when in fact our leaders secretly incited the other party to attack.  So we should be hesitant to ever affirm just cause without reservation.  But there are many times when we can be quite clear that there is not just cause, and the Church is responsible to speak up in such situations.  It should generally be fairly obvious to the citizens of a country whether or not they are under attack, or under the threat of imminent attack, by a hostile foreign power that is determined to kill them.  It should have been clear at the time, for instance, that the US had no just cause to engage in World War I, and it shouldn’t have required any detailed inside information to make that judgment.  World War II is a more difficult case, and I can understand Christians at the time who thought the US was just to engage.  Vietnam was obviously fought without just cause; so obvious that it’s remarkable to me that Ramsey, writing on just war theory during the Vietnam War, did not see any opportunity for Christians to speak against this failure of ius ad bellum.  

In the age of the War on Terror, this criterion has been deliberately obfuscated.  We are told that we are not dealing with hostile nations anymore, but with hostile groups of individuals who hail from many different nations and derive their support from many different nations, and who are liable to attack us at any moment.  It thus becomes a matter of secret intelligence, rather than visible reality, as to whether our lives are imminently threatened, and if so, by whom.  Christians should know enough to be suspicious about claims made in such murky waters.  But even if we had to withhold judgment, and trust our leaders to do right whenever there was uncertainty (and I can’t see where Christian citizens are called upon to give their leaders such a huge benefit of the doubt), there was still ample basis to call the invasion of Iraq unjust.  For one thing, there was the constantly shifting story as to why we were supposed to attack, with multiple conflicting rationales being thrown around.  This should’ve been an obvious red flag.  If there was a compelling just cause, it should’ve been focused on, to the exclusion of other issues.  

What were some of the reasons given?  1) Saddam was killing innocent Kurds and his own people.  2) It would be beneficial for the nation, and for the region, to have a democratic government.  3) They had harbored and possibly funded Al-Qaeda members at various times, possibly the same ones as had attacked us.  4) They were developing weapons of mass destruction, that they might someday use against us, or give to someone else to use against us.  Let’s cross-examine these.  

What about #1?  Assuming this was happening, and to some extent we would have to take the word of our leaders on this point, though we have a responsibility to look at other sources as well, does that constitute just cause?  Well, just possibly, if you believe that defending other people’s innocents, not merely your own, can be a just cause.  This is a debatable point, but I am inclined to say that it may be in situations where the situation is dire, and the innocent and the murderers are clearly discernable--the only situation like this I can think of off the top of my head is the Rwandan genocides.  90% of the time, though, either the plot is much too thorny to justly and successfully intervene from a distance (both sides are at war and guilty of atrocities), or else the murder and oppression is on too limited a scale to justify invasion and the horrors of war, which would kill at least as many innocents as they would protect (here, the criterion of proportionality comes in).  In Iraq, I think both of these ambiguities were clearly operative, which should have made us deeply skeptical that #1 could constitute just cause.  

#2 doesn’t even make an attempt to satisfy just war criteria, and seems to stem from the school of thought that treats war as “politics by other means”--a useful tool for accomplishing any beneficial purpose, not a means of last resort for preventing mass murder. 

#3 has a vague aura of justice about it, but when you look closely, this aura disappears.  Nowhere in just war theory does it say that anyone who has at any time been friendly to an enemy of yours is a just target for invasion, and I can’t imagine how one could begin to justify such a broad rationale.  Even if it were conclusively shown that Iraq had directly and intentionally aided those who carried out 9/11 attacks, that wouldn’t suffice for just cause, since just cause does not mean retaliation, but protection.  The Bush administration would have had to show that Iraq was currently offering direct and significant support to people who were currently attacking, or imminently planning to attack, innocent Americans.  I don’t even recall them trying to claim this, and even if they had, we would’ve then turned to the criterion of proportionality, and so it’s hard to imagine how such support could have justified a massive invasion.

#4 also has a vague aura of justice, since it makes it look like we’re defending ourselves.  But this strains the notion of pre-emption well beyond the breaking point.  So far as I recall, not even the wildest rhetorical excesses of the lead-up to war tried to show us that they were clearly armed and preparing to attack any day--it was all based on foggy fears about the future.

Now, what are we to make of this?  Of the four criteria, #2 could not possibly comprise a just cause, while #3 and #4, although lying in the general neighborhood of a just cause, could not themselves, as they were presented in the lead-up to the war, comprise just causes.  Only #1 could have, in theory, comprised a just cause, though it seems almost certain to have failed the test of proportionality, and, in any case, would have failed utterly to move public sentiment to war. 

