Judging the Truth: Law and Moral Relativism | Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2022

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This talk was given on October 4, 2022 at Georgetown University. For more information please visit thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and an Assistant Professor in systematic theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001 and was ordained a priest in 2007. He practiced law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice before becoming a Dominican.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:05.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:09.0	Thou shalt not judge for our contemporary culture, and especially for the typical university culture, this is
0:23.9	sometimes considered to be the first and greatest commandment, perhaps the only commandment.
0:31.6	The great sin of our time is to be judgmental, or at least to be regarded as judgmental. It's a kind of capital
0:38.9	vice, you might say, of postmodernity. I think that poses a special challenge for law students
0:47.2	and a special challenge for the legal profession more generally because in fact, as you know well,
0:53.1	the law is rife with judgments.
0:57.3	And the elite of the legal profession, we call judges.
1:02.9	And their job is precisely to judge.
1:06.5	Okay, so how do we put these things together?
1:08.5	How do we understand that?
1:09.7	Now, some would argue making judgments in the practice of law, or the judgments that the law makes,
1:18.1	have a different character than moral judgments, properly so called.
1:22.4	And when we say, thou shalt not judge, we're really talking about moral judgments, not these other kind of judgments.
1:28.3	Okay, but I think this is worth examining whether this is true.
1:32.3	I think in the background of such a view is an assumption or a conviction, whether spoken or unspoken,
1:40.3	acknowledged or unacknowledged, that moral judgments are arbitrary and subjective.
1:48.0	They're often not based on anything as objective as provable facts.
1:54.0	And therefore, if they're acknowledged at all, they should be relegated to the realm of private and interior subjective convictions.
2:02.8	They don't have public standing.
2:05.7	They can't get into the space where the law makes judgments.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.