Joseph Shaw's Philosophy Blog

Non-Directive Counselling: what I have learnt

2011-11-02T10:18:00.005Z

Last evening I presented one of two papers on NDC at a seminar on the subject organised by the Anscombe Centre, and took part in the discussion. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of proceedings, or reveal the identities of anyone (I don't know if they'd mind or not), but I will sumarise what I think I learnt from a very interesting evening.

As the seminar was attended by a number of people from counselling organisations (or organisations which do counselling inter alia), as well as a number of moral philosophers, we were able to try in a sustained way to get to grips with each others' angles on the subject. The counsellors (as I might call them for convenience) were naturally not used to the kinds of questions we raised; nor were the philosophers especially well-informed about counselling. The first thing which emerged was that, as far as I could see, the existence of moral problems of the type we were raising had not occurred to the counsellors as a group before (or: before the thing blew up in the Catholic press a few months ago). Handling a counselling session to minimise cooperation with evil, or consent by silence to evil, was not part of their training. As Catholics they naturally had some instincts on these matters, but these things had never been formalised, and although they went into counselling with considerable professional training, ethics from a Catholic point of view did not form part of that. In this, of course, they are in the same boat as doctors, though one might have hoped for something better from organisations with strong links to the Church.

They were able to clarify for us some of the protocols they use and how these relate to the kinds of moral problem which I outlined. The answers to the question 'Can an NDC counsellor volunteer information?' and the question 'Can an NDC counsellor answer a question about his own moral view?' were both a clear 'no': nor would any of the counsellors present allow themselves to break the rules of NDC in an emergency situation.

On the other hand, some of them did say that they would aim to steer the conversation in particular directions, that they looked out for 'pro-life clues' and so on. If some kind of information would make a difference, in the counsellor's judgement, he would steer the client into asking for it.

This might look as though the rules of NDC were being kept in letter but not in spirit, but it also emerged that other organisations, including pro-abortion organisations, would regard the provision of information as not infringing NDC at all. Their approach would be to make sure that the client had a full set of options to consider. The pro-life counsellors would not set out options unasked: one reason for this which was discussed is that if you give pro-life options, it would seem that you had to give options involving abortion as well. Something a bit like a Socratic questioning method, of getting the client to see for herself, and to ask for herself the necessary questions, is used instead.

In addition to this, one counsellor pointed out that it would be impossible for a counsellor not to convey a certain amount about his own preferences by tone of voice, body language and so on. (Thinking about this afterwards, it occurred to me that this was much less the case with counselling over the phone.)

My argument in my paper was to the effect: NDC may well work in some cases, and indeed be the best approach in some cases, or for some of the time in a case, but a counsellor must be ready either to switch into a more interventionist mode of operating, or refer the client on to a more interventionist type of counselling, if the counsellor judges that a good outcome depends upon it. I pointed out in my paper that such a procedure was perfectly normal in ordinary counselling. However, the counsellors present were very resistant to this suggestion, and it is clearly not a way of doing things they are used to.

They used two arguments against it. One was that becoming more interventionist would undermine the rapport with the client. If this were true then it would never bring about a better outcome; but equally if it were true then other counselling organisations, who tell their counsellors to switch into a more interventionist mode when the client is suicidal, would have noticed. And indeed if being interventionist never worked then all the other kinds of therapy, other than NDC, would never work, and that seems rather an extravagant claim.

The other is that any deviation from NDC would be found out and referrals from GPs and the like would dry up. In the case of one counselling group represented at the meeting at least, the organisation's business model depends on strict adherence to the rules for this reason. Against this it should be pointed out that there are other business models: you can advertise and get your clients that way, and non-NDC pro-life counselling groups do just that. More fundamentally, this argument does not look to me like a justification for close material cooperation in a grave evil.

My preliminary conclusion from the discussion is this. One the one hand, despite saying they would never break the NDC rules, and their reluctance to move the client on to other forms of counselling, pro-life NDC counsellors can find ways of getting the client to ask for necessary information, can steer the conversation in a pro-life direction, and so on: so there are more resources for ensuring a good outcome (and avoiding cooperation in evil) than might appear at first.

On the other hand, when push comes to shove, and in the admittedly unlikely case when a word in season would make all the difference, pro-life NDC counsellors will stick to a strict interpretation of the rules and remain silent. I have yet to see a sufficient moral justification for that, but no doubt the debate will continue.

Why I was wrong about Triple Effect

2011-09-28T12:21:00.001+01:00

Frances Kamm has proposed something called 'Triple Effect', in which an agent can bring about a desired effect, which is essential for his overall plan, without intending it. She says this shows we can use something as a means which we do not intend. I agreed with her analysis, though I said it should not be called a means of the agent.

Kamm's examples. The party: I will only throw a party if I don't expect there to be a lot of clearing up. I think my guests will do the clearing up for me, so I throw the party on that basis. But I don't intend that they clear up.

Looping Trolley: I can direct a trolley away from one set of people tied to the track only the basis that lives will be saved overall. In fact there are even more people tied to the alternative track. But luckily (?) there is a very fat man tied to the track as well, who will stop the trolley before it gets to these latter people. I can direct the trolley in that direction without intending the squashing of the fat man.

These have some plausibility, particularly the party example (or so it seemed to me), but I have realised that this approach is subject to powerful counterexamples, like this one.

The wicked uncle. My uncle is very rich and very wicked; a whole community is suffering under his exploitative sway. I fancy scratching my finger on the trigger of a loaded gun I am pointing at him, which will obviously go off and kill him. Normally such finger-scratching would be wrong, because the unintended effect of killing an innocent (non-aggressor) would outweigh the good of relieving my itch in this way. But in this case the good consequences of his death far outweigh the badness of the death in itself. So the balance of non-intended consequences is actually positive.

Now this seems absurd, and if we allow this then any action with overall good consequences which violates a deontic constraint (a common-sense moral prohibition like 'don't kill the innocent) could be done with a little morally irrelevant posturing. So the moral structure of deontic constraints would effectively collapse into Consequentialism.

The case is indeed absurd because when I say that the good consequences of the action make it morally possible to do, I am taking cognizance of them in a way which implies that I intend them. One intends things which motivate one to act as one does. The good consequences of the death are motivating me, in part, and I would nit act without them; thus I must be intending the death of the uncle as well, as a means to my intended end.

What I failed to see was that on Kamm's examples the agent must be intending the good foreseen results because they are essential to his plan. If he did not expect them then he'd have to call it off, and he'd better make sure they happen, by adapting the plan if necessary. They are indeed his means, but by the same token they are intended.

This admission also effect another example I came up with: the railway enthusiast. He is so keen on railways that he wants to build one really as an end in itself. Someone points out that railways are dangerous things and people are bound to be killed in accidents in the years after it is built. This seems to rule out the project. Then someone else points out that railways are safer than roads and by shifting traffic away from roads it will have an overall positive effect on the number of accidental deaths. I DID say that the enthusiast can proceed with the building with no intentions about accidental deaths, happy in the knowledge that the balance of unintended consequences is positive. I NOW say that since the improved overall safety is essential to the moral viability of the project he must intend it, if only as a means to the end of building a railway.

Changing my position in this way brings underlines the principle found in many discussions of the Principle of Double Effect, that the good consequences of an action must not flow causally from the bad foreseen side effects. At least, if the bad side effects are such that it would be wrong to intend them, one cannot justify the action on the basis of further, good, effects which flow from them, for to do this is to bring them, and the bad cause of them into one's intentions.

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The ethical problems of non-directive counselling

2011-07-14T15:09:00.008+01:00

Update: for the latest episode in the story, see here.

There has been a flurry of interest in this topic on the Catholic blogs, since LIFE, the pro-life charity, has got accreditation for its counsellors as conforming to the 'non-directive' style favoured by the secular counselling industry. The hope of the organisation that using non-directive counselling (NDC) will win the organisation acceptance by, and influence in, government, and even funding, is not entirely without foundation. But non-directive counselling is very controversial in Catholic ethics, and I have seen no serious defence of LIFE's stance.

What are the problems?

Practical. 1. It is claimed that non-directive counselling works. The claim is very hard to substantiate since the counsellor normally does not know what the ultimate outcomes are. We can't hold this against the method, but the claim that its effectivness is a knock-down argument in favour of it won't wash either.

2. The suggestion that the alternative to LIFE's NDC is to say to clients what you want them to conclude at the end of the counselling, at the beginning. This is the reverse of the truth. People going to LIFE counsellors know that they are going to a pro-life group - the name rather gives it away. They then get no guidance at all from the counsellor. The alternative is to use a more neutral name, start the counselling very softly-softly, and then introduce some important facts into the discussion: notably what abortion is, what the alternatives are. This is the approach taken by other pro-life groups, and they are just as adamant as LIFE that this approach works.

Psychological. NDC is a horse from the 'values clarification' stable established by Carl Rogers and others. Rogers found that he could get 1950s university students to pull themselves together simply by repeating back to them their own statements. This obviously worked because the students for the most part had very clear, and fairly old-fashioned, values from their upbringing. It has a very different effect on people today who come from a pretty values-free background in the first place. Indeed, it is favoured today as part of a package with the idea that all decisions are equally valid, there are no objective moral principles, and so on, and it is really hard to see why anyone who is not a moral subjectivist would give NDC a second glance.

Funding. James Preece raises the question of why Catholics are being asked to fund LIFE's counselling. This is a good question because NDC counsellors are not supposed to allow their own values to influence their counselling. It follows that pro-life NDC counsellors will be no different, and no better from the point of view of outcomes, than pro-abortion NDC counsellors. Why, then, does LIFE think it is important to expand its band of counsellors? Why not let non-aligned or even pro-abortion groups pay for it? Just let people ring the Samaritans.

Or is LIFE and its supporters hinting that their counsellors are more likely to get pro-life outcomes than others? If that is true, their accreditation for NDC should be taken away.

Moral. It is a principle of moral and civil law that silence implies consent. Silence is one of the 'Nine ways of being an accessory to another's sin' in many examinations of conscience. To speak more formally, it is evidently a way of cooperating materially in evil. Material cooperation can be justified in some cases, but this cooperation is close, not remote, and the evil is extremely grave. The justification would have to take the form of an overwhelming good that would be attained, or evil avoided, by the silence, in relation to the chance of non-silence doing any good.

So this would be justified: stifling one's protest about the brutality of the concentration-camp guard would clearly save many people from serious suffering; voicing it would anyway do no good; and no-one is going to imagine that you approve of the brutality anyway (there is no chance of scandal). At first glance, LIFE's supporters have a mountain to climb to show that LIFE counsellors are in that kind of situation.

So can we have an argument, please?

Another Prussic problem

2011-03-08T14:44:00.003Z

Alexander Pruss has put forward some very troubling counter-examples to the solution Frances Kamm gives to the 'Loop' case. Since I follow Kamm, at least in outline, these are problem cases for me too.

Rather than summarise all that here readers can see Pruss for themselves. Here is a response - though not, at the moment, a solution.

Case 1. Jim the railway enthusiast is keen to build a railway between two large cities. His motivation is simply that he loves railways. A safety expert tells him, however, that over 50 years there are likely to be 50 deaths on this railway, if built. Jim is sad because this appears to show that it would be wrong to build it: 50 deaths is a high price to pay for his dream of a gleaming new railway. However, the expert quickly adds that the railway will divert traffic from the roads, and since railways are generally safer than roads the number of lives saved will be, say, 55.

Jim is happy again: it seems that these two unintended side-effects of his project don't just cancel each other out, but leaves him with a modest credit balance.

Case 2. Benny the blackmailer tells Jill that unless she kills one person (Charlie) he, Benny, will kill two other people (all these victims are innocent with nothing much to distinguish them). Jill knows it would be wrong to intend the death of an innocent even to save two lives. Instead, she points her gun directly at Charlie's head, and, with the intention of giving her trigger finger some much-needed exercise, pulls the trigger. She knows, of course, that Charlie will be killed as a result of this, but whereas this would normally be an act of terrible recklessness, she knows that the unintended side-effect of Charlie's death will be more than off-set by the saving of the two other innocents.

What we need to bear in mind with Pruss's cases, which are like my Case 2, is that while it seems that in these cases something is going horribly wrong, the plausibility of the reasoning in Case 1 and others like it is perfectly ok. Not just ok, in fact, but it is essential that we are able to off-set side-effects if we are to engage in any large-scale action: government policies on transport, education, health and so on will invariably generate 'winners and losers' and we balance these out to see if the policy is permissible. If we are to stop Jill's line of reasoning we must show that it is different from that of Jim. Case 1 shows that Kamm's original insight ('triple effect') remains correct.

So how are they different?

1. Jim could intend the good results if he wishes; Jill could not, because if she did she would have to intend the evil means to them. Put another way, the good results come from the evil results for Jill, but not for Jim.

2. Jill is acting much more immediately than Jim, on persons she can identify. She is more closely involved in the evil of innocent deaths.

3. The trivial goods Jill and others like her are intending could be achieved in other ways, which do not bring about such drastic harms. We might ask: what is Jills' intention in doing it this way? The answer would be: to take advantage of the favourable balance of unintended side effects available in this exact situation.

I'm not happy with any of these three differences, as the basis for allowing Jim's reasoning and ruling out Jill's.

On 1: Jim could intend the good results, but as stipulated he doesn't. This will often be the case with the leaders of large-scale projects. Again, consider the 'butterfly effect': by turning over in bed, we may cause a hurricane in New Zealand. We don't need to worry, however, because we are just as likely to be preventing a hurricane in New Zealand. We don't need to go to the trouble of intending the good possible results of our careless actions in order to take advantage of their neutral overall effects; we just note (in response to objections) that we aren't making things any worse.

2. It has been noted before that having identifiable victims can have an effect on our intuitions. It surely can't have an effect on the truth of the matter. The identifiable victims in the Jill case partially explains our distaste for her reasoning, but I'm not ready to bite the bullet and say that, therefore, what she does is ok.

3. We might we say: Jill's intention in exercising her trigger finger with a loaded gun pointed at Charlie with the safety catch off is to capture the positive balance of side-effects, which would not be captured in any other way. Similarly, we always adapt our plans in order to avoid disastrous side-effects. If someone tells you that simply by travelling from A to B via C you may spread a deadly disease from C to B, then you don't go via C, you go via D instead. So Jill can exercise her finger with the gun pointed another way, unloaded etc. etc. but if she does that a disastrous result arises: two innocents are killed by Benny. Instead, she gains her trivial good in a way which won't have this disastrous result, but a less disastrous one, that of Charlie dying.

My feeling right now is that there is a moral difference between the cases, but I can't identify a principled explanation for it.

Intending harms: some thoughts

2011-03-01T18:52:00.001Z

Following the Double Effect conference organised by the Anscombe Centre, I've been thinking about what it means to intend harms. Here are some preliminary thoughts.

There are a range of ways of understanding what constitutes intending a harm, which corresponds to different ways of understanding intention as a whole. A preliminary characterisation of harm would include pain, loss of function, and loss of opportunities for good.

1. An agent intends any harm he knowingly brings about.

2. If an agent intends a physical effect which is a harm to the patient, then he intends the harm which is constituted by that physical effect.

3. If an agent intends a loss of function (etc.) to the patient, then he intends the harm constituted by the loss of function.

4. If an agents intends that the patient by harmfully effected by something, then he intends that harmful effect.

To illustrate:

A. Spraying mosquitoes: Adam sprays an area from an aeroplane to kill disease-carrying mosquitoes, in the knowledge that a small number of people will suffer a painful allergic reaction to the spray.

He intends harm under (1) but under none of the others.

B. Beatrice uses the body of Duncan to cushion the fall of Edith from a ladder. Beatrice intends Duncan to absorb the impact of Edith’s fall, a physical event which is harmful to Duncan.

Beatrice intends harm to Duncan under (1) and (2) but not (3) and (4).

C. Freddie tapes up Georgina’s mouth and nose to prevent her using up oxygen on a stricken submarine.

Freddie intends to harm Georgina under (1), (2) and (3), but not (4)

D. Henry the government official is impervious to requests for help for those suffering from an epidemic. Irene infects him with the disease, in the hope that his own suffering will prompt him to change his policy.

Irene intends to harm Henry under all the definitions.

Counterexamples.

It is easy to show that definition 1 is too wide.

Justin knows he will suffer some pain and stiff limbs after his exercise routine, but he is not motivated by bringing about these harms, he is motivated by the desire to get fit.

Contrary to definition (1), Justin does not intend the harm, since intention is tied to reasons for action and motivation. Which is to say, intending something which brings about a harm is not the same as intending a harm.

It is harder to show if any of the other definitions are too narrow, since here the question is of whether it should be said that what the agents bring about is a harm, or (like Justin’s exercise) that it merely bring a harm about.

Craniotomy: is reducing the size of the baby’s head ipso facto harming the baby, or does it merely bring about harm to the baby?

Fat Man: is using the Fat Man to stop the trolley (to soak up the trolly’s kinetic energy) ipso facto harming him, or does it merely bring a harm about?

In the exercise case, the causation of harm by the agent is direct and inevitable; it is clear that it is not intended, however, since it is clearly besides the point of Justin’s practical reasoning (though it is accepted as a side-effect of what he does): it is neither an end nor a means. In Craniotomy the death of the baby is beside the point in the same way, but the physical modification of the head is not beside the point: it is intended.

I am inclined to say: This bodily modification is not merely a cause of a harm, it is something which is undesirable in the same way that a loss of function is undesireable, that is, in and of itself. I am harmed if my limbs or organs are radically pushed out of shape; it not merely the case that having them radically pushed out of shape will cause me a harm, rather it is a harm to me. If this is right, then definitions 3 and 4 are too narrow.

This is supported by intuitions such as this. If we were to define theft in terms of intentions, then it might be ‘to intend of another the loss of property rightfully his’. The intention of something which will probably lead to a loss of property is not theft: such as taking on a weaker opponent in a game of skill, with a wager. On the other hand the harmful nature of the loss of property does not have to intended: the thief need not intend the victim to suffer grief or want, for example. All the thief needs to intend, to intend a theft, is an objective transfer of goods from the victim to himself. One way of explaining why this is wrong is to say that although the thief may not intend that the victim be harmed in terms of grief or want, taking someone’s goods harms him ipso facto. The thief intends something which is a harm, even if he does not intend the victim’s harm as a separable objective.

Again, we are harmed when cheated, betrayed, or libelled, because those things are bad things when they happen to us. Agents who intend those bad things to happen to others are intending harms to happen to their victims. They may not, in fact, care about the victims’ well being; that may be indifferent to them, whereas they have some other end in view for which cheating and so on is a useful means. Nevertheless, they intend to harm insofar as they intend these bad things to happen to their victims, since these bad things are harms.

Looking at it in this way suggests that a wide definition of harm is needed: harms include not only loss of function, but the compromise of physical or material wellbeing. Causing the loss of wellbeing in this wide sense is not necessarily wrong, but it will normally be wrong if it is intended as an end or a means.

The problem of state neutrality, again

2011-01-31T11:04:00.005Z

My attention has recently been drawn to a new organisation, the English Defence League. I'm very hazy about what it is all about* but one paragraph in the mission statement caught my eye.

We also recognise that Muslims themselves are frequently the main victims of some Islamic traditions and practices. The Government should protect the individual human rights of members of British Muslims. It should ensure that they can openly criticise Islamic orthodoxy, challenge Islamic leaders without fear of retribution, receive full equality before the law (including equal rights for Muslim women), and leave Islam if they see fit, without fear of censure.

Is this something Catholics would want to push forward, or be concerned about?

As I've blogged before, it is a principle of liberal political theory that what is allowed in the 'private sphere' is determined by principles of public justice. So if members of a particular religion treat each other in a way which conflicts with these principles, then they are subject to the rigour of the law. If the principles of public justice being applied are correct, then there could be no objection to this; the problem is that those principles are contested, and that different religious groups disagree with the standard liberal ones.

In recent years, two developments have taken place which are in conflict with each other, and the conflict is becoming increasinly clear, even though both developments have been promoted for a long time by the same political groups, broadly speaking the Left.

1. The principles of public justice have become increasinly demanding. Government agencies have increasingly seen it as their remit to change minds and behaviour: to give a couple of examples, they have been concerned about the upbringing of children (for example, the campaign against corporal punishment), about the rules governing private clubs and associations (for example, on the equal treatment of women, or on smoking). We have seen an increasing impatience on the part of government agencies with churches which do not admit women or homosexual activists to the various forms of ministry.

2. There has been an increasingly evident policy of allowing certain groups to run themselves by their own rules. The two best examples of such groups are Muslims and homosexuals. So the laws on actual bodily harm cannot be applied to those engaged in masochistic sexual acts; the laws on public decency cannot be applied against homosexuals in public parks. Prosecutors are reluctant to look into the public, let alone the intramural or private, acts of Muslim activists who use threats or incite others to hatred or violence. And most famously, Sharia courts have been recognised as forums for arbitration, and as such their decisions have status in English law.

In practice the two tendencies have been able to co-exist by the principle that public principles of justice cannot be enforced against anyone who can shout 'homophobe!' or 'Islamophobe!' at their accusers. There has long been a principle that they cannot easily be enforced against those who can should 'racist!', which can be tough on black victims of domestic violence, but with Islam we have a group which can make maximum use of this concession, which therefore takes on enormous political implications. For as a religion Islam is in a position to create ghettos in the historical sense: areas of cities, for example, where the law of the land is not enforced, but where the rules are set and enforced by community leaders.

(To the question Why has the Left promoted two developments in such clear opposition to each other?, the answer is to be found in the books of the 'New Left' and their predecessors. Basically, (1) is their essential agenda; (2) is tactical: it is simply a way of weakening the strongest institutions in society which oppose the essential agenda. Since those institutions are often Christian, they can be weakened by insisting on privileges for other religions, and on groups such as militant homosexuals who are irreconcilably opposed to Christianity. It is actually no surprise that as the tactical value of these other groups decline, and the possibility that non-Christian institutions, including Islamic ones, will start to assert themselves against the liberal agenda on social attitudes, the Left will turn on them without mercy.)

In looking at this situation it is hard to know whether Catholics should be more worried about the increasingly aggressive public principles of justice, the increasingly aggressive assertion of independence by Islamic groups, or the likely outcome of the clash between the two. Already there has begun a backlash within the Left, which has belatedly realised that it has created a phenomenon it cannot control, and which has very little in common with the Left in terms of social attitudes. The promoters of the backlash would instinctively insist on a more rigorous enforcement of the principles of public justice, and the more they are worried about the social practices of Islam the more they will want to make those principles intrusive and demanding.

For this reason my sympathy has to some extent always been with the Muslims. They are attempting to live according to the principles of their religion in the midst of a culture highly hostile to those principles. It is not their fault that concessions have been made to them which has created an anomaly in the law. When I see secularists turning their sights on Muslims, I know that attacks on the Catholic Church will follow, if only to demonstrate that the secularists are even handed.