All of this suggests that, leaving out the benefit of hindsight and considering what was publicly known at the time, there was ample cause for the Church to stand up and say, “This appears to be an unjust war; as it stands now, Christians cannot support it.”  This would be no pouty pseudo-pacifist naysaying of the sort Ramsey derides, but an objective, principled, thoroughly defensible stand that could have prevented a great deal of evil.  I would thus suggest that, if we are to revive the just war doctrine, it is both crucial and practicable that we revive, and insist upon to the best of our ability, ius ad bellum, rather than merely trying to referee the brawl after its already started, as Ramsey would have us do.

A few more responses on the taxation issue

April 16, 2010

Since a few people have told me they appreciated the stuff I’ve been posting on taxation and theft here, I thought I’d post just a bit more from the Facebook discussion--the text below was in reply to a section of a large rebuttal someone wrote up there, but it should basically make sense on its own.  Also, since it’s that time of the year again, and the Tea Partiers were out in force yesterday, I recall my first little essay on this whole business, which I wrote last Tax Day, and you can find here.

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You then make a statement that my problem is that I “blur the concepts of necessary taxes and redistributive taxes....Taxes for the common defense fall in the first category, taxes for the redistributive principle fall in the second.”  Yes, it is precisely my point to blur these categories.  Why are taxes paid for defense necessary?  Well, they’re not absolutely necessary, but we generally think that they’re important for the preservation of society.  In an economy characterized by dangerous inequality and serious poverty, one might argue that redistributive taxes are just as necessary for the preservation of society.  Moreover, many taxes are “redistributive” in the sense of benefiting some more than others, including taxes for the “common” defense, as I argued in the original post and in my comments after the first post.

Then you extol the virtues of voluntary giving.  Great--let’s have more of that.  If the Church can motivate people to give voluntarily, and care for the poor, then let it do so, and the government will have no reason to get involved.  I remember reading about some 19th-century Scotch Presbyterian who organized such an effective and generous church system of poor relief that the local government was able to vastly scale back their welfare program.  But if the Church is failing, she can hardly complain when other institutions try to pick up the slack.  A couple quibbles with what you said in this paragraph, “None of these services were based on an enforced-tax or upon a social principle of wealth distribution”--neither of those is strictly true; in many nations in Christendom at various times, the tithe was enforced, whether or not it should’ve been; second, in the early Church, church charity was based upon “a social principle of wealth distribution”--many of the Church Fathers called explicitly for the rich to sell all their excess and give the proceeds to the Church for it to distribute equitably, Acts 4 style.  Also, you say, “Nor did the apostles, church fathers, or any others enforce any such standard, but leave it with the conscience.”  Well, it depends what you mean by that; the Church Fathers may have “left it with the conscience” but they raked consciences over the coals regularly on this subject, so you can’t quite characterize it as a hands-off approach.

At this point you move on to make some (to put it charitably) rather ignorant and snarky comments about Popes Pius XI and John Paul II.  If you don’t agree with them, fine, but I think you need to respect them, and the great body of teaching they represent.  I don’t know enough about Pius XI to defend him specifically (but I doubt you know enough about him to attack him specifically) but John Paul II was, by all counts, a very holy man and a noble leader, who devoted himself to the good of the Church, so far as he understood it, and the cause of the oppressed.  The Catholic Church in the past few decades has put Protestants (especially conservative ones) to shame when it comes to defending the cause of the poor, and sacrificing much for them, so let’s not throw around charges of “hypocrisy.” 

Your reading of Pius XI’s quote here was particularly odd.  Pius said, “[the state] does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and rushing to its own destruction.”  You seem to have a problem with the last clause, somehow reading it as if Pius was against “material things.”  What Pius says here seems self-evidently true--that the private possession of goods, in itself a good thing, will, if unrestrained, cause intolerable evils and eventually its own destruction.  Wasn’t it the Apostle James who said “The love of money is the root of all evil”?  Private property is a dangerous thing, because private owners can easily fall into selfishness and greed, and, unless restrained by laws, destroy others in their greed.  There’s no opposition to material things here, just the cold hard truth about human nature.

Then you tell me all this stuff from Richard Bonney’s book.  I appreciate all the extra information, but I’m not sure exactly which parts are relevant to the matter at hand.  Yes, taxes are higher now than historically; yes, Rome had a very oppressive tax system, particularly oppressive because it disproportionately afflicted the poor--it was if anything a reverse redistribution at times, as some of your own citations show.  Indeed, you cite Basil the Great calling for the poor to be exempted from taxes--this sounds like what conservatives would decry as a redistributive system--everyone receiving the benefits of government, though only some people pay for them!  

