From Natural Purpose to God’s Will: A Fallacious Move
Brian Resnick at the Atlantic treats us to a couple of essays from the 1939 edition of the magazine, one making the case for legal contraception, and the other explaining the Catholic case against their use. Resnick and my fellow writer at the League Tod Kelly find both articles fascinating for their similarity to the disagreements we’re having about contraceptives today in light of the HHS mandate, the GOP presidential campaign, and the testimonies before Congress. I encourage you to read both essays, but I’d like here to zero in on a particular argument made in the second essay because it perfectly frames the sort of “natural law” argument about which I’ve lately had the bad habit of writing subversive things.
The essay’s author, Father Francis J. Connell, presented the argument as follows:
The most general norm of right and wrong established by this natural law is that a person’s actions are morally good when they are in conformity with God’s will, and they are morally bad when they are in opposition to God’s will.
Throughout the entire universe wisdom of God can be perceived, ingeniously adapting means to ends, coordinating causes and effects. This divinely planned harmony is particularly manifest in the constitution of living beings. Each organ has its proper purpose, each faculty its proper function. Now it is certainly the will of the Creator who adapted these vital powers to definite ends that they should operate toward the attainment of these ends. He Himself directs the activities of irrational creatures by providing them with certain irresistible inclinations, so that they necessarily employ their faculties for their proper purpose. The effect of this guidance in animals we call instinct. The bird will infallibly use its wings to fly; the bee is certain to employ its marvelously constructed organs to gather pollen and to make honey. But to man, the most exalted of the living things of earth, God grants freedom of choice in the use of his powers. A human being can direct his faculties of soul and of body to the purposes intended by the Creator, or he can distort them to other ends. And on the way he chooses to employ them depends the morality of his actions. When a person uses his faculties for their proper purpose, his action is morally good, for it is in accordance with God’s will; when he deliberately frustrates their proper purpose, his action is morally evil, for it is opposed to God’s will. The gravity of the sin is proportionate to the gravity of the harm resulting from the action.
Fr. Connell went on to apply this line of reasoning to the sexual act: “when husband and wife deliberately and positively frustrate the procreative purpose of sexual intercourse, they pervert the order of nature and thus directly oppose the designs of nature’s Creator.” For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the sexual organs and human sexuality have the “naturally ordered” purpose of procreation and that God has designed them for this definite end. Does it thereby follow, as Fr. Connell asserted, that it is God’s will that the sexual organs and their vital powers should always operate toward the attainment of this end? Logically, it doesn’t, not unless one assumes, as Fr. Connell did, that God’s ordering of the vital faculties towards a particular or primary purpose means that God wills that this initial ordering always be followed.
Fr. Connell had no doubt about this assumption: “now it is certainly the will of the Creator who adapted these vital powers to definite ends that they should operate toward the attainment of these ends.” He asserts the will of God as if it were a given, when really his assertion begs the question. That God ordered vital powers towards a certain end may suggest that God wills that those ends never be deliberately and positively frustrated, but being suggestive, if we can even get that far, is not tantamount to the moral certainty Fr. Connell posited. We cannot logically derive from natural purpose, even natural purpose initiated by God, a non-negotiable moral imperative. The connection has to be either assumed or proven through another route.
Aside from the fallacious leap, there are a couple of reasons for doubting there’s a necessary connection between the vital powers having a divinely-designed ends and God’s will that these vital powers are always exercised in accordance with these ends. First, given that vital powers can evolve, we cannot be certain that these powers will always function in the same way. For example, the belief that God created human beings as male and female does not, on its own, tell us whether the human species will always remain typically male and female, i.e., a species that reproduces sexually. Second, human intelligence has the capacity to reform or improve vital functions in creative ways, a potentially that at least raises the question whether God intended the human species to use its intelligence to change nature and natural purposes.
To be sure, these are two reasons for suspicion; they are not proofs. Nothing I’ve said above discredits the Catholic understanding of human sexuality and sexual morality, or even other conceptions of natural law; I’ve addressed only one of the arguments, an argument I’m prepared to dismiss as fallacious and would like to see tossed into the dumpster. Its problem is in moving from designed ends to a moral imperative based on what God wills. An argument against contraception that begins with what God wills for moral action would not make the same mistake.
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What you’ve said above does, in fact, descredit the alleged “natural law” understanding of human sexuality (if the “natural law” understanding is meant to be axiomatic), at least until such time as the questions you’ve raised have been answered.
As has been discussed on other threads, this only discredits the simplistic physicalist or “externalistic” understanding of Natural Law on this question. And THAT understanding deserves to be discredited, as it does nothing but hurt the cause of traditional morality given how easy it is to refute.
That, however, is not the notion of Natural Law held by Aquinas, for example, which understands that morality is seated in the will itself, not by an arbitrary following of “rules” either Revealed or perceived in nature, but rather by the very inner logic itself of being a free rational being.
The sort of natural law this old article is pushing represents something of a “pop” bastardization in theology of the real natural law idea, and one will notice that this bastardized understanding is usually only ever is invoked to discuss the pelvic issues. Real natural law addresses things from an “internal” perspective, and not this materialist “certain body parts fit certain places” notion, and provides a much more robust set of basic moral principles.
To “A Sinner”
Thomas’ Aquinas vision of natural law is that rational creatures participate in the eternal, divine law insofar as they participate in the rationality of God and therefore are capable of understanding eternal precepts within the natural order. These rules are both external and internal, in the sense that the eternal law is the foundation of the order in creation in which man finds himself as well as the internal rational life of man.
Nevertheless, such a theory would still have observable, external consequences no matter how internalized one defines its operation. If there were universal moral principles, as a Thomistic understanding of natural law demands, there would be a corresponding universal cultural expression of those principles. Yet a study of anthropology and sociology finds that moral principles are quite diverse, and it is my own hypothesis that in order to confirm the universality of a given moral principle that principle would need to be defined so broadly that it would have almost no moral “punch.” In any case, natural law has begun to disintegrate in proportion to more or less European culture’s exposure to the true variety of cultures and moral systems (indeed, this disintegration began quietly more or less six centuries ago, when the discovery of the New World and the vastly different habits of its inhabitants forced the self-assured Europeans to label the New World inhabitants “savages” and deny, to a greater or lesser extent, their rationality).
I suppose, then, my question would be: what are these “robust” moral principles which are universally part of man’s internal rational life? If we cannot name them, how can we be sure they exist? And if we can name them, should we not be able to find those principles somehow expressed in the material cultures of human history, not just the Graeco-Roman or so-called “Judeo-Christian” traditions?
Indeed, as I said in the last thread on this, Aquinas doesn’t seem shocked by the fact that a diversity of goods are proposed by various people/cultures as man’s last end.
I agree with Rodak, I think you have discredited the “natural law” argument, and this is the primary argument against contraception. With natural law gone, what is left? Paul VI’s spurious social arguments in Humanae Vitae?
After reading Father Connell’s argument above, I’m struck that the same sorts of arguments are not applied to other body organs, even sexual ones. For example, couldn’t one argue that the natural function of breasts for a lactating woman, is to feed her child? But we don’t say it is sinful for a woman to chose to feed her baby with formula or a wet nurse, as many did before the invention of formula.
We also do not apply natural law arguments against mutilation to male circumcision, but we apply these to sterilization.
I really wonder how the Catholic argument against contraception can stand without the natural law understanding?
Again, if people are construing THIS as “The” Natural Law argument (mainly because, it seems, they WANT to see it discredited)…this is simply intellectually dishonest, or at least ignorant.
Well, can you please explain it in a different way then. Because my understanding of St. Thomas’s argument is very similar to the one Kyle articulated above. Yes, the Divine Will is involved, but the way one understands the Divine Will is the way things are related to their natural and divine telos. Ultimately there is no way to prove the naturalness of divine morality. What we are left with is X is immoral because it violates it’s natural end (Y). We don’t have any way to confirm Y, other than the Church says it is so. Part of the syllogism is ultimately missing.
I must be deft because I cannot see the distinction you are trying to make in your above comment.
What many of these understandings are missing is the fact that morality requires a moral subject, a person. Mere material events of the external order have no moral quality without determination by the will of a rational subject.
What many of these descriptions of “natural law” make it sound like is some simplistic notion like “a penis going anywhere else but a vagina is a bad and unnatural occurrence” and, thus, bad for humans to will that occurrence or cause it to come about.
But this gets the nature of morality backwards.
In reality, a mere juxtaposition of material parts (or motion thereof, or emission of fluids thereby, etc) has no moral quality.
What has the moral quality is how (or perhaps, more precisely, why) such events engage the will, the ends the conscious subject seeks by that instrumentality, etc.
I think you’ve misread Fr. Connell’s argument. He is writing from within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, so his ethics presupposes certain things that are treated in the philosophy of nature, including a philosophical psychology and an account of nature that includes all four causes, and in metaphysics, such as God’s existence and attributes. According to this philosophical vision, what God primarily wills in creating the universe is its order – any where that means are seen to be adapted to ends the will of God is seen to be at work, providing for creatures by uniting them in a single cosmic order. The Aristotelian-Thomist seeks to understand God’s self-revelation not just through the inspired books of scripture, but through the book of nature — nature is essentially “theonomic”, i.e., it reveals God’s law to us by natural means. In the first lectio in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, St. Thomas emphasizes the need to recognize the order that exists in the universe in order to introduce order into human acts. The order in things is twofold; there is the order of parts to the whole to which they belong, and the order of parts to one another. Reason, by considering the order in things (Philosophy of Nature and Metaphysics), is itself ordered and is thus able to introduce order into a) its own acts (Logic), b) acts of the will (Ethics), and c) external things (Art). Ethics, then, presupposes a robust account of the human person from the standpoint of a philosophical psychology undergirded by an Aristotelian account of nature.
To the point then. Ethics, unlike the speculative sciences, is not about discovering an order that is in things, but rather about introducing an order into our actions. The order we introduce into our actions is an order to our ultimate end, namely, acquiring God. The question the ethicist must face is “how do I order my actions so as to attain my end?” The end is given, but the means are not. The end is given, however, in a speculative examination of human nature. In the course of discovering the ultimate end of man, the Aristotelian-Thomist discovers, by an examination of his activities, that man has various principles of action (called faculties, or powers, which are rooted in his essential nature). Principles of action are distinguished one from another on the basis of their objects. Here there is discovered an order — nature (first principle), faculty (intermediate principle/means), action (end) — which is perfective of the human. If a human agent is to introduce an order into his actions that will enable him to achieve his ultimate end, it will be through employing his faculties according to the order he discovers in them, for the highest faculty in man is his intellect by which he discovers order and introduces it into his actions and into the external world. It is in the Philosophy of Nature and in Metaphysics that the philosopher discovers that God is the principle of this order, and that it is thus God’s will that he act in accordance with this order that he discovers in the book of nature.
Now this analysis may not impress you. Your two reasons for suspicion indicate that you reject the Aristotelian-Thomist account of nature. But if you have rejected that, you have also rejected the possibility of certain knowledge about material realities. And if you have rejected that, you have also rejected the possibility of certain knowledge about the nature of human beings. This also entails a rejection of any certainty in the realm of Ethics.
@ Chas –
What, exactly, do you mean by “material realities?” It is precisely the in-depth knowledge of the nature and function of the sexual apparatus of human beings that makes artificial birth control (for instance), both possible and effective. Or do you mean “material” in some abstract, phyical way?
And what, exactly, do you mean by “the nature of human beings?” Again, do you mean some idealized, abstract notion of the proto-typical human being, or do you mean that which characteristically pertains to the actual bi-pedal mammal who walks around wearing a ball cap and shopping at Walmart?
And finally, what exactly do you mean by “Ethics?” Do mean a system of immutable, revealed laws, caved in stone at the dawn of history? Or do you mean codes of conduct prevalent in a specific society, at a specific time, generally recognized to have been formulated by gradual consensus in order to deal with moral issue commonly confronting members of that society at that time?
That should read “Or do you mean ‘material’ in some abstract, non-physical way?”
By material realities I simply mean “sensible beings”, things that we encounter by means of the sense.
By human nature, I mean that principle which makes an individual to be a human being rather than some other animal and which he shares in common with other human beings. (Nature is a kind of principle – a principle of activity in things, represented in the intellect as an essence in which case it is a principle of knowledge.)
By Ethics I mean that part of speculative knowledge that determines the proximate principles of human action. This knowledge is practical in its fundamental orientation, but is only fully practical when employed in a practical syllogism which terminates in an action. As speculative, ethics is concerned to discover universal rules of human activity conducive to the end of happiness. Thus the necessity involved is the same as that in the science of nature – necessity on the hypothesis of an end.
This may be true, but I think this manner of presenting it can still seem a little too externalistic for some people if we place the emphasis on, say, the body rather than the will.
Ultimately, natural law morality boils down to Reason ordering the Will.
I’d emphasize, then, less the “purpose of faculties” and more the intelligibility of desires/acts relative to those various ends.
The body is an integral part of the human being and the faculties rooted in the sensitive powers of the soul participate in the order given by reason, by means of the will, which employs those powers (and the organs which are their vehicles) to the end proposed by reason. The natural teleology of the powers themselves enter into the reasoning process about what to do, and determine whether reason is right or wrong. The intelligibility of desires/acts relative to the various ends is fundamentally bound up with an analysis of natural teleologies. The way you describe this sounds more like the “New Natural Law” approach of thinkers like Grisez, Rhonheimer, Finnis et al. But this is not the classical natural law approach of traditional Thomism, of which Connell was an exponent.
Well, yes, we have to assume that there is a purpose to the faculties in order to determine whether the end and means chosen by the will is intelligible. If someone is desiring an end (say, pleasure) by a certain means, one has to ask whether the connection of those means to that end is intelligible and transcendent or not, and the intelligibility will depend on the telos of the faculty which is providing the (in this case, pleasure). But that’s why I spoke merely of “emphasis”
I note also that Connell never uses the “body part x fits body part y” argument. It is about the proper use of a faculty, which entails the use of certain organs that go along with it. But the reproductive faculty can’t be reduced to the penis and vagina. It includes the intentional use of all the organs of reproduction — thus on this analysis embryo transfer itself is seen to contradict the intention of nature. Nor does it entail that we must use our organs at all, but that if we use them, it should be according to the order which is perfective of the faculty, and thus of the agent. Further, the “contrariness to nature” must be complete – the use of a faculty that actually subverts it’s natural end, not merely a failure to attain the end. This is also the foundation of the intrinsic immorality of lying – a subversion of the purpose of speech.
We cannot logically derive from natural purpose, even natural purpose initiated by God, a non-negotiable moral imperative.
I find your insertion of the term ‘non-negotiable’ interesting. Do you think that the argument would be on surer ground if it concluded to a negotiable (defeasible/presumptive) moral imperative?
Yeah, in the sense that natural purpose as initiated by God is suggestive for how one ought to act and live. I’m not sure I’d call it an imperative in the sense of being obligatory for all, but I can see a reasonableness to someone’s deciding, for himself, to act in accordance with his understanding of the divine order on the basis that it’s probably a safe bet for living according to God’s will.
The problem is that the Church itself almost always presents the teaching in “externalistic” terms, which quite frankly are an epic fail.
As to “internalist” accounts or the “intelligibility of desires/acts relative to those various ends”, as we’ve discussed at length before, A Sinner, I don’t see such accounts as being, well, intelligible. I think anyone who is not a barbarian agrees that Reason should order the Will in ethical situations (though I think it’s more complicated and nuanced than that); but the argument that Reason should order the Will towards X since only thus is the desire involved “intelligible” seems to boil down to saying that you ought to feel a certain way; or that the way you feel is “correct” only in certain contexts. Both this and the concept of “moral object”, which I also find unintelligible, ultimately rest on Magisterial decree. In short, it’s not obvious that contraception is intrinsically wrong (as it is obvious with, e.g., murder of innoncents) unless one buys into the concept of “moral object” or “intelligibility of desires”; but then if one asks why contraception is intrinsically wrong, though not obviously, or why the moral object of intercourse requires that all acts be of a “procreative type” or why the desire involved in contraceptive intercourse in “unintelligible”, it all comes down to “this is the teaching” which is essentially “Because we say so.”
In fact, Kyle indicates this: Its problem is in moving from designed ends to a moral imperative based on what God wills. An argument against contraception that begins with what God wills for moral action would not make the same mistake. I think this is exactly right; the problem is that outside of Magisterial fiat, it’s hard to see how to argue that God wills that contraception never be used, or that it’s always intrinsically evil.
Now as a parent, I can say that “Because I say so” is not always a bad argument; but for intelligent adults it’s not usually a good approach. The fact that the Church itself doesn’t merely rely on “because we say so” arguments shows that the hierarchy realizes that such a statement doesn’t come off as credible. The fact that the locus of the argument keeps switching–first it’s externalistic natural law, then it’s the purported evil effects of contraception to society, then it’s the highly questionable Theology of the Body–shows that the Church sees that no arguments yet used are seen as credible, and that it’s throwing out everything, hoping something will stick. The fact remains, though, that one really good and effective argument is better than a hundred weak ones. If you’ve made a good argument, you don’t have to say, “And besides….”; but that’s all the Church seems to say in these matters.
The fact that the locus of the argument keeps switching–first it’s externalistic natural law, then it’s the purported evil effects of contraception to society, then it’s the highly questionable Theology of the Body
I’m not really convinced that this is historically what has happened. The approach in Humanae Vitae is explicitly multi-pronged, and many of the later developments in the subject are attempts to develop those arguments further and in greater detail from one perspective or another. That’s very different from the locus of the argument constantly shifting; HV doesn’t give a full-scale account, but simply uses Church authority to say “This is the result you should be getting, and here, in very, very brief and general terms is why.” (Actually, HV wasn’t about contraception, but about how one can build a marriage-friendly society, and it only addresses birth control because that was the big controversial issue in theology of marriage at the time; it would have made no sense in context to go into any more detail than needed to make the basic point.) Everybody since then has been looking at different ways of elaborating that basic argument that will make it more clear and also address objections made since.
I think it’s pretty clearly false that “If you’ve made a good argument, you don’t have to say, ‘And besides….’”; this seems to be a common view, but I don’t think this is the way rational inquiry works at all. Good arguments aren’t merely stopping points but beginnings for further inquiry, which requires handling new objections, approaching the same subject from different perspectives, etc.; having lots of And-besides’s is always the case with a genuinely good argument (although it’s true that not all arguments with lots of And-besides’s are good arguments).
“then if one asks why contraception is intrinsically wrong, though not obviously, or why the moral object of intercourse requires that all acts be of a ‘procreative type’ or why the desire involved in contraceptive intercourse in ‘unintelligible,’ it all comes down to ‘this is the teaching’ which is essentially ‘Because we say so.’”
Hardly. The non-transcendence or intelligibility of a choice for contraceptive sex is easy enough to demonstrate from the very fact that such a desire is explainable only with reference to unimpeded intercourse, and the self-subverting or internally incoherent logic, then, of that choice relative to the good.
Why such internally contradictory choices are immoral requires an understanding of morality as an ordering of the will towards the good, which is itself based on the very nature of human beings as free subjects and the fulfillment of that nature. But that’s not terribly hard to demonstrate either.
Said to me just now on Twitter: “I’ll be honest with you, I pretty much skip your reasoning and see what A Sinner and Brandon have to say in response.”
Again, my purpose in participating in this thread is to show that Connell is not doing something obviously fallacious in appealing to God’s will here. It is in fact bound to happen given his traditional Thomist approach to ethics. God’s will is discovered in the book of nature by seeing what he has made and tracing it back to him as the source. Given what we can know about God by natural reason, according to this view, we discover that God wills the good order of all things (i.e., God is provident). We discover that we are made by God and ordered (ontologically) to happiness as to our ultimate end. This order itself is willed by God, who has also given me reason and will so that I can freely order myself to happiness. What conduces to happiness is what God wills for me while what does not conduce to happiness is contrary to God’s will. If my happiness is bound up with ordering the activities of my various God given faculties to their proportionate ends (which are themselves given ultimately by God), then to fail to order them to their given ends is contrary to the divine will. I don’t see a logical fallacy in here. You may dispute the principles he uses to get there which includes an aristotelian-thomist conception of nature, that we can rationally demonstrate God’s existence and some of his attributes, that the principle of order is intelligence, and thus the first principle of order is the first intelligence, etc.
This is all well and good, but as I said earlier, I don’t think that’s exactly how modern man reads those arguments.
Modern man is so used to consequentialism and other externalistic notions of morality, that when he reads some of the natural law arguments phrased in the old fashioned way, it sounds like we’re arguing that a certain juxtaposition of matter, or mere event or occurrence of the external order, somehow has a bad moral quality because “things aren’t going where they’re supposed to” or something like that.
And why such a reading is obviously unsatisfying, is because there is a general (if implicit) understanding that meaning is read into matter only by conscious subjects.
Kyle,
1. First, I think Fr. Connell is a little bit sloppy when describing natural law. He says the natural law says that “a person’s actions are morally good when they are in conformity with God’s will, and they are morally bad when they are in opposition to God’s will.” I wouldn’t describe it that way. I think it would be better to say that “a person’s actions are morally good when they are in accord with our nature (which of course was created by God, who intends that we live in accord with our nature).” Though God created our natures and created the natural law, the natural law is not a set of obligations that are derived because God said so; they are moral obligations derived from our nature and our natural inclination to the good. I think this Public Discourse article speaks on this issue:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4636
But let’s set that quibble aside. I can’t help but think that you are talking at cross-purposes with Fr. Connell and other natural law theorists. When you say “We cannot logically derive from natural purpose, even natural purpose initiated by God, a non-negotiable moral imperative,” for example, I can’t help but think that you’re not using the language of natural law theorists in the same way that the natural law theorists use it. I can’t help but think that you have a different understanding of of “ought-ness” or “moral imperative” or “natural purpose” than natural law theorists, which means you’re talking past them instead of directly addressing them. I know other commentators have alluded to this, and I have to. (Consider the discussion in your first foray into natural law: http://vox-nova.com/2011/09/14/deconstructing-natural-law-ethics/ )
2. I think your last “two reasons for doubt” miss the mark completely as criticisms of natural law theory. Natural law theory involves a study and discussion about our nature as human beings. Your two reasons for doubt assume a scenario where there are beings who no longer have human nature. There’s nothing wrong with such speculations, but they’re outside the realm of natural law theory and are in the realm of science fiction. They’re in the realm of the speculations like “What if God created a non-human rational being on another planet who reproduced asexually? Would this being be fallen or unfallen, or have an experience of sin and/or redemption like us? How would the Trinitarian God reveal Himself to this being? Would the Second Person of the Trinity become incarnate again, taking on this different non-human nature?” Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with these speculations (see Lewis’s Space Trilogy), but they’re outside the realm of a discussion about the natural law. Your two reasons for doubt ask “What happens if humanity changed into a non-humanity?”, which is kind of like asking “What happens if God transformed a human into a different rational being with a non-human nature, like Lewis’s Hrossa?” I suppose it could happen, because all things are possible with God, but I don’t see that as a criticism of natural law theory, which discusses humans with a human nature– a human nature that is essentially the same whether it is found in the earliest beings who were infused with an eternal human soul at the dawn of humanity, or the incarnate Jesus who took on human nature, or we human beings today.
@ Chas –
I can’t help wondering if you actually believe in the literal truth of all this prescientific sophistry, or if you are simply so proud of having learned it all so thoroughly that you relish any opportunity, such as this post affords you, to trot it out and show it off it a bit? Your presentation is, undeniably, most impressive.
I was able to respond to you without being a condescending jerk. I expect the same.
You have a point – sorry for being a bit of a jerk –
you can expect better indeed.
@ Chas –
You’re right. I’m sorry. That was frustration speaking. You didn’t deserve the snark. But I was sincere in expressing my admiration for your presentation. It’s really quite impressive.
Rodak, lol a great way to bring it to the point.
This academic exercise in ‘natural law’ seems to me a bit like insisting that one can utilize the great Newtons ‘timeless’ understanding of Physics to explain Quantum Physics — it just does not fly.
This is certainly not Newtons/Aquinas fault at all but the modern day Simplicissimus desire to pretend that time finally stands still.
A modern day Thomas Aquinas would have his work cut out and likely would have to fight legions of learned ‘experts’ – just like the original had to fight such experts in yesterdays news back in the 12th century.
You will be disagreeable as long as you continue to insist that somehow advances in the material sciences have affected metaphysics or ethics (they haven’t and can’t; the value/significance attached to human acts cannot be affected by the natural sciences. Answering “how” and answering “why” are simply referring to two difference categories…)
I don’t completely agree–as you know, for the Greeks, at least, philosophy–”love of wisdom”–was holistic. The physics, metaphysics, and ethics were all intertwined. For example, Epicurus wasn’t particularly interested in atoms qua atoms; his atomism was a partial support of his ethics in that if we’re just made of atoms that rearrange, then there is no reason to fear death (from Epicurus’ view, of course). Likewise, the Platonic view of the One as more or less the World Soul underlying the visible cosmos wasn’t intended as an exposition of physics, but of how God interacts with the world.
As you know, much of Artistotle’s ethics (and thus Aquinas’) is based on the teleology of the human being, and much ethics derives from the attempts to look at humans as they are, in order to determine the proper telos. In this process, Aristotle’s hylomorphism and his theory of substance and accidents generally comes in at some point. However, as a sometime physics teacher I can say that the substance/accident or form/matter view of nature is really quite incompatible with atomic theory (that’s without even going into quantum theory–just plain atomic theory seems to undermine the whole concept). A good critique of Aristotelianism and its influence on Western Christianity and society in general (by a Catholic physicist) is here.
Having said that, I agree with you broadly that scientific advance doesn’t affect philosophy or ethics; but to say there’s no effect, even in principle, just strikes me as not so.
I used to be somewhat of a Thomist, and I have great respect for the achievement of Aristotle, St. Thomas, and their later followers. I have come to think over the years, though, that Scholasticism was a wrong turn in Western Church history. I believe the Eastern Orthodox approach to philosophy in general and ethics in particular is better; and by and large it produces the same results without the hyper-hair-splitting tendencies and super-abstraction seen in the West.
substance/accident is hardly incompatible with what we know of physics, as least not as a metaphysical assertion dealing with how categories of reality are constructed in consciousness. We can and do indeed still, conceptually, abstract the thing-in-itself from the bundle of relative properties which we attribute to a given being, whether that being is an atom, a dog, or a piece of bread.
I’m not sure that you can abstract the thing-in-itself from relative properties, except maybe for heuristic purposes. You can’t abstract the Mona Lisa from the configuration of brush strokes and colors, because, like any other painting, it is the configuration of brush strokes and colors. I guess you could argue that the face of la Gioconda is an emergent property of the configuration (though that could be debated), but “emergent property” isn’t what Aristotle means by forms and accidents.
Every observable property of a material object–color, weight, odor, density, taste–is caused by its particular configuration of atoms and sub-atomic particles. If an object ceases to have one property and begins to have another (e.g. a ripening apple turns from red to green), the “substance” doesn’t lose one set of “accidents” and gain another, while remaining the “same substance”; rather, the reconfiguration of atoms as the apple ripens produces different colors, odors, etc.
It would be like trying to argue that the meaning of a word is the true substance and the spelling merely an accident. The very word itself results exactly from the spelling. If you change the configuration of the letters–the spelling–you don’t have the same word.
The late Thomist philosopher Mortimer Adler even went so far in one of his books (I forget which) as to deny that atoms even exist except in potentia–this on Aristotelian grounds! That would be like saying a word is a untied whole and the individual phonemes of the spoken word or the letters of the written word are only abstractions!
In any case, I don’t think “conceptual abstraction” or “categories of reality as constructed by consciousness” is what Aristotle or St. Thomas meant–I think they saw substance and accident as how the world actually was, and not a mode of our cognition. That doesn’t even sound Thomist or Aristotelian, but more like pure Kantianism!
“Every observable property of a material object–color, weight, odor, density, taste–is caused by its particular configuration of atoms and sub-atomic particles. If an object ceases to have one property and begins to have another (e.g. a ripening apple turns from red to green), the “substance” doesn’t lose one set of ‘accidents’ and gain another, while remaining the “same substance”; rather, the reconfiguration of atoms as the apple ripens produces different colors, odors, etc.”
Once again, you’re looking at this from a materialist perspective, as if metaphysics was attempting to give a PHYSICAL account of the universe.
It’s not.
The Greeks were well aware of the perpetuity of change you describe, the constant “continuum.” In fact, it was the question of “How can the river ever be the same thing from moment to moment if water keeps flowing through it?” which led to the metaphysical solution of substance in the first place.
Substance/accident is about the world of Ideas, about how conscious subjects construct reality.
Yes, an apple that ripens changes, but the changes are accidental to the essence “apple” as a category of thought with an internally consistent definition.
“The late Thomist philosopher Mortimer Adler even went so far in one of his books (I forget which) as to deny that atoms even exist except in potentia–this on Aristotelian grounds! That would be like saying a word is a untied whole and the individual phonemes of the spoken word or the letters of the written word are only abstractions!”
From the perspective of human experience, this isn’t such a stretch, though. Individual letters don’t mean anything, only words have significance. Likewise, in the world of our conscious experience, we do not perceive atoms, or even individual discrete sensory tropes, we perceive objects with properties.
Atoms are, in fact, largely a mathematical abstraction. With real effect, no doubt, in the structure of reality, but nevertheless even then atoms are parsed by subjectivity as substances with accidents (location, etc)
“In any case, I don’t think “conceptual abstraction” or “categories of reality as constructed by consciousness” is what Aristotle or St. Thomas meant–I think they saw substance and accident as how the world actually was, and not a mode of our cognition. That doesn’t even sound Thomist or Aristotelian, but more like pure Kantianism!”
There is no distinction, though. We have no way of standing “outside” the perspective of our own subjectivity, that’s the only “reality” we have. Even the universe as a whole, is being “Observed” by God. (I suspect, you are bound to misinterpret me when I say this…)
But, when we have a “bundle” of properties whose compresence we attribute to a substance…the subject of attribution of that compresence IS the substance, is the “reality.” Substance is not some mystical “thing” as if it’s a type of matter. It is a metaphysical abstraction of reality which describes how we can attribute continuity in change, how we can find concrete boundaries in what is really a continuum. “Apple” is no less real just because all apples are really unique combinations of atoms, anymore than “Circle” is unreal just because in this world all things only approximate a circle.
If you don’t understand this fundamental difference between physics and metaphysics, I don’t think you should go any further into any other philosophizing until you get past this physicalizing of the metaphysical.
I quite well understand the difference between physics and metaphysics. I am at somewhat of a loss as I’ve never seen or heard this kind of interpretation of Aristotelian hylomorphism. What you say sounds more like Berkeley or Kant.
I do see from here that apparently “matter” (hyle) has a rather different meaning for Aristotle than for us; given which I’m even more inclined to disagree with his perspective.
Substance is not some mystical “thing” as if it’s a type of matter. It is a metaphysical abstraction of reality which describes how we can attribute continuity in change, how we can find concrete boundaries in what is really a continuum.
Maybe this is it–maybe it’s the Buddhist in me. Buddhism–and for that matter, Greeks such as Heraclitus–says there is only the continuum, and that the borders are arbitrary impositions by human minds for convenience and heuristic purposes. The famous example is the explanation as to how a chariot is merely the sum of its parts. Or think of Heraclitus’ famous statement that you can’t step twice in the same stream. Or think The Matrix: “There is no spoon!”
