Sunday, January 28, 2007

On conscience (more)
From Mario Savio in 1964 via Thom at Ad Dominum. AFAIK this agrees with Catholic teaching: a well-formed conscience is the court of last resort as the story of Franz Jägerstätter shows.
You can't disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you're considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.
The really ancient-minded (in the good sense, the wisdom-of-the-ages Catholic sense) might object to this saying that doing one’s duty to something beyond the self and ‘rights’, to God for example and to objective reality, is better than the ‘Enlightenment’ and classical liberal/authentic conservative notion of rights. Sed contra the two are not mutually exclusive!

More from Savio:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Jägerstätter as libertarian:
When the Nazis arrived, not only did he refuse collaboration with their evil intentions, he even rejected benefits from the regime in areas that had nothing to do with its racial hatreds or pagan warmongering. It must have hurt for a poor father of three to turn down the money to which he was entitled through a Nazi family assistance program.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Leave comment