Freedom and Human Dignity

In another very interesting post, Chris Blosser takes issue with Mark Shea's claim that neoconservatives subscribe to a kind of idolatry of democracy. Blosser quotes Irving Kristol at some length in rebuttal of Shea's idea, and one paragraph in particular stood out for me as especially thought-provoking:

There is, however, an older idea of democracy - one which was fairly common until the beginning of this century - for which the conception of the quality of public life is absolutely crucial. The idea starts from the proposition that democracy is a form of self-government, and that if you want it to be a meritorious policy, you have to care about what kind of people govern it. Indeed, it puts the matter more strongly and declares that if you want self-government, you are only entitled to it if that "self" is worthy of governing. There is no inherent right to self-government if it means that such government is vicious, mean, squalid, and debased. Only a dogmatist and a fanatic, an idolater of the democratic machinery, could approve of self-government under such conditions.

The idea that Kristol is opposing here is something that he characterizes as "the liberal idea of democracy par excellence", namely, the idea that majority rule as such is itself the central value in any morally acceptable polity. What he proposes in its place is the idea that self-governance is a value whose moral acceptability is a direct function of the value of the persons proposing to govern themselves.

In some ways I find this way of looking at things rather congenial--at least, it appeals very strongly to the Aristotelian in me. There does not seem to be any particularly compelling reason, for example, to defend a society (such as the one that Jim Tucker is always defending) that enslaves a significant proportion of its own population merely because the majority is willing to do so, and yet this is precisely what one commits oneself to if one regards majority rule as per se the central political principle in any morally acceptable polity. In fact, it is precisely the morally base nature of such a society that some regard as sufficient justification for interference in the local practices. Similaryly, even if Nazi Germany had not first attacked the Allied nations, there may have been sufficient moral justification for a military incursion grounded in the objective of liberating the groups who were being exterminated.

There is another side to this, however. When it is suggested that the moral acceptability of a polity is a function of the value of the persons constituting that polity, it immediately raises the question of how one is to evaluate the value of the persons in question. In the examples I cited--the ante-bellum South, Nazi Germany--it is tempting to confuse the value of the persons with the values expressed by the moral choices of the persons. It is morally wretched to choose to hold people in slavery or to externimate entire groups, but the persons who make such morally wretched choices are themselves as morally valuable as anyone else. One wishes that they weren't so craven, perhaps, but that is a separate matter. Without necessarily fully endorsing Socratic intellectualism I am nevertheless drawn to the idea that vicious behavior--even the criminally vicious behavior of the Nazis--is due principally to a kind of headstrong ignorance, the kind of invincible ignorance that one is sometimes required to constrain simply in order to protect oneself.

From a religious perspective it is this freedom to choose even the criminally vicious path that makes us imagines Dei, though obviously the Proper Good for humans is not the criminally vicious but the perfectly good. Independently of religion, it is the the principle of reason that makes morality possible in the first place and, hence, is the ultimate standard by which we must measure the value of the persons in a polity. Since the rational faculty is the same in everyone (though, obviously, that faculty is not developed to the same extent in everyone) we must treat everyone as equally valuable, whether or not we like their choices.

Anyone who looks at the matter in this way will have to take a slight exception to Kristol's claim that "if you want self-government, you are only entitled to it if that "self" is worthy of governing." It may depend upon what, precisely, he means by "self", but at least the way it is put here the claim is rather banal, since all "selves" are equal, regardless of the manner of life they choose to live. A person can choose a way of life that is objectively "vicious, mean, squalid, and debased" and still be as deserving as anyone else of treatment befitting his full human dignity. It may not be possible to treat him that way, since his own behavior may work against it (think of the difficulty of bringing self-rule to certain parts of the Middle East, for example), yet he is still deserving of such treatment. So instead of saying, with Kristol, that the vicious and base do not "deserve" self-government, I would say that the vicious and base make it very difficult for the rest of us to treat them as they deserve, and it is not all that clear that our obligation to treat them as they deserve should go very far beyond treating them in the way that they appear to desire, since to treat them as they deserve is always going to be reducible to treating them as free persons. This is further complicated by the fact that I noted in the posts on torture, that it is quite possible for folks to be mistaken about what they desire, if we equate what is desirable with what is objectively best for us in the long run. We may make one sort of decision with regard to the extermination of whole groups of people, or with regard to societies that hold slaves, while we make an entirely different sort of decision with regard to a society that is not self-ruling. In one we may choose to intervene, in the other not. Or we may choose to intervene not in the one but the other, or in both, or in neither. The decision to intervene, however, must always be grounded in a desire to treat the other as a fully free person, deserving of the same respect that I would ask for my own person.