I’m not completely committed to such a view; nor am I completely committed to hylopmorphism, though I do find some things about it attractive, especially in its more Platonic form (no pun intended). I’m not sure any philosopher has (or ever will, in this world) solved the problem of change vs. continuity in a completely satisfactory way. I do have to continue to disagree with you regarding atoms!
“Matter” is just potency/potentiality, basically, but matter without form is just a philosophical abstraction.
“Maybe this is it–maybe it’s the Buddhist in me. Buddhism–and for that matter, Greeks such as Heraclitus–says there is only the continuum, and that the borders are arbitrary impositions by human minds for convenience and heuristic purposes.”
You seem to be proposing just a sort of nominalism. But in reality, that’s simply not how common sense sees things. There is a continuity of identity of bundles of properties, even as the properties gradually change, and the identity continues until the object no longer meets the substantial or essential definition of whatever category (apple, tree, dog, etc)
If you deny this, you are denying even the validity of mathematics and geometry, which surely are more Philosophy than natural science.
You speak as reality and “impositions by human minds” as if they are separate things. But the truth is our construction OF reality IS reality. “Reality” as an idea can’t be meaningful if we don’t first posit Meaning, obviously.
I challenge you to show me (or even refer to) a Reality without referencing or invoking a conscious subject. Oh, wait, you can’t, because to do so YOU would have to be referencing something to ME, and we are both conscious subjects!
Saying something is “real” is to say it is a potential object of knowledge/knowability (and hence the Eastern Christian insight that God’s incomprehensible essence is, actually, beyond the being/non-being categorical duality, and can only be known in its existences/hypostases, not as a “bare essence” as it were).
Substance is real, at least inasmuch as a continuity of identity of anything is real (and the very fact that we perceive that would indicate it is; metaphysics of the “never the same stream twice” variety wind up incoherent, undermining their own existence.)
Said more briefly: relations exist, not just absolutes. What you are asserting would be like saying taking one of those Color Blindness Test circles and saying, “There is no number, there are merely individual dots, it is the human mind grouping them by similar color which is ‘imposing’ that pattern on then.” But that’s to attribute “reality” only to absolute discrete entities and not to the relations between them, relations of similarity or difference, etc. Just because categories are Ideas and not matter, doesn’t mean they aren’t real, as consciousness and ideas themselves are part of the furniture of the universe, of reality, and so must be taken into account, are just as real as the matter they are being “read onto,” just like Meaning is as real as the ink on paper whose patterns a Mind is perceiving as significant.
In fact, you can’t have it both ways: if Kyle’s argument is that “is” in one sense can’t PROVE “ought” (well, actually, I’ve argued it can if we’re talking about an “is” INTERNAL to the human Will, which is the seat of “ought”)…your “side” can’t simultaneously claim that any external “is” DISproves any “ought” either.
No, the debate about morality has to be internal to the faculties of the human soul (reason, free will, etc), and I don’t think the natural sciences extend to that.
I think I’m inclined to give more credit to the ‘externalist’ approach than A Sinner; but I do think there’s a significant issue here. While the manualist tradition did a lot that was good, I think one point at which they regularly fail to do justice to natural law theory is in their failure to recognize that Aquinas, in particular, holds that not all natural laws bind in the same way, and this causes problems. Most of natural law concerning sex is binding at the species-level; the analogy is not to truth-telling (which binds every rational person) but to manual labor. As a matter of natural law everyone has an obligation to do the work required to support themselves (in particular, to feed and shelter themselves). But this is more collective than distributive in force: the human race has a natural obligation of practical reason to do the work required to support itself, and this sets up the presumption that everyone will contribute to the fulfilling of this. But this doesn’t actually mean that everyone has to spend their days farming, etc.; for some people it may be practically impossible (e.g., sickness or age), while others will be reasonably concerned with ends so much more important than even survival (Aquinas’s example is education) that as long as (1) they contribute to these ends, and (2) those ends to be adequately fulfilled require spending one’s time doing other things than manual labor, and (3) the relevant manual labor is actually getting done, they should be supported by others in their endeavors, whether by payment or gift. You’d better have good reasons for not doing it, but that’s the most onerous requirement that the natural law imposes. And so with sex (it’s why, for instance, there’s a natural obligation to reproduce without everyone being required to try to do it). Getting to anything more precise than this is difficult work at best, and I think there’s at least an argument that the ‘externalist’ approach makes it even more difficult.
(I’m more sympathetic to it when people make clear that they understand Aquinas’s point that getting precise, specific conclusions from natural law is hard. Natural law theory wasn’t made to be a method for getting answers to ethical questions, but an explanation of how there are rational obligations at all, which is why Aquinas himself puts all the emphasis for practical life on his theory of virtues; the two are connected, since we are obligated to be virtuous, and certain virtues make it easier for us to draw conclusions about our obligations, but trying to make natural law stand alone is very, very dangerous. But I think there’s often something to be said for the manualist and influenced-by-the-manualists approaches, as long as they don’t pretend it’s an easy and straightforward inference.)
I think you’re making a good distinction here, but I don’t think you’ve applied it quite rightly. Although the positive precept to “multiply” holds good for all time, it does not hold at every moment. This is similar to your work analogy. Positive precepts are very general and can be difficult to apply in a given situation. Negative precepts, however, are at a level of generality that is easier to apply in a given situation. All I need to know to apply a negative precept is that the act I propose to myself is the kind under prohibition. If I am walking down the street and a panhandler asks me for money, I know that I am under the general obligation to give, but that this act of giving may not be required for me to be virtuous. However, there is more to it than that. For if I am going to work, I am going to need more specific rules to follow in order to know what I may and may not do. Likewise, if I’m going to follow the general rule to go forth and multiply, I must know what means are required for this end. The end is here given, and identified as a good. Now I must determine the morally upright means to that end. If I can’t get more specific than this end, then there is no rational basis for saying that monogamous sex is a better means than IVF. St. Thomas argues, in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 3, chapter 120 or thereabouts, that the command to be fruitful and multiply is consequent on our bodiliness, which entails that we have reproductive faculties, and that that faculty is ordered to mature offspring as its proper object. The proper use of the faculty is determined by its being rightly ordered to that end. On the hypothesis of the end that there be a mature human being, St. Thomas reasons that the proper use of the generative faculty necessarily entails a long standing union between the mother and father for the sake of the child. He further argues that the union of mother and father be entered into prior to the use of the generative faculty, and then that as secondary precepts of the natural law (secondary because not known to the general mass of humanity but only to the wise) there is also required monogamy and indissolubility of the marriage contract. The only legitimate use of the generative faculty that St. Thomas is able to identify is that the man direct the activity of his generative faculty (the vehicle of which is the genetalia) to the wife by means of an act which is essentially ordered to procreation and vice versa. The order to the end is only preserved when the faculty is employed in this way, and if used in any other way its use is contrary to nature. Thus St. Thomas gets fairly specific in his treatment of sexual ethics.
Chas – obviously 21th century humans do not take all the pointers for sexual ethics from a 12th centruy monk.
Clearly most man do not share the view that they “direct the activity of his generative faculty (the vehicle of which is the genetalia) to the wife by means of an act which is essentially ordered to procreation and vice versa”. Clearly the church insistance that this is all about procreations does not reflect the practical ethics of modern day humans.
This is not good old Aquinas’s fault – it is however the fault of intellectually lazy folks who can not be bothered to sort out how to incorporate the lessons of the larger scientific and societal developments. Guess what, natural human curiosity to explore the unknown tends to prevail – in science and in life.
Hi, Chas,
I can’t tell from your comment where it is you think that the distinction isn’t being applied correctly.
“Clearly most man do not share the view that they “direct the activity of his generative faculty (the vehicle of which is the genetalia) to the wife by means of an act which is essentially ordered to procreation and vice versa”. Clearly the church insistance that this is all about procreations does not reflect the practical ethics of modern day humans.”
