AMERICAN CATHOLIC SOCIAL THEORY! A POSSIBLE CONSENSUS?

To a non-expert reader like myself, contemporary debate in political theory and ethics, including Catholic social ethics in the United States, is one of the more promising discussions of our period. Unlike many debates in epistemology or, I regret to say, in fundamental theology, the debate in Catholic social ethics and political theory seems to yield more of a consensus (although, by no means either a full or a non-controversial consensus) than other debates. It is always risky to formulate a possible consensus. However, I shall attempt to do so here. In Catholic social ethics (represented, in the US, not only by Catholic ethicists but by the pastoral letters on nuclear war and the economy of the American bishops), there seems to be something like a consensus on three points.

First, a responsible Catholic social ethics in a pluralist and democratic society will be obliged to make its case on grounds acceptable, in principle, both to the Catholic and wider Christian community on the one hand, and to the larger secular, pluralistic, democratic, and, in that basic sense, “liberal” society on the other. Insofar as Catholic social ethics succeeds in that public enterprise it will also correlate (as distinct from juxtapose) the arguments from inner-Christian resources and the distinct arguments from “reason,” including some form of a general ethics and political theory. Second, appeals in Catholic social ethics to earlier versions of “reason,” such as dehistoricized versions of natural law, have been replaced by more historically conscious but not relativistic defenses of “reason.” This move is analogous, I believe, to the abandonment of dehistoricized Enlightenment notions of rationality in contemporary liberal social theory.