When the Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was rst released to the public, it occasioned a storm of controversy. The Bishops were criticized for presuming to enter into the debate on public policy, as well as for the specic policy recommendations they made. Here, Sterba and Rasmussen debate the philosophical validity of the Bishops' analysis of the U.S. economy, discussing the conception of human dignity philosophically, while critiquing economic empirical evidence.