I distinguish between human motivation for engaging in certain activities and rational justification for the same. I agree that most do not see themselves as “directing the activity…” and that it would in fact be weird to think of oneself as doing that in the heat of passion. St. Thomas would agree; a virtual intention to order one’s acts to their proper end suffices for upright behaviour. There is no need to be consciously thinking “gotta aim this right”; a general intention to do what is right suffices. But the rational justification of the use of the generative faculty is found in its order to its end, which is given by nature. Much of what passes for practical ethics is simply unreflective intuition based action, much of which is more rooted in ends set by disordered passions rather than on ends discovered in the scientific examination of nature.
Brandon,
Sorry for the lack of clarity. What I saw as deficient in the way you approached the distinction was that although the positive command to procreate is something that pertains to the species, there is a great deal more specificity that can be arrived at once you look at the things required to engage in that activity. We should not look for more precision than the subject matter allows, but I think that more precision in sexual matters is allowed than you suggest in your comment.
Chas,
Thanks for the clarification. I agree entirely that you can get more specific; I deny that it’s easy and straightforward to do so, and Aquinas is quite clear about the difficulty as well whenever he discusses natural law as such. The argument by Aquinas that you pointed to in SCG 3.121ff is, I think, a good example here; despite the relative brevity, this is a complicated argument drawing heavily on several extended prior discussions, does not confine itself purely to one line of argument, and is on a subject that is well upstream of, and that arguably requires less specificity than, the birth control issue. And, as I said, I actually give some credit to, and have some sympathy for, people who make arguments in the ‘externalist’ fashion, as long as they don’t pretend it’s an easy and straightforward argument.
@ Thales –
But human beings can already reproduce asexually in theory, through cloning. And a humanity somewhat as imagined by Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” is not beyond the realm of possibility. Sterile women are now giving birth with some regularity. We can also imagine the real possibility of a world in which the male of the species has become unnecessary as women clone themselves. I believe that Doris Lessing has written a novel on that theme. The fact is that man has evolved the ability to transcend, or manipulate, his own evolution already. This is a gift (or curse) of his God-given intellect. So what does Aquinas make of this?
Rodak,
But our nature hasn’t changed, even though we can do things by science that we weren’t able to do previously. The fact that we can manipulate science to reproduce via cloning, for example, or that we can fly in an airplane, or whatever, doesn’t mean our nature has changed. We are just as much a human being as an ancient Greek is a human being.
@ Thales –
Then it must mean that sexual reproduction is not part of our nature, since it has become something optional, rather than something essential, as it once was. Therefore, the controversy over birth control is silly.
Rodak,
No, that’s incorrect. Just because I can choose to starve myself, doesn’t mean that eating to nourish myself is not in accord with my nature. I can kill myself, but that doesn’t mean that living is something optional, rather than something essential and part of my nature.
Birth control and non-sexual reproduction are two different issues.
I’d argue the latter is an ethical issue related to Justice towards the child so conceived, and the treatment of human beings as relational subjects vs commodified objects.
That is different from the natural law argument for chastity (which is a form of Temperance), however, which would merely say that if you aren’t going to be reproducing sexually, then it is against reason (which is to say, Meaning, intelligibility, whatever you want to call it), to co-opt the desire/pleasure associated WITH that good, with that end, with that faculty…for merely it’s own sake, as if one’s last end and happiness consists in creating purposeless itches merely to scratch them.
[I]t is against reason (which is to say, Meaning, intelligibility, whatever you want to call it), to co-opt the desire/pleasure associated WITH that good, with that end, with that faculty…for merely it’s own sake, as if one’s last end and happiness consists in creating purposeless itches merely to scratch them. (emphasis added)
This cuts right to the heart of it. Scenario A: A couple has sex during the woman’s infertile period as determined by NFP and (for the sake of the argument here) with 100% certainty that pregnancy will not result. They have chosen this day specifically in order to avoid pregnancy. How, by your definition, are the not “co-opting the pleasure…for merely its own sake”? Or conversely, how is it that a couple using contraception must necessarily be “co-opting the pleasure…for merely its own sake”? The implication both ways is that somehow pleasure–not excessive pleasure, or selfish pleasure–but pleasure as such is somehow suspect.
Look: I’m walking through the park on a beautiful spring day and stop to smell the honeysuckle for no other reason than that they smell nice. Is that “co-opting the pleasure…for merely its own sake”? Later I stroll through town, and though I’m not hungry as such (I’m not stuffed either) I decide to pop into the ice cream store and get a cone (let’s make it artificially sweetened and low-fat, if you like) just because I’ve taken a notion to and because it tastes good. Is this “scratching a meaningless itch”? Is this a sinful failure of Reason to keep the Will and those unruly passions in check?
Really, I think this is the point at which arguments like this lose a lot of people. No matter how one finesses it, it comes out sounding like “Well, you can have your dessert but only if you eat your broccoli first!” The pleasure is simultaneously denigrated in that it’s implied to be always verging on the edge of raging, mindless, animalistic lust; and at the same time grossly over-emphasized to the point that it seems to eclipse any notion that a married couple having sex might do it not just for pleasure but for comfort or togetherness or, oh, say, love?
Not only that, but this is hanging an incredibly big “ought” (you ought never under any conceivable circumstances have contraceptive sex) on a rather tenuous “is” (that some configuration of intelligibility of desire vis-à-vis the will and the object of the act is in place–assuming that even means anything). Anyway, that’s my five cents.
“A couple has sex during the woman’s infertile period as determined by NFP and (for the sake of the argument here) with 100% certainty that pregnancy will not result. They have chosen this day specifically in order to avoid pregnancy. How, by your definition, are the not ‘co-opting the pleasure…for merely its own sake’?”
As someone how has explicitly and specifically rejected “moral object” as a category in favor of what can only then be consequentialism, I don’t expect you to understand.
But, what I would say is that the choice of unimpeded infertile sex is still a choice for a type of act ordered towards fertility (at least in terms of what the will itself has caused).
Your consequentialist analysis would not recognize this notion of a type of act “ordered towards” and so would possibly view infertile vaginal sex as simply equivalent to any type of contraceptive or masturbatory (etc) sex act.
However, the very word “infertile” and how we use it suggests a categorical difference. To say an act is INfertile, implies that we’re discussing the type of act that is ordered toward fertility.
We don’t generally speak of cooking or gardening or typing at our keyboard as infertile acts, just because no procreation results. These acts are simply NON-fertile, it doesn’t even makes sense to judge them along an “infertile/fertile” dichotomy. We don’t generally speak of masturbation that way either. And indeed, if a couple kept having oral sex, or using a condom, or were a gay couple…and not getting pregnant…we likewise would not conclude this couple was infertile, because infertility is an evaluation we make of acts of the sort which could be fertile, which are ordered towards fertility. There’s a difference between playing a game and losing (even deliberately), and simply cheating or playing a different game or not playing a game at all.
You may deny this distinction is morally relevant. Nevertheless, it serves to show that infertile vaginal intercourse remains categorically different, with reference to fertility and procreation, than other sorts of acts. An INfertile act is different from a merely non-fertile act by the very fact that it’s the SORT of act which can be fertile, which is ordered towards that.
And, at least in Catholic morality, it’s what end acts (of the will) are ordered towards that matters, not so much the consequences (though they can be a factor too).
“The implication both ways is that somehow pleasure–not excessive pleasure, or selfish pleasure–but pleasure as such is somehow suspect.”
Pleasure is “suspect” in as sense, inasmuch as pleasure (in possession, like desire in apprehension) is the phenomenological experience that indicates something as Good. Pleasure/happiness/enjoyment in an object chosen indicate a good.
But then we have to ask how and why? Why is this good? Is this good? What is the chain of “whys” connecting this back to some trascendent good, ultimately back to the glory of God.