This line jumped out at me: “In the past, as Brad points out, other Christians have failed to realize the full Biblical principle of private property”--OK, so here we have at least a concession that our modern teaching on this matter is not the Early Church’s teaching.  Good.  I do not think that we have to adopt the Early Church’s teaching on this matter wholesale; but my point is that we must acknowledge that some of our claims on this subject (e.g., redistribution=theft) run contrary to their attitudes, and that should cause us to be rather more modest in our claims.

A bit later, you point out that “Nowhere in Chrysostom’s explanation of taxation is any theory about the State providing for the poor to accomplish wealth redistribution or equity, or any other socialist idea.”  To be sure.  Chrysostom wanted the Church to handle all that redistribution--he was thoroughly socialist, actually, but he wanted an ecclesial, not a state socialism.  What I want people to realize though is that the reason no one back then envisioned the state involved in redistribution was because the state had not yet been Christianized.  When the State did increasingly get in the business of supporting the poor, taxing the rich, providing free education and healthcare, etc., the people who were the driving forces behind this were Christians, trying to fulfill gospel mandates in the political sphere.  A pre-Christian state would not be likely to think of redistributing to the poor; for a Christian state, such began to seem like a mandate.  I don’t mean to say that this was the right conclusion to reach--that these socializing Christians had the right idea, but it’s important for us to understand the genealogy of this development.  That’s why, for instance, I cite Martin Bucer, who encouraged aggressive intervention by the civil authorities to protect the poor and control the rich.  But you just breezed over Bucer, surprising, since as a Protestant, he would seem to be the most significant figure to you.

Now, you say some things about Aquinas.  For one, you say that Aquinas is a shaky source because he used Aristotle.  Ah!  But do you not realize that his use of Aristotle in his teaching on property is to moderate the radical stance of the early Church Fathers?  In other words, he uses Aristotle to establish a much more pro-private-property stance than that of the earlier tradition.  So it doesn’t work for you to say, “Oh, we can’t trust his negative attitude toward private property, since he was using Aristotle.”  Now, to be sure, Finnis attempts to make explicit what is merely implicit in Aquinas--or perhaps, to construct an argument out of building blocks that are in Aquinas, and we cannot be sure how much Aquinas would agree with his claims for redistributive taxation (for Aquinas, the Church would’ve been the most natural institution to be handling such things, not the state).  My point though is that the building blocks are there in Aquinas--Finnis isn’t just cooking things up out of thin air; and we as modern Christians need to reckon with Aquinas’s tremendously influential teaching here.

I’m impressed that you consulted Finnis’s book for your rebuttal, and would admire your thoroughness, but I think you were not sufficiently attentive on the subject of superflua.  It is a bit more complicated than this.  I’m running out of time right now, so I will just post the notes and quotes I had taken a few weeks ago on this section of Finnis:

There is a threefold distinction in Thomas between “(a) resources one needs for the very survival of oneself and one’s dependants, (b) resources one needs in order to fulfil one’s responsibilities for the support and education of one’s relatives and household, for maintaining one’s business or profession or other vocation, for launching one’s children in such ways of life, for paying one’s debts, and other such genuine responsibilities, and (c) resources which are left over {superflua} after one has made reasonable provision for both type (a) ‘absolute necessity’ and type (b) ‘relative necessity {necessitas conditionata}.  Then Aquinas’ theorem is twofold: (I) everything one has is ‘held as common (or in common)’ in the sense that it is morally available, as a matter of right and justice, to anyone who needs it to survive; (2) one’s superflua are all ‘held as common’, in the sense that one has a duty of justice to dispose of them for the benefit of the poor.”

I: those in life-threatening need can take whatever will relieve that need, and “this entitlement overrides anyone else’s otherwise legitimate title or property right.” II: Furthermore, if I am aware of someone in such strict need [go take a look at II-II q. 71 a. Ic], and there is no other who is available to provide it, I have a “duty of strict justice (not merely ‘charity’)” to help them, not merely out of my superflua, but out of what I use for relative necessity....when no one is in extreme necessity, property-owners may keep their property “just as far as their type (b) need to maintain themselves (with their dependants) in the form of life which they have reasonably adopted.”  All superflua should then be made available to those who lack the resources for their type b) needs.  “The poor have a natural right that the whole of this residuum be distributed in their favour.”  

