Rebutting the is-ought 'problem' in five steps

Among the many philosophical puzzles that can captivate the aspiring thinker is the supposed is-ought problem. Originating with writers like Hume, it criticizes the supposed fallacy that one cannot derive an "ought" of moral obligation from a descriptive "is."

Obviously there is truth to this. Just because I am a blogger doesn't mean I ought to be one.

But some internet denizens have seized upon the problem and cite it with prodigality.

There are many responses to them, like the explanation of duty or teleological goal as inherent to existence. For such critics, it seems the is-ought makes a hard philosophical distinction out of a mere verbal distinction.

I am no longer in a position to judge most of these arguments, if I ever was. Yet I do appreciate a comedic rebuttal like that put forward by Deogolwulf.

In a long comment thread, he dismisses the purported problem as "a poor figment of an eighteenth-century philosopher's mind."

I. There is an is-ought gap.
II. A rational animal ought to accept what is.
III. I am a rational animal.
Therefore,
IV. I ought to accept that there is an is-ought gap.
Therefore,
V. Oh dear.

Because the is-ought problem is fundamentally an ethical one, it cannot be kept on the logical plane alone. By considering the personal obligation (and telos) of a rational creature, Deogowulf brings philosophy away from the mind games of the blackboard and the e-mail signature and back into life where it belongs.

Jacques Ellul on technology, freedom and moral judgment

Technology will not tolerate any judgment being passed on it. Or rather: Technologists do not easily tolerate people expressing an ethical or moral judgment on what they do.

But the expression of ethical, moral and spiritual judgments is actually the highest freedom of mankind.

...So whatever I say about technology and about technologists themselves is unimportant to them.

It won't deter them from what they are doing. They are now set in their course. They are so conditioned.

For a technologist is not free. He is conditioned by his training, by his experiences and by the objectives which he must reach.

He is not free in the execution of his task. He does what technology demands of him. That's why I think freedom and technology contradict each other.

-Jacques Ellul
The Betrayal of Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul (~28:00 mark)

Ellul of course speaks broadly. After all, no matter their vocation few people tolerate moral judgment on their work.

One could debate what he means about the expression of judgments as the highest freedom. But it is certainly a higher freedom than that of instrumental reason.

The "conditioning" of technologists is not simply the kind of habit one expects of a virtuous man. Rather, it is a discipline bordering on the penal. Without conscious effort, efficiency and neutrality towards ultimate matters easily become the highest virtues. Here is a curious overlap between a technological focus, careerism and consumerism.

Especially in bioethical debates, technological experts and pretenders to expertise often appeal to freedom from moral censure. Ellul's often radical philosophy suggests this phenomenon is in fact the slavery of a man in servitude to his tools.

The wisdom of property

Many traditional conservative critiques of capitalist and business ideology emphasize that these encourage an amputated view of man, reducing him only to his desires and choices.

This reductionist ethos tends to cut off the individual from his family, his history, his country and even his God.

The same ethos has direct bearing on cultural conflicts surrounding sex and bioethics, where lifestyle individualism merges with consumerist demand to deny and to transgress the limits of bodily nature.

Yet the link to Liberal philosophy's view of property is rarely highlighted.

In this spirit, Villanova Prof. Mark Shiffman provides an excellent and concise critique of Lockean anthropology in his discussion of The Human Meaning of Property at Front Porch Republic.

According to Locke, our right to property derives from our investment of our labor to improve something that did not belong to another already (Second Treatise, chapter 5). This right includes property in our own person – our body and our mental faculties. Locke’s formulation of our relationship to ourselves in terms of labor-derived property hints at the view of the human person that underlies it, which is the reduction of the person ultimately to the will. For if it is our labor that makes our bodies our property, and the same goes for our minds, then what is the “self” that initiates and is responsible for this labor, if not the will that makes us stretch our limbs and direct our attention to what is around and inside us?

....The will places value on things, initiates the labor that improves their value, and shapes the way we think of them in terms of the right to exercise itself in their disposal. Locke’s examples, like Madison’s, emphasize agrarian property, but do so solely in terms of the prospect of infinitely increasing yields... The will imposes its limitless terms on the world, rather than recognizing natural limits to its satisfaction – except the limits that have to be observed and enforced by government to accommodate the existence of other wills seeking their own satisfactions. These latter limits, seen from the point of view of the person protected by them, are what we call “rights.” They are thus negative or prohibitive in character, grounded on the valuation imposed on the world by the individual will, and formulated so as to coordinate all the individual and conflicting wills that fall under one system of government and laws.