I think you’ll find that the arguments for a “unitive” good (considered as something separate from the two halves of the reproductive system coming together in their common act, which is what the unitive end REALLY is) wind up with a circular and self-enclosed explanation whereby you end up claiming that the union is accomplished through shared pleasure, but that the pleasure is the pleasure of union (the union of shared pleasure, the pleasure of union…ad infinitum in a self-enclosed explanatory circle).
“Look: I’m walking through the park on a beautiful spring day and stop to smell the honeysuckle for no other reason than that they smell nice. Is that ‘co-opting the pleasure…for merely its own sake’?”
Presumably, the pleasure here is the pleasure of sensory experience (most are). Your transcendent good is knowledge of the creator through the variety of things he has made.
However, you would be hard pressed to convince me that the reason stimulation of the sex organs feels good (especially when enhanced by visual, tactile, etc stimuli in the forms of bodies-as-sexed) is merely because of experiential knowledge.
It’s pretty clear why orgasm accompanies those sorts of actions, why it is localized in those organs, why it occurs with ejaculation in males, and why it is of a unique intensity. There is no reason, except one, for THOSE particular types of physical interaction to feel THAT good, but then not other sorts of “dance” or “play” we could imagine between people.
If you deny this, then even modern science and evolution are against you. It’s pretty clear why those actions are desirable, why those acts are appealing, why those acts feel good, and I don’t know if anyone could keep a straight face claiming it’s merely the good of experiential knowledge.
“Later I stroll through town, and though I’m not hungry as such (I’m not stuffed either) I decide to pop into the ice cream store and get a cone (let’s make it artificially sweetened and low-fat, if you like) just because I’ve taken a notion to and because it tastes good. Is this “scratching a meaningless itch”? Is this a sinful failure of Reason to keep the Will and those unruly passions in check?”
Presumably the ice-cream still has some sort of nutritional value of some sort. But you don’t need to have that as your explicit motive. Indeed, when in accordance with reason (which can be implicit, it doesn’t have to be explicit), the pleasure is in fact the “motive” for doing good things, because all it is, as I said above, is the subjective phenomenological indicator of goodness.
That being said, I will quote you two things from the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Gluttony. On the one hand, “it must be noted that there is no obligation to formerly and explicitly have before one’s mind a motive which will immediately relate our actions to God. It is enough that such an intention should be implied in the apprehension of the thing as lawful with a consequent virtual submission to Almighty God.”
On the other hand, “It is incontrovertible that to eat or drink for the mere pleasure of the experience, and for that exclusively, is likewise to commit the sin of gluttony. Such a temper of soul is equivalently the direct and positive shutting out of that reference to our last end which must be found, at least implicitly, in all our actions.”
The “for” here doesn’t refer to explicit motive, however, but rather to the end to which the will is ordered by the type of act. Pleasure may accompany that end, and is the “other side of the coin” with desire of motivating us to achieve goods…but it cannot, in itself, be the end. The end has to be something intelligible and transcendent (in the case of eating, it’s nutrition).
@ Thales –
Consider the Doris Lessing scenario: an all-female humanity. Or the Aldous Huxley scenario: bottle babies.
I didn’t say that these would change human nature. What I said was that these would indicate that sexual reproduction is not a necessary condition for, or an essential aspect, of human nature.
Rodak,
I don’t know what you’re trying to argue. Just because some individuals don’t reproduce sexually, or just because we can imagine a future where we used science such that ALL individuals never reproduced sexually… that doesn’t change our human nature; it doesn’t change our essence and the type of thing we are — namely, a rational animal that reproduces by sexual union.
If that became the case then, Rodak, sexual pleasure wouldn’t exist and sexual activity wouldn’t be desirable.
As long as that appetite exists in the will, however, it pretty clearly only has one intelligible end, and is part of human nature (if only by the very fact of the appetite still existing!)
Rodak,
Consider: Imagine a future where all of humanity is enslaved by robots or non-human aliens, where all humans are kept in a drug-induced coma, a la Matrix, where no human beings ever uses their reason, nor do they ever animate themselves. Yet that wouldn’t change our essence. The type of thing we’d be would still be rational animals, even thought we’d be rational animals who never actually act as rational animals.
@ Thales –
“I didn’t say that these would change human nature. What I said was that these would indicate that sexual reproduction is not a necessary condition for, or an essential aspect, of human nature.”
What do you not understand about the above statement w/r/t human nature?
Rodak,
The fact that some individuals might not sexually reproduce (or use their reason or be animated) is not an argument that sexual reproduction (or rationality or animation) is not a necessary condition for, or an essential aspect, of human nature.
Say what you will about Fr. Connell’s natural law argument, it was at least fairly clear. A person doesn’t have to be schooled in philosophy to know what he said. Now I’m wondering if anyone can respond directly to Kacy’s request for a similarly clear statement that reflects a fuller understanding of natural law. It’s not that I don’t understand anything that’s been written so far. I’d just like to see what the better natural law argument would look like summed up and presented for public consumption….and then critiqued by Kyle. (My apologies if that’s presumptuous, especially this late in the discussion.)
Okay, I think the better argument would say simply something like, “There is no reason why sex acts of the sort not ordered towards procreation are desirable. No intelligible transcendent reason at least. The explanations end up invoking purely instrumental or mechanistic reasons that themselves ultimately refer back to the reason of mating, which is the very reason that has been deliberately excluded! The will has thus turned in on itself, with subjective experience being chosen as the person’s last end, cut off from the transcendent chain of meaning that would connect it to the final good (ie, God). In other words, the very inner moral logic of such acts subverts themselves with reference to the good and the final good, the end and the last end.”
Thank you, Sinner. But doesn’t the Church already admit a unitive purpose to marital sex acts? I mean, it has already been admitted that procreation isn’t the only good that makes sexual intercourse desirable, that there is another purpose that goes beyond “subjective experience.” Allowing NFP would seem to say that this unitive purpose is sufficient when procreation is a bad idea at any given time. That accepted, what makes actually thwarting the procreative possibility wrong at those times when procreation is a bad idea?
I know what Fr. Connell would say, but I’m not sure what the exact reasoning would be in the “better” argument.
As I think I mentioned in a post above, conceiving of the “unitive” end as somehow separate from the procreative end is a fallacy. When the Church speaks of the unitive end, what is meant is the union of the two halves of the reproductive system in their common function, which is a function ordered towards reproduction whether it actually results or not (it is, after all, the reproductive system, not the digestive system.) It is necessarily procreative union. The union spoken of is “one flesh,” not one heart or one mind or anything based on mere intersubjective emotional experience. And the mere juxtaposition of parts cannot be considered a union unless they are truly cooperating in an organic function ordered towards some good. As Grisez (who, admittedly, is of the “New” Natural Law school) says, “sexual intercourse cannot be a communion of persons if it is little more than the juxtaposition of instruments used by isolated self-conscious subjects to reach individual and incommunicable enjoyable sensations.”
A Sinner: Even if one grants the distinction between infertile and nonfertile, that’s still not the same thing as saying that infertile acts are ipso facto intrinsically evil.
I don’t consider myself a consequentialist–there are certainly other factors. I do reject the concept of “moral object”. Put it like this–the only way it works without devolving into “tab A into slot B” is if one assumes the moral object as a given. The only way this is possible, though, is if one also assumes that God has made it so. In other words, even an atheist could give an account of why murder or theft is intrinsically wrong, without even necessarily having to be consequentialist, let alone a theist. But to argue that NFP is OK whereas contraceptive sex isn’t, one has to argue that contraception is intrinsically evil; which requires a moral object to distinguish the two in terms of how the act is ordered; which more or less requires that one accept the concept of the moral object and the evil of contraception on the grounds that the Church teaches this to be God’s will–in short, “because we say so”. Fine if one accepts the premise–but it certainly doesn’t establish such a premise, or demonstrate it.
Look, almost all Christian teachers in all denominations before about the 17th Century taught that even sex in the infertile periods, if done deliberately, was a sin. Some Traditionalist Catholics are very consistent in this respect in also rejecting NFP. They have the same Thomistic tradition as we do, but they don’t read it in such a way as to give a pass on NFP! Even some who don’t reject NFP tout court are highly suspicious of it. Once again, this is logical.
