Posted on 08/07/2018 1:47:33 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Imagine that a depraved tyrant is oppressing your country, driving its citizens into misery. You have the opportunity to save the country: By starting an affair with the tyrant’s wife, you can gain access to the tyrant and depose him. Is that OK?
This case was raised by a commentator on Aristotle, who thought it a circumstance in which adultery might be justified. But St. Thomas Aquinas, in his De Malo, says that the commentator is wrong. “One ought not to commit adultery for any benefit,” St. Thomas writes, expressing the constant teaching of the Church. Some acts, whatever the circumstances, are just always bad—to use a theological term, they are intrinsically evil.
Those two words are all that needs adding to the many responses to the McCarrick scandal. As others have argued, there should be an inquest into who knew what; the bishops should directly confront the wickedness within their dioceses, while making it easier for whistleblowers to speak up; and, yes, maybe some literal sackcloth and ashes would help. Most fundamentally, as Bishop Edward Scharfenberger observed in a widely shared letter, any answer to the abuse crisis cannot succeed unless it is founded on spiritual renewal—a turning back to Christ and His teaching.
One part of this teaching, as Scharfenberger implies, is that there are such things as intrinsically evil acts, and that sexual abuse is among them. This is a useful doctrine, as well as a true one.
Few of us can enter into the twisted thoughts of a sexual predator. But everyone knows how the mind, when tempted to do something wrong, will cast around for justifications. It’s not that big a deal … Just this once … I need it for my health … Everybody else does it … Why would God care about something so trivial?… My situation’s very unusual, anyway … What can steel the mind against temptation is the knowledge that an act is, in itself, destructive of happiness and friendship with God; that it would be pointless to enter into dialogue with the temptation, because the only good answer is No.
That knowledge is even more helpful in the presence of cultural pressure to succumb. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe gave a lifelong witness to the existence of intrinsic evils—as she put it, “the idea that any class of actions, such as murder, may be absolutely excluded.” She contrasted this with the idea that moral laws are “rules of thumb which an experienced person knows when to break.” Anscombe drew this contrast in reference to Harry Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. In 1956, she made a lonely protest against Oxford’s honorary degree for Truman. It did not matter, she argued, whether the bombs might have led to a smaller overall loss of life: “For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder.” That “always” fortified her when majority opinion thought she was foolish. In a mad world, an understanding of intrinsic evil helps you to stay sane.
There never was an upswell of popular support for sexual exploitation, as there was for bombing civilians. But during the last century the world did lose its mind about sexual morality. Old disciplines were overturned, and the upheaval changed attitudes towards children and young people. In 1970s Britain, for instance, the Paedophile Information Network made great strides towards respectability. Polly Toynbee, the definition of a liberal columnist, has recalled her “sinking feeling that in another five years or so, their aims would eventually be incorporated into the general liberal credo, and we would all find them acceptable.” Across the Atlantic, the North American Man/Boy Love Association counted among its members Allen Ginsberg, paragon of the ’60s counterculture. (The inaugural meeting of what became NAMBLA, incidentally, was attended by Fr. Paul Shanley, a priest later convicted of child rape.) That was the era of change through which a generation of priests lived.
At around the same time, the Church was thrown into turmoil. Among the many novelties of those years was the advance of new moral theories, which shelved the idea of intrinsic evil. These theories proposed that what really matters is whether your heart remains basically open to God; or that your conscience can decide whether a moral law applies.
The people who came up with these theories were often well intentioned. They were trying to get away from needless inflexibility and cruel judgmentalism. But in discarding Church teaching, they also kicked away a means of support for the vulnerable. Those tempted by suicide, or sexual exploitation, are not helped by being told that each decision must be discerned in conscience on its own merits. One thing that may help them is to know that a certain choice is definitely the wrong choice, and that God can give them the grace to avoid it.
In Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, Sarah Miles speaks to a priest and tries to find a loophole so that she can continue her extramarital relationship. “Every time I asked him a question I had such hope; it was like opening the shutters of a new house and looking for the view, and every window just faced a blank wall. No, no, no, he said.”
Sarah walks out and slams the door, reflecting bitterly on the priest’s coldness. It’s God, she thinks, who has mercy. “And then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he’s got mercy, only it’s such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.”
