How I came to love Thursday.

My internal dialog today:

Jennifer: I’m hungry.

Jennifer: You are supposed to be hungry.

Jennifer (wincing): Oh, that’s right.

 

 

 

Lent-o-rama: Please Advise

Bearing asks for advice on how to assist children with their lenten devotions:

. . . I was not a child growing up in a practicing-Catholic family.   I literally do not know how to encourage a Lenten devotion without becoming Lent Cop Mom.

Seriously.  Help me out here.  . . .

Since I know I have a few readers here who could answer this one, and because I want to know the answer too, please go read the whole thing and then inform us.

Thank you.

Opinions Solicited (How often does that happen?)

Hathaway’s looking for opinions on his Crash Course in Catholic Ethical Thinking .  I’m having my turn at the busy week, so I promised him I’d comment by mid-week or he should pester me.   But you, aren’t you looking for someone to argue with today?

Here’s his ending:

. . . The Church can have compassion for the person in the extreme without saying “this teaching no longer applies because there is this one extreme case, and the rest of you can go on and do whatever you want.”When someone’s holding a gun to your head, either literally or metaphorically, and you do something intrinsically evil, you’re not a sinner. If the Nazis are at your door, and you lie out of fear, that’s not heroic virtue, but it’s also not a sin.

Again, intrinsic evil just means that the act is always evil and can never be virtuous in and of itself. It does not mean that it’s as bad as something else or better than something else.

So:

1. Means, motive and end are all good? Act is virtuous.2. Means, motive and end are good, circumstances are extreme? Act is heroically virtuous.

3. Means are neutral or good. Intentions are good. There are multiple ends, at least one bad and one good? This is “double effect”.

4. Means are bad. Intentions are good. Ends are bad. Circumstances are extreme or person is ignorant? The act is wrong, but culpability is reduced, possibly to nothing.

5. Means are bad. Intentions are bad. Ends are bad. Person is ignorant or not acting in total freedom; and/or matter is not grave? Venial sin.

6. Means are bad. Intentions are bad. Ends are bad. Person acts in full knowledge and freedom. Matter is grave. Mortal sin.

It is really crucial to be clear on these distinctions. To say “X is intrinsically evil” is not the same thing as saying “Y is a sinner for doing X” or even to say that “X is always mortally sinful”. It’s just to say that the using X as a means puts the action under categories 4-6 above.

Read the lead-up.  Tell him what you think.  Friendly guy.

Abortion and Tidiness.

Go read this at the Catholic Key Blog.  And not just because I am a person who likes both babies and a good drink now and again.  But because this resonates with maybe what you have seen elsewhere?

Because maybe right now you are facebook friends with one of the coolest teenagers in the universe?  And that kid wouldn’t even have been given a name, let alone a chance to see the light of day, if some scared 16-year-old and her mother hadn’t resisted the pressure to do what all those clean-cut wholesome small-town upper-class ladies were saying they had to do to “get rid of the problem”?

When someone has to die in order for me to maintain my sterling reputation?  . . . No.  Just no.   –>  If only all my lousy ideas and major mistakes could result in something as awesomely awesome as a certain favorite nephew of mine.  Why would someone want to kill the one good thing to be granted?

Go and sin no more.  That’s meekness.

Lent-o-rama and other quick notes

I made the Aggie Catholic Guide to Lent (thank you Mark Shea) it’s own special category in the sidebar.  Am going to maybe build the category up a bit.  Send suggestions.  Thanks.

And yes,  yes, I know I am behind on updating the sidebar with other great blogs I’ve recently started reading and recommending.  Pester me if yours isn’t up on the list by Monday.

***

Please pray for a special intention for some missionaries in difficulty.  Thanks.

***

Brad Warthen posts Clark Whelton’s What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness.  Let it be a warning to us all.

Mr. Magundi on Beggars.

***

And how to cut to the chase with your friendly but inexperienced evangelical door-to-door missionary:

Kind and earnest missionary asks, “If you died tomorrow, where would you go?”

Reflect.  Give honest answer: “Purgatory.”

Silence.  “Um, here, have one of these.”  Hands over tract, quickly retreats to next door.

Perfectly nice kids, by the way, and nothing anti-catholic in the tract.  Basic model plan-of-salvation, baptist version.   Refreshing, really.  Catholics could learn a thing or two.

 

 

The Trouble with Double Effect

[Update for those who didn’t find this from Siris: Brandon Watson adds more and explains things better over there. ]

I’ve wanted to hit this one for a week or so now, what with the excitement of late.  Honest inquirers have proposed that in the lying-in-serious-situations question, perhaps double effect applies?  It is a reasonable suggestion, what with there being situations where, for example, the principle of double effect permits killing.  And killing people is a really big deal.