In other words, your claim that Aquinas says that we are only responsible to give what is left over after we have tended to all reasonable needs and responsibilities is oversimplistic--that is only true if you know of no one in extreme necessity, and quite possibly that is true for most of us (though in an era of globalization, the question can be asked how far our responsibility extends to global neighbors).  Plus, I do not, I’m afraid, share your rosy reading of Christian America: “Now, that rather sounds to me like how most Christians today live – we pay for our expenses, and tithe, and give of what was left over to the church, to family, to friends, to mission work, and other things. Most people do not have much, if any, ‘superflua’ in this sense. After all, if you’re saving up for a house to provide for your family, that clearly falls under the necessities of life. If you’re saving up for a new car because the one you have is suffering, that’s clearly providing for your family, and in my case, providing for my livelihood since I drive to the businesses I meet with.”  My experience of Christian America (and I do not in any way exclude myself from this indictment) is that we convince ourselves that we “need” any number of little luxuries--a new article of clothing every couple weeks, several cups of coffee a day, an iPhone, a flat-screen TV, a rather large house, a rather nice car, a generous supply of junk food, etc.--and then, if all that is covered, we might reach into our pockets and call ourselves generous.  This is not an easy teaching, and I don’t pretend that it is; it’s given me a great deal of pause and hard thinking over the past few months.  

Is Redistributive Taxation Really "Theft"? (Pt. 2)

April 9, 2010

(See the first part in the previous post)

...Third, and most significantly in my mind, this narrative requires that we can legitimately regard the money that has been taken from us as “our money”--as in the Margaret Thatcher quote, “you run out of other people’s money.”  Now, I have already pointed out one sense in which this is oversimplistic--simply by being members of a society, some of our resources have to be pooled, and the decision over how to use them will not belong to us alone.  Nevertheless, it could still be argued that there are some uses of money by a society that are inherently unjust, that simply no society has any business using its members’ money for.  This, perhaps, is how to take statements like Wilson’s: with the implied distinction that while there are certain uses to which our government may justly put our tax money, uses that we should accept even when we think they are ill-managed, there are others which it cannot.  In the latter cases, since it is levying money from us for unjust purposes, one could make the case that it is unjust in levying the money, and thus the money still justly belongs to us.  To take what justly belongs to another is “theft” or “robbery” and so, in such cases, perhaps the accusation holds.  

In fact, Aquinas says as much: “If princes exact from their subjects that which is due to them according to justice for the preservation of the common good, this is not robbery even if they employ violence in doing so.  But if princes extort by violence something which is not due to them, they commit robbery just as much as the bandit does.” (ST II-II Q. 66 a. 8 ad 3; notice, by the way, that Aquinas uses the word “robbery” rather than “theft”--this points to another sense in which our modern critics have been careless, though I had not mentioned it so as not to seem petty: “theft” properly speaking refers to property taken in secret; “robbery” to property taken openly and by force.)

So the question here is whether there is any justice in taxation for things like welfare, healthcare, social security, etc.  Of course, these are all somewhat distinct phenomena, and so we might have to have an argument about justice in each case.  But I’ll try to simplify the matter into the single question: is it ever legitimate for laws to require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough?

Now, interestingly enough, on this point, the general consensus of the Christian tradition seems to be resoundingly “yes”!  Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens says, speaking of society’s obligations to workers, says, “The obligation to provide unemployment benefits, that is to say, the duty to make suitable grants indispensable for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families, is a duty spring from the fundamental principle of the moral order in this sphere, namely the principle of the common use of goods or, to put it in another and still simpler way, the right to life and subsistence” (par. 18; I will come back to this “principle of the common use of goods” in a bit).  

Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno states, “Yet when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and thus rushing to its own destruction; it does not destroy private possessions, but safeguards them; and it does not weaken private property rights, but strengthens them” (par. 49).  

Martin Bucer, in his De Regno Christi, among many other suggested economic regulations, went so far as to say that the king ought to take land from the wealthy wool farmers and give it to subsistence farmers, that all might be able to provide for themselves and that the land might be better managed and populated.  

