[Mb-civic] Conscience versus duty - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Conscience versus duty

By James Carroll  |  November 14, 2005

TIMOTHY M. KAINE was elected Democratic governor of Virginia last week 
because, apparently, some Americans think a radical dichotomy between 
private and public morality is a good thing. ''My faith teaches life is 
sacred," Kaine, a Roman Catholic, told voters. ''That's why I personally 
oppose the death penalty. But I take my oath of office seriously." One 
hears the beat of silence. ''And I'll enforce the death penalty."

Kaine's statement was a sharp affirmation of distinct ethical spheres -- 
a person's ultimate obligation to conscience, and that same person's 
equal, if sometimes opposite, duty to impose a sanction that conscience 
abhors. The New York Times reported that ''focus groups and Internet 
surveys showed that voters respected Mr. Kaine's position, even if they 
did not agree with it." They respected Kaine's readiness to execute the 
condemned, even though he thinks it wrong to do so.

American voters are familiar with this kind of ethical reasoning, if it 
can be called that. For more than three decades, on another subject, 
politicians of various stripes have routinely pronounced themselves 
''personally opposed" to abortion, but ready to protect legal access to 
it. The usual rationale for this position is that, in our system with 
its separation of church and state, it would be wrong for a politician 
to impose a ''private" religious conviction on a public that does not 
share it.

This refusal seems to be a personalizing of the nonimposition clause of 
the Constitution (''make no law respecting an establishment of 
religion"), with the officeholder acting to uphold the freedom of 
conscience of each citizen, even if at the expense of the officeholder's 
own conscience. This dichotomy not only defines the nation, but must 
define the inner life of every one hoping to serve the nation as a leader.

There are clear benefits to this approach. It is, for one thing, an 
antidote to the poison of state-imposed religion, in reaction to which 
the founders of the United States sought and found an ingenious 
constitutional solution. The importance of this ''wall of separation" 
tradition is newly evident as some proselytizing Christians in the US 
Air Force, for example, implicitly put the power of rank and office at 
the service of conversion. Alarms should sound when certain kinds of 
beliefs are deemed necessary for the ''unit cohesion" on which the 
military depends. President Bush's selection of a candidate for the US 
Supreme Court based mostly on her ''faith commitment" was another 
instance of a troubling embrace of a religious test for an office that 
must be kept resolutely apart from religion. Similarly, the plethora of 
''faith-based" initiatives coming from Washington rightly raises 
hackles. The public sphere must be protected from religious preference 
of every kind.

But another result of this dualism has been a deadly impoverishment of 
both private and public moral thinking, from the start. As I learned 
from Wendell Berry, the church-state divide let the first generation of 
Americans, like Thomas Jefferson, abhor the institution of slavery in 
private (''Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is 
just.") while doing nothing to oppose it in public -- a refusal to 
impose a ''private" morality on a slave-owning public. An objection that 
was ''merely" ethical carried no weight when it came to law or policy -- 
or to the meaning of ''all men are created equal." Was it only 
incidental that it served Jefferson's own political purpose to keep his 
''private" objection private?

Contemporary politicians who declare themselves ''personally opposed" to 
abortion, but ready to enable it, may be sincere at some level, but at a 
deeper level their opposition rings hollow. Judging not by what they 
say, but by what they do, one must disbelieve them. Perhaps their real 
''private" secret is the conclusion that, in some circumstances 
(following the principle of the lesser evil, for example), abortion is 
the right thing to do, and that the government, therefore, must protect 
it as an option. Convoluted public-private rhetoric about the death 
penalty can be similar.

In American politics, it is easier to fudge such moral questions in the 
blurred borderland of ''separation" than it is to mount a direct 
challenge to an ecclesiastical establishment or powerful interest group. 
As litmus tests, abortion and the death penalty can seem to sit in 
opposite dishes, but the moral conundrums raised by each are similar. In 
both cases, and in others, what we need are politicians who reach moral 
conclusions in the privacy of conscience (whether religiously or not), 
and then dare to claim, explain, and defend their private positions in 
public.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/14/conscience_versus_duty/
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