The bishops of the American Catholic Church are upset with President Obama’s mandate that all participants in regulated health-care programs should have coverage for contraceptives, abortions, and perhaps some other services and products considered immoral by Catholics and many others. But this Catholic layman has a question:
What right have the bishops to object in quite this way to a mess they helped to make by strongly supporting national health-care in a country in which there is so much divergence in moral beliefs affecting medical decisions?
In fact, we can generalize as I did in the title. Any national program which affects matters of moral order will eventually create these sorts of conflicts if there is no consensus on important moral issues in the underlying population of individuals and communities. The interested reader can sample letters and reports here to see how enthusiastically the American bishops and their staffs helped to create this mess which bothers them now. It’s quite appropriate they should be bothered but, over the past six years, I’ve posted several essays about the difficulties of acting as if we’re a morally coherent nation when we’re not. Others have been arguing about the dangers of national social welfare programs from various standpoints, including the highly regarded Catholic historian Thomas Woods who argues from a libertarian standpoint. Did any of the bishops or their advisers pay attention to any sounds outside of their echo-chamber?
Take this as a general rule:
Social systems which have a major moral component should be designed for and implemented within morally coherent communities.
This doesn’t exclude charitable give-and-take between communities not in full moral agreement, but it does exclude dependency relationships except in the most dire of circumstances — such as the large-scale destruction of a region’s infrastructure by a natural disaster.
In other words, the American Catholic Church and its leaders, Christian leaders in general, had no business in recent decades pushing for any sort of national health-care in a country where there is no consensus on moral issues affecting medical care, such as abortion, contraception, hospice care, or the care for children lacking some of the capabilities of most children. If anything, they should have been questioning many existing programs such as Social Security and Medicare. After all, the opponents of Social Security beginning in the 1930s have criticized more than the financial dangers of Social Security. Some have also claimed that such a program would weaken the bonds of families and would even cause an inter-generational war. And, as it turns out, weak families and inter-generational war over Social Security and Medicare are among our greatest existing or imminent problems.
As we become more dependent upon medical systems which are certainly not under the control of individuals nor local communities nor even the larger religious communities, we’ll be offered such poisonous fruits as drugs and techniques developed by experimentation on lab-grown embryos `engineered’ to have specific medical problems, growth of embryos who will never be born but will provide transplantable tissue or organs, engineering of babies to be brought to birth to provide transplantable organs — some of this is already happening quietly in major research centers. For example, this relatively old article article from 2006, Harvard to Create Human Embryonic Stem Cell Lines , tells us:
After more than two years of intensive ethical and scientific review, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Harvard and Children’s Hospital Boston have been cleared to begin experiments using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) to create disease-specific stem cell lines in an effort to develop treatments for a wide range of now-incurable conditions afflicting tens of millions of people.
Here’s an article from the Harvard Gazette, talking about a meeting of some theologians who discuss some varying views on the allowability of using these embryos for research — the Catholic Church and more conservative Protestant churches seem not to have been represented: Stem cells, through a religious lens. Read the article and note the difference in moral teachings regarding the use of embryos grown from stem-cells even amongst theologians of monotheistic religions. How can Catholics participate fully in a health-care system with Muslims who allow the therapeutic use of stem-cells derived from `surplus embryos’ produced in fertility treatments? I don’t feel the right or the urge to go on a nationwide crusade to stop all acts I consider immoral but I also can’t benefit from such acts without endangering my relationship to God, not even surreptitiously by way of medicines or techniques derived from research on those embryos. Nor do I even wish to be in a hospital which carries out what I consider to be immoral research or treatment. If we can’t be sure the service or product isn’t free of the taint of moral disorder, then we’ll have to refuse it. The bishops have helped to create a situation where any morally well-ordered Catholic Christians might soon have to refuse all services and products of the American medical industry. The entire industry is on its way to being morally contaminated in a very deep way.
We should learn to think in terms of the general rule suggested above:
Social systems which have a major moral component should be designed for and implemented within morally coherent communities.
Human beings with diverse moral beliefs aren’t going to be able to agree on a wide variety of health-care issues or social welfare issues in general. A morally diverse group of human beings or a morally diverse gathering of human communities aren’t going to be able to form a coherent community at a small or large scale. A falsely-justified attempt at implementing social programs with those who don’t agree with your moral positions will result first in the moral corruption or confusion of human beings in the various communities, not just the community with the highest moral standards. In addition, such confused efforts will produce serious disagreements threatening any existing social coherence, however slight, and will endanger any chances of meaningful dialog on matters of fundamental moral importance. And they might even endanger the very existence of some of these communities reduced to dependence upon a government which pursues its own interests, probably more free to do so because of the lack of moral coherence along with the pretense that we are a morally coherent nation.
Anyone who wishes to read a well-documented scholarly analysis of this lack of moral consensus in the modern West can check into the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, such as After Virtue; Whose Justice, Which Rationality; Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry; and Dependent Rational Animals. For a good historical work narrating the past five centuries as a period of decay in the West, see From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun.