Category Archives: Moralilty

The Danger of Playing House

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Moralilty, , , ,

“Playing house” is a common children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually centering around family life.  What happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable still like to play the game?  Something along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a “61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself — acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.”   Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into which our culture is descending.

Imagine little baby Uma, when she is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really creepy for us.”  On it, she will find the name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge.  Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her grandmother.  Now this permanent public record will look like a case of incest.  Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better?  In truth she will know that she was pieced together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts.  She will know she was a “product” of conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s sister’s egg.

Straight Out of A Brave New World?

As the origins of life grow to more closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to point out this injustice.  Justice requires that equals be treated as equals.  When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is, as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology.”   

No one can measure the psychological effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has attempted to study it.  Children of divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their parents “love them very much.”  That is because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you came from love, that is, you are not an accident.  Likewise children conceived in a laboratory could face a similar identity crisis.

If you doubt the person-product connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop into a healthy baby.”  If you are going to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.  Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception.  The article doesn’t say what happened to these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human experimentation.  At least there was some semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the child was too much “like playing God.” 

Procreation and the “Right to Make Life”

Perhaps the clearest indication of where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question.  After laying out all of the specific costs of the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?”  And this is, the battleground over which must fight if we are to rectify this injustice.

Humans do not reproduce, they procreate.  This is more than a mere semantical distinction.  Reproduction is a closed activity.  It simply requires two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce offspring.  Human procreation is different however.  Like other material creatures, humans exchange genetic matter.  But they lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their offspring.  This must be created by Someone else and requires His intervention.  Because procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed.  Couples receive children rather than grasp at them. 

The biological limitations that God has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own thriving.  Seizing what should otherwise be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents.  But it need not be so for the children.   Even though the children conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product of technology, in truth they are not.  They are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings, God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist.  He still loved them into existence, even if their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.

One way to put a halt to the skid down this slippery slope is to change our rights language.  Even if the State grants them, there are no such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly speaking, reproduce.  As proof of this, notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people connected to these rights.  In fact, they render children’s rights obsolete.  What people do have are procreative rights.  These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.   

In closing, there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already lost.  This is no mere “playing house” precisely because of stories like this.  In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death or a frozen existence.  This couple may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.  The demand for procedures like this (as well as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase unless we do something to protect these children.

Temptational Judo

Incarnation, Moralilty, Passion of Christ, Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, The Life of Jesus

Truth be told, we really don’t like thinking about sin, let alone even talking about it.  But ignoring it is like trying to deny the existence of death.  We can pretend that it doesn’t exist for only so long before we must face the facts.  And just as a healthy spiritual life consists in regularly confronting death, so too, despite the vociferous objections of psychologically (as opposed to spiritually) trained clergy, does it include regularly pondering our sins.  Not to relive them, but to relieve the damage we do to ourselves because of them.  So rather than avoid thinking about them, I would like to suggest we spend some time thinking about our sins of thought.

That we can sin in our thoughts is something many of us unconsciously reject even though we confess publicly that “…I have greatly sinned in my thoughts.”  Our Lord too chastised the Pharisees many times for their thoughts—“why do you think evil thoughts in your hearts?” (Mt 9:4).  We tend to think of sin as something external, something that must be consummated if you will.  We absolve ourselves saying “I can’t help what I think, but I would never do it.”  But to even think it is, in a certain sense, to “do it”.  As the Book of Wisdom tells us “perverse thoughts separate us from God” (Wis 1:3).  Our will may not be fixed strongly enough to actually carry through or we may not do it because we fear the consequences or we may just lack the opportunity.  But to think it is to want to do it.

To Think It is to Want to do It

This may seem extremely old fashioned or overly rigid until we realize that the terrain over which spiritual combat with the devil is fought is our minds.  Think of the battle between Satan and Our Lord in the desert—the Tempter wanted to change Our Lord’s mind.  This is a perfect image because the ongoing battle is between which mind we will garb ourselves in—the mind of Satan or the mind of Christ.  And so, we must explicitly make known what we mean when we say “to think it is to want to do it.” 

This battle is one that is fought in fog and confusion.  Not all of our bad thoughts are equally bad nor are all of the thoughts our “own”.  This makes it hard to tell the difference.  But in order to lift the fog we must let the Son shine on our thoughts.  To help us in doing this, St. Alphonsus Liguori puts before us three moments by which to  evaluate what is going on.

First there is the suggestion.  This is where the evil thought is presented to the mind.  Where it “comes” from is not really that important.  The devil can suggest bad thoughts by manipulating our memory and imagination or it can arise “spontaneously” by following a train of thought or our memory running amok.  There is obviously no sin at this point, although it is knocking at the door.  Next there is the delectation “when the person stops,” St. Alphonsus says, “to look at the bad thought, which by its pleasing appearance causes delight.”  We are still not at the point of sin, unless we reach the third moment, consent.

Reversing the Moments

Working backwards we must admit that the exact point of consent is often difficult to decipher.  It almost has a “how far can I go” type quality to it.  That is why we should flip this around and look at evil thoughts not as a near occasion of sin, but as an opportunity for merit.  In doing so, we enter into the workings of Divine Providence in capturing the grace that God made available when he allowed the temptation to arise.  This is the mind of Christ Who practiced temptational judo in meriting for us salvation.  Ultimately, this is why we do not so much worry about the source of the temptation and see it as coming from the Providential hand of the Father.

It is a relatively short journey for the evil thought to pass from temptation to sin because it is linked by the delectation.  The bait covering the hook of sin is always some pleasure and in this regard sins of thought are no different.  There is something pleasing in the evil thought—some aspect of revenge, venereal delight, or other guilty pleasure.  That is why we cannot remain passive.  Sin ultimately is a willingness to pay the price of evil to buy the pleasure attached to it.  Therefore we can never be passive in the face of a temptation.  Once we have moved to pleasure we have already, in a certain sense gone past the point of no return. 

Vigilance then is the key.  We must, at the moment the temptation arises, reject it completely.  Call it what it is and pray for the grace of perseverance.  Go to Our Lord in the desert and capture the grace He won for you for this very moment.  Let it not be won in vain. 

And this, then, is why reflecting on our sins of thought is so much a part of a healthy spiritual life.  These temptations of thought are the building blocks of holiness.  Each time we say ‘No’ we are conformed more and more to the image of the Son in the desert.  St. Francis de Sales thought that mortifying our thoughts and imagination was one of the keys to holiness.  He thought it absolutely necessary to kill any daydreaming or useless trains of thought because it gives us the power to control our own thoughts and recognize temptations for what they truly are the moment they arise.

Going to the Chapel

Church and State, Ecumenism, marriage, Moralilty, Sacraments

Living in what is a predominantly non-Catholic culture, one of the most common questions that faithful Catholics are confronted with is whether they should attend a non-Catholic wedding or not.  One can certainly appreciate the moral difficulty of such a decision especially when there is a question as to the validity of the marriage and the chance that such a decision could permanently alter their relationship with the bride and bridegroom.  Complicating the issue is that the Church has not spoken definitively but instead has left the Faithful to exercise their own prudence in coming to a decision. Prudence requires knowledge of the principles involved so it is instructive to examine the principles involved.

The Scandal to Evangelization Ratio

For most people there is a certain moral calculus that comes into play.  They attempt to discern what might be called “a scandal to evangelization ratio”. They may intuit that their attendance at the wedding has the opportunity to create scandal but attempt to balance that with the opportunity to show them the love of God (i.e. evangelize).  This type of calculation however is fraught with problems.

First, it represents an equivocation of the theological understanding of scandal with the worldly version of it.  Scandal in the worldly sense means some behavior that causes public outrage.  Scandal in the theological sense is much broader than this and can occur even when there is no “public outrage”.  St. Thomas says that scandal really has two dimensions to it—what he calls active and passive scandal.  Active scandal is when 
a “man either intends, by his evil word or deed, to lead another man into sin, or, if he does not so intend, when his deed is of such a nature as to lead another into sin… something less rightly done or said, that occasions another’s spiritual downfall ”  Passive scandal on the other hand, is the reception of “another man’s word or deed actions such that it disposes him to spiritual downfall”  (ST II-II, q.43). 

For the sake of the discussion at hand, the focus is on active scandal.  Before we set aside passive scandal though a further distinction needs to be made.  A man may be guilty of active scandal even if the person who witnesses the word or deed is not actually led into sin. This is why St. Thomas calls it a “deed of such a nature as to lead another into sin.”  It is the type of the action and not its consequences that determine whether someone has committed a sin of active scandal.  A scandalous action may still be scandalous even if there is no “public outrage.”  The reason why this matters is that even if no one else knows about it (except the bride and groom of course), because a wedding is a public act it would still be the type of act that causes scandal and thus a scandalous act.  

Returning to our scandal/evangelization calculator we see why this approach would not work.  Negative precepts like “thou shall not commit active scandal” are binding at all times.  Positive precepts like “preach the Gospel” are still an obligation, but their fulfilment depend on the circumstances.  Setting aside the inherent contradiction that we could somehow preach the Gospel while at the same time sinning personally, there still would be no proportionality between the two.  Avoiding sin is one of the circumstances in which the positive precept of evangelization is set aside. Even if we label this quantitative tradeoff  as “discernment” it is still not possible.  Nor, as an aside, could we appeal to the principle of double effect because of the same lack of proportionality.

St. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio warned about confusing the “law of gradualness,” that is the gradual way in which the ethos of the Gospel takes hold in a man’s heart, with the “gradualness of the law.”  There are not different degrees or forms of God’s law that apply for different individuals in different situations.  But in an effort to be “pastoral” or “charitable” people will try to lighten the load of the law by issuing personal abrogations instead of working with the person openly so that they may make their life conform with the life-giving ethos of the Gospel.  Sometimes the most loving and just thing to do is to tell a person the truth and then to continue working with them (even if virtually through prayer) to help them conform their lives with that truth.  You might not see immediate conformity, but you must always (hopefully gently) spur them on to living out the truth.  Otherwise you rob the Cross of its power by trying to make it easier on them.  This might also require some redemptive suffering on your part as you are scorned by them because you spoke truthfully. 

Other Moral Reasons

Scandal is not the only thing at play here, and, in fact, may not be the largest issue.  Weddings by nature are public events precisely so that the community can witness to the union. Practically speaking a witness is not just someone who attends a wedding, but someone who consents to it. Traditionally speaking this explains the tradition of asking whether anyone objects.  Just as St. Paul, bywitnessing to St. Stephen’s stoning was complicit in it (c.f. Acts 7:58, 8:1),witnesses at a wedding are cooperating formally in the exchange of vows.  That is, their attendance (and forever holding their peace) implies consent.  Based upon everything you know about the bride and groom, you will that they should be married.  To not align your will with the spouses and still attend the wedding would be a lie.  This goes for any other moral “short-cuts”like only going to the reception, not going and sending a gift, or even saying “congratulations.”  All of these, using the language of the body, tell the couple and everyone else that the marriage as something to be celebrated is a good thing.   

All that having been said, can we come up with a rule by which we can operate?  I think a general rule of thumb would be that it is morally permissible to attend a wedding in which there is a reasonable presumption of validity.  This can include marriages of Catholics, so-called mixed marriages, marriages between non-Catholic Christians, and non-Christians. The first two are governed by Canon Law and relatively easy to discern(canon 11-08-1133).  It is not like you have to form your own pre-Cana Tribunal to determine whether the wedding will be valid, but that you have good reason to believe that it is.  A wedding involving, for example, a couple who were previously married to other people, would be a clear-cut example of one that we would have to avoid.

What About Gay Weddings?

We have a great deal of freedom to exercise good judgment with only a few obvious exceptions.  There is one other exception that bears some closer examination and that is same-sex weddings.  All that we have said so far including scandal and formal cooperation would disqualify a Catholic from attending.  But those are not the only reasons.  Same-sex marriages are an intrinsic evil because they can never be ordered to the good, regardless of the intention or circumstances.  To witness and explicitly or implicitly imply consent to such a union is itself an evil. 

