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How should we think and talk about large, complex, internally riven institutions?

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This is a prologue to some further thoughts and observations in the coming days/weeks. Consider the accuracy of the following two statements, in light of this and this:

1) The Catholic Church considers the use of contraception to be a flagrant violation of God’s designs and plans for human sexual flourishing; it is sinful and impermissible for practicing Catholics.

2)  The Catholic Church accepts the use of birth control as a normal and necessary part of life, but for a variety of historical and cultural reasons,  politely tolerates and indulges the habit of some members of their internal hierarchy (who, notably, have no families or sex lives of their own to manage) making claims like (1).

Obviously, how one assesses the relative truth value of these statements will depend a great deal on the background theory/approach to institutions one is currently using (which we could classify, broadly, as ‘formal’ in the first case and ‘sociological’ in the second). Also obviously, I think, each of these ways of thinking about institutions is likely appropriate for some purposes. But which ones? When–and for what purposes–should we consider institutions in these two senses? For the purposes of most political discussions and issues, we seem to tend to prefer approaches that leads us to statements like (1). When the White house announced the rule for insurance contraception coverage two years ago, they did something interesting: in citing the Guttmacher study linked above’s finding that 98% of sexually active Catholic women use contraception at some point in their lives (which led to various Catholics hilariously but erroneously attempting to claim this was erroneous read of the study; as if getting that number down to 89% would have been some sort of notable epistemic victory) they seemed to be gesturing toward a different approach to institutions; the one that might lead to conclusions more along the lines of statement (2) above.

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