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"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing [or words to that effect]." - Edmund Burke
That statement is rubbish (and it's quite likely Burke never actually said it.) One reason why it's rubbish is that it's so often invoked by good men who are arguing in favor of evil actions. "If we do nothing, then the evil men will bomb our women and children. Therefore, let us bomb his women and children first so that evil may not triumph." It's one of liberal modernity's favorite games:
Fat Man and Little Boy vs. a land invasion to secure an unconditional surrender with millions dead.
Abortion on demand vs. treat women as chattel.
Invade Iraq vs. surrender to Islamic terrorists.
Torture prisoners vs. surrender to Islamic terrorists.
Embryonic stem cell research vs. sanctimonious anti-science moralizing that causes endless preventable suffering.
Euthanasia vs. being responsible for suffering.
McCain vs. Obama.
Vote vs. engage in armed revolt.
Crafting false dilemmas can be fun. Everyone can play.
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Killing women and children first.
The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of fascist atrocities which provoked them. But with a few exceptions, the American press has done little to remind us what Allied bombers wrought 60 years ago over the skies of Dresden and other German civilian targets, or over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And of course, there’s no hint of repentance. We were engaged in total war. The war had been forced on us by aggressive, inhuman regimes, of whom we could only demand unconditional surrender. In the face of so many extremes, of governments which could rape Nanking and slaughter the Jews, to win we could rightly resort to the most extreme of means. There was a powerful inner logic driving us to exterminate all those civilians. And so we did it. And so we refuse to regret it. And so we plan to do it again.
...It’s easy to lose sight of reality, when we’re dealing with such numbers. So let’s think of it this way: Every child who died from our bombs was as innocent as Anne Frank.
People who angrily respond to this with, "But the Germans and Japanese did the same and much worse besides," are missing the point entirely. For starters, it is we who now stand in a position of dominance over much of the earth, and our ability to discern the right path and to follow it will have a decisive effect on the rest of the world, and will determine whether our future is to be that of a nation intent on justice or of one devolving into just another large scale criminal enterprise, like most of the world’s now-fallen empires.
We Americans have to face and accept responsibility for the simple fact that what we did at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, etc., was wrong. I'm quite aware that not everyone grants this as a fact or that it is simple. The simplicity I'm referring to is not to the actual historical decisions, but to the principle: it is wrong to target noncombatants in war. It is wrong to incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians in one fell swoop. It is wrong, and maybe what needs to be said more than ever in our current cultural climate, it is wrong even if there are putatively good reasons to do it. If it isn't wrong, then our fight with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda simply becomes a question of who struck first, who had the greater provocation, who was more of a victim - we have no principled reason to disagree with their methods.
I'm not trying to say that the circumstances surrounding the decision made by Truman in 1945 were such that doing the right thing should have been easy. Nor do I seek to judge the moral culpability of those who made the decision and those who carried it out. It was not an easy decision, and anyone who says it would have been if he had been the one to make it is fooling himself. There is much that can be said and has been said about the extenuating circumstances surrounding the decision. What we, as a people, must not and cannot ever do is say that it was right.
It's important that we not ever say that because the sins of the past remain as temptations in the present. Someone who believes that stealing is wrong may, faced with the right combination of temptations and circumstances, steal anyway. But someone who doesn't believe stealing is wrong at all will certainly do it regularly. I think the great flaw - possibly the fatal flaw - with the American people is our tendency to think that if something really, really needs to be done, it must therefore be the right thing to do. It's a far lesser sin to occasionally fail to live up to the moral law than to reject it altogether.
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Catholics to pope: Lift birth control ban.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — More than 50 dissident Catholic groups from around the world have written an open letter asking Pope Benedict XVI to lift the church's ban on birth control.
Pop quiz hot shots: What is the difference, if any, between these two statements?
1. "X is true because the Magisterium says so."
2. "I know that X is true because the Magisterium says so."
Sometimes in the heat of debate and in everyday sloppy language, the first is used as shorthand for the second. In general though, they mean very different things. In general, the first is completely false. This is true even in juridical and disciplinary matters, and not just on matters of faith and morals.
