Sec. 45 repeats a point discussed earlier, namely that as “the economy, in all its branches, constitutes a sector of human activity”, it is essential that it be structured intrinsically by the logic of caritas:

Efforts are needed — and it is essential to say this — not only to create “ethical” sectors or segments of the economy or the world of finance, but to ensure that the whole economy — the whole of finance — is ethical, not merely by virtue of an external label, but by its respect for requirements intrinsic to its very nature.

This point is further articulated in sec. 46, which spells out in more detail the importance of economic activity that regards profit “as a means of achieving the goal of a more humane market and society” and seems like it would have been better placed alongside the discussion of mutualism in chapter three; similarly, sec. 47 discusses development programs and the phenomenon of international aid, noting that in each case there is a real potential for abuse and bureaucratic waste and, consequently, a need for transparency, for a direct involvement of the people whose interests are at stake with the activities of those aiming to help them, and for a careful responsiveness to the intricacies of concrete situations.

Finally, secs. 48-51 take up the topic of human relationships to the natural environment. Benedict stresses the importance of recognizing the “inbuilt order” of non-human nature: “the natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure; it is a wondrous work of the Creator containing a ‘grammar’ which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation” (sec. 48). The consequent duties have political dimensions as well as individual ones: it is incumbent on technologically advanced societies to reduce domestic energy consumption to allow the distribution of resources to developing countries that lack them; on political authorities to “ensure that the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations” (sec. 50); and on the Church to build up a “human ecology” that will strengthen in turn a proper attitude toward the rest of creation:

The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society. (sec. 51)

As its title suggests this chapter is rather wide-ranging, and there is clearly a lot of value in it. What is frustrating, though, is that not much is done to explicate how these issues are supposed to relate to one another, let alone how they tie in to the document’s overarching themes. I’m happy to have someone show that these complaints are misplaced.

P.S. Here is the text of the encyclical, and here are my notes on the earlier chapters. For next Sunday we will read chapters 5-6 as well as the conclusion, because I’m going to be on the road for the week after that.

P.P.S. Maclin Horton has gotten around to posting some thoughts on the encyclical and the surrounding fuss, and they are well worth a read.

It is important to emphasize – as I’ve seen remarked before; I just can’t recall where – that the central argument of this chapter is not that healthy markets require robust regulatory states and political systems that ensure a just distribution of wealth; this is certainly among its claims (see e.g. the second paragraph of sec. 41), but it clearly is not the primary one. Rather, as suggested just above, the point Benedict makes most often is that since economic activity has a “human significance, prior to its professional one” (sec. 41), markets themselves must therefore be geared toward social justice and informed by the logic of gift; and so it is not enough for government to step in and impose these values simply as a corrective. As he puts it in sec. 39 (though note that one could pull a similar quotation from almost any paragraph in this chapter):

When both the logic of the market and the logic of the State come to an agreement that each will continue to exercise a monopoly over its respective area of influence, in the long term much is lost: solidarity in relations between citizens, participation and adherence, actions of gratuitousness, all of which stand in contrast with giving in order to acquire (the logic of exchange) and giving through duty (the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law). In order to defeat underdevelopment, action is required not only on improving exchange-based transactions and implanting public welfare structures, but above all on gradually increasing openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion. The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society.

(Whatever translator came up with “world context” should never be allowed near the English language again.) Hence our questions should be: In practice, what does it mean for everyday economic activity to incorporate such relationships? Beyond obvious demands like those of fair pay and honest disclosure, what does market ethics (if we might coin a term) consist in?

One suggestion that comes up repeatedly as an answer to the first of these questions is that the market must have room  for the economic activity of those “who freely choose to act according to principles other than those of pure profit, without sacrificing the production of economic value in the process” (sec. 37); hence for “commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends” (sec. 38) that exist alongside enterprises that are public or more narrowly profit-oriented. Benedict calls this a way of “civilizing the economy” (ibid.), and it can be seen as a counterpart to the call for dispersed, multi-leveled, and cooperative political authority that comes in the second paragraph of sec. 41. Similarly, in sec. 40 there is an articulation of the more familiar demand for corporate managers to be attentive to more than just the demands of their shareholders: workers, clients, suppliers, producers, and the broader “community of reference” all have a stake in the life of the business, and so a long-term and appropriately wide-ranging view of the ends of economic activity is consequently is an inescapable demand.

Ultimately, then, it seems best to read this chapter as directed toward business leaders even more than political ones, since as Benedict puts it “attitudes of gratuitousness cannot be established by law”, while markets and political institutions alike “need individuals who are open to reciprocal gift” (sec. 39). It certainly seems right to regard a widespread failure to embody such openness as among the chief causes of social injustice.

