As a nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel A. Alito has come under intense scrutiny. Much of what people have found is unsurprising except, perhaps, for his involvement in Concerned Alumni of Princeton. This group was created to oppose the admission of women and ended up defending preferences for the children of alumni, but not for minorities.

The New York Times reports:

The group had been founded in 1972, the year that Judge Alito graduated, by alumni upset that Princeton had recently begun admitting women. It published a magazine, Prospect, which persistently accused the administration of taking a permissive approach to student life, of promoting birth control and paying for abortions, and of diluting the explicitly Christian character of the school.

As Princeton admitted a growing number of minority students, Concerned Alumni charged repeatedly that the administration was lowering admission standards, undermining the university’s distinctive traditions and admitting too few children of alumni. “Currently alumni children comprise 14 percent of each entering class, compared with an 11 percent quota for blacks and Hispanics,” the group wrote in a 1985 fund-raising letter sent to all Princeton graduates.

Those latter numbers were used to indicate that the policies on admitting more minorities were bad. There was no stopping the changes in either society or Princeton, though, and over the course of time more and more people at Princeton found the positions adopted by Concerned Alumni of Princeton to be immoral.

“Is the issue the percentage of alumni children admitted or the percentage of minorities?” Jonathan Morgan, a conservative undergraduate working with the group, asked its board members that fall in an internal memorandum. “I don’t see the relevance in comparing the two, except in a racist context (i.e. why do we let in so many minorities and not alumni children?),” he continued.

Fortunately, the group ceased to exist in 1987 — far later than it should have ended, too. Yet they continue to have an impact because they are driving debates about the history of American conservatism generally and Samuel Alito’s personally beliefs in particular. It’s implausible that he didn’t with their anti-women and anti-minority positions when he joined. What does he think today? Does even regret his beliefs of the time? Given the above, it’s not a surprise that he would write a decision on abortion that would argue, by implication, that women should be treated like children:

Now, in your opinion in Casey, right after that quote from Justice Marshall, you write this: “These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209.” Section 3209 is Pennsylvania’s spousal-notice provision. Then you conclude, “Justice O’Connor’s opinions disclose that the practical effect of a law will not amount to an undue burden unless the effect is greater than the burden imposed on minors seeking abortions in Hodgson or Matheson.” And you uphold the spousal notice law because its burden doesn’t exceed the burdens in those other cases.

Now, here’s my question, Judge. Do you really think an undue burden for a grown woman is the same as an undue burden for a teenager? Do you think a woman deserves no more deference than a girl? [...]

Now, I’m seeing two arguments there. One is that the woman has some kind of misperception about her marriage or her situation, and her husband can set her straight. And the other argument is that the husband has such a profound interest in keeping the fetus alive—and his wife has such a small interest in controlling what happens to her body—that the government can force her to consult him even if she’s so afraid of him, or so certain she can’t have this baby, that she won’t talk to him unless we threaten her with criminal charges.

Winston Smith writes:

CAP seems to think that its actions are justified as attempts to defend “traditional values at Princeton.” That’s sophomorically ambiguous, and for us to know what’s really going on they’d have to made it clear whether they meant that they were (a) defending the traditional values of Princeton or (b) defending, at Princeton, traditional values in some wider sense of the term (Western values, Christian values, American values, or whatever).

Either way, it’s going to take more than an appeal to “traditional values” to defend these conclusions.

But the failure of appeals to tradition isn’t my real concern here. Rather, I’m interested to point out, once again, how close many conservatives come to being cultural moral relativists.

How is an appeal to tradition very close to an appeal to cultural moral relativism (CMR)? Because, in essence, the appeal to tradition is often stated as “this practice is traditional and has been done for so long, and this is an adequate moral reason for doing it now and continuing to do it in the future.” This isn’t really very different from Cultural moral relativists who say that because something is a tradition in some other culture, it’s wrong for others outside the culture to judge that practice as immoral.

Not all appeals to tradition flirt with cultural moral relativism, though:

Now, CAP doesn’t unequivocally advocate (CMR), but they don’t unequivocally not advocate (CMR). It isn’t clear what they’re doing. They may be Burkean conservatives who think that social institutions are the outputs of long informal experiment, and should, thus, be given some presumption. They could be advocating adherence to tradition--as so many people do--for aesthetic reasons. Or they may be cultural moral relativists. We can’t tell from what they write. I will bet you very large amounts of money that they themselves don’t know what they really think They’re confused. That’s the way it is with those who flirt with relativism, both on the left and on the right.

At a bare minimum, then, they are guilty of very sloppy thinking — so sloppy that it starts tipping over into thinking that is very wrong, irrational, and oddly similar to the thinking which they condemn when others do it. Personally, I suspect that in many cases like this the sloppy thinking is a product of simply not caring what sort of thinking one is doing, so long as it leads to the conclusions one favors. Terms and arguments are left ambiguous so that one has more options to shift the argument if flaws are found.

 

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Religious Right News