One might question the designation of it as an intrinsic evil, but in truth it attempts to “solemnize” a sacrilege.  From the beginning, marriage was meant to be a sacred union that reveals Christ’s nuptial relationship with the Church (c.f. Ephesians 5:21-33).  Even non-Sacramental marriages bear this mark and in this way marriage as a sign is considered to be the “primordial sacrament” (c.f. JPII Theology of the Body, 06 October 1982).  Same-sex marriage is a sacrilege because it attempts to falsify the sign.   Therefore a Catholic knowing this would participate in the sacrilege by attending a gay wedding.

Before closing it is worth revisiting something said above about having the hard discussion.  It can be extremely difficult to disappoint other people, especially people you love.  There is a real risk of damaging relationships.  That is why it is important keep an eternal perspective on these types of things.  When we generously strive to avoid disappointing God first, He always outdoes us in generosity by blessing both us and the other people involved.  While it may strain the relationship here, it paves the way for the only real relationship in the Communion of Saints.  Bearing this in mind, can help to ease some of the difficulty here and now.

Catholics Slinging the Ink?

Moralilty, Theology of the Body, ,

The tattoo taboo which kept many people from even getting inked in the past has been lifted causing many Christians to ask whether they should join the growing trend.  This seemingly harmless form of self-expression coupled with silence from the Church renders us subject only to our personal inclinations.  But is this really the case?

Before addressing the question directly, a digression is necessary.  In an age where “freedom of conscience” is over-emphasized, we can fall into the trap of thinking that if the Church has nothing to say about a given topic then we are free to decide for ourselves.  But this type of thinking can be morally harmful.  What the Church does for us is to provide moral principles by which we can freely (in the truest sense of the world) govern our own lives.  She will teach those principles through specific instances, especially where the application might not be very clear or the offense is particular egregious, but in general we should not expect the Church to speak on every single topic.  Nor should we simply assume that all is well because the Church has been silent.  We instead must see what moral principles are involved in our decision.

Secondly, we have to admit, especially in an age of exaggerated Gnosticism, that we are both body and soul.  Something permanent like a tattoo is not just a change to our body, but a change made to our person.  In this way permanent tattoos are different than something like a temporary tattoo, drawing on our skin or even wearing a particular outfit.  A permanent change, being a different moral object, likewise carries a different moral weight than a temporary change.

Biblical Prohibition?

Turning, then, to the question of tattoos, we have to ask what moral principles are in play. Within Evangelical circles, these moral principles are clearly laid out in Sacred Scripture. Leviticus 19:28 says that “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks on you: I am the LORD.”  Many other Christians are quick to point out that this particular precept is not binding upon Christians because it belongs to the Jewish ceremonial law.  I will leave it to more erudite biblical scholars to argue this particular point without weighing in, but it seems this approach could lead us into an unnecessarily deep Scriptural rabbit hole.  What can confidently be asserted however is that specific prescriptions are given for specific reasons, at specific times and in specific places.  But the underlying principle remains intact.  Christ did not abolish the law, but fulfilled it.

Tattoos were used as marks to show who the bearer belonged to.  Slaves bore the marks of their masters, soldiers the marks of the general and worshippers the sign of their deity.  Because the Jews were told from “the beginning” that they bore in their very person the image of their Deity, they were prohibited from getting tattoos.  They already were marked with the sign of their Master, their General and their God and to bear a mark of another would be tantamount to a lie.

It is this fundamental principle, namely, that man bears the image of God in his person that motivates the proscription in Leviticus and also motivates the Church’s teaching on the immorality of any bodily mutilation.  The principle of totality and integrity says that we may not modify the body of a person except in the case of medical necessity or to restore proper functioning, including necessary cosmetic changes (like when a person is burned or physically deformed in another way).  Put in more religious terms, those things that make the sacrament of the body reflect the image of God are good while those things that mask the image of God are not.

This is why something like makeup would be in a different moral category than tattoos.  Makeup, when modestly applied, should enhance the beauty that is already present in the person.  It draws attention to the image of God in the person.  Too much makeup on the other hand only serves as a mask and hides the reality of the person as she really is.  A woman who wears makeup that modestly draws attention to her eyes bears no moral fault, while a woman who attempts to hide her wrinkles by applying a ton of makeup is trying to cover up more than the wrinkles (in essence lying about her age).  It is a question of enhancement versus alteration.

Tattoos and Bodily Mutilation

Returning now to the question of tattoos, the meaning of tattoos may have changed so that they are no longer marks of ownership, but the underlying principle remains valid.  It also seems very obvious that someone who covers themselves with tattoos has mutilated their body.  But what about the person who wants a single tattoo?  We return to the question of whether the one tattoo is an enhancement, namely, it helps to see the image of God more clearly, or is it an alteration?  It seems, rather unavoidably, that it amounts to a bodily alteration and therefore is a form of bodily mutilation.

There are many who will object that bodily alteration is perfectly fine.  Isn’t that what we do when we go to the gym?  These are fundamentally different however.  Changing your body through working out cooperates with a natural process.  Tattoos do not.  They are more like the man who gets pectoral implants than the man who spends his time bench pressing.

Most people would not go through the moral calculus we just did. Instead they view tattoos as a form of self-expression, like the person who wears mismatched socks or only one color shirt.  This however falls back into the Gnostic/Dualist trap.  The body is not something I merely wear, but is me.  That I have to add something to my person so that I can express myself seems like an oxymoron.  We have been given many natural powers by which we express ourselves.  Plus in the majority of cases the meaning of tattoos is hardly obvious.  That is, they fail as a means of self-expression because they do not adequately express their meaning.

There is one last reason why someone should avoid tattoos and it is based on a principle of St. Francis de Sales.  The saint thought that there were many things that on the surface seem to be morally permissible, but once we examine them we realize they are fraught with moral danger.  While I don’t think tattoos pass the first test, even if they do, they fail the second as well.  So much of the moral life is about why we do what we do and there are not a lot of good reasons to get tattoos.  Most of our personal reasons center on our own vanity.  After all, why would we have them except to draw attention to them?  There is also the temptation to dress in a way that shows them off, which can also lead to immodesty and unchastity.

There was a time not too long ago where tattoos were considered taboo—signs of being a fringe dweller in society.  But in recent times they have gone mainstream with some estimates of 1 in 5 Americans having one.   Despite their popularity however, Catholics should think twice before slinging the ink.

Gender Dysphoria and the Brave New World

Culture, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Theology of the Body, , ,

After receiving an overwhelming thumbs-down from the LGBT community for her upcoming role as a transgender man, Scarlett Johansson has withdrawn from her participation in the film.  Initially she defended her casting by reminding the critics that actors in movies are not actually turning into the characters they play but instead are merely portraying them.  Never ones to fully grasp the distinction between imagination and reality, the transgender supporters continued to blast her until she finally relented telling Out.com that she had made a mistake.  In her official statement she said, “I am thankful that this casting debate, albeit controversial, has sparked a larger conversation about diversity and representation in film.”  While Ms. Johansson may be grateful that a conversation has been sparked, this particular group of people’s track record with actual conversation and debate is rather sketchy.  Adept at verbal sleight of hand and ad hominem (would they call it something different like ad et identify hominem?) arguments transgender activists avoid answering the tough questions.   But just in case they are in a talkative mood, there are a few questions that many of us would like to have answered.

The movie is supposed to tell the life story of a “transgender” man, Tex Gill.  I put the adjective in front of man in quotation marks not to be a contrarian but because my question has to do with the label transgender.  If he really is a man and not constructed to be a man, then why must that label appear at all?  Is he any less of a man than say a man who hasn’t transitioned?  It seems to me that by applying the modifier, you are admitting as much.  What if a man had been cast to play the protagonist?  Would we have seen the same response?

Why Must There Be a Label?

The label will always apply because the dirty little secret is that you cannot actually change someone’s sex to match their gender identity.  No amount of hormone therapy can change the biological reality, a reality that touches the entire person all the way down to the cellular level.  Some differences are not due to hormones but are a direct result of the genetic differences between the two sexes as numerous studies have shown. (like the ones detailed in Exploring the Biological Contributions to Human Health: Does Sex Matter?).  The best you can do is to give that woman some masculine characteristics.  Likewise, no amount of plastic surgery can turn that same woman into a man.  Perhaps you can remove breasts and construct something that looks like a penis, but it will never achieve true biological functioning completely like one.  This, and the exorbitant cost, is why most people opt out of genital reconstruction.

At best the person suffering from gender dysphoria can hope for artificial changes in their bodies in hopes of matching their gender identity.  How is it then that this will remedy the inner turmoil they experience?  In other words, how will they ever be able to remove the “transgender” label and live merely as a man or woman?  They will always carry some physical reminders of who they really are.  It is no wonder then that most of the evidence points to the psychological benefit being relatively minor given that they have only deepened their existential crisis by living in, as Dr. Paul McHugh says, “counterfeit sexual garb.”

St. John Paul II reminded us over and over that men and women only find true meaning in their lives by making a sincere gift of themselves to others.  In a fallen and wounded world this is far from obvious so that God has left our bodies as a sign of this path to happiness.  To mutilate this sign in hopes of finding your true identity only serves to lead a person further into darkness rather than light; unhappiness rather than fulfillment; transgender man rather than man.

One of the reasons why Johansson was hesitant to give up the lead in this film is because it has all the makings of an Oscar winning performance.  In fact it does not take much prognostication skill to predict that whomever ends up playing Tex Gill will be nominated for an Oscar.  We can be just as sure that Hollywood won’t be making any movies about the thousands of horror stories of those who at various stages of transitioning realized they were making a mistake and couldn’t sufficiently de-transition to undo the damage already done.  That is because these people do not fit the narrative that transgender activists are writing.

Thanks to the rise of radical feminism, all distinction between the sexes must be erased.  In her 1970 book called The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone added a Marxist twist to Simone Beauvoir’s idea that the female body (with its capacity for bearing children) is at odds with women’s freedom.  Enslaved to their bodies and victims of male privilege the only way out (synthesis in Marxist terms) is to erase all differences between the sexes.  Rather prophetically she calls for an end to “sex distinction itself” by any means necessary including the use of biotechnology.  Thanks to the invention of the term gender and Gender Studies programs her vision has become a reality.

The question however is how many innocent people must fall prey to the creation of a Brave New World in which rather than helping those with gender dysphoria come to grips with who they are, we must be coerced into agreement with them.  They outlaw “conversion therapy” saying it is cruel to help someone live in accord with their biological sex while they encourage actual conversion therapy that includes hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgical mutilation.  They silence all those who disagree with them and bully actresses into passing on movie roles.  Welcome to the Brave New World!

The Myth of Moral Neutrality

Conscience, Freedom, Moralilty, Relativism, Sin, , , ,

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers and ethicists as to whether or not a man is capable of performing a morally neutral act.  Like all of moral philosophy this seemingly theoretical question has practical and, more importantly, eternal consequences for the rest of us.  In performing an impromptu poll among Catholics I know, most of them said “of course there are morally neutral acts” and then proceeded to list off a few, none of which were morally neutral.  In this post then I would like to address this question in hopes of not just solving a problem, but changing the way the reader approaches everything that he does.

In approaching this question there is an important distinction that must be made.  St. Thomas in his treatise on human actions (ST II-I q.6) reminds the reader that there are two “types” of actions in which a human being is the agent.  First there are what he calls “acts of man.”  These are natural acts of man that involve his vegetative and sense faculties such as digestion, growth, heartbeats, sensual perceptions (like seeing and hearing) and so forth.  These acts are performed without any movement of the intellect and will and are in no way voluntary.  Once they do become voluntary (such as when we choose to look at something) they fall into the second category; what St. Thomas calls human acts.  These actions, because they involve deliberation and choice, are voluntary actions.  Morality concerns itself only with human acts.

Just because acts of man are not voluntary does not mean that they are morally neutral.  Just as we would not say actions of an animal are morally neutral because they do not proceed from a voluntary action, so too we would not say that these acts of man are morally neutral.  They are not morally anything because they are not morally evaluable.