Thoughts?

P.S. Here is the text of the encyclical, and here are the previous entries for this reading group. Next weekend, we’ll discuss chapter four.

One of the reasons I don’t think of myself as a libertarian even though they’re the group whose actual policy preferences most closely mirror mine is because of things like this. Legislation reflects a society’s moral values. In fact, it should reflect a society’s moral values, consistent with individual freedoms, because it is what a democratic polis is all about: a nation deciding by which rules it wants to live.

Government can’t and won’t “just get out of our lives”, simply because what you describe as “getting out of our lives” isn’t the same thing as what I describe as “getting out of our lives”, and, until Jim Manzi finally succeeds at creating evidence-based social science, there is no scientific way to decide what government should or should not do — and nor should there be.

So if you want to disincentivize smoking through sin taxes, that’s perfectly fine. It’s okay to have public policy that disincentivizes bad things just because they’re bad, without having to make budget projections over the next 30 years. I’m willing to pay extra to feed my addiction. But don’t lie about the real reason you’re doing it.

Justify driving organ sales to the black market, where the brokers get rich, the sellers get a pittance, and only the rich can afford them, rather than taking the money we currently spend on dialysis to compensate those who are willing to help provide the gift of a dialysis-free life to others.  Bonus question:  explain why we should prevent people from voluntarily donating a kidney when living kidney donors do not appear to have an elevated risk of kidney failure without resorting to any of the following

1. Huffy declarations that anyone who disagrees with you must be amoral
2. Appeals to the fact that many other people are also against organ donation
3. Invoking the infamous "ick" factor involved in selling a body part

Extra credit:  do all of the above, to someone on longterm dialysis who is legally prevented from buying an organ, or having the government buy one for her.

I am similarly inclined, though as a reader pointed out no less an authority – for some of us, anyway – than the Pope himself has suggested a line of argument that seems to meet Megan’s criteria:

As regards the practice of organ transplants, it means that someone can give only if he/she is not placing his/her own health and identity in serious danger, and only for a morally valid and proportional reason. The possibility of organ sales, as well as the adoption of discriminatory and utilitarian criteria, would greatly clash with the underlying meaning of the gift that would place it out of consideration, qualifying it as a morally illicit act.

The central concern that Benedict is articulating here has to do with the need to prevent our understanding of the human person from being captured or corrupted by what he calls “the logic of the market”; the body must not be “considered a mere object”, and the potential for self-commodification that could attend the sale of body parts is something that any advocate for open markets in human organs should take very seriously. (Except the libertarians, who are in favor of the commodification of everything.*) If I were of the sort to offer arguments for the blanket illegalization of material compensation for living organ donors, these are the lines those arguments would follow.

But at least two further points need to be made.

The first is that it is not at all clear that compensating organ donors would essentially “clash with the underlying meaning of the gift” in the ways in question. To take a few admittedly strained examples, think of opera halls and campus buildings that have been named after donors, or – better – stained glass windows in churches that bear the names of the people who paid for them. Having such a window installed simply for the sake of putting one’s name up there for all to see is clearly an exercise of vanity, but we don’t decide that the real possibility of feeding into such sinful tendencies is a reason to do away with that form of acknowledgment altogether; rather, we see that the potential for societal recognition can incentivize giving without compromising its nobility. So why can’t it similarly be that, as the University of Minnesota’s Arthur Matas puts it to Virginia Postrel, the promise of compensation for organ donors could help to “push them over the edge”, and send the message that “We can compensate you but never repay you”? Can it really be that any sort of material compensation turns a gift into a sale, thereby making it morally illicit?

Secondly and relatedly, it is important to see that there is a large gap between allowing donors to receive tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for their organs and prohibiting them from receiving any compensation whatsoever beyond travel costs and a bit of disability pay. AEI’s Sally Satel made this point quite effectively in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal:

States could offer health and life insurance to living donors, or funeral benefits to families of posthumous donors. Donors could also be offered a tax credit or perhaps a very generous contribution to a charity of their choice.

The rewards could come from state governments or approved charities, not from individuals, and the organs would be distributed according to formulas already in place. That means organs will not be available only to the wealthy.

In fact this strikes me as even more caution than would be necessary, but the key point is that not all compensation must take the form of money that can be immediately spent – and instituting limits of these sorts would clearly be a way to work against the potential for “clash with the underlying meaning of the gift” that Benedict reasonably worries about. Given the pain currently endured by tens of thousands of dialysis patients waiting years on end for a transplant, it seems appropriate to hope that space can be opened to try to find such a middle ground, ideally on a state-by-state basis.

