Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
By Jennifer Roback Morse:
The latest book by Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, is a series of essays held together by natural-law reasoning. Although George is a devout Roman Catholic, he does not draw on church teachings. His methodology should interest anyone who wishes to construct reasoned arguments to place principled limits on government.
First, a disclaimer: My formal training in philosophy ended in the fourth grade, when I memorized the St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism. Any philosophical knowledge I have attained since then has been entirely self-taught.
One of George’s key chapters, “Two Views of Liberty . . . and Conscience,” lays out the analytical approach. Does freedom mean we get to do whatever we want? Does a defense of freedom rule out substantive claims about what is truly good? George answers both questions in the negative. He believes truth claims about human flourishing need not impinge on anyone’s freedom.
George illustrates the issues by contrasting John Stuart Mill with John Henry Newman. Mill and Newman were among the most distinguished and powerful intellects of the nineteenth century. Both wrote compelling defenses of freedom, but they had very different views of what freedom and hence conscience mean.
Mill articulates his understanding of freedom through his famous “harm” principle. “‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’” (qtd. on p. 107). And what is the basis of this principle? According to Mill, it is an appeal not to abstract right but to utility “in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (qtd. on p. 108).
As George notes, for this concept to do any work one has to have some notion of the “permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (p. 110). The utility principle by itself cannot provide answers. George believes Mill had “something of a tin ear for religion,” whichMill probably thought would “wither away in an age of freedom” (p. 110).
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