But I don’t think we can invoke double effect in the case of lying, and my reasoning is simple: Double effect requires two effects.

***

Some background to get us started. We mostly only hear about “double effect” in such thorny and famous situations as just warfare or legitimate self-defense, so we might get the idea that it’s just this handy trump card moral theologians keep up their sleeve for when they really, really wanna kill somebody.  Nope.  Not that.

Double effect (also called “parallel effect”) is actually one of the two principles that work together to keep our moral system sane.  The other is ‘ends don’t justify the means’, but that isn’t our topic today until way down below where I go out on a limb and guess things.  Back to Double Effect:

#1 Reason to love Double Effect: It lets you take a shower.

Because here’s what: Showers and bathtubs are super dangerous.  You could slip and crack your head open. And if the bathroom weren’t bad enough, you probably keep a stove and a water heater around the house, and perhaps even some kind of Vehicle of Death in your garage.  (Or, if you are a Luddite, a Pack Animal of Death for your transportation needs.)

Double effect says that you are allowed to have all this and more!  Because you aren’t actually trying to drown, scald or maim anybody.  Those are unintended consequences of your perfectly reasonable efforts to stay clean, fed, mobile, and so forth.   You’ll try to avoid those bad effects if you possibly can.

[What you can’t do: If your enemy fails to drown in his bath, you can’t hold him under.  In fact you can’t even lay out the bath things and light a scented candle in an effort to lure him to his death.  You may only lead him to the tub for a legitimately good reason, such as to reduce the general stinkiness and discourage the spread of impetigo.  Or perhaps so that he might unwind after a long day driving. you. crazy.  But not to kill him. Barring circumstances we’ll get to down the page.]

So that’s the use of double effect.  It lets us do something good, even if there is a some risk of something bad happening in the process.

Now unless you suffer from deep scruples, you probable don’t lay awake nights wondering if your really did the right thing, caving in and buying a water heater.  So where double effect gets famous is because it permits seriously dangerous action if there’s a genuine need for it.

You may not, for example, throw yourself in front of a bus in order to get that drat fly at last. (Even though the fly is germy and annoying, and you only want to give your beloved a peaceful picnic.  Good cause, good action, but the risks are disproportionate.  It’s a no-go.  Hope the bus gets the fly, and live to swat another day.)  But if it is to push your hapless child out of harm’s way, yes you may take the risk of your likely death in order to save the child.  You aren’t trying to die.  You hope to avoid dying.  Everyone will be much happier if a guardian angel steps up and takes care of things.

And that’s the clincher of double effect — there are two effects: There is one thing good you are trying to achieve, and one bad bad you hope to avoid. Even if the bad effect is 100% likely barring supernatural intervention, you can’t be trying to achieve the bad effect.

In our bathtub-as-weapon scenario, it looks like this: You are peacefully getting ready to hop in the tub, when your enemy bursts in and thrusts his knife at your chest.  So you avail yourself of the only way to save your own life, pushing him into the tub and holding him under until he quits struggling.  The clincher is in the ending.  Suppose you get yourself to safety, and the guy somehow lives.  Maybe the plug was dislodged in the struggle, and in fact he’d only fainted from lack of air but not yet drowned, and when you go back to the bathroom with the police officer to show him the corpse, the man is gasping and confused, but not dead.  And you are no longer in danger.  You don’t get to refill the tub and see if you can do him in.  The whole “killing” thing was not the desired effect at all, remember?  You just wanted to save your own life.  If you could have done it some other way that didn’t risk killing the guy, you would have.  That mission accomplished, the tub goes back to its peacetime use.

So that’s double effect.

[To clarify here: You don’t have to defend yourself with household appliances only.  If you had a .45 in your bathrobe, you could have used that.  But you’d have to stop shooting as soon as you knew you were safe.  And if the guy lived, you’d have to let him live.  You weren’t trying to kill him, remember?  Only trying to save your own life.  Only.  That’s the clincher.]

***

So why can’t lying be just another weapon under the principle of double effect?  I think it can’t, because I don’t see that the “double” applies.  There aren’t two separate effects going on.

If I lie, I have a single purpose: To hope you will be deceived.  I’m not saying something false, but hoping that you will somehow figure out the truth anyway.  I’m saying something false, and hoping you’ll fall for it.  If the lie doesn’t deceive, it doesn’t do the very thing I wanted it to do.