Thomas Aquinas, as I have recently posted about, argued that, as property was given first and foremost for common use, and only secondarily for private possession, insomuch as that served common use, it was a duty of justice that the property of those with surplus be used to meet the needs of those who were lacking.  Indeed, for Aquinas this meant that the man in great and pressing need could take from the one with surplus without it being considered theft.  (In case we should think Aquinas a radical in this, we should note with relief that he hesitated to go so far as the Church Fathers and say that the man with surplus who held onto his surplus was guilty of theft or robbery.)  Aquinas does not specifically treat of redistributive taxation, but renowned Aquinas scholar John Finnis connects the dots for us:

“He teaches that rulers have a responsibility to provide, for each of their subjects, whatever they would otherwise lack to sustain them in their respective conditions and status in life. [II-II q. 77 a.4c]  More clearly, he goes along with Aristotle’s clear and repeated teaching that it is appropriate for the state’s rulers and laws to make provision for the fair distribution of goods for use in consumption, so that that use be truly ‘common’. [I-II q. 10 a. 1 ad 1, q. 105 a. 2c and ad 3)  In Aquinas’ own theory this amounts to saying that the distribution by owners of their superflua is an appropriate subject for legislation to avoid backsliding, arbitrariness, and inequity.  So payment of taxes imposed for redistributive purposes will be a primary way in which owners discharge their duty of distribution.”  

(By the way, I think Finnis’s points here help to preempt any “Robin Hood” objections, along the lines of “Well, if Aquinas is right, then why can’t just anybody take from the rich to give to the poor?”  God calls different people to different responsibilities, and if you aren’t a total anarchist, you believe that he calls some people to positions of governance, responsible for overseeing justice and the common good.  These people may have a responsibility to ensure the common use of resources that any old private citizen does not have.)

The principle of the priority of common use articulated by Aquinas became a standard of Catholic moral theology, and, so far as I can tell, was long shared by most of Protestant moral theology (though I will defer to the expertise of others here); it is this to which John Paul II and Pius XI are appealing.  The idea is that since God only ordained private property in order to serve the common good, it naturally follows that someone cannot legitimately cling to their private property to the detriment of the common good, but should let the governors of society put it to use where it is most needed (e.g., giving it to someone who cannot afford healthcare).  There is no injustice in this reallocation; on the contrary, there is injustice when some members of their society cling to resources that others may be desperately in need of.  

Of course, I do not pretend that the Christian tradition has been unanimous on this point, any more than it has been unanimous on any other point.  Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and Anthony Rosmini’s 1840s treatise Society and Its Purposes, for example, seem to regard such reallocations as matters of charity, not justice, and hence not the government’s business (see my previous post).  However, the grounds upon which both of them put forth their philosophies of property and politics are essentially Lockean, leading many subsequent Catholic thinkers to doubt them on these points.  

The crucial standard for us, of course, is the Bible.  For my part, at least, it is hard to see how the Old Testament laws did not require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough.  I have recently posted about this, of course, but so this post will be complete in itself, I will briefly reiterate some of the same points.  The gleaning laws seem like they would meet the modern conservative definition of “theft”--private property owners being required by law to let others have part of their resources.  The triennial tithe, and the requirement that the produce of the sabbath year be shared with all, seem like the same sort of thing.  The Jubilee law states that land must be taken from the current owner and given to the original owner.  And I could go on.

Of course, we cannot make simple one-to-one applications from the OT laws to welfare laws today; far from it.  Gleaning may not prove to be a legitimate basis for Social Security, for instance.  Indeed, some may even argue that none of these OT laws could be used in any such way because these weren’t really “laws,” simply moral decrees, binding on the individual conscience, but no more.  I confess that after six months researching this issue, that argument doesn’t make any sense to me, but I know it has been made.  So, I don’t mean to say, “Ah look!  The Old Testament requires us to impose Obamacare and all the rest”; but I do mean to say that one has to reckon with such texts, and with the strong consensus testimony of the Christian moral tradition, before one could begin to make an accusation like “Taxation for these purposes is theft.”  Such an accusation does not have any prima facie plausibility or force, as most of those making it seem to blithely assume; it may have some force after careful and patient argument, but not otherwise.  

And of course, this does not mean that there may not be many other grounds for objecting to much of this legislation, including Obamacare.  One might say, for instance, that it is inefficient, or ill-conceived, that it will not succeed in helping the common good, but will make problems worse, that certain particulars of it are unjust, that there was a failure of due process of law, etc.  But to say that it is straightforwardly “theft” is to declare any supporter of it, including many a Christian brother, an accomplice to a crime.  As a practical matter, this is hardly going to be helpful in moving the discussion forward, and, in any case, it seems that we ought to think twice before leveling such an accusation.  In light of the points I’ve raised here, it seems that we need to ask ourselves, are we OK with saying that Aquinas and Bucer advocated theft?  What about Moses?  If what we are now facing is something quite different from what Aquinas, Bucer, and Moses advocated, we need to spell out rather precisely what the difference and what the problem is, instead of simply assuming that, because some resources are being redistributed, they’re being stolen.