The idea of intrinsic evil may look harsh and punitive. But to those struggling to stay afloat, it can be a lifeline.
Dan Hitchens is deputy editor at The Catholic Herald.
To hell with "pastoral accompaniment," "new paradigms" and situation ethics.
Put the fiends in jail. "Sexual battery", at the very least, would work. I'd even try RICO.
Boy, don’t you now it.
“Know” it. Autocorrect, my worst enema.
Remember, Situation Ethics was "invented" by Joseph Fletcher, who was an apostate Episcopal priest and a proto-version of Peter Singer. The fault of Situation Ethics is that it presumes that we are smarter than God, and/or that God is not capable of working all things together for good for those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose.
This is not a pedophile issue, as the number of pre pubescent males involved is quite small. It is gay men taken advantage of their positions of power to take advantage of young men. This is one of the reasons that the media no longer pounces on these stories. Add to the fact that the Church hierarchy has caved on issues like gays marching in St Patrick’s Day parades, and you have, what has almost become, a non story. Try this one on. The Archdiocese of NY has an LGBT outreach program and the contact is a transvestite, whose social media pages are beyond vulgar, yet the Arch looks the other way. Tell me why?
A lot of Dioceses have nothing to do with Courage, the Catholic ministry for people who experience same-sex attraction and strive to live in chastity --- and yet they tolerate, encourage, or even directly sponsor "ministries" which function like gay dating clubs.
Those who do this are in danger of hell.
And the clerical "sponsors" of these corrupt ministries, even moreso than the poor trapped and troubled gays.
Well said. Very well said.
If there are just wars, then the rules of a just war, properly executed, are also just.
We know from following Homer Simpson’s extensive posts about the end of WW2 in Japan, that the US warned Japan ad nauseum about the consequences if they persisted in waging war.
This was just and well done by us.
Likewise the rule of a just war is to minimize loss of life. America did this by dropping the bombs on two separate occasions, following lengthy delays and repeated warnings.
On ALL counts the Americans conformed to the rules of war in a just war. They thus saved at least a million lives.
Would that the heathen German and Japanese had observed the rules of war, and the theology supporting it, as well as the Americans did. If so another ten million could have been spared death.
Then you're agreeing with Anscombe. That was exactly her position.
She was in favor of focusing on military targets and military assets, and blasting them with physical destruction until they could aggress no more.
She opposed the intentional or indiscriminate targeting of civilian, which is murder.
“...Anscombe... was in favor of focusing on military targets and military assets, … She opposed the intentional or indiscriminate targeting of civilians ...” [Mrs Don-o, post 10]
The Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained military facilities, organizations, equipment, supplies and personnel. These were the targets hit by US forces, within the limits of the aiming systems and munitions then available. To dismiss the atomic strikes as “intentional or indiscriminate” is a falsehood. If critics like Elizabeth Anscombe claim otherwise, then we are under no obligation to take anything else she said seriously.
Philosophers, intellectuals, and moralists of every stripe are free to think whatever airy thoughts they like; they have not obtained the wealth and leisure to pursue whatever mental whims strike their fancy through their own efforts, but through the sacrifices, privations, and toil of the armed forces, security personnel, and lesser lights of western civ. They are neither worthy leaders nor moral exemplars; it is too cute by half, and merrily convenient, that they pass the time by critiquing Harry S Truman, appointed or elected officials then governing, industrial workers, and members of the armed forces, who had to make unhappy decisions and do unspeakable deeds so that Anscombe and the rest were able lead a lotus-eating, frivolous life while scorning the rest of us and telling us where we went wrong.
Lifeboat Ethics. Favored by Frankfurt School.
However, collateral harm to civilians is different from intentional devastation,whether it's intentionally targeted on the civilians or intentionally indiscriminate.
City equals Target ... that's the kind of thing that gave Hideki Tojo a bad name. That's why he was arrested and sentenced to death for war crimes, and hanged in 1948. I think it was right and just to hang him for that reason.
Do you agree?
Of course, murderous acts against civilians are prosecuted only against losers, not winners.