In contrast: I hop in the car hoping to get to the store.  I hope I don’t die in a fiery crash on the way, even though I take that risk.    I use lethal force to defend my own life; if the force turns out not to be lethal, so long as my life is saved, my mission is accomplished.  The goal was not to kill another, it was to save myself.

But in the case of lying, my very mission is to lie.  I may be using it to try to achieve a good end, but there’s no way for me to separate out my end from my means.  Because the end I’m trying to achieve is to deceive somebody.  If the lie doesn’t work, the deception won’t occur.

I just don’t see how we can say there is a ‘double’ or ‘parallel’ effect going on.  There aren’t two effects.  There’s just one.

So if there were a principle that permitted lying in some serious situation, I think double effect would not be that principle.

And that’s all I really wanted to say.

********************************************************

Now I start some additional related ideas:

But remember it is acceptable — desirable even — to withhold the truth from those who have no right to have it. And I think this is where things get confusing.  Because it is perfectly okay for me to not let you know how much I weigh, what I had for breakfast, or whether I am sheltering a woman fleeing from her crazed and murderous ex-husband.  These things aren’t your business.  You have no right to know.  So I don’t have to tell you.

Now we’ve been through a whole list of non-lying ways to withhold the truth back on my other post.  But here’s where the confusing thing comes in:  In my resorting to any of those tactics, you might end up deceived.

You might, for example, ask me if I ate all the Krispy Kreme donuts.  And when I say nothing, or say some true thing that does not answer that question, you might infer that either a) I did in fact eat all the donuts, or b)  I gave them to the woman you are now quite sure I am hiding in my closet.  [And depending on which you assume, you might make a further speculation on whether I weigh too much or too little.]

So an unquestionably innocent action might have the result of causing you to believe something that is not true.  It is a double effect.  What I wanted was for you not to know.  What happened is that you were deceived by my answer — you took me to be asserting something I was not.

THIS ENDS THE PART WHERE I’M FAIRLY SURE OF WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.

***

THIS STARTS THE PART WHERE I REALLY NEED SOMEONE TO CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG.

Complicating things further, I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to intentionally cause you to be deceived. That is, say you are stalking me at Krispy Kreme because you think I’m sheltering the fleeing woman, and you want to find out.  And I know this, and there are serious reasons you should not be given this information.

–>  So as I buy all three dozen Hot Donuts Now, I say something to the clerk like, “Boy Scouts sure love donuts!”  Entirely true, yes, but I said it just to throw you off the trail. To cause you to believe, erroneously, that the Boy Scouts were going to get these particular donuts (which I never said).  I intended to deceive you with my truthful statement.  I could even walk with donuts in hand into the building where scouts meet, and then secretly send the donuts back to my vehicle in some concealed way, before going home to give them to the woman in my closet.  (Probably giving the Scouts two dozen, so they can honestly say that yes, I gave them donuts.)  An elaborate deception designed to protect an innocent person in hiding.

So assuming this deception is morally acceptable, how could lying be wrong?

It comes back to the bathtub and bus.  I can use the bathtub, or a gun, to save my own life, even if it means using mortal force to do so.  I can jump in front of the bus to save my child’s life, even if it means certain death for myself.  But there are limits:  What if, say, my enemy required me to drown his other enemy (who was no threat to me) in that tub, and if I did so, I could go free? What if throwing some innocent bystander in front of the bus would knock my child out of harm’s way?

Those things would be murder.  So I can’t do them.  Even though some kinds of deadly actions are morally acceptable for proportionately serious reasons, not every kind is therefore allowed.

In the same way, it seems that even if some kinds of intentional deception are morally acceptable for proportionally serious reasons, it does not follow that every kind of deception is therefore allowed.

———– I’d be most grateful if some person who is knowledgeable on these matters could tell me if this last bit makes any sense, or if I’m wrong wrong wrong.  Thanks.—————-

Meekness

I was pleased to see that in addition to Chelsea Zimmerman (put me in a paragraph with her any day), John Hathaway is on the undecided couch.  He ponders here and here, and then finally takes action in this letter.  This is one thing that I admire about John, even when it terrifies me: the man is not shy.  Just not.

But I’m definitely leaning toward the Tollefsen-Shea camp, not a surprise.  It fits too well.

Am I so meek?  I wish.  My specialty is doing things exactly the wrong way (even when I know better), and I’ve failed out of Meekness 101 more times than I care to count. Despite this, I have been wanting to write about Meekness for a while now, because if you’re a poly-sci/history type, you eventually figure out that the meek really do inherit the earth.

Here’s the tough part in making sense of it: In your brain when you hear the word “meek”, do you just swap in “weak” and think it means the same thing?  And maybe something about “shy as a mouse”, since mice are small and the word “mouse” starts with “m”?

[And maybe you add in something about being a peasant or something, because you think “humble” = “poor”.  Doesn’t work.  St. Thomas More was meek.  Wealthy, opinionated, but ultimately meek.]

What it really means is “mild of temper” (that’s not me) “long-suffering” (more not) and “patient under injuries” (nope, not that either).  And then we think of the Amish, who are famously meek.  So we think, oh, okay, meek = pacifist?  Maybe sometimes.  But a really good soldier is massively meek.  How else do you hold up under confusing orders, dangerous conditions, constant hardship, and just do what is asked no matter the personal cost?  That’s meek.

Public, peaceful resistance to brutal dictatorships?  That’s hardcore meekness.  (And not forgetting that yes there is a time and place to bear arms.  But remember those just war criteria?  “Some chance of success”?  Though it is just as bloody, sometimes peaceful resistance is the only moral option.  But much harder.  All the pain and suffering, maybe more, and none of the gratification of sticking it to your enemy, no matter how futile the effort.)

Anyhow, saying all that, the way I think it ties in to the recent internet excitement, is that maybe shy, weak, pro-lifers like myself need to work on our meekness a little more?  Not the fake-meekness that means ‘doing nothing’, but the real kind, which is doing what is right and what is necessary, no matter the cost.

I hate it when I post things like this.

 

Tollefsen Reply Discussion Thread

Chris Tollefsen’s reply is up, over at Public Discourse. Note about the reading level: I didn’t have to look up any words in the dictionary, which is pretty noteworthy.  But the crux paragraphs do require you to slow down and read carefully.  So don’t try to skim, you’ll just end up feeling really dumb or really resentful, depending on your disposition.

(Why yes, I did know he was going to link to this blog, he warned me a few days ago.  No, I did not know about any of the other contents of the reply until I read it this morning, other than that he promised to address the Nazi at the Door problem.  Which he does.)

So this is the thread for discussing the state of the debate as it stands today, if there’s anyone left who isn’t thoroughly bored or disgusted with the topic by now.  (And who has free time.  I’m fascinated by the problem, but I have other problems, such as long division, calling me today.)  I have not done a check for new posts elsewhere this morning, so by all means link to anything fresh that you think moves forward the discussion.

 

*****************************************************************

 

Note to any new readers here: 1) Welcome! 2) Your first post or two gets automatically held for moderation.  I will try to check in periodically, and keep the spam folder empty as well, but we are actually having school today, so you take 2nd place to my darling children.  You knew that.  If your post is submerged in the ether for an unexpected amount of time, don’t assume it was due to any fault of your own.

Fr. L. on the gambling industry.

More yes.  This is all true.   Over the past dozen years I’ve spent a lot of time in Vegas.  I’m familiar with the city, inside and out.  (Surprise: I prefer “out”.  Red Rocks, to be precise.)

To Fr. Longenecker’s comments I’ll add that gambling generates no wealth.  It doesn’t feed, clothe or shelter any better than my sitting on the porch playing 3-men’s morris does so.  (Except, in that case, I get to spend time with my child, teach some strategy, get my rear whipped by a 4-year-old . . . yes, there is all that.  The bulk of casino gambling doesn’t even pretend to give us that much.)

Gambling does redistribute wealth.  If you need a method to get cash from the hands of wealthy private-jet owners into the hands of waitresses, well, yes, that is one way.  But what Fr. L says about the industry is absolutely true, including the addiction and family-destroying and saving-depleting bits.

He didn’t mention the associated crime, but you can count on that too.  When you take a whole bunch of people who want something for nothing and stick them all together in one place, it’s not exactly a surprise that greed crosses legal lines here and there.

–> This isn’t some fundamentalist getting his rear in a wad because you like to play poker with your friends.  It’s not about whether games of chance are somehow evil.

But when you pray that prayer about “lead me not into temptation”? It implies a responsibility to avoid leading your neighbor into temptation either.

You want investment?  Build a farm, or a factory.  A school even.  (Or, go crazy, send a guy to seminary.  That’s an investment.)  The gambling “industry” is not industry at all.  And you go there to spend your money, and end up spending yourself as well.

historians on the mount

Bearing has a short post on, revenge, meekness, historians, the ancient Greeks and the service of truth. Most interesting. My favorite bit is the call of the historian to impartiality.  Yes.  Yes!  Thank you, Greeks.  Thank you.