The proximate reason why we have to abstain from meat on Fridays is because the Magisterium has established this as a discipline. The reason why we obey the Magisterium in matters of discipline is not simply (and circularly) because the Magisterium says we must obey her in matters of discipline. The Magisterium does not (and she herself says this, through the person of Pope Benedict) make things true by asserting them. She can be completely trusted to tell us what is in fact true. An infallible witness to the truth is not the creator of truth.
Catholics who complain about the Church's teaching on birth control (or other issues) have a certain epistemic oddity behind their wishful thinking. Underlying their complaints seems to be a belief that moral facts are not really facts: that they are based solely on the authority of the Church, as if the Church has the authority to make something moral or immoral simply by declaring it so. Catholics can hope the Church will adopt an objectively false view of sexual morality all they wish without changing the fact that using birth control is objectively evil. People hope for all kinds of counterfactual things, but wishful thinking does not make the counterfactual any closer to being true.
Someone who hopes the Church will change her position on birth control is hoping the Church will adopt an objectively false moral position.
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Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature "incapable of being ordered" to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church's moral tradition, have been termed "intrinsically evil" (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that "there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object".
...If acts are intrinsically evil, a good intention or particular circumstances can diminish their evil, but they cannot remove it. They remain "irremediably" evil acts; per se and in themselves they are not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person. "As for acts which are themselves sins (cum iam opera ipsa peccata sunt), Saint Augustine writes, like theft, fornication, blasphemy, who would dare affirm that, by doing them for good motives (causis bonis), they would no longer be sins, or, what is even more absurd, that they would be sins that are justified?".
Consequently, circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act "subjectively" good or defensible as a choice.
Discussions about moral evil always turn into discussions about the subjective culpability of the acting subject. I think this is a mistake because the two are really completely different topics. Evil acts are always self-destructive even if, due to invincible ignorance or a non-culpable error in judgment, the acting subject is not culpable for the evil.
Suppose Fred the blogger is of the opinion that the existing pro-choice legal regime ought to be left untouched for the time being, in favor of other extra-legal means of opposing abortion. He justifies the legality of abortion in the United States on the grounds of subsidiarity. He believes the abortion laws should eventually be changed, but for the time being Christians ought not to spend so much time and energy harping on it because there are many other unaddressed issues that (putatively) affect the number of abortions.
Now suppose Fred speaks publicly to that effect. In doing so, he would objectively be doing evil, no matter how subjectively sincere he may be.
Non-culpable moral evil is just as bad for us as the alternative. It commits us to objectively evil acts from which it can be very difficult to extricate ourselves. The fact that it may not in principle be culpable moral evil doesn't mean that it isn't moral evil. It doesn't mean that repentance and conversion are unnecessary.
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Necessity is the mother of all moral heresy. How often do we hear the following:
Torture is immoral because it isn't necessary. It doesn't actually work in providing reliable intelligence.
Abortion is immoral because it isn't necessary. Adoption is always an option.
Atomic bombings of civilian cities was immoral because they weren't necessary. The Allies needn't have insisted on unconditional surrender.
Suppose though that in a particular case it really is necessary. Suppose that all human life on earth will be utterly annihilated if we do not undertake one of those particular acts.
It doesn't matter one bit. It's still wrong to do it.
These moral arguments from (non)necessity are a way of marketing an idea that is unpalatable to a particular audience by hiding the essence of the idea. To be more blunt, they are a lie. The fact they hide is that morality is the Cross. That's why I don't like to see them, particularly coming from Christians.
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| » I guess I just don't understand what "equal" means |
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"Equal" is one of those words everyone thinks they understand but really don't: that is, just about everyone who uses it means something different by it, and often the same person means something different from one use to the next as he goes along. Every claim of equality implies one more step, without which the claim of equality is meaningless. In the abstract, equal means that some specific attribute is identical among two or more specific instances. When we're talking about numbers, that attribute is quantity: two groups of three is equal to six. When we're talking about anything other than numbers, all claims of equality are meaningless unless we identify the putatively identical attribute.