Allowing a community to live according to its own rules, within some limits, is actually quite a widespread historical phenomenon. Jews are the prime example of people who both wanted to have their own rules, and were permitted to have them by the state, as a community within a community, from the Temple tax enforced on the diaspora in the time of Our Lord to the original 'geto' of Renaissance Venice. There is nothing wrong with a group living by its own rules, if these rules conform to correct public principles of justice. What we are faced with today is a unreasonable set of public principles, on the one hand, and a set of group rules which include (or tolerate) cultural practices which are contrary to perfectly reasonable public principles.

If Muslim women are forced to marry, for example, this is of course unacceptable. What worries me is that the public policy makers who may, in time, be forced to recognise this point think that it is unacceptable that Catholic girls do not have instant access to abortion. The much less well-developed Catholic ghetto, in which we have our own schools and hospitals run on Catholic principles, is already under ferocious attack. We should beware of giving ammunition to our attackers.

That is not a principled response, however. A principled response would be this: the primary focus of Catholic political engagement must be with arguing for a better set of public principles of justice. Only in this way will we be able to defend our own institutions, and only in this way will the political problem of Islam become tractable: the process of polarisation between heavy-handed liberal public principles and radicalising Islam can be put into reverse.

What this amounts to is the persistent attempt to make public principles Catholic. That is to say, we should work for the conversion of England.

*The EDL appears to be a far-right group. Extremist groups claiming to combat certain aspects of left-wing ideology, without any connection with a broadly based social conservatism or religion, is a tradition which goes back at least to the anti-clerical royalists of the French Revolutionary era. It includes Muarass, Mussolini, the Nazis, and more recently the Pim Fortuyn movement, in varying degrees of nastiness.

Rhonheimer's mistake

2011-01-08T12:17:00.009Z

I have been reading Fr Martin Rhonheimer's reply to Luke Gormally, and it seems to me that he is making a demonstrable mistake. This is of interest since he is a rigorous and in many ways an impressive writer. This is my analysis.

Rhonheimer’s argument against Luke Gormally:

1. Rhonheimer’s (R’s) argument is based on the idea that the sexual acts forbidden by the Natural Law are to be understood in terms of the intentions of the agent.

2. R points out (correctly) that in order to show that the use of an anovulatory pill is (normally) wrong, Humanae Vitae (HV) had to rule that it is the contraceptive intention of the user which is key: thus, the use of the Pill is wrong iff the user intends to impede conception.

3. This R contrasts with arguments frequently met with in the tradition before Humanae Vitae, which make use first and foremost of the notion of ‘unnatural acts’.

4. R points out that since in outward behaviour sexual acts contracepted using the Pill appear less deformed than sexual acts contracepted using a condom, this appeared to some ‘Revisionist’ theologians to leave an opening for the Pill to be used licitly as a form of contraception. This was countered by HV as described (2).

5. R claims that HV’s more developed expression of why contraception is wrong should be used in relation to condoms (and presumably any other form of contraception): these are wrong iff there is a contraceptive intention.

6. R expresses the relationship between the contraceptive intention and the traditional language of unnatural acts by saying that sexual acts are unnatural if they are done with a contraceptive intention. Again, they are contrary to chastity if they are done with a contraceptive intention.

7. On the other hand, R says that it does not make sense to say that acts are contrary to chastity because they are unnatural, if there is no contraceptive intention. This limitation of the prohibition of Natural Law to acts done with a contraceptive intention, R claims, is something revealed by HV in light of the personalistic approach of Gaudium et Spes, though it is also in accord with the long-standing tradition of understanding moral acts in terms of the intentions with which they are done.

Thus R writes:
I am aware that, as you [Gormally] wrote in your letter, your “critique did not rest on any claim that the use of a condom is necessarily contraceptive” but rather on the argument that condomistic intercourse “is an essentially non-reproductive sexual behaviour.” You perhaps can accept what I say about contraception, but you want to distinguish – from any form of contracepted acts – those acts which in addition are behaviourally essentially non-reproductive and therefore “against nature.” In my view "Humanae vitae" has rendered obsolete this distinction.

Response:
Rhonheimer seems to me correct in points 1-4. Point 7 is demonstrably false. It has an obvious counter-example in (heterosexual) sodomy: as the Church teaches, acts of sodomy are illicit under Natural Law regardless of the intention with which they are done. These acts need not be motivated by a contraceptive intention; they may have many intentions. It is quite clear however that sodomy carried out with the intention of pleasure, for example, is wrong, even within marriage.

It is not, of course, forbidden as mere outward behaviour. Bodily movements over which the will has no control for one reason or another are not subject to moral appraisal. The prohibition refers to acts chosen and intended. Rhonheimer correctly says that contraceptive intentions make acts wrong; in the case of sodomy, it is the intention to enagage in a complete sexual act in vase indebito which make acts wrong. In the case of murder it is the intention to kill.

On Rhonheimer’s argument it may seem puzzling that acts with sodomistic intentions are contrary to the virtue of chastity. Why should they be? The argument in Humanae Vitae about the unitive and procreative aspects of sexuality underpins the claim that acts with a contraceptive intention are contrary to chastity; what argument is there in the case of acts with a sodomistic intention? There is no need, however, to seek arguments in HV for what all Catholics at the time of HV and before and since have taken for granted, the wrongness of sodomy; one can look at the previous tradition. This tradition, framed in terms of unnatural acts and teleology, is not, contrary to Rhonheimer, abrogated by HV, which was seeking a new argument to explain a case to which the old arguments did not so clearly apply.

That, however, is a problem for Rhonheimer, not for his opponents. It is enough to say that Gormally’s argument seeks to identify condomistic sex as a form of sodomy (so there is a question of the exact definition of sodomy), and that Rhonheimer’s response denies that sodomy is intrinsically wrong. Whether or not Gormally is correct (and while his argument is compelling we will ultimately have to await a clarification from the magisterium), Rhonheimer must be wrong, since the illicit nature of sodomy is far too deeply embedded in the tradition of the Church to be considered a fallible teaching (see Romans 1:24-27).

Postscript: The condemnation of heterosexual sodomy is implicit througout the Tradition, though the focus is generally on homosexual acts. In the modern era sodomy is clearly defined as anal intercourse (or any intercourse 'in vase indebito'), regardless of the sex of the participants, and of course regardless of the further intention of the act, and this is clearly condemned in all the manuals of moral theology. Here are a two examples of the condemnation of sodomy (clearly in the sense just described) by the Magisterium.

1. A friend has found the following in the classic 'Contraception' by Noonan: "On 3 April 1916, [the Sacred Penitentiary] declared that when a husband wished to commit 'a sodomitic crime', he must be resisted by his wife and she could not cooperate 'even to avoid death' as the act would be 'against nature' on the part of both. The Penitentiary expressed 'great astonishment' that some priests had taken a milder view. (Decisiones Sanctae Sedis, p.35)" (p. 514, fn.136, John T. Noonan, Contraception, Mentor-Omega, New York, 1965)

2. The 1917 Code of Canon Law includes sodomy among the sexual sins for which the laity are to held 'infames'
Can. 2357. par. 1. Laici legitime damnati ob delicta contra sextum cum minoribus infra aetatem sexdecim annorum commissa, vel ob stuprum, sodomiam, incestum, lenocinium, ipso facto infames sunt, praeter alias poenas quas Ordinarius infligendas iudicaverit.

There are parallel norms dealing with clerics (2358 & 2359).

Luke Gormally replies to Rhonheimer

2010-12-20T19:14:00.002Z

I can't find this online in a convenient form, though it appeared here (scroll down). It deserves a wider audience.
------------------------------

An open letter to Fr. Martin Rhonheimer by Luke Gormally

Dear Fr Martin,

I hope you may agree that the time has passed when it would be appropriate to resume the private and friendly email exchanges we had in 2004/2005. Your recent interventions, published by Sandro Magister and 'Our Sunday Visitor', following the observations of Pope Benedict about the use of condoms as a prophylactic measure, amount in effect to renewed public advocacy of your point of view. That point of view originally found public expression in an article in 'The Tablet' (10 July 2004) about which you say: 'I was informed that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, had no problem with it or its arguments'.

It is unclear what is strictly implied by this statement. Are we to assume that the Congregation formally considered your article in the light of advice from its consultors and agreed there was no problem with it? Many will think that that is what your statement implies. And if they do, then a viewpoint which I continue to think profoundly subversive of the Church's teaching on sexual ethics will appear to have acquired authoritative endorsement. There is clearly an urgent need now for the Congregation publicly to clarify its position.

A significant body of moral theologians and moral philosophers submitted some time ago a detailed critique of your position to the Holy See. It is a pity that that critique is not in the public domain and that I am the person identified as a principal critic of your position. Though I lack the distinction of many of your critics, the public prominence I have been given inclines me in face of the renewed advocacy of your position to reiterate the principal points of the critique which I advanced in 2005.

As you know, my critique did not rest on any claim that the use of a condom is necessarily contraceptive. Acknowledging that, however, does not mean that the teaching of 'Humanae vitae' is irrelevant to this debate, for section 12 of that encyclical states a quite basic principle of the Church's sexual ethic. It is that there is 'an inseparable connection - established by God and not to be broken by human choice - between the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning which are both inherent in the conjugal act'. If the exercise of sexual capacity is to be chaste it should be marital, and to count as marital it must be reproductive type behaviour, ''per se' apt for the generation of offspring' (Canon 1061). Any type of behaviour which 'qua' behavioural performance is of its nature inapt for the generation of offspring cannot be the bearer of 'procreative meaning'. It cannot therefore unite a couple in the way proper to marriage. Intercourse with a condom is of its nature inapt for the generation of offspring. It is a minimal condition of intercourse being of the reproductive kind that a man ejaculates into his wife's reproductive tract. It does not make sense to say that a couple engaging in intercourse with a condom intend marital intercourse. One can intend only what is in principle realisable, and marital intercourse is not realisable through behaviour of a non-reproductive kind.

What seemed to me radically subversive about your position in 2004 (with which the CDF 'had no problem') is the claim that provided a couple have a prophylactic rather than contraceptive intent in engaging in condomistic intercourse their intercourse is marital. That amounted to saying that essentially non-reproductive type behaviour can be marital, a thesis that is inconsistent with the basic norm of chaste sexual behaviour. Though in your OSV interview you say that you did not at the time 'sufficiently take into account' the kind of objection I have stated to your position, you also say you remain unsure whether this objection is compelling. And it is significant that your reason today for not encouraging a couple to use a condom is because of what you take to be required by the virtue of justice (that 'one abstain completely from dangerous acts') and not at all because of what is required by the virtue of chastity ('I would not think their intercourse to be what moral theologians call a sin 'against nature' equal to masturbation or sodomy').

Condomistic intercourse as essentially non-reproductive sexual behaviour is precisely what moral theologians call a sin 'against nature'. And sins 'against nature' are more deeply contrary to the virtue of chastity than simple fornication. It seems to me that you misinterpret the motives of those who object to the idea that it would be better for an adulterer, a fornicator or a prostitute to wear a condom in having intercourse, as you propose. What is at issue is not a concern to tell people how to perform intrinsically evil acts. It is rather a concern not to endorse the 'common sense', worldly wisdom, which you seem to endorse in circumstances in which people cannot be persuaded to embrace chaste behaviour. For your admirable desire to persuade people 'to abstain from immoral behaviour altogether' will hardly be advanced by representing as preferable 'sins against nature' which are more deeply corrupting of a person's sexual dispositions.

A concern for justice is indeed important in sexual relationships but the claims of justice ought never to be secured at the expense of subverting other moral dispositions. That is the very least that is implied in the ancient thesis of the unity of the virtues.

We should be clear what is meant by that rather vague phrase 'humanising sexuality'. It cannot be taken to mean, if it is to be consistent with the Church's teaching, persuading people to make their sexual activity the expression of just any kind of 'loving concern' for others. It means converting them to a chaste way of life, which surely requires that one is unambiguous about the need to abstain from sexual activity outside marriage and within marriage to engage only in such sexual intercourse as is 'inseparably unitive and procreative in its significance'.

I have addressed this open letter to you in the hope that a brief presentation of a counter-position to yours will serve to bring home the need for an authoritative clarification of the issues. For the CDF's apparent endorsement of your 2004 article is troubling.

With kind regards and all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Luke Gormally

London, December 15, 2010

The Pope on condoms: some conclusions

2010-11-25T17:15:00.003Z

The Pope's remarks on condoms have generated a tidal wave of blogging by orthodox Catholics eager to counter the absurd reporting by the secular media.

It is pleasing to see that a consensus quickly formed around the basic meaning of the text: one might call this the 'less evil, not justified' response. This is what I said myself; Fr Joseph Fessio's illustration, of muggers putting pads onto the metal bars they use to club their victims has attained some currency, as has Janet Smith's example of using an unloaded gun to rob a bank.

I've seen it said that the Holy Father was really talking about the mentality of the individual using the condom, rather than the objective moral status of the act. The subjective state of the agent is clearly in the spotlight, but while it is possible the Pope had in mind a subjective improvement without a objective improvement, the most obvious interpretation would involve both. (A subjective improvement without an objective one might happen if the agent took a step towards making his action more morally acceptable in a completely wrong-headed way, a way which did not, in fact, make the act more acceptable. Such as a murderer deciding to ask Odin to take his victims to Valhalla before despatching them.)

The text we have been discussing has presented a moving target, however, as successive things have been revealed about it: first, the problem of the translation of the key term (a male prostitute, in the original German), and then the Vatican Spokeman's claim that the Pope told him it would make no difference if the prostitute were male or female. This kind of thing undermines attempts to defend the Holy Father while increasing the confusion and opportunity for mis-reporting in the secular media.

Insofar as there is a real issue here, it is this: as is well known there is an argument that condoms could be used, not for contraceptive purposes, but to stem the spread of disease, such as AIDS. Since this obviously would not come under the Church's prohibition of contraception, we have to look elsewhere for a reason to condemn it, if we are to do so. A number of reaons have in fact been put forward, but they have not found their way into magisterial statements. The matter is one of open debate, though it has been pretty clear that the rejection of condoms is the 'safer' opinion, the one 'favoured' by the Church. I've discussed it in some detail myself.

In the classic case, the married couple where one party has AIDS, the reasons for condemning condom use are clear and overwhelming. It would be an insane risk for them to have marital relations, even with a condom: taking such a risk would be wrong for each of them. The Church's condemnation of duelling comes to mind: you shouldn't risk your life or health unnecessarily.

Would it be better to use a condom rather than not, in marital relations, in this context? That depends on the second argument, which is that there is a problem with 'condomistic intercourse'. Intercourse using a condom is, according to this argument, is not natural intercourse, because there is a barrier between the parties. It is akin to sodomy.

The argument has been made influentially by important Catholic experts, including William Hay and Luke Gormally. It has a pedigree in the debate before the invention of the contraceptive Pill: since it was common to say that contracepted sex (using a condom) was unnatural, and distorted the marital act, when the Pill came out its supporters said that it had the advantage of not distorting the act in itself in the same way. (It was quickly pointed out that the use of the Pill for contraceptive purposes was intrinsically wrong in itself, of course.)

In the context of this second argument it may make a difference whether the prostitute in the Pope's example was engaged in homosexual acts or ordinary sex. If the former, the second argument wouldn't apply. That's why I said that while the use of a condom might be a step in the right direction for a rent-boy (like padding the iron bar one uses to bludgeon people unconscious), it wouldn't necessarily be so for a female prostitute.

The words of the Vatican Spokesman, Fr Lombardi, suggest that the Pope did not, in fact, use the example of a male prostitute having this kind of argument in mind. If the case of male (understood as homosexual) prostitutes and female ones are equivalent, and in both cases there is a 'step towards moralisation' being made in adopting condoms, then it would seem that there is not a problem with non-contraceptive use of condoms. This is what is exciting some liberals inside and outside the Church.

But we are going far too fast. Let's list the caveats.

1. Even if the second argument against the prophylactic use of condoms is rejected, the first argument remains. It is still obviously true that having sex knowing one has HIV is subjecting one's partner to a significant risk of contracting an incurable deadly disease, even with a condom. Such an act is obviously wrong - for married couples and prostitutes alike.

2. Fr Lombardi's version of the Pope's views is not incompatible with the second argument, for two reasons. First, it may be that, while condomistic sex is worse than non-condomistic sex (inside marriage, and outside marriage), subjecting one's partner to the high risk of contracting AIDS is worse than subjecting one's partner to a lower risk of AIDS. If the difference of moral badness between the latter is of greater import than the difference of moral badness in the former, then we may have made some small progress by moving from high-risk non-condomistic to lower-risk condomistic sex. A parallel might be a murder who uses a knife rather than a hand-grenade: it is a more painful method to kill but has less risk of maiming bystanders.

3. Fr Lombard's version is not incompatible for the second reason that the Pope may simply not have this second argument against condomistic sex in mind. This is an answer to a journalist's question, after all, and it may be that if the Pope were asked 'what about this argument about condomistic sex?' he'd say something different. What this is clearly NOT is a rejection of the argument that condomistic sex is not natural: the Holy Father simply isn't considering the matter.

4. Related to the last point, we are simply miles and miles away from an authoritative statment. We start with a book containing the words of the Holy Father in his capacity as a private theologian. Naturally, this is of interest in understanding the Pope's public acts but it isn't an official commentary on them, still less does it rival them. Then we have to understand that this is an interview: whereas in his book 'Jesus of Nazareth' the Pope laboured over multiple drafts and composed each sentence with care, in this book he speaking entirely off the cuff. While we might imagine that there was some editing this is a completely different type of publication. Finally, we have the words of Fr Lombardi, who has no brief either in moral theology nor as a spokesman for the Pope. No one can speak for the Pope - as Fr Lombardi himself has emphasised. And we are at liberty to disagree with him in any case.

One can understand the temptation, on the part of those who don't like the arguments against the prophylactic use of condoms, to seize on the Pope's remarks (and Fr Lombardi's), but they simply don't do what the liberals need them to do: to make it possible for the Church to allow or promote condoms to combat AIDS. The only uses of condoms the Holy Father has referred to remain immoral. Any tension between his reasoning and the argument about condomistic sex being unnatural remains ambiguous.

Perhaps the Holy See will clarify the Church's teaching. This may well have been delayed, as Fr Tim Finnigan suggests, by the fear of the headlines it would generate. But anyone with an eye to the direction of the debate over the last 40 years (and longer) would be foolish to assume that a clarification would generate headlines like 'Pope softens line on condoms'. Much more likely, in my view, would be headlines like 'Pope hardens line on condoms'. It is probable that a clarification would endorse the argument on condomistic sex, and inconceivable that it would say that that condoms were permissible as a prophylactic for a married couple.

Postscript: John Smeaton has an interesting selection of Church statements condemning contaception outside marriage, which is an important side issue. Even in immoral sexual relations, it makes it worse to use contraceptives. Furthermore, the Holy Office said in 1854 that sex with a condom is intrinsically evil, without reference to a contraceptive intention.

The Pope on Condoms: from the Anscombe Bioethics Centre

2010-11-22T12:41:00.002Z

The Pope on AIDS and condoms

What the Pope said:
Peter Seewald: On the occasion of your trip to Africa in March 2009, the Vatican's policy on Aids once again became the target of media criticism. Twenty-five percent of all Aids victims around the world today are treated in Catholic facilities. In some countries, such as Lesotho, for example, the statistic is 40 percent. In Africa you stated that the Church's traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church's own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.
Pope Benedict: The media coverage completely ignored the rest of the trip to Africa on account of a single statement. Someone had asked me why the Catholic Church adopts an unrealistic and ineffective position on Aids. At that point, I really felt that I was being provoked, because the Church does more than anyone else. And I stand by that claim.
Because she is the only institution that assists people up close and concretely, with prevention, education, help, counsel, and accompaniment. And because she is second to none in treating so many Aids victims, especially children with Aids.
I had the chance to visit one of these wards and to speak with the patients. That was the real answer: The Church does more than anyone else, because she does not speak from the tribunal of the newspapers, but helps her brothers and sisters where they are actually suffering.
In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.
As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work.
This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man's being.
There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection.
That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.
Peter Seewald: Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?
Pope Benedict: She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.
(From The Light of the World London: CTS, 2010, pages 117-119]

Commentary from the Anscombe Bioethics Centre:

This is a significant and thoughtful passage, but one could be misrepresented or misunderstood. Hence it is important to be clear about what Pope Benedict is saying and what he is not saying.

1) The first thing the Pope says is that the fundamental response of the Church to the HIV crisis should be to guide, to support and to accompany the victims - and “she is second to none in treating so many AIDS victims, especially children with AIDS.” [Indeed in 2001 it was estimated approximately 25% of all AIDS care worldwide was provided by Catholic organisations]. Unfortunately this key message of the Pope may well be lost in what follows but an attempt should be made to repeat it, at least to those more sympathetic in the media who may report it.

2) Secondly, in relation to condoms and AIDS prevention the Pope reiterates that, “we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms”. To make the point he considers “the so-called ABC Theory”. While the Western media have never taken abstinence or fidelity seriously in the approach to AIDS, the predominant approach of secular AIDS education programmes in Africa and elsewhere is A-B-C: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom so that condom is the third line of defence (or as the Pope says, as “a last resort”) not the starting point. Furthermore, a fixation with condoms can also lead to the “banalization of sexuality” against which the Pope urges a “humanization of sexuality”.

3) Thirdly, (and this is what has been the focus of media attention) the use of a condom could be “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility”. This is indeed a dramatic statement because it is the first time that a Pope has said something positive, albeit in a very qualified sense, about the decision to use a condom to prevent infection. The example he uses is deliberate – a male prostitute, one whose activity is far from the Church’s teaching and is far from a humanized sexuality, and whose actions are already non-procreative. In this case the decision to use a condom could be a “first step” in a moral development – recognising responsibility for others and for oneself – taking care of others and of oneself. What should be clear is that this first step should not be the last step: that someone in this degrading and dangerous situation needs to find a different way of living altogether. But nevertheless, the decision to try to limit the danger of infection (for oneself and for others) can be a first step in a positive moral development.

Note what is not being said here. The Pope is not saying that the use of condoms is in itself moral or virtuous. Nor is he saying that their use can be “justified” on pragmatic grounds as a policy of AIDS prevention. He explicitly denies both of these moves. The use of condoms is “not… a real or moral solution”. Hence the Pope is not endorsing the arguments of some moral theologians that the use of condoms to prevent infection is objectively justified as a ‘lesser evil’ or by ‘double effect’. Rather, the Pope assumes that the use of condoms in not objectively good but that it might nevertheless represent for some person a subjective and partial move towards the good, “a first step” (the Pope repeats the phrase “ein erster Schritt”) on the way towards greater moral understanding. The Pope is thus considering an individual and thinking of his moral development. He is not suggesting that such an act might be objectively morally justifiable.