A Pacifist Pope?

Chris Blosser offers an extremely helpful assessment of the situation at Against the Grain in this post. The answer, it would seem, is a qualified "no".

Against Pointless Reduction

Theoretical reduction--the reducing of one theory to the postulates and theorems of some other theory from which it can be logically derived--is possible in lots of areas, but it is not always advisable. Biology, for example, can be reduced to particle physics, but it is not clear what the motivation would be for translating talk of cells and DNA molecules into talk of muons and quarks. Surely that kind of thing would not make biology more accessible. One could refer to me as the great-great-great grandson of Walter Carson, but why do that when it is simpler just to refer to me by my own name? Indeed, there are certain kinds of cases where reduction is not merely pointless, it is downright mistaken. In biology proper, for example, we may insist that the unit of selection is anything from the allele to the herd, but if we choose the wrong level we will exclude possible explanations for phenomena such as altruistic behavior.

In ethics, too, reduction is often a temptation that ought to be avoided on pain of mistaken analysis. In an interesting post at Waka Waka Waka, Malcolm Pollack responds to my post on torture with this:

although Carson’s post is intended as a critique of the prevalence of the conventional utilitarian view these days, it seems to me that all he is doing is substituting different variables into the same utilitarian formula – the spiritual wound suffered by the torturer outweighs, in his equation, the merely physical suffering of those we would seek to protect by a coercive interrogation. He is certainly entitled to his belief. But is it appropriate as government policy, when the first job of government is to defend the people, many of whom do not agree with this religious perspective?

This is an interesting idea, that my view is ultimately just utilitarianism in disguise. But there are three problems with this analysis, each of them, I'm afraid, severe enough to vitiate the analysis.

Let me begin with a relatively benign problem. Pollack appears to attribute my position to an essentially religious sentiment, but that is quite mistaken. While it is true that the position I have staked out is consistent with my religious views, it is not the case that the position I have staked out follows from my, or any, religious point of view. The view that I stake out is essentially the Socratic/Platonic one, as I indicated in my post. Neither Socrates nor Plato was motivated by primarily religious considerations. The idea is that there is a highest good for humans, and that this highest good is connected to objective human flourishing, not to any particular religious dogma. Further, this objective human flourishing is not to be identified with physical or material well being. The idea that human flourishing is identical with physical well being or even pleasure is more closely associated with hedonism than utilitarianism, but certainly utilitarians are friends of the so-called pleasure principle, another point that I made in my first post.

Secondly, suppose, for the sake of argument, that my view was essentially grounded in my religious view. It is telling that Pollack finds this possibility worrisome on the grounds that not everyone in a particular polity will share the same religious views. That alone appears to make the view unsuitable as grounds for policy as far as Pollack is concerned. And yet such a starting point is entirely unreasonable. Suppose a particular polity were to adopt the utilitarian approach to solving questions such as this. Not everyone in the polity will share utilitarian sentiments either, so why should that kind of theoretical underpinning be grounds for policy? The fact of the matter is that all of politics is a matter of coercion in a certain sense, because it is always a matter of obtaining some degree of consensus and the process of obtaining consensus almost always involves somebody somewhere along the line compromising some aspect of their deeply held convictions. There is no reason to think that religious convictions are not on the same level as non-religious convictions in this regard. Just so long as I can provide an argument in favor of my policy that does not require that everyone subscribe to my religion--that is, as long as my arguments are grounded in theologically neutral starting points, starting points that any rational person could accept in principle--then there is no reason to suppose that having a religious reason for holding the view is a violation of the Constitution. To take a rather silly example, the Constitution mandates democracy; I might myself thing that God also mandates democracy, but it is not a violation of Constitutional principles if I advocate democracy using theologically neutral arguments even though I personally accept it for religious reasons. (Some people make a similar mistake when they assert that opponents of abortion are attempting to mandate conformity to their religious views; a person may oppose abortion for religious reasons but that does not mean that there are not perfectly good, non-religious arguments against abortion that a religious person can appeal to.)