Definition of murder: unjust killing, esp. killing an innocent person, whether as a means or as an end, either intentionally targeted or by a deliberately indiscriminate act.
If this is not your definition of murder, then I'm curious: do you have a definition? One that can be applied across a variety of instances of killing (abortion, terrorism, euthanasia, private revenge, hostage situation, WMD's, etc.)?
I would be sincerely interested in hearing it.
Too few people get the reality of intrinsic evil. It's all a calculation, "What's a net short-term plus for the Collective"? Or even more automatically, "What works for me?"
You make the historically false assumption that the intentional destruction of whole cities, together with their population, was opposed by pacifist hippies and favored by experienced military men. This isn't true.
Take, for example, Admiral William Leahy, White House chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."
Leahy also said, "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
In the WWII era, even non-nuclear carpet bombing didn’t always get every military target in a given region. Even precision guided munitions of today aren’t 100%. From 70+ years ago, one was much more likely to miss the target than hit it.
In a city where military targets are woven into the fabric of the city’s life, conventional bombing seven decades ago would have been painfully slow, difficult, and less than completely successful, perhaps allowing the enemy the means to continue its defense for a much, much longer period of time, perhaps until the last citizen of the enemy had been killed (as the enemy had promised).
As well, massive carpet bombing of the degree necessary to subdue the enemy would have achieved horrible collateral damage as well. And because the inherent, gaping inefficiencies of that era’s bombing technologies, more than these two cities probably would have needed to be targeted, paradoxically leading to the probability of causing MORE deaths of innocent non-combatants due to collateral damage.
In choosing between strategic options, it isn’t enough to ask, does this particular action minimize innocent deaths via collateral damage? One must question the overall strategy. Because, once a particular strategy is chosen, so are all the chronological, dependent steps required by the strategy, and all the results therefrom.
A conventional strategy going forward, in lieu of the use of the two nuclear weapons, would have resulted, at least in the minds of the military and civilian leaders at the time (the Church-recognized competent authorities) in millions of enemy deaths, most of them innocent people as a result of collateral damage.
Thus, the flaw in the argument that the use of nuclear devices was not morally justifiable is that it discounts entirely the belief and the objective likelihood that a strictly conventional campaign would have resulted in even more dead innocents via even more, and dramatically more widespread collateral damage.
This is the problem of dealing with these questions in a way that considers each and every action separately, out of the context of the whole. It is a fallacy to condemn one option by citing its actual harms in favor of another option where the harms may be more hidden due to their increased granularity, but may be far greater.
It is also related to the fallacy of equating the actions of the fellow who pushes the old lady out of the way of the oncoming bus with those of the fellow who pushes her into the path of the oncoming bus. After all, both are pushing little old ladies around.
“Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that ‘the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’”
And yet, after the SECOND use of a nuclear weapon, there were elements within the Japanese government that actively sought the overthrow of the emperor rather than surrender. Perhaps Leahy was wrong.
On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA informed the White House that the Soviet Union was a strong, thriving economic success that had a GDP perhaps twice the size of the US.
Not everybody “in the know” actually knows anything.
“...You write with confident, dismissive contempt about people you know absolutely nothing about...Admiral William Leahy...wrote in his 1950 memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war..’ “ [Mrs Don-o, post 16]
After decades of enforced association, I know more about ADM Leahy and the US Navy than the forum can possibly imagine. All of you would be asleep, or contemplating suicide, if I chose to type it in response.
Can’t anyone here stop arguing from Authority?
ADM Leahy is a terrible choice at any rate. He wrote what he wrote only to satisfy the most venal of bureaucratic-political motives, seeking to preserve his pet armed service (which had done well by him, though he was not of any conceivable moral stripe to deserve it), from budget and national-status encroachment being threatened by the upstarts in the US Air Force, who actually knew what to do with them danged new-fangled aeroplanes, and (worse) had had the cheek to use some to win WW2 before Leahy & colleagues could arrange the grand spectacle to suit whims.
“The Archdiocese of NY has an LGBT outreach program and the contact is a transvestite, whose social media pages are beyond vulgar, yet the Arch looks the other way. Tell me why?“
You don’t want to know. I mean, a full reveal of the “truth” of this horrible situation would likely be literally unbelievable.
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