Catholic Republic by Timothy Gordon

Author:Timothy Gordon [Gordon, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dangerous Books
Published: 2018-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Does the Law Make the Citizen Moral: The Positivism-Originalism-Activism Spectrum

Here’s the point of the above discussion of the basics in virtue ethics: neither law, nor any motivation besides free, individually-imposed moral choice and habit, can truly or fully make men morally good.l But in various aspects of the “American experiment,” even many Catholic commentators often say otherwise. They imply that law, because aligning with morality in many undeniable ways, makes citizens morally good. Such commentators, along with most of today’s legislators and judges in America, have not taken seriously the Aristotelian distinction between accidental virtue and true virtue. This means they draw together too closely the relation between jurisprudence and ethics, and thereby suggest a contradiction of Aristotle: that “actions prescribed by law make citizens truly moral.”

These commentators, judges, or legislators err on the side of virtually no distinction between legality and morality, advocating activism (i.e., legislating morality). Conversely, erring on the opposite side, posing that there is virtually no morality in the law, is positivism (i.e., separation of church and state).

Now the reader sees that, for the Catholic Natural Law tradition, the individual citizen must choose virtue apart from the law, even if he happens accidentally to be following a law when he acts rightly:m

To observe an understood and fair law is not to be coerced by it. Coercion only arises for Aquinas when someone acts unreasonably in a situation that seriously endangers others or the common good. Thus, a free and just society will be one primarily run by free obedience to law on the part of those who understand and will to be just or fair according to its stipulations. A society that requires a constant and heavy dose of coercion is one rapidly deviating from the norms of reason and free adhesion to what is understood to be required.37

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