How significant is this statement? It is the first time that a Pope has said something positive, albeit in a very qualified sense, about the decision to use a condom to prevent infection. It is also a remarkable statement in terms of its tone and for what is not said. The Pope does not say that condoms are ineffective or that they are likely to make things worse. Indeed he says they are sometimes used with “the intention of reducing the risk of infection” which gives the impression that, in an individual case, they may actually reduce the risk. He is clear that condoms on their own are not the “solution”, and that “much more needs to be done”. But he does not deny that condoms might reduce infection rates in some circumstances. He even states that they might represent a subjectively positive moral step in some individual cases, if it is just a first step on a longer moral journey.

It is very likely that this statement by the Pope will be represented as a change of Vatican policy towards condoms and HIV. However, the Pope is not here addressing the question of institutional policy but is addressing a question of moral theology. He is asking whether in some cases the decision to use a condom might be a positive moral step. Some theologians may well argue that this paves the way for a new Vatican policy of at least tolerating the distribution of condoms: which it may to some extent. But this is more than the Pope explicitly says and to move too quickly to further possible implications is to risk losing the significance of what the Pope is actually saying.

A fixation with the policy on condoms is precisely what the Pope wants us to move on from. No such policy can be a “solution” if it is not part of a broader humanization. Nevertheless, what the Pope has done, without denying any part of traditional teaching is to call attention to a case of someone for whom the decision to use a condom is “a first step in the direction of a moralization”. Thus in some cases the decision to use a condom could be positive, at least in a subjective and partial way. But the Pope has said this in the hope of redirecting people away from fixation on condoms. This is why he calls it “a first step” a step that calls for further steps, towards faithfulness and the humanization of sexuality, that is towards the ‘A’ and the ‘B’ of ‘A-B-C’.

Pope Benedict starts by calling attention to the need for solidarity and accompaniment with victims and to the tremendous work the Church is doing in this regard. People may not hear this point, but it is perhaps more likely to be heard in the context of this passage because of the tone of the passage as a whole. As the Pope made an impression in his visit to Britain as much by his tone as by his words, so the tone of these words will also give an impression.

Dr David Albert Jones
Anscombe Bioethics Centre, 21 November 2010

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I told you so!

2010-08-15T21:01:00.004+01:00

This week, we read the following news item:

Judge Walker's ruling overturned Prop. 8, an amendment to California's constitution approved by voters in November 2008 that defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.

Walker's written decision listed as its 77th finding of fact: 'Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.'

In a list of supporting citations, the ruling quoted a 2003 document issued by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), 'Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons.'

'Sacred Scripture condemns homosexual acts as 'a serious depravity,'' is the first CDF phrase quoted in Judge Walker's decision.

The document was signed in 2003 by the CDF's prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who was elected to the papacy in 2005.

Some time ago I argued on this blog:

It has now dawned on people that barriers to individuals pursuing their conception of the good are maintained not only by an oppressive state, but by employers and school teachers: including the Church as an employer and including Catholic teachers in Catholic schools. It has also dawned on people that a general atmosphere created by the expression of certain attitudes can be a barrier: notably racist and homophobic attitudes. It is beginning to dawn on people that the expression of the Church's teaching, by the Pope or by an ordinary Catholic in the street, creates just such an atmosphere, in which some people feel intimidated from pursuing their conception of the good (and doing so in accordance with the universally accepted conception of justice).

Catholics need to wake up to this kind of argument. It cannot be opposed by appeals to the separation of Church and State, or the rights of individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good. These arguments cannot vindicate conceptions of the good which oppress others.

Instead Catholics needs to take a step back and provide some arguments that their conception of the good does NOT oppress anyone. The only way to do this is by pointing out that the way liberals choose their conceptions of the good is based on a superficial and unsatisfying materialism, and that the Catholic vision of the world is actually TRUE.

We have to stop trying to live alongside the secularists, and start trying to convert them.

Why Catholic Apologetics doesn't work

2010-02-12T11:07:00.005Z

The crescendo of condemnation of the Church on her teachings on sexuality, especially as they impinge on public policy (civil partnerships, adoption, sex education) has led many Catholics to long for an effective apologetics, and effective apologists. It is true that apologetics is no longer taught: it was once the continuation of catechesis. But talented and forceful Catholic apologists do exist, and they make zero impact on the public debate. There are of course problems of coordination (who is pushed forward as a spokesman at the critical juncture) and media bias (how, if at all, they are reported), but the more fundamental problem is with their arguments. Vis-a-vis the secular humanists of modern Britain (and more widely), they don’t work.

Standard modern Catholic apologetics is based on two flawed arguments, which are frequently presented. First, that, on homosexuality, the Church condemns the sin (or the ‘lifestyle’) but not the sinner; second, that the separation of Church and State should guarantee religious freedom (and hence the freedom of Catholic parents and schools to teach what they like, of Catholic charities to have the employment policies they like, and so on).

The first does not work both superficially and more fundamentally. Superficially it is a con: of course the Church condemns sinners, as sinners. Liberals within the Church may prefer to forget this, but the Church’s enemies are not going to allow them to. One could adduce hundreds of such condemnations from the Church’s Scriptures and Magisterium. Naturally, the Church loves the sinner as a creature of God, and searches, weeping, in the desert for the lost sheep. But she condemns him too, and requires of him repentance and penance.

But this is a matter of words: there is a more fundamental problem. The Church’s position is characterised as holding that homosexuality is a sin, which is nonsense, or that the Church condemns people because of their sexual orientation, which is more nonsense. Acts and vices and agents are condemned; a natural inclination is none of these. The Church condemns ‘homosexual acts’ as they are called (sodomy), as sins; a voluntarily acquired habit of performing such acts, as a vice; and the people who perform them, as sinners. But when this is clarified the secular humanist won’t be satisfied, for he will say that sexual self-expression is a fundamental right, and that a homosexual inclination is essential to a person’s identity.

It is because the secularist believes these two claims that, by his own lights, the Church really does condemn people because of their sexual orientation. For, by the secularist’s argument the Church arbitrarily picks out one group of people, those with a homosexual inclination, and tells them they may not seek sexual fulfilment: she casts them as second-class citizens, to face either a half-life of impossible self denial, or moral condemnation. And really, the first option is itself a kind of moral condemnation, because the Church is condemning their only route to sexual self-expression. Saying that the Church condemns homosexuality is a convenient short-hand for this argument.

There is an interesting connection between this and the Church and State question, which will emerge below.

I heard with my own ears Cardinal Pell, when he came to Oxford, repeating the oft-made claim that the separation of Church and State should act to ‘protect the Church’. Those engaging with Pell in the public debate in Australia, as in Britain, will find this a very puzzling claim.

What the separation of Church and State, aka ‘State neutrality’, means is that the State withholds from using religious arguments and claims in justifying public policy, in order to avoid privileging one religion over another. Since the state has to use some basis for policy decisions (as I have discussed here), it uses a conception of rationality and an associated conception of justice which are supposed to be uncontroversial: common ground. The conception of justice protects us from criminals and guarantees contracts, so we can all get on with pursuing the good life as we understand it.

J.S. Mill, one of the pioneers of this approach, used the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ to describe the two spheres, with their different kinds of justification and claims. These terms are still widely used, but they are misleading, because things only count as ‘private’ if they don’t infringe the principles of justice. So domestic violence is not immune from state interference. The same goes when we label something ‘religious’ or ‘the Church’: it is only immune from state interference if it is just. Clerical paedophilia or embezzlement are matters for the police, and human sacrifice would be as well.

And here’s the rub. If you examine the supposedly uncontroversial conceptions of justice and rationality, you will find that they are contrary to the Faith. The dominant theory of rationality since the Enlightenment centres on the idea that desires give people reasons for action, and rational action is action based on a weighing up of reasons. When the Church tells us that some desires are the result of Original Sin, and that we should desire things which we don’t currently desire, not only does it sound odd but we are not even supposed to be discussing it: we are all supposed to have accepted the Enlightenment conception of rationality as the basis upon which to discuss everything else.

Similarly with justice, for the secularist the ideology of ‘equality’ is, as David Cameron so memorably puts it, ‘a bottom-line, full essential’. It follows closely from a conception of justice based on Enlightenment rationality, of allowing each person to pursue his own desires without interference. When a ‘gay school pupil’ is taught the Faith in a Catholic school, or a Catholic parish declines to employ a catechist with an immoral lifestyle, these are barriers—not insuperable ones, but still illegitimate ones—to those people joyfully pursuing their desires. They are therefore are infringements of justice. The religious or private context, on this argument, can and should lend no protection from prosecution.

Look at it this way. The freedom the Church enjoys under a regime of ‘state neutrality’ is exactly the same as the freedom she is attempting to deny the pupil and the catechist: the freedom each individual has to pursue his own conception of the good. This is what the secularists mean when they say the Church is demanding special privileges, a ‘carve out’ from the law, and denying to others what she enjoys for herself.

It has taken the British debate a long time to catch up with the implications of these Enlightenment assumptions: the French caught up with them in the Revolution. It has now dawned on people that barriers to individuals pursuing their conception of the good are maintained not only by an oppressive state, but by employers and school teachers: including the Church as an employer and including Catholic teachers in Catholic schools. It has also dawned on people that a general atmosphere created by the expression of certain attitudes can be a barrier: notably racist and homophobic attitudes. It is beginning to dawn on people that the expression of the Church's teaching, by the Pope or by an ordinary Catholic in the street, creates just such an atmosphere, in which some people feel intimidated from pursuing their conception of the good (and doing so in accordance with the universally accepted conception of justice).

Until the intellectual leadership of the Catholic Church—bishops, spokesmen, apologists, bloggers, teachers—understand the terms of the debate, we are going to get nowhere with our apologetics. In the meantime we are going to hemmed in more and more in our proclamation of the Gospel and our charitable work.

An effective apologetics has to address the issues over which the secularists disagree with the Church, and not concede the assumptions which make their position correct and the Catholic position incoherent. The issues we need to press are these: the hedonism at the basis of modern political calculations is sterile and unsatisfying; and the state should not be neutral between value claims—something which is not even possible—but accept the correct values. This approach does not guarantee success, but we will at least be engaging in a useful debate, and not ‘beating the air.’

Intention in Cardiff

2009-05-07T13:43:00.003+01:00

I recently gave a talk on euthanasia to the studen Pro-Life Society in Cardiff University. This gave rise to a question from a graduate student, by email, as follows (in part). His questions are in blue, my replies in bold.

I agree that intent is vitally important but I think it only applies more broadly than to killing/not killing. With the example of the child slipping in the bath. Would it have not been wrong if the intent was primarily to gain the inheritance, with an undesirable side effect being the child dying? I think yes! You phrased this scenario as wanting to let the child drown so that you could claim the inheritance. But is there a difference between the two as I have worded them?

The point of the example is that the person looking after the child needs the child to die if he is to inherit the money. The death of the child is intended, therefore, as a means to inheriting. We intend means in exactly the same way as we intend ends.

You also gave the example of not jumping into the river to save your rival, because it would spoil your shoes. This was okay despite knowing that not jumping would cause his death because his death was not your primary intent even though it might be your desire. But on the other hand not jumping in because you desired his death was wrong.

I fail to see the difference. In both cases you have knowingly chosen not to act to save his life. The intension does not justify the end. If saving his life was right, then you have done wrong. Either you have valued shoes which are not sacred above a life which is. Or you have wished a man to die for your own benefit.

The 'end', saving ones shoes, does not really need to be justified: it is not wrong. I didn't say that it would be permissible not to jump in, out of concern for one's shoes, only that it would be possible. It would be wrong because it would infringe one's obligation of aid to someone in danger of death. It would not be wrong becuase the bystander intended the death - ex hypothesi he didn't.

If I intend to buy a cheap pair of shoes and as a result of that demand a child is forced to attempt to supply my 'need' in a sweatshop and as a result of industrial accidents/poor conditions dies am I then responsible?... given that I already know that children are dying in sweatshops.

I was not intending death but I still think the knowledge of the means makes me somewhat culpable. (I bought a £10 pair of shoes yesterday, and am feeling a bit guilty)

You may be complicit in a bad situation: in technical language, you might be involved in material cooperation with evil. But you don't intend the evil, which makes it less bad. Obviously it is worse if you are buying the shoes in order that the child dies.

So, can I turn off a machine, for the patients 'good', be that the prevention of suffering or etc. when I know this bring about immediate death? I can only be innocent if somehow I believe that their death will not be, 'bad'. Indeed that allowing the inevitable to hasten nearer is somehow 'good' and in their best interest, on balance, given the discomfort of being in a coma, having a feed tube in place, etc. If their death can then be described as good how can it be wrong to desire it for a patient. If it is not wrong to desire it. Why should it be wrong to act in the patients 'good' or best interest to allow it to happen. Not to make it happen but allow it to happen.

Another way of putting this is: the doctor stops the treatment when the treatment is no longer doing the patient any real good. I agree.

I think there is a clear difference between injecting potassium, which is fatal (and largely untraceable) and not giving antibiotics/more chemotherapy/IV food&fluids. In the first, you are taking the ending of a person's life into your own hands. In the second you are deciding not to artificially prolong their life.

In medicine we artificially prolong life all the time. This is not wrong, in many causes it is good. This is good but I don't think it is always good or an obligation.

I had not heard that the intent to allow a person to die being described as wrong before. I ... struggle to see how intent to kill and intent to allow to die can be the same thing.

..But I really struggle to see the deference between intent and the expected side effects and how one can then be said to be morally responsible for one and not the other.

Well, how do you express the difference? This has proved, in the philosophical literature, to be extremely hard. If it is ok to 'permit' death (while intending it) and wrong to 'kill' (while intending), it will be easy to find ways to bring about people's death by omission, and not by action. The morally important difference, as is recognised by the law, is what you intended. If you intended the injection to kill, you have murdered the victim. If you intended to cure, or ease pain, then the death was either an accident or a side effect.

You are responsible for forseen side effects, however, under the principle of proportionality.

...With end of life events I really struggle to see more than a semantic difference between the intent to prevent suffering, by stopping feeding which will cause death, and intending to allow death, by stopping feeding which will cause an end to suffering. The outcome and ultimate intention is the same. In both I am aware of the consequences of my actions and have to believe that the intent, to prevent unnecessary suffering, allow God to make decisions as to when the life will actually end and respect the life that is there by not actively killing them will be enough.

I'm not sure what distinction you are trying to draw here. It is wrong to intend death, by action or omission. It is permissible to act or omit to act with the intention of easing pain; if this shortens life that it will be permissible if that is a proportionate evil to the good you are trying to bring about. In other words if the patient is going to die soon anyway, and the suffering is very great, and the only drugs which will ease the pain will shorten the life, you can intend the easing of pain knowing that your actions will shorten the life. This is no more 'murder' than building a road on which you know people will die - despite the fact that in these cases we are talking about actions, not omissions.

Discrimination in hiring: the Christian colleges in America

2009-04-11T17:57:00.003+01:00

The American Philosophical Association is undergoing a rancourous debate about a proposal to prevent various Protestant universites from advertising in the APA's paper, 'Jobs for Philosophers'. The argument is that since these universities ask their staff to live in accord with Christian norms, which exclude sex outside marriage, they discriminate against homosexuals. This kind of argument is becoming common.

A very helpful response has been put together by Mark Murphy, a Catholic philosopher at Georgetown University. It is interesting to note the leading role taken by Catholics to defend the right of institutions to follow a practice that no Catholic institution, as far as I know, would dream of adopting. These Protestant colleges, moreover, would as cheerfully have excluded Catholics as homosexuals a generation ago. But that, as they say, is not the point.

Dr Murphy's letter can be seen in full here; here's an interesting extract on the nature of discrimination.

First, there are reasons to believe that these institutions are not engaging in discrimination based on sexual orientation. The policy lacks a definition of discrimination. We suggest that it is plausible that satisfaction of any of the following conditions is sufficient to constitute discrimination, but satisfaction of at least one of them is necessary: (a) intentional targeting for burdening of the protected class; (b) burdening that is motivated by animus against the protected class; (c) burdening of the protected class that is disproportionate and not adequately justified. But none of these is satisfied in the case of the sexual conduct requirements at these Christian colleges. (If there is an alternative understanding of 'discrimination' not here considered under which these schools do discriminate, we ask that the defenders of the original petition bring it forward and defend its acceptability.)

(a) Those with a particular sexual orientation are not targeted. Employment is conditioned on one’s willingness to refrain from sexual conduct outside of traditional marriage; it is compatible with the satisfaction of this condition that one be of any sexual orientation, and no particular sexual orientation would be sufficient to meet the condition.

(b) There is no institutional animus toward those who are homosexually oriented; or, to put it more guardedly, no evidence at all of institutional animus toward those homosexually oriented has been brought forward. The norms of sexual conduct of the institutions in question are broad, reaching to various sorts of sexual conduct, both homosexual and heterosexual, and appear to be generally enforced as written. (If defenders of the original petition have evidence that these institutions' policies are being enforced in a way that provides evidence of institutional animus, we urge that they put it forward.)

(c) What will generate most contention is whether there is unjustified disproportionate burdening. Defenders of these schools’ policies will note that adherence to their policies on sexual conduct is justified by the job description, which is to contribute to the living of a Christian life in a specific sort of educational community. This way of life does in fact place different burdens on people; no doubt those who are homosexually oriented are burdened in a way that those heterosexually oriented are not. But we think that it is important that in the context of US discrimination law, and even in the context of the APA’s own norms, there is some deference given to the religious character of the institution — that these are schools that adopt the requirements for the conduct of their communal life from what they take to be divine revelation, and it is explicitly allowed by the APA policy for schools to make adherence to the faith statements of these schools, statements that include moral claims about the ordering of individual lives and communities, a condition of employment. When we add to this the fact that one's adherence to a certain faith affects what one counts as a 'burden' and what personal and social meaning those burdens have, it is, at best, an extraordinarily contentious claim to hold that these schools discriminate in the sense of placing a disproportionate burden without adequate justification. To put it another way: for the APA to defend the claim that there is unjustifiable burdening, the APA will have to endorse officially a certain disputed view on the ethics of marriage and human sexuality, and commit itself to the falsity of any view, secular or religious, that disagrees.

The Pope on AIDS and condoms

2009-04-11T14:10:00.003+01:00

My attention has been drawn to a very interesting article on Alligator online by Michael Webb, which goes into some detail about the research on the effectiveness of condoms. The Pope's claim that condoms 'make things worse' with the AIDS epidemic in Africa has overwhelming plausibility to those who have watched the failure of contraception to reduce so-called 'unwanted pregnancies', and, for that matter, ordinary sexually-transmitted diseases, in the West. If fire-hosing condoms at people doesn't reduce pregancies, it is not going to work with AIDS either. In fact we actually see an increase of pregnancies, and abortions, where contraceptives have been pushed at people; a similarly tragic consequence, one may infer, is likely to happen with AIDS. The fact that the advocates of condoms refuse to accept that this is happening, and insist the situation would be even worse without the condoms, just shows the blind attachment to ideology when you face ostracism and redundancy for dissent.

Why condoms might be counterproductive as preventers of pregnancies and AIDS is, intuitively, that promoting contraception promotes a culture of promiscuity, and the culture of promiscuity is actually not very friendly to putting those rubber things on just at the moment life is getting interesting. Webb, however, uncovers some very interesting research which not only supports the casual empiricism against condoms but gives a slightly different (though not conflicting) explanation, that of 'risk compensation'. When you make an activity safer, people performing the activity will take more risks with it: see 'The Pope was right' on the Cornell Society.

Everything we do is based on an assessment of benefit and risk. We have a certain appetite for risk (as they say in finance), and if something becomes safer, we'll tend to go for the extra benefits associated with taking on another slice of risk. This is really not controversial; the only question, in making things safer in any given situation, is whether the risk compensation will end up making the situation worse over all. It will depend on how much safer people are made to feel, and what the opportunities for greater risk-taking might be.

People in countries afflicted by AIDS are still willing to engage in promiscuous sex: hence AIDS continues to spread. Whatever the (perceived) risk they are running is, that is a level of risk they are happy to live with. If you give them condoms and they wear them 50% of the time, thinking that makes them 50% safer, they would rationally double their number of partners to get back up to the old level of risk. The reward of doing this, of course, is fantastic: twice as many partners! There may, of course, be other factors.

So much for the principle. But this is exactly what many researchers have found. Over to Michael Webb:

Dr Edward Green, Director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard. “The best evidence we have”, he says, “supports the Pope’s comments. There is a consistent association shown by our best studies between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV infection rates.” He told me:

In epidemics that are population wide, where most HIV is found in the general population, for whatever reason we can't get people to use condoms consistently, and when they use them at all, that seems to have the effect of disinhibiting people's behaviours so they end up taking greater sexual risks and cancelling whatever risk reduction they have gotten from the technology they're using.

Webb points out that the studies making this point are fairly limited in number: no surprise there, since this is not a conclusion the AIDS industry wants to hear. He also points out that there is agreement accross the debate that IF condoms were used 'consistently and correctly', and IF behaviour didn't change, then condoms would help with AIDS: true, but irrelevant.

More interstingly, Webb makes the odd conclusion that 'the Pope should not make claims that can be interpreted as being scientific.' This is odd because he adds that the Pope's remarks were interpreted as making a claim not supported by the evidence. But the body of Webb's article has shown that it is perfectly scientifically respectable to hold that view; it may not be the view of the WHO but there is plenty of evidence for it, and the WHO is not infallible.

A deeper reason for Webb's criticism of the Pope, however, is that the Pope's position is, or ought to be, really a matter of moral teaching: against promiscuity, and against contraception. Webb seems to think that if this was made clearer, criticism of the Pope would have less traction.

It is true that the Pope's position is driven by moral concerns, and the moral teaching of the Church. But it is because voicing this moral teaching has been condemned as tantamount to mass murder - as Jon Snow gently put it, the Pope is responsible for 'millions of deaths' - that it become necessary to look into the claims being made about the effectiveness of condoms.

Catholic reseachers and all people of good will can and must refute the lies which are used to justify crimes. The Nazi genocide was unjustifiable, but people were persuaded to go along with it on the basis of grotesque lies about the Jews. The Church has had to contend with 'black legends' in every age; the work of the Bollandists on Church history is an example of her response. It is true that even if they were successful, condoms would not be justified, but the Pope in concerned to influence opinion and policy, and the lies must be opposed.

The idea that Catholics should leave the 'facts' in the hands of their opponents to distort at will only has to be stated to be rejected.

