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
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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)