Human Acts

Once this distinction is made and we focus only on moral acts, we can begin to see why no action is morally neutral.  In evaluating the moral status of any given human act, St. Thomas suggests that one should look at four particular components; its genus, its species, the circumstances surrounding the act and its end (ST I-II, q.18).

It is the first two components, genus and species, that define the object of the human act.  The object of the act would be how one would define it if they were to witness the act.  These moral objects can be good, evil or indifferent based upon their relationship to reason.  It is the object that determines whether a given act can be ordered to the good or not (Vertiatis Splendor, 79).

Yes, I said that the moral object can be indifferent or neutral, but that does not mean that the action itself is morally neutral.  Because no human act takes place in a vacuum, it is also necessary to examine the circumstances surrounding the act.  In saying that the circumstances “surround” the act one is able to catch a glimpse into their relationship with the exterior action.  Circumstances are related to the exterior action as accidents.  This means that because they are truly exterior to the moral act they are not good or evil in themselves.  However some circumstances are morally relevant and thus add a character of good or evil to the action.  The morally relevant circumstances would be those that affect the relation of the act to man’s ultimate end according to reason.

We can imagine actions that are both indifferent in their object and in their circumstances.  Yet still this does not prove there are morally neutral actions because one needs to evaluate the act from the point of the view of the moral agent in considering the end that is intended.  While the external act and the circumstances may be morally neutral, no voluntary action can be considered neutral from the point of view of intention.  Every voluntary act is done for a purpose.  The purpose is either in accord with right reason and thus is a good act, or it is contrary to right reason and thus considered an evil act (ST II-I, q.18, a.9).

It becomes evident then that one can say there are two ends to each exterior act: the end of the act itself and the end which the agent intends.  How these two ends are related can be understood by relying on St. Thomas’ use of matter and form.  He says “(H)uman activity is defined formally by its goal and materially by its external object” (ibid).  This is an important point that follows from this.

The intention of the agent is more important than the end of the act itself in evaluating the act morally.  However, because the exterior action is the means to carry out the end the agent intends, it must be a good means for accomplishing that end.  That is there are some objects like murder for example that can never be ordered to a good end.  Secondly, although one can separate the two ends in theory, they both form a single act.  In other words for the act to potentially be good, both must be good.  Likewise, while a good intention may lessen the moral gravity of an objectively evil act, it cannot make the act itself good.  However, a bad motive can change the moral quality of an otherwise good action.

The exterior act itself is objective but to only emphasize this component is to fall into legalism.  The intent is subjective, but to only emphasize this principle is to fall into subjectivism.  Finally, the circumstances are relative, but to only emphasize this is to fall into moral relativism.

Clearing Up Any Confusion

A few examples may help to make all that has been said clear.  Suppose a man sees an older woman carrying a large heavy bag and looks like she is preparing to cross the street.  He decides to carry the bag for her (the object).  She really is going to cross the street (circumstances).  He wants to perform a kind act (intention).  This is a morally good act because all three components are good.  Now take the same object and intention, but now the woman tell him she does not want to cross the street.  This becomes a morally bad act because it is contrary to reason to carry a bag for someone across the street who is not going to cross the street.  Finally suppose that the object and the circumstances are the same as the original example but now the intention is to impress the woman’s daughter.  Now the act becomes morally bad because it is done with a bad intention.

That exercise is clear but what about something like eating lunch, or more specifically eating a sandwich for lunch?  The object is good—providing nourishment to your body, but the other two components are what determine whether it is a morally good act or not.  Have you already eaten enough?  Is it the last sandwich?  Are there other people that need to eat?  All of these circumstances have bearing on the moral evaluation of it.  What about the intention?  Are you eating because you are nervous or because you are hungry?  Are you eating because you want to keep someone else from eating or are you leaving half the sandwich because someone else needs to eat as well?  Each of the circumstances and intentions will determine whether it is a morally good or bad act, but none of them will make it morally neutral.  To eat when you are hungry is in accord with right reason and therefore a good action.  Eating a sandwich for lunch can be a morally good act!

Herein, I think, lay the confusion.  We think of morality in terms of breaking rules and not primarily as acting in accord with right reason.  There is no moral law against eating a sandwich for lunch therefore it is permissible.  Permissibility implies neutrality.  But once we slide into the realm of thinking in terms of permissibility and not in terms of right reason we only try to avoid doing anything wrong and lose our desire to do good all the time.  And this is why this question is completely practical.  Once we see right and wrong in this light and not necessarily as not breaking a rule, we begin to thrive as persons.  When we recognize that the good is always an option for us, we develop all the virtues at a faster pace.  When we begin to taste the sweetness of the fruit of virtue, we desire to have our reason rightly formed so that conscience may judge the good to be done at all times.  There are no morally neutral acts, indeed.

The Metaphysics of Anxiety

Anthropology, Moralilty, Suffering, ,

In the United States alone, some 40 million adults suffer from an anxiety disorder.  Given our current cultural climate, that number is only expected to rise, reaching greater epidemic proportions.  What is the cause of this meteoric rise?  Many Christians would point to the coincidence of the rise of a Godless culture which is certainly a contributing factor.  Until you realize that Christians also suffer from it at alarming rates.  The Christians in the former group would say that the latter simply lack faith.  But is that necessarily true?

The Metaphysics of Anxiety

It is helpful to first develop a “metaphysics” of anxiety which will enable us to better understand it.  Fear is one of the five passions of the irascible appetite.   These passions arise because of some desired good being difficult to obtain or some evil difficult to avoid.  Specifically, fear is a forward-looking passion that arises with the awareness of an impending evil that cannot be avoided.  Because it is future-directed, it is aroused directly by the imagination and memory.  The imagination and memory make some evil present to the person and the passion of fear is stimulated.  One person may experience fear when going on a roller coaster because they imagine that it will crash.  Another person may experience fear because their memory reminds them of the time when one did crash.  The person then must engage their reason to determine whether the threat is real.  Some may choose not to ride because there is a strong actual likelihood it might crash, or they might not ride because the feeling of fear it is too strong, mitigating any pleasure they might get from the ride.

The most common type of fear is anxiety which is aroused because evil is often unforeseen, leaving a person wondering whether he will be harmed or not.  Being future-directed, the imagination must place before the person fearful images (called phantasms in Thomistic language).  There is a sort of feedback mechanism in which the imagination supplies an image, the body experiences fear, the imagination supplies another image because there is a sense of danger enforced by the body.  The fear then increases.  The only way to stop this loop is to change the phantasm in the imagination by an act of the will, choosing to turn the mind towards something else.  This is why distraction is often used to get the mind “off of it.”  This is also why people will turn to drugs and alcohol to either dull the imagination or overwhelm the passion with pleasure.  Either way once the image of the future evil is removed, the anxiety ceases.

Although this seems like common sense, it should be mentioned that oftentimes a person who has anxiety bore no moral responsibility for the onset of their condition.  Those of certain temperaments, choleric especially, feel the passion of fear more acutely and so may be prone to anxiety disorders.  The environment can also be a contributing factor.  You could multiply the examples, but suppose a child was repeatedly abused at a young age.  They begin to live in constant fear awaiting the next time the abuse will take place.  They become habituated to experiencing anxiety so that even after the actual threat is removed they are still awaiting some other future evil, one that they cannot even specifically name.  This loop may govern the rest of their lives unless they can cultivate some sense of security in their lives.

Faith and Anxiety

An expert in anthropology, it is this feedback loop that Our Lord has in mind when He tells us “do not be anxious about your life” (Mt 6:25).  He provides a series of images (“look”) to change the phantasm and invites us to engage our reason to combat the anxiety.  Our reasoning, illumined by faith, is that even though there is evil all around, “your heavenly Father knows what you need” (c.f. Mt 6:33).  Our Lord, understanding well our psychology, is teaching us that when the fear of the future arises we should turn to the present moment and call to mind that, as the word suggests, God’s Providence will provide all that we need (Mt 6:34).

Faith then is the antidote to anxiety and as faith diminishes anxiety will increase.  The truth is that we, using our own strength, are powerless in the face of many evils.  When we know that “all things work for good to them who love God” (Romans 8:28), it can help us to conquer anxiety.  But, and this is important, not all anxiety is caused by a lack of faith.  This is a mistake many Christians make, either chastising themselves for not being able to overcome their anxiety or chastising other Christians because they don’t have “enough faith.”

How to Alleviate the Suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder

As alluded to in the introduction there are many people who suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  As the name implies, it is a disorder in the imagination-irascible passion loop.  A person may have become so habituated to experiencing anxiety that they lack the volitional control to stop it.  That is, as St. Thomas suggests, the passion is experienced so powerfully that they are unable to engage their reason (ST I-II, q.77, art.2).  This is the “law of sin” that St. Paul reminds us that battles against the “law of the mind” and has the power to overcome the mind (c.f. Romans 7:23).  This is why anti-anxiety medication, even if it is often over-prescribed, is a valid remedy in that it helps to dampen the strength of the passion and enable the person to re-engage their reason.

Obviously, a person without faith lacks the intellectual data to truly combat the images, especially when this is combined with a lack of the ability to control their imagination.  But the point is that even the person with faith may experience the anxiety so deeply that they find it impossible to make an act of faith.  They may have the strongest faith in the world, but the anxiety is so flooding their system that their reason and will is unable to control it at times.  They remain trapped in the imagination-anxiety loop.  Add to this the guilt, likely reinforced by the demonic bully, and they end up sliding towards despair.

With the instances of this disorder on the rise, it is important for us to understand these mechanisms, especially those who are close to sufferers of Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  Telling them “you just have to trust” or “just pray about it” is not the most helpful.  This is their cross and it is not necessarily a self-inflicted one.  The weight of this cross is of course lightened by the weight of the Good News that God is sanctifying them and purifying their faith through it, but it is also lightened by the Simon of Cyrene’s that cross their path.  Loneliness is a great cause of anxiety and just the awareness that someone else “gets it” and they are not completely crazy can be a means of lessening that anxiety.  Being willing to act as reason for them and letting them bounce their anxieties off of you to help talk them down can also help them regain gain control.  This can be a heavy burden, but like Simon you too will be sanctified by it.

The “bodiliness” of Catholicism also offers unique sources of healing.  Confession, the place where guilt goes to die, is perhaps the most important ingredient.  The medicinal effects of the Eucharist are felt not only in the soul, but through the “the renewal of your mind” we are enable us to regain control of our passions. Likewise, the Rosary, not only because it invites the passionate Our Lady of Sorrows to pray with us, but also because it engages the entire person like no other prayer, is also a key ingredient to healing.

“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Mt 6:34) Our Lord told us.  Many people experience tomorrow today and are crippled by anxiety.  By developing an understanding of the metaphysics of anxiety, we can better help them live for today.

You Betcha

Freedom, Money, Moralilty, Virtue, ,

Last month the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports gambling, paving the way for states to fabricate their own legislation regarding sports betting.  What each of the states end up doing is still to be decided, but before political expediency takes over, we should take an opportunity to consider the morality of gambling.  The topic of gambling and games of chance is not foreign to the moral teachings of the Church.  It has been a part of her Magisterium from very early on.  And so we can look at the principles that have been articulated in order to shine some light upon the subject of betting.

Over the past century, the Church has seen a profound shift in her pedagogical methods.  Gone are the days of the manualists, paving the way for more positive virtue-based pedagogy.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange described the prevailing views of the two schools as “the science of virtues versus the science of sins to be avoided.”  Whether this change in emphasis is a good thing or not is a question for another time, but what is not questionable is the fact that the “science of the virtues” approach has brought with it an open antagonism towards the science of “sins to be avoided.”  The manuals were very useful at the time because of the manner in which they taught.  They would first articulate general moral principles and then give examples of applying those principles to concrete examples.  It gave the readers (who were mostly confessors and theologians) a moral vocabulary that enabled them to navigate the practical realm with greater ease.  These manuals still retain their use today, even if in a complementary way.

