At the barricades

Commonweal, Sept 27, 2002 by Mark A. Sargent

This absolutist strain in George's thought generates some important questions. His core concept of a "secular orthodoxy" lumps together "secularists" as disparate as liberals Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, utilitarians Peter Singer and Richard Posner, and such libertarians as Robert Nozick. Taken together, do they really constitute an "orthodoxy"? Similarly, his swipes at "feminism" do not acknowledge, let alone engage, the variety of feminisms, including a robust Christian feminism. Arguments can be constructed from natural law about human equality to support feminist positions inconsistent with George's convictions about marriage and the family.

In asserting the rational superiority of his arguments about abortion, same-sex marriage, and sexual morality George's trump card seems to be what he regards as the correct understanding of the integration of mind and body. He contends that those who would legalize abortion, recognize same-sex marriages, or countenance contraception and "nonreproductive type" sexual acts are captives of a philosophically indefensible "mind-body dualism." George claims that for "orthodox secularism" only the "conscious, desiring, self-aware, and future-directed part of the human being ... is truly the `person.'" For secularists, the body is not part of the "personal reality" of the human being; it is "subpersonal." This detachment, according to George, is implicit not only in arguments for abortion and euthanasia (which implicitly treat the body as something that can be discarded freely) but also prevents recognition of marriage as a "two-in-one-flesh union" of two persons. Only in heterosexual marriage and "reproductive-type" sexual acts, he concludes, can a true "unity of body, sense, emotion, and will" be found. Everything else amounts to an immoral "instrumentalization of sex." Obviously, all this is debatable; what is important is George's apparent belief that his resolution of the mind-body question ends the debate, making it unnecessary for him to engage directly with moral and legal arguments that raise different concerns.

His philosophical resolution of the question of same-sex marriage, for example, does not acknowledge that the specific question is situated in the larger question of the dignity of persons who are homosexual, and that there are both theological and social-utility arguments that may justify recognition of same-sex marriage, or at least legal relationships that approximate some aspects of marriage. Similarly, his persuasive argument that an embryo is in fact human life does not, as a matter of pure reason, indisputably end the argument over abortion. Even those who accept the premise that an embryo is human life may reach differing conclusions about the moral status of that life. Similarly, insistence that an embryo constitutes human life should not preclude recognition that the embeddedness of fetal life in another life raises questions about the mother's autonomy that are morally complex. One may still come to a pro-life conclusion, but to do so simply by asserting that a human life is a human life and therefore deserves the same level of legal protection is too easy.