The third problem with Pollack's analysis is much more serious. The third problem is that he mistakenly assumes that the moral position I stake out is essentially reducible to a kind of utilitarianism, in which the central value is a certain spiritual relationship with God. Putting aside for a moment the fact that this problem is closely related to the first problem, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Pollack is right. The difficulty now is that every moral theory is essentially a variety of utilitarianism, and that seems highly implausible. For example, if Pollack were right, then even Kantianism, the anti-utilitarian moral theory par excellence, would actually be a variety of utilitarianism in which the central value is conformity with a formal principle of reasoning.

The central thesis, however, not only of Kantianism but of the position that I staked out, is that there are certain things that ought not to be done regardless of the consequences that follow upon not doing the things in question. Utilitarianism is essentially consequentialist: torture is morally justified just in case better consequences result from doing it than from not doing it. What I am saying is that it is better to refrain from torture even if we could obtain better consequences from using it. There is no way the two positions can be reconciled. Similarly, Kantianism explicitly says that consequences have nothing whatsoever to do with the moral rightness or wrongness of our actions and, indeed, goes so far as to say that moral goodness is independent of our passions and desires. According to both Kant and Plato, it is entirely possible that we may be mistaken about what the good is and even about what we truly desire; this is not possible according to the utilitarian who, famously, actually defines desirability in terms of what is actually desired. It should only take a moment of rather straightforward reflection to see what is wrong with this. Suppose I am addicted to cigarettes. I have an actual desire, right now, to smoke one; but only a moron would say that it is desirable in a Socratic sense to smoke cigarettes. What is desirable according to the utilitarian is not always what is desirable according to the Platonist.

So it is not merely pointless to reduce my view to a variety of utilitarianism: it is a theoretical mistake of the first order. All moral views are not logically compatible and, hence, are not theoretically reducible to some single explanatory account.

When Pontificating is a Good Thing

Fr. Kimel has an excellent post up at Pontifications about Jonathan Bonomo's account of the Calvinist view of the Real Presence. As usual, the writing is clear, concise, thoughtful, charitable, and orthodox. I would say that, in general, Pontifications is one of the best religious blogs I have seen.

Adding to the overall value of the blog is the generally high quality of the comments posted there (with the exception of the one or two hounds I put up over there myself). I know of several clergy and philosophers who comment there regularly. I am sometimes at a loss as to what to make of all the activity in the blogosphere--sometimes it seems more than a little self-indulgent. But in the long run I think we are all better off, if we are willing and able to read with a critical eye, thanks to folks like Fr. Kimel, Mike Liccione, Fr. Freeman, and the others who contribute to Pontifications in one way or another. They also steadfastly refuse to blogroll me as further proof of their good sense.

The Oasis

When we returned from our vacation in Holland, Michigan, to Ann Arbor, I attended Mass for the Assumption at the parish of St. Thomas the Apostle. It is a lovely old church, completed in 1899 and lacking the kitchy art of many 19th century churches. Instead it has tasteful stained glass windows, beautiful Italian marble columns marking off side aisles, and a large sanctuary with a striking alabaster altar.

They also have something new since the last time I visited: a (relatively) gigantic new tabernacle right behind the main altar. The tabernacle used to be in a little alcove off the to the side, as in many churches of traditional design after Vatican II. Since the true aggionamento of Benedict XVI, however, the faithful are beginning to dare to hope that Catholic Churches will look a little more, well, Catholic. I remember when I first converted in 1983 my parish church, St. Thomas More in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, still had statues of Mary and Joseph right there in the sanctuary, but within two years they had been moved to the "gathering space" just inside the front door, and then, only three years later, they were in the basement. Not long after they were moved again, and I had no idea where they had gone until a friend of mine in the Legion of Mary told me of finding the statue of Mary in the women's bathroom. They weren't exactly high art, but they weren't hideous, either.