This “right” that precedes and legitimates government is natural in the sense that the passions of all human beings lead them to lay claim to it. If we take the will of the individual and extract what is universal in it (or sufficiently universal for practical purposes), this will provide us with the basis for elaborating a reliable system of rights, or a set of exemptions from interference that everyone can sign on to. Madison quite correctly asserts a reciprocal equivalence between property and rights. Unfortunately for his republican cause, this equivalence opens the door to the marketization of every aspect of life.

This habit of making the will foundational to man and to government ends up placing all choices beyond criticism, provided they do not conflict with other choices. Reason, one of man's mental faculties, is the "property," and thus the instrument, of the unquestioned will.

Such voluntarism calls into question the humanity of those who do not present obvious evidence for having wills, such as the brain-damaged and the unborn.

It also distorts the meaning of nature, seeing it not as good in itself, but only insofar as it is transformed into an expression of human will and the imperialist self.

Proposing a less willful view of property, Shiffman follows Richard Weaver:

The responsibility for property that is intimately connected to our life as a person (and this is the meaning of proprietas: what is one’s own and characteristic of oneself) calls upon virtues that render us more complete human beings. Foremost among these virtues is practical judgment, informed by long-term views of our life as a whole and our relationship to our community. Thus only property that satisfies this criterion falls under “metaphysical right,” i.e. must be recognized as rightly belonging to our very being and its fulfillment as what it most truly is.

While I would scrutinize the place of practical judgment as a foremost virtue, his essay brings to the fore the distinction between property as an instrument to satisfying human desires and property as an instrument to advancing human goods. Even the "instrument" takes on different connotations depending on its object: is property best used "to the extent desired" or used "to the extent it is beneficial"?

For advancing the wisdom of property, Shiffman's essay may be used to benefit.

Nature, Custom, and "Evil Love"

J. Budsiszewski has penned a noteworthy reflection on nature, the under-mentioned concept of connaturality, the "second nature" of custom and habit, and the perilous case of habits gone wrong.

In his essay The Natural, the Connatural, and the Unnatural he writes:

According to what might be called the lower meaning, the natural is the spontaneous, the haphazard, the unimproved: Think of Adam and Eve in the jungle, or for that matter, think of the jungle itself. From this point of view, a human being is at his most natural when he is driven by raw desires, "doing what comes naturally," as we say. But according to what might be called the higher meaning, the natural is what perfects us, what unfolds the inbuilt purposes of our design, what unlocks our directed potentialities. Think this time of Adam and Eve in the Garden, not the jungle, or for that matter, think of the Garden itself. From this point of view, a human being is most genuinely "doing what comes naturally" when he at his best and bravest and truest -- when he fulfills his creational design, when he "comes into his own." The lower way of speaking makes nature and second nature enemies. The higher makes them friends, at least potentially.

While talk of design and purpose must, I think, at least reference the challenges of philosophical Darwinism or empiricism, Budsiszewski's exploration gives the reader much to appreciate. His distinction between nature in potentia and "second nature," nature as actualized, must be kept clear in all discussions of human nature.

Take his description of habit and custom:

St. Thomas says that something can be connatural to a being insofar as it becomes natural through habituation, because "custom is a second nature." What he has in mind here is the way that habits and customs -- and, at another level, divine graces -- fill in the blanks, so to speak, which the generalities of nature leave undetermined. The result is that we acquire new inclinations to certain things, and come to find pleasure in things in which we did not find pleasure before. There are all sorts of varieties of second-nature connaturality, for example the connaturality of the lover with the beloved, whereby our nature adapts itself to the thing which, or to the person whom, we love.

The generalities of human nature, those discovered through philosophical or scientific inquiry, cannot forget the place of custom. It is in the domain of custom, too, that character and personality are most at play, whether in fiction or in reality.

Heresiologists make poor dramatists and social critics because they believe mistakes or differences about human or divine nature drive human behavior, when in fact it is the particular flaws and perfections of individual or collective habit that have the most motive power. These heresy-hunters call hubris Pelagianism, despair Calvinism, and impiety Gnosticism. Would that intellectual error were the only cause of sin! Education and argument would then suffice to correct the wicked.

Budsiszewski shows that mankind is capable of far more crookedness:

Not only can a man come to love what is contrary to his connatural good -- he can come to hate what conduces to his connatural good. In other words, he can learn to loath those things which tend to the very happiness that he is fashioned, by nature, to seek. Evil of a particular kind will become second nature to him even though it continues to be contrary to first nature -- but just because it has become second nature to him, he will have difficulty recognizing it as evil.

How does one cure a wicked habit when it is not recognized as wicked, when evil is one's good? Rational correction has its place, but perhaps external coercion and internal self-revulsion are the only other remedies short of divine intervention. Examples of external coercion are too familiar, ranging from social pressure to legal punishment.

Self-revulsion, however, needs more examination. Perhaps every sin contains within itself its own destruction. The sated glutton realizes his doom after the last gulp leaves him empty, or the wrathful pundit flinches upon seeing his recorded rage. Budsiszewski cites one woman who rejected her self-destruction after seeing others in extremis just down her vicious path. Call it the car-wreck effect.

This self-recognition constitutes a virtue of its own, and of course sin is best fought with true virtue.

Budsiszewski further references the Angelic Doctor in discussing how sin is a misdirected good. But the saint supplies us with an implicit rebuke of Romantic sentimentalism:

Evil is never loved except under the aspect of good, that is to say, in so far as it is good in some respect, and is considered as being good simply. And thus a certain love is evil, in so far as it tends to that which is not simply a true good. It is in this way that man "loves iniquity," inasmuch as, by means of iniquity, some good is gained; pleasure, for instance, or money, or such like.

(S.T. I-II, Q. 27, ad 1.)

No one can, without hinting at tragedy, say "Love conquers all" after reading this description of an "evil love."

(via diogenes)

The Hopefulness of Grief

Dermot Quinn, speaking in the ISI lecture "Religion, and the Conservative Mind," considers how Russell Kirk could maintain hope while doubting the limitless capacities of mankind:

Human depravity bulks large in the Conservative Mind. The book exhibits a very Tory insistence on the reality of evil, the folly of schemes of social and personal perfectiblity, the inevitability of disappointment in a corrupt world.

Kirk thought of himself as a Christian Stoic. His best writing reflects a conviction that the most perduring of the permanent things is sorrow We would not be human without "the inescapable emotion of grief." Yet this is not as gloomy as it sounds.

Kirk used this grief to justify a politics not of dissent and despair, but of hope. After all, to recognize the fall from grace is to recognize grace itself as salvifically necessary. Awareness of human weakness is the beginning of wisdom.

Am I right in believing that contemporary hopemongers rarely show grief? At most, they muster compassion, which is not the same thing.

See also: Patrick Deneen's Hope against Hope

The Peter Kreeft v. David Boonin CU-Boulder Abortion Debate

Judging from the turnout, the debate last Friday was a great success. The 288-seat basement auditorium was filled past capacity. The audience overflowed into the hall, where about forty chairs were set up. I’m told that spectators even crowded the stairs leading up from the basement. Not having left the auditorium until well after the debate had ended, I didn’t see the overflow. I conservatively estimated the turnout at over 400, others estimated it at 600. One fellow estimated 1,000, but that seems on the far side to me. More people arrived, but left because of the crowd.

Not bad for a cold Friday night in a college town.

The event was well-publicized. As I noted earlier, the event’s Facebook page numbered 95 RSVPs and over forty possibles. The archdiocese plugged the debate in the last Denver Catholic Register, and also posted a notice at its website.

Since Thursday, at least 25 people have come to this blog searching for information on the Kreeft-Boonin debates, which are a traveling show. Many of those visitors were local. The debate has certainly energized interest.

Peter Kreeft answered the debate question “Is abortion ever morally justifed?” in the negative, taking the pro-life side. He argued that for personhood is coextensive with human nature, enjoying all the rights thereof. He also argued that people cannot rationally deny the right to life of the unborn without denying the right to life of newborns.
Catholic News Agency summarizes:

He recounted how he once discussed abortion with "some very intelligent feminists," claiming that they had no argument justifying abortion that would not also justify infanticide. "After the argument they came up to me and said 'Congratulations, professor, you changed our mind. We didn't think you could do that'"

"'Oh, good,' I said, 'you're pro-life now?'"

"'No, we're pro-infanticide'," Kreeft finished, prompting surprised laughter from the audience. "So logical consistency can be a two-edged sword," he noted.

