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I finally got around to watching this panel:
@ccpecknold's opening statement is a brilliant summary of De Koninck on the common good.
@ccpecknold's opening statement is a brilliant summary of De Koninck on the common good.
The questions by @RyanTAnd are also very good and very trenchant.
The question that Prof. Burns raises about love of one's "politeia" (he uses "regime," but I take him to mean regime in the Struassian sense: a translation of politeia) being prerequisite to effective political action is ill-served by his example of the transgender argument.
I think that Pecknold and Anderson answer it quite correctly. To love one's politeia rightly is to love what is good in it and wish to improve it by correcting what is not good.
This is also a point that @gjpappin makes following Aristotle: action taken to "preserve" a "regime" in the right way actually changes it for the better.
And, as Pecknold argues so persuasively, to make something better you need to have the right standard.
I think that last question of the whole panel was misunderstood (as often happens at the end of a panel). The answer should have been that a judge should not in fact be an originalist.
The judge should interpret the law in the light of more general principles of right—including the natural law. This is, in fact, what most judges do.
And it is what the first US Supreme justices did, as Fr. Charles McCoy shows this in this paper: https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol6/iss2/3/
In other words, even if a judge thinks on historical-critical grounds that the people who wrote the 14th amendment were not intending to include unborn children under the term "persons," he would still interpret their words in the light of more general principles.
This goes back to the critique of the "postmodern" character of originalism (cf https://iusetiustitium.com/the-deconstructionist-ghost-in-the-textualist-machine-2/ ). Concepts are not completely arbitrary Suassurian "cuts" in reality: they refer to realities in our common experience.
Hence the word "person" should be interpreted in accord with what the reality of the person is with which we are in contact through our common experience.
This is similar to the question about the meaning of "death" that I treated here: https://www.academia.edu/47732555/Robert_Spaemann_and_Wolfgang_Waldstein_as_Critics_of_the_Brain_Death_Concept The concept of death does not refer to an arbitrary construct which can mean whatever we like, but to a reality that we all experience.
