Truthful Teleology Matters

Two different essays, same foundation:  truthful teleology matters.

In the first, Joshua Schulz shows us the un-truthfulness of teleology-from-economics.

The New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a Christian-owned photography business couldn’t refuse to photograph a homosexual wedding. In his concurring statement, Justice Richard Bosson gives a new twist to Mill’s classic liberal distinction of between what is “private” and “public” based on harm, and instead distinguishes between what one may believe in one’s “private” life and what one must do in the market. In the “smaller, more focused world of the marketplace,” he writes, merchants must “compromise” with those who believe other than they do.

This is a wild distortion of the Christian/Aquinian understanding, or as Schulz remarks, the judge's opinion is like  'using a thesaurus without using a dictionary.'

...The traditional and limited Christian duty to secure the welfare of others regardless of their natural “accidents” has become an open-ended duty to secure the satisfaction of others’ desires, regardless of one’s own religious and moral beliefs, even when the desires one is being asked to satisfy are immoral....

Citing Aristotle and Aquinas, Schulz shows that we are obligated to assist others in the preservation of their lives. But 'preservation of life' is not the same as 'fulfillment of desires,' as was the case in New Mexico.

....we find the Court arguing that homosexual couples have a right to the someone’s camera in the same way the pauper has a right to the baker’s bread. The glaringly obvious difference between the cases is that the pauper needs the bread to survive and is obligated to pursue legitimate means of survival, whereas homosexuals desire but don’t need that someone photograph their wedding (it is possible to get married without a camera)....

(That also happens to be the error of Justice Kennedy's infamous remarks on 'creating one's own reality' in the Texas sodomy decision.)

...The Court’s decision combines the traditional Christian belief that merchants in a commercial society should not unjustly deprive someone of some goods and services with a rejection of the idea that human life is for something, a rejection popularized by positivist economics and Rawlsian liberalism.

The Court’s decision is a perfect example of Alasdair MacIntyre’s “disquieting suggestion” in After Virtue that modern moral discourse consists of “fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived,” and no one is the wiser....

...The upshot of the Court’s argument, Justice Bosson concludes, is that the State can enforce “tolerance” and the violation of one’s religious beliefs as the “price of citizenship.” Bosson has only shown yet again that liberal tolerance requires complicity, whereas Christian tolerance only ever required forbearance. The peace he seeks is the peace of tyranny, and not the peace of love or justice.

Speaking of tyranny, the second essay discusses the Obama pathology of lying.  This one is prefaced by the trenchant observation of Abp. Wenski:

"In our nation's culture wars, the two sides are fighting about the understanding of man and his relationship to truth and reality. One side — and today, "gay marriage" is its poster child — holds that anyone can essentially create his or her own reality. This side holds for a radical autonomy by which truth is determined not by the nature of things, but by one's own individual will. The other side holds men and women are not self-creators, but creatures. Truth is not constructed, but received and thus must reflect the reality of things. Or, as the Book of Genesis says: "Male and female, He (God) created them." (Genesis 1:27)." 

That is followed by Klavan's observation:

 ...both Obama and many of our journalists were trained in the post-modern academy where they were taught that there is no such thing as moral truth but only culturally inculcated narratives. In such a world, the moral narrative that can be drummed into the head of the populace is the truth that wins. Convincing people that a good has been achieved is the same as achieving it."...

Which is to say that truth does not necessarily play a part in 'achievement of a good.'

That stems from Obama's serial lying.  Klavan cites Roger Simon:

...Barack Obama is another matter. His lies are not mainly for self-defense (although Benghazi has elements of that). They are lies of ideological volition. He lies to get his way. And he does it so well, with so much seeming earnestness — as in his umpteen (and continuing!) pronouncements that no one would lose their health insurance or personal physician from Obamacare, when, it’s now clear, he knew all the while this was utterly false — that his behavior appears almost sociopathic.

In other words, to Obama these are not really lies, because he has no values, religious or otherwise, that make them so. This is more than just the prototypical Marxist ends justifying the means...

He never had a moral basis for honesty. Lying, from the Choom Gang through Reverend Wright and beyond, was his lifestyle. And he had the consolation that he was lying for a better good. No one ever told him otherwise. If that goes on for long enough, you lose contact with truth. It becomes almost a non-existent phenomenon, an irrelevancy."

There is a difference between "what IS" and "what we would LIKE it to be."  "What IS" will not change, no matter the lies we tell ourselves or others.

And this country had better figure out "what IS" quickly.