The tabernacle at St. Thomas the Apostle also is not spectacularly beautiful as far as its artistic execution, but it is remarkable beautiful in what it is: an in-your-face statement that we are not ashamed of the doctrine of the Real Presence or of the Catholic understanding of the nature of the Incarnation. We do not think it a distraction to have this statement behind the main altar: we are grownups, and during a Mass we can focus on the altar without drifting into puerile reveries about That Big Thing behind Father. It was an insult from the start to make such an assumption in the first place.

Don't even get me started on ad orientem. The better parishes have already returned to it.

Our Utilitarian Times

In James Taranto's blog, Best of the Web Today, there is a story from the London Guardian regarding the probable use of torture to thwart last week's terror plot in the UK (Taranto's piece; the Guardian piece). Taranto agrees that "the claim of torture seems at least plausible" and raises the question

it is possible that thousands of air passengers were saved from murder because British officials acted on information the Pakistanis obtained using brutal methods that would not have been acceptable in Britain or the U.S.

Assuming for the sake of argument that this is so, should those thousands of innocents have been sacrificed so as to spare the British government whatever moral taint came with the Pakistani information?

His answer is brutally honest:

t strikes us that the murders of thousands of civilians would be a far worse "form of defeat" than the moral compromise in which the British government is alleged to have engaged.

Although one would like to hear more about exactly how and why Taranto orders his own moral values in this way, we are not treated to such an exposition--he drifts off, instead, into a screed against Andrew Sullivan, saying of the torture issue only that "these are questions about which reasonable people can differ, and over which reasonable people are necessarily going to have to argue."

It is a remarkably interesting question, however. The Nazis, rather infamously, used all sorts of regrettable methods for abstracting information from tight places. In particular, they learned a great deal about hypothermia by subjecting Jews and other prisoners to freezing temperatures and watching what happened. The data that they collected was very valuable to them at the time, as they were fighting in the freezing temperatures of the Russian tundra at the time, but the same data were eagerly sought by researchers in more recent times who simply wanted to find ways to help victims of hypothermia. There was something of a debate over the moral propriety of using data taken from human subjects against their will: is it really the case that all knowledge is worth whatever cost must be paid to obtain it? This is the question that is also at the heart of the fetal stem cell debate: what sort of a society are we, that we are willing to take steps that will lead to an increase in abortions merely on the off chance that doing so will give us a few insights into the curing of a few diseases? Why are we so quick to take these steps when we don't even know for sure that we will gain the knowledge sought, nor do we know for sure that fetal stem cells are better for this research than umbilical cord stem cells.

The question of the moral status of torture is rather similar. We want some information, and we want it right now. What are we willing to do to get that information? Let us grant, for a moment, that the Jews in World War II and the aborted fetuses enjoy a different moral status from terrorist prisoners. The Jews and the fetuses are, presumably, guilty of no crime and deserving of no suffering, so to torture or kill them is in no way justified. A terrorist prisoner, by contrast, is presumably guilty at the very least of what British Common Law once called "prisoning treason", that is, of knowing about some Very Bad Thing and keeping that knowledge private (in a mental prison, as it were). Indeed, if they weren't guilty of "prisoning treason" we wouldn't be contemplating the use of torture on them in the first place. I've recently finished reading Antonia Fraser's excellent book, The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605, the history of the so-called "Powder Treason" of 5 November 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and others planned to blow up Parliament, along with King James I and his family, as a blow against the unjust oppression of the Roman Catholic religion. Many Catholic martyrs suffered torture and death at the hands of the authorities because they were suspected of "prisoning treason" when, in fact, they had no knowledge of the plot (see, for example, the life of St. Thomas Garnet, a Jesuit who was falsely accused of complicity in the plot and who went to the gallows for refusing the break the seal of the confessional).

The case of the English Jesuits, all of whom opposed the use of violence to achieve political ends but all of whom were suspected of plotting the violent overthrow of the Crown and, hence, were often tortured, killed, or exiled, raises an interesting parallel. Torture was commonly used in the 17th century to extract confessions and information from prisoners. Sometimes prisoners were merely shown the rack, sometimes they were worked on it, but these are finial distinctions in practice, since both are cases where the state used the either the threat or the reality of severe physical harm to get what it wanted. When this is done by persons who do not represent the state it is called terrorism. Nowadays we have a category that did not exist in the 17th century: "state sponsored terrorism," which blurs distinctions previously clear.