It's all well and good to say that in order to be constitutional or just a law has to apply to everyone. Whenever we talk about "equal protection of the laws" this means, I guess, that whatever the law protects it has to protect for everybody. But this still seems to me like a meaningless abstraction. The law isn't going to equally protect us from trespassers if you're a homeowner and I am not. The speed limit laws aren't going to be applied equally to someone who drives a car and someone who rides a bicycle. The laws relating to trespassing and speed limits have to make authoritative discriminations at the level of particulars. Every law, without exception, makes such authoritative discriminations. That's almost a definition of law in and of itself: an authoritative discrimination. While it may not be a full definition, it is certainly a necessary component. A law which made no discriminations could hardly be described as a law at all. So it is too with "rights," which are a special category or particular view of law, which also make discriminations. Your right to free speech does not include yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater.
So "equal protection of the laws" or "equal rights" is either meaningless - that is, substantively superfluous unless backstopped against a tradition or natural law which does all of the discriminatory heavy lifting - or it is self-contradictory, requiring us to discriminate without discriminating.
We moderns have had it drilled into our heads from birth that discrimination is intrinsically evil. Discrimination is nothing more than a judgment between alternatives that can be either good or bad, made for either good or bad reasons. Law and authority inherently discriminate, and this is both good and necessary. In order to avoid talking about good and evil though, we introduced the concept of equality into our political discourse, and thus emptied it of all meaning.
May. 19th, 2008 @ 10:11 am
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| » While we're at it... |
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Every time a court makes a bad ruling, the conservative judicial positivist bandwagon comes rolling through town. Conservatives tend to think that sticking to the original text of the Constitution will make our legal regime better: that positivist, constitutional originalism will save the day. I was once an enthusiastic believer in this notion, and even now I'm quite sympathetic to it. Ultimately though I've come to believe that laudable though it may be, it's as much in error as Protestant attempts to get back to the early Christian church through positivist Bible orginalism.
Positivism in religion - sola scriptura - resulted in religion being whatever the individual religious believer interpreting the Bible said it was. It has created thousands of Christian or pseudo-Christian denominations. Positivism in law has the same effect. What not enough conservatives appreciate is that positivism and postmodernism are two sides of the same coin of irrationality, an irrationality born from the attempt to ignore natural law.
I still sympathize with judicial positivism as an attempt to check the imperial judiciary, but in practice it has the opposite effect. Biblical positivism emancipates the individual Christian to construct whatever kind of religion he likes. Legal positivism emancipates the judge to invent whatever kind of law he likes. Failure to embrace legal positivism does not rob the Constitution of all meaning, but embracing it fully would rob it of all meaning. Sola scriptura and sola constitution both try to confine all meaning to a closed text, and both ultimately rob that text of all meaning. As long as conservatives continue to fail at understanding this, as long as they continue rejecting natural law arguments in favor of legal positivism, they'll continue failing at their efforts to oppose the excesses of modernism and postmodernism.
May. 15th, 2008 @ 11:35 am
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| » Circles are now squares |
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If a court ruled that Saddam Hussein killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand because some of the bullets he fired into the air during one of his speeches traveled back in time and space to 1914 Sarajevo, then everyone would rightly conclude that the ruling was nonsensical and invalid. Any public figure who attempted to uphold or enforce that ruling would deserve a long stay in a padded cell instead of plaudits for his loyalty to the court. If a legislature passed a law requiring courts to ignore bullets that were fired after the trigger was pulled and take into account only those bullets fired before the trigger was pulled, then this would not create an obligation on the part of judges who know the law of cause-and-effect to either enforce this positive law or resign. When the legislature asserts nonsense it is not the duty of sane judges to step aside and allow that nonsense to wreak havoc in the lives of the people whose cases the judge adjudicates (the same holds, of course, when the judiciary asserts nonsense.) To assert that it does is to reverse responsibility. Those responsible for nonsense are those who propagate nonsense. Those responsible for protecting the common good, whether they are judges or legislators or executives, have a duty not to resign and to resist it to the extent that the resistance does not become immoral.
Natural law deals with the nature of moral obligation. If a future course of action is immoral, then by definition it cannot be moral to carry out that course of action. Positive law cannot - it literally cannot - change this any more than it can change the law of cause and effect. Legal positivists might acknowledge the existence of the natural law (and everyone, in practice, believes in the natural law) but they'll deny that judges have the competence or the responsibility to take it into account in their rulings. Whether any judge is competent or not is a question of particular fact. But the notion that judges can avoid questions of natural law and the issues that arise when the positive law conflicts with it is clearly false. Judges can no more ignore the natural law than they can ignore the laws of physics.