Licit cooperation with evil

2009-01-19T14:59:00.004Z

Here it is, in Poland (hat-tip to the Hermeneutic of Continuity).
The window can be opened from the outside. A person with a baby the parents are unable or unwilling to care for can pop the baby in and make themselves scarce. The baby will be scooped up by nuns on the other side and looked after. This is a modern version of a long-standing practice; in former times convents would sometimes have a wheel set horizontally into the wall like a dumb waiter: put the baby on the wheel, turn it so it goes inside, the baby is cared for and the parent or whoever remains anonymous.

Is it cooperation with evil? Of course: it is an extremely grave sin for a parent to abandon a child, even when the child's prospects are not too bad. The existence of these windows facilitates this abandonment, by ensuring that there will be no legal sanction against the abandoning parent. (Neglect and of course killing of children is illegal: normally abandonment would be at least neglect and probably killing.)

Furthermore, not only are these windows providing a specific mechanism for a person who wishes to commit this sin, but by making the sin easier and eliminating the legal risk they will certainly be making it more common, if only fractionally.

It is not wrong, however, to provide the window. The nuns' intention is conditional: that a person seriously considering abortion, infanticide or abandonment use the window instead, and perform a less serious sin with far less bad consequences for the baby. They do not intend that anyone abandon a child, any more than a person providing fire-extinguishers intends there to be a fire in which they might be used. Given that the provision of the window is a merely material, not formal (intended) cooperation with evil, it can be justified by reference to its consquences, including the possible scandal it might cause. Since the motivation of the nuns is clear enough, there is not likely to be scandal; nor does it seem likely that the existence of the windows will increase the number of times people abandon (or murder) their infants to the point where the scheme becomes the cause of greater harms than of good.

In this way it is a far clearer example of licit cooperation with evil than other putative examples, such as needle-exchange schemes for drug addicts, the provision of drugs themselves to adicts, or the distribution of condoms.

Humanae Vitae

2008-08-05T16:47:00.002+01:00

Letter published in the Catholic Herald, Julty 25th 2008.

Sir,

I enjoyed Quentin de la Bedoyere’s interview with Professor John Marshall (Features, 18th July), a member of the commission which vainly recommended to Pope Paul VI that he change the Church’s teaching on contraception. Particularly amusing was the suggestion that the faithful have not ‘received’ this teaching, as if Christ should, when faced by a rejection of his teaching by many of his followers (John 6.66), have reconsidered it, or as if St Paul, anticipating an audience who ‘would not endure sound doctrine’ (2 Timothy 4.3), would recommend giving them unsound doctrine instead. It is one of the most remarkable works of providence in modern times that Paul VI was able to overcome the pressure from this commission, and other sources, to exercise faithfully his role, which was that of a teacher, not a weathervane.

Two well-known and closely related arguments are relevant here. First, the unitive value of the sexual act in marriage is dependent upon its procreative potential, since it is in becoming, or being open to becoming, a single procreative principle, that the couple is drawn together. Second, sexual self-giving in marriage is incomplete when procreation is artificially excluded, since in that case one or both the partners is holding something fundamental back: he or she is not giving him or herself wholly, but excluding his or her fertility.

These arguments, which are at least implicit in Humanae Vitae sections 8 and 9, have been set out with great clarity since then, notably in the work of Karol Wojtyla, both before and after his election as Pope John-Paul II. Far from it being the case, as Professor Marshall affects to think, that there are no Natural Law arguments for the Humanae Vitae position, I am not aware of any other arguments, compatible with artificial contraception, which explain the unitive role of the marital act.

Yours,

Joseph Shaw

CFFC attack on conscientious objection

2008-01-30T11:51:00.002Z

Catholic For a Free Choice campaigns for abortion; it has been condemned by the US Catholic Bishops' Conference; see the information here. It is currently seeking to undermine the role of 'conscience clauses', clauses in laws or contracts of employment which allow anyone with an objection to abortion to refrain from cooperating in it. They make an extended argument in their pamphlet 'In Good Conscience: Respecting the Beliefs of Health-Care Providers and the Needs of Patients', available here.

The argument can be summarised as follows:

1. Conscience is sacred.
2. When a doctor/nurse/pharmacist declines to hand over pills/perform an operation which a patient desires (presumably in good conscience), the patient's conscience is 'negated' (p12). There ought to be 'deference to the conscience of others' (p9).
3. Doubt is cast on the possibility that the medical employee is himself acting in good conscience, by suggesting that in refusing to hand over abortifacients or perform abortions they are merely following the orders of their Catholic hospital or of the Catholic hierarchy (p.10).
4. Even if the conflict between the patient and the medic can be seen as a conflict between two consciences, the way to resolve the matter is for a Catholic (or any other) hospital to 'serve as a facilitator of all consciences': i.e. to let the conscience-afflicted medic to step aside from the case and replace him with a more flexible colleague. Presumably the original medic's cooperation here will be required (p.13).

From a Catholic point of view (the document is at pains to present itself as based on Catholic principles), this argument is bizarre.

On (2): conscience relates to the agent's actions, or to what they ask or agree to have done to them. If a woman (sincerely, conscientiously) wanting an abortion is refused one by a Catholic doctor, this is not parallel to the situation of a (sincere, conscientious) doctor whose employer seeks to overcome his reluctance to perform abortions by threats. In the latter case, an attempt is being made to get a person to act against his conscience; in the former case, one free agent is declining to cooperate in the proposed action of another free agent.

CFFC's refusal to see the doctor as a free agent in this situation is puzzling. The suggestion seems to be that since the doctor has the knowledge and the equipment necessary for an abortion, he is under an obligation to perform one to anyone who asks. But no doctor is under an obligation to give patients the treatment they ask for: it is the doctor's role to determine what treatment is appropriate; the role of the patient's conscience is to refuse to submit to treatments the patient thinks are wrong. The patient may be deluded or obsessive about his medical interests; in the case of abortion, the conscientious Catholic doctor will not conclude that abortion is in the interests of either the mother or her unborn baby.

On the one hand CFFC wants to say that abortion is simply part of normal medical treatment; but on the other hand, they are claiming that it has a special status in which the patient, uniquely, takes the initiative and the doctor is a mere technician who must obey or risk violating a right. But the mere fact that abortion is legal under certain circumstances does not mean that anyone has a 'right' to it.

On 3. There is no reason to suppose that Catholic medics who pay attention to the Church's teaching are not thinking for themselves. In a society where abortion is commonplace and socially acceptable, anyone who is reflective enough to accept the Church's arguments, based on Natural Law, against abortion is taking a courageous stand against the current. The role of Church teaching in clarifying our thinking on moral matters is part of the development of the 'formed conscience', a phrase absent from CFFC's discussion. This is obviously what Church teaching is for: what else is it for? On the other hand, the conscience of women who ask for abortions may well be distorted by the refusal of secular society to think the issue through, and above all by pressure from family and friends. This is not a good example of a conscientious decision.

On 4. First, a medic who, faced with a request for abortion, calls in a colleague to carry it out, is cooperating with abortion. If abortion is wrong, then this is wrong. If a hospital asks him to do this, it is asking him to act against his conscience.
Second, hospitals exist to further the health of their patients. If a hospital chooses to reject that role, and become places where women can dispose of unwanted members of their families, they are not being 'neutral' about anything, but evil. Such a hospital clearly could not call itself 'Catholic'.

In summary: it is never right for any doctor to give any patient treatment which the doctor thinks will harm the patient (unless a medical intervention is necessary to help for example an unborn baby), however sincere the patient might be in asking for it. It is also wrong for any doctor to arrange for such treatment to be given to the patient by another doctor. Equally, it would be wrong for any doctor to give a patient treatment which the patient refuses to consent to. To override the doctor's judgment or the patient's consent by coercing them to act or be treated against their wishes is to violate their autonomy and freedom of conscience. This has got nothing to do with religious belief; these are principles of Natural Law which protect the consciences of everyone.

Catholicism and Acupuncture

2007-11-26T16:20:00.000Z

Fr Timothy Finnigan, Parish Priest of Blackfen and blogger, wrote on acupuncture and Catholicism in his regular column in the Catholic Herald, 16/11/07, concluding:

A Catholic ought to be sure that their therapist is not committed, in their therapy and advice, to promoting a world view that is incompatible with Christianity. If there is any doubt about this at all, it would be better to steer clear of acupuncture.

I wrote a reply which was published in full in the 23/11/07 edition, as follows:

Sir,

Fr Finigan is quite correct to point out that acupuncture is based on a medical 'model' related to Taoism, a philosophy incompatible with Catholic teaching. It should also be remembered that conventional Western medicine is based on a medical model which takes the philosophy of materialism for granted. This philosophical outlook is held by the great majority of researchers and practitioners, and has many implications for medical practice. Like Taoism, it is incompatible with Catholic teaching.

As well as being impractical, it would seem unnecessary for ordinary Catholic patients to worry about the metaphysical commitments of their doctors. All medical models are imperfect; treatments based on imperfect models can still have good results; prudence directs us to the doctors best at curing disease, not the ones best at philosophy or theology. The focus of moral attention, on the other hand, should be on whether a doctor is giving concrete advice lacking in the moral dimension, as when materialist doctors propose to treat the unborn or the dying without the respect due to human persons. It is far from clear that medical traditions based on Eastern philosophies such as Taoism are worse off, in this respect, than traditions based on home-grown absurdities such as materialism.

Indeed, not even a medical tradition rooted in Catholicism, such as the 'humours' theory used in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, is immune to manipulation by immoral doctors. Ben Johnson and Nicolo Macchiavelli both wrote plays lampooning doctors who recommended sex (if necessary, outside marriage) as an aid to health. The compatibility of the medical model with Church teaching at a metaphysical level does not guarantee the compatibility of a practioner's advice with the Church's teaching on a practical, moral, level.

Yours,

Joseph Shaw

Genetic Enhancements: reply to Savalescu

2007-11-23T12:24:00.000Z

My talk at the inaugaral meeting of the Wolfson Applied Philosophy Society, chaired by Dr Francine Baker. My paper responds in general terms to an article by Professor Julian Savalescu of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics which can be read here (pdf).

Gene Therapy and Genetic Enhancement

Part I

I am not a specialist in medical ethics, and I can only hope that I will bring some freshness to a specialist debate, and give the specialists present today something to talk about. I am a specialist in theoretical, normative, ethics, and I approach this question with an eye to seeing what general principles of theoretical ethics might be applicable.

Professor Savalescu, of course, does this in his paper, saying that gene therapy is no different from ordinary medical treatment, and is therefore morally unproblematic. I shall adopt the same starting point. If we ask what moral principles govern medical treatment, we find most famously the principle that medical treatment is for the restoration of health, and perhaps also for the prevention of disease. When this definition is violated, treatment becomes morally problematic.

For example, it is morally problematic when governments propose to sterilise or castrate or lobotomise mentally retarded or mentally ill or simply morally bad persons for social reasons. It is problematic when governments regard political dissidents as mentally ill, and confine them to insane asylums. It is problematic when a person suffering from ‘Body Integrity Disorder’ asks a surgeon to amputate his healthy limb. It is problematic in all these cases because medical treatment is being given to people other than with a view to their restoration to health, or to the prevention of disease.

To take the first of these examples, when governments sterilise the mentally disabled, this is usually condemned for two reasons. First, the patient is not in a position to consent. Second, the procedure is not in the medical interests of the patient—it is not aiming at their restoration to health. On the contrary, an aspect of the patient which is functioning normally, healthily, is subjected to a procedure designed to prevent it functioning healthily. Even if consent could make this kind of thing permissible, in this case consent is lacking.

It should be noted that the fact that patient is not in a position to consent makes it all the more important to make sure medical treatment is medically required. This principle is clearly going to be applicable to embryos and young children subjected to genetic enhancement.

In certain cases consent can make a non-therapeutic procure permissible. Giving blood would be an example. But where a serious and permanent harm is done to the health of a patient, other than to restore the patient to health (as when a gangrenous limb is amputated), consent does not seem to be sufficient to make it permissible. This is the case with Body Integrity Disorder. Those who want limbs amputated just because they suffer from an unfortunate desire, are refused treatment by conscientious doctors, because the treatment would do nothing to restore them to health.

The patient believes that the treatment would make him happier. The medical establishment replies that this belief is itself part of a mental illness. The patient may insist that he is mentally fine, and the doctor should get on with it. We have a disagreement here, and it is important to note that both sides are obliged to appeal, not simply to the importance of satisfying preferences, but to an objective notion of health. Such disputes have raged about homosexuality: is it a medical condition, or, as the jargon has it, a way of being normal? A view has to be taken if we are to decide what treatment is appropriate or permissible.

What was wrong about the Soviet practice of confining dissidents to looney bins is that the dissidents were not truly mentally ill. The claim that they were, according to some strange Marxist-Leninist psychological theory, was simply implausible. Such claims have to be examined and debated, if they are to be used to justify medical treatment. Professor Savalescu apparently believes that we can talk about medical practice without talking about the concept of health, but he is wrong.

Savalescu draws on a series of examples which appear to make unclear the point I have tried to make clear. Food supplements to improve mental abilities, for example, and plastic surgery, do not seem to be attempts to restore health, but surely, he seems to be saying, they are not impermissible. In response, one may ask whether food supplements fall under the concept of medical treatment at all; there may be borderline cases here, of course. But insofar as we regard them as medical treatment, we can regard their function as properly medical, that is, as giving the patient a better state of health, of healthy functioning. There is no question at all, in such cases, of impairing function, of mutilation, which is the opposite of restoring health.

In the case of plastic surgery, what we have is a medical intervention which frequently does not seem to have the normal justification, of restoring health, unless having a large nose, or small breasts, is regarded as a disability, and not just a way of being normal. It may be that this is indeed how it is regarded by the patients, at least in conjunction with their own attitudes to their bodies. They may be wrong; they may be suffering from something parallel to Body Integrity Disorder. It may be better for the medical profession to offer counselling, rather than surgery, to perfectly healthy people seeking plastic surgery, as opposed to car crash or burns victims. On the other hand, it is clearly not such a serious matter as the examples I gave earlier, since there is normally no loss of function where plastic surgery is concerned. My aim here is not to settle the matter, but to point out that argument here is possible.

So, let us apply the principles I have been developing to the case of gene therapy. Gene therapy is a medical intervention; since it has permanent effects, which may be irreversible, it is a serious matter and demands serious justification. The justification it needs, like all medical intervention, is a medical justification, which is to say that it restores or preserves health. Thus, if a person had a genetic disorder which impaired life expectancy or function, and if this could be cured by gene therapy, whether this involved addition or subtraction or modification of genes, then it would seem, in principle, the therapy is justified. If a person had a gene for homosexuality—to use one of Savalescu’s examples—then intervention to remove that gene would be justified if, and only if, homosexuality is regarded as a disability, and not as a way of being normal. And so on with the other cases.

So it seems that gene therapy would not be justified in order to enhance intelligence or vital statistics, unless one were able to argue, and argue successfully, that without the therapy the person would be suffering from poor health, limited functioning, disability. Evidently such arguments would be successful in certain cases. Equally evidently, the demand for medical justification would prevent the kind of genetically enhanced utopia Savalescu seems to have in mind.

Part II

Let me now present in a different way the argument I have set out. It would be possible to imagine a medical profession that saw itself in an entirely technical light. Doctors would exist solely to do what patients asked them to do. They know how to bring about various effects on the human body, for good or ill, and they would do those things on request. Sometimes this would involve restoring health, and sometimes destroying it. Sometimes saving a diseased limb, sometimes cutting off a healthy one. This kind of medical profession would be the one ready to do Savalescu’s bidding. Perhaps the practice of plastic surgery has been leading the medical profession in this direction, but cases like Body Integrity Disorder show that we are not there yet.

What cases like Body Integrity Disorder show is that medicine is not merely a body of technical knowledge, like plumbing, but a value-laden enterprise. It is necessarily connected with the concept of health, which is a normative concept. Part of the understanding which doctors have to acquire is an understanding of what health is, which is part of an understanding of what is good for people, what is in their interests. Patients certainly have autonomy, notably the right to refuse treatment, but they rely on doctors not only for technical information, but for an evaluation of their options. If the medical profession became a purely technical matter, doctors would become mere technicians. That is not our image of doctors, nor theirs of themselves. It would be a degrading change. As things stand, doctors are answerable to their own professional evaluations; this means they must have the right to refuse to carry out inappropriate treatment.

Here’s a parallel we in this room should understand. People engaged in academic study are not merely gaining a body of useful technical knowledge; that would not be academic study. We are engaged in an essentially value-laden enterprise, connected with truth and professional judgement. Academic conclusions should have academic justification, which is to say justification in terms of reasoned argument; they cannot be justified by their convenience or money-value. There is something appalling about the idea of an academic who deliberately falsifies his own conclusions, regardless of the reason. Normally we can rely on academics’ sense of their own dignity to prevent this. Academia would be pointless if we did all our studies but didn’t undertake a proper evaluation of the results. We are answerable to our own professional evaluation of the material we are working with. For a serious academic to argue for whatever conclusions those paying him preferred would be a kind of prostitution, and he would immediately cease to be viewed by others as a serious academic. For the whole of academia to go down that road would be the complete degradation of the profession. This is not a Utilitarian argument, but it is nevertheless a consideration Professor Savalescu, as an academic, would ignore at his peril.

Just as the work of academics is essentially value-laden, the central value being truth, or, if you prefer, the exercise of academic judgement, so the work of doctors is essentially value-laden, where the central value is health, or the medical good of the patient. The idea that this might be reducible to the patient’s own preferences would be news to the whole branch of medicine, psychology, whose stock in trade is the changing of patients’ preferences. I have not articulated what the concept of health amounts to; it is enough to point out that there is such a concept, and that it has this role.

Given that there is such a concept, and that doctors make use of it in their evaluations of what treatment is appropriate, it should be clear that it will never be permissible to make serious medical interventions to healthy people. It may be possible to make the strong stronger or the clever cleverer, but that is not what medicine is for. The fact that this would satisfy the preferences, or assumed preferences, of the patient is an insufficient justification; that does nothing to provide the medical justification which is needed for a medical intervention.

Part III

This conclusion may seem mysterious. Medicine is governed by certain values internal to itself which prevents it from being as useful to others as it might be. The same is true of academia: academics worthy of the name do not manipulate their conclusions to further even worthy goals of social policy. But this seems less mysterious. For an academic who honestly thought one thing, and said another in public, would be lying, and it is a familiar enough idea that there is a moral constraint against lying. What is the moral constraint at the basis of a doctor’s refusal to make medical interventions other than with a view to restoring health?

I would propose that the answer is that there is a moral constraint here, most familiarly known as a constraint against mutilation. I put it in this cautious way because the cases we have may not look at first glance like cases of mutilation; what I am suggesting is that, properly understood, the constraint behind the limits of medical practice, which is very clear in classic cases of mutilation, is sufficiently broad to cover the cases we are focusing on here. Accordingly I propose to use the word ‘mutiliation’ in a broad sense.

One easy way to express what is wrong with sterilising the mentally disabled is that it is a case of mutilation. The way I have been expressing it is that the medical intervention has no medical justification, which would be justification in terms of restoring the patient to health. My suggestion is that the two ways of putting it are equivalent; they are interdefinable. Medical interventions without medical justifications are mutilations. We may raise the scalpel against, or give potions and drugs to, our fellow human beings only with a view to the cure or prevention of disease of the patient. To do so otherwise is wrong; it is akin to assault, battery, and mutilation. I think the moral intuition here is clear enough; stipulatively, for convenience, I will call the forbidden action mutilation. So the next question will be: is it plausible to characterise genetic enhancement, when lacking a medical justification, as mutilation in my broad sense?

First of all, let me clarify the meaning of mutilation. Normally, mutilation leaves the victim worse off, but this need not be so. Cutting off a healthy limb for no good reason is obviously mutilation. Would it cease to be mutilation if victim was fulfilling the condition necessary to gain a vast sum of money, leaving him overall better off? Of course it would; we would then ask whether the mutilation was worth it, or was morally justified by it. Like the ugly sisters in the un-Disnified version of the Cinderalla story, who cut of parts of their feet in order to get them into the magic slipper, we can see that there is a moral problem with this. This is not the way we should treat our bodies.

Now consider prosthetic limbs. These have been getting better and better. It will not be long before a prosthetic leg will actually be better than the usual healthy natural leg; perhaps this is so already. Let us suppose it is indeed so. Would it be right for a person to allow either or both of his healthy natural legs to be removed, in order to be fitted with souped up prosthetic legs, as we might say, bionic legs? Again, our moral intuitions are against this. By all means, let the unfortunate souls who lose their legs on land mines or in any other way get the best prosthetic limbs money can buy; but it would not be right to cut off a healthy limb to enjoy the benefits of an artificial one.

Our genes are part of our bodies. This is perhaps something we have to learn; it is not obvious, just by looking at us, but it must be so. Given the moral constraint on mutilation, it follows that it would be wrong to remove parts of our DNA to replace them with others, artificial or borrowed, supposed to be preferable, without medical justification. The moral constraint against mutilation is the protection morality gives to our physical integrity; it is the moral implication of the value, the moral importance, of the human body. Too often ethics limits itself to the moral implications of the value of life, or pleasure, but few if any philosophers defend the view that these are the only things of moral importance. So just as the value of life has the implication that we may not kill, without certain limited kinds of justification, so the value of the body has the implication that we cannot invade or disarrange it, without certain limited kinds of justification. The violation of the constraints protecting life is murder; the violation of the constraints protecting the body is mutilation.

'Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice'

2007-08-08T16:35:00.001+01:00

The consultation is about a draft ‘guidance’ document, ‘Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice’ (‘PBMP’), from the General Medical Council. Using examples, the Guidelines aim to set out principles which should govern cases where patients ask for a type of treatment a doctor does not wish to give.

PBMP is, unfortunately, seriously confused. The first problem is its reference to two red herrings: first, the principle that doctors should not ‘discriminate’ on the basis of their own or their patients beliefs (or lifestyle, race, etc.), and second, the distinction between ‘personal beliefs’ and ‘clinical knowledge and judgment’.

On the first, although discrimination is not defined in the document, it would be reasonable to understand it, in the medical context, as treating different patients differently on the basis of non-relevant criteria. Thus, a racist doctor who consistently gave cheaper and less effective medicine to patients who were members of a particular racial group, would clearly be guilty of (wrongful) discrimination.

PBMP’s three examples are the circumcision of boys for religious reasons; abortion; and the refusal of Jehovah’s witnesses to use blood products. In each case, what the patient (or the patient’s parents) is asking for may not be what the doctor thinks is right. However, in none of these cases is discrimination an issue. A doctor who refuses to go along with the patient’s wishes would be applying to the patient in front of him the same judgements he would apply to everyone. The way the PBMP keeps returning to the principle of non-discrimination suggests that such a doctor might be guilty of discrimination, but this claim is never explained or justified.