The Gunpowder Treason, as well as other plots against the English government of the 16th and 17th centuries, was discovered in part through the routine use of torture of private individuals by the state. In the case of many Jesuits, the torture was applied to innocent persons, but the argument was sometimes made, just as it is sometimes made now in defense of the death penalty, that the sacrifice of one or two innocent persons is justifiable in pursuit of the common good, particularly when such sacrifices wind up saving many other innocent lives. There is an old chestnut in moral philosophy, a thought experiment in which we are supposed to imagine a sherrif in a small town where a woman has been raped. The townspeople are growing restless as the perp remains at large, and they want justice done quickly. The sherrif realizes that if he does not catch the rapist soon there will be rioting in the streets. We are supposed to imagine that he knows with a high degree of certainty that this rioting will occur, and that it will result in many deaths and serious injuries. We are then asked whether it would be "worth it" for the sherrif to just pick some itinerant stranger at random and frame him for the crime, thus providing a nice show trial for the townspeople and avoiding all the mayhem. Our intuitions are on trial here: on the one hand, we value justice, which says it is unacceptable to punish an innocent person for a crime he did not commit. On the other hand, some folks urge us to make utilitarian calculations like this all the time: if it will result in a better payoff, why not do it?

That is what is being urged in the contemporary debate over torture. On the one hand, our intuitions tell us that torture is wrong. Not merely because we may wind up torturing innocent persons, just as the English crown tortured innocent Jesuits, but because torture is per se an affront to human dignity in so far as it objectifies persons and renders them instrumentally rather than intrinsically valuable. For the Kantian or the Socratic, there is no way to justify the use of torture. For the utilitarian, however, there may be. The utilitarian can point to the possibility of a very favorable outcome, just as James Taranto points to the possibility of saving hundreds of lives by torturing a few terrorists. As utilitarians, we also have available the possibility of ranking the value of innocent persons above and in some cases way beyond the value of terrorists, thus making the calculations even easier.

The fact that so many people are comfortable with this sort of reasoning, and with the reasoning in favor of stem cell research, demonstrates that we live in remarkably utilitarian times. If we are utilitarians, questions about the value of knowledge become easier to answer. The value of knowledge lies in the amount of happiness it produces in the long run. Suppose, for example, we could forever eradicate heart disease from the human condition, but only after three years of research on aborted fetuses. That would be roughly three million abortions, but if we are talking about forever eradicating one of the biggest killers on the planet, then we're talking about saving many, many millions of lives over the long run. The utilitarian says "Go for it". What if, instead of fetuses, the research required the sort of research that the Nazis did to obtain their hypothermia data? Again, the utilitarian might find justification for saying "go for it". To be fair, not all utilitarians would reason this way. Some would say that "human dignity" is also a value that is important to safeguard, and they would claim that this value must be put into the calculations of what ought to be done. It is hard to see, however, how the short term suffering of a certain number of people can seriously be weighed against the long term benefits, which would presumably last for thousands of years. Folks who support fetal stem cell research have no principled reason to oppose the use of unwilling human subjects in scientific experiments, even if those subjects are bound to die, just so long as the research promises something as astonishingly helpful as the eradication of heart disease.

Fortunately for the rest of us, no scientific program could ever hope to promise such a thing. Indeed, there is very little that it can promise, even on a very modest scale. That doesn't prevent shills like Nancy Reagan going around making political hay out of opposition to fetal stem cell testing, however, because many folks these days have a utilitarian streak as wide as their own egos.

In the case of torture, there is a tendency to think about the possibility of the loss of innocent life as outweighing by far the temporary suffering of a few despicable human beings. We are not the 17th century British, after all: we aren't talking about putting people on the rack, ruining them for good and basically ending their meaningful human existence. We're talking about sterile needles under the fingernails, or sleepless questioning for days on end, or sodium pentathol. Isn't that a price we're willing to pay?

If you're a utilitarian, it is difficult to find any justification for saying "no" to torture. If you're tempted to say that humans are per se valuable and that torture is an affront to that value, you are still trapped, since the killing of the innocent persons that the torture is intended to prevent is also an affront to that value, and the latter affront is a far greater one than the former.

