How Liberalism Cuts Out the Natural Law: John Rawls's Sleight of Hand, Part 3

JOHN RAWLS USES THE ISSUE OF ABORTION to illustrate how his "political liberalism" based upon "public reason" is supposed to lead to "strictly political conception of justice." It is perhaps fortunate that Rawls chose this issue, which is darling among the liberals, as it shows that the Rawlsian "justice as fairness" is hardly fair. Rather, the formula touted as neutral is in fact calculated always to hush the natural law in favor of comprehensive liberalism. There is something rotten in a conception of justice that allows for the killing of one group of human beings for the benefit of another, which prevents the state from interfering to protect a group of human beings, and which, moreover, has the audacity to suggest that this result is morally compelled.

The Unapologetic Advocate of Political Liberalism: John Rawls

Rawls's suggestion that "any reasonable balancing" of "political" values of the respect for human life, the "ordered reproduction of political society over time," and women's equality would necessarily result in giving "a woman a duly qualified right to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy during the first trimester," and maybe even beyond that boundary. (George, 93 (citing PL, 243). In this area, to suggest (as the natural moral law, science, inherited cultural traditions would suggest, and the law, at least until 1973, itself suggested) that reason would require there to be a law that must protect human life from the moment of conception, and so exclude any law that would leave that life unprotected and subject to private assault with impunity, is, in the Rawlsian construct, to import a "comprehensive doctrine" into the debate. And this, Rawls would insist, defies the fundamental ground rules of political realism, and violates political justice. George, 93.

It is all very convenient for the liberal. Rawls need not even listen, much less answer, the dissenting voices, the voices that cry out that a fundamental injustice is being carried out upon the unborn. They are voices crying in the political wilderness, a desert caused by Rawls's refusal to allow the waters of "comprehensive doctrines" to rain upon the political landscape. These voices are therefore the voces clamantes in deserto Rawlsianorum. (Rawls does not only want to not listen to these natural-law voices of the victims' advocates, he apparently is deaf to the voices of his slaughtered brothers and sisters, whose voices cry out to heaven for vengeance, and this only after the liberals have failed to hear their voices pleading for justice, and when justice was denied them, for mercy. All they wanted was a chance to live, a chance denied them by the bloodthirsty liberal Huitzilpochtli of whom Rawls is such a devotee.)

St. John the Baptist: Vox clamantis in deserto

The Rawlsian formula is a very convenient cover for the liberal partisans of abortion "rights." They need not even answer the reasonable arguments of their political opponents. In other words, the Rawlsian "political liberalism" construct allows the liberal to insist that the political process, and hence laws passed during the course of that political debate, be unreasonable. And, of course, an unreasonable law is a bad law, in fact, if Sts. Augustine and Thomas are to be followed, no law at all, and certainly no law worthy of the name, ranking as it does with immorality. And a political process that is calculated to promulgate bad laws is a bad political process. As Robert P. George summarizes it:

Rawls offers no argument as to why the developing human being should or even may be excluded from the laws' protection on the basis of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency. He does not offer reasons to rebut those "secular" (i.e., scientific and philosophical) arguments and fully "public" reasons offered in defense of the rights to the unborn prof-life citizens--Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

Rawls even admits that what is involved in this issue is his opinion and not reasonable argument. George, 93 (citing PL, lv). Rawls believes, nevertheless, that the person who believes, based upon sound reason, that a law that fails to protect the life over a substantial portion of human beings is execrable is compelled to support that law. True, Rawls magnanimously allows that such a person need not personally participate in an abortion, and need not avail himself of that right. Rawls also allows for free speech, even political speech on the issue. But the thought may never be put into law. Rawls insists that that person recognize the law that allows abortion as not only legitimate but just and demanding obedience. So the Rawlsian construct is clearly anti-Theaetetian: he stresses political opinion (doxa) over political knowledge (episteme). Both Plato and St. John the Baptist are given cold shoulder by Rawls. Instead of spirit and right reason governing law, we have the naked and arbitrary will of Rawls and those that think alike him: Rawls advocates the tyrannous enforcement of liberal dogma.

Plato in Athens

That is why . . . there is something scandalous in the self-styled "liberals" and "democrats" . . . to remove such issues from public debate by arbitrarily restricting the presentation or saliency of reasons and arguments on one side of debates over the nature, dignity, and destiny of the human person quite irrespective of their soundness, reasonableness, or truth. There is nothing "liberal," "democratic," "reasonable," "moral," or "ethical" about doing that.

George, 95. Indeed. It is manifest that the Rawlsian theory is rotten and anti-natural law and anti-natural rights at the core. We ought not be lulled by the Rawlsian calls to "political liberalism" (one recalls Barack Obama's great Rawlsian speech at Notre Dame), as ultimately these calls are neither calls to a reasoned public discourse nor calls for a non-partisan formula for fair political debate in a pluralistic society. Rather, the Rawlsian theory is a fancy theoretical muzzle designed to harness the minds and thoughts of its opponents. It is, in fine, a political filter designed and shamelessly proposed by Rawls. It is a political filter calculated to keep the natural law out of the political debate, to squelch its influence, and therefore shut it out from the process of fashioning of positive law. More ominously, it allows the silencing of the voices of liberalism's human victims. It virtually assures the continuing sacrifices to the liberal god Moloch or whatever else the liberal god's name may be. This liberal god is as bloodthirsty a god as ever there was, as ravenous a god as the Aztec's Huitzilopochtli. Rawls was one of this bloody god's servitors and great high priests. And when John Rawls died and faced the true God that he denied, he had stain of his brothers' blood on his hands, the smell of it on his breath, and the justifying thoughts of the crime in his head. May the Lord God have mercy on his soul, a mercy Rawls, in his liberal Havardian hubris, never gave to the diminutive victims of his comprehensive and political liberalism whose voices now accuse him.

The Bloodthirsty Aztec god Huitzilopochtli,
Demonic predecessor of Rawls's god of Liberalism

Note: In this series of blog entries relating to the Rawlsian critique, I have relied heavily on Robert P. George, "Restricting Reasons, Attenuating Discourse," in Human Nature in its Wholeness: A Roman Catholic Perspective (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2006), 80-94, cited here as "George."