The Law that Dare Not Speak Its Name

Thank you for the example. I see what you are getting at.

Let me pose a different example. Say there's a fire in a multi-story building. The fire-fighters rush up the narrow staircase to try to rescue 2 children on the second floor. Seconds count. At the top of the stairs they find a 300-lb woman collapsed from smoke inhalation--- and collapsed in such a position that she's blocking the door at the top of the stairs and the firefighters can't open it. They can't lift this woman, but they could push her off to the side so that she falls down to the first floor, then open the door and get the two children out of the building.

They know that this will probably result in at least bruises, probably broken bones, for the very heavy woman, and in any case it;s unlikely they could come back for the after they get the children out.

Are they justified in pushing her off the staircase?

You answer. Then I'll tell you mine.

My own view is that

(1) The paramount objective is to save lives, if this can be done without violating any exceptionless moral norms.

(1) Since the woman's life cannot be saved, that is off the table as a duty. (Something that is impossible cannot be obligatory.)

(2)The duty that remains is, saving the children.

(3)What will happen to the woman if you push her off the stairs? That is unknown. She could land someplace soft and be uninjured. She could be bruised. She could break a bone. She could break her neck and die. Any of these outcomes are foreseeable, but unintended. The one thing intended is to move her away from the top of the stairs.

(4) Will pushing her over the side of the steps, kill her because she'll be burned in the fire? No, because she will be burned in the fire in any case. At the top of the steps, she is doomed to die in the fire. At the bottom, she is still doomed to die in the fire. Pushing her off there steps is neutral with regard to fire fatality hazard.

(5) My conclusion. Push her off the steps.

If there is any possibility of doing so (in this seconds-count situation) try to minimize the harm of her fall. If there is a mattress handy, shove it over for her to land on. (But if you can't, you can't.)

After the children are out, go back and see if you can drag her out of the house on the mattress. (But if you can't, you can't.)

I see it as essentially a triage situation. Your "perfect" intent is to save everyone--- and you will, if things go "perfectly." But you know in all probability that won't happen. So you save the two children you can. Then (if remotely possible) you go back and try to save the woman. (But if you can't --- say the ceiling has collapsed --- you can't.)

What do you think of this?

There is a question of freedom to act. In the example, when a mother steals an apple to fit the child, I indeed did not clarify the presumption that for a mother there is no choice but to feed the child. If she has a choice: the child is crying but not in danger of death, then she may not grab that apple. Another example would be if the private property is not marked: then, perhaps (depending on the acculturation) an intruder is not acting freely simply because he does not know that the apple is private and cannot be taken. (The latter was the situation with the American Indians who simply could not grasp the concept of private land for agricultural use).

Back to your example: the firefighter is a professional, trained to evaluate the situations and consequences of them. So, he will be killing the fat woman freely by pushing her off the stairs. His duty is above all not to kill anyone; this duty remains even though she is about to die anyway. His duty to save the children is satisfied: he made an attempt and discovered that he could not do so without committing a murder. If the child pushed the woman, or a parent, then the moral equation would have been different because the child or parent would be acting in a highly agitated state and not freely.

Likewise, a doctor may attempt to save the life of the mother in labor, but he may not kill the baby in order to treat the mother: both the baby and the mother are his patients.

Likewise, a priest who is told at confession that the penitent is about to commit a heinous crime may not use the information the priest obtained to stop the crime.

These are all cases when double effect provides no excuse because a positive step is taken freely and in the knowledge that the step is immoral. The fact that the criminal step serves a greater good does not excuse the step.

Thanks for a good discussion here.

I should have clarified, too: that under no circumstances can the firefighters kill the fat woman, as a means or as an end. Even if they can't save her, she has to be treated as a dying person, not a sack of meat.

For instance, if they found they couldn't shove her because of her weight, they couldn't dismember her and throw the pieces down separately. That would be murder full stop.

However, if the landing point is only one floor (10 feet) down, you can quickly make a reasonable judgment that hitting the floor won't kill her. You might (professionally) anticipate that it could cause broken bones, depending on how she hit, but that doesn't absolutely rule out an action: EMT's sometimes break ribs doing CPR on frail patients, people sometimes break legs landing in a rescue net, it's a commonly acknowledged risk, justified (I think) by the proportional and reasonable expectation that this will save lives.

As I mentioned also, it would be morally obligatory, if possible, to try to ensure a safer impact (throw a mattress down first) and, later, to rescue her, of course, again if it's possible.

