Fr Peter’s views about the relationship bet-ween divorce and the common good (The Sunday Times, March 27, 2011) are interesting, but I confess myself confused by his position on divorce legislation.
Going by his citing from the pastoral letter of the British bishops I took it that we are in agreement at least that the common good is not to be calculated on utilitarian grounds, so I was astonished to find him contradicting himself at the end of the piece by saying that “I myself prefer to consider as simply as possible, social consequences that are more easily calculable.”
What critics fault in utilitarianism is precisely the assumption that social consequences are measurable or calculable, easily or otherwise, in any but the most approximate way.
The Americans made a utilitarian argument based on the calculation that the action would ultimately save more lives than it destroyed to justify dropping atom bombs on Japanese civilians in the last war. But though this was self-evidently true of American lives since the bombs were not dropped on them, the calculated consequences for the Japanese went horribly wrong; indeed they are incalculable.
The problem in both cases is not that the study isn’t “well conducted” but that the consequences in either case could never be entirely foreseen or calculated, scientifically or otherwise.
For this reason every speculation made about future consequences, including of the introduction of divorce legislation, is just that, speculation. One could want to argue that not all speculation is the same; some speculation is better founded, better supported by the evidence, than others, and that consequences can be measured in degrees of ‘probability’.
But, as is well-known, there are always disputes, in every case of social research, over what counts as evidence in the first place, and then on how it should be read or interpreted, and there are equally well-known problems with defining, never mind measuring, probability.
This is not to dispel the value of the social sciences but to make the point that social phenomena are not like the phenomena dealt with by the natural sciences, especially when what one is considering is today’s society which is formed by complex and various forces (changing family patterns, the all-intrusive media, the spread of learning, friends and peer-pressure, etc).
In short, drawing any direct causal relationship between one selected phenomenon divorce and the phenomenon of increasing marital breakdown, is nonsense.
There is not one cause for marital breakdown in contemporary society but a complexity of causes which are thrown up differently in different social environments and impossible to separate.
Fr Peter himself hedges on the subject: he deplores “our lack of well-conducted studies that would allow us some fairly reliable evaluation of the likely consequence of any divorce legislation. (my italics)” Should the question of divorce legislation, I ask, a matter that intimately touches the lives of so many people, directly and otherwise, be decided on fairly reliable evidence of likely consequences, even were agreement on what is ‘fair’ and ‘reliable’ possible? I think not.
Fr Peter struggles to make a case for the idea of ‘the common good’ not rendering it also “reducible to individually enjoyable goods” (which is a liberal not a utilitarian reduction).
His analogy with attending a Mozart opera at the Manoel doesn’t work at all. The ‘added value’ of the experience of listening to Mozart with others lies in the well-founded assumption that those present share a common “appreciation of the emotive and intellectual elegance of Mozart’s music”. But what works for a culturally homogenous group in a theatre, doesn’t work for ordinary society where people will respond differently to Mozart’s music (to continue the analogy);
The question is not how to define the common good but who defines it, the state, the Church, the attorney general, the citizens in a referendum? The point is that in a pluralistic democracy like ours any definition of ‘the common good’, will be arbitrary and therefore an imposition on those who do not share it.
Is there a way into the issue of divorce legislation, then, other than through such imposition? Yes. Fr Peter, perhaps unwittingly, suggested it himself when, returning to the British bishops’ document, he quoted them as referring to “the totality of the common good,” as “the sum of those social conditions that allow the human dignity of all to be respected and basic needs to be met while giving men and women the freedom to assume responsibility for their own lives.” The italics, of course, are mine. The case for responsible divorce legislation could not be more eloquently made than in these words of the bishops.
The problem here is that the respect for freedom based on the recognition of the mature adulthood of the people they referred to, that is the basis of modern civilised life, is, sadly, a language our society’s collectivist mind-set is not attuned to.