This is, as I said many times in the comments to my earlier post, not at all an issue about which I’ve made up my mind; and I do think that the concerns about self-commodification are very, very legitimate. But it seems clear to me that the question of which political arrangements will best serve the public good in this domain should be regarded as open, rather than as closed.

* Actually, that’s not true. But it is fun to say.

That book is a common target, so much so that I have to wonder whether we’ve been missing the point of it all these years. Silverstein had a dark sensibility and a wicked sense of humor. Maybe he set out to write a bleak fable about kids who selfishly milk their elders for every drop they’ve got. Is it possible that he finished the manuscript, looked at it with satisfaction, and said to himself, Yep, that boy sure was a bastard?

Well it’s certainly possible, and if that’s what he thought then he certainly was right.

Mark Shea would say the same:

It’s children’s literature for Generation Narcissus, in which we learn the valuable lesson that It’s All About You–Forever. Take as much as you want because it would be wrong, terribly wrong, for the ones you exploit to judge you. At the end of the day there will be no consequences because Love means letting you do whatever you like without regard for relationship–Forever.

And ditto Eve Tushnet, in an old post that I think may be the source of my present dislike for the book:

… the tree is the villain. It spoils the child, gives him no basis for a real life in the world, and then martyrs itself so he can keep being dependent on it forever. There are reasons to martyr oneself… and some of them are awful.

Noah Millman and H.C. Johns, on the other hand, dissent from my verdict, and I appreciate the points they’re making. It seems to me now that the comment I left on Noah’s post was based on a too-quick misreading of his argument, and the idea that adults can benefit from seeing themselves in the child-turned-man rather than the tree does, I think, indicate a possibly fruitful reading; though if we’re trying to look at the story – as I was – through the eyes of a child, then as the above-quoted comments suggest the particular variety of “unconditional love” that the boy gets from the tree may not embody an especially healthy lesson.

Speaking of which, H.C. writes:

As sympathetic as my warped communitarian heart is to demands for mutuality, I think that the story’s lack of shared charity is actually its most powerful point.  It seems to me that the story’s complexity comes from the fact that love isn’t always mutual, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee interpersonal justice.  In fact, in some cases it can demand precisely the opposite: that we give until we have nothing left, and that the only compensation we can expect is the satisfaction from having done so. When I try to imagine what it must be like to raise a severely disabled child or deal with an addicted sibling or care for a mentally ill parent, this is the only understanding of love that can suffice… The love that gives until it is spent.

I hear this. But the problem, which I gestured at only very quickly in my original post, is that human love simply doesn’t end up leave its subjects “spent” in this way; there is death, to be sure, but that’s not a consequence of love in the way that the tree’s destruction follows upon the boy’s exploitation of it. The exceedingly rare occasions when actual martyrdom is demanded constitute plausible exceptions to this general rule, but the situations that the tree and the boy find themselves in aren’t at all like that, which makes it hard for me to resist the conclusion that there’s something downright unethical, if not quite villainous, in the way that the tree allows itself to be taken advantage of. Giving of oneself is noble, and when properly ordered it need know no real limits, but real love means sometimes having to say “I’m sorry, but that’s one thing you just can’t have”.

(Image via Wikipedia, and punchline modified shortly after posting.)

People are doing everything they can to stay in their homes, and/or to feed their children. I can only imagine what many families would do if it were legal to sell one’s body parts for money. And I’m not kidding: as I think about a loved one whom I lost last year, I would have gladly sold one of my own kidneys, if this would have helped pay for better medical treatment for him. If I had the option now, I would do this without much of a second thought.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I fail to see how this constitutes a serious objection, and notwithstanding the obviously weird and potentially problematic aspects of open markets in human organs I can’t shake the conviction that carefully experimenting – at the state level, please – with the legalization of such markets and the establishment of other financial incentives to encourage organ donation is absolutely the right thing to do. I suspect, though, that I’m solidly in the minority in that conviction, and I’m willing as ever to be reasoned with, so fire away.

Please, though, make your objections more forceful than “Allowing people to do X for money might lead people who need money to do X”.

At first I wasn’t quite sure what Rod Dreher was aiming to do by calling out Eminem because a man thought he was quoting him while committing murder, but after several days, the discussion has led him into a key point about the role of art in modern culture:

No serious person believes that art should be devoid of sex and violence, because sex and violence are part of life. It all comes down to how an artist handles those things, and the context in which the art is created. We live now in a culture in which artists and those who promote them refuse any moral responsibility for their work, and tell themselves that they are operating from a position of ethical superiority.

The fact is, art is never created in a vacuum.