Conversely, the notion that mystical "emanations and penumbras" emerging unseen from the positive law create moral obligations on the part of the citizenry is equally false. It's as false as believing that courts can alter the laws of physics in declaring that Saddam Hussein started World War I. Positivists might think that natural law and penumbral lawa is a distinction without a difference, and that we can avoid questions of what is true by sticking to the positive law alone. The difference, though, is unavoidable. Courts literally cannot alter the laws of physics and create facts which are false. Likewise, courts literally cannot alter the natural law and either impose a moral obligation to do something immoral, or make an immoral act moral. The issue of what is true cannot be covered up with any amount of procedural wallpaper. Otherwise, we're all postmoderns in a world where circles can be squares.
EDIT: Andrew Sullivan is jubilant. He asks rhetorically: "So the initiative question becomes: do you want to divorce thousands of already-married couples? Or do you want to keep things as they now are?" That's what I was talking about. If a state constitutional amendment was passed then it wouldn't be "divorcing thousands of couples" because those couples were never really married. Likewise, if I were a business owner then I wouldn't extend benefits to same-sex couples like I would to married couples, because the latter are married and the former are not. Call it discriminatory if you wish, because I am discriminating between fantasy and reality. And I'd cheerfully go to jail before I recognized that falsehood as reality.
May. 15th, 2008 @ 10:20 am
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| » Be it resolved |
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From Jim Kalb's review of The Death of Reason came this interesting bit:
The author's conclusion is that we need some tribalism, fanaticism and law of the jungle of our own, just enough to maintain our ability to put individual self-interest first. It's the classic neoconservative version of the culture war: liberalism does itself in, so let's stick some traditional discipline into it and justify the discipline by pointing out that it'll put the system of everybody doing what he feels like doing on a more reliable footing.
The classical liberal views the communist as a tyrant or would-be tyrant, and the communist views the classical liberal as a tyrant or would-be tyrant. Both are, of course, quite right. Every species of liberalism (communism, libertarianism, neoconservatism) is inherently self-destructive and contrary to reason and nature, which is why each species adopts unprincipled exceptions to the freedom and equality of the Nietzschean superman. Whether they've ever read a word of his writings or not, all unreflective moderns think of themselves as Nietzchean supermen: equally autonomous individuals, self-created through reason and will, emancipated from the arbitrary chains of history, tradition, and nature; under no ultimate political obligations to fellow men other than those implied by doing what one wills and respecting the equal rights of others. This is an admittedly difficult topic to discuss since liberal assumptions undergird everything that is considered acceptable for polite political discourse in the English speaking world these days. People think you're weird enough if you're a classical liberal with some allegiance to the past. But to question liberalism itself - to impugn its very coherence as a doctrine or worldview - involves a major dislocation for most moderns. Almost everyone in the United States, for example, is a liberal. They may be left-liberals (Michael Moore) or right-liberals (Sean Hannity) but they only differ over means and not ends.
To give an example of what I mean, there is a type of conservative for whom the illegitimacy of the abortion regime in the United States stems from the procedural matter of it not being voted into law in the formal exercise of the will of the nation of free and equal supermen and their representatives. In short, they are not outraged about abortion's objective status as a moral crime and abomination, but rather its procedural status as an undemocratic imposition by judges.
Apr. 11th, 2008 @ 11:19 am
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| » Blogging can send you to Hell |
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There are nine ways of being an accessory to another's sin: by counsel, by command, by consent, by provocation, by praise or flattery, by concealment, by partaking, by silence, and by defense of the ill done. From the Pontifical Academy of Life: The Principle of Licit Cooperation with Evil.
The first fundamental distinction to be made is that between formal and material cooperation. Formal cooperation is carried out when the moral agent cooperates with the immoral action of another person, sharing in the latter's evil intention. On the other hand, when a moral agent cooperates with the immoral action of another person, without sharing his/her evil intention, it is a case of material cooperation.