Why should we resist this line of reasoning? Why should we not all be utilitarians about torture? There are many ways to approach this question, and mine is a highly personal one; I suspect that it will not be shared by very many others. My response lies in a rejection of the "pleasure principle", the foundation of much utilitarian thinking. This principles holds that human happiness consists fundamentally in an affective state that is directly related to the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. On this account, martyrdom as such is morally bad, since it involves the willing sacrifice of one's own life in pursuit of a putatively higher principle. St. Thomas Garnet chose to go to Tyburn rather than break the seal of the confessional, and if human happiness consists in an affective state directly related to his physical well being then he purposely chose pain over pleasure, which, according to utilitarianism, is morally wrong. Clearly a Thomist cannot endorse anything like this kind of principle, since Thomists are in a theoretical line that goes through Augustine to Aristotle to Plato to Socrates when they claim that the good for human beings is independent of their physical well being. Socrates famously held that even a man on the rack can be happy, just so long as he understands the Form of the Good, because on his account that's what happiness consists in (that is, human happiness just is understanding the Form of the Good). Aristotle found that rather hard to swallow, but endorsed a modified version of it in the tenth book of his Nicomachean Ethics, and both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas held that human happiness depends upon a rational relationship with God rather than on material flourishing.

If you thought, however, that I was saying all of this by way of suggesting that torture, being the mere physical affliction that it is, cannot interfere with a person's "true happiness" and, thus, is justified, then you are seriously mistaken. The idea is quite the opposite: when we torture evil people, we become like them in using violence to obtain what we want, and while that may certainly harm the evil people in a physical way it harms us in a fundamentally more important way--it harms our own human condition by being an act that is contrary to the Form of the Good. This ought to be obvious, since we regard terrorists as evil precisely because of the fact that they are willing to use violence to achieve their ends even when non-violent means are available to them. As good persons, we cannot rationally justify the use of torture to obtain what we want, even if the refusal to utilize torture results in the physical suffering--or even death--of innocent persons. The Thomist is committed to the possibility that the avoidance of physical suffering does not necessarily justify literally anything, since the Thomist does not believe that physical well being is the foundation for human happiness.

In short, the rejection of torture requires a deep theoretical committment that many people are not prepared to make, if only because they are not fully aware of the theoretical underpinnings of their own moral psychology. A large number of people are what we might call "folk utilitarians", that is, they have an intuition that the pursuit of happiness is not such a bad idea, and that happiness is nothing if not an affective state. For such people there is little more that needs to be said about the matter and, indeed, I suspect that even reading tons of Plato would not change their minds. In particular, it is difficult to get people to see that one can regard the pursuit of happiness as essential while rejecting the idea that happiness consists in physical well being or in an affective state related to physical well being.

So I remain unconvinced that the case for torture is clear and obvious in these dark days. It is particularly difficult for me, a Catholic, to endorse the use of torture, in light of the suffering of the English Catholics at the hands of a cruel police state, but even apart from that I have to think that there is something that separates me from the terrorists, and it is not merely the fact that I don't know how to make an IED out of fertilizer. The difference lies in the fact that there are certain things that I will not do in order to achieve my own ends; terrorists, especially suicide bombers, seem to be willing to do literally whatever it takes to achieve their ends, because they, like many of those who oppose them, are utilitarians at heart: the end justifies the means.

Ignoratio elenchi

That's a fancy Latin slogan that means, basically, not knowing what the question at issue is when having an argument. I'm reminded of the slogan by an interesting post at Maverick Philosopher on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. Bill writes:

Not every armed conflict is a war. The 'war' against Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations is more like armed conflict between legitimate law enforcement agencies within legitimate states and criminal organizations. Hezbollah is sometimes described as a state within a state. This is loose talk. Hezbollah is better described as a criminal parasite organization hosted by a legitimate state that lacks the power or the will to suppress it.

If this is right, then talk of a 'cease-fire' between Israel and Hezbollah is as obtuse as talk of a 'cease-fire' between law enforcement and a criminal gang like MS-13.