Kreeft presented a version of his argument that those who are uncertain about the personal state of the unborn child must refrain from abortion. Again, from the CNA summary:

Even someone unsure if the unborn child were a person, Kreeft argued, would in the absence of certainty have to refrain from an abortion. To kill someone without knowing if they are human is still homicide. To act in a rash manner that could kill someone, such as poisonously fumigating a room without being sure it was empty of people, would amount to criminal negligence. Barring certain knowledge that an unborn human is not a person, abortion similarly would be blameworthy even if the human fetus were not a person with the right to life.

Boonin noted that Kreeft's argument that any moral uncertainty about moral status of the unborn child meant all abortions were at minimum morally blameworthy could have radical implications if applied consistently. This "appeal to uncertainty," as he called it, could require one or more controversial stands: pacifism, since some soldiers are innocent conscripts and other innocents are killed in collateral damage in war; vegetarianism, since there can be doubt about whether killing an animal is blameworthy; opposition to capital punishment, because there was a possibility innocents would be executed; and finally it could require people to give all of their excess income to charity, since there was uncertainty whether spending money on luxuries deprived hungry or sick people from necessary resources.

I thought this was one of Boonin’s stronger points. Elsewhere he characterized some of Kreeft’s arguments as the often-fallacious slippery slope arguments. I believe he meant Kreeft’s allusions to the dehumanization of slaves or Jews in recent centuries. However, I think he dodged Kreeft’s postulate that justifying abortion also justified infanticide, which arguably is also a slippery slope argument.

Boonin himself proposed a thought experiment, a modified version of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist needs a blood transfusion” scenario: “Suppose you walked out in the park yesterday and a doctor caught you and conked you on the head and knocked you unconscious. You wake up, and the doctor has hooked you up to a bone marrow extraction device. The bone marrow is extracted from you and pumped into me. You ask 'What's going on?' The doctor says 'Don't worry, stay hooked into Professor Boonin for the next nine months, he'll be fine. Disconnect yourself now, because of a bone marrow disease, he's going to die.'”

Boonin thought most people agreed disconnecting oneself from the ill person was morally justified.

To the objection that this situation only applies to victims of rape, and that a woman consents to a pregnancy by consenting to sexual relations, Boonin modified his example: "Before you went walking in the park yesterday, you knew for a fact that my doctor was going to come looking in the park for a bone marrow donor. Your friends warn you 'Don't go in the park, lock your door! If you go into the park, there's a chance you're going to end up getting hooked up to this crazy philosopher, and you'll have to stick around for nine months." Escaping from this modified situation, Boonin thought, was similarly morally blameless.

But here I think he exposed the flaws of this thought experiment. It entails treating all pregnancies as kidnap-rescue scenarios. I don’t know about you, but no woman I know says “Bob and I are trying to force myself to carry a fetus for nine months.” Something so ordinary and universal as pregnancy, from which all men originated, cannot find a good analogy in such an extravagant hypothetical.

The thought experiment’s treatment of pregnancy as a disease, while certainly appealing to college students, also cannot form a consistent ethic. Think of the performance contradictions involved in an obstetrics ward that delivers babies, performs lifesaving surgeries in utero, and also commits abortions.

I also wonder: What would Boonin say are the duties of the father to a fetus considered parasitic?

Further, there is rhetorical manipulation latent in Boonin’s example.

In Thomson’s version of the scenario, a “famous violinist” suffers from some unspecified fatal ailment, the treatment of which requires someone to hook up to him for nine months. Boonin replaces the unspecified treatment with a bone marrow transfer, which is invasive and very uncomfortable.

Boonin also puts himself in the place of the ailing violinist. Whatever his other physical endowments, Boonin is not the handsomest of men. Further, both he and the hypothetical violinist are a few decades removed from their fetal stage.

Describe the person needing treatment as a gurgling infant, a cute four-year-old, or an ugly autistic teenager, and I think the audience reaction, and the philosopher’s intuitional response, would change depending on their sympathies with such persons. Make the ailing patient a blood relation, a pedophile, or a doctor nearly done with the cure for that bone marrow cancer from which he suffers, and our conflicted emotions cloud the argument that is meant to dissolve pro-life objections with revulsion towards imprisonment.

Boonin made some concessions to the pro-life cause, saying that if pregnancy were less burdensome an abortion could be an immoral act. I believe I heard him after the debate endorse the typical “viability” pro-choice criterion. I wished he had included this position in his public remarks, because it means that in his ethic, at the time when pregnancy is most burdensome upon the woman, it is least permissible.