Material cooperation can be further divided into categories of immediate (direct) and mediate (indirect), depending on whether the cooperation is in the execution of the sinful action per se, or whether the agent acts by fulfilling the conditions - either by providing instruments or products - which make it possible to commit the immoral act. Furthermore, forms of proximate cooperation and remote cooperation can be distinguished, in relation to the "distance" (be it in terms of temporal space or material connection) between the act of cooperation and the sinful act committed by someone else. Immediate material cooperation is always proximate, while mediate material cooperation can be either proximate or remote.
Formal cooperation is always morally illicit because it represents a form of direct and intentional participation in the sinful action of another person. Material cooperation can sometimes be illicit (depending on the conditions of the "double effect" or "indirect voluntary" action), but when immediate material cooperation concerns grave attacks on human life, it is always to be considered illicit, given the precious nature of the value in question.
A further distinction made in classical morality is that between active (or positive) cooperation in evil and passive (or negative) cooperation in evil, the former referring to the performance of an act of cooperation in a sinful action that is carried out by another person, while the latter refers to the omission of an act of denunciation or impediment of a sinful action carried out by another person, insomuch as there was a moral duty to do that which was omitted.
Passive cooperation can also be formal or material, immediate or mediate, proximate or remote. Obviously, every type of formal passive cooperation is to be considered illicit, but even passive material cooperation should generally be avoided, although it is admitted (by many authors) that there is not a rigorous obligation to avoid it in a case in which it would be greatly difficult to do so.
Suppose Fred writes a blog post where, commenting on a news story, he says that a woman ought to abort her unborn child. Assume that he is being honest - that he actually intends for her to procure an abortion. Obviously the act of blogging has an insignificant effect: it contributes to the atmosphere of overall support for legalized abortion and support for this specific abortion. Nevertheless, it does provide material support to the ultimate act of killing that baby. The intention of the person procuring the abortion is shared by Fred the blogger.
This is formal cooperation with evil. Suppose Bob is the one who actually kills the child. Fred's blog post - again, assuming its veracity - materially cooperates with Bob's act and formally cooperates with the child's murder.
Formal cooperation with evil is when we will something that is evil, period, case closed, end of discussion. Attempting to convince ourselves that what we will isn't actually evil - whether it's abortion, torture, euthanasia, sodomy, adultery, etc. - doesn't change that. Neither does drawing analogies to things that are not evil. If you will that X be done, even if X is actually done by someone else, and X is evil, then you are formally cooperating with evil.
Apr. 6th, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
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| » Move it or lose it meat bag |
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Recent convert to Catholicism John C. Wright points out an obvious truth: you do not argue with machines. You either reprogram them or destroy them.
If man is just a meat machine, there is no reason to get angry with him for cheating on his wife. There is no reason to be indignant with him for being a member of a political party you disagree with. Indeed, if he is a machine, there is no reason to argue with him at all: send him to a re-education camp to be reprogrammed. Human life might be sacred, but meat machines are not sacred, they are merely objects. Fix the ones worth fixing, the ones useful to you, and throw away the broken ones.
Every time I have this discussion with atheists, materialists, fallen away Christians, or other type of person in error, they keep falling back on one of two things: their feelings or utilitarianism. They observe social norms because they feel empathy for their fellow human beings, or because they feel compassionate, or they feel nice, or kind, or generous, or compassionate. Such people frighten me. Our feelings are notoriously unreliable; they are not subject to the will. And feelings, no matter how strongly we may hold them, are not reasons. They are not laws. They are not rational standards.
Secondly, they appeal to utilitarianism. Certain moral norms, they argue, are more conducive to creating functioning societies. Obviously civil society is impossible if stealing is permissible. If we are not secure in our own property rights, then it is impossible to establish the trust necessary for a community to form. That, they continue, is why all cultures observe certain moral norms: in a kind of natural selection for civilizations, those who observe them survive while those do not not don't. It's certainly not because of any metaphysical* mumbo jumbo about God or natural law, or what have you. It seems to me that this fails as well. Certainly if society is to function, we cannot tolerate either stealing or killing the innocent. But what if we decide we don't want society to function? What if our current society is not worth preserving or defending? Indeed, if we are simply meat bags with no free will, then on what basis can we express preference for any one thing, such as civilization, over another, such as barbarism? Machines are neither sacred nor possess any dignity. You either reprogram them or destroy them.
