Subjective meat

Modernity is engaged in an all out war against the good, the true, and the beautiful. A key component of that war is convincing people that moral norms and the moral gravity of human choices are subjective rather than objective.  This is, of course, a pile of errant nonsense.

The relationship between the subjective and the objective in human choices is obvious to children but can, like many deep philosophical subjects, seem befuddling to intellectuals.  Catholics are fortunate to have an authoritative tradition to draw upon to slice through the befuddlement, and the tradition that applies to this particular subject is the traditional understanding of mortal sin.

In order for sin to be mortal, Christian tradition holds that there are three requirements: grave matter, full knowledge, and deliberate consent.  What distinguishes mortal sin from venial sin is that the matter is objectively grave and that knowledge and consent are sufficiently present subjectively.

But all sins, not merely mortal sins, involve the interplay of matter, knowledge, and consent.  The matter of sin is the objective content of the acting subject’s choice.  (Keep in mind that “objective” is not a synonym for “physical”).

Moral wrongs always involve a defect, and the degree of personal culpability of the acting subject always depends upon his choice to do something which is objectively evil: personally culpable evil is always a defect in the will.

But as we’ve discussed before, defects of knowledge make it possible to do something evil unwittingly. Defects of knowledge also make it possible to do something that isn’t evil while under the impression that it is evil.  Eating meat that was sacrificed to idols while under the impression that doing so blasphemes is evil because, even though he is mistaken about the objective facts, the acting subject is under the impression that he is doing moral wrong but chooses to do so anyway.

So we have a number of permutations of human acts as analyzed under the trio of matter, knowledge, and will:

1. Morally good acts.
2. Non-culpable mistakes, where knowledge is non-culpably defective, will is good, and matter is objectively evil (Catholics call this “invincible ignorance”).
3. Culpable mistakes where knowledge is culpably defective (the person should know better) and matter is objectively evil. (This is “negligence” or something roughly equivalent).
4. Culpable acts in which knowledge is defective, the action itself is accidentally objectively good or neutral, and the will deliberately chooses evil because of defective knowledge.  This is like the case of the man who eats meat sacrificed to idols while under the mistaken impression that doing so is blasphemous.
5. Culpable acts in which the matter is evil, the person knows what he is doing, and chooses it freely.

Scandal, of course, is any act the matter of which involves leading others to sin — any kind of sin.

There is of course plenty more that could be said: this is just a very basic outline resting on the traditional Christian understanding of moral evil.  But the one thing you’ll notice is that the moral gravity of the matter of the act is always objective.  Even in case 4, where the action itself is objectively neutral or good, the moral gravity arises from what the acting subject mistakenly thinks he is doing.  The thing that he mistakenly thinks he is doing is – objectively – committing blasphemy.

Because we are not omniscient it is possible for our knowledge to be defective.  This gives rise to a number of permutations in how it is possible to do moral wrong.  But the possibility of making mistakes does not cast any doubt on the objectivity of moral standards: as Pope St. John Paul II put it in Veritatis Splendour,

It is possible that the evil done as the result of invincible ignorance or a non-culpable error of judgment may not be imputable to the agent; but even in this case it does not cease to be an evil, a disorder in relation to the truth about the good. Furthermore, a good act which is not recognized as such does not contribute to the moral growth of the person who performs it; it does not perfect him and it does not help to dispose him for the supreme good.

Where the Metal Meets the Meat

“If the execution was the result of a good-faith mistake, then it’s not injustice, which means that, morally speaking, the act is one in conformity with justice.” – CAEI commenter Seamus, whom I thank for the thoughtful post.

Acts aren’t purely subjective things though: they have both objective and subjective components. An objectively unjust act can be subjectively justified – an honest mistake. But upon learning of the mistake it is wrong to insist that the act overall was just, because insisting that the act was just encompasses not merely its subjective component but also its objective. “We executed the wrong guy, but it was a just execution” is incorrect precisely because it is ignoring the objective element of justice. It is more accurate to say “We executed the wrong guy unjustly, but it was an honest mistake” because that deals with both the objective and subjective elements.