The second red herring is the distinction between a doctor’s ‘personal beliefs’ and ‘clinical knowledge and judgment’ (para 16). Taking each side of the alleged distinction separately, PBMP acknowledges that doctors must be free to exercise their judgment as to what is clinically, medically, appropriate to a patient. On the other hand, by contrasting this with something ‘personal’, it suggests that clinical judgment is somehow ‘public’, or common to the profession. This is a mere slight of hand: clinical judgement is personal, and good doctors sometimes disagree. It would be better to talk about a doctor’s ‘personal, clinical judgement’. Again, the term ‘knowledge’ is misleading, as contrasted with ‘belief’, since the bases of clinical judgements will include opinions which couldn’t count as ‘knowledge’, including the doctor’s personal medical experience. So along with ‘personal, clinical judgement’ we must talk of the doctor’s ‘clinical views’, not limited to ‘knowledge’.

When we contrast a doctor’s ‘clinical views and personal, clinical judgement’ with his ‘personal beliefs’, there does not appear to be any contrast at all. However, what PBMP clearly intends to include under ‘personal beliefs’ are moral beliefs and values. It is mere rhetoric to assume these must be beliefs rather than knowledge (don’t we all know that paradigmatic cases of murder are wrong?). So the contrast PBMP is trying to make would turn out to be that between the doctor’s medical views, and his moral views.

There is, unfortunately, a serious problem with this distinction, arising from the fact that medical views and judgements are necessarily value-laden. Medicine is about giving appropriate treatment to patients, and thus depends on the concepts of health, well-being, and benefit, and their contraries. These are all clearly evaluative terms. When a doctor says that a certain treatment will return a patient to good health, or that the benefits of a certain operation will not outweigh the pain and inconvenience, he is making a value judgement.

If the GMC wishes to avoid this, they might insist that clinical judgments are purely instrumental: they are simply about how to get a patient from one physical (or mental) state to another. If a patient wishes to get rid of a back pain, or to walk without a limp, the doctor will advise on the best ways of doing this. If a patient wants to end up in what a doctor might, as the maker of value-judgments, regard as a worse state, the doctor will nevertheless, as a clinical technician, advise the patient how to achieve that. But the GMC cannot take this view, because it is committed, as the NHS and whole medical establishment is committed, to resisting the pointless demands of obsessive or deluded patients.

One example of such demands is that of a person suffering from a mental affliction known as ‘body integrity disorder’. Sufferers want healthy limbs amputated. It would be natural to say: such an amputation would not be medically or clinically justified. That claim, of course, makes use of the fact that medical/clinical judgements include judgements of value: the amputation won’t make the patient better off. However it is expressed, it is the doctor’s grasp of values, the value of health, and the purpose of medicine to advance human well-being, which enables him to resist requests to amputate healthy limbs.

The clinical/moral distinction, accordingly, collapses. PBMP tries to buttress the distinction by reinforcing it with a distinction between what is non-personal, and what is personal, and again between knowledge and mere belief. But none of these distinctions works in the way PBMP needs it to work.

However the distinction is understood it turns out to be irrelevant to the GMC's argument, as will emerge below.

The crucial part of the guidelines is paras 18-21, which tell doctors what they must do if a patient asks for a treatment the doctor does not judge appropriate (based on the doctor’s ‘personal beliefs’).

Para 19 tells us that doctors are not required to refer the patient to another doctor. On the other hand, ‘you must ensure’ the patient is capable of seeking another opinion; if the patient is not capable, para 20 tells us that the conscientious doctor must arrange for another doctor to take over the case, ‘without delay’. Finally, para 21 tells us that doctors opposed to certain procedures should inform their employers, so their employers can find a way to make sure the procedures remain available through other doctors.

I have shown that the clinical/moral distinction will not work. Doctors may and indeed must make all-things-considered judgements about what will benefit patients, as a basis for refusing to accede to patient demands, where those demands are misguided. The GMC might retort, all the same, that in such a case a patient has the right to a second opinion, and the doctor has the duty to facilitate the patient in seeking a second opinion. If another doctor may come to a different judgment, so be it.

Thus, if Doctor A regards a possible operation as so risky, and of such limited benefit to the patient, that it would not be right to perform it, and if the patient persuades Doctor B to perform it, then Doctor A can simply wash his hands of the matter. Presumably, Doctor B has made a different assessment of the risks and potential benefits, and thinks the operation justified.

It is this kind of case which PBMP seems to have in mind, to supply the principles to deal with conscientious objections: the principle that the patient’s right to a second opinion is paramount. However, this principle is only operative within a certain range of cases. Doctor A knows he has made a prudential judgment which other doctors whose judgment he respects may agree or disagree with. It is a different matter where a patient has asked for a procedure which is ruled out, not by a prudential judgment, but by a fundamental medical moral principle. If a patient asks for an unnecessary amputation, a doctor who refused might be sufficiently confident in his colleague's judgement that allowing the patient to seek a second opinion would do no harm. If he lacked that confidence, however, taking steps to assist the patient get a second opinion would be wrong, because it would be taking steps to violate the fundamental value of the medical profession, that medicine seeks the patient’s welfare. This patient is mentally ill, and seeking something which, if he recovers mentally, he will bitterly regret, which will cause him pain and loss of function, with no good effects at all, apart from the satisfaction of a disordered desire. This is not something a doctor should be assisting, even by referring the patient to another doctor.

Again, if a patient asks for a supply of psycho-active drugs for recreational use, a doctor who refuses should not refer the patient to another doctor for a second opinion, unless the first doctor had complete confidence in his colleagues’ probity. This would be so even if the law allowed doctors to supply such drugs for such purposes. As things stand, the law recognises that the patient’s good is more important than the patient’s wishes, and forbids doctors to cooperate with the giving of drugs for recreational purposes.

The problem, in the case of abortion, is that the wrongness of abortion, the fact that it is never in the interests of the patient, is no longer recognised by law, or by the medical profession as a whole. The fact remains, however, that from a conscientious doctor’s point of view, it is a case like that of the unnecessary amputation or the recreational drug use, and not like the risky operation. It should be contrary to the evaluative, medical judgment of a doctor to assist in or recommend or in any way to cooperate in an abortion. This problem is in part recognised by the ‘conscience clause’ of the Abortion Act itself, and by PMBP itself, where it wishes to force a conscientious doctor to refer a patient to another doctor only where, in the GMC’s view, this is absolutely necessary.

Clearly, however, PBMP still seeks to force doctors to cooperate with abortion, by assisting patients’ getting a second opinion. As I have argued, this would make sense if the doctors who refused to perform the operation did so from a prudential calculation which another doctor might re-evaluate in good faith. It is wrong to ask a doctor to act against his judgement when this judgement is based on a fundamental principle: that abortion can never be in the interests of a patient, all things considered.

What makes a Catholic institution?

2007-05-25T17:59:00.000+01:00

Catholic charities of all kinds are ceasing to be so. In some cases they like to parade their Catholic 'heritage' when asking for Catholic money. It would be useful to have proper criteria for Catholic organisations, which we could use to weed out the fakes.

First: on claims to a Catholic 'ethos' or 'values'.

A charity can obviously claim to have a Catholic 'ethos', or say that it is founded and informed by Catholic values or a Catholic perspective. This will effect who wants to be a donor, a trustee, or a beneficiary. So although one might think that the mere claim to a Catholic ethos or Catholic values is a rather feeble effort for a 'Catholic' institution, actually it is of great significance, because the claim - on websites and so on - itself tends to create such an ethos. And it is amazing how many formerly Catholic charities decline to make such a claim.

Second: on cooperation with evil.

We need to go beyond this, of course, and say what effect Catholic values have on the running of the institution. So it would be reasonable to say, as a result of the ethos and values, there are certain things the charity will not do: obviously formal cooperation in intrinsically evil actions, but also proximate material cooperation in intrinsically evil (or gravely evil) actions. Catholic teaching gives us a list of intrinsically evil actions to use. So a Catholic institution wouldn't employ a person to expedite abortions (formal cooperation) or have a condom machine (proximate material cooperation). It might allow employees to misuse their freedom of speech to speak against the Church or the moral law, since this is a more distant material cooperation, but it would seek to minimise this and counteract the evil effects of it.

Third: on Catholic aims.

The second point is merely negative. So, the next step is to say that a Catholic charity is one which has Catholic aims. These would be of the form: 'To give glory to God by doing X.' X could be anything, but many formerly Catholic institutions would find it deeply embarrassing to put it like that in their self description, and I think that should rule them out. We can take it a step further and say: a Catholic institution is never concerned merely with the bodily or financial welfare of its beneficiaries (or staff), but also with their spiritual welfare. And then we can ask: what do you do to promote this spiritual welfare? The answer should include, I would suggest: by performing our tasks in the spirit of the service of Christ in the persons of our beneficiaries; by prayer in common; by marking the Church's seasons and feasts; by having Mass said in or specifically for the institution at least several times a year.

None of this will get anyone into trouble with the non-discrimination or harassment laws. But it would make for a genuinely Catholic institution.

Referrals and the Sexual-Orientation Regulations

2007-05-15T09:39:00.000+01:00

In the recent debate concerning the Sexual-Orientation Regulations and adoption agencies the Roman-Catholic Church asserted that its adoption agencies would have to close if the Regulations were adopted on the grounds that it would be impermissible to place children for adoption with two gay parents even though that is what the Regulations would demand. The curious thing is that agencies such as the Catholic Childrens' Society were already, even though not forced so to do by law, referring gay couples wishing to adopt to other agencies. But if it is wrong to place children for adoption with gay couples surely it is wrong to refer gay couples to agencies that will place children with them?

Referrals Again

2007-05-15T09:31:00.000+01:00

On an 80s comedy programme On the hour a comedian rang up Conservative Central Office pretending to have a story about Neil Kinnock behaving badly. Central Office said that they were not prepared (presumably for moral reasons) to handle the story, but suggested he take the story to The Daily Mail. But if it is morally unacceptable to handle a story surely it is morally unacceptable to suggest that the peddler take it to another place?

Referrals for Abortions

2007-05-14T17:58:00.000+01:00

Dr Ian Sapsford, a Torquay GP, has written letters to several Christian periodicals, asserting that 'The National Health Services Act imposes on Christian doctors an obligation to sin against God while at work'. He explains:

We breach this law if we fail to provide a pregnant woman with an abortifacient pill, or refuse to refer her for an abortion (or to another doctor whom [sic] we know will do so).

The National Health Service Act 1977 Section 29 says:
(1) It is every Area Health Authority's duty, in accordance with regulations, to arrange as respects their area with medical practitioners to provide personal medical services for all persons in the area who wish to take advantage of the arrangements.
(2) Regulations may provide for the definition of the personal medical services to be provided and for securing that the arrangements will be such that all persons availing themselves of those services will receive adequate personal care and attendance, and the regulations shall include provision
(a) for the preparation and publication of lists of medical practitioners who undertake to provide general medical services;
(b) for conferring a right on any person to choose, in accordance with the prescribed procedure, the medical practitioner by whom he is to be attended, subject to the consent of the practitioner so chosen

There does not seem to be anything contrary to this in the National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Act 2002 or the National Health Service Act 2006. It seems that Dr Sapsford is wrong in thinking that this is the law.

In fact, there is an explicit exception for those with conscientious objections in the Abortion Act 1967

§ 4 Conscientious objection to participation in treatment

(1) Subject to subsection (2) of this section, no person shall be under any duty, whether by contract or by any statutory or other legal requirement, to participate in any treatment authorised by this Act to which he has a conscientious objection:

Provided that in any legal proceedings the burden of proof of conscientious objection shall rest on the person claiming to rely on it.

(2) Nothing in subsection (1) of this section shall affect any duty to participate in treatment which is necessary to save the life or to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of a pregnant woman.

Nevertheless, the GMC adds (and this may be what is worrying Dr Sapsford):

If carrying out a particular procedure or giving advice about it conflicts with your religious or moral beliefs, and this conflict might affect the treatment or advice you provide, you must explain this to the patient and tell them they have the right to see another doctor. You must be satisfied that the patient has sufficient information to enable them to exercise that right. If it is not practical for a patient to arrange to see another doctor, you must ensure that arrangements are made for another suitably qualified colleague to take over your role.

This is what the BMA says:

Doctors with a conscientious objection to abortion should make their views known to the patient and enable the patient to see another doctor without delay if that is the patient's wish.

A spokesman for the Department of Health quoted in The Daily Mail for 3rd May 2007 said: "If GPs feel their beliefs might affect the treatment, this must be explained to the patient who should be told of their right to see another doctor."

What does 'ensure that arrangements are made' mean? And what does 'enable' mean? Is it permissible to ensure that arrangements are made for a patient seeking an abortion to be seen by a doctor that will grant her what she seeks? If it is immoral to sell guns to drunks would it be permissible to ensure that arrangements are made for the drunks to see a gunsmith without scruples? Would it be permissible merely to inform the drunk of the whereabouts of a gunsmith without scruples? Would it be permissible merely to inform the drunk that he could go elsewhere? I guess as follows: no, no, no, yes.

I was interested to read about the case of Janaway v Salford Health Authority in 1988 when a doctor's secretary (Janaway, a Roman Catholic) was sacked for refusing to type a letter of referral. The courts held that ‘the task asked of Janaway did not constitute participation in the actual abortion procedure’. (I can see that the case is referred to in a 1988 edition of Law and Justice: The Christian Law Review by one David Poole, but that is all I know about it.) Is typing a letter of referral permissible? I'm inclined to think not; one is co-operating in evil, albeit without intending that the evil be done. Those Germans that typed letters about the movement of Jews in WWII may not have committed a legal offence, but surely they are morally guilty of aiding and abetting a terrible crime?

One final point: I think that it is impermissible to perform an abortion even to save the mother's life. Is it then morally permissible to be a doctor? I regretfully think not: in becoming a doctor (at least of a certain sort: obs and gyny, and perhaps even a GP) one would be accepting a duty that one couldn't morally discharge. Of course, it is (thankfully) very rare that such a duty would arise, but surely it is immoral to accept a duty knowing one could not discharge it?

'Morphine cases'

2007-02-27T17:33:00.000Z

'Morphine cases' are an established part of the philosophical debate on double effect. It is worth reminding ourselves that medical practice has moved on from the kind of case philosophers have in mind, which in described by the Rev Billings in the radio talk described below. Hat-tip to 'Care not Killing'.

The use of Morphine

"We remain deeply concerned that some media reports are giving the misleading impression that doctors are administering morphine to dying patients in the knowledge that it will kill them.

The latest of these came on Radio Four's 'Thought for Today' on 23 February, when the Rev Dr Alan Billings, Director of the Centre for Ethics and Religion at Lancaster University, addressed the case of Kelly Taylor, a 30 year old woman, who is currently seeking legal permission to be heavily sedated with morphine and then dehydrated until she dies.

In the broadcast, Rev Billings referred to the so-called 'double effect' of high doses of morphine – a misconception that has become pivotal in Kelly's case. He said, 'Every day we allow doctors to end the lives of some people by making a distinction between intention and outcome. A doctor increases the morphine of a terminally ill person in great pain to the point where they die. The morphine kills. That's the outcome, but the doctor is not thought culpable because his intention is the relief of pain, not the death of the patient.'

Rev Billings here was expressing two popular misconceptions about morphine: that it frequently ends the lives of terminally ill people, and that it causes sedation when given in doses necessary to relieve pain. We strongly refute the statement that doctors are ending lives by giving their patients large doses of morphine to control pain.

Morphine, if deliberately given in very high doses to people who are not in pain, does cause respiratory depression and death. It was indeed the drug used by Dr Shipman to kill his victims, and this has undoubtedly heightened public anxiety about its use. However, when correctly used to relieve pain in a patient who is terminally ill, morphine should never cause death. By contrast it usually lengthens life and improves its quality. This is because the therapeutic dose of morphine, which relieves pain, is virtually always well below the toxic dose which ends life and because the relief from pain which it brings removes stress factors in the patient's condition. In addition, toxic doses risk causing increased agitation in some patients- hardly what is intended by those advocating this approach. In modern medicine, and especially in palliative medicine, doctors can kill the pain without killing the patient.

So-called 'terminal sedation' is very rarely necessary; and when it is, it is used to control severe agitation, rather than physical pain, in patients whose conscious level is diminished by their illness. Even when used for the management of agitation, it is very seldom necessary to sedate any patient continuously until they die, but usually only for periods of 12 or 24 hours at a time. Whatever the circumstances, morphine is not the drug of choice used for this sedation since sedation wears off rapidly, which is good for patients taking it for pain relief, but it makes it a poor sedative."

The same mismatch between philosophical examples and medical practice applies to the 'craniotomy case': the procedure at issue (crushing the head of a baby during childbirth in order to remove it quickly from the birth canal) is simply no longer used. The really 'hard' cases often turn out to extremely rare. It is unclear, for example, whether a 'therapeutic' abortion would ever be needed to save the life of a mother.

Philosophers usually aren't medically qualified, and for us an imaginary situation is as good as a real one, for the purposes of testing intuitions and proposed policies. But perhaps we should be more careful about allowing pro-abortion medical myths publicity.

Marriage, anulments and liturgy

2007-02-04T21:45:00.000Z

(The following has been published by CFNews, here. For a report on the Pope's speech, see here.)

This week's Catholic Herald carries a front-page story on a recent speech by the Pope condemning over-easy annulments. In part:

In a speech to the Roman Rota, the Church’s highest court of appeal for annulments, the Pontiff pointed to a “crisis” in the way marriage was understood.
He said that Catholics and even tribunal judges were affected by the secular idea of marriage as merely the “formalisation of emotional bonds”.
In “some ecclesiastical realms” this idea has caused annulments to be granted for the sake of the couple’s well-being rather than because the marriage was invalid.
“The crisis over the meaning of marriage has affected the way many faithful think,” the Pope told judges and officials of the Roman Rota last Saturday. “The indissoluble conjugal bond is denied because it’s treated as an ideal that cannot be made ‘obligatory’ for ‘normal Christians’.

The Pope has correctly identified a specific misunderstanding of marriage as a cause of the decline in the ability of marriage tribunals' capacity to apply the correct principles to determining the validity of marriages. The misunderstanding is the replacement of the notion of the 'indissoluble marriage bond', as the central concept of marriage, with the notion of a 'formalisation of emotional bonds'. It seems clear that the same false understanding of marriage is behind the decline of marriage itself: in fewer people being willing to make the commitment of marriage, and ever more people who have married, getting divorced.

Where might we find such a view expressed? Well, here is the opening prayer of the revised marriage ceremony, promulgated in 1969:

"Dear friends, you have come together in this church so that the Lord may seal and strengthen your love in the presence of the Church's minister and this community. Christ abundantly blesses this love. He has already consecrated you in baptism and now he enriches and strengthens you by a special sacrament so that you may assume the duties of marriage in mutual and lasting fidelity. And so, in the presence of the Church, I ask you to state your intentions."

Now look at the Latin:

Dilectíssimi nobis, in domum ecclésiæ convenístis, ut volúntas vestra Matrimónium contrahéndi coram Ecclésiæ minístro, et communitáte sacro sigíllo a Dómino muniátur. Amórem vestrum coniugálem Christus abúnde benedícit et ad mútuam perpetuámque fidelitátem et ad cétera Matrimónii offícia assuménda eos peculiári ditat et róborat Sacraménto, quos ipse sancto iam Baptísmate consecrávit. Quare vos coram Ecclésia de mente vestra intérrogo. (For the full texts, see here.)

There are many problems with the translation, but let's just look at the key phrases:

you have come together in this church so that the Lord may seal and strengthen your love in the presence of the Church's minister and this community.

in domum ecclésiæ convenístis, ut volúntas vestra Matrimónium contrahéndi coram Ecclésiæ minístro, et communitáte sacro sigíllo a Dómino muniátur.

The highlighted Latin phrase means literally '[you've come together so that] the Lord my establish the sacred bond [of matrimony]'. The official translation has removed the notion of matrimony as a sacred bond, established by the Lord, and replaced with the notion of the couple's love merely being strengthened by the Lord. In other words, the correct view of marriage, as an indissoluble bond, is expressed in the Latin, but in the English this view has been replaced by the false view, that marriage is the formalisation of an emotional bond.

So what is His Holiness saying? That the view of matrimony put forward in the scandalously inacurate official English translation of the new order of matrimony is responsible for a misunderstanding of marriage among even the higher echelons of the Church, which has dangerously undermined the institution of marriage itself.

Posted by Joseph Shaw

Christ King of Poland?

2007-01-10T13:03:00.000Z

Daniel writes: What do you think? Would you consider this part of the ideal state? (A small group of Protestants, the Reformed Presbyterians, refused to go along with the British Revolutionary Settlement in 1688 because it made no reference to Jesus as King, interestingly. They are still active today, though I think they are now allowed to vote etc.)
>
> ** Polish MPs bid to make Jesus king **
> A group of Polish MPs submit a bill seeking to proclaim Jesus Christ king of their country - a move criticised by clerics.
> <>
>

Respondeo: Yes, I saw that. Also that the Polish bishops aren't keen. It's a nice idea, and it can be done in a number of ways. There was a huge fight before the Revolution in France about consecrating France to the Sacred Heart. The King finally did it, by Royal Decree, at a very late stage. A similar fight is going on about consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The people opposed to all these moves want to keep religion out of the public domain. Including the Polish bishops, unfortunately.

Declaring Christ King seems particularly appropriate, and it's suprising that it's not been done before. However I think that it was taken for granted in the Christian monarchies: the king receiving his crown from God etc., as depicted in ceremonial and art. God was always the King of Israel, as I understand it, and the human king a kind of deputy, just as the Pope is Christ's deputy as Head of the Church.

(When Henry VIII made himself Head of the Church of England, he wasn't just usurping the role of the Pope, but of Christ. As Elizabeth seemed to realise; at least she rejected that title.)

It's very interesting about the Presbyterians.

Oral contraceptives as abortifacients

2007-01-10T00:07:00.000Z

Daniel Hill writes: "I have been discussing with a friend the possibility that the oral contraceptive pill functions as an abortifacient. See, e.g.,: The Growing Debate About the Abortifacient Effect of the Birth Control Pill and the Principle of Double Effect by Waltet Larimore, MD <http://www.epm.org/articles/pilldebate2.html> Ethics and Medicine (January, 2000;16(1):23-30)

A condensation of the booklet Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions? <http://www.epm.org/articles/bcp5400.html>

Since I don't rule out contraception in general, but do rule out abortion, this is of great interest and concern to me. It may be of less interest to you, but this friend also argued that it was impermissible for somebody using NFP to drink coffee, since coffee can (he said) kill a newly fertilized egg (and, indeed, a foetus). Further, since, he went on, coffee affects the ovum, whether fertilized or not, he argued that it was impermissible for a woman ever to drink coffee (pre-menopause) since she would run the risk of damaging her ova in such a way that when fertilized they would not implant, and, hence, that one would be indirectly (though of course unintentionally) bringing about the death of a fertilized egg, should one later become sexually active.