The point of this digression, and how it relates to gambling, is that one would be hard-pressed to find an adequate discussion of gambling in today’s moral theology books.  The emphasis may be on developing the virtue of temperance, but without concrete situations in which the virtue is formed leaves us without any frame of reference.  Even if half the story is positive, it is still only half the story.  Discussing the virtue without discussing how the stop the opposing vice from forming is not enough.  Virtue isn’t only formed by facing a temptation head on, but also in the speed in which we flee from those moments of trial.  In other words, virtues are positive things that are formed by avoiding the near occasion of sin, a concept we hear very little about today.

Moral Approach

With that being said, we have to return to one of the most popular manuals of moral theology (partially because it was the first that was written in English) to find a thorough discussion of gambling.  In his Manual of Moral Theology, Fr. Thomas Slater, S.J. briefly treats the subject of gambling and games of chance.  He says that gambling, when it is framed within the realm of recreation and entertainment, is morally legitimate with some obvious caveats.  First, on the part of the gambler he must be acting freely and betting what is at his free disposal.  This means that he is not betting money that would otherwise be necessary for living and providing for his family.  Likewise both parties must clearly understand the rules of the game and that the outcome of the game is uncertain.

The reason why it is helpful to examine this issue from the “old” schema of moral theology is that this is one of those situations where just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.  Gambling is fraught with moral danger because it is a highly addictive form of entertainment that very quickly gets out of control, paving the way for moral ruin.  Neuroscientists have recently discovered, what St. Thomas and the Scholastics already knew, certain behaviors by arousing our passions, can become addictive.  Specifically they have found that certain behaviors like gambling produce similar chemical responses in our brains as some of the most addictive drugs like cocaine.  These neurotransmitters (of which dopamine is the primary one) are produced in response to certain stimuli and produce a feeling of pleasure.  This release is not just in the actual winning of the bet, but in the anticipation of the winning.  This means the pleasure comes not so much in winning but in betting.  And like all physiological pleasures we must “up the ante:’ (pun intended) in order to reproduce the same response.  The stakes must become higher and higher to produce the same feeling.  We do not need to look to far to find examples of men (mostly) and women whose lives have been ruined because of this addiction.

We are Catholics and that means we do not flee from things simply because their abuse can lead to addiction.  As Chesterton once said, “In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe, and the Cross can all fit together.”  But recall that gambling was a morally legitimate means of recreation. Once it ceases to be that, either because we do as a source of income, or it becomes an addiction, it no longer serves its purpose.  In fact one must ask how exactly this type of recreation, even when engaged in as such, re-creates us especially given the obvious dangers.  Still it remains legitimate, even if I cannot personally see its merits.

Legal Approach

Chesterton’s quote also reminds us of a related historical failure in which laws were made to curb abuse by prohibiting all use—Prohibition in the 1920s.  At the time, drunkenness was a social problem that needed to be dealt with.  Unfortunately by prohibiting “the production, transport and sale of (though not the consumption or private possession of) alcohol” (18th Amendment), it opened the door to even greater social ills.  This was because they were not good Thomists, failing to recognize that you cannot outlaw every vice.  The Angelic Doctor thought that laws should only treat “the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others…”  In essence, the Angelic Doctor is saying that when a law prescribes acts that are far beyond the virtue of the average person in society, then there ought to be no laws against it.  One of the reasons for this is that the law may become a pathway to further vice.  What instead should have happened at the time was further support of the Temperance Movement, even through legislation.  The law cannot create virtue, but it can clear the way for it.

The parallels to sports gambling are obvious, even if it does not quite effect the same percentage of society as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  There should be no laws prohibiting sports betting, but instead the aim should be towards forming and fostering the virtue of temperance, even if this requires oversight and rules that limit the amount of gambling a person may engage in.

Music and Morality

Culture, Moralilty, Music, Virtue, , ,

When Plato set out to write the Republic, he was attempting to present a blueprint for a just society filled with just men.  You might be surprised then to find several sections in which he discusses music.  Plato, like many of the ancients, thought music was not invented but discovered; a sacrament that made the order and rhythm of the universe felt.  “Rhythm and harmony,” he thought, “find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful.”   In other words, music, because of its power to captivate us and bring us pleasure, also has to be evaluated morally.  And in this, we moderns would think him entirely backward.  Maybe the lyrics matter a little, but music itself is entirely neutral.  Good music is in the ear of the listener.  Plato himself would group us moderns with the fools of his day who “[I]n their mindlessness [they] involuntarily falsified music itself when they asserted that there was no such thing as correct music, and that it was quite correct to judge music by the standard of the pleasure it gives to whoever enjoys it, whether he be better or worse” (The Laws 700e).

This is not an attempt to empirically verify what Plato thought as true, but only to set the table by asking a simple question—what caused the sexual revolution?  Put more precisely, why did things change so drastically in the mid-60s and 70s?  It would be hard not to connect it to the revolution in music that preceded it.  In fact we can do this for many periods of recent and not-so recent history; from the nihilism of the late 19th Century and its connection to the denial of tonality in music to the denial of tradition in the Romantic composers, Plato seems particular prescient—“ [A]s Damon says, and I am convinced, the musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of a city’s laws” (Republic 424c).

The Moral Aspect of Music

Although we could continue to trace the music-cultural connection, it is more instructive to examine the nature of music and its effects on morality to show why this will always be the case.  What makes this particular topic difficult to discuss is that most of us have a fundamental misunderstanding regarding morality.  We have come to see it mainly as following rules, that is, as a training exercise of the intellect.  But the moral man is one who trains his will such that he learns to take pleasure in the right things.  It is no unlike the man with a healthy diet in that he learns to like the taste of food that is healthy for him.  When driven by pleasure alone he will consume only those foods that are sweet to his palate, treating health as, at best, a secondary concern.  When he is concerned with his health and sees food as necessary to maintaining it, he will develop his palate such that he finds pleasure in foods that are truly good for him.

The food analogy is a helpful aid to understanding music.  Music naturally has a capacity to move us and bring us pleasure.  It is able to target specific emotions or evoke certain images.  Military men were able to cover much greater distances when marching to music.  They were able to go bravely into battle on the heels of the otherwise unarmed military drummers and buglers.  Movies add to the suspense of the scenes by playing music.  Try watching the shower scene in Psycho without the music and see if it elicits the same response from you.  Music clearly feeds the soul and therefore we should ask how to separate the healthy music from junk food.

This inherent capacity of music to move us is where music takes on a moral component.  Emotions are part of the constitution of man and are meant to be bodily responses to good and evil.  They can be stirred up (or permitted to endure) interiorly through reflection or they can be stirred from contact with something exterior to us.  When they are stirred up from the outside prior to any moral reflection, there is no moral aspect per se.  But once we choose the particular emotion, then it becomes subject to moral evaluation.  The morality of emotions is something most of us already grasp.  What we may not realize however is that when we choose a thing because it will stir up an emotion, this too is subject to moral norms.

When we choose a song that we “like” what we are really saying is that “I like the emotion this music causes me to feel.”  Fallen as we are, without reflection we tend towards those things that stir up base emotions.  To continue to feed certain emotions develops in us a habit for those emotions to arise on their own with ever greater frequency.  These unbridled emotions then dispose us towards vice, making it easier and more pleasurable.  Music that is rhythm-heavy with a syncopated beat (like modern popular music and rock) for example, tends to stir up the base emotions associated with anger and lust.  Train the body enough in these emotions and acts will follow.  The angry teenager who only wants to listen to his music (he is addicted to the pleasure of feeling angry) and the “bumping and grinding” that sets the scene of the dance club are both caused by the accompanying music.

Evaluating Music

Because of the melody, harmony and rhythm, music has the capacity to bring us pleasure; and not just bodily pleasure.  The melody and harmony can bring pleasure to our souls while the pleasure of rhythm can be felt bodily.  Music that respects this ordering, placing rhythm at the service of the other two, will bring us spiritual pleasure.  This gives us a way in which we might evaluate the quality of the music.  Music that corresponds to the ordering of the soul, when the artistic primacy of melody and harmony above rhythm is respected, is objectively good music.  Classical, folk and liturgical music are all examples of genres in which this hierarchy is respected.

Notice that I have said nothing about the lyrics.  In truth, lyrics serve only, at best, a secondary role.  To say “you don’t listen to the lyrics” doesn’t really change anything.  Even if you don’t understand German, you know that Beethoven’s Ninth is an Ode to Joy.  Much of the music in vogue today, you can’t understand the lyrics anyway.  Regardless, lyrics are meant to serve the other aspects of the music.  They are meant to make clearer the artist’s intent.  In rhythm heavy rock and pop music, the lyrics are supporting the beat and the song would have the same effect (maybe not as deeply) without the lyrics.  This is why Christian rock is an absurdity.  The rhythm is saying one thing and the words another.  There is no due proportion and the result is ugly in the truest sense of the word.

In a world where arguments are ignored(especially when someone might be addicted to the thing you are arguing about), there is value in personal experience.  The easiest way for us to evaluate our own musical choices is to simply observe ourselves when we listen to a particular song.  Where does your mind go and what emotions are stirred in you?  What is it that you like specifically about the song?  Conversely when you think of the “anti-one hit wonders” like Mozart, Bach, Palestrina and the like, what is it you don’t like about their music?  Is it boring?  That might be because you have been feeding on junk food for so long that you need to refresh your musical palate.  With a steady diet of only music that uplifts your soul, you will come to draw pleasure from objectively good music.  Trust me, if I, with the steady diet of crappy music I used to listen to, can do it then so can you.  And you will be that much the better for it.  In fact, society as a whole will be that much better for it.

Jealous of Our Ideas

Anthropology, Culture, Moralilty, Relativism, ,

Regardless of whether or not Plato took artistic liberties with the character of Socrates there can be little doubt that the father of modern philosophy was one of history’s world’s greatest teachers.  Great for the content of his teaching, but especially renowned for his manner of teaching.  Many people cannot tell you one thing he taught, but they can tell you how he taught—the so-called Socratic Method that involves leading a person to the truth through a series of leading questions.  The genius of his method was the homage he paid to the irrationality resulting from original sin (even if he probably would deny the existence of original sin itself, believing all vice was solely brought about as a result of ignorance) that causes us to be jealous of our own ideas.  His method of cooperative argument destroys the protective walls we erect around our ideas by giving the appearance that the new ideas are also our own.  I have written in the past on how this method can be very powerful as a tool for evangelization, but today I would like to focus on the effect this seemingly innate jealousy has on us individually and societally.

“My Ideas, Right or Wrong”

Our ideas are true or false based upon whether or not they conform to reality.  Truth is, in essence, a relationship between thought and what really is.  This relational understanding of the truth as both subjective (my idea) and objective (reality) is the key to safeguarding against the jealousy of which we are speaking.  For this jealousy of our own ideas causes each of us to zealously defend our ideas even to the point of blinding ourselves to reality.  When left unchecked it leads to a deeply rooted stubbornness (what St. Thomas calls pertanacia) that refuses to give up its ideas because it would be an admission that the other person is more intelligent than ourselves.  St. Thomas says that this eventually leads to a crass obstinacy that is the mother of all discord in which we are constantly arguing to find at least one other person who can agree with us.

Jealousy for our ideas is manifest in the tendency we have not only to demand agreement in conclusions, but in the manner of arriving at those conclusions.  How often do we find ourselves experiencing jealousy when someone else explains something differently than we would?  We may agree with the conclusions, but we pick apart their explanation and think about how much better we would explain it.  This jealousy blind us by turning our subjective understanding of the truth into the truth itself.  It objectifies the properly subjective.  Coming at the truth from different angles always benefits all of us if we have the humility to allow others to teach us what we already know.  If Our Lord could grow in wisdom and knowledge, coming to the truth he already knew in a new way, then we too can do the same thing.

We apprehend many things, but comprehend nothing.  Because we never know anything fully, we can always grow in knowledge of a thing by coming at it from a fresh angle.  Coming at the truth from different angles always benefits all of us if we have the intellectual humility to allow others to teach us what we think we already know.  If Our Lord could grow in wisdom and knowledge, coming to the truth he already knew in a new way, then we too can do the same thing.

We not only objectify the subjective, but we also “subjectify” the objective.  What I am thinking about here specifically is when reality becomes entirely subjective, what we call relativism.  The self-refuting quality of relativism as “the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth”, notwithstanding, many people accept this into the treasury of their ideas.  In fact, a whole generation has practically grown up with this as a fundamental tenet of their reality.  In response to one of his teachers telling him “you cannot force your beliefs on other people,” my 12-year old son told his teacher that during the next test he was going to cheat because “you cannot force your belief that cheating is wrong on me.”  The only response he got was “touché.”  He had challenged the deeply seeded relativism and lost by way of his opponent conceding.  Welcome to the new world order.

The point is that because of relativism, any attack upon one’s ideas is an attack upon the person.  There is no longer a distinction between an idea and reality because they are in essence the same thing.  The truth is entirely subjective.  In calling into question their ideas, you have threatened their world.  Now not only are they jealously guarding their ideas, they must zealously defend their world.  Wed the jealousy of our own ideas with relativism and their offspring is the “safe-space.”  We laugh at the iGens and Millenials who need “safe-spaces,” calling them soft, but we forget that we have created their environment in which an argument is scary because it is always personal attack.  How can they see it any other way given how they have been formed?

It is this combination of jealousy and relativism that also is the source of the “division in our country” that everyone is so fond of talking about.  Argument, the very thing that held the founders together, is impossible in that climate.  Everyone takes everything as a personal attack and therefore responds in kind.  This cocktail is literally poisoning our society and could, without any danger of hyperbole, lead to its ultimate demise.  Interiorly we all need to lighten up and avoid succumbing to jealousy.  Exteriorly we have to fight relativism and its two daughters, tolerance and indifference, wherever we find them especially as they are being taught to the young.  Perhaps we can learn from Socrates in this regard as well.

Socrates: ” So you believe that each man’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s.”

Protagoras: “That’s correct.”

Socrates: “How do you make a living?”

Protagoras: “I am a teacher”

Socrates: “I find this very puzzling. You admit you earn money teaching, but I cannot imagine what you could possibly teach anyone. After all, you admit that each person’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. This means that what your students believe is as good as anything you could possibly teach them. Once they learn that each person is the measure of all things, what possible reason would they have to pay you for any further lessons? How can you possibly teach them anything once they learn that their opinions are as true as yours?”

 

 

The Truth on Lying

Conscience, Defending the Faith, Dialogue, God's Will, Moralilty, Natural Law, Sin, ,

 

One of my favorite all-time commercials is a Geico ad in which President Lincoln is asked by his wife whether or not the dress she is wearing makes her backside look fat.  As cleverly designed as the commercial is, and as refreshing as “Honest Abe” might be in our current political climate, this short ad is particularly compelling because it forces the viewers to think about the nature of lying.  Drenched in a culture that has shown a particular allergy to truth-telling, we “spin the facts” and color-code our lies, bleaching them of any wrong doing.  As lies increase, trust decreases, turning us all into masters of suspicion. Lies will break down any society, the family included, but there is an ever-greater danger hidden in the weeds of lying—losing a grip on what is real.  Telling a lie over and over, we can easily forget the truth.  As philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth…but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world…is being destroyed.”   It is time to tell the truth about lying.

Most of us know a lie when we tell it, but there is a shadow over truth telling that creates a grey area.  That is because we lack a really good definition.  Even the Church has struggled to come up with a good definition.  In the 1994 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the definition of lying was “to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth”(CCC 2483).  When the official Latin text was released 3 years later, the italicized part was left out, rendering lying as “speaking or acting against the truth in order to lead someone into error.”  This is true as far as it goes, but it does not shine enough light to remove the shadow.  This is why St. Augustine’s definition is especially helpful.  He says that lying is deliberately speaking (verbally or non-verbally) contrary to what is on one’s mind.  In other words, there is an opposition between what one speaks and one what thinks in lying.

Loving the Truth

Because most people look at lying as mostly a legal issue, it is first important for us to discuss what makes lying wrong.  Our communicative faculties have as their end the ability to convey our thoughts.  When we lie, that is when we say something that is contrary to what we are thinking, we are abusing that power.  Notice that in this teleological (looking at the purpose of the power) approach circumstances do not matter.  Lying is always wrong.

Seen another way, we can make further sense of the intrinsically evil nature of lies.  Our Lord is pretty harsh in His condemnation of lying; calling those who lie the devil’s offspring “because he is the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).  There are no such thing as white lies.  A lie is an offense against the truth, the same reality that God, in His Providence, has orchestrated.  That is, all lies, are primarily offenses against God because we are rebelling against the way things are and revolting against His ordering of things.  It is our love for God and with gratitude for His Providential care that we should love the truth so much that we would never lie.

In this case, removing the white does not necessarily remove the grey area until we can answer what constitutes lying.  Recall Augustine’s definition of a lie as the willful communication of an idea that is contrary to what one is thinking.  This definition is preferred because it removes the situation where the speaker is wrong in their thinking from the realm of lying.  If your son did not know he had homework and then told you he didn’t then that would not be lying.  He communicated the truth as he understood it.  Similarly with joking or story telling where the purpose is to convey irony or illustrate a deeper truth.  Many people say “I was just kidding” when they are caught in a lie, so again this is something we all naturally seem to grasp.  Regardless, at a certain point—like when the person asks “are you joking?” –it ceases to be a means of laughter or truth telling and becomes lying

Intuitively we grasp that to forget or joke around is not the same thing as lying.  But it is the so-called hard cases that make it more difficult.  For example, there is the oft-cited situation of the Nazi asking where the Jews are hidden. It was an attempt, although not precise enough, to deal with these hard cases that motivated the authors of the Catechism to include the clause “who has a right to know the truth” in the original definition.  It would seem that the only way out of this Catch-22 would be to lie because it is “the lesser of two evils.”

Living the Truth

It is necessary as this point to make the distinction between deception and lying.  All lies are deception, but not all deception is lying.  There are times when deception might be necessary, especially when the interlocutor plans to use the information in order to commit some evil.  Although our communicative faculties have as their purpose the communication of the truth as we know it, this does not mean that we have an obligation to communicate the truth.  In fact, the obligation may be to remain silent such as when you are keeping a secret.  Likewise the obligation to communicate the truth does not mean it has to be communicated in the clearest fashion.   But because lying is intrinsically evil, that is, it can never be ordered to the good, it can never be a means of deception.

Protecting the truth from those who have no right to the truth is done then not through lying but through what is called Mental Reservation.  A mental reservation is a way of speaking such that the particular meaning of what one is saying is only one possible meaning.  There are two classes of mental reservation—a strict mental reservation involves restricting it in a way that the listener could never guess what you mean.  This would be a form of lying.  A broad mental reservation means that the average listener could figure out one’s meaning, even if it is not very clear.  Blessed John Henry Newman uses the classic example from St. Athanasius’ life when he was fleeing persecution and was asked “Have you seen Athanasius?”  The great enemy of the Arians replied, “Yes, he is close to here.”  Obviously there are a number of ways this could have been interpreted, but it was not a falsehood strictly speaking.  A similar approach could be taken with the example of the Nazis and the Jews but never in a way that would constitute lying.

What if however the soldiers had continued to probe Athanasius, forcing him to answer directly?  Broad mental reservation may be employed for as long as possible but when it fails, one may, out of a love for the truth, simply remain silent and suffer whatever consequences may come from that.  Likewise, many people tell other’s secrets simply because the other person asked and “I wasn’t going to lie.”  One can keep a secret without lying, but it may mean suffering at the hands of the interrogator.  However, before my teen readers see this as a Jedi mind trick and add it to their war-chest to use against their parents, this only applies when the person in question does not have a right to the truth.  When the person has a right to the truth, you have an obligation to give it to them in as clear a manner as possible.  There are some, especially in the Church, that rely on mental reservation to mask heresy.

In the commercial, Honest Abe, wanting to avoid lying, answers that the dress does make Mary Todd look a little fat.  Is this the only possible answer he could have given, or could he have exercised a mental reservation?  I’ll leave that for the readers to answer and debate in the comments section below…

What’s for Dinner?

Culture, Culture of Life, Fasting, Leisure, Moralilty, Natural Law, Scripture, Suffering, Theology, , ,

In keeping with tradition, President Trump pardoned Drumstick, the thirty-six pound presidential turkey, yesterday and sent her to Gobblers Rest on the Virginia Tech campus.  Millions of other turkeys will not be so fortunate however adorning the tables of Americans tomorrow gathering for the Thanksgiving Day feast.  For a small, but increasing, number of those families, they will forgo the fowl because they are avowed vegans and vegetarians.  Included within this group are a number of Catholic intellectuals who have rejected their omnivorous ways by making a moral argument for vegetarianism, seeing it as an antidote to the culture of death.   Before the Lion of PETA lies down with Lamb of the National Right to Life, it is instructive to offer a Christian perspective on vegetarianism.

Animals and Their Use

In examining the order of nature, it is patently obvious that there is a hierarchy in which the perfect proceeds from the imperfect.  This hierarchy also resides in the use of things so that the imperfect exists for the use of the perfect.  The plants make use of the earth for their nourishment, animals make use of plants and man makes use of plants and animals.  Man is said then to have dominion over all of visible creation because, having reason and will, he is able to make use of all of it.

Revelation supports human reason in this regard as Genesis tells of God’s granting of dominion to mankind because he is created in God’s image (c.f. Gn 1:26-27).  But this is really a two-edged sword.  Dominion means not just that we have the capacity for using things, but also that there is a right and wrong way to use them.  With free will comes the capacity for the misuse of creatures.   So that the question is not really whether man has dominion over the animals but whether this dominion includes the right to eat them.

Thus when we reflect on the proper use of animals, we usually use the term “humane.”  Although it is an oft-used term, it is not oft-understood.  When we speak of the “humane” treatment of animals it does not mean that we treat them as if they were human.  Instead it refers to the truly human (i.e. moral) way of treating animals as living, sentient beings over which we have been given not just dominion but stewardship.  Humane treatment refers to the truly human way of using the animals.  This would mean that all traces of cruelty or causing unnecessary pain carry moral weight.  Put another way, we should avoid any all forms of abuse, which, of course,  always assumes there is a proper use.

The question also needs to be properly framed.  It is not really whether or not this use includes the death of the animal.  Just as the use of plants by animals may lead to the death of the plants, so too do higher animals prey on the lower.  There is no inherent reason then why the use of the animal by man cannot results in death.  Some make the argument for the moral necessity of vegetarianism based on the fact that we should not kill a living thing.  A moment’s reflection however allows us to see that virtually all of our food, including many things like wheat and fruits and vegetables, results from the death of something that was living (see Augustine’s City of God, Book 1, Ch.20 for further discussion on this).  No one truly objects because the plant matter, lacking sentience, does not have the capacity for pain.  To advance further we must look more closely at animal pain.

Kindness

Every generation has its pet virtue and for our generation it is kindness.  Provided we “would never hurt a fly” we are deemed good people.  The great enemy of kindness is cruelty and its daughter pain.  Pain is the greatest evil.  But this is not entirely true.  Pain becomes an evil when it becomes an end in itself.  This is true in both humans and animals.  It can however serve as a means, provided it is minimized in carry out its purpose.  That purpose can be either corrective (like getting too close to a fire) or for growth.  Cruelty would not be to cause pain, but to cause it unnecessarily.  The power of sentience is not simply for feeling pleasure, but also allows for the feeling of pain.  This power is good and necessary for the creature to thrive.

The difference in humans and animals is the capacity, not to feel pain, but to suffer.  There must be an I to experience suffering or else it is merely a succession of pains without any real connection.  As CS Lewis says in The Problem of Pain it is most accurate to say “pain is taking place in this animal” rather than “this animal is suffering.”  We should avoid saying things like “how would you like to be in a slaughterhouse?”  The experience of animals in that environment is very different from the suffering that would have gone on in a place like Auschwitz.  They may be in pain in the slaughterhouse, but there is no suffering.  Any appeal to emotions based on an anthropomorphic comparison ultimately muddies the waters.

The causing of pain in other humans, always as a means, is licit provided the patient receives some benefit from it.  At first glance it would seem that animals would derive no benefit from the pain caused by humans.  When we view pain as means of moving a person towards perfection then we can see the parallel in animals.  The perfection of any creature consists in it achieving the end for which it was made.  Man was made for happiness (in the classical sense of becoming morally good) and animals were made for man.  If the pain that a man causes an animal is necessary for his own happiness and acts as a means to helping the animal reach the end for which it was made, namely the service of mankind, then there is nothing inherently wrong with it.

The Moral Case For Vegetarianism

All that has been said so far helps to clear up some of the ambiguities surrounding the issue, but has yet to address whether a moral argument could be made for vegetarianism.  In the state of original innocence man was a vegetarian (c.f. Gn 1:29).  Man had dominion over the animals but did not use them for clothes or food (ST I, q.103, art. 1).  The animals obeyed man, that is, all animals were domesticated.  For his own disobedience man was punished by the disobedience of those creatures which should have been subjected to him and they became difficult to domesticate and often posed threats to his life.  Shortly thereafter the animals were used for clothing (Gn 3:20) and food (Gn 9:3).  In short, because of the frailty introduced to the human body as a result of the Fall, it became necessary to make use of the animals for warmth and nutrition.

Any argument that man “was originally a vegetarian” ultimately falls flat because we cannot return to our Edenic state.  With the Fall came irreparable damage to both body and soul of which animal flesh provides a partial remedy.  Furthermore, within Church tradition, fasting from meat has long been practiced as a means of mortification.  We are called to abstain from good things so that eating meat is a good thing and thus worthy of being sacrificed.  In short, any attempt to make a moral argument that eating meat is wrong ultimately falls flat.

Likewise making a connection to the culture of death is problematic.  It is not clear how using animals for food is directly connected or acts like a gateway drug for the culture of death unless you equivocate on the word death.  The culture of death is one that causes spiritual death.  How the killing of animals, when done in a humane way and not out of greed, leads to a culture of spiritual death is not immediately obvious.

All that being said, there is a manner in which vegetarianism can represent a morally praiseworthy act, that is by way of counsel and not obligation.  Because meat is a concession made by God because of man’s fallen condition, abstaining from meat can act as a participation in the fruits of Christ’s redemptive act.  This is why the Church has long obligated abstaining from meat specifically (as opposed to some other kind of food) during certain liturgical periods.  Permanently abstaining from meat, when done with this intention, becomes a powerful spiritual practice.  It also becomes an act of witness to both the world and to those in the Church who often neglect this practice.

For the omnivores among us—enjoy your meat this Thanksgiving Day with a clear conscience.  But make an offering of thanksgiving Friday by holding the leftovers until Saturday.  Herbivores, allow your vegetarianism to be a constant sign of the redemption won at so great a cost.  Truly, something to be thankful for.

Changing the Cultural Smell

Culture, Moralilty, Natural Law, , ,

Long before it was fashionable to write books whose titles include profanity, philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote an extended essay On Bullsh*t.  Written in 1986, it is as current as ever, explaining why male cow excrement is a fitting metaphor for how Political Correctness spreads like manure, fertilizing our social landscape while carrying with it a noxious stench.  Thanks to its ubiquitous nature, we grow wearing of pinching our noses and eventually let go allowing it to saturate our minds.  Case in point—the recent scandal of sexual impropriety has shown not only that we have been holding our noses to it, but that we may in fact have forgotten how to breathe properly.  It is in that spirit, that I hope to end the bullsh*t by offering an introduction and application of Frankfurt’s work.

When I was in college, we used to play a card game called BS.  It was like Uno, except, rather than picking up cards when you did not have anything to put down, you would attempt to bluff your way out of it.  If another player thought you were bluffing then he would call BS and whoever was right became the owner of the pile.  The really good players were skilled at bluffing that they were bluffing, calling out the wrong number (which was really the right number), thus making it really hard to know what the player actually believed.

BS and Indifference

Nostalgic as I am for that game, it is relevant because it is illustrative of what real BS is like.  It is not really lying, but a form of bluffing.  It is merely an attempt to represent yourself as a certain kind of person.  Whether you are really that way is secondary at best, really inconsequential—it is only the appearance that matters.  As Frankfurt says, BS is really short of lying because it doesn’t really care what the truth is only how what you say makes you appear to be.  Its indifference to the truth makes it, in a certain sense, worse than lying because at least a lie pays a certain deference to the truth, even if it is still trying to deny it.

BS is not so much that someone gets things wrong, but that they are not really even trying to get things right.  The feigned conviction is not grounded in either a belief that what you are saying is true nor, as with a lie, in the belief that it is not true.  This indifference to the truth is really the essence of BS.  In fact we even have a special word for it—Political Correctness.  BS is at the heart of Political Correctness.  Whether or not I actually believe X is wrong or not is inconsequential—only that I say the things that make me appear to think it is wrong.  If tomorrow the court of public opinion changes then I will spout my BS to the contrary.

Frankfurt uses the example of the man leading a July 4th celebration standing up and giving a patriotic speech.  Whether the man is a patriot or not does not matter, his only goal is to appear patriotic because the setting demands it.  The man may be, and probably is, indifferent.  As the BS spreads so does the indifference.  All of the mouth breathing leads to brains that have been deprived of oxygen and no longer know what or why they believe certain things.  They simply become parrots repeating what someone else has said and keeping up appearances.

The BS Meter

The BS meter is maxed out with the latest sexual impropriety scandal.  For years Hollywood and Washington, as hubs of US power, were also seedbeds of exploitation.  Once a few women had the courage to speak up, the BS starting flowing.  Now to be clear, I am not saying they aren’t telling the truth.  I am sure the overwhelming majority of them are and that there are any number of victims who won’t speak up.  What I am saying is the “outraged” response.  One day Actor X is hitting Twitter saying all the PC things.  He doesn’t believe a word of it because the next day we find out he is just as guilty.  Next day Senator Y is condemning Actor X and it turns out there are pictures of him exploiting another woman.  Just as sure as tomorrow will bring another outing, there will be the accompanying BS.  BS kills conviction and once the next scandal hits, the problem creeps back into the shadows.

How do I know this?  Because it isn’t just Actor X and Senator Y that are guilty of it.  We are all complicit.  We may talk about how horrible sexual exploitation is, but it is all BS.  Take a look at your favorite news web site today and glance at the stories.  You will see a story about Al Franken, Roy Moore, and will also find one about some young female teacher arrested for sexual encounters with a teen boy.  Franken and Moore will pass but each day brings another story of a woman (usually a teacher) being arrested for a rendezvous with a male (underage) student.  The numbers are increasing (latest available data, collected in 2014, showed that a third of nearly 800 student-teacher sex prosecutions involved women) and we pretend it is not a problem.  But rather than outrage at this blatant abuse we click on each story to see the mug shot of the latest Mrs. Robinson with the accompanying Facebook or Instagram “sexy” photo.  Barstool Sports (BS), who just got their own SiriusXM radio station, even came out with a Sex Scandal Starting Lineup of the hottest teachers in 2016.  BS needs to keep the cycle of BS going by appealing to “guys.”  After all, what guy didn’t fantasize being with some hot teacher at some point?  Somehow without any basis in truth, these same guys who have bought BS’s BS are supposed to turn around and not sexually exploit women.  BS is dizzying if nothing else.

The examples grow exponentially.  What about the BS of equality?  Or the BS of freedom?  Or the BS of tolerance?  Even the Church is not immune with the BS masquerading as ecumenism.  BS has a funny way of infecting an entire culture.

In our collegiate game of BS there was only one way to win.  Once you got down to one card the other players would always call BS to keep you from winning.  The only way you could win is if you told the truth—that is you actually had the next card in the sequence.  It is only the truth that can set us free from cloud of BS and in the midst of a cultural crisis we as Catholics have a unique gift to offer the world.  We must preach the Good News of who we are as men and women, equal and not, and who we are in light of Christ.  Christ came so we would not have to deal with BS any longer.

On Social Justice

Moralilty, Politics, Virtue, ,

Over the last couple of years, the protest movement has gathered so much steam that there seems to be an organized protest over nearly everything.  One California company has even gone as far as to offer their employees paid time off to participate in protests as a form of social justice.  The fact that these “social justice” protests result in destruction of property, violence and any number of offenses against justice shows that these protest movements are actually counter-productive at best.  They are based on a cart before the horse principle in which the participants and organizers (assuming at least some good will on their part) assume that once “just” social structures are in place, then the people will act justly.  Until this happens, they may need to “make a mess,” to borrow a phrase from the liberal manifesto Rules for Radicals to grab people’s attention, but that should eventually settle down.  But the cart of social justice can only be pulled by the horses of just individuals.  That the protestors are unjust while screaming for justice shows just how convoluted our thinking about justice has become and how necessary it is to develop a more complete understanding of justice.

Justice is the firm and habitual disposition to give to each person his or her rightful due.  Or, put more succinctly, justice is the habit of giving to each what is owed to them.  In short, to “owe” another person means that we are giving, or more accurately restoring, to them something that they already own.  Those more classically schooled will recognize in the “firm and habitual disposition” the definition of a virtue.  Justice is one of the four virtues (along with prudence, temperance and fortitude) on which all the other virtues depend.

The Interiority of Justice

It merits a reminder as well that because justice is a virtue, this means that it is primarily something interior to the person and not exterior.  Just as the person who habitually lies is a liar, so too the person who habitually acts justly is just.  The “environment” helps us to be more or less just, but it is the individual man who is just.  When a critical mass of individuals are just, a social justice follows.  Men without the virtue of justice, no matter how just the social structure, will always tend to destroy that structure.  That is precisely what we see in the protest movement—injustice committed in the name of justice.  While this might be a glaring example, the same can happen when the leaders are not just men either.

As the definition suggests, justice is meant to govern relationships and so to speak of “social justice” is a bit of a tautology.  This is why it remains a fuzzy concept for many of us and often just ends up being a mask for a political movement.  The Church has always viewed it as the cooperation of just men who form, maintain, or re-form social institutions that serve the common good.  Justice rules (i.e. social justice) a community when three fundamental structures of communal life are in proper order—individuals one to another (commutative), society to individuals (distributive) and individual to society (legal justice).  In his book on Justice, Josef Pieper has a helpful diagram to keep these straight.

 

The first form of justice is called commutative justice.  Commutative justice is usually what we think of when we speak of justice.  It governs the relationship between two people and assumes a certain level of equality between the two.  Being equals, they must equally bear the burden of any social exchange.  A person needs a pair of shoes from a cobbler and exchanges a just price, say $10, for the shoes.  Anything less than that then the buyer would be guilty of an offense against commutative justice.  Anything more and it would be the cobbler who violates commutative justice (As an aside, I will post on the Church’s teaching on just price, so for now just assume that $10 is a just price). It is also commutative justice governs the duty of restitution.   If a person steals from another, then they violate commutative justice and the guilty party must make some restitution to restore to the victim that which is owed.

Because many people think only in terms of commutative justice, many injustices occur because groups of men have obligations towards individuals.  In truth, while commutative justice is based on a principle of equality, men are not equal in all ways.  This is why the Church also speaks of distributive justice.  Distributive justice is not based on equality, but based on proportion, according to need, merit, circumstance, etc.  What properly belongs to man through distributive justice is a proportionate share in what is common to everyone, that is, to each man must be given a proportionate (not equal) share of the common good.

A classic example helps us to see how these first two forms of justice work.  Suppose there are two brothers, ages 2 and 16, and they approach their parents because they want candy.  There is only a single bag of M&Ms left and so the parents must divide the bag between the two.  Rather than counting the M&Ms and splitting them evenly, the parents give the 16 year old  2/3 of the bag and the 2 year old, 1/3.  They give unequal distribution because of their ages and amount of candy they should eat.  This is distributive justice.

