I can’t seem to find Sir 30:26, or any numbering of it that seems to relate to slavery. What translation are you using? Could you please correct me on that?

Prov 20:30 indeed invokes corporal punishment; but is not a further and less obvious step of interpretation needed to paint this as a support for torture? Is the act of torture different in species than what is described? Understanding the literal sense (as the intended meaning of the author in his socio-historical context) would help to clarify this for me.

In Romans 13:3-4, it would help to know who exactly Paul means by the “authorities,” in what sense does God “establish” them, and what is the nature of their “punishment?” Again, this does not seem obvious to me at this stage as an endorsement of capital punishment per se.

The same goes with the NT references to wifely duty. A bit more detailed exegesis would help to understand your position. My overall questions are: is your interpretation immediately evident with regard to the passages and if not, what guides your hermeneutic? And how justify it any more than those implicit or explicit in the teachings of recent popes on these issues? Is there an alternative interpretation that is not simply “demythologizing” or “liberal” in nature?

Further, a question about the death penalty: while understanding your hesitance about John Paul’s prudential judgment being inserted in the Catechism, I want to know: do you disagree with his prudential judgment? If so, why? Do you believe that in the modern American system flaws are present that lead to death penalty rulings that reflect incorrect prudential judgments? At the case-by-case level, the level of prudential judgments, do you think that the current system has “got it orthodox?” I think it would require a bit more work to employ passages like Romans to justify the specific case of John Doe who may be on death row for murder even…

Pax Christi,

I’m only saying that if intent is not applicable to intrinsically evil acts ….

Any word can be used to refer to more than one thing. Pertinent to the present discussion, this includes both “intent” and “waterboarding”. If by “intent” you mean the choice involved in choosing a particular behavior or action, then that kind of intent is very much pertinent to an intrinsically evil act. (It wouldn’t be an act at all without that kind of intent). If by “intent” you mean why the person is choosing that specific behavior or action, or what he hopes to accomplish by choosing it, then that isn’t pertinent.

It is true – but trivial and uninteresting – that if we choose a sense of “waterboarding” which is physicalist and a broad enough category, and if we use ‘intent’ to refer to any sort of intention at all, we can say that some waterboarding is bad and some is licit. That is also true of abortion: if we choose a broad enough category of physical description and allow ‘intent’ to be multivocal then we can say that some ‘abortion’ is bad and some is licit, depending on ‘intent’.

But all of that is really just a self-serving word game, which doesn’t address any of the criticisms of waterboarding prisoners or aborting children. I am beginning to think that self-serving word games are instrumental in opening wide the gates of Hell.

I’m only saying that if intent is not applicable to intrinsically evil acts as we’ve gone over many times here, that if waterboarding is an intrinsically evil act it then does not apply.

Why do you get so nasty, anyways?

Oh, and you’re boring too…

If you know what physicalism is and you know that it is just as condemned as consequentialism, then you also know that the physicalist sense of the word “waterboarding” that you use in this line of argument is question-begging, trivial, and pointless in addressing the arguments against waterboarding. But I haven’t actually seen any evidence that you know any of those things.

Also, since I know what physicalism is, please explain to me how physicalism has anything to do with pointing out the dead-end argument of saying waterboarding is intrinsically evil while simultaneously saying intent determines the quality of the act?

Or at least Zippy will chime in with the fact that physicalism is every bit as condemned as consequentialism, that neither TT nor Phillip seem to have the faintest idea what that means, and that until they do have at least some notion of what that means they are incapable of even discussing the subject coherently.