I do not have a whole lot more light to shed on the common good debate, but I think I owe Michael Brendan Dougherty and our readers a short reply to Michael’s latest rejoinder. I do not believe that I misrepresented Michael’s position, and it was certainly not my intention to do so. Did I misunderstand it? I leave it at this point to readers to compare Michael’s conclusion to the impression it produced and decide for themselves whether or not that was what he intended to convey. For my part, I always try to make clear my own conclusions; we lawyers are trained to do so, because if you don’t say out loud what you’re asking a judge for, you won’t get it.
Just to pick one example, I think it was reasonable of me to read Michael’s citation to Anthony Kennedy as an effort to hang Kennedy’s philosophical meanderings on me and on others who share my views, when it really just reflects the characteristic flabbiness of Kennedy’s thinking, which does not follow from any premise of mine. I’d submit that the fairness of that reading on my part is shown by Michael’s repeating the charge more explicitly the second time around: “Many self-identified conservatives are responding to common-good discourse by rephrasing [Kennedy’s] view that individual rights include defining your own concept of existence.” Really? Who? I don’t see how it follows at all from considering liberty important to conclude that history, biology, and reality don’t exist or that one person’s liberty extinguishes another’s right to life. It’s not clear who Michael is talking about. Certainly not any Christian conservative. (Or any religious Jew, for that matter.) My own view is that Anthony Kennedy–ism can quite easily be rebutted and dismantled without the need to throw out our existing frameworks for fusing classical liberalism with the importance of private virtue.
I stand by my original insistence on the importance of clarity, precisely because clear language lends itself less to confusion about what exactly we intend to say. And to that, I would add that it’s not helpful to the cause of clarity to write things that attribute ideas and impulses to others — things such as, “They wonder why some are looking for an American political vocabulary to reverse these trends,” or “A young generation of conservatives is rising up” and shouting things, or that steps are taken for “their vandal effect” — without saying whether or not one thinks those people are right, or whether they are wrong and in need of correction and guidance in a more constructive direction.