Free Will and Democracy

In 1797, the Reverend Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale University, argued “...that if God had decided from all eternity that an individual's fate was to die of smallpox, it was a sin to interfere with the divine plan through a man-made trick like vaccination.”

Sound familiar?

Everyone has their own conception of what a god or God is, how he or she interacts with the world. We cannot possibly address all concepts in a morning essay. However, the line of thinking implicit in Reverend Dwight's argument, and present too in Candidate Mourdock's recent comments on pregnancy resulting from rape, is of a god that influences or guides our behavior.

Probably the most useful image of God in this instance is of the Platonic God: The God represents in his or her divine instance all that is good or perfect. To illuminate our behavior, we have only to ask, “Is my behavior emulating what would be the behavior of one who is perfect, and perfectly good?” If so, the behavior is likely acceptable, if not, one may wish to reconsider.

But that is not the god that Dwight and Mourdock envision. Their god has a plan, and interfering with the plan is the wrong, for the simple reason that we cannot know the plan aforehand, and it is then assumed that what ever occurs is the plan!

Notice, however, that the God of Dwight and Mourdock is indistinguishable from a non-god, indistinguishable from the absence of any god. It is impossible to discern, using their logic, that there is a god in the universe. Saying that a pregnancy resulting from rape is God's will is logically equivalent to saying that a pregnancy resulting from rape is Nature's natural outcome – there is no test that could be administered to determine the difference.

Mourdock's conclusion rhetorically begs the question...

But the line of thinking is more insidious than even that. Implicit in reaching the conclusion that we shouldn't interfere is to deny the concept of Free Will, the concept that we can (and should!) make our decisions and choices upon the best available information currently at hand.

Present at our nation's founding were individuals steeped in Enlightenment ideals, individuals who were willing to place Free Will front and center of our public and political discourse. A Democracy cannot exist without Free Will, and the exercise thereof. Freely we can make arguments for or against our behaviors, for or against laws and policies that may constrain that behavior, and freely we can submit to the conclusions. However, democratic discourse has no place for vacuous appeals to invisible authority, no place for attempts to eliminate the exercise of Free Will from individuals and replace it with one person's concept of what should be.

People who exhibit thinking like Mourdock (we can add Todd Akins as another example) have no place in public office. Their underlying thought processes hew back to the days of predestination, back to unquestioned submission to authority. Their thinking denies Free Will, denies that others have the right to exercise it, denies a foundational cornerstone of Democracy.

In so doing, they reveal that they are unfit for public office in our Democracy.