Intrinsic Evil and McCarrick (good, short read about good and evil)

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.

“Hitting military targets per se is the military’s duty... do you have a definition [of murder]? ...I would be sincerely interested in hearing it.”

Now I get it. Shut up and solider, because We Who Know Everything (we moralists, religious believers, academics, philosophers et al) are your betters.

Belief in Absolute Truth, and in one’s own Rectitude, is more hubris than Conviction. We Who Know Everything aren’t engaged in a noble endeavor to enlighten and convert us lesser mortals, to bring us into the fold.

What We Who Know Everything are actually doing is playing the game of one-upmanship, which all humans play, and have been playing since well before recorded history began.

We Who Know Everything are totally convinced of the ascendancy of the moral over the real. And they are convinced that they have a handle (the only handle worth having) on the situation - especially in the sense that all must give way to them on moral grounds, or be excluded.

After decades of watching people in all walks of life, here and overseas, in the past and in the now, I’m not convinced. If you fall off your roof while trying to fix a shingle, odds are you will be injured - doesn’t matter what your philosophical insights are, nor your religious beliefs. Gravity does not care about such human preoccupations.

I’ve collected other examples, but We Who Know Everything flee from them. Or you squeal in rejection and dismissal; especially absurd is the conceit (verily worshipped today, by a bunch of self-styled conservatives and those of traditional inclinations) that the USA advanced to victory 73 years ago because more people attended church regularly than do now.

Many regard the use of atomic bombs in combat in 1945 marked some sort of turning point, and are thus pleased to look down on those who bleed and die to ensure their security. Perhaps that is so, but I cannot accept the idea that human beings are so surpassingly important, that Allied actions then must be condemned as the actions of the Axis Powers have been condemned. Universality is a mental illness.

We Who Know Everything are of course convinced that their moralizing is racking up points on their behalf, but from my viewpoint the moralists, religious believers, academics, philosophers et al have become a net negative: parasites, as it were, on us lesser mortals. They make demands but bring nothing of worth into the community. My job has been made harder by their actions and their advocacies, but I’m told I don’t even have any standing to complain.

“... After all, both are pushing little old ladies around.” [sitetest, post 17]

“...Not everybody “in the know” actually knows anything.” [sitetest, post 18]

“...May I ask you to go back and read our remarks again, and see the complete disjunction between what you wrote, and what I wrote?
I did not in the slightest intend what you think. …” [Mrs Don-o, post 23]

A hundred and one thanks to sitetest for wit and clarity. The support is welcome, the moreso for being uncommon. I’ve been berated and belabored, intimidated and condescended to by people with reputations rather more imposing, and egoes rather larger, than what most members of the forum here admit to. But no one takes a back seat to Freepers who bridle with indignation when someone presumes to challenge their orthodoxies.

Mrs Don-o is entirely correct that I don’t know her that well, nor have I known many of the historic personages, nor the modern public persons, whose utterances she quotes in defense of her pronouncements.

My response is that I don’t have to know anyone involved to foresee their reactions, or understand their behavior in terms of organizational dynamics, office politics, and everyday practical psychology.

My conclusions about who people are and why they behave this way or that stem from almost 29 years spent in uniform, working with every rank, every specialty, every armed service, plus encounters with folks from numerous non-military government agencies, and personnel from Allied nations. It was my privilege to know almost all of them, and gain insight not only concerning the modern military establishment and what it does, but to peer through a window into many of the communities and subcultures within American society at large.

On purpose, I’ve kept my conclusions at a low level and as simple as I can, as connected to direct personal observations as I can; after workaday, street-level experiences in leading, following, and inducing individuals to get their acts together and perform as a unit, I concluded that folks aren’t motivated that much, by high, wide, sweeping theories, and the related justifications for this or that form of political organization or societal framework. Such are the stuff for the members of those chattering-class groups I’ve already criticized: church hierarchists, philosophers, academics, journalists, attorneys and the like. They don’t do any real work, and as such are no more than a drag on the rest of us. Parasites. Goes for those purporting to be conservative almost as much as anyone on the Left.

Many forum members will refuse to believe that I take no pleasure in attacking their religious/moral outlook. That’s not what I’ve been doing anyway; they seem to set great store in believing that their religious beliefs have given them answers to “ultimate questions” about life, the universe, ultimate causes, issues of Right and Wrong, codes of behavior, etc. All of those are theories and inhabit an elevated intellectual plane. Theories are not reality.

I am not challenging the accuracy of any of the Timeless Truths they claim to have discovered. It gradually became my home-grown opinion that almost nothing I did on a routine basis was affected by those Ultimate Questions, and that no matter which way the Questions got answered, what I was doing wasn’t affected one way or the other.

And yet the members of those groups - whom I’ve sometimes called our self-appointed moral arbiters - have never granted the courtesy of reciprocal reluctance. Indeed, they seem to look on it as a duty to meddle in what others are up to. And their lack of experience and understanding does not ignite any concomitant caution on their part. They have been wrong about what I’ve been up to, and why I did it, so often that I now laugh at most of what they say. And at length, I came to suspect that if they were so wildly wrong about the petty details (some of which are somewhat above petty, to those of us who toiled in the profession), maybe they were wrong about some of the big stuff, too.

At issue in the current dustup appears to be a disagreement over the value of human life.

I will make the observation that Mrs Don-o and those in agreement with her are coming rather too late to the party, in critiquing those who fought World War Two for us (I was too young to show up for the party) for lacking fine sentiments about any church’s diktats on the sanctity of life. It sounds silly enough when applied to the Axis nations, who weren’t shy about admitting they cared not a fig for the lives of anyone who got in their way; I rather suspect they got a little humor from hearing church hierarchy types tut-tut at them (when they weren’t killing said church functionaries out of hand).

But what truly annoys me is the propensity of various Americans and other members of western civ, who think they are leading us out of some dark swamp of ignorance, barbarism and a-morality, by leveling the same critiques at those in the armed forces of the Allies, who don’t live up to what they’ve told us are Moral Absolutes. The critics and accusers are not balancing the cosmic books by doing what they do; they merely sound absurd. Not to mention ungrateful.

I’m supposed to fall on my face in gratitude, for Mrs Don-o and fellow moralizers, who are dispelling my ignorance of the value of life of an enemy? C’mon.

And I do believe Elizabeth Anscombe was a lotus eater. Anyone who made good in academia, or philosophy, or any chattering-class activity of that sort, after WW2, has led a life of lotus-eating by definition.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.