If someone holds the position that starting the Iraq war was unjust but an honest mistake, I really don’t have any problem with it. What is a problem is when people insist that starting the Iraq war was categorically just. If it was categorically just that means it was just in both its subjective and objective characters. And this of course assumes that the war was started with the intention of adhering rigorously to the JW doctrine, that the assessment of the putative WMD threat was in fact done with objective prudence, etc. I think those assumptions are themselves pretty suspect, but they are at least arguable.

I don’t really have a quibble with someone who says that under the JWD the Iraq war was a mistake, rather than strictly speaking unjust. A mistake allows for both the objective and subjective elements of justice, rather than refusing either of them entry into the discussion.

If we rule the objective element of justice out of our discussion a priori though then we get to all sorts of ridiculous results: e.g., that particular abortion wasn’t unjust because the person having it doesn’t subjectively believe abortion to be unjust. Bosh! She may not be subjectively culpable, but it is ridiculous – I daresay postmodern – to say that therefore the abortion she had was a just abortion.

Many on the Right want to rule the objective component of justice out of bounds when it comes to the war. That is because it is precisely in the objective elements of justice, where the metal meets the meat, that their arguments in favor of its justice break down. And it is the same trick – starting from the fact that there is a subjective element and inferring incorrectly that all that there is, or all that is pertinent, is the subjective element – which is invoked under postmodernism in general.

Triple jeopardy

John Noonan’s basic thesis is that Church doctrine prohibiting usury doesn’t categorically prohibit anything at all: that the doctrine boils down to the idea that charging interest is either licit or illicit depending on circumstances and subjective intentions extrinsic to the contract itself. The putative coup de grace in reaching this conclusion for Noonan is what is called the triple contract.

The triple contract is an agreement between two parties, but in order to understand it you have to first consider a contract between three parties: lets call them the investor, the managing partner, and the insurance provider.

The managing partner proposes (say) to undertake a risky but potentially very profitable sea voyage. The investor provides funds to finance the voyage in return for a fixed profit. The insurance provider, for a fee, provides security to the investor: a guarantee that the investor will receive his money back and a fixed profit, even if the voyage fails.^[1]

In the triple contract the managing partner is also the insurance provider, and he imputes his fee as the insurance provider to himself.  In effect he agrees to provide an insurance bond as an inducement to get the investor to invest, and then underwrites the insurance bond himself.

As with most attempts to turn the moral prohibition of usury into a decorative accessory which doesn’t actually prohibit any well defined objective behaviors, the part you aren’t supposed to notice is the whole matter of security for contracts. In this case the fact that insurance bonds (understood equivocally) were accepted as morally licit is supposed to make Noonan’s readers fail to notice the difference between actual property staked as security and a personal IOU.

A personal guarantee is not a licit “insurance bond”. Rent charged against a collection of property, set aside and held in escrow as a contingency if things don’t go according to plans, is licit.

Of course, if you game the scenario forward this raises the question of why a managing partner with the resources to fully insure the investor and his profit would bother with an investor in the first place. But it might make sense if, say, the managing partner had illiquid property like farms or estates to post as security: property he doesn’t want to sell unless the enterprise fails.

So if you encounter the triple contract as something supposedly problemmatic when you are reading about usury, you can rest assured that it is a nothingburger.  The sleight of hand involved rests on all of the usual equivocations.

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[1] Note that in insurance underwriting it is not typically the case for an insurance bond to cover even 100% of the possible loss, let alone the entire loss plus a profit, because of the perverse incentives this creates to destroy economic value.

A moral theory of general relativity

In this post I will argue that usury is worse than adultery in an important sense.

First we need some background.

We distinguish between what we call venial matter and grave matter (mortally sinful kinds of behavior). White lies, for example, are the former. We should never commit any sin (by definition), but for the purposes of this post we will set aside venial sin and consider only grave matter.