Have you come across these arguments before? How should one respond to them?"

Respondeo: First, I take it that it is uncontroversial that the conventional 'pill' can act as an abortifacient. A similar thing is true of the 'Morning After Pill': that it can prevent fertilisation, but it also works by preventing implantation. If you take the thing after sex has occurred, the chance of it working (if it works) contraceptively, rather than by causing an abortion, is reduced, and continues to fall as time goes on.

I don't see what NFP has got to do with it.

But the coffee issue is less complicated that it looks. It is conceivable (though highly unlikely) that a woman is drinking coffee in order to cause an abortion, or to mutilate herself with a view to reducing her fertility. That would violate the prohibitions on intending those things.

But if not, then it is simply the familiar question: how much care must a (potentially) pregnant woman take over her health? And the answer is: be reasonable! If drinking coffee increases the chance of miscarriage only by some tiny per cent, and a woman regards giving up as a serious inconvenience, then she's under no obligation to give up. If the danger is significant and the inconvenience small, then she should give up. The same is true of crossing the road.

As it happens I've not heard that about coffee. But every other thing is supposed to be bad for pregnant women, and it's becoming absurd. What is really the worst thing for them, IMHO, is to turn them into neurotic invalids, but that's another story...

What is tricky is whether women taking chemicals advertised as 'contraceptives' ('emergency' or not) are guilty in any sense of abortion. Anyone who cares about it will find out quickly enough that taking those things act as abortifacients, but that doesn't settle the question of whether they intend them to act as such. They may, of course, but if they don't then there's still the wrongdoing of recklessness with an innocent life which the agent in question has a particular duty to protect.

Hope that helps.

Absolute prohibitions

2007-01-06T17:44:00.000Z

Daniel Hill draws my attention to a Jewish moralist's summary of moral absolutes - things one can never do under any circumstances at all - as a very short list: murder, apostasy, and one or two other things (I think). Can the Catholic tradition produce a similar, neat list?

It looks as though it should be able to. There is a healthy debate on whether lying is forbidden absolutely, or only in certain circumstances. Killing the innocent is clearly prohibited absolutely, as is apostasy. So where's the list?

The problem (if it is a problem) is that Catholic moralists seem to want every prohibition, or at least as many as possible, to be absolute. So, faced with a situation in which a certain class of actions is permissible in some circumstances, and not in others, the tendency is to define a sub-set as being forbidden in all circumstances. So, with lying, for example, we have the taxonomy of officious, jocose and malicious; the last is absolutely forbidden; the jocose lie is not forbidden at all (or at least not on pain of mortal sin), and we can go on arguing about the officious one, but it's probably absolutely forbidden too.

Similarly, to argue that in some cases (the 'starving man and the rich man's surplus') theft is permissible, turns into an argument in favour of a narrower definition of theft, with the starving man case excluded from it, which is absolutely forbidden.

Is this a good or a bad methodological tendency? Although it seems confusing, I think it is the inevitable consequence of two good things. First, it derives from an attempt to cover every case in a clear way. Jewish casuistry is equally interested in hard cases as Catholic casuistry, but is less interested (as far as I can see) in reducing the casuistical analysis to a statement of principles. (Ie to say: now we've got a set of cases where the act is wrong and a set where it is right, what exactly is the principle dividing them?) With the ultimate focus on specific morally relevant principles, rather than more general principles with a set of exceptions, you end up with more moral absolutes.

Second, the role of intention (as usual!) has a role here. The concept of intention makes it possible to produce these plausible and specific moral principles, since the intention of each kind of harm to another is something which can be absolutely forbidden. The exceptions to rules such as 'do not kill' mostly turn out to be cases in which the killing is not intended.

In dealing with non-intended harms there is, instead of an absolute prohibition, the principle of proportionality.

In conclusion, one could say (although the manualists don't talk like this) that there is just one absolute prohibition in Catholic ethics: do not intend harm. And one non-absolute restriction: do not cause foreseen and disproportionate harm. (Plus there are positive duties, such as the duty of worship and obedience to God, and the duty of aid to our neighbour.) Since the question of what is 'harm' in the necessary sense is a controversial one, it is more usual to specify the absolute restrictions as: do not intend deaths, losses of property, etc., each of which has a sister-principle limiting non-intended harms of that kind by the principle of proportionality.

Secularism and state neutrality

2007-01-06T17:17:00.000Z

Christianity and the ‘non-confessional state’. (This was published by CFNews: see here.)

Philip Trower, in his 2004 article for Catholic World Report included in the 4th Jan CFNews bulletin, argues that the rise of militant secularism – evidenced by the rigorous exclusion of religious language and symbolism from public life, for example – derives from the collapse of the ‘non-confessional state’, a state which does not prefer one religion to another, into a ‘secularist state’, a state in which a set of avowedly non-religious values, centering around humanism and hedonism, are given official status. This is a kind of confessional state, in which what the state confesses is a secularism which has become a substitute religion.

Trower’s diagnosis is certainly correct. What I cannot, however, agree with is the prognosis: the implication of his article that what is needed is a return to a non-confessional state, and that the process by which non-confessional states have become secularist states is based on a ‘misunderstanding’. If only, he implies, politicians and others understood the distinction properly, then we would not have the problem of militant secularism being imposed on us by the state. State schools could go on having nativity plays, etc. etc..

The problem is that there is a deep confusion in the very notion of a non-confessional state. Such a state is supposed to be neutral on controversial, value-laden issues, notably about which religion is correct. So how, in such a state, should human biology, or the history of the Reformation, be taught? What textbooks should be used? The problem is not that these are difficult questions, but that if the state has no controversial or religious values of its own, it will have no basis upon which to make the decisions.

Again: which religions and churches should be accorded charitable status, and for what faith groups should military chaplains be provided? The Taliban? Scientologists? Satanists? How is the state to determine that question, if it has no theological values?

The answer given by political theorists friendly to the idea of a ‘neutral state’, is that without reference to controversial, value-laden religious claims, the state can conduct its affairs by reference to what all reasonable people agree about: basic rationality. Everyone wants food on the table and a roof over their heads, and so on. This quickly reveals itself to be a form of reasoning that does not simply leave to one side the question of which religion is true, but assumes that they are all false. For if the only thing the state takes into account is our material needs, then it is acting as if we had no other needs at all: it has de facto adopted materialism as a substitute religion. The form of ‘rationality’ here, of course, is far from uncontroversial, and carries with it the potential to turn a non-confessional state into a secularist one. This problem has been explored at length by Alastair MacIntyre’s appropriately named book: ‘Whose Justice? Which Rationality?’

The same thing has been forseen in a different way by Edward Norman, in his book ‘Secularization’, where he points out that the non-confessional state is not the stable end-point of a political development, but is simply a transitional phase, when the dominant religion has lost the power or the will to impose itself on the state, but is still too strong to be ignored completely. The rising set of values which will soon be, and in many ways already is, the official creed of the state, is secularism.

The fact is that the state cannot do without values. Political judgments, judgments about the relative merits of educational philosophies or medical treatments, can only be made with the help of values. A non-confessional state inevitably gravitates towards a set of humanistic, hedonistic and secular values, because any move in any other direction will be attacked as giving one religion priority over another.

Catholics and members of other religions have to be clear about this. The goal of their political engagement is not to push the state back into the untenable position of making decisions neither on the basis of Anglicanism nor on the basis of any other coherent set of values or world view. That would be an absurd and Quixotic project. No: our aim is to get the state to make decisions on the basis of what we believe to be the correct values and world view. Sterlising the disabled makes sense if traditional, religiously inspired moral values are set aside in favour of hedonism and materialism. In opposing something like this, we are trying to get politicians and the general public to see that hedonism and materialism are inadequate, and that our own values are superior. We are pushing them, however feebly, towards a confession of the Truth, the only basis upon which correct judgments about how to promote the Common Good will be made.

Joseph Shaw

On-line casuistry

2006-08-29T17:14:00.001+01:00

I thought it would be fun for people to post links to any on-line manuals of casuistry with which they are familiar. Here are some that I have found:
A Brief Text-book of Moral Philosophy by Charles Coppens
(Here is the definition of a lie: A falsehood, or lie, is speech contrary to one's mind.)
Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deonoology and Natural Law by Joseph Rickaby
(Here is his definition of 'lying': a formal lie is saying what one believes not to be true, or promising what one intends not to perform: briefly, it is speaking against one's mind.)
Catholic Moral Teaching / by Joseph Mausbach
(Here is a section on lying.)
Elements of Moral Theology by John J. Elmendorf
(Here is the section on lying.)

On-line casuistry

2006-08-29T17:14:00.000+01:00

Lying in the CCC

2006-08-24T11:48:00.000+01:00

An interesting fact reported this week by Quentin de la Bedoyere on lying in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As he notes, the explanation of the obligation was changed between editions:

Version 1: a lie is 'to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth.' The 'Justice' version.

Version 2: a lie is 'to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error' - with an added proviso that one should use discreet language. The 'Natural Law' version.

The fact that Version one appeared in the CCC is sufficient to show that it is a permissible position in Catholic theology. It is less restrictive, and would be a lot easier to use in hard cases: one may tell untruths in order to lead into error, when one's interlocutor is engaged in some wicked enterprise for which the information one has is vital. It is also clearly what St Robert Southwell acted on, as famously explained at his trial. I'll try to put his dialogue with the prosecutor onto this blog.

Is it ever permissible to deceive?

2006-08-16T18:01:00.000+01:00

Not long ago the government urged us to leave lights on when we go out, in order to prevent burglaries. There are three possible ways of looking at this:

It's a case of impermissible deception: the government is asking us to bring it about that burglars believe a falsehood, viz. that we are in when we aren't, and it's always wrong to bring it about that someone believe a falsehood (at least if the person does not consent).
It's a case of permissible deception: the government is asking us to bring it about that burglars believe a falsehood, but the burglars have no right to know the truth here, so their rights are not violated if we bring it about that they believe a falsehood. (A similar argument was used to justify Sven-Goran Eriksson's lying to his employers about his sex life.)
It's not a case of deception: we do not intend to bring it about that burglars believe a falsehood, we intend to bring it about that they do not believe the truth (viz. that we are out) -- our intentions would be fulfilled if the burglar suspended judgment. We intend merely that the lights' being on should bring it about that the burglar not think that we are in.

I'm inclined to favour (1) above. (I wonder if a burglar has ever broken into a house with the lights on, found nobody at home, and trashed the place, leaving a message saying 'Thought you would try to deceive me, did you?'. It may also be the case, long term, that the result of this scheme will be that burglars will break into more houses with lights on, thinking that nobody is at home, and end up having to beat up the occupants. This may thus lead to a rise in violent crime even if it leads to a decrease in burglary.)

Another interesting example is a friend of a friend that used to smuggle Chinese Bibles into China. He was asked by a custom officer whether he had any literature in his case. He replied:

I have no literature that I can read.

He said this because he thought it would be morally wrong to say 'No', as that would have been a lie. He also thought that it would have been foolish to say 'Yes', as then the custom officer would have found and confiscated the Bibles. He seemed quite pleased with the way round the impasse that he discovered (being unable to read Chinese). But if he wished to bring it about that the custom officer believe a falsehood (viz. that he had no literature in his case) is that really any better than lying? Obviously the custom officer's job was not to ascertain whether he had any literature that he could read but whether he had any literature at all in his case. But perhaps this friend of a friend intended merely that the custom officer shouldn't believe that he had any literature in his case; perhaps he intended just to confuse the officer.

One final, famous, example on the same point. In response to the famous case of the mad axeman at the door asking whether one's friend is inside, many mediaeval casuists asserted that one should say 'non est hic', which could mean either the true 'he is not eating here' or the false 'he is not here'. But if one intends that the axeman should take it in the latter sense, as surely one does, is one not attempting to deceive him, and is this not as bad as lying to him? (Again, perhaps it is possible that one is intending merely that he shouldn't form the opinion that the friend is inside; perhaps one is trying only to confuse, but this seems unlikely.)

Other examples of deception are:

(i) telling children 'noble' lies, e.g. about Santa Claus/Father Christmas;

(ii) teaching children simplified, and strictly false, versions of chemistry, physics, etc., because the truth is too hard for them to understand

(iii) giving approximations because the exact truth would be too tedious to spell out in detail.

One can argue that (iii) doesn't really count because one is affirming not the approximation as an exact truth, but the approximation as an approximation, and this will be understood by one's interlocutor. Are (i) and (ii) justified, though?

Lastly, and most strikingly, there appear to be examples in the Bible where God himself deceives. The two most famous are 2 Thessalonians 2: 11, 'Therefore God sends them [the perishing] a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false', and the story of God's sending the lying spirit to deceive Ahab, reported in 1 Kings 22:

19 Micaiah continued, "Therefore hear the word of the LORD : I saw the LORD sitting on his throne with all the host of heaven standing around him on his right and on his left. 20 And the LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?'
"One suggested this, and another that. 21 Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
22 " 'By what means?' the LORD asked.
" 'I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,' he said.
" 'You will succeed in enticing him,' said the LORD. 'Go and do it.'
23 "So now the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The LORD has decreed disaster for you."

Is it significant that in these passages God acts through secondary means rather than directly affirming a falsehood himself. Do these passages show that it is permissible sometimes for us to deceive after all? Or do they show only that it is sometimes permissible for God to deceive?

Any thoughts?

Can One Lie to a Dog?

2006-06-27T17:50:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine sent me this moral query:

My dog wouldn't come down the stairs today when I called, so my daughter shouted: "We're going!" which is usually sufficient to send my dog racing down the stairs. I reprimanded my daughter because she was lying (we were not going out, and it was wrong to get my dog down the stairs under false pretenses). Then I shook the keys because my dog usually comes down upon hearing the keys. Talk about casuistry! But I was wondering whether you thought it is possible to lie to a dog, and thus whether a moral issue might be involved (assume it was only my dog and I, no other humans about).

Here is my suggestion: to deceive is to cause someone or something to have a false belief, intending so to do. Lying is one way to deceive. In lying one (a) affirms a falsehood, (b) believing it to be a falsehood, and (c) intending that someone believe it. There are other ways of deceiving: shaking one's keys at an adult human in order to get the adult human to believe the falsehood that one is going out, for example. I think that lying and deceit are always wrong.

I don't think, however, that a dog can have beliefs, and so I don't think that a dog can have false beliefs. In addition, one isn't usually affirming the proposition that one is going out when one says to a dog 'We're going out'; one is usually merely giving the dog a certain aural stimulus that will cause it to come down. Shaking of keys is likewise the mere conveying of an aural stimulus: there is usually, when talking to dogs, no intention that this have a causal effect by way of beliefs.

Having said all that, it seems to me likely that my friend's daughter (like most children and some philosophers) thinks of the dog as having beliefs, and so she was attempting (succesfully?) to lie to the dog. Therefore, my friend was right to castigate her. His own action in shaking the keys would, however, give his daughter the false impression that it was morally permissible to deceive -- as long as one didn't lie. So, while my friend's action was in itself morally permissible (since (I'm sure) he doesn't think that dogs have beliefs), it was ill advised in the circumstances. He should have told his daughter off, sent her out of earshot, and then done exactly what she did (but with different intentions).

What do others think?

Jumping Ship

2006-06-08T17:51:00.000+01:00

Joseph S., you quoted Davis in your very interesting (honestly!) post on the technical terms used in Roman-Catholic handbooks of moral theology to the effect that it is morally permissible to jump out of a sinking boat to lighten it, since one doesn't intend to kill oneself.

This raises an interesting problem: why is it that it is morally permissible for me to jump out of the boat voluntarily to lighten it, but impermissible for you to throw me out? (Compare the notorious case of United States v. Holmes.) Lord Bacon claims that it is morally permissible for you to throw me overboard and he was cited (unsuccessfully) in the equally notorious case of R. v. Dudley and Stephens:

Necessity carrieth a privilege in itself. Necessity is of three sorts: necessity of conservation of life, necessity of obedience, and necessity of the act of God or of a stranger. First, of conservation of life. If a man steals viands to satisfy his present hunger, this is no felony nor larceny. So if divers be in danger of drowning by the casting away of some boat or barge, and one of them get to some plank, or on the boat's side, to keep himself above water, and another to save his life thrusts him from it, whereby he is drowned, this is neither se defendendo nor by misadventure, but justifiable.

It is alleged that Bacon justified himself by appealing to 'the canonists', but surely there is no support for this among them or the 'manualists'?

Another question: would it be permissible for me to ask you to help throw me overboard? Would it be permissible for you then to do so? I think so; it seems to me that consent makes a huge difference.

It might be thought that throwing me overboard is impermissible because it still involves intending an assault on my person, but would it, then, be permissible for you to remove a plank in order that I might fall overboard carried by my own weight? I think not. Perhaps the principle is that one shouldn't intend that somebody's body be moved without that person's permission? Still, it seems like a minor offence rather than the major one that we feel against Holmes and his fellow sailors.

Trolleys and fat people come in again here . . . .

Any thoughts, anybody else?

Discrimination and Sexual Orientation

2006-06-08T11:26:00.000+01:00

I have e-mailed the below to equality.project@dti.gsi.gov.uk
The deadline for comments is Friday 9th June.

I would like to make a response to the 'Getting Equal' consultation document.

The document is flawed by a consistent conflict between the main text and the examples. The main text refers to discrimination on the basis of (real or perceived) sexual orientation. Yet the examples appear to be cases of discrimination on the basis of behaviour (p42: same sex couple holding hands), or marital status (discounts applicable to married persons not applicable to persons in a civil partnership, p43). It is not explained why or how these examples are examples of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but presumably the reasoning goes like this:

The only reason why someone should object to a same-sex couple holding hands (in his restaurant), given that he doesn't object to a heterosexual couple holding hands, is a wish to discriminate against those of a particular sexual orientation.

And similarly for the discount case.

However this reasoning ignores the possibility that the restaurant owner (or whoever) is making a judgement not about the sexual orientation of the persons at issue, but on the morality of their behaviour or lifestyle. It is perfectly possible to believe that it is morally permissible for a heterosexual couple to hold hands, and at the same time believe that it is not permissible for a homosexual couple to do so (admittedly this is not a great example, but the point remains valid). A restaurant owner who held these beliefs would think that it is more likely to cause justified scandal and upset to his customers to witness displays of affection from a same-sex couple, than it would for them to witness such a display from a heterosexual couple.

This judgement is in NO WAY dependant on and in no way implies discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

As a matter of contemporary cultural fact the kinds of beliefs I have alluded to are associated with certain religious commitments. The impact of the proposed regulations will be, therefore, an effective discrimination against the freedom of conscience and of association of people of certain faiths. It will cause particular problems for religious charities and other institutions, as many of these are committed to employing people whose lives conform to certain moral standards. If discrimination on the basis of moral behaviour and general way of life is understood - as implied in this consultation document - as discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, this will be very harmful for charities and institutions with a religious ethos.

Bennett and the Cruel Sea

2006-06-01T12:54:00.000+01:00

Extract from an unpublished piece. See Bennett. The Act Itself.

The naval captain is too squeamish to go after the submarine (killing ship-wrick survivors floating in the water) just in order to go after the submarine. He loses his squeamishness, however, when he considers the possibility of killing the personal enemy. Bennett suggests that acting on the intention to kill the enemy would be a way for the captain to fulfil his military obligation, but that it would contravene the obligation not to kill one of the survivors. He also suggests that failing to drive through the survivors, out of squeamishness, would contravene his military obligation. Therein lies the problem, a dilemma in which the first horn is doing the right action on the wrong intention, and the second horn being not doing the right action at all. However, Bennett is mistaken in his presentation of both horns.

On the first, it is not the captain’s duty simply to drive through the survivors; it is his duty to take militarily appropriate action, with the proviso, whether or not this is specified explicitly in military law or the commands of this individual’s superiors, that it is a very serious wrongdoing to conduct operations on the basis of personal enmities, let alone personal enmities with people on his own side, or non-combatants. The proposal before him, according to Bennett, is to do exactly that: to drive through the survivors in pursuit, not of a submarine, but of a personal vendetta. This is not a proposal to fulfil his military duty; it is a proposal to put the warship and sailors at his command to a purely personal use. It would be an act of piracy.

Since he would be also driving through the survivors if he were doing his duty, this clearly represents a golden opportunity for him to pursue his vendetta without being detected. That, however, obviously does not justify his action. Again, his commanding officers might prefer him to behave, outwardly, as he ought to behave, with the wrong intention, than not to behave that way at all. It should be clear, however, that obligations, even military ones, are not just about bodily movements: the same bodily movement might be required and forbidden in conjunction with different mental states, such as beliefs, expectations, and intentions. Obligations govern actions in the full sense, behaviour plus the mens rea, the mental element. So the preference of the military superiors for our captain to move his body in a certain way, regardless of what he is thinking, does not show that his action in doing this would necessarily be the action required by military duty.

On the second horn of Bennett’s dilemma, suppose that the personal enemy were not there, and the captain ‘could not bring himself’ to drive through the survivors. Would that be a failure of duty? Usually, when people say they can’t bring themselves to do things, they mean simply that they have a strong aversion to doing it, which gives them a reason not to do it, and that they don’t value the reason in favour of doing it sufficiently highly to do it anyway. The same people who say that they could not bring themselves to put down the cat, or sack the cook, would do it soon enough if enough depended on it. If Bennett’s captain was on a Soviet ship, and if he had a political commissar standing beside him on the bridge, holding a revolver to his head and reminding him of his obligations, he might suddenly find it in him to do the action after all. If the captain’s inability to do it was of this kind, then it would be true that in failing to do the action the captain would be failing in his duty, for he would be failing, in a kind of moral laziness, to get a grip on himself.

However, that is a distracting thought, because this is Bennett’s example and Bennett tells us that the captain ‘could not bring himself to do it.’ We must take him at his word and assume that the captain really could not do it: there was some kind of psychological blockage which not even a revolver-toting commissar could overcome. We should think of the captain as having a kind of breakdown, akin to shell-shock. The question is whether, in these circumstances, the captain would be failing in his duty in failing to drive through the survivors, and the answer is clearly ‘no’. No one should blame a person who is literally incapable of doing an action for failing to do it. The best thing, militarily, might be for the captain to grow wings and fly over the survivors, plucking them from the ship’s path, but no one is going to drag him before a court martial for failing to do that, for the simple reason that he can’t do it. He might have more difficulty in persuading his superiors that he couldn’t drive through the survivors than that he couldn’t grow wings, but he would not be the first officer to crack up under the stress of combat, and even military law acknowledges the principle ‘ought implies can’. Since there can be no duty to do the impossible, the captain’s incapacity dissolves his obligation to drive through the survivors.