Just as in the example the parents, who govern the good of the family, chose the allotment of M&Ms, it is the custodian of the common good in society then that determines the proper proportion.  For society as a whole this would be the State, or more properly understood, an individual that has the power to determine the allotment.  So, it is not the State that is just or unjust, but individuals holding power within the State that act justly or unjustly.  This simply reiterates the point about when the emphasis is on just structures and not just men, justice is almost never achieved.

Social Justice

Social justice is often equated with distributive justice because it is viewed mainly as a problem of distribution and the focus mainly remains on this dimension.  However, those who desire social justice ought to focus more on the relationship between the individual and society that St. Thomas calls legal justice. In short it is the individual, not focusing so much on his rights, but on his duties to society that creates social justice.  It is, to borrow from JFK’s famous speech, to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  If each man were to focus on contributing to the common good and not just his own private goods then social justice would reign.

What all of this brings to the forefront is that the protest movements as they are practiced now are truly protesting against social justice.  In attempting to raise the awareness of injustices, they do harm to the common good.  Anyone who reads Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, can’t help but be struck by his thoughtful reflection upon what is just.  It was only because he had spent time thinking about justice that he was able to envision what it would look like.  He and his fellow co-founders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to counter injustice with more injustice.  Instead they kept their eyes focused on the common good (the focal point of his I Have a Dream speech) and how a more just society could be formed.  Destroying property, trampling on the good of the free speech of others, and destroying public order all creates less social justice not more, no matter how many days of paid leave they are given to protest.

Grandpa Adam and Grandma Eve

Anthropology, Bible, Moralilty, Natural Law, ,

In his 1950 Encyclical, Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII cautioned about a number of ideological trends that undermined the Faith of the Church.  Among these was a certain idea connected with the Theory of Evolution called polygenism.  For the evolutionary idea to be accepted it would require not just two first human parents, but the transition from animal to man would require a multitude of men and women.  In other words, it is a rejection of the belief that Adam and Eve were two real people from which the entire human race descended.  The Pope strongly condemned acceptance of this idea saying, “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis, 37).

On the surface, it appears to make little difference as to whether there was an actual Adam and Eve or whether mankind traces its roots to a multitude of first humans.  Diving beneath the surface, we see that acceptance of polygenism threatens to undermine the foundations of the Christian faith.  If polygenism is true, then the Christian faith is necessarily false.

Evolutionary theory applied to man does not only mean that man was made by blind forces but is ultimately an attempt for men to remake themselves.  The creature becomes his own creator.  No Adam and Eve means no Original Sin.  No Original Sin, no need for Christ.  If we were never “in Adam” then there would be no need to be “in Christ.”  With a multitude of races at our beginning, there would be fallen and unfallen men living together and only those who are direct descendants of Adam need redemption.  Evolution eventually weeds this out through natural selection, removing any distinction and Christ becomes entirely unnecessary.  Even if this is a case of unintended consequences on the part of Darwin and his ideological descendants, we can be sure there is at least one highly intelligent person who revels in this idea.

In the mind of many Christians, this sets up a Catch-22.  If we accept a literal Adam and Eve, then where did their grandchildren come from?  To accept a belief in only first two parents means to accept that their children were incestuous in populating the earth.  With no outsiders to marry, Cain, Abel, Seth and their unnamed sisters would have married each other.  Rejecting a literal Adam and Eve seems to be better than accepting this morally repugnant option.  Or is it?

Why Incest is Wrong

When asked why incest is wrong, most of us would say because the genes of those closely related by blood are so similar that it can result in offspring with serious genetic defects.  Looked at properly however, this is a consequence of the wrong and not necessarily the reason why it is wrong.  Whether we posit that because Eve was taken from the rib of Adam they were nearly genetically identical (making their act of intercourse genetically the same as fraternal twins) or that Eve was fashioned with a different genetic code than Adam, the important point to remember is that their genetic code would have had no mutations in it.  After the Fall, their offspring may have had mutations in their DNA, but, if we accept the modern scientific explanation of these mutations as appearing at random, we should not expect identical mutations to occur in Adam and Eve’s offspring.  Without the necessary doubling of mutations in the parents, we would not see the same effects that we see with inbreeding today.  Once the gene pool has a sufficient number of these mutations present in it and the likelihood of some deleterious effect occurring on the rise, God issues a positive command that a man may not marry someone of close relation like his sister, aunt, or niece (Lev 18-20).

In short, the consequence of serious birth defects is a sign that incest is wrong, but is not what makes it wrong.  In City of God (Book XV, Ch. 16) Augustine visits this question as to why Cain, for example, committed no wrong when he married his sister.  We can borrow from his explanation to help us see past this intellectual obstacle.

The Augustinian Solution

First, he looks at the purpose of marriage and procreation and says something that most of us would not think of as a purpose today.  Augustine see this as one of the goods of marriage—marriage multiplies relationships.  In the past, especially in ruling families, marriage was viewed as a means to bring the families together, making them one.  It brings strangers together and makes them a family.  A woman’s brother becomes the man’s brother-in-law, her father, his father-in-law.  Without the marriage of the man and woman, these men would not have entered into a familial relationship.

When closely related persons married, this good is lost.  When siblings marry, their mother is both mother and mother-in-law.  This was obviously unavoidable in the case of Cain and his sister, but, according to Augustine, is a reason to avoid close marriage.

Obviously, this would not be a precept of the natural law, but Augustine and St. Thomas both say that marriage between a parent and a child was always contrary to the natural law because of the relationship of parent and child could never be placed on the equal footing required for marriage.  A child always owes their parents piety while spouses have no such obligation.  This is why Noah curse Ham when he “saw his nakedness” (Gn 9:20-25), which is a Hebraic euphemism for sleeping with his mother.

While not a precept of the natural law, marriage between siblings and close blood relatives is still wrong because of our fallen human nature.  For men and women to live closely together (like siblings do today or close blood relations such as cousins did in the past) with the potential for the relationship to become sexualized is a great temptation to lust and use.  This is why it would be just as wrong for Greg and Marsha Brady to get married as it would be for two blood siblings.  To make such a union illicit can serve to remove this temptation and makes it taboo.  The fact that we initially recoil at the thought of Cain and his sister means that this taboo has had its intended consequence.

Removing incest as an obstacle to belief in two first parents goes a long way in helping us to see why polygenism must be false and why we should reject any form of it.  Grandpa Adam and Grandma Eve, first parents and first grandparents.

St. Gianna Molla and the Principle of Double Effect

Abortion, Moralilty, ,

Since her canonization by Pope St. John Paul II on May 16, 2004, St. Gianna Beretta Molla has become the Patroness of the Unborn Child.  Faced with serious complications during the pregnancy of her fourth child, St. Gianna bravely put the needs of her child ahead of her own.  Pro-lifers often point to her heroic witness as a model to be followed.  They are right in doing so, but maybe not for the reason they often cite.  Most portray her situation as an all or nothing—they say she was faced with having life-saving treatment and an abortion or no treatment at all.  The problem is that this is not actually what happens.  The details of St. Gianna’s dilemma matter greatly in the retelling of her story, especially because it helps illustrate a moral solution for mothers who are faced with serious medical problems during pregnancy.

St. Gianna’s Story

While pregnant with her fourth child, St. Gianna developed a large fibroid; a benign tumor of the uterus.  In the normal course of events when these tumors are found during pregnancy they are unobtrusive enough that they may be left be.  In St. Gianna’s case, the tumor was large enough that it was likely to cause serious complications during the pregnancy that ultimately could threaten the development of the child and put her in considerable pain and risk for a serious infection.  There are additional medical details of her situation (detailed here) but for the sake of our discussion this should suffice.

When St. Gianna learned of the fibroid tumor, she was, according to her husband, presented with three options by her doctors.

  1. Terminate the pregnancy via direct abortion and remove the fibroid
  2. Have a hysterectomy that removed her uterus. This would also result in the death of the 2 month old preborn child.  For her personally this was a low-risk approach and was also the standard of care at the time given the lack of medical technologies (such as ultrasound machines) that we have today.
  3. Remove the fibroid and continue her pregnancy. This option could result in the spontaneous miscarriage of the child because of the irritation to the uterus.  It also carried with it serious risks for herself.  The blood loss from a pregnant uterus can be excessive and difficult to control.  It might also be that the wound could re-open during any point in the pregnancy.

Notice that not receiving any treatment was not one of the options as the story is often portrayed.  This was not a real option as to not do anything would have placed the child at great risk.

Examining the Moral Principles

Before examining her decision, it is helpful to make some distinctions and define some moral principles.  This is what makes knowing the details of her case very instructive.  It is a real-life, concrete example of what someone did and it contradicts the abortion or nothing approach that many people often assume.

The first point to look at is why (1) is morally problematic and (2) is morally permissible.  Looked at superficially, the two acts look to be the same—in both scenarios the child ends up dead and the mother lives.  But how we end up there matters, even if we end up in the same place.  Despite Machiavellian protestations to the contrary, one may never do evil so that good may come about.  The end does not justify the means.  Abortion, that is the direct killing of an innocent human being is always wrong regardless of whether the mother’s life is in jeopardy or not.

In scenario (2), the death of the child, although foreseen, is not directly willed even if it is permitted.  What is willed is the preservation of St. Gianna’s life.  Notice too that the preservation of her life does not come about as a result of the child’s death, but as a result of the removal of the uterus.  That same removal of the uterus also has the “side-effect” of killing the baby, even though it was not chosen for that reason.  Finally, there is a certain proportionality involved in the moral calculation in that both mother and child’s life are of equal value and by not acting you are placing one or both of their lives in jeopardy.

Option (2) demonstrates an important moral principle called The Principle of Double Effect.  This principle recognizes that none of our acts occur in a moral vacuum.  Each of our actions are complex with a mixture of goods and evil attached to them.  Thus, even if the will chooses some good, there can often be an evil associated with it.  This is why when we make our moral calculation, we must look not just to the external act but to the underlying choice of the will.  With this in mind, there has classically been the need for the distinction between two types of will—the direct will and the permitting will.  We may never, morally speaking, directly will an evil.  However, we may permit it.

The Principle of Double Effect

The Principle of Double Effect says that it is morally allowable to perform an act that has at least two effects provided all four of the following conditions are met.

  1. the object to be done must be good in itself
  2. the intent of the agent must be to achieve the good effect and to avoid the evil effect as much as possible. The evil effect must not be directly willed but only permitted.  This is the case even if the evil effect is foreseen.
  3. the good effect is proportional to the bad effect and there is no other way to achieve the effect.
  4. the good effect must follow directly from the action and not as a result of the harmful effect.

St. Gianna would have been morally justified in choosing option (2), but instead she chose option (3).  Although under no moral obligation to do so, this decision flowed from her desire to put the life of her child first.  She was a mother and a holy one at that, so this decision came somewhat second nature.  It is not the reason she is saint, but she made this decision because she was on her way to sainthood.

Most of us know that she eventually lost her life after delivering a healthy baby.  But there is not direct evidence that she died because of her decision.  The cause of her death was an infection in her abdomen that was brought about as a result of the Caesarian section that was performed.  Why this detail matters again speaks to how we present her as a witness.  She knew that her health was in jeopardy by choosing (3) but there was no reason for her (she was a doctor) to think it may end up leading to her death.  She made a courageous decision, but also one based on prudence.  It is her courage and prudence that made her a saint and makes her a great Pro-life witness.  It wasn’t her unwillingness to do something evil, but her willingness to love her children at great personal cost.  Saints are praised not because they didn’t choose evil, but because of their witness of heroic virtue.  Knowing the details enables us to let her witness speak clearly to a very confused age.

Modesty and the Freedom to Be Loved

Moralilty, Theology of the Body, Virtue

An assistant principal at a Texas High School recently came under fire for making comments that were “inappropriate and offensive to students.”  What did he say?  During an assembly he called out the young ladies in the school for wearing tight clothes and short shirts.  He went on to blame them for “the boys’ low grades” intimating that they are distracted by the clothes many of the girls wear.  While his comments may have been lacking in humor and mode of delivery, they were not lacking in truth.  He was challenging them to dress more modestly.  The problem is that many young people lack the necessary context to understand the value of modesty and therefore are “offended” when someone says something.

