To continue yesterday’s discussion:  Are there in fact implicit norms to which the codes of particular cultures are better or worse approximations?  Judge Posner says “No.”  Let's consider his first example, murder.  Posner claims that the prohibition of murder is a mere tautology – that killing is wrong when killing is wrong – so that essentially it says nothing.  But is this correct?

The arguments of Richard Swinburne seem to be well known (and well debated) among professional philosophers of religion, but little known outside their ranks.

Swinburne’s Principle of Testimony:  “[T]hose who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe any others when they say they do -- again, in the absence of deceit or deception.  If we could not in general trust what other people say about their experiences without checking them out in some way, our knowledge of history or geography or science would be almost non-existent.”

Harvard anthropologist David Pilbeam, reviewing a book about human origins:  “My reservations concern not so much this book but the whole subject and methodology of paleoanthropology.  But introductory books – or book reviews – are hardly the place to argue that perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories.  Rather, the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past.  Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans vie

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.  And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”  --  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

So far I’ve agreed with Bishop McElroy that the distinction between principles and prudential judgments should be consistently applied to both social evils and intrinsically evil acts, but I’ve suggested that he is not consistently following his own advice.

As we saw yesterday, Bishop McElroy doesn’t argue that we shouldn’t distinguish between basic principles and prudential judgments, but that that we ought to apply this distinction consistently -- not only when we are considering social evils such as poverty, but also when we are considering intrinsically evil acts such as abortion.  I closed by saying that this is an excellent point, but the devil is in the details.  Why?

A long-running battle between the so-called Catholic left and the so-called Catholic right concerns which political issues the Church should speak about and which ones she shouldn’t. One crucial distinction is that teaching the basic principles of Catholic social doctrine go to the heart of her charism, but she has no special expertise in prudential judgments about how to apply them.

Query: