You’ve got that right. Choosing a behavior which inherently treats a person as nothing but an object or animal is not a “purpose” at all, and it is an “end” only to the extent that the behavior resulting from any choice to behave is a certain kind of proximate “end”.

Thanks to you. Perhaps this can be discussed at another time.

Zippy,
Perhaps not. But then that renders those referring to the Catechism in regards to torture in the same boat. Thus necessitating this discussion nicely aided by Brother Matthew’s genuine efforts at understanding what torture is.

This will be my last post for a while. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

And what I am saying is that I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

On the punishment issue, I’ll drop it, since you seen determined to construe the term in a legal rather than the more generally descriptive sense.

As is all too common when you and I interact, you appear to have completely misconstrued the point.

I think you’ve pretty much proved my point by going to the moral act (making a person suffer as nothing but an object or animal) in order to define why a set of concrete acts are torture.

That’s all I’m saying, that it’s the moral act that makes it wrong, not the concrete act.

And yet, of course I’d agree with Aquinas that some concrete acts are necessarily connected with a evil moral act — as in the concrete act of having sex with a woman other than your wife can never help but be connected with a moral act of fornication or adultery.

On the punishment issue, I’ll drop it, since you seen determined to construe the term in a legal rather than the more generally descriptive sense. (If I punish my brother by not inviting him to a family Christmas because he’s insulted my wife, do I do him an injustice by not holding a trial first?) You’ve also been ignoring my qualifying that I’m not sure but what this might be better described as punishmetn or a sort of defense.

Too many comments as it is, though, and a certain degree of conversational openness is required to get anywhere in such things.

This from the Catechism:

“Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.”

So the words I use are similar to the words the Church uses in its argument.

Sure. Shorthand, torture is any concrete behavior which makes a person suffer as nothing but an object or animal: a behavior which extracts some fungible commodity (e.g. information, meat, an adrenaline rush) from a person by inflicting suffering. I’ve discussed this extensively at my blog and elsewhere over a period of literally years now.

Now you might argue that “extract some fungible commodity” is an end or intention, but I think that makes a multivocal semantic hash of things: it would be like calling “achieve an orgasm” or “depositing semen” an end in an act of adultery. I think we all distinguish between behavior and intentions more broadly construed intuitively every time we do anything at all, that the distinction is ontologically clear, and that difficultes which arise are discursive/epistemic in nature not ontological/deontological. We all know what we’ve done.

A year ago I discussed the object of the act as a kind of moral qualia here, for example.

As far as blackmail goes, I’m not convinced that it is intrinsically evil the way you’ve defined it. Yes, many acts are specifiable in part through broadly construed circumstances and intentions, and yes, these things are important in determining the morality of acts in general. But intrinsically immoral acts, acts evil in their object, are evil simply as chosen behaviors, period, no exceptions, no justifying them by reference to an intended end, etc.

In Quaestiones Quodlibetales IIRC Aquinas tells us that some acts are specified by ends and circumstances. But then he goes on to distinguish between these kinds of acts and acts which “have deformity inseparably annexed to them, such as fornication, adultery, and others of this sort”: that is, intrinsically immoral acts. So I don’t take John Paul II to be out on a limb here in some territory uncharted by Aquinas; I just take him to have reined in, as he says, “…false solutions, linked in particular to an inadequate understanding of the object of moral action.”

I actually agree with you that the object is a species of moral behavior; I just believe that having a certain purpose in mind is an essential element of the behavior itself. I can’t imagine a definition of torture that wouldn’t mention this. Can you provide one? Anyway, I’m turning in…