Thinking ahead to this Wednesday (29 October)

This Wednesday's session will be on, 'The social nature of the human person: politics, the State and the role of the Church.'

I suppose that one of the key differences between Catholic social teaching and the modern 'commonsense' view is the role of the State. There is a (non-Catholic) tendency to think of the State as the source of all legal authority which is to be contrasted with the Catholic natural law tradition that argues a) that the authority of positive (ie State) law is derived from natural law; and b) that there are intermediate bodies (both the family and the associations of civil society) that have a natural right to exist rather than simply a right devolved by the State.

So what then is the role of the State? (Do we really need a State?) Yves Simon  (here) discusses the need for the State under two headings:

a) Substitutional. In certain circumstances, the State may act as substitute for the citizens' own decisions. This in turn takes two main forms:
  i) Permanent substitution: if the citizen body is permanently unable to make decisions which achieve the common good, then the government should do it for them. (This is very much behind Plato's idea that government should permanently be run by experts (philosophers!).)
 ii) Temporary substitution: if the citizen body is temporarily unable to make decisions which achieve the common good, then the government should do it for them but with a view to educating them to be able to run the country.

b) Unifying. Even if you imagine a society made up of entirely wise people, you would still need a government to decide which (of a number of possible good aims) that society should in fact aim at. As Simon puts it:

Even in the smallest and most closely united community, unity of action cannot be taken for granted; it has to be caused, and, if it is to be steady, it has to be assured by a steady cause. Here are a man and his wife -- both are good and clever, but one thinks that the summer vacation should be spent on the seashore, and the other would rather spend it in the hills. If they remain divided, one goes to the seashore, the other to the hills, and common life ceases temporarily. It would come to an end if a similar divergence concerned an issue of lasting significance.

Questions to think about:

a) What goods should a government aim at? (Are there as many different goods as there are individuals with opinions?)

b) Do we need experts to recognize (some? all of?) those goods?

c) Is democracy a good form of government? Why? (And is our modern Western democracy a good form of democracy?)

d) What role should the Church play in thinking through answers to the above?

Look forward to the discussions on Wednesday!