But in my view, just pushing her off the steps in itself is not murder. There is not the intent of murder, and it is not an act of murder. It is an act of triage. (In my view. I am not an expert in the situations that arise in fire rescue situations, for sure.)

I would agree that just shoving her off as a "dead loss" when she's not dead, would be gravely wrong.

Breaking ribs during CPR or breaking legs jumping are different scenarios: the rescue effort is directed at the same person suffering a double effect. Here the fat woman gets an injury before she dies, and the injury is direct result of a freely undertaken act of the firefighter.

I suppose you can say that the injury can be neglected in comparison to death, if it is merely a risk of injury. However, I still don’t see pushing her to a sure injury. It could the the case where the mind of the firefighter simply cannot contain the amount of faith in God necessary to consider the situation intractable. But still, the moral ideal is to leave the situation to God and not push the women; the situation, in truth, is intractable.

So do we have a recognized Catholic moral theologian opine on this?

"In principle, both are intentional causing injury: actions intrinsically bad."

Here's where we disagree. Dropping her to a likely injury is surely physical harm, but there is nothing morally bad about it, no --- zero ----moral offense, if these two conditions are simultaneously met:

the injury is not directly intended. (The sincerity of this could be tested by asking three questions: if there were a less harmful alternative, would you take it? Would you try to minimize the harm beforehand, e.g. by providing a softer landing? Would you try to remediate the harm afterward, e.g by dragging the woman to safety and treating all injuries?)
the harm is justly proportionate (in this case, causing injury vs. saving lives.)

I don't think these are equivocations. I think they happen every day; we just don't analyze them every day. Let's see if I can list some off the top of my head.

Your toddler is frantically upset because another toddler has taken his toy. He finds a fork and goes after the other kid with the apparent intent of stabbing him in the hand. (You have kids? Then you know: this happens.) You grab him and pull him back sharply, yelling "No!" He drops the fork and is yelling hysterically. You've injured his arm. *Harm, foreseeable but not directly intended.*The end was proportionate.
Your older daughter is carrying your baby daughter in her arms at a farmers' market. Distracted, she doesn't realize there's a produce truck backing up towards her; the truck driver apparently doesn't notice either. You shout, grab her and literally throw her out of the way. She ends up with bruises. You have done objective harm. * But the harm you inflicted was not directly intended. *The end was proportionate: life-saving.
Measles vaccination. The risk of lasting harm to a child from measles is very low, but occasionally child-to-adult transmission occurs, with grave harm if the adult is a pregnant woman whose measles can gravely injure the unborn child. Therefore vaccination is almost universal. So all children are, often against their will, literally injected with disease organisms, not principally for the individual child's own good, but for the overall protection of public health. * The harm inflicted --- pain, fear, various injection risks---is foreseen, but not directly intended. *The end is proportionate: life-saving.

I think many of the myriad things GOOD parents do, plus the everyday actions of GOOD doctors and GOOD defense/security/law enforcement, turn out, if you analyze them, to be examples of double effect, where the harm done is foreseeable, proportionate, and not directly intended. In such cases, it's not a mitigated moral offense, it's NO moral offense.

In all your recent examples both the harm and the benefit accrue to the same person, as well as perhaps another: the child pushed out of the way is the same child protected from the psychological scar of causing injury (plus, of course, the other child is protected from the injury itself); the other two are exactly the same person getting both sides of the double effect.

I do not see how injuring a woman before her death in the fire is intrinsically good or neutral. It is intrinsically a moral bad.

It is only the huge imbalance between the injury: merely a broken bone a minute before painful death and the good: the rescue of a child from the fire that obscures the analysis.

Remember there are three components to invincible double effect:

1. Intrinsic nature of the act is good or neutral.
2. Intent is good.
3. Harm is outweighed by the good.

In your principal example, (1) is lacking. If the firefighter pushed her out of the way of the fire, but caused an injury, that would be an intrinsic good like in your three recent examples, but that was not your original case. If he pushed her around while still unable to remove her from the fire, that would be intrinsically neutral. But he, a firefighter capable of evaluating the odds, injures her; injuring people is intrinsically bad.

Yes, I have children and understand the realism of the three recent examples. I also still remember nearly poking the eye of my play-fencing childhood mate and shudder at the thought.

I get what you're saying, but where we differ is on "What is the intrinsic nature of the act? Is it good, neutral, or bad?"

