How to Be Both a Good Person and a Good Citizen

 In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at the belief that you can decide for yourself whether to obey a law, good or bad, and whether such a decision excuses you from taking the penalties for breaking the law.

Thoughts on the Fourteenth Amendment

The recent decision by the United States Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to “every free-born person in this land” raises some interesting issues.  First, of course, is the situation itself.  The concept of an executive order that creates law or changes the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is, at least in the opinion of this writer, intriguing.

What Would Trajan Do? Part II

 As we saw last week, Ancient Rome had a problem with slaves convicted of crimes doing the work of honest municipal slaves, receiving pay and benefits, and generally causing scandal by taking jobs from other slaves and foreigners.  Still, rather than simply get rid of the illegal slaves (which would have exacerbated the chronic labor shortage), the Emperor Trajan came up with a solution.

Sticking to Your Guns: Rights and Wrongs

 

The recent horrifying upswing in mass shootings in the United States has again focused on the question of gun control — and rightfully so.  At least in today’s posting, however, we are not going to take a position on the question of gun control, but to examine the underlying assumptions and principles of a very broad spectrum of opinions on the subject.

Protecting You from Me

       In yesterday’s podcast, we did something unusual, at least for us.  We put up two old movie clips from Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), as well as some newsreel footage of the actual verdicts being handed down.  It must be admitted that the fictional depiction gives a clearer understanding of the fundamental issues involved.  Of course, in an actual courtroom, a good judge doesn’t get the kind of scriptwriters that Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster got.

A Judicial Pascal's Wager

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there appears to be a bit of a bruhaha (but no one is laughing . . .) following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and a possible successor.  In an age focused on mindless prejudice to the point of obsession, it’s interesting that the objections to the possibility of a practicing Catholic being appointed to the United States Supreme Court seem virtually unchanged from the rhetoric of a number of fringe groups from the late 1700s down to the 1950s.

A Philosophy of Law

 

With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, speculation has shifted into high gear as conservatives push for what they think will be a conservative justice, and liberals for a, er, liberal justice.  That’s a little simplistic, but it’s the view most people have of the situation.  The problem is that it’s a little bit more complicated than that.

Need for a Strategic Plan

In the previous posting on this subject, we discovered that using the United States Supreme Court to create law and impose the views of one group on everyone else in the country is something of a double-edged sword.  Specifically, when the slave-owning “interests” in the American South succeeded in making human chattel slavery a federal issue instead of confining it to the individual states, they got what they wanted — legal justification to extend slavery anywhere in the United States, regardless whether or not it was legal in a specific state.

Whence This Chaos?

 

In a recent article in Catholic World Report (“Why We Are Where We Are“), George Weigel opines that the increasing chaos we see around us these days is the result of the United States having lost its way after being cut loose from the liberal principles of its founding.  There is a good deal of merit in Weigel’s argument, but it doesn’t really explain how the U.S. lost its anchor.  As he says in this edited-for-length extract (since you can read the entire article by clicking on the link; it’s not long):

Do We Need a Theocracy?

We’ve been looking into the roots of socialism, and how socialism and social justice became confused.  One of the things that struck us that we had never noticed before was the insistence of the early socialists that, one, what became known as socialism was originally not intended as an alternative to capitalism, but to Christianity, especially the most organized and hierarchical form of Christianity, Catholicism.

Was the State Made for Man, or Man for the State?

In the previous posting on this subject, we addressed the question whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” and came up with the non-answer that it depends on what you mean by “Christian nation.”  We decided — that’s us, not you — that, yes, you could use that term if you didn’t mind saying something misleading, but it would be better to say that the United States was founded as a country that — with certain rather key exceptions — embodied respect for the dignity of the individual human person.

What Do You Mean By “Christian Nation”?

A couple of weeks ago an article appeared in The Christian Post on how America was departing from the values of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  The idea was that the principles espoused by the Founders were essentially Christian, and that therefore the United States is properly a “Christian nation.”

Life, Charity, and Justice

In classic Thomist philosophy, as we saw in the previous posting on this subject, the four natural virtues are temperance, fortitude, prudence, and — above all — justice.  According to Aristotle (and thus Aquinas), the capacity to acquire and develop these virtues is built into human nature.  No one is human without the capacity to acquire and develop these virtues, for that capacity (which is the good common to every human being) is what defines human beings as human beings.

We the People

It’s an absolute dogma of modern politics and economics.  Everyone has the right to what they need to live a decent life.  If people do not have what they need to do so, it is the responsibility of the State to see that they do, and all efforts are to be directed to the end of providing people with what they need.

Financing Change

One of the most frequently heard questions about the proposed “Green New Deal” is where ire they going to get the long green to pay for it?  For those of you not familiar with 1890s slang, “long green” refers to paper currency — appropriate, since it was in 1893 that the populist leader Jacob Sechler Coxey, a theosophist, proposed measures that many consider the precursor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a rip-off of Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal from 1910.

Is Development Bad?

At the end of the previous posting on this subject, we noted that some people with agendas had found what they wanted in John Henry Newman’s book, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.  The problem was that what they claimed to have found was the opposite of what Newman had actually written.

The More Things Change. . .

It comes as a complete surprise to many people today to find out that one of the most burning issues of the latter half of the nineteenth century in U.S. politics was “the Catholic Question.”  The fact that not even textbooks in Catholic schools mention this, or give any hint that something was amiss, may be a symptom of just what is wrong with both Academia and politics today.  After all, if you don’t know why something is the way it is, how can you expect to come up with a just or even workable solution?

Flexible Standards, II: Making Money

Yesterday we looked at the whole concept of “flexible standard.”  We decided that having a flexible standard is another way of saying we have no standard at all.  After all, what is a yard if yesterday it was 36 inches, today is 18 inches, and tomorrow it is 83 inches?  And what do you mean by “inch”?

Flexible Standards, I: The Living Constitution

A Southern Lady of our acquaintance (please note the capitalization), has been known to turn her nose up at certain things on the grounds that they do not meet her “standuhds.”  Being mostly “standuhds” (or, if you prefer — which we do — “standards”) relating to certain social mores, these are sometimes a trifle flexible, possibly even a little vague at times.

Some Comments on Rights, Subsidiarity, and Charity

A lot of discussion about economic and social justice brings up such esoteric concepts as “rights,” “subsidiarity,” and “charity.”  The problem is that a lot of people who use the terms don’t really seem to be using the classic definitions of these concepts, but appear to be tailoring them to fit their current wants and needs.