Before he was to become Bishop of Rome, Fr. Karol Wojtyla wrote what might ultimately become his most important work, Love and Responsibility.  In it, he examines the relationship between the sexes and lays out the foundations of what would become his Theology of the Body.  Perhaps if the Assistant Principal was familiar with the work, he would have been able to draw on Fr. Wojtyla’s lengthy discussion on the importance of modesty.

In the book he makes what many today would consider a radical assumption—that men and women are different.  This difference is not just skin deep but goes to the very depth of their being as man and woman.  In fact our bodies are simply expressions of these differences rather than the totality of these differences.  These differences even affect the ways in which men and women are attracted to each other.

When one speaks of being “attracted” to someone, it primarily means that there is a response to a perception of some value in that person.  But because the person is not just an object but also a subject, there is always the danger of treating the other as a “something” rather than a “somebody.”  To guard against this tendency, Fr. Wojtyla articulates what he calls the personalistic norm—“A person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”

The sexual attraction (Wojtyla calls it the “sexual urge”) between men and women is a recognition of the sexual value of the other person.  It is experienced in two forms; sensuality and sentimentality.  Sensuality is the attraction to the body of the person of the opposite sex.  Sensuality is stirred when we encounter a person of the opposite sex and find value in their body as an object of personal enjoyment. Sentimentality is the emotional attraction to the sexual value residing in the whole person in the form of their masculinity and femininity.  Since sensuality is oriented towards the body as an object of enjoyment, it is generally stronger in men while sentimentality because it is more relational is strongest in women.

Because the sexual urge is so strong, there is always the danger that men and women will look upon the other person merely for their sexual value.  They then become an object of pleasure rather than a person to be loved.  In order for love to develop the entire “value” of the person must be seen and not just their sexual value.  What this means is that men and women must keep some of their sexual value hidden so that true love can blossom.

This, Fr. Wojtyla says, is the value in the experience of shame.  Shame arises any time that something which by its very nature ought to be private somehow becomes public.  Sexual shame arises when the sexual value of the person obscures their personal value.  Shame then acts like a protectant against use.  Most of us have experienced this.  A man instinctively will look away when he is caught staring at a woman he finds attractive.  A girl who is dressed immodestly will be forever adjusting her clothes.   Although they may not articulate it as shame, it is experienced by all but those who are shameless.  Modesty on the other hand is the “constant capacity and readiness to feel shame.”

pride-and-prejudice

As I mentioned sensuality is generally stronger in men.  This means that modesty and shame must be more pronounced in women.  The problem is that women are not primarily inclined to sensuality and so they do not intuit the need to conceal the body.  Modesty comes about when they gain an insight into male psychology

Even if it fell flat in its delivery, the Assistant Principal was trying to offer a much-needed insight into the male psychology.  Perhaps rather than being offended, what the students experienced was shame.  It isn’t just the boys’ problem for not focusing and it is not just the girls’ problem for dressing immodestly.  It is the self-perpetuating problem of use.  The girls dress immodestly, deliberately flaunting their sexual value, the boys respond by seeing only that.  The boys treat them as objects to be used and the girls accept this use.

The problem, I said, was one of context.  When we hear the word modesty we are immediately drawn to a Victorian encounter between men and women.  We must free modesty from this image.  Remember the goal is to keep sexual values from obscuring the true value of the person.  This does not mean that the person should hide all of their sexual value, only to the extent that they can be seen as a part of the value of the person.  The accentuation of sexual value by dress is inevitable and is not necessarily incompatible with modesty.  It is when the attire is chosen specifically to provoke a reaction that it becomes immodest.  As Fr. Wojtyla says, “What is truly immodest in dress is that which frankly contributes to the deliberate displacement of the true value of the person by sexual values, that which is bound to elicit a reaction to the person by sexual values, that which is bound to elicit a reaction to the person as to a ‘possible means of obtaining sexual enjoyment’ and not ‘a possible object love by reason of his or her personal value’.”

Most importantly, and this is what those young ladies needed to hear, modesty is more than keeping the boys from failing their classes and more than just protecting themselves from being gawked at.  “Sexual modesty is not a flight from love, but on the contrary the opening of a way towards it.”  Each of those young ladies desires to be loved and dressing immodestly, even if it garners attention, will never foster true love.  Only modesty frees love to blossom.

Know Thy Temperament

Moralilty, Virtue

In 2014, Americans spent over $10 billion on self-help books, CDs and seminars.  Although these techniques promise change, very often they fail to make any lasting impact on our lives.  The problem oftentimes is that the programs themselves have a different definition of happiness or perfection and so we end up dissatisfied even when we reach our goals.  More often however is that we lack the self-knowledge necessary to really affect change in our lives.  When we begin to confront our shortcomings, a certain amount of sadness arises in us.  In order to avoid this sadness, we develop blind spots to our true faults.  We then embark on some self-help program to fix faults we don’t really have or ones that are minor at best.  This is not to say these programs have no use in our lives, after all, only that they will be entirely ineffective unless we have self-knowledge.  Placing ourselves before God in prayer by which we come to know ourselves as He knows us is remains the most effective way to grow in self-knowledge and to heal those defects that we have.  But many people may not be aware that in the Catholic tradition there are other objective means to growing in self-knowledge, namely by relying on the knowledge of our temperament.

Fr. Jordan Aumann defines a temperament as, “as the pattern of inclinations and reactions that proceed from the physiological constitution of the individual. It is a dynamic factor that determines to a great extent the manner in which an individual will react to stimuli of various kinds.”  Within this definition we can see two factors, namely that our temperaments are based on our material makeup (physiological constitution) and represent a pattern or a natural way to reacting to a given situation.  These reactions can be quick or slow and short in duration or long lasting.  Each of these four combinations maps to a specific temperament.

What makes knowledge of one’s temperament extremely helpful when it comes to self-knowledge is that it enables us to see both are natural strengths and weaknesses.  It also makes some virtues easier while others are harder.

There are two caveats that are important for us to understand as well.  First we must never use our temperament as an excuse for our bad behavior or as a way to minimize our faults.  We use it to understand our tendencies and as a means to view our weaknesses—but this is always done so that we can open the windows of our souls and allow the transforming light of Christ to shine on them.  Second, just because it is a natural tendency does not mean that we are stuck with our temperament.  As Aumann’s definition suggests, temperaments are dispositions which means they can be molded and changed.  Our goal ought to be to for the perfection of all four temperaments rather than thinking we are stuck with our own.

In looking at each of the four temperaments, we begin with the choleric.  The choleric temperament is easily and strongly aroused, and the impression lasts for a long time.   Because of this, the choleric tends to show great zeal for whatever he sets his mind to.  He tends to be strong willed and highly emotional and a man of principles.  The virtues of perseverance and justice tend to come rather easily and this temperament naturally lends itself to leading others.

On the other hand, the choleric because he is highly emotional often acts quickly and is imprudent in his haste.  He must actively work to cultivate patience, prudence, and humility.  Because he is principle based he tends to put principles ahead of people and rarely does things just to be nice.  So, on a natural level they need to practice charity in dealing with others.

The passionate partner of the choleric is the melancholic.  The melancholic reacts slowly but once aroused the impression is strong and long lasting.  By nature the melancholic is inclined to reflection, piety, and the interior life. They are compassionate toward those who suffer, attracted to the corporal works of mercy, and able to endure suffering to the point of heroism in the performance of their duties. They have high ideals and a commitment to perfection.  They also tend to analyze their projects thoroughly.

The melancholic tends to be overly critical of themselves and others, dismissive and overly judgmental.  They lack self-confidence and often have difficulty starting tasks.

Those with a Sanguine temperament tend to react quickly and strongly to almost any stimulation or impression, but the reaction is usually of short duration.   The sanguine is optimistic, sometime overly so and are usually fairly outgoing. This means that compassion usually comes rather easily to them, but they have trouble being impartial because their feelings are so strong.  They tend to be impulsive as well.

Because the deep passion in their initial response quickly fades they tend to lack perseverance.   Vanity can be a great temptation for the sanguine as well as envy. One of the greatest challenges that a sanguine faces is making impulsive decision.  One way to overcome this is by striving to cultivate the virtue of prudence.  They also need to cultivate the virtue of perseverance since they can easily lose focus on tasks that require long commitments.

Finally, we have the phlegmatic temperament.  The phlegmatic is rarely aroused emotionally and, if so, only weakly. The impressions received usually last for only a short time and leave no trace. The fundamental disposition of the phlegmatic is that he is reserved, prudent, sensible, reflective, and dependable.  He is not easily provoked to anger or prone to exaggeration.  Phlegmatics are well known for their easy going nature.  They also tend to be clear and concise in their speech.  The phlegmatic however does not like conflict and will avoid it at all costs.  In fact they have a tendency to avoid not only conflict but anything that is physically or mentally demanding.

four_temperaments

Because they tend towards laziness and even sloth, the root sin of the phlegmatic is most often sensuality.  Other ways that sensuality manifests itself in the phlegmatic person include anger and impatience in the face of anything hard, disorganization because they seek whatever is immediate, and the consistent tendency to put off prayer.  The phlegmatic then needs to cultivate fortitude and temperance.

Hebrews 10:24 says, “We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works.”   If we reflect on this for a moment we realize that knowledge of our own temperament and of others can be used to help motivate others.

As we set out on the journey of self-knowledge, we quickly realize that, like St. Paul, we do not do the things we want to do but what we do not want to do.  There is an execution gap in our lives.  Not only that, but understanding the temperament of those around us helps to overcome a great deal of conflict in our lives, especially those we live with and work with.

In accomplishing any task, there are four key areas to consider.  They are

  • Setting the Right goals
  • Getting Started
  • Overcoming Obstacles
  • Persevering to the End

Each of the temperaments then has a characteristic weakness associated with one of these areas.  Understanding how to strengthen these weaknesses and the proper way to approach the person will help anyone’s motivation.

As I mentioned earlier, the choleric is a self-motivated leader who is driven to complete his objectives.  However because the choleric is quick to respond and slow to receive advice, he often sets imprudent goals or no real goals at all.  The choleric then needs to learn to take the time to choose goals properly.  The key then as a choleric is to be patient, and set the right goals.  In dealing with a choleric, motivation is normally not the key but we need to slow them down.  We can ask them if they have buy-in from others on their ideas or help brainstorm with them.  We must also help them to remain charitable because they often see others as stumbling blocks and will try to steamroll over them.

The melancholic, due to his naturally reflective nature, does not have trouble setting proper goals.  Instead, he will often struggle with actually getting started.  This manifests itself also by being overly focused on the small details because they want everything to be perfect.  The key for a melancholic is to prioritize goals.  In working with them they need a kick start—but this cannot be in the form of you doing it for them.  Instead ask what you can do to help them get started or ask them for a solution to specific problem you are having.  If you can keep them focused on the individuals steps they won’t get bogged down in the details.

Sanguines, like Cholerics, tend not to have any problems getting started.  They are usually eager to get going.  Instead they struggle with persevering to the end.  Their optimistic nature causes them to overlook true difficulties or minimize them.  The best thing for a Sanguine is to set and schedule.  They can be helped by regularly following up with them to see their progress.  Setting interim goals will keep them from getting bored.

The Phlegmatic is perhaps the most difficult to motivate because of their laid back nature.  They struggle with setting goals like the Choleric, but the main struggle for them is overcoming obstacles.  They need both encouragements throughout the process and to be held accountable at all stages of the process.  It also helps to remind them of past successes.

In conclusion, it bears repeating that the purpose in understanding temperament is to grow in understanding both of ourselves and others.  This is much more than mere self-improvement on the natural level—it should have as its goal to fulfill God’s will as a loving and joyful spouse, parent, and friend.  Understanding temperament not only helps us become more capable of controlling our emotions and moods, it helps us identify the most effective means to grow in virtue and obedience to God’s will.

***If you are interested in taking a temperament test for yourself, here is a link to one that is contained in the book The Temperament God Gave You***