We have known, since 11 September 2001, that many of the time-honored principles of warfare generally, and of just war theory in particular, simply do not apply to the present set of conflicts in which we find ourselves. Our enemies do not always wear uniforms; they often masquerade as civilians when not merely hiding behind civilians; they almost always depend upon manipulating the media and the application of terror to achieve their political ends. This does not excuse us--or anyone else--from acting in conformity with the logic of morality, but we may find that what the logic of morality compels us to do in defense of self and of the helpless will not seem as pristine and noble as some idealists would like. It is salutary to remember that all forms of violence, even those that are undertaken in self defense, are ugly. There is no such thing, really, as a "noble" fight to the death--one must simply, sometimes, fight against those who would kill you. If those who are trying to kill you without justification wind up getting their noses bloodied--or if it is rather the noses of their friends that get bloodied--it might behoove one's enemies to cease and desist unilaterally.

In fact, that might be the closest thing to a noble act that certain kinds of enemy can ever achieve--to admit that they were wrong to have attacked you in the first place.

The More Things Change...

There's a rather famous essay by Richard Cartwright called "On the Logical Problem of the Trinity" (available online here). In it, Cartwright argues that the doctrine of the Trinity as enunciated in the Athanasian Creed cannot be made sense of using ordinary intuitions about identity and difference, genus and species. The Maverick Philosopher gave the essay a rather charitable interpretation in a post from a year and a half ago, but I'm inclined to think that Cartwright, like David Hume, knows what follows of logical necessity and what does not, and so leaves tell-tale cigarette butts all over the house hoping that his roommates will assume that he is a smoker.

I've been spending much of my summer vacation (what little of it there is) working on a paper on Anselm's De processione Spiritus Sancti, which starts from precisely the same beginning as Cartwright but which draws an entirely different conclusion. Anselm is writing, ostensibly, for the benefit of the Greeks who deny the propriety of inserting the Filioque clause into the Nicene Creed, and, in the end, he draws the inference that one must accept that the Holy Spirit proceeds both from the Father and the Son, that this, indeed, follows by logical necessity from the concepts and relations involved in the Most Holy Trinity.

This is a rather startling difference: one person argues that the whole setup is logical nonsense, the other that it leads inexorably to a sure and certain conclusion that is perfectly logically coherent. The difference lies in the way the two conceive of the notions of identity and difference, and one cannot help but recall, as one reads through these essays, the monumental amount of work Plato put into the deciphering of just these two properties in such works as the Parmenides, the Sophist, and other dialogues. Independently of whether human reason can grasp something like the Trinity, it is interesting to find that Plato, 2350 years ago, was already on to what is centrally important to philosophy and human experience. It turns out to be things about which we already have lively intuitions but which, upon closer examination, prove to be more stubborn in their explication than we had ever imagined.

Fr. Kimel on Justification

There's a great post up at Pontifications on the problem of justification. Joe Bob says check it out.

But He Is A Really Nice Guy

From a 9 July Los Angeles Times column by Charlotte Allen:

As if to one-up the Presbyterians in jettisoning age-old elements of Christian belief, the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord. When a Christian church cannot bring itself to endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New Testament, it is not a serious Christian church. It's a Church of What's Happening Now, conferring a feel-good imprimatur on whatever the liberal elements of secular society deem permissible or politically correct.

Ouch. That's going to leave a mark.

Si quaeris paeninsulam amoenam, circumspice

I'm taking a little time off for R&R in Holland, Michigan, right on the shores of Lake Michigan. The weather here has been beautiful, with clear, sunny skies and temperatures just right to make you want to go jump in a lake. This particular lake has enough of a microclimate that there's wind blowing moderately large breakers that you can actually surf on. The kids are deliriously happy, and I'm not far behind.

Driving in from the eastern part of the state one begins to notice more and more Lutheran and Calvinist churches. There's only one Catholic church here in town and guess what it's called? That's right, Our Lady of the Lake. You can recognize it pretty easily, because it's a lot uglier than the other churches. I haven't been inside yet, but I'm sure it will be lovely.

Holland is home to Hope College, also Calvinist, at least by background. I'm not familiar enough with things here to know whether it has the same sort of affiliation with the Calvinist religion as Duke has with the Methodist, but one hopes not--even Calvinism is better than sheer debauchery. I think.

It's not hard to find WiFi access here, but it is rather difficult to find it on the beach, and it's even more difficult to find time to get away from the beach, so probably blogging will be even lighter than it has been of late. On the other hand, when one is on vacation one does tend to ruminate, and I suppose I will find at least a little time for some of the usual vapidity that my readers have grown accustomed to.