Liberalism, Philanthropy, and Praxis: Realigning the Philanthropy of the Republic and the Social Teaching of the Church

Fordham Law Review, Jul 2016

This Article seeks a common ground for theists of the Abrahamist religious faiths and agnostics in the Socratic philosophical tradition on the role that the liberal state should play in advancing the two coordinate aims of traditional philanthropy: helping society’s least well off and advancing the highest forms of human excellence. It focuses particularly on Abrahamists who are orthodox Catholics and Socratics who are left-liberals, distinguishing their broad views on the liberal state’s proper philanthropic role from the far narrower views of libertarians and other right-liberals. It concludes that adherents of Catholic Social Teaching and advocates of secular left-liberalism can conscientiously work together toward a far greater governmental role in advancing philanthropy than is currently reflected in the United States’s fiscal policy. To do otherwise is to impose a most perverse tax on both our society’s most needy and its most generous. That, one hopes, is not who we are.

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Liberalism, Philanthropy, and Praxis: Realigning the Philanthropy of the Republic and the Social Teaching of the Church

Liberalism, Philanthropy, and Praxis: Realigning the Philanthropy of the Republic and the Social Teaching of the Church Rob Atkinson 0 0 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information , please contact Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Tax Law Commons Recommended Citation Rob Atkinson, Liberalism, Philanthropy, and Praxis: Realigning the Philanthropy of the Republic and the Rob Atkinson* -Jesus1 -Plato2 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it; You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men. This Article seeks a common ground for theists of the Abrahamist religious faiths and agnostics in the Socratic philosophical tradition on the role that the liberal state should play in advancing the two coordinate aims of traditional philanthropy: helping society’s least well off and advancing the highest forms of human excellence. It focuses particularly on Abrahamists who are orthodox Catholics and Socratics who are leftliberals, distinguishing their broad views on the liberal state’s proper philanthropic role from the far narrower views of libertarians and other right-liberals. It concludes that adherents of Catholic Social Teaching and advocates of secular left-liberalism can conscientiously work together toward a far greater governmental role in advancing philanthropy than is currently reflected in the United States’s fiscal policy. To do otherwise is to impose a most perverse tax on both our society’s most needy and its most generous. That, one hopes, is not who we are.   * Greenspan Marder Professor of Law, Florida State University. My thanks to Alexandra Akre (FSU Law 2016) for her invaluable research assistance. This Article is part of a larger symposium entitled We Are What We Tax held at Fordham University School of Law. For an overview of the symposium, see Mary Louise Fellows, Grace Heinecke & Linda Sugin, Foreword: We Are What We Tax, 84 FORDHAM L. REV. 2413 (2016). 1. Matthew 22:37b-40 (New Rev. Standard Version, Catholic Ed.) (noting Jesus’s response to a lawyer, who asked which is the greatest commandment). 2. PLATO, EUTHYPHRO 81 (Benjamin Jowett trans., Heart’s Int’l Library Co. ed. 1914) (noting Euthyphro’s response to Socrates about the relation of piety to justice). II. PHILANTHROPIC ETHICS: TOWARD A PROPER REGARD FOR ALL “OTHERS”..................................................................................... 2650  III. PHILANTHROPIC POLITICS: TOWARD THE OPTIMALLY PHILANTHROPIC LIBERAL STATE................................................. 2658  CONCLUSION: LABORING TOGETHER IN THE VINEYARD (WHICH IS THE LORD’S, SOME OF US BELIEVE AND NONE OF US NEED DENY)........................................................................................... 2674 INTRODUCTION: ODD ONE OUT: AYN RAND, THOMAS AQUINAS, OR JOHN STUART MILL? Forgive me for beginning with a subject that may seem a bit off topic, if not out of date: Congressman Paul Ryan’s speech at Ge orgetown University during the 2012 presidential campaign.3 You will recall that Representative Ryan, then the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, tried to pass the wolf of Ayn Rand’s hand-me-down Nietzscheanism off in the sheep’s clothing of Catholic Social Doctrine.4 But very good shepherds on the Georgetown faculty were on their guard; their joint letter politely—pastorally, it is fair to say—sent Representative Ryan back to remedial catechism class.5 The letter itself made two very basic points: Ayn Rand’s philosophy is insistently antireligious and egoistic; Catholic Social Doctrine is emphatically theistic and philanthropic.6 That letter was a fine—I dare say loving—corrective for those faculty defenders of the faith to deliver to a fellow Catholic; Representative Ryan, to his credit, seems to have taken the message very much to heart.7 That may, in the eyes of the Republican Right, make him unfit for his party’s presidential nomination;8 it may also, in the eyes of his Church, mark the saving of his soul. I quite agree that Rand’s brand of libertarian conservatism—and Ryan’s and many another—cannot be reconciled with Catholic Social Teaching. But what, you may well wonder, has my take on that episode got to do with my Article for this symposium? The Georgetown faculty’s exchange with Representative Ryan, after all, was a dispute among Catholics in good standing over basic points of Catholic doctrine (...truncated)


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Rob Atkinson. Liberalism, Philanthropy, and Praxis: Realigning the Philanthropy of the Republic and the Social Teaching of the Church, Fordham Law Review, 2016, Volume 84, Issue 6,