Sunday, April 27, 2025

Catholicism and immigration: Reply to Cory and Sweeney

Recently, my article “A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws” appeared at Public Discourse.  Both Therese Cory and Terence Sweeney have raised criticisms of the article.  In a new article at Public Discourse, I reply to them.

Posted by at

6 comments:

  1. NormApril 27, 2025 at 8:26 PM

    This is very well written article.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul D. Van PeltApril 28, 2025 at 5:47 AM

    Good work, Professor! The straw man fallacy is an old one, and signal of a weak argument, not well considered. Ms. Cory, or anyone else of stature in philosophy (or other disciplines), ought to know better.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Miguel CervantesApril 30, 2025 at 12:14 AM

    The immigration debate in Europe is quite different to that in the United States. While immigration to Europe is largely Islamic, pagan and generally "Third Word", producing all the social tensions and threats to European identity mentioned in the posted article, immigrants to the US (particularly "illegal" immigrants) are overwhelmingly Christian, and mostly Catholic, by background. This distinction is usually overlooked in debates; by liberals, because they don't particularly want a Christian country, and by WASPish conservatives, because they are, well, WASPs. After two hundred years of them, it's about time to frame political debates in the terms employed by the social theorists who preceded the Enlightenment, Bellarmine, Suarez, Aquinas.

    ReplyDelete
  4. TonyMay 4, 2025 at 2:44 PM

    Indeed, the phrase “legitimate difference of opinion about a matter of public policy” places public policy outside the realm of things one can objectively morally evaluate—a view commonly found in company with relativistic notions of prudence,

    What makes such a judgment “legitimate”? If it is because the judgment correctly reflects the action’s objective moral status, then Catholics cannot reasonably disagree. But if it is because one has the right to apply moral principles prudentially as one sees fit, then this can only be true if the action has no objective moral status or its true status is for some reason undiscoverable

    I always stop and do a double-take when a moralist starts throwing around "objective" for moral analysis, because it is so darn easy to misuse the term. For instance, it can be used to refer to the "object of the act", one of the 3 fonts of morality of every human moral choice. And as we all know from 2000 years of development and Veritatis Spendor, if the object of the act is inherently disordered, the moral act is intrinsically evil and no amount of good ends or circumstances can salvage it. THAT is one way to get "objectively wrong" for a category of act.

    It also the case that we might use "objectively wrong" for an act where, in the concrete case, the motive - the end - of the act was evil, even though the object of the act was neutral or good. In the concrete case, that individual act was vitiated by the evil motive, and vitiated concretely in a known way once the motive was known. But you can see that this kind of negative judgment applies to the individual case of that one action on its own due to the actor applying himself toward an evil end, the act was not evil in its species (i.e. it was not vitiated by the object of the act), and so it was not wrong as a matter of general category. Which would imply a kind of extended meaning to "objectively" wrong.

    The third fond is circumstances, and about the RELEVANT circumstances there is always a long list of possible candidates, because one may consider primary, secondary, tertiary, etc consequences. But later and more removed consequences are hard to discern clearly, and so one usually must act without being certain about such consequences. Where a sufficiency of the particular circumstances are known clearly, and where many of them have an obvious import for the action, we can often make sure judgments about the act. But when the relevant factors are in the thousands, and many of them inherently uncertain, and where even holy men disagree about the best course of action, we do not apply the term "objectively immoral" to one of the courses even if it is not the most perfect of the choices available.

    ReplyDelete
  5. TonyMay 4, 2025 at 2:44 PM

    But even more interestingly for "objectively moral" acts is that sometimes you have 2 or 3 or more GOOD options in front of you, and your work is to discern to decide the best among them. If you decide A is best, but only because you were unavoidably ignorant of some factors (circumstances) that would show that B is the best, because A is still a good thing, the choice for A is a morally good act even though it was not "objectively" the best choice. The same, by the way, applies to situations where the only choices available are ones with unhappy results, and your work is to minimize them. An innocent error about which choice has the best factors (or least bad) in favor of - factors strictly in the sense of the 3rd font of morality - does not turn the choice into an "objectively immoral" choice. St. John Paul II most vociferously situates that moral judgment in the acting person, i.e. a subject, and the righteousness of their personal act in the moment of choice hangs on rightly conforming their will according to the 3 fonts as known to them, their will adhering to an upright object of the act, with a good motive, selected rightly according to the factors known to them. (Though this always only applies to the circumstances of the act, never modifying the act's rightness where the object or motive is evil.) We would never characterize an act as "objectively immoral" when it had good object, good motive, but was slightly less good than another choice in regard to the circumstances. The Church has clearly taught that not all less-than-100%-perfect acts are sins: some are merely imperfections, not sins.

    ReplyDelete
  6. IanMay 4, 2025 at 3:55 PM

    One wonders whether the assimilation of earlier immigrants into the American way of life was a net good: it seems that what this ultimately involved was a subordination of religious principles to an Americanist civic religion, whereby immigrant groups traded their rich ethnic heritages, in which religion permeated their entire ways of life, for an American-flavored cosmopolitanism with religion treated as an optional add-on. Instead of identifying with a particular ethnic group now, which historically included religion as a central component, we identify as white or black or whatever, racial categories that lack the rich content and connection to culture and tradition that an ethnicity possesses, or as American, which is conceived of as being separate from whatever religion you happen to be.

    Of course, European nations have not fared much better in this regard, so perhaps European immigrants to America would have lost their religion anyway even had they resisted assimilation.

    At any rate, when Cory asserts that historically immigration has served to enrich rather than disrupt the culture of America, or that fears of earlier waves of immigration have proved to be unfounded, that this is true is not at all clear to me. It seems to me that many of these earlier immigrant waves did cause a fair amount of disruption, corruption, and so forth. Moreover, the very ideology behind the American conception of assimilation (e.g., precluding substantive religious commitments from playing any publicly authoritative role) will result in immigration having a tendency to impoverish rather than enrich our culture by erasing the particularities and traditions necessary to maintaining a culture. Of course, we cannot compare what America looks like with these earlier waves of immigration to what it would have looked like had these earlier waves never occurred, so it is not a question that can be decisively settled by appeal to empirical facts alone.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)