Which reminded me, almost instantly, of Bringhurst on the same subject:

And what of the typographer Peter Schoffer, who in 1463 was asked to typeset and print a pamphlet urging all good Germans and Christians – not just skinheads – to massacre the Turks? Schoffer too took refuge in the craft. He set the pamphlet handsomely, with a particularly handsome first leaf: four lines of large textura and a lot of white space. The result is still much prized. It is Europe’s earliest known title page.

[...]

Morality is part of language itself, and language is part of morality. Not all sentences are good to speak on all occassions even though the language can construct them. And not all things the designer can design are desirable just because he can design them. I think this truth applies, in its small way, even to Peter Schoffer’s title page – though in Schoffer’s case the witnesses are dead, the statute of limitations has long run out, and the page is inarguably beautiful.  (Robert Bringhurst, “Boats Is Saintlier Than Captains,” Everywhere Being Is Dancing, pp. 197-9)

The matter of wondering where the limit should be drawn is nothing new, and it is not new that the question should often appear either unanswerable or the answer utterly arbitrary. Denying that there is a limit at all, however, is frequently more dangerous than misplacing it. Art for art’s sake along will not suffice, though the piece may still be beautiful. Art is like anything else – it must exist in the real world, our world: in Wendell Berry’s construction, “its real habitat is the household and the community.”

Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos may not be common in the life of most households. But they are a part of my life and mind – exist, that is, in “my household” (though at 21 and in college, there isn’t much of one) – and so long as I exist as a part of a community, they are a part of the lives of those communities of which I am also. Art must be consumed by the living, and so must enter life. The only way it can truly be for its own sake is for no human eye to ever behold the finished piece – for it not to be art.

So there are beautiful things in the world that probably ought not to have been made – though that does not affect the fact that they are, especially once they are granted enough distance from the moment of their creation, beautiful nevertheless. Morality and craft cannot be separated. “Deed is belief.” (I associate the thought with Will Herberg, though I can’t find it, and I doubt he said it so succinctly.) I’m hardly trying to imply that the Beatles are responsible for the Manson Family murders, but Rod has a point: art (and “art”) exists in the world, and its creators have the obligation to recognize that it will have consequences, for good or for ill – and that they will not be able to foresee all of those consequences. The artist who would cut himself off from the morality of his work is the artist who would cut himself off wholly from the world, from being. But that’s something which we simply can’t do. By being, we are in the world — a world in which morality, if one is to acknowledge its existence, permeates life, which consists of deeds that can therefore not escape the question of morality — and because we are in the world, to shirk the matter of morality is to shirk responsibility.

There is a strong temptation to say, very simply, that these sorts of decisions are family affairs and none of the public’s business. However, the answer is not as simple as recognizing a family’s right to privacy, as the case of elective abortion makes clear. The decision to carry a disabled child to term means something very different depending on how ordinary or extraordinary the decision is. The public’s attitude towards children with Down Syndrome is not the same when 15 percent of women choose to abort such children as when 90 percent do. (The exact figure in the United States is 91 percent.) If elective abortion continues to be the overwhelming norm, the child’s disability will come to be seen as something the mother brought upon herself rather than as something she simply accepted. The assumption will be that no normal woman would have borne the child since, after all, normal women don’t. This same shift—from seeing disability as a family’s fate to seeing it as a self-inflicted burden—will naturally follow if more quadriplegics follow the example of Daniel James, the British rugby player who ended his life at the Swiss clinic Dignitas after an injury left him paralyzed. (Dignitas has ended the lives of more than a hundred Britons since it opened ten years ago, and, in that time, not a single spouse, relative, or friend has been prosecuted for the legal crime of assisting them.) The difference between ordinary and extraordinary measures is an important moral one; it determines the moral—and therefore legal—expectations we have of our neighbors and ourselves. These private decisions have public consequences.

Read the whole thing.

(a) Repeal all restrictions requiring humane treatment of non-human animals. The Congress should not get into the specifics of what procedures can be used when. If it must, it should broaden the set of cases in which non-human animals can be harmed or killed to include not only cases in which human health is at stake, but cases in which people get a kick out of it, or in which there’s money to be made through the research.

(b) Require training in animal research techniques for a Ph.D. in the natural sciences.

(c) Require that any research center provide any researcher or corporate donor with appropriate resources to perform research on non-human animals, and that those research costs be fully reimbursable by the federal government. If they have no one on staff who can perform the research, they should get someone. See (b) above.

Because, you know, one way to stop terrorism is by enforcing our laws. We should absolutely do that. But another is to make it clear that terrorism doesn’t work. We should do that too. And the best way I can think of is to change our present situation, in which far too few scientists perform research on non-human animals. We can keep whatever strictures we want on research on human subjects while also ensuring that no one person has to take on him- or herself the risks that militant animal rights activists want to subject them to.

Or am I somehow misunderstanding the logic of hilzoy’s position?