Gone Fishing

To see the Fisherman, really.

See you all next month, or maybe July.

Urban Legend About Accuracy of Snopes.com Turns Out To Be False

(When it comes to the Internet, people are so gullible).

Object Puzzle Pieces

‘Object’ means ‘chosen behavior.’ And when a chosen behavior is evil, no intentions or circumstances can make it good. Don’t even start with why you are choosing to do it. It doesn’t matter why, when the chosen behavior is evil.

Judgments about morality cannot be made without taking into consideration whether or not the deliberate choice of a specific kind of behaviour is in conformity with the dignity and integral vocation of the human person.

Hence human activity cannot be judged as morally good merely because it is a means for attaining one or another of its goals, or simply because the subject’s intention is good.

But on what does the moral assessment of man’s free acts depend? What is it that ensures this ordering of human acts to God? Is it the intention of the acting subject, the circumstances — and in particular the consequences — of his action, or the object itself of his act? … But as part of the effort to work out such a rational morality (for this reason it is sometimes called an “autonomous morality” ) there exist false solutions, linked in particular to an inadequate understanding of the object of moral action.

Some authors do not take into sufficient consideration the fact that the will is involved in the concrete choices which it makes: these choices are a condition of its moral goodness and its being ordered to the ultimate end of the person. Others are inspired by a notion of freedom which prescinds from the actual conditions of its exercise, from its objective reference to the truth about the good, and from its determination through choices of concrete kinds of behaviour.

In this [false] view, deliberate consent to certain kinds of behaviour declared illicit by traditional moral theology would not imply an objective moral evil.

Such theories however are not faithful to the Church’s teaching, when they believe they can justify, as morally good, deliberate choices of kinds of behaviour contrary to the commandments of the divine and natural law. These theories cannot claim to be grounded in the Catholic moral tradition.

But the consideration of these consequences, and also of intentions, is not sufficient for judging the moral quality of a concrete choice. The weighing of the goods and evils foreseeable as the consequence of an action is not an adequate method for determining whether the choice of that concrete kind of behaviour is “according to its species”, or “in itself”, morally good or bad, licit or illicit. The foreseeable consequences are part of those circumstances of the act, which, while capable of lessening the gravity of an evil act, nonetheless cannot alter its moral species.

The morality of the human act depends primarily and fundamentally on the “object” rationally chosen by the deliberate will, […] The object of the act of willing is in fact a freely chosen kind of behaviour.

“there are certain specific kinds of behaviour that are always wrong to choose, because choosing them involves a disorder of the will, that is, a moral evil”.

And Saint Thomas observes that “it often happens that man acts with a good intention, but without spiritual gain, because he lacks a good will. […]”

The reason why a good intention is not itself sufficient, but a correct choice of actions is also needed, is that the human act depends on its object,…

One must therefore reject the thesis, characteristic of teleological and proportionalist theories, which holds that it is impossible to qualify as morally evil according to its species — its “object” — the deliberate choice of certain kinds of behaviour or specific acts, apart from a consideration of the intention for which the choice is made or the totality of the foreseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned.

Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances.

Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object“.

If acts are intrinsically evil, a good intention or particular circumstances can diminish their evil, but they cannot remove it. They remain “irremediably” evil acts; per se and in themselves they are not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person.

Consequently, circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act “subjectively” good or defensible as a choice.

For this reason — we repeat — the opinion must be rejected as erroneous which maintains that it is impossible to qualify as morally evil according to its species the deliberate choice of certain kinds of behaviour or specific acts, without taking into account the intention for which the choice was made or the totality of the foreseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned.

When we engage in an evil chosen behavior – an intrinsically evil act – it doesn’t matter why we choose to do it. It only matters that we choose to do it. When we choose to do it, we are doing evil. There is no “why” which can justify it.

Object Puzzles

Suppose a married couple uses condoms for several years. Later, they find out that the husband was sterile the whole time and they couldn’t have had any children anyway.

Does this mean that their prior acts of contraception were not really acts of contraception?

Suppose a woman is incapable of having an orgasm unless her husband wears a condom. They have no desire to prevent pregnancy whatsoever, but they use condoms in order to achieve this other good end associated with the unitive telos of sex.

Does this mean that when they have intercourse with a condom that they are not contracepting?

Suppose a woman has the skull of her unborn infant crushed in the second trimester because she doesn’t want to get fat.

Is this an abortion?

Suppose a woman has the skull of her unborn infant crushed in the second trimester because doctors don’t know how to save her life without crushing the skull of the baby.

Is this an abortion?

Suppose a general orders the incineration of a city of civilians because it has a lot of Jews in it and he hates Jews.

Is this a war crime?