*: It should be noted for all future discussions either in this blog or in comments I leave elsewhere that it is not possible, in practice, to "reject" metaphysics (or ignore them as irrelevant mystical gobbledygook). A man who claims to reject metaphysics, therefore, does not result in him having no metaphysics, but rather confused, unprincipled, arbitrary, incoherent metaphysics.
Mar. 28th, 2008 @ 03:03 pm
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| » Ru'es you can use, fool |
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The dichotomy between science and faith is false. There never has been and there never will be anything discovered by the light of science than can contradict the truths of the Christian faith. Anyone who says otherwise either,
1) Doesn't understand the science
2) Doesn't understand the faith
3) Is trying to sell a book
Or as the Angelic Doctor once put it in his Summa Contra Gentiles:
The truth that the human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith. For that with which the human reason is naturally endowed is clearly most true; so much so, that it is impossible for us to think of such truths as false. [If we only undertand the meaning of the terms in such self-evident propositions as "The whole is greater than the part" or "What has color must have size," we cannot think them false.] Nor is it permissible to believe as false that which we hold by faith, since this is confirmed in a way that is so clearly divine. [It is not our faith but its object, God, that justifies our certainty.] Since, therefore, only the false is opposed to the true, as is clearly evident from an examination of their definitions, it is impossible that truth of faith should be opposed to those principles that the human reason knows naturally.
Thus, either Christianity is false, or reason is false. If both are true, then there can never be any real contradiction between them since truth cannot contradict truth. We are speaking objectively here, not subjectively. The objective stock of truths revealed to us by God for us to believe, and the objective stock of truths acquired through the use of our reason properly used, do not contain any contradictions. Subjectively, we fallen creatures easily and frequently err. We can either misunderstand the faith or misuse our reason. Opinions and philosophical assumptions can certainly contradict the faith. But reason and science in themselves cannot and do not.
Mar. 26th, 2008 @ 09:20 am
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| » Consequentialism: It's the new black |
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Dogmatic pacifism and advocacy of total war are two sides of the same coin; they are both errors which stem from a misconception of the nature of war. Both assume that because war always has evil consequences, it is sometimes necessary to do evil acts ourselves in pursuit of a good end: that it is impossible ever to wage war as a good act. The pacifist therefore concludes that war can never be just by definition because some of war's consequences are evil. The total war advocate concludes that because evil is inevitable in war, we should not shy away from committing whatever evil actions it may take to end the war as quickly as possible and with the fewest bad consequences.
The dogmatic pacifist, at least, is more principled than the total war advocate - the pacifist correctly believes that one may not do evil in the pursuit of good. But he incorrectly holds that the morality of an act is determined by its consequences. He fails (like his doppleganger, the Curtis LeMay wannabe) to distinguish between intended/chosen consequences and unintended/foreseen consequences. They are both consequentialists.
Now there is a type of pacifism that is not consequentialist; one could call it prudential pacifism. The prudential pacifist acknowledges that just wars are possible in theory, but that in practice they never occur. Just wars are a possibility in principle, but a practical impossibility.
I don't think it's possible to be a dogmatic pacifist and remain consistent with either Catholic moral teaching or the natural law, because dogmatic pacifism is a species of consequentialism. Prudential pacifists don't disagree with the Church's principles; they may differ with the Church on a particular war in particular circumstances based on a prudential judgment of the facts. The prudential pacifist could very well be wrong, but he won't be falling into moral heresy.
I myself am no type of pacifist, despite the charges of armchair Shermans who apparently believe that opposing a particular war necessarily means one opposes all war in principle.
Mar. 16th, 2008 @ 07:47 pm
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| » Just a formality |
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From the American Spectator:
Notice that after spending much of Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate rattling on about his commitment to universal health care, Obama in the final moments of it delivered himself of the regret that he failed to support more vigorously those calling for Terri Schiavo's death by starvation and dehydration.
"When I first arrived in the Senate that first year, we had a situation surrounding Terri Schiavo. And I remember how we adjourned with a unanimous agreement that eventually allowed Congress to interject itself into that decisionmaking process of the families," he said. "It wasn't something I was comfortable with, but it was not something that I stood on the floor and stopped. And I think that was a mistake..."