Bennett’s dilemma dissolves with it. The choice before the captain turns out to be a choice between an act of cold-blooded personal vengeance contrary to both ordinary moral principles and his military obligations, and remaining in a state of catatonic passivity caused by the harsh realities of war. This, of course, is a psychologically incredible situation, but that is not the fault of the moral principles, or of their reliance on the concept of intention.

Condoms and Aids

2006-05-29T15:48:00.001+01:00

The linked article [link to article in the Sunday Herald now broken, grr] indicates the poor level of debate on this topic in the popular press. Archbishop Conti (of Glasgow) is trying to make a somewhat complicated point. I'd like to summarize some of the arguments doing the rounds.

First, the natural law prohibition (according to the Church) is against contracepted sex. In terms of intentions it covers acts with (as Finnis calls it) a double intention: both the intention to have sex and the intention, if one has sex, that this act of sex should be prevented from resulting in pregnancy.

This gives rise to the following arguments.

Non-contraceptive uses of the Pill: for controlling menstruation etc.. The permissibility of this is uncontroversial. The permissibility of marital sex in this context is not affected - there is no contraceptive intention.

'Nuns in the Congo': can take the pill when fearing rape. There is no intention to engage in a sexual act. This sounds odd but is widely accepted in the Church. It depends of course on the strictly contraceptive effect of the pill (as opposed to the abortifacient effect).

Morning-after Pill for rape victims: an extension of the last argument. Finnis has defended this, again on the basis of the contraceptive effect of the pill. Its permissibility depends on the intention, and an informed person will make use of this morning after pill after rape with a contraceptive intention (as opposed to an abortifacient intention) only in certain conditions, depending on the time of ovulation and the time since the rape. There is a good precedent for this in the classical discussions (see Henry Davis Moral and Pastoral Theology, Vol II, p171). But the conditions attached to it undermine its practicability.

Non-contraceptive use of condoms: to protect against infection. This seems to be Conti's point. The parallel with the non-contraceptive use of the Pill is inescapable. The fact is that all sorts of things can render a person temporarily or permanently infertile, notably pregnancy, lactation, disease and certain kinds of medical treatment, and even if these things have been entered into voluntarily they do not affect the permissibility of marital sex, assuming they have not been done with a contraceptive intention.

The lesser of two evils argument: if people are going to fornicate, commit adultery, or resort to prostitution, it is better they do so with condoms, because of the risk of infection, and the injustice done to the children who are conceived. This seems to have been Cardinal Martini's argument.

Some uses of this form of argument are uncontroversial: if a pregnant women is hesitating between an abortion and giving her child up for adoption, the agencies of the Church will encourage her to do the latter - despite the fact that doing so is a serious sin. (The child has a right to be brought up by his natural parents.) It is far preferable, of course, to abortion. The efforts of Catholic charities to discourage abortion actually encourage the abandonment of children, but that (non-intended) result is less bad than the alternative, which is a larger number of abortions.

Other uses are controversial: needle-exchange programmes for drug-addicts; efforts to make prostitution less dangerous and unpleasant; free clean drugs for addicts; etc.. It is always a matter of balancing the seriousness of non-intended harms, and has be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Countervailing arguments draw attention to the non-intended harms of the promotion of condoms for infected couples.

The material scandal argument. It would cause scandal for the Church to allow the use of condoms in a sexual context (blowing them into balloons is clearly ok), because for the simple the natural law prohibition is against using contraceptives, simpliciter. 'The Church is against condoms.' This sounds simple minded, but highly paid media executives are very simple minded indeed.

The infrastructure argument. Distributing condoms and educating people in their use will increase the contraceptive use of condoms to a disproportionate extent. Collaborating in the policies of agencies and governments who promote contraception as a thing good in itself, will be even worse.

The Russion roulette argument. Condoms are far from fail-safe in preventing pregnancy, and the same will be true of preventing infection. (On the one hand the virus has to enter the bloodstream, but on the other an infected person is infectious all the time.) For a married person who knows he is HIV positive to have sex with his uninfected partner with a condom, would be for him to play Russian roulette with his partner's life.

On reflection, whatever one may think of the principles appealed to in favour of a permissive attitude to condoms, and whatever balance of harms derives from the earlier arguments, the Russian rouletter argument seems to be decisive. How could it be right to subject a spouse this this appalling risk, and to do so without necessity, and repeatedly?

Post Script: since writing the above I have encountered a different approach: that 'condomistic' intercourse is itself wrong, even within marriage, even with no contraceptive intention, because the condom barrier prevents it from being an act of mutual self-giving. This is an attractive argument, and is set out by William May here.

Torture: reply to Joseph S.

2006-05-29T15:22:00.000+01:00

Situation A: we have a ticking timebomb planted by a terrorist, but we don't know where. His wife didn't know that he was a terrorist but she does know where he's been spending a lot of time lately. She won't, however, say where until a lawyer skilled both in our law and the law of her native land and religion arrives to witness her statement. We don't have time to wait for this lawyer; is it OK to torture her to get the information out in a couple of minutes?

Situation B: we have a ticking timebomb planted by a terrorist in our hands. Only one person can defuse this very intricate bomb safely. But he is retired now and won't leave the bedside of his dying wife. Can we torture him to get him to leave her and defuse the bomb?

With regards to both A and B, Joseph S. suggests that yes, it is morally permissible to torture the person in question. I disagree. Even if they are guilty of a wrongdoing, it is surely not one that deserves torture. In any case, it is plain that we aren’t considering torturing them as punishment for their wrongdoing, for we’d stop the torture as soon as they agreed to help (and not resume it afterwards), even though the torture might go on for different times at different levels of intensity for different cases, contrary to what we expect from punishment.

Also consider the following case: suppose the terrorist’s innocent wife wants to cooperate but cannot remember where her husband left the bomb. The psychologist says that she’ll remember under torture. She doesn’t submit voluntarily to torture, for she believes it’s always wrong. (Her belief is correct if the argument of my paper is sound.) Surely it wouldn’t be OK to torture her to get her to remember?

Joseph S. also suggested the following: anyway, if we define ‘material aggressor’ as ‘person who is a causal factor in an impending harm, and harming whom could avert the harm’, then they are material aggressors, and the question of guilt does not even arise.

I think, however, that this definition will be too broad. It will certainly include (contrary to the Vatican) babies that are causing their mothers harm, and would include, surely, the fat potholer whose stuck body prevents us from getting out of the cave, or the bystander that is in my way as I rush to escape some harm.

Note that there are other contexts than ones involving agents of the state in which the question arises: suppose that my daughter has been kidnapped and I have captured one of the gang, who tells me that my daughter has been buried alive in an airless coffin and has only hours to live. He refuses to divulge where she is buried. May I beat the information out of him? No, I say.

Daniel

When is it permissible to kill in self-defence?

2006-05-29T11:06:00.000+01:00

With regard to the first post on this blog, I'd like to raise for broader discussion the question of what constitutes material (as opposed to formal) aggression. The question can be posed without the jargon: when is it morally permissible to intend to kill someone in self-defence? One answer would be:
(A) It is morally permissible to intend to kill someone in self-defence only if that person is maliciously intending to kill (or cause grievous bodily harm to) one.
There are, however, some problems with this:
(i) it wouldn't allow one to kill in self-defence in war time (for the enemy soldiers wouldn't have malicious intent);
(ii) it also wouldn't allow one to kill in self-defence if one were about to be wrongly judicially executed (e.g. by mistaken identity);
(iii) it wouldn't allow one to kill in self-defence if one were attacked by someone acting in (what he or she thought was) *his or her own* self-defence;
(iv) it wouldn't allow one to kill in self-defence if one were subjected to grievous bodily harm by a doctor under the mistaken impression that he or she was performing a surgically beneficial procedure;
(v) most importantly, it wouldn't allow one to kill in self-defence if one were attacked by a madman or a drunk or someone under the influence of drugs;
(vi) also, it might well be that someone endangers my life maliciously without intending to kill me, e.g. if I am a shipwreck-survivor on a small plank in the open sea, someone tries to throw me off not to kill or hurt me but to save him or herself--I think that here it would be permissible to kill my assailant even though he or she doesn't intend to kill or hurt me.
At the other extreme would be this principle:
(B) It is morally permissible to intend to kill someone in self-defence only if that person would kill (or cause grievous bodily harm to) one if one weren't to kill that person.
But (B) seems too permissive for the following reasons:
(i) it would allow a mother to kill her foetus if it were endangering her life (though intended abortion is always condemned by the Vatican);
(ii) it would allow one to kill clumsy bystanders that were about to knock one in front of a bus;
(iii) it would allow one to kill a child that was playing with a handgrenade;
(iv) it would allow one to kill the person falling off a building on top of one.
Some of these cases are a bit tricky, and there is certainly controversy surrounding them.
I propose a midway principle:
(C) It is morally permissible to intend to kill someone in self-defence only if that person is about intentionally to kill (or cause grievous bodily harm to) one.
The point about (C) is that it allows one to kill people that are about intentionally to perform an action that amounts to killing or the causation of grievous bodily harm even if they do not intend to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. Thus, one may kill the person trying to tip one off the plank into the sea since he or she intends to perform the action of tipping one off, which will amount to killing or causing grievous bodily harm, even though the assailant doesn't intend to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. It will not, however, allow one to kill a child, to abort a foetus, or kill a clumsy bystander or a falling person, since they aren't intentionally about to perform an action that would amount to a killing or infliction of grievous bodily harm. It would allow one to kill a mad person or a drunk or someone under the influence of drugs provided that he or she was about intentionally to perform the action in question: there is a difference between a drunk's drunkenly pushing one over a cliff and a drunk's drunkenly falling into one knocking one over a cliff.

What do others think?

Captain Oates and Altruistic Suicide

2006-05-28T20:35:00.000+01:00

Quentin de la Bedoyere (QB), writing in the Catholic Herald (successive issues, May 2006) raises the question of Captain Oates leaving his companions, on their antarctic expedition, in order to maximise their chances of survival (since he would not be using up stores etc.). Oates simply left the camp and walked into the wilderness to certain death. Was this wrong?
QB addresses one response: it was permissible because Oates's intention was to benefit his companions, and not to die himself. QB replies: Oates accomplished his helping of the others by his own death. Since one must intend one's means, he intended his death.
I reply: Oats's death was not a necessary part of Oates's plan; it was his absence, or better, his non-use of the scarce resources, which was necessary, and this was accomplished by his walking away from camp (to certain death).
Similarly, the man who jumps out of an overladen life-boat, to lighten it, intends to lighten it, and to jump out (as a means to that), but does not (necessarily) intend his own death, which does nothing to advance his plan of saving the remaining people. (On this example see Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology.)
As a matter of fact, Oates is on record as advocating suicide using a revolver as a way out in these situations, and wanted a revolver on the expedition for the purpose. This would obviously involve the intention of death, since the only way shooting oneself brings about one's non-use of scarce resources is by one's being killed. This suggests Oates's intention may have been to kill himself. However this does not change the principles at work in the case.

Kant's Religion on Ritual: reply to Lucy Allais

2006-05-25T16:56:00.000+01:00

My original argument: Kant wrongly rejects outward religious obligations (such as rituals), in Religion within the Realm of Reason Alone, failing to see that (for example) sacramental rituals purport to effect a metaphysical change, and are thus not (in the view of the participant) 'empty'.

Lucy's reply: Kant is here relying on the conclusion of an argument in the First Critique, in which he attempts to show that such metaphysical changes are unknowable. Thus no participant in a sacramental ritual could know that there will be or has been a metaphysical change, and thus there is no justification for the participation. Accordingly, any objection to Kant on this subject should start with the First Critique, and not with the remarks about ritual in the Religion.

On further reflection, I reply: First, the justification I sought for the ritualist was subjective, not objective, and Kant's argument against the knowability of metaphysical facts would not directly impinge on this. (I mean that it is a matter of what the participant believes to be the case, not what actually is the case, which determines the blameworthiness of his action. The ritualist believes he knows the necessary metaphysical facts, and so on.)

Second, Kant is willing to countenance the 'postulation' of three admittedly unknowable metaphysical facts 'as problematical hypotheses', which nevertheless are rightly used as assumptions in deciding what to do: Viz. the existence of God, the freedom of the Will, and the Afterlife. This provides a model for dealing with further metaphysical claims, such as Transubstantiation. Kant thinks that he is licensed to postulate the three claims, and not any others, because they are in different ways absolutely necessary for us to postulate if we are to act rightly and with moral worth. The claim that the reality of Transubstantiation is not something which is necessary for us to postulate, certainly makes sense from Kant's point of view, but is vulnerable to theological objections. Suppose, say, that God revealed that it was after all necessary? ('If you do not eat My Flesh.. you can have no life in you.')

In fact Kant refuses to dismiss the possibility of divine revelation to individuals, but claims it cannot have any moral impact, because it is necessarily not 'universal'. It is this argument which gets the most exercise in the Religion, not the unknowability of metaphysics.

Third, I referred to the Catholic Sacraments as an extreme example of a ritual not being 'empty' and mere outward actions and words - according to their devotees. However there are many religious ritual obligations which do not rest on metaphysical claims such as transubstantiation. Ordinary prayer (praise and thanksgiving), for example, is regarded (in the Tradition) as a obligation upon all rational beings, not contingently upon a revealed command, but as the consequence of the recognition of the existence of God, which can be recognised by arguing from the effects to the cause (so the classical argument goes). Kant rejects such teleological arguments, but he does postulate the existence of God, precisely in order to take account of its practical consequences. He does not regard the existence of God as an indication that we are obliged to engage in prayer, however, and it is not clear why. Again, I suspect that theological assumptions are in play here.

Fourth, Kant actually approves of rituals designed to raise heart and mind to God. We should use 'certain formalities' to make ourselves worthy of divine assistance; these are 'observances which have no intrinsic value but yet serve as a means to the furthering of the moral disposition.' (Part II Section 3) See also the General Observation at the end of this Section: rituals with metaphysical import are allowed a purely ethical role.

This is of great historical interest, because (thought not without precursors) it is the manifesto for 'liberal' modern theology. It is clearly influenced by the (usually incomplete) Protestant rejection of the supernatural in religion, in favour of the ethical. Classical Protestant moves are to say that, for example, saints can be allowed a role not as intercessors in heaven (answering our prayers), but as ethical examples for our imitation; church services do not create a metaphysical reality, but retain a role as exhortations (and usually very tedious ones); etc. etc..

However, despite this, Kant continues to insist that religious observances cannot be moral duties: 'one can recognise its useful influence... and at the same time deny to it, taken as the illusory duty of divine worship, all influence upon the concept of genuine (that is, moral) religion.' Why? Because it is historically developed or revealed, and so is not universal, and genuine moral duties are universal. A familiar argument, but a bad one: why not say that the duty to worship God is universal, but (in Kantian terminology) an imperfect one? Or indeed one that can be perfected, for a certain group, by a divine revelation or a historical church.

More needs to be said about Kant's argument and the best response to it, but it does at least seem to be a moral and theological issue, and not a metaphysical one.

2006-05-17T20:08:00.000+01:00

Forgiveness

Forgiveness: some comments on Lucy Allais’s ‘Aspirational Forgiveness’

Joseph Shaw

This is one of those topics in which philosophers are uneasily aware that there is a theological background to ordinary thinking, without understanding, or wanting to get involved in, the theology. So a couple of thoughts about that might be useful, although I’m far from being an expert on that either.

The ‘foundational prayers and creeds’ Calhoun refers to as establishing the Christian idea of forgiveness is presumably the Fifth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ This is illustrated by the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, and other passages. I note this because an easy way in to the theological literature is to see the discussion of either in biblical commentaries, or, especially, the petition-by-petition discussion of the Lord’s Prayer in the 16^th C. Catechism of the Council of Trent, or the new Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Two important things which are worth saying are these: Christian forgiveness is not exactly obligatory, since there is great emphasis on its being voluntary; and Christian forgiveness does not wipe away all need for punishment. Both these points are important, but easy to miss.

On the first: The major incentive for forgiveness is the desire for a similar forgiveness from God. And in each case, what actually happens in forgiveness is that the forgiver disclaims at least some what is owed to him in justice. (This obviously can’t be obligatory: it can’t be a requirement of justice to waive what is just.) Since we forgive what is owing to us personally, we can forgive an injury without being unjust; it is supererogatory. (We have the right to give up what we have a right to demand.) However, in the context of a Christian’s relationship with God, a failure to forgive others would be scandalous, since God has forgiven each of us much more—hence the parable of the unforgiving servant, who refused to forgive a trivial debt, having been forgiven himself a vast one. If we hope, not for justice, but for a supererogatory forgiveness, from God, we have to behave in a parallel way ourselves.

This is, incidentally, in line with your interpretation of Bishop Butler. Butler is following the standard orthodox line here, as given in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, for example. Feelings of resentment may remain, and insofar as they are involuntary, should not be a cause for scruples in the Christian, who has genuinely given up plans for revenge etc..

On the second: In withdrawing our claim on what is owed to us, we don’t necessarily obviate the need for punishment, let alone repentance. It is interesting that you mention absolution here, because, odd as it may seem, real absolution does not remove one’s liability to punishment. What it does is commute eternal punishment due to mortal sin (if the penitent has confessed a mortal sin), to temporal (ie non-eternal) punishment (ie purgatory). This is still due to God’s justice, even though the penitent has clearly received God’s forgiveness.

And even this kind of absolution is only possible because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Christ’s sacrifice is an offering to God which is sufficient to make up for all the sins throughout history, and Christ made this offering available to us to satisfy God’s justice, making God’s forgiveness possible. God forgives (ie, no longer requires what is owed to him in justice, which is eternal punishment), because he graciously accepts the offering of Christ, offered by the penitent in lieu of what he owes God. (So God’s forgiveness is still supererogatory, but it does not go so far in merely giving up the demands of justice, as to trivialise the wrongdoing and the wrongdoer: a point emphasised by Richard Swiburne in his book on atonement.)

On the other hand, sins which are forgiven are ‘blotted out’, not merely ignored, and no longer act as a barrier in one’s relationship with God. This is in sharp contrast with the Lutheran and in general Protestant view, in which God merely ignores our sins. In Catholic thinking, God makes us genuinely better people. Our souls are injured by sin, and they are healed by God when he forgives us.

It is interesting to think of the philosophical debate in the light of this doctrine. If one doesn’t want to talk about God, but wants to give a sympathetic account of the intuition that forgiveness is possible and good, and even quasi-obligatory, the paradoxes your paper started with arise very quickly. However, it still makes sense to say that one is not being unjust in waiving what one is owed; and that this is a good thing, when seeking to restore a relationship with someone who is seeking forgiveness. What is not possible to see is how justice might be satisfied from a different source, ie Christ’s sacrifice; and how forgiving others has an important role in one’s other important relationship, ie with God.

Forgiveness of the unrepentant, I think, is a slightly different animal, although the same word is used. I think that the theological context of this is the command to love one’s enemies, and pray for the persecutors, and not curse them. Again, in the original context this is motivated by reference to the parallel with God’s attitude, which is to love everyone, and to seek their salvation—God does not desire the destruction of the sinner and so forth. And as before, while as an individual one gives up one’s claim on the person persecuting one, the need for the latter to repent, and to be punished/ do penance, remains. And again this is all connected to the way in which Christ took on the burden of sin in dying on the cross. But whereas the point of forgiving the penitent—God forgiving us or us each other—is to restore the relationship, the point in forgiving the unrepentant is to seek his good, and not his (moral) destruction.

In one sense God has already forgiven all sins, because he has accepted Christ’s offering, which is sufficient in justice to make up for all sin. But in another sense God’s forgiveness awaits the sinner’s repentance, which involves the sinner’s pleading of Christ’s offering on his own behalf. What we imitate, here, is God going after the sinner—the lost sheep—and trying to win him over by doing good to him, and not merely abandon him to his just punishment. As with the other kind of forgiveness, without the theological background this is harder to understand, but I think that the supererogatory nature of wishing well to the persecutor, without denying the seriousness of his wrongdoing, is still intelligible.

The example of the adulterous husband illustrates some of these issues. In Catholic teaching adultery (and ‘unreasonable behaviour’, which would cover physical abuse) gives the injured party the right to separation (of ‘bed and table’). (The conditions for to annulment and remarriage are a separate matter.) If the injured party should forgive the adulterer/ abuser, this is the giving up of what is belongs to her by right. The good of the relationship would usually be a powerful reason to forgive, and thereby restore the relationship, but as you say there are limits, most obviously where physical abuse is concerned. In the scenario you describe, the beaten wife might give the husband the forgiveness of not seeking revenge, but not go back to him, even if he expressed repentance.

I hope this is helpful. In light of what I’ve said, one thing I would look out for in this debate is whether the different participants accept the possibility of supererogation. A lot of people don’t, and if you don’t, I think the paradoxes of forgiveness are insoluble.

2006-05-17T20:02:00.000+01:00

Torture

Daniel Hill’s ‘Tortue and Self-Defense’: Comments

Joseph Shaw

I think the examples and discussion throw up some extremely important questions, and I will try out another response, below. There are a few relatively minor issues I disagree with you about, however, and I’d like to get them out of the way first.

First, while is relatively uncontroversial to say that killing is ok in war and self-defence, it is not uncontroversial to derive the right to kill in war from the right to kill in self-defence. This move is fashionable with certain kinds of political theorist, but Thomists disagree, and there are a lot of them about in the debate about intention. Aquinas is a lot more comfortable with the state’s right to kill than with the private citizen’s; so deriving the former from the latter would be retrograde.

Second, I don’t like the terminology of ‘intentionally causing harm’. Agent either acts with the intention to cause harm, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, he may still be acting intentionally, and if he is acting intentionally, what he is doing may be causing harm. In which case it is natural to say that he is intentionally causing harm—although (ex hypothesi) he is not acting with the intention of causing harm. People like Anscombe even say that an intentional action which knowingly causes harm is intentionally causing harm, and that this allows us to conclude that the harm is intended—which is hopeless. To avoid the muddles which arise from that scenario, I completely avoid using the adverb ‘intentionally’.

Third, I am surprised at what you say about innocent threats: the child playing with the hand-grenade and so on. It is well-established in the debate—obviously not infallibly so—that one can intend to harm innocent threats, and I should like to see a full-length argument against this view. (Innocent threats are distinguished in the Catholic tradition as ‘material aggressors’, as opposed to ‘formal aggressors’.) There is a very good reason for this: in the paradigm case of the just war, the subjective guilt of enemy combatants has got to be irrelevant to one’s right to kill them. One may even be quite sure that the enemy soldier is convinced, on the basis of the information available to him, of the justice of his cause. But the right to self-defence, public or private, is not removed by this. What it depends on is the objective rightness of the situation: if you know he’s wrong to be attacking you, you can resist. The same goes for the child and the grenade: he’s a material aggressor; the aggression is unjust; one may resist the aggression.