Kreeft’s response to Boonin’s arguments seemed passive. A friend in attendance called his performance “understated,” which is perhaps the better word. Since I was more interested in recording the debate than in considering its truth, I initially thought Boonin did well against Kreeft. Only upon reflection, Kreeft’s position endured while Boonin’s shrank in stature.

At one point Kreeft suggested shifting the ground from “rights” to “responsibilities.” This was a bit inconsistent, since Kreeft’s arguments from the beginning used rights-language.

However, I think that shedding “rights talk” is the correct path to take. Rights-language is often antagonistic and conflict-based. Nobody talks about a right to be hugged, or a right to hug, because those actions have not been politicized. The conflict between mother(and father) and child is precisely what needs to be abated. Rights disputes suppose human equality, rather than human unity as the more important consideration.

In an egalitarian climate, the right to life must be universalized in distortive fashion. That is why Boonin can try to separate the right to life from the right to life support. While everybody can in theory live(insofar as anyone can theoretically live), the ability to sustain that life varies from person to person. Often such variety cannot be described in terms of equality.

“Rights-talk” is a political shorthand, a second-order description of the good in question. When talking about the right to life distracts from talking about life, something has gone awry.

The aftermath of the debate, and my excitement over what is happening in Boulder’s Catholic campus ministry, will have to fill another post.

For now a few references:
Update: I have published the detailed account made from my audio recording at Google Docs, it's ~2,000 words.

A recording of the debate is available on the ArchDen website

Francis Beckwith on Boonin’s book, “A Defense of Abortion,” a review excerpted at Mirror of Justice

Peter Kreeft's essay Human Personhood begins at Conception

Ivy Catholic reports a Kreeft-Boonin debate at Yale, the video of which is viewable at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Alasdair MacIntyre on Video

The video archives at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture is another fine resource. I was happy to see MacIntyre lecture, especially since he is a better speaker than he is a prose stylist. He discusses the compartmentalization of life required by so-called pluralism, wherein standards of action in one area of life simply do not translate into other areas of life.

Other videos look very promising.

Mushroom Cloud Morals

The anniversaries of the nuclear strikes on Japan have come around again, providing the opportunity to distinguish between those who see ethics as a peacetime luxury and those of a more principled bent.

Andrew Cusack compiles contemporary reactions, citing at least one author featured here before.

Roger Kimball brushes aside objections.

The Amputated Ethics of Liberalism

Dangerous Intersection writes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt's enquiry into contemporary popular ethical deliberation. Haidt groups ordinary ethical considerations into five categories: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. Curiously, liberals tend to view only the first two sets as acceptable ethical concerns, while conservatives tend to include all five.

Haidt speculates on how such a split could have arisen:

How did it come to pass that in much of Europe, and in some parts of the United States, moral concerns have been restricted to issues related to harm/welfare/care and justice/rights/fairness? We believe that a team of historians and sociologists could easily tell such a story, probably involving references to the growth of free markets, social mobility, science, material wealth, and ethnic and religious diversity. Mobility and diversity make a morality based on shared valuation of traditions and institutions quite difficult (Whose traditions? Which institutions?). These factors help explain the electoral map of the United States in the 2004 presidential election. When viewed at the county level, the great majority of counties that voted for John Kerry are near major waterways, where ports and cities are usually located and where mobility and diversity are greatest. Areas with less mobility and less diversity generally have the more traditional five-foundation morality, and therefore were more likely to vote for George W. Bush – and to tell pollsters that their reason was “moral values.”

Of course, historians and political scientists have long told this tale. Liberalism has long been held to be a "least common denominator" morality which truncates traditionalist ethics for the sake of peace in the wake of destroyed religious unity. Many also note how reductionist ethics increase business opportunities by opening up markets for what was once regarded as sacred, or redirecting loyalty towards brands instead of towards people. As standards become increasingly utilitarian this reductive spirit sidelines other considerations, hampering one's ethical growth.

The wider vocabulary of traditionalist ethics allows for greater nuance in theory. Though friendship or marriage, for instance, can be understood as matters of harm and care or fairness and reciprocity, the concepts of loyalty and purity provide further layers for ethical exploration and discussion. Likewise the abandonment of such categories renders the critic powerless to correct their abuses. The lazy secularist must dismiss all appeals to holiness, while a writer genuinely concerned about the sacred is better equipped and motivated to eviscerate cant masquerading as piety.

