The Great Integralist Debate

A Debate Concerning Legal Authority

I’m back from a two-week-long whirlwind book tour. I’ve visited Duke, U San Diego, Ashland, Ave Maria, and The American Catholic Philosophical Association. It’s been a lot, but also a lot of fun. I’m writing this post to introduce you to the author-meets-critics panel on my book at the ACPA. Something extraordinary happened - progress.

Here, four integralists provide an hour of criticism. I then respond for fifteen minutes and then fifteen minutes of questions. The first commentator is philosopher Thomas Pink, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. He is, in many ways, the intellectual founder of the movement. The second commentator is Alan Fimister, Assistant Professor of Theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and one of the leading integralist theorists. The third and fourth commentators are Tyler McNabb and Brian Besong. McNabb and Besong are Associate Professors of Philosophy at St. Francis University. They represent a younger generation of integralist scholars.

My exchange with Pink was the one that helped us advance the integralist research program the most. Here, I review the discussion. In my next post, I'll focus on its significance for integralism.

I. The Justice Argument

It all begins with my Justice Argument against integralism. The argument is simple. Integralists make two claims:

1. Coercion into the Catholic faith is always unjust.

2. Coercion to keep the faith is often just.

These claims are hard to reconcile. Doubly so because integralists use baptism to render claim 1 and claim 2 consistent. Baptism somehow transforms religious coercion from unjust to just. I don’t see anything in the Catholic doctrine of baptism that can explain this. Indeed, as far as I can tell, any principle that plausibly explains 1 seems to undermine 2. Baptism leaves those arguments untouched.

For example, the argument that authentic faith must be free supports claim 1 and undermines 2. Baptism doesn’t change this. Second, that respect for persons requires religious liberty supports claim 1. However, the argument also undermines claim 2. Baptism doesn’t change this either.

II. Aquinas on Vows

Now, I don’t think those two arguments should be compelling to non-liberals, and that’s why I don’t fool with them in the book. Instead, I run through six ways of reconciling the essential claims, none of which are quintessentially liberal, not even consent theory.

Thomas Aquinas solves this problem with a consent theory. Aquinas analogizes baptism to a vow. One must make a vow voluntarily, but a legal body may, after that, enforce it. But Aquinas's article on this matter doesn't address infant baptism. He can't, I don't think, because infants make no vow upon their baptism.

Their parents or godparents make a vow. And I allow their vows to obligate their children in some respects. But if the child grows up without Catholic beliefs, she lacks obligations to the Church. Ex. If her parents raise her Jewish, she will be non-culpably ignorant of the Catholic faith. That holds regardless of her baptism. She has no obligations to the Church, or at least cannot be held to them.

It also isn’t clear how baptism relates to vowing. If baptism is a vow, we should always expect it to contain a choice. But that isn’t the case for infants. But if baptism accompanies a vow, it looks like the vow explains our obligations, not baptism.

III. Classical Theories of Political Obligation

Political philosophy has distilled the historical theories of state authority into neat classes. I modified some of these to help explain the authority of the integralist state. But these theories must explain authority over the baptized and not the unbaptized. The theories don't work for state authority, and don't work for integralism either.

Associative theories of obligation explain political obligations via membership in a community. The non-Pink integralists in the video implicitly adopt an associative theory (in my view). Indeed, their associative theory runs so deep that they don't see the force of the justice argument. In their view, we acquire obligations simply by becoming members of the Church and the state. Baptism marks our membership in the Church. They reason from the tight association between community membership and political obligation.

IV. Pink’s Theory of Legal Authority

Fascinatingly, Pink did not run this line. Instead, he offered a scholastic theory of legal authority (in contrast to Thomas Hobbes). This theory can explain how baptism creates obligations to the church-authorized state. But he does not think baptism guarantees that we have such obligations.

For Pink, legal authority (church or state) exists if:

1. It facilitates its subjects’ response to normative power (reason and/or grace).

2. Subjects trust the authority as an authoritative witness to truth.

The first claim is tremendously rich and complex. You'll only understand it with a background in scholastic theories of reason. The second claim, however, is easier to assess. Pink claims legal authority rests on trust in the authority. The people must trust the authority as an authoritative witness to significant truths. Concerning the state, our trust in political authority comes naturally. Concerning the Church, by contrast, trust begins or is amplified by our baptism.

My counterargument was simple. We naturally tend to trust our parents and the people we associate with. We do not have a natural disposition to trust national political authorities. I don’t see evidence for it in the political trust literature. Plenty of people seem to grow up distrusting the government.

Similarly, baptism only disposes us to trust the Church. The disposition does not become a reality if we remain ignorant about the Church. Or if we have some weak epistemic link to it.

Pink replies that much distrust is culpable. A legal authority can exist even when distrusted, so long as people are at fault for not trusting it. But this raises the problem of determining when distrust is culpable.

I solve this problem by exploring our practice of holding people responsible for disobedience. Most people think the laws of their nation-state are authoritative. They blame people who deliberately break the law, at least when the laws seem moral. But only some people grow up with such trust. Consider totalitarian states with enormous black and grey markets.

Baptism does not automatically make people culpable for distrusting the Church. We see this with many Protestants. But Pink agreed on this point. He thinks punishing Protestants today would generally be unjust.

I don’t see this as a concession on Pink’s part. He thinks integralist coercion is only justified for a subset of the baptized. It does not apply to those who mistrust the church-authorized (integralist) state non-culpably.

The trouble is that non-culpable mistrust might be everywhere. Even if it is common, modern integralist states face tremendous difficulties determining when mistrust is culpable. Indeed, they will struggle to determine who is mistrustful in the first place. In practice, the legal authority of the Church is de facto narrow. It applies only to those we can tell are trusting or culpably mistrusting. And I think Pink is OK with that point. He’s not, as he said to me, a coercion-monger.

V. Closer Together

This means that Pink and I have moved closer together extensionally. In practice, similar groups of people are subject to legitimate coercion. Here's my view, at least in principle. If someone joins the Orthodox Church, they can be subject to spiritual coercion. That can include excommunication. I can imagine them growing up to trust a church-state union, and if that union serves the common good in a public manner, their distrust might be culpable in some cases. In that case, the church-state union’s coercion might be publicly justified for many citizens. Owing to the dynamics of disagreement, that won't happen often. So Pink and I are far apart. But Pink's integralism is far less illiberal in its implications. And, in my view, his theory of legal authority isn’t intrinsically illiberal at all.

Here’s where I think we made intellectual progress. Pink and I agreed that our positions remain far apart because of differences in our accounts of culpable failures in reasoning. It is striking that this is where our differences turned out to lie. I did not even begin to anticipate this before our discussion.

So, I am edified and delighted that we made intellectual progress.

In my next post, I encourage integralists to adopt something like Pink's trust condition on legitimate legal authority. They should update their views.