Not comfortable interjecting himself into health care decisions? Here we see once again liberalism as willfulness writ large. It permits any and all contradictions, proposing endless federal meddling in the health care decisions of states and families at one moment, then forbidding such meddling in the next, lest abortion and euthanasia be jeopardized.
Obama's health care plan is predicated on massive interference. He knows what is good for families and states far better than they do, all the way down to the smallest details of policy. But we're told by him that the federal government has no interest in stopping a cloddish husband from finishing off his inconveniently disabled wife.
IT IS NOW A cliche that the GOP blew it by defending Schiavo so loudly. The truth is that moment represented one of the few honorable acts of a dishonorable GOP Congress, and if the Republicans had any sense they would revisit these fundamental moral issues, which provide the starkest dividing line between liberalism and conservatism.
This is a perfect example of formal cooperation with evil. Everyone who knowingly took the side of starving Terri Schiavo to death is himself morally guilty of murder. Formal cooperation with evil is when we will something evil to actually be done, period, full stop, end of discussion. Attempting to convince ourselves that what we are willing is not evil does not change that and neither does drawing analogies to acts which are not evil. If you will that X be done and do something - anything at all, no matter how insignificant - to bring X about, and X is evil, then you are cooperating with evil. Someone who thought Schiavo's feeding tube should have been pulled and blogged to that effect, or gave a speech on the Senate floor calling for it, formally cooperated with her murder. It is irrelevant if the blogger or politician did not think what he did was evil.
While Obama and the others were morally guilty of participating in Schiavo's murder, how we deal with them as a juridical matter is and should be different from their personal guilt as a moral matter. In other words, they do not deserve jail but they do deserve hell, and that is precisely what they will get if they do not repent.
Mar. 6th, 2008 @ 09:40 am
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| » Absolution via positivism |
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Positivist theories are never exculpatory. Politicians and judges do not have a license to do wrong simply because their theories of government or jurisprudence constrain them to a choice of evils. There is no excuse for a judge who says that Roe v. Wade is "settled law" or that "there's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent." Anyone who tries to justify that stance always does so on the basis of a political or legal theory. No political or legal theory justifies formal cooperation with evil. Expressing an intention to fully enforce Roe is formal cooperation with evil. "I am personally opposed but..." is never exculpatory, so don't even start.
Mar. 4th, 2008 @ 04:28 pm
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| » The Constitution is dead; let's keep it that way |
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"The natural law ... provides the necessary basis for the civil law with which it is connected, whether by a reflection that draws conclusions from its principles, or by additions of a positive and juridical nature." The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1959
The normative force of all positive law, including the US Constitution, rests on the natural law. Positive law loses all normative force when it attempts to contradict the natural law. But that does not at all imply that positive law has no stable meaning. The idea that we have a "living Constitution" is a leap from the positivist frying pan into the emanations and penumbras of postmodern fire. Both ideas are Nietzschean attempts to push the natural law outside the bounds of reality that has consequences and replace it with the will to power of the free and equal superman. When a legal system is disconnected from the natural law, something will arise to fill in the gaps in the messiness of every day human affairs. With apologies to Chesterton, a man who rejects natural law will not believe in no law; he'll believe in any law.
If you haven't read it yet, I strongly recommend The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. Here, the author responds to a critic.
Feb. 26th, 2008 @ 11:01 am
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| » Sit, anathema, sit. Good dog. |
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"1. If anyone says that: the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema." - Vatican Council I
Catholics who claim that the existence of God cannot be proven through observation of nature and through human reason unaided by faith have to do a lot of dancing around the word "prove." They have to argue that "prove" means something other than "show with certainty to be true," and then under their new definition of "prove" argue that the existence of God cannot be proven. Sort of like Humpty Dumpty's talk with Alice.
Persuasion is always a personal decision. I can tell you and you can know with certainty that eating at Carl's Jr. three times per day will cause you to gain weight, but you might not be persuaded to refrain from doing so anyway (Six Dollar Western Bacon cheeseburgers are pretty hard to resist). For most people in that category their reasoning goes like this: "I want to do X. God says I cannot do X. Therefore, God does not exist." Or without bringing God into it at all: "Right reasoning R says I cannot believe X. I really want to believe X. Therefore, reasoning R must not be right." Sometimes though people honestly don't see, and the reasons why are more mysterious than willful ignorance. Never underestimate the human capacity (I include myself here) to reject right reason.
