What Would You Do
May 5, 2009
A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. The bomb will go off on the 2000th beat of the heart of terrorist’s unborn child. Do you order the abortion and save 1,000,000 people?
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Much like the folks who continuously come up with difficult scenarios for finding oneself with a “blessing” – like being brutally raped, being a victim of incest, finding oneself pregnant under 16, discovering one has a deadly disease, discovering one’s blessing has Down Syndrome – the people who continually have questions about difficult scenarios that torture apparently will solve seem to in the end really be desiring the right to torture.
If one has the proper moral “lights” which are informed by a true Christian spirituality, the answer to this is very simple.
It’s much like the dilemma that Nietzscheans like to pose to Christians to make them squirm: “If you are a prisoner in a concentration camp and the commandant offers you the opportunity to kill your fellow Jews ‘mercifully’ and expeditiously, and informs you that, if you do not accept, not only will you die more miserably and protractedly but so will your brothers and sisters, what do you do?”
The answer is, you kill the COMMANDANT, or you try to, as quickly and as efficiently as you are able to. It would be an act of chivalric defense of yourself and your brothers and sisters. He hasn’t merely attempted to implicate you in his crime of genocide, he has also attempted to force you to commit spiritual suicide, which you have no RIGHT to do. This is because, no matter how merciful you think you could be in this position, the fallen nature of humanity dictates that you will eventually grow to LOVE this illegitimate use of heady power over others–it will addict and destroy YOU. Killing the commandant is thus an act of justice AND self-defense.
So what you do in the situation stipulated here is inform the terrorist that, although you will not torture him, a TERRIBLE retributive justice will be visited upon at the time of his sentencing (e.g. solitary confinement FOREVER), unless he helps to prevent the catastrophe.
“The end does not justify the means. Thus the condemnation of an innocent person cannot be justified as a legitimate means of saving the nation.” CCC 1753
‘Nuff said!
John R,
I would have a doctor administer a drug specifically to stop the unborn child’s heart from beating. The intention there would not be to kill the child, but rather to disable the triggering mechanism for the bomb. Under Catholic thought, it would indeed be wrong to condemn an innocent person. Consequently, it would be wrong to directly kill the unborn infant by, say, electrocution, or poisoning, or some other method. However, when the sole intention is to stop the heart from beating to prevent the bomb from going off, the death of the infant is foreseen but not willed. Consequently it would be licit with the proportionate reason of saving a million lives.
“Nuff said!”
Not true at all. Not even close.
You have ripped two sentences out of a part of a section entitled “I – The Sources of Morality.” Then you proceed to distort the significance of the passage you quote along with the entire section from which you quote.
Moreover, this passage is dealing with the morality of ACTS. Do you know the significance of the term ACT?
You can’t use a Cut & Paste technique to interpret the Catechism.
Why have you not said anything about the principle of the choice of the lesser of two evils?
David:
No, but the intention of the injection is directly to stop the heart i.e. to kill the child. The bomb not going off may be an accident or double effect but the principle effect is the death of a child. Thus it’s still abortion and still immoral under Catholic teaching.
I know this site is often ridiculous; here’s proof you’re actually crazy.
I have read a lot of nonsense but this is the most absurd twaddle that I have ever had the misfortune of coming across.
Michael Denton is right. The object of the act, the chosen behavior, is to kill the child (whether you do so by drug injections or tweezers is not really relevant). As Anscombe pointed out, intention is not merely “an interior act of the mind which could be produced at will” (a relic of the Cartesian approach). As she noted, the bombers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could easily have said they did not “intend” to kill anybody as they obliterated cities with nuclear weapons.
Looks like some people have been made profoundly uncomfortable by the scenario offered above.
How about an honest answer from some people?
Like David, who gives a clever but ultimately unconvincing answer. Let’s be real. We’re talking about killing a kid to save a city. Let’s forget the wire and say it was magic. Let’s say the only way to stop the bomb was violent dismemberment. Let’s close up all the loopholes and face a scenario where one has the possibility of choosing a great evil to prevent a greater evil.
