: No real reasoning ability required, it
: seems; just an ability to distort the
: reasoning process.
I don't agree that the reasoning ability of the judiciary is distorted or not 'real', John, not at least according to the principles foundational to the liberal state of which it is both participant and guardian.
: That is the problem – the parlous
: state of current public reason, uninformed,
: as it is, by ignorance of correct moral
: principles.
Conor Sweeney:
"... one of my pet frustrations is the rear-guard initiatives of Christians who respond to same-sex marriage campaigns and legislation by beating the drum of so-called "natural" marriage, mapped out according to the conditions of liberalism, and thus defended largely by recourse to consequential social arguments.
Not only is this largely pointless within a culture that no longer believes that there is anything remotely normative about nature or sacred about marriage, but at a far deeper level it actually distracts us from what should be our primary vocation of proclaiming the radically sacramental gospel of marriage. Instead, we often seem intent on propping up an existing social order - that, short of Christological reorientation, is dying anyway - by recourse to "grey" appeals premised on a capitulation in advance to the terms and conditions of liberalism, which thus tend to be ineffective and self-defeating from the word go.
Perhaps in a time where people inhabited a theocentric universe unframed by the ontology and practices of liberalism, abstract appeals to doctrine, morality, tradition, nature, right reason, Aristotelian virtue and the like would have had much more effect. But this is no longer our world. And because it is no longer our world, appeals to a suite of arguments that do not illuminate the radical christocentric centre of faith instead tend to become points of entrenched conflictual dialectics rather than evangelical invitation and illumination. Even worse, this "grey" preoccupation endlessly defers our own conversion to what marriage really is in its primary sacramental realization.
I have no desire to be told that mutual love and the presence of Christ and the Spirit in my marriage with my wife are little more than "accidents" or ornaments. I have no desire to be told that the more basic social significance of our marriage is "natural" - that is, that its value lies most in the contribution we make to society by basically being biological "breeders" and educators of children. But this is not Christian marriage. And nor is it the marriage that Christians should be proclaiming for others."
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/07/06/4495331.htm
: That is the result of applying
: honest reasoning to the essential nature of
: human beings, but modern legal argument
: obtains false conclusions by arguing from
: accidentals, not essence.
According to the tenets of the liberal state, which we all embrace to some degree, (eg defence of liberal market economics) the essence of the human person is his freedom, understood as autonomous, inalienable right to self-determination
Until we address this and establish an 'ontology of the gift' with the essence of personhood being the freedom to love and to share what is first given, rather than the freedom to choose, arguments made on the basis of historically held moral precepts won't be of much help.
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