Fourth, I am extremely wary of distinctions between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ actions and the like. Do you have a neat and tidy criterion for the distinction? You need to state what it is. Personally, I think that Jonathan Bennett has buried that whole approach in ‘The Act Itself’. But I’ve got a paper about it if you’re interested, which is also relevant to my solution below (‘A Use for the Act-Omission Distinction’).

On the major issue: now that you’ve convinced me that we have to talk about intending harms and pains in self-defence, it would seem that the right to self-defence comes down to the right to inflict harms and pains on people. So the problem is: why do our intuitions tell us it is ok to inflict pain on a paradigmatic aggressor, like the 11-yr-old, and on the terrorist reaching for the bomb switch, and not ok to torture a terrorist into telling us where the bomb is hidden, and things like that? Let alone the terrorist’s otherwise innocent wife, who knows the secret, or the retired bomb-disposal expert, who is reluctant to help. (Nice examples.)

A couple of possibilities come to mind. One is: are the people in the latter category aggressors, in the same sense as people in the former category? At first glance it would seem that the only way of distinguishing them from aggressors would be some positive/negative distinction which I am quite sure would collapse the moment it is articulated. But I’ll come back to this.

Another is that our intuitions tell us no such distinction. Of course it is morally ok to torture the terrorist for information which will reliably save lives, and the wife, and the retired bomb expert. All of them are in fact guilty of a very serious wrongdoing, of failing in a positive duty to aid others and undo a wrongdoing, when it is in their power to do so, and where the cost of doing so is small. (They are accessories to the bomb-planting, in fact, either formally or materially.) And anyway, if we define ‘material aggressor’ as ‘person who is a causal factor in an impending harm, and harming whom could avert the harm’, then they are material aggressors, and the question of guilt does not even arise.

A third possibility, which in a way incorporates both the above, is this: in drawing up rules of engagement for soldiers and police, especially in a situation where one hopes for reciprocity from the enemy (as in the Geneva Convention), it may makes sense to make some distinction here, for practical and pragmatic reasons. Because of the marked tendency to over-use torture, the high likelihood of persons being tortured who actually lack the information being sought, and the appalling nature of torture itself, it may seem sensible to agree that harms should not be inflicted when a person has surrendered. Physical surrender is without doubt the key to the rules of engagement: that is when harm must stop. As discussed, a person may continue to be an aggressor, material or formal, while in secure custody, by withholding information. Indeed enemy soldiers with knowledge of their army’s secrets will normally come into this category. But in the interests of placing a limit on the horrors of war, the convention that one may not harm such aggressors is agreed, and becomes morally binding.

So here is a type of active/passive distinction which will resist collapse: different norms apply before and after surrender; surrender being a conventional concept indicated by intentional use of conventional signs.

How about that?

2006-05-17T18:57:00.000+01:00

Insomniac's corner: Catholic handbooks of moral theology - a discussion of their technical terms

(extract from a longer unpublished piece by me)

Next I need to give some more systematic attention to the terminological issues raised by the manualists. To help me explain their applications, I shall refer to some imaginary examples.

Alfred the bandit steals money, preferring a life of crime to an honest job as a way of supporting his family.

Belinda the doctor gives dying patients high doses of pain-killer, in the knowledge that this will shorten their lives, but with the chosen purpose only of controlling their pain.

Cuthbert the doctor gives dying patients high doses of pain-killer, in the knowledge that this will shorten their lives, but with the chosen purpose to finish them off, because he is fed up with them.

The word ‘intention’ (and its Latin root) is used in a number of different ways. The 1939 edition of Gury and the Dictionary of Moral Theology use it in connection with the first condition of the PDE: one intends the positing of the cause, or whatever one immediately does. This suggests, to use a term to be explained in a moment, that ‘intention’ should be limited to the object of an act.[i] (Alfred’s intention, in this sense, would be theft.) However, Prümmer uses it in a way distinguished from the first condition, to refer to the motive of the action (Alfred’s desire to support his family); Prümmer’s interest is in good or indifferent actions done with bad motives.

Again, Prümmer and Davis use ‘intending’ and ‘willing’ in their discussion of the voluntary, where they adopt Jeremy Bentham’s distinction between directly intended (or ‘willed’) and ‘indirectly intended (or ‘willed’)’ to separate things really intended, and those which are merely foreseen (see below). (Belinda, on this terminology, intends or wills her patients’ deaths indirectly, and their comfort directly. Cuthbert intends his patients’ deaths directly.) Finally, in his discussion of suicide Davis uses the word in the ordinary sense and with admirable clarity. A man jumps out of an over-laden boat to lighten it:

We defend his action, because the first effect, viz., the lightening of the boat, was a good effect, intended by him as such, and the other effect, his drowning, was not at all intended in itself, neither as an end or as a means. It was foreseen and permitted.[ii]

(On this usage, Belinda does not intend the deaths at all.) To avoid confusion I shall continue to use the word in this, my own sense, except where I make it clear that I am doing otherwise.

The ‘object’ of an act is (Davis tells us) ‘that to which the will immediately and primarily directs itself and its activity’.[iii] This is the action itself under an appropriate description, ascribable to the agent as what he is doing. The description is one in the ‘moral order’, and it is generally fixed by reference to the intention of the act, although it may still be natural to distinguish object and intention. This requires a different illustration. ‘Getting appointed as x’ is the intention with which Daphne goes to a job interview. However, while ‘going to a job interview’ is obviously the description of an action which Daphne is doing, ‘getting appointed’ is not; rather, it is something which she hopes to achieve by means of the action. On the other hand, the intention of getting appointed rules out a description of Daphne’s object as merely ‘going to room y in building z’, or ‘walking around’. When we say that she is going to a job interview, this description relies on and implies (at least in the normal case) her intention to get a job. The practice of distinguishing objects from ultimate intentions explains the manualists’ tendency to separate the action in itself from what it does, its purpose (in Prümmer), or its causal role (in Gury and Davis), despite the fact that for all of these writers the act is understood (implicitly) in terms of its intention. Again, Alfred’s thieving might be separated from his supporting his family, as object and purpose. I return to the concept of ‘object’ at the end of the section.

The ‘act’ itself, by distinction from the object of the act, is the act of will which is the origin of the action. It is objects which are good or bad in the first place, but there is also a goodness or badness of the will in doing them, as will become clear in dealing with the next two terms. The difference between act and object is sometimes referred to as the distinction between the external act and the internal act, since usually the internal act of will is accompanied by an external act of the body. However, a mental action like imagining or calculating is an object of an act of the will, and not just an act of the will.

The distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ sin is between sin which is against one’s conscience and sin which is ‘in dissacord with unsuspected moral obligation’.[iv] The manualists have at their disposal an elaborate classification of different kinds of ignorance, and an account of how much, if at all, they excuse. The distinction between formal and material goodness and badness corresponds to the objective goodness or badness of the object of the act, and the subjective goodness or badness of the act itself.[v] What this means is that Alfred’s theft is objectively wrong, as an object of the will, but if Alfred has non-culpable ignorance of the immorality of theft (if this is possible) it may be subjectively excused. On the other hand, because theft is objectively wrong, if Alfred knows it is wrong, then his will must be malicious, regardless of any further intention in the action, and it is a morally wrong act. Again, an indifferent object (giving a pain-killer) may be done with a good will (as by Belinda) or a bad will (as by Cuthbert). The good or bad will determines the moral quality of otherwise indifferent actions.

Prümmer adds that causing a bad result (such as deaths) is a materially bad act, a ‘material sin’, but there is no formal sin if it does not fall under any of the first three conditions of the PDE, and if, further, there is a justification in terms of a compensatory good (the fourth condition: in Belinda’s case, the easing of pain). The concept of material badness of acts is also important for dealing with what the contemporary philosophical literature calls ‘innocent threats’. A child playing innocently with a hand-grenade, or an enemy soldier sincere, but mistaken, in his belief of the justness of his cause, are ‘materially’ in the wrong, or are ‘material aggressors’, and force can be used against them. A person who takes your goods thinking they are his is a material thief, and can be apprehended.

An act ‘which is itself a morally wrong act’ (as Davis puts it), is distinguished, by implication, from actions which are themselves innocent, but are made wrong by the will or by circumstances. There are two ways in which an act may be wrong ‘in itself’: it may be intrinsically wrong, like ‘hatred of God’, or it may be wrong because of a ‘positive precept’, that is, an authoritative command[vi] (such as a contract of employment, or the law of the land). Acts wrong in themselves cannot be willed rightly, unless there is non-culpable ignorance: someone willing them is willing wrongly. Other objects are indifferent in themselves, but are made right or wrong by circumstance or motive. (Belinda’s use of an illegal painkiller is wrong in itself. Cuthbert’s giving a legal painkiller to the patient he wants to finish off is wrong because of his motive. Belinda’s giving a lethal dose of legal painkiller to dull the pain of another patient is right because of the circumstances - for example, because it will not shorten his life by a significant amount.)

The distinction between acts wrong in themselves and those wrong only because of motive or circumstance reinforces the tendency to separate the ‘object’ from circumstances, motives and consequences, but the separation is not carried out systematically because the description of the object often specifies the motive (‘hatred of God’), the circumstances (‘theft’, taking what is another’s) or anticipated consequences (‘saving a life’).

The ‘voluntary’ is a category the manualists have adopted, via Aquinas, from Aristotle. The way they use it, however, is their own. Davis seems to have it that it is the consequences of action, and not exactly actions themselves, which are voluntary or not. (Thus the focus is on losses of property, not on acts of thieving.) Intended results are voluntary (the loss of property Alfred causes). If I know that an effect will occur if I act, but act without intending it, the effect is voluntary in its cause, but not in itself[vii] (the deaths of Belinda’s patients). If I refrain from preventing an effect when I should prevent it, it is indirectly voluntary (if Alfred leaves a victim injured, who dies without assistance).

Prümmer calls acts, not consequences, voluntary or not. (Thus the focus is on acts of thieving, not losses of property.) Acts willed in their cause, but not in themselves, he calls indirectly voluntary. An obligatory act which is omitted is called negatively voluntary.[viii] (So what Davis calls ‘indirect’ Prümmer calls ‘negative’; Prümmer calls ‘indirect’ what Davis calls ‘voluntary in its cause’.)

Although it is more natural to say that it is acts which are voluntary or not, and not the results of acts, the focus on acts causes Prümmer problems. First, although the result of an omission might be attributable to an agent as what Davis calls ‘indirectly voluntary’, the omission cannot itself be called an ‘act’, even (as Prümmer has it) a ‘negatively voluntary’ one, because omitting to act is not a kind of act. Second, Prümmer’s example of an indirectly voluntary act is Aristotle’s case of throwing cargo overboard in a storm. Prümmer says that the loss of the cargo is ‘detested’, but in fact, while the loss of the cargo’s value is not desired or intended, the loss of its weight emphatically is intended, as the chosen means to saving the ship. The case is exactly parallel to Davis’ suicide example quoted above. The distinction between value and weight cannot, however, be made when talking in terms of ‘acts’ rather than outcomes.

Prümmer later says that effects which ‘could and ought to have been foreseen’ (the victim left to die, perhaps when Alfred eased his conscience with the thought that he might be saved by a passer-by) are ‘indirectly intended’.[ix] Overall, his terminology explains why Prümmer refers, instead of to foreseen but non-intended upshots, to indirectly voluntary acts.

‘Direct’ and ‘indirect killing’ is not used in my sources’ formulation and initial discussion of the PDE, since that is a general principle, not limited to killing. Davis has a later section on ‘indirect killing’ which does not use that phrase in the text;[x] however, his discussion indicates that it refers to killing which is a ‘secondary effect’ in accordance with the PDE, which he then calls ‘indirectly intended’ or ‘indirectly willed’ (Belinda causing deaths). Prümmer links it explicitly to the voluntary, and says that indirect killing is an action in which killing is indirectly voluntary.[xi] On his terminology this means that it is not intended.

However, in another passage Davis writes ‘It is never allowed directly, i.e., by direct means, nor intentionally, i.e., with deliberate intent, to kill the human product in utero…’[xii] This attributes to the notion of directness a reference not only to intention but to certain kinds of causation, which is then put on a level with intention as coming under the prohibition. Indeed, it is natural to think of ‘directness’ in this area as causal directness.[xiii] This is not in line with Davis’ own official definition, and it suggests that Belinda’s giving of pain-killers, which is causally responsible for the deaths of her patients, is ‘direct’ regardless of her intentions; I return to Davis’ treatment of this issue in the next chapter. It cannot really be the case that causal directness should be put on a level with intention; as well as misclassifying Belinda’s actions, causal directness does not imply that one knows what one is doing. Charles Fried gives the example of a person running to catch a train who knocks a bystander off the platform to his death: this is causally direct, but not only unintended but unwitting.[xiv]

‘Co-operation’, Davis tells us, ‘is concurrence with another in a sinful act’.[xv] It may be ‘formal’ or ‘material’, depending on whether the sin is itself willed, or not. The category of material co-operation is further subdivided and can be excused for strong reasons in certain kinds of case. It is important, however, as an example of a wrongdoing associated with one or other good or virtue which does not involve an attack by intention on the good or virtue. The PDE explicitly recognises the wrongness of actions which fail the test of proportionality, as wrongs against (say) life, which do not include an intention to kill; material co-operation with a killer, as by supplying the murder weapon out of a desire for profit but in the knowledge of the bad use to which it would be put, is in the same position, and is certainly not ignored by the manualists. It cannot be subsumed under proportionality, because the moral significance of, say, handing the killer a gun is not reducible to its impact on the value of outcomes: it would be wrong even if someone else was standing by ready to lend another gun if necessary, in which case whether one co-operated or not would make no difference to what ultimately happened.

A pithy expression of the moral importance of co-operation is given by the ‘Nine ways of being accessory to another’s sin’ which is a traditional part of the ‘Examination of Conscience’ printed in Catholic prayer books: ‘1. By counsel. 2. By command. 3. By consent. 4. By provocation. 5. By praise or flattery. 6. By concealment. 7. By partaking. 8. By silence. 9. By defence of the ill done.’

While on the subject, a related way discussed by the manualists to do wrong without necessarily intending harm to any good is connected with scandal. Like co-operation it comes in two varieties, ‘direct’ scandal, where bad example is intended to cause another’s wrongdoing, and ‘indirect’ scandal, where it is not.[xvi] At least arguably indirect scandal, like material co-operation, is not reducible to proportionality. As with proportionality, in both these cases the prohibition is against doing something knowingly, and not just by intention: if we know that we are acting in such a way as to cause harm, or that we are co-operating in evil, or that we are giving scandal, then this is wrong unless there is some justification, either in terms of compensating goods, or the high cost of avoiding it, or something else.

Finally, twin concepts not used by Davis and Prümmer, but which are closely related to the above listed concepts: finis operantis and finis operis. The finis operantis is the ‘end of the agent’; the finis operis, literally, is the ‘end of the action’. In its ethical use this distinction corresponds to that between ultimate motive (finis operantis) and object (finis operis). Calling them ‘ends’ is simply a way of emphasising that they are both intentions (in my sense) of the agent: the agent has as an end, intends, not only his ultimate goal, but also the action he does in order to achieve that goal.

I mention these concepts and distinctions not in order to recommend them to a wider audience, but in order to facilitate an understanding of the issues surrounding intention, as discussed in the Catholic tradition. By way of explanation for the complexity exhibited here it is important to understand that the manualists, like legal theorists, aspired to a complete coverage of morality, in such a way that the principles necessary to decide any moral question would be available to their readers. In addition, and again like legal theorists, the manualists were obliged to build upon an existing foundation of precedents, partially articulated principles and established terminological usages. Someone going through the material with a blank sheet of paper might be able to work out a more parsimonious set of concepts, but such a project would make it difficult to incorporate the insights of previous thinkers or authoritative decisions as originally expressed.

I need to say a little more about the concept of the voluntary, and the notion of the object of an act. On the voluntary, as I noted the concept comes from Aristotle, who did not seem to have an articulated concept of the will or of intention. By contrast, the concepts of will and intention come from the Augustinian tradition. The synthesis of these two traditions by Aquinas has left his successors with two sets of concepts for doing what is essentially the same job: separating the paradigmatic wicked action from actions where an agent is not to be blamed for a bad outcome he nevertheless caused. Defining the voluntary in terms of intention is the way the manualists have adopted of unifying their set of concepts, but this makes the notion of voluntariness even more obviously redundant. The concept continues to influence the way the discussion is framed, however, most importantly is drawing attention to acts, rather than intentions or outcomes. The search for acts which are supposed to be right or wrong ‘themselves’, and attributable or not attributable to the agent, brings in the concept of ‘object’.

This is the most important of the concepts just explained. It is worth pausing to consider what would result if Germain Grisez were correct to complain, as he does, that the manualists categorised actions merely as ‘chunks of behaviour’.[xvii] This presumably means that ‘objects’ are actions described in morally neutral terms, such as ‘crossing the road’ or ‘killing’. This seems to be presupposed by Elizabeth Anscombe when talking about ethics, when she say that intentions have reference to actions, not to outcomes, and so an action is intended itself, even on a description which includes reference to unintended consequences.[xviii] She tends to say, further, that the main morally important outcome of an action is, somehow, to be seen as an intention of the agent, for the purposes of the PDE, even if it is not intended; a similar move has been made by other writers who suggest that an action of ‘killing’ has a ‘finis operis’ of death ‘in itself’ which is attributable to the agent, regardless of what the agent intended as an end or a means. This interpretation is ruled out, of course, by the definitions of ‘object’ I have already referred to, but it should also be noticed that it has the result that the question of the PDE would simply not arise. Since unintended consequences can always be fitted into a description of the object, every action which produced an evil effect would be an evil object: every action causing a death could be described as a killing. It is obvious that not every action which predictably causes death, such as Belinda’s giving of lethal pain-killers to dying patients, is categorised as having ‘killing’ as its object or finis operis by the manualists: that is why they can distinguish between results of an action which are means and ends, on the one hand, and results which are mere side-effects, on the other. In fact, as I noted above, the manualists understand the object by reference to the end of the action: it is not just any description of what someone did, but a description in terms of something which is definitely intended by the agent.

This allows them to do what they clearly do do, which is consider actions which kill on descriptions other than ‘killing’, and so on. Anscombe and her followers are concerned by the possibility that self-serving descriptions of wrong actions will allow people to get away with murder, but this fear is unfounded because of the way the manualists’ PDE works. The description ‘All I did was move my arm’ is ruled out, because it is as a ‘moral’ action, and not a physical movement, that an action must be considered: there should be some implicit reference to the end of the action. So it would have to be ‘All I did was knife Edgar for money’, which is a psychologically (‘morally’) comprehensible description because it captures the reason the thing was done: the intention. As Gury indicates, the object is associated with the end, and this is just a way of using the scholastic principle of categorising actions by intentions. Again, when Anscombe talks more accurately about intention, outside an ethical context, she puts it like this:

an object is not what is aimed at is; the description under which it is aimed is that under which it is called the object.[xix]

It may seem absurd to allow a villain to say ‘All I did was knife Edgar for money’, when he killed him, but the truth of matter will be dragged out by the PDE. For the next question is: was Edgar’s death a means to an end? If it was, the original under-description makes no difference: the act is murder. Before we get carried away by the idea that killing is just killing, we should notice the moral differences between Belinda and Cuthbert, and an unlucky surgeon, a panicky mugger, and a hired assassin.

Here is another example. Suppose someone were to say ‘All I did was relay to them a truth, which I thought they should know’. Without taking issue with the description, we can mark this down as an indifferent ‘object’, and move on to the question: what was the motive? - to give offence, perhaps? Then it has an evil motive, and is a wrong action. Or did the agent act in the hope of gaining (for example, amusement) from something which was anticipated to follow from an evil result (the offence)? Then the agent is using an evil means (offence), and the action is wrong.

The dialogues I have sketched, as I say, drag the truth out from the most inadequate description. (In fact, they would drag it out even from a description in terms of physical movements.) They are the kinds of dialogues the manualists’ intended readers might have had in the confessional. We might call this the method of the ‘penitent’s description’.

The best way of appreciating the role of the concept of ‘object’ might be to see it as a way of dealing with ordinary moral language, since ordinary language distinguishes inconsistently between the action ‘itself’, the motive, the circumstances and the net results. The manualist categories are not, exactly, a conceptual analysis of what is necessary for an expression of moral rules. Rather, once we have heard the ordinary language description of what has happened, the different categories serve to emphasise that any intended evil is wrong. The intention principle makes the same substantive judgement with much greater philosophical elegance, but the ordinary descriptions have to be completely rethought, and we need to ask a question expressed in non-ordinary terms: was there any evil in the things which you intended, which is to say, which, of the things you made more likely by your action or omission, gave you a motivating reason to act?

[i] Cf. David S. Oderberg Moral Theory: a Non-Consequentialist Approach (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) p87

[ii] Henry Davis Moral and Pastoral Theology, Volume II: Precepts, 3rd ed (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938) p145

[iii] Davis Moral and Pastoral Theologu Vol. I p55

[iv] Davis Vol. I p204

[v] Davis Vol. I pp41-43

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Davis Vol. I pp12-14

[viii] Prümmer pp12f

[ix] Prümmer p26

[x] Davis Vol. II pp152-154

[xi] Prümmer p129

[xii] Davis Vol II p168

[xiii] See Costa in Fisher and Ravizza (1987) p297

[xiv] Fried p39, footnote.

[xv] Davis Vol. I p341

[xvi] See Davis Vol. I p334; Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica IIa IIae q.43 a.7

[xvii] Germain Gabriel Grisez The Way of the Lord Jesus Vol. I: Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983) Ch12 App3, p308

[xviii] G. E. M. Anscombe 'Medallist's address: Action, intention, and double effect', in P.A. Woodward (ed) The Doctrine of Double Effect (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) pp57f; cf. John Lamont 'Finnis and Aquinas on the good of life' New Blackfriars 83, no. 977/978 (2002): 365-380; p373; see also Anscombe

[xix] G. E. M. Anscombe Intention, 2nd ed (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963) §35, p66

2006-05-17T17:33:00.000+01:00

Material Aggressors: continuing discussion with Daniel Hill

The aggressor idea is much kicked around. As you know the application to a foetus was condemned in 1898 and 1902 (on the history, see Ramsey 'War and the Christian Conscience'). That wouldn't stop a Jesuit taking it up, of course! I'll read this Conley piece. I'm not completely clear on how best to define a material aggressor. But a foetus doesn't look very like a child playing with a grenade, or a person falling onto someone from a balcony. The foetus is just *there*, and has as much right to be there as the mother - a point made by Finnis is his reply to Judith Jarvis Thompson's strange article about finding yourself an involtary life-support machine for a famous violinist.