My answer is this: abortion is intrinsically evil, it will always be intrinsically evil, and if there is any circumstance that ever justifies an abortion, this isn’t one of them.
That being said, I might just do it. And if I did do it, it would still be wrong, it would still be evil. And I will still have to be held to account by God for what I did. It would be something I would have to confess and probably spend some time in purgatory for, assuming I die in a state of grace.
I might be willing to go through all that, if it will save a million people, but I’ll never pretend that it is good.
I wish someone would post this on a more conservative Catholic blog. I’d like to see how our self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy react when the tables are turned like this.
Intrinsically evil means intrinsically evil, period. Mark Shea at Inside Catholic has been doing some great writing on this in recent weeks.
Speaking of which, Shea has a new article up at IC now on torture.
Hold the phone, wringing information from a terrorist by the infliction of pain in the ticking time bomb situation is entirely plausible. Triggering the bomb from the heart beat of an unborn child is absolutely implausable. No discomfort whatever in this.
Oh but ROB, the implausibility is a feature, not a defect. Our best reasoning is done contemplating situations that have never existed and likely never will exist. Attempting to reason by applying our actions under ordinary circumstances to similar situations is just not realistic enough to encompass the complex society we have.
Good question M.Z.!
And the answer is No, you do not order the abortion.
Pax Christi,
M.Z. Says:
May 5, 2009 at 3:05 pm
“Oh but ROB, the implausibility is a feature, not a defect. Our best reasoning is done contemplating situations that have never existed and likely never will exist. Attempting to reason by applying our actions under ordinary circumstances to similar situations is just not realistic enough to encompass the complex society we have”.
I repeat GKC: “Truth is stranger than fiction because we make up the fiction”.
Just so, “suppose” situations cannot determine real situations.
Pray.
I suppose I should come out and say I don’t think this is a good thought experiment. It clarifies nothing. As Digby notes, it tries to place the burden of another actor’s action upon the subject. What these and similar experiments do is try to appeal to the American spirit of always thinking there is some solution to every problem. There is a certain hubris to the American spirit that believes any problem of evil can be overcome with the proper application of ingenuity.
Gerald:
Yes, I know what it is to act. And I have read this entire section of the catechism. To quote this entire paragraph (I assume you can look up the section yourself):
1753 A good intention (for example, that of helping one’s neighbor) does not make behavior that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying and calumny, good or just. The end does not justify the means. Thus the condemnation of an innocent person cannot be justified as a legitimate means of saving the nation. On the other hand, an added bad intention (such as vainglory) makes an act evil that, in and of itself, can be good (such as almsgiving).39
Now, if my intention is good…”I want to save human lives!” that does not necessarily mean that my action is good. The means here–an abortion–are intrinsically evil. The nature of the act of abortion is evil. Therefore, I don’t see it as a legitimate way of achieving a good object (saving human life).
If I am way off, I would appreciate a charitable explanation. Instead of…”Do you know the significance of the term ACT? You can’t use a Cut & Paste technique to interpret the Catechism.”
Let’s assist each other, brethren–not beat on them.
A terrorist has planted a bomb in New York. Do you slap the terrorist to get him to tell you where the bomb is?
Pray, again.
No, but the intention of the injection is directly to stop the heart i.e. to kill the child.
Michael,
I disagree that stopping the heart is the same as killing the child. Hearts are stopped all the time in the operating room for the purposes of open heart surgery. Stopping a heart is not killing. Killing the unborn child (by, say, poison) to stop the heart would be killing. Stopping the heart is just stopping the heart.