The Evolution of Natural Law

Amy Welborn notes that The New York Times reports that Marc D. Hauser, previously mentioned here for his research on ethics and neuroscience, has just released his new book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser's view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society ? do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don?t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don?t cheat, steal or lie.

Like Dr. Hauser, I see potential for a fruitful dialogue between the biological sciences and ethics, especially natural law ethics.

However, I am unsure how science can reclaim such discoveries as authoritative. The NYTimes summarizes: "The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value."

If we grant that our moral sense is the accumulated, accidental, and unplanned result of the evolution of our ancestors, can a Darwinian natural law ethics be particularly binding? It's like an ad populum appeal to a population spread out across millions of years. The anti-traditional default position of modern liberalism discourages people from holding fast to the fixed customs handed down by their parents. Why should they adhere to the fixed urgings passed down from their ancestors' biology?

Besides such philosophical questions, there is also the danger that such valuable work will be compromised by the "anti-speciesist" stands now found among many academics. Take this introductory paragraph from the NYTimes:

Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals? feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Such forms can be hitched to an anti-humanist ideology, deriding the special consideration for humans. Some of these thinkers allege that if a moral sense is found among the "dumb beasts," that's just one more blow against humans' putatively prideful place at the center of their universe.

First, this ignores the group-selection claims of Professor Hauser. As chimps privilege chimpkind, humans treat their own better than another species.

But second, I wish to attack the idea that the discovery of a moral sense among animals somehow cuts down mankind.

Certain forms of Cartesianism, especially pop-Cartesianism, are hostile to any implication that there is a physical basis for mental actions. They treat animals as mere res extensa, lacking the capacity for thought. One story goes that Descartes, while deriding the state of animals, kicked a goat to drive home his point.

This Cartesian sensibility has quite influenced modernity, and has perhaps aggrandized mankind by treating the human species as angels incarnate rather than glorified mud. It is to God and to his chosen saints, rather than nature, that contains Cartesians' moral exemplars.

I suggest that the place of animals throughout Christian and even pagan lore frees us from thinking, like pop-Cartesians, that any kind word for animal ethics thereby enables the anti-humanist crowd.

Think Aesop, the ant and the grasshopper, the fox and the grapes. Ancient and medieval writers had few qualms about treating animals as moral exemplars, sometimes even their moral superiors. One of the Desert Fathers even said: "A dog is better than I am, for he loves and does not judge."

Also recall the imagery of the pelican, who in past times was believed to rend its own flesh to feed its children. This was taken not even as a mere moral exemplar, but as a symbol of Christ's crucifixion and the Eucharist. Because of the sacramental nature of creation, even an ethics that includes ancient primates for its early models can be redeemed.

Waterboarding Video Demonstration

I wasn't the only one who had the idea. See this Waterboarding Demonstration Video. It lacks the melodrama of Hollywood depictions of torture. Being a controlled demonstration, it does not capture the fear of a man unsure of his fate, being shouted at in a foreign language.

Doubtless this will cause those with a nuanced view of torture to scoff, saying "What's the big deal?" Moral corruption at work, pardon the mess.

The Paulist Press in 1945

via Gashwin Gomes, a reaction to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Here we come upon the essential evil. The American people have for some years been indoctrinated with the heresy that there is no such thing as a universal everlasting law. Professors of ethics say there is no Absolute, that is to say, no God and that if there were, we have no means of knowing His mind or even if He is a person and has a mind. That there is no such thing as natural law; that laws are temporary and arbitrary, made up, so to speak, as we go along; that the law that served our ancestors may be obsolete in our days. If that kind of ethics prevails, our Christian civilization will dissolve in gas like the bodies of the 100,000 to 300,000 victims of the first atomic bombing. No discussion of this question can neglect the argument that the atomic bombs were used to bring about a quicker surrender of Japan and thereby in the end, to save lives. The end does not justify the means. It is not permissible to do evil that good may come. If obliteration bombing is evil -- and this is the question -- it cannot be made good by the supposition or even the certainty that it will in the long run be more merciful that a surely legitimate way to make war.
-Rev. James Martin Gillis, CSP, Editor, The Catholic World, September 1945

The standard apologists for atomic bombing often dismiss those who judge "with the clarity of hindsight," implying that the strikes enjoyed unanimous approval back in the good old days. Let them read Rev. Gillis.