In this case, removal of the woman from the door entry is precisely what is intended, and it is intrinsically neutral. Injury is what you do not want, and try (within the limits of the possible) to prevent or mitigate, and therefore is not intended.

Injuring her is not desired, neither as the means nor as the end. It is a separate thing from removing her from the door entry area, which is a neutral act. "Injure the woman" was never part of the plan.

If you push her away and --- despite the mattresses --- she hits hard and breaks her collarbone, that was foreseeable but unintended. It formed no part of what you desired to accomplish, neither as a means nor as an end.

I would say that a result you absolutely do not want, and tried to prevent or mitigate, cannot be said to be "intended."

It's somewhat like an ectopic pregnancy situation. You're not intending the death of the human embryo; that's not what you desired to accomplish. You intend the removal of the life-threatening condition. IF you could remove that embryo and get it to reimplant someplace else -- in the mother's uterus, or in some artificial gestational system -- you would be morally obliged to do so. But if you can't, you can't.

You still remove the embryo: its removal is precisely what is intended,; but its removal causes an unintended harm. Avoiding the harm, or even saving its life was not, in any case, possible. That which is impossible cannot be morally obligatory.

Elizabeth Anscombe (whose name I tremble to invoke!) took a notoriously hard line on "intent" --- harder, I think, than the majority of Catholic ethicists in the Natural Law tradition. As I understand it, her view was that you can't claim "no intent" unless you can honestly say, "I didn't know I was doing that."

Come to think of it, that would make it very hard to justify the removal of an ectopic pregnancy; and as far as I know, she raised no moral objection to the embryo and tube removal. Yet one can't imagine this conversation: "You harmed a living embryo!" "I didn't know I was doing that.")

It applies, I think, to my example, in this way. Say you pushed the woman off the stairs and she ruptures her pancreas and collapses a lung. You could honestly say, "I didn't know I was doing that." Or say she suffers a broken ankle. "We did what we could to prevent broken bones." Or say she lands in precisely such a way that she crashes onto a sofa without injury to herself. "Thank God, that's just what we were hoping for." Any and all of these phrases could show lack of harmful intent.

Compare the situation where they try to lift her (rather than just roll her off the stairs) and, pulling hard on her arms, they dislocate her shoulders and tear ligaments. In this case even though they knew there was a risk of doing that, I would say there still was not intent. "We didn't know we were doing that." "It's sure not what we were aiming for. We were just trying to remove her."

From Wikipedia, citing Dr. Cavanaugh:

This set of criteria states that an action having foreseen harmful effects practically inseparable from the good effect is justifiable if the following are true:

the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral;
the agent intends the good effect and not the bad either as a means to the good or as an end itself;
the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect and the agent exercises due diligence to minimize the harm.

Principle of double effect

Of interest to us is that the first two are separate. There is the intrinsic nature of the act, and the intent of the act. You are correct that the intent of the firefighter is good. But that speaks nothing of the intrinsic nature of the act.

The intrinsic nature of pushing a woman down the stairs is to cause an injury. It is in the nature of falling down from a certain height that an injury results. That is itself does not yet fully describe the act: for example, similarly injuring the enemy in a just war is not intrinsically bad. However, the woman is not an enemy: her injury is not preventing her from doing harm. It is then intrinsically bad act of causing injury to an innocent.

If that does not work to you, please explain how anything can be intrinsically bad in your system. For example, how is it that abortion is intrinsically bad but causing the same fatal injury to an enemy soldier is not bad.

Annalex, this is a really good discussion, and only reinforces to me that I need to engage this kind of analysis more often, and with similarly well-informed persons as yourself.

I can't answer your hhouht-provoking questions right now, because Ih ave to get at my garden again before it rains. You know how it is in the Springtime, weeks of enforced idleness because the weather isn't right, and then all of a sudden everything is urgent, and needs to be done at once!

I WILL get back later today. If I don't, give me a sharp kick!

Snow! Yow! My little 6-pack of Israeli tomato plants just came in the mail, and I’m thinking of putting ‘em in the ground on Saturday. Snowy KC, eek! I guess I’ll stop complaining about our Tennessee weather :o/

OK, I just got back from my RCIA’ers -— we’re doing Mystagogy and getting ready for our “Missioning” thing with Bishop Stika this Sunday. Lord, I love these converts!!!

I will absolutely get back to you tomorrow about Natural Law. We’ll get that ironed out for sure :o)

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