The State and Health, the State of Health, and the Health of the State: Assessing Terms and Conditions
Harold Berman’s scholarly intuition that the Western legal tradition is undergoing an unprecedented crisis, one comprehensive in scope and thus with uncertain prospects for the tradition’s survival, is hard to gainsay. Law itself is in doubt, including the notion of its autonomy from political will, its transcendent derivation. A salient point of departure from the tradition is in the shift from decentralized judicial resolutions of private disputes to centralized bureaucratic managerialism and State omnipresence.
Prominent in this altered and ascendant legal-political order are its exertions in service of public health—with “health” understood in a way fitted for despotic rule: in terms of a mechanistic reduction of persons into merely empirical, measurable features. These measurements permit and facilitate political claims of total comprehension, certainty, and forecast. By this form, virologists were empowered to overcome centuries of Western juridical tradition. Male and female, seen as functions or postures rather than (non-measurable) givenness and callings, are being erased from law—as are the prerogatives of mothers and fathers to halt such family contradictions as the transing of their children. Embryos are fodder on which to practice gene editing to facilitate progress in producing lab-refined children, making for “fitter families.” In such ways does the current betrayal of human nature proceed; a carelessness with profundities of person and community are enacted in the name of health.
We need to think non-scientifically when dealing with non-scientific things. Here we might start with the meaning of health, and along with that, the calling of justice, and the relation between them.
Moscow, Idaho
May 25, 2023
7:45 am – 6:00 pm
Invited papers will be presented, followed by discussion among participants.