The Lazy Editorialist's Guide to Writing

Step 1: Call for a pre-emptive nuclear strike

Step 2: In your follow-up column, Quote reactions from opponents even nuttier than you and pretend to be the reasonable victim of powerful maniacs.

Sad to see Relapsed Catholic is lapping it up.

Subverting the Pornocracy

Activists Target Hotel Porn.

I beat them to it with a complaint to Embassy Suites, though I never received a reply.

Hotel porn is morally, though not always legally, the equivalent of prostitution and the hotels are its pimps. They make a pretty penny pandering porno:

Precise statistics on in-room adult entertainment are difficult to find. By some estimates, adult movies are available in roughly 40 percent of the nation's hotels, representing more than 1.5 million rooms. Industry analysts suggest that these adult offerings generate 60 percent to 80 percent of total in-room entertainment revenue -- several hundred million dollars a year.

Further Discussion on BettNet, and the campaign's home is Citizens for Community Values

Neuroscientific Confirmation of Natural Law Theory?

Hauser and his colleagues have found that people are sensitive to the doctrine of double effect even in thought experiments that don't push their emotional buttons. Even when the dirty work of actually doing the pushing is taken out of the equation, most test subjects say they are more willing to kill someone as a side effect of saving others than to kill that person as a direct means toward that end. And they make this distinction even when they can't explain their preferences afterward.

In his forthcoming book, ``Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong" (Ecco), and in other recent papers, Hauser suggests we may have a moral 'faculty' in our brains that acts as a sort of in-house philosopher-parsing situations quickly, before emotion or conscious reason come into play. Hauser compares this faculty to the mental quality that allows human beings to acquire and use language naturally and effortlessly.
Blood on the Tracks

...the Victorian project (which persists to this day) of doing away with Christian dogma but trying to keep Christian morality intact is doomed to failure. Not because Christian morality can't be approached rationally by nonbelievers of good will, but because without the lived experience of a religious tradition it will never be anything more than an abstraction, an arid intellectualism, something that gets followed when following it is easy to follow and abandoned as soon as the going gets tough.

-Ross Douthat, discussing torture and other evils

"I hate having ethics."
"Well maybe someday science will discover a cure for it."
"I don't care who has to die for that!"
"Now you're coming around."
-Stephen Colbert vs. Stephen Colbert

An Appreciation of Whit Stillman's Metropolitain

As with the play in Mansfield Park, it can be assumed that most people today (the confessional and narcissistic culture has grown still worse) would fail to be moved by Audrey's defense of conventions that guard intimacy. Their concept of privacy is reduced to personal license; as Von Sloneker says, "I can do whatever I want here." In the modern age, we are to respect the privacy of others not by refusing to gaze into their lives (now practically impossible) but by refusing to care about what we see.
Udolpho.com

Also notable from Udolpho, a takedown of Kevin Smith, "Peter Pan in Short Pants":

I always maintained that another movie about religion wouldn't be forthcoming, as "Dogma" was the product of 28 years of religious and spiritual meditation

Is that what it's called? Meditation? I thought it was just a pot-induced stupor. The message of Dogma, for those lucky enough to dodge that bullet, boiled down to the highly enlightened philosophy of "be a good person", helpful advice for Kevin Smith's childlike fans but tending to leave unexamined all moral reflection that cannot be demonstrated using King Friday and Lady Elaine Fairchilde hand puppets. Par for the course.

Whenever one feels like hanging on to what's left of one's adolescence, re-reading this scathing attack should revivify the spirit of anti-slackerdom

IVF Children: Begotten or Made?

The child is the gift of life that supervenes on the spouses? mutual gift of self. It is not the direct product of their wills. What we intentionally make are things, property at our disposal. What we beget, are persons equal in dignity to us. The term procreation is used only of the way human beings come into existence. It draws attention to God the Creator who is active in the coming into being of each child, who directly creates each soul. It is His design that each child should be conceived within the conjugal act that expresses the love of the spouses. Couples may desire a baby. They should not make them or cause them to be made by others.
Rev. D. Vincent Twomey, SVD
via Irish blog Guard Me With Your Glory

"Begotten, not Made" can be ascribed not just to God, but to the creature in His image, man. Natural Law ethics in its contemporary form often has problems making its philosophical arguments complement theological ones. This essay, I think, shows how the two approaches can be intertwined, each illuminating the other.

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien
As to be hated, needs to be seen
Yet seen too oft, familiar with its face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
-Alexander Pope, Essay on Man