I fail to see how this is dramatically different than removing a part of a pregnant woman’s fallopian tube where an embryo has implanted. If the embryo is allowed to grow, the woman’s life is threatened. Catholic medical ethics allow the part of the tube with the embryo to be removed, which means certain death to the embryo. It does not allow direct killing of the embryo, as would be the case if the woman took the drug methotrexate. (As a consequence, Catholic women in this situation must undergo surgery, whereas non-Catholic women may be able to avoid surgery and take a drug, both having exactly the same outcome.) I am saying that stopping the heart is like removing the part of the fallopian tube with the embryo. The intention is not to kill, but the action means certain death in both cases.
Mr. Nickol,
There is an unfortunately tendency to treat double effect as a physically. The dual of effects under evaluation in double effect are teleological. In the case of an etopic pregancy, we understand the fallopian tube’s purpose to carry the fertilized ovum from the ovary to uterus. If an obstruction such as a cyst forms, that impedes the fallopian tube’s purpose. It also can lead to significant harm to the woman in most cases. Repairing the obstruction, be it cyst or in the case of an etopic pregnancy, child, is the primary effect of the act. If one were simply desirous to kill the child, removing the fallopian tube would be sufficient. This is our second effect. Therefore an application of double effect allows the removal of the fallopian tube.
In evaluating this case under double effect, we are using the stopping of the heart to achieve the diffusion of the bomb. Therefore it fails the 3rd test of double effect that the bad effect not be the cause of the good effect. (I could argue based on the 1st criteria, but that is necessarily more convoluted.)
You cease the heartbeat of the fetus, waterboard the terrorist 183 times, then disable the device, then restart the fetus’s heart using a powerful stimulant injected directly into the womb. This is what my favorite moral theorist, Jack Bauer, would do.
If an obstruction such as a cyst forms, that impedes the fallopian tube’s purpose. It also can lead to significant harm to the woman in most cases. Repairing the obstruction, be it cyst or in the case of an etopic pregnancy, child, is the primary effect of the act.
MZ,
This does not make sense to me medically. An obstructed fallopian tube in itself is not dangerous to a woman’s health. In fact, women have their fallopian tubes deliberately blocked (tied) as a method of fertility control.
It seems to me fundamentally mistaken to equate the creation of temporary fear of drowning (waterboarding)with the intentional destruction of the unborn child. Obviously the latter extinguishes a human life and waterboarding does not. However the original propostion remains silly because a fetal heartbeat could not trigger a bomb as a matter of fact. A better analogy might be: the terrorist is given a tour of a Cook County Public Hospital with aborted babies dying amid the trash and then shown his heavily pregnant wife taken into the abortionary and told that will be the fate of his unborn child unless he divulges the location of the bomb. No forced abortion was ever planned or did take place. The terrorist of course has suffered extrememe mental anguish. Torture?
Bonus Credit – No occupant of the oval office could contemplate letting aborted babies die amid hospital trash. True or False.
Just evacuate the city.
I understand why people want to resist these types of experiments as “not all that helpful” and “fictions.” But at the same time they are precisely helpful in exposing the prioritizing of moral principles in one’s reasoning. And often it is only highly unlikely, somewhat ridiculous situations that serve to expose this. Two people could agree for their entire lives on abortion being immoral and people dying in nuclear explosions being immoral; but perhaps not at all for the right reasons. Only when faced with this somewhat absurd scenario does one discover whether abortion is truly treated as an intrinsic evil, because intrinsic evil means NO circumstance can render it acceptable. This is an example of a circumstance that would, I fear, coax many people to see abortion as acceptable (because, after all, its saving soooo many lives!), exposing a utilitarian principle of reasoning and disregard for the notion of intrinsic evil.
The probability or improbability of analogous thought experiments has little or nothing to do with their value. And the point of comparison on which the analogy is based is very important. Here I believe, no matter how different abortion and torture are, the point was to expose their fundamental commonality as intrinsically evil acts. Thus while many would allow for torture in this case and not abortion, it helps to expose a fundamental inconsistency in reasoning.
Pax Christi,