Human Judgment and the Neutral Public Square

Monday, March 14th, 2011

Did you ever stop to consider that no moral or political judgment can be made without reference to the nature, purposes and ends of the human person? There is a kind of theory, or perhaps more properly simply an “aura”, surrounding modern liberal democracies which causes us to imagine that a sound social order demands value-free judgments. But in fact it is impossible for moral and political judgments to be value-free, and it is equally impossible that the values which come into play can derive from anything other than the nature, purposes and ends of the human person.

So, for example, a dictator or the leader of a totalitarian state might argue that he has a right to constrain the lives of the citizens to fit the purposes which the dictator or the state may impose, but this too is based squarely on the assumption that, in the order of nature, the State is prior to the person, and that the purpose of the human person is to serve the ends of the State. Some may believe, of course, that the State is in the best position to determine what is good for the social order as a whole. But these fundamental assumptions about the nature and purposes of the human person must be in place for that belief to become operative.

Read “Human Judgment and the Neutral Public Square“