How Should a Non-Catholic Respond to Catholic Moral Teaching?

摘要

We would like to commend Ari Zivotofsky and Alan Jotkowitz (2009) for their engagement with the recent Instruction Dignitas Personae. Intrinsic to these kinds of engagement, and indeed to all forms of dialogue across traditions, are the various responses to the claims made by rival traditions as well as characterizations of their various disagreements. So, to engage in a fruitful dialogue across traditions one must proceed from a shared premise about the nature of traditions: that in adhering to some particular tradition, one commits oneself to that particular tradition’s account of what is to be considered true and false and hence involves necessarily a rejection of the possibility of adhering to some other tradition (MacIntyre 1988, 367). And this means that all traditions of enquiry, to the extent that qua traditions of enquiry they offer particular accounts of the true and false, are necessarily rival and incompatible.Thus, those who inhabit particular traditions should recognize that they will be required, if they are to adequately understand the claims of those rival traditions, to situate those claims within the context of that rival tradition’s method of enquiry and framework of rational justification. To do otherwise is to fail to put oneself in an adequate position to engage in constructive dialogue. For if one does not situate the claims of rival traditions within the context of the tradition of enquiry in which they find rational justification, they will have stripped those claims of any kind of rational justification whatsoever. And this is because those particular claims are only justifiable as particular conclusions of a particular tradition of enquiry.