Suppose a general orders the incineration of a city of civilians because he personally considers even the old ladies and infants in a highly militarized society to be legitimate military targets.

Is this a war crime?

Suppose an interrogator subjects a helpless prisoner (not a volunteer or trainee) to waterboarding because he likes to see those towel-headed Wogs struggle and suffer.

Is this an act of torture?

Suppose an interrogator subjects a helpless prisoner to waterboarding because he thinks he might get some actionable intelligence out of the exercise.

Is this an act of torture?

(Hint: According to Pope John Paul II, the moral object of an act is the chosen behavior of the acting subject, independent of the acting subject’s intentions or the circumstances).

A Big Enough Tent for Torture and Abortion

Giuliani is that rare political combination: moderate ideologically, but not mushy personally. He has the hard edge of an ideologue, but not the rigidity or extremism.

So now the definition of ideological moderation is being both pro-abortion and pro-torture. It’s a Big Tent and all that.

(HT: Eunomia)

The Heretic Larison…

…has Blasphemed, so the Faithful Followers of the Prophet Dawkins (PBUH) are issuing Fatwahs.

Equally Meaningless

I posted the following in a thread about the 14th Amendment to the CONUS at WWWtW:

I guess I don’t understand what “equal” means. (“Equal” is one of those words that everyone thinks they understand but really don’t: that is, just about everyone who uses it means something different by it, and often the same person means something different from one use to the next). I blogged on this a while back while addressing an entirely different subject. At the time I wrote:

“It seems to me that every claim of equality implies at least one more semantic step, without which the claim of equality is meaningless. In the abstract all that ‘equal’ means is that some attribute is identical among specified instances: that the things being specified are identical in some respect. With numbers that attribute is quantity. With anything other than numbers, every claim of equality is empty without specifying the putatively identical attribute(s).”

Maybe we can say that in order to be prima-facie constitutional a law has to apply to everybody. If we limit this to “protection of the laws” that means I suppose that anything the law protects it has to protect for everybody. But this still seems to me to be something of a meaningless abstraction: the law isn’t going to equally protect both you and I from trespassers at One Elm Street if you are the homowner and I am not. It has to make an authoritative discrimination at the level of particulars. Every law without exception has to make some kinds of authoritative discriminations at the level of particulars. This is almost a definition of what a law is: an authoritative discrimination. It is certainly essential to law if it doesn’t constitute a full definition: a “law” which makes no authoritative discriminations isn’t a law (just as a “right”, which is a special category or particular view of a law, always makes authoritative discriminations).

So “equal protection of the laws” or “equal rights” is either empty of meaning – that is, it is substantively superfluous and has to be backstopped against some tradition or conception of natural law which does all the discriminatory legwork, and which is let alone by the principle to do that legwork at the level of particulars – or it is outright self-contradictory, requiring us to authoritatively discriminate in a way that doesn’t discriminate.

At a certain level modern people don’t want to face the fact that some discriminations are good and some are evil; that authority inherently discriminates and that this is good and necessary. In order to avoid talking about good and evil we introduce the concept of equality and empty our discourse of all meaning.

Consequentialism: It’s the New Black

Winning is everything. Fighting ruthlessly may not please the safe-at-home moralists, but it’s losing that’s immoral. […]

Whether you’re left, right or in between, ask yourself this yes-or-no question: If torturing a known terrorist would save the life of the person you love most in the world, would you approve it?

If your answer is “no,” you’re not a moral paragon. You’re an abomination.

(HT: Eunomia)

Padded Cell-Mates

Positivists and postmodernists may despise one another, but there is a surprising resemblance between them. “Pomos” declare the death of the subject, while the cognitive scientists explain subjectivity away as an epiphenomenon of brain processes.

Suicide Notes

“In New Jersey in May 2007, Kosovo blowback has finally reached America. […] But like the Bourbons of yore, KosovA enthusiasts inside the Beltway learn nothing and forget nothing. […] That’s the broad picture, dear reader, and a bunch of overexcitable, non-al-Qaeda-connected ‘Yugoslavs’ from New Jersey will not be allowed to disturb it.”

“Now how have I defined modern liberalism? As the belief that non-discrimination is the highest and ruling value of society. And here is that belief wrought to its uttermost. For Bjorn Staerk, non-discrimination is higher than life, it is higher than the duty to stop murder, it is higher than the duty to protect the innocent, it is higher than right and wrong, it is higher than the survival of society itself. Non-discrimination is God, a god who allows no other values to co-exist with himself, a god who is absolutely supreme and alone.”

“Our ideas are universal. Our love for mankind is unexcelled, this is to say; so also is our hatred for men in their particularity and finitude. We become death, the destroyer of worlds. In Saecula Saeculorum, Amen.”