Feb. 24th, 2008 @ 10:05 pm
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| » Intrinsic confusion |
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When we intentionally cause intense suffering in a person completely under our power, and that suffering is the moral object - the chosen behavior - of our act, it is torture. I know that many people think we should be morally licensed to intentionally cause intense suffering in prisoners if we think they have valuable information. These people are all wrong. Moreover, the ongoing project to find loopholes or circumstances where intentionally causing intense suffering in prisoners is putatively licit, is itself deeply evil and wicked. It is indeed possible to licitly do things that cause suffering in a prisoner under double-effect reasoning when that suffering is a foreseen but unintended consequence of another action. But when the suffering is the object, never.
An example would be a man licitly condemned to death. We would prefer that the man confess his sins, make peace with his victims or their families, and go to his death repentant without suffering at all. We do not intend his fear, inner turmoil, or anguish at the prospect of facing death. His suffering is not a means to any end of ours. His suffering is an unintended consequence of carrying out a licit execution.
But if the intense suffering of a prisoner - whatever the specific means we use to bring it about - is itself the outcome we desire, or is a cause of the outcome that we desire, we are torturers. If the intense suffering is the means - whether it's caused by waterboarding, strappado, or sleep deprivation - that we choose to accomplish some end, we are torturers.
Now, as a general thing, the moral status of an act depends on its object, intent, and circumstances. If the object of the act is not evil in itself, then the act may be licit depending upon an evaluation of the intent and circumstances which, together with the object, make the act a human act subject to moral evaluation. Not so with intrinsically evil acts. An intrinsically evil act is evil because of the nature of its object. Intent and circumstances are completely irrelevant to the conclusion that the act is morally evil.
So suppose someone says "I know the Church says that act X is an intrinsically evil act, but I don't have a good definition of act X. Therefore it is possible that act X might be morally licit under circumstance A, but not morally licit under circumstance B." Does this make any sense when we are talking about acts which the Church has authoritatively taught to be intrinsically evil?
The short answer is that no, it does not make any sense. If we know that act X is intrinsically evil, then we know it is evil because of the nature of its object, and we know that no circumstance or intent can make it morally licit. We know that act X cannot be made licit by a change of circumstances or intent. We know this even if we don't have a precise definition of act X: in fact, we know it even if we have no idea what act X is at all.
The notion of an intrinsically evil act that is defined as the kind of act it is by its intent or circumstances is self-contradictory. So if your operative definition of torture includes qualifiers based on intent or circumstances, qualifiers which make the act torture or not-torture based on intent or circumstances, you know for a fact that your operative definition of torture is wrong.
Feb. 22nd, 2008 @ 09:33 am
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| » Shun the frumious Bandersnatch |
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There's an overwhelming insistence among torture apologists that we need to have a precise philosophical definition of torture before we can have a fruitful discussion. Sure torture is evil, they say, but "torture" is such an elastic word as to be completely meaningless. And yet the funny thing is that I have yet to see the people who insist we need a more precise definition voluntarily provide one. If we really need a more precise definition for how to treat prisoners humanely (I am not at all convinced that we do, but so very many people seem to think we do) then providing one ought to be their first priority. Yet I haven't seen a single attempt - not one - by any of the loudest voices calling for a definition to provide one and justifications for it. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that when people say "we need a better definition of torture," they aren't actually saying we need a better definition of torture.
The Catholic Church has definitively prohibited torture under all circumstances. It has also prohibited adultery, fornication, pornography, euthanasia, and abortion. At the same time the Church has not provided a precise philosophical definition of torture (or any of those other things for that matter.) This leaves two possibilities: either the Church takes it for granted that all civilized people know what torture is and can avoid it; or else it is the Church of the Jabberwock, a trickster church that has prohibited gyring and gimbaling on the wabe without telling us what that means. So I ask my fellow Catholics - do you believe in a trickster church, or the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, infallible guide to faith and morals?
Feb. 21st, 2008 @ 09:39 am
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