Choice of grave matter justly deserves the punishment of Hell^[1]. Without Christ’s freely given grace (ordinarily^[2] received through participation in the sacraments He instituted), mortal sin brings the judgment of justly deserved eternal condemnation.

Contracepted sex, adultery, sodomy, masturbation, and skipping Mass on Sunday without good reason are all grave matter. (Skipping Mass is grave matter because it involves disobedience of rightful authority in an important matter).

This list is, needless to say, nonexhaustive. And particular instances of other kinds of sins (e.g. theft, lying, usury) may be grave or venial depending on content: stealing a cookie from the cookie jar is probably venial, but stealing an old couples’ life savings is certainly grave matter.

We can consider the relative gravity of kinds of mortal sins under three modes by asking three distinct questions.

1) What are the most grave sins for you?

These are the mortally sinful behaviors which you are most likely to commit. You are most likely to commit mortal sins when you have a strong temptation to them, when the means to do so are easily available, and when you don’t personally intuit (for whatever reason) the moral gravity of the offense. These are the most grave and dangerous sins for you.

2) What are the most grave sins corporately?

This follows a similar pattern but for communities as opposed to individuals.  It depends in part upon what kinds of grave sins the community does not, qua community, treat as grave sins. If in a particular community contraception is considered generally acceptable, adultery is not considered acceptable, and many more people contracept than commit adultery, then contraception is a more grave sin than adultery corporately.

3) What are the most grave sins abstractly?

Without disparaging the possibility of addressing this question philosophically, I would suggest that it is rare for people to take an interest in this mode of gravity except as a means of avoiding the discomfort of addressing the other two modes: harlots dancing on the head of a pin, if you will.

Now for the argument:

Gravity in the first mode depends upon the particular person and his circumstances, of course, and so any argument about the relative gravity of sins generally speaking will not apply.  It is worth noting though that the gravity of kinds of sins in the individual relation will have significant dependence upon the corporate relation, because man is a social animal with all that implies.  (We might think of this as a ‘moral theory of special relativity’).

Gravity in the third mode is of abstract interest, but purely abstract relations between species of sin in a Platonic sense is not the sort of gravity the argument will address.  (We might think of this as asking the question ‘what was moral gravity like before the Big Bang?’)  The argument is that usury is concretely, as instantiated in our actual present reality, more grave than adultery.

Corporately, in our society in general, there remains some resistance to the idea that adultery is a perfectly normal and acceptable thing.  Resistance to the idea that usury is a perfectly normal and acceptable thing is immaterial; in fact even basic comprehension of what usury actually means (and doesn’t mean) is extremely thin on the ground.

There is still a pretty clear understanding, in more orthodox communities, of what adultery actually is and is not; and there remains strong moral disapproval in those communities.  The same cannot be said of usury.  Even in the most orthodox communities there is confusion over what ‘usury’ actually means, despite the ultimate simplicity of the subject matter and numerous Magisterial statements over the course of millennia. Even in the most orthodox communities there is controversy where there should not be controversy: there is rejection of the Tradition of the Church and the Magisterium (not to mention a lack of financial competence) in favor of an intrinsically uncharitable, modernist, subjective approach to usury.

In short, the most orthodox of communities are not corrupted by confusion and dissent over the grave moral wrong of adultery to the same extent these same communities are corrupted by confusion and dissent over the grave moral wrong of usury.

And an important figure in Christianity once said:

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

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[1] The traditional conjecture that different sinners have different experiences of Hell, depending upon their particular sins, may be worth a mention.

[2] We also have the concept of extraordinary grace, which is our way of acknowledging that, while God has promised to us the efficacy of His sacraments and always keeps His promises, He is not limited to dispensing grace in only this way.  However it is also worth noting that the presumption that one will onesself personally receive extraordinary grace is, itself, grave matter.