Constitutional conscience depends on faith, else it degenerates into expediency
Evidence
One sad spectacle of modernity was the effort to try to make law a god, and politics a religion.’ In a letter to me, Patterson replies to my portrait of postmodernity by saying: What does a person like myself, who has no faith in God, do?’ I think he has in mind my claim that conscience plays a crucial role in the sort of decisionmaking we have built into the American constitutional system, and my further claim that “there is no conscience without faith for without faith there is only expediency.” — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 402
Categorization
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the faith-conscience linkage holds for nonreligious decisionmakers in a secular legal system.
- XREF: Connects to the claim about modern efforts to treat law as a secular surrogate for religion. — connects to: Legal indeterminacy is inherent and requires a justified role for conscience — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 786; Portraying constitutional conscience truthfully requires offering a moral choice — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 169; Maintaining core moral beliefs requires faith, not causal explanation — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 896 (+1 more)