I’d point out a couple of other things. Neither Aristotle nor any of his pagan followers ever condemned contraception, to my knowledge; and as far as I know (and I could be wrong), none of them developed the concept of “moral object”, though as you know they certainly weren’t consequentialists. This tends to support my view that these concepts were added later on by Christians–at least in the Scholastic Catholic tradition–and tended to presuppose what was against God’s will–e.g. contraception–rather than actually demonstrating it.
Second, the Orthodox have gotten along fine for centuries without a Thomist/Scholastic ethical philosophy, or a teaching that analyzes moral objects, or any of that. As you know, their perspective is very similar to that of the majority of the commission whose perspective Paul VI rejected–that is, that while not necessarily ideal, contraception in the context of a marriage open to life over its whole course, and for sufficient reason, is not always or intrinsically immoral, but the business of the couple and their spiritual father. Looking at the Orthodox, I don’t see them as any less holy than we, nor do they seem to be decadent sex fiends, either. It’s also interesting that there is a concept in Orthodoxy that in some cases when even a conciliar document (e.g the attempted reunion of Florence) is rejected by the people (which it was, emphatically), that is God speaking in the economy of salvation. Not often, but occasionally. The ab omnibus of what is believed “semper, ubique, et ab omnibus” in the Western tradition at least implies such a possibility, though I’m not aware of much theological discussion on it. Perhaps if something is rejected so nearly ab omnibus as Humanae Vitae was, even implicitly by whole national bishops councils at the time, that means something. I don’t imagine you’d agree; but it’s worth thinking about.
Finally, I won’t go into for reasons of length and because of the necessity of giving it more thought; but while I certainly think that pursuing good can alienate you from the Good, I’m not sure I agree with your or the Scholastic account of the relationship between intelligible transcendent reasons connected with goods, or the way in which all goods relate to God. I’m not saying they don’t–I’m not sure I agree with the manner in which it’s proposed here. Once again, the Orthodox seem to have done fine viewing it differently; but this is something I’ll have to research and consider much more before I try to discuss it much.
“Even if one grants the distinction between infertile and nonfertile, that’s still not the same thing as saying that infertile acts are ipso facto intrinsically evil.”
…no one said they were.
In fact, the Church would say infertile acts are fine. Non-fertile acts (like skateboarding, typing, reading, washing dishes) may be fine too. What would not be fine is taking the pleasure OF mating…without mating. That is to say, indulging the sexual appetite specifically towards acts that are non-fertile, seeking the subject end without the ordering towards the objective good to which it correponds.
“I do reject the concept of ‘moral object.’ Put it like this–the only way it works without devolving into ‘tab A into slot B’ is if one assumes the moral object as a given. The only way this is possible, though, is if one also assumes that God has made it so.”
Once again, you’re just knocking down a straw-man here based apparently on a misrepresentation of what moral object is.
In Veritas Splendor, John Paul said, “In order to be able to grasp the object of an act which specifies that act morally, it is therefore necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the acting person. The object of the act of willing is in fact a freely chosen kind of behavior. To the extent that it is in conformity with the order of reason, it is the cause of the goodness of the will; it perfects us morally…. By the object of a given moral act, then, one cannot mean a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on the basis of its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the outside world. Rather, that object is the proximate end of a deliberate decision which determines the act of willing on the part of the acting person”
Now, to use your example of theft, it is clear that there are three morally relevant fonts and not just two. So we can look at the difference between stealing vs. being given money. In both cases the consequences are the transference of, say, money from one person to another, which is in itself morally neutral, and in both cases the intent of the person taking the money may be (and ultimately usually is) something good or at least morally neutral, like buying some clothes.
But “receiving a gift” and “stealing” are two different moral objects, and stealing is bad even with a good intent, and even though the consequences in themselves are morally neutral (ie, in the context of giving, it is not bad that one person has less money afterward).
The consequences, and the intended end, are not the only thing that matter. The proximate ends (that is to say, the “path of means” chosen by the will to achieve its end) matter too.
“In other words, even an atheist could give an account of why murder or theft is intrinsically wrong, without even necessarily having to be consequentialist, let alone a theist.”
Well, two points:
1) you use the terminology of right and wrong here. But the Church and I are not talking about merely right and wrong, but rather about good and bad. One division of terminology I might make is to say “right and wrong” is the language of ethics only, but I’m talking about MORALS which is much broader. The language of “right and wrong” assumes that the origin of ethical imperatives are rights that people have (which can be wronged). However, morality (of the Catholic sort) is based on the Good, not merely on Rights. “Right and wrong,” or ethics, deals only, then, with Justice, and seems to think that “being a good human” consists only in being just and respecting the rights of others. But the Catholic vision of morality (and, frankly, most peoples if you probe enough) knows that there are virtues other than Justice, and that being a good human being certainly involves a formation of character that involves more than just external Justice (on the natural level, it also involves prudence, fortitude, and temperance).
2) I’m not really interested in Atheist morality or ethics. As some like McIntyre have discussed, Natural Law assumes Natural Theology. Natural Law does not claim to function without God, we merely claim that it functions without Revelation. It still requires the God Knowable to Natural Reason. If there is no Final Meaning to the universe or life, then Natural Law’s conclusions make no sense, as they depend on a Final Good that is ultimately unitary and transcendent. If we live in an atheistic universe of nominalism, the trying to make any categorical analysis of “the good” is silly, as desire then might be purely random or arbitrary, and “the good” might be a variety of disparate and even contradictory ends that never can, in fact, have an coherent order given to them.
“But to argue that NFP is OK whereas contraceptive sex isn’t, one has to argue that contraception is intrinsically evil; which requires a moral object to distinguish the two in terms of how the act is ordered; which more or less requires that one accept the concept of the moral object and the evil of contraception on the grounds that the Church teaches this to be God’s will–in short, ‘because we say so.’ Fine if one accepts the premise–but it certainly doesn’t establish such a premise, or demonstrate it.”
It doesn’t require just “because the Church said so.” Moral objects can be analyzed as good or bad, as orderable towards the Final Good or not, based on their own internal logic. It is a salient moral difference that NFP avoid conception through ABSTINENCE, whereas contraception involves choosing to deliberately frustrate the only end which renders that desirable intelligible in the first place.
But, of course, this requires an understanding of morality that is more than ethics. An understanding that isn’t just about “whether this hurts anyone/violates their rights,” but rather about being a Good Human, that is to say a human being whose will is ordered towards the Good, whose acts are ordered by Reason or Meaning that is transcendent.
“Look, almost all Christian teachers in all denominations before about the 17th Century taught that even sex in the infertile periods, if done deliberately, was a sin.”
Except, no they didn’t. We can look to Aquinas himself on this, and he quite clearly knows that the elderly are sterile, but doesn’t forbid sex among the post-menopausal.
Furthermore, we look at numerous legends of infertile women finally being granted a child by a miracle of God. We have to assume that for this miracle to have occurred, they must have been having sex while thinking they were infertile (only to be surprised by the miracle).
Unless you’d posit that the legends supposed they had stopped having sex once they realized they were infertile, and then started again only once they received a specific revelation from God telling them about the miracle beforehand. But that’s not in any of the legends.
“Second, the Orthodox have gotten along fine for centuries without a Thomist/Scholastic ethical philosophy, or a teaching that analyzes moral objects, or any of that.”
The Orthodox most certainly do have “moral object,” though they might not call it that. They have the Ten Commandments, after all! Which (though an example of Revelation confirm nature, at least in the last 7) basically is a list of types of acts that are bad regardless of intent or consequences. If you are telling me that Orthodox morality is based only on intent and consequences…you’re just wrong.
“There is no reason why sex acts of the sort not ordered towards procreation are desirable. No intelligible transcendent reason at least. ..”
A Sinner good luck explaining this to your wife/husband – no intelligible transcendent reason – really?
Honestly, grega, what could you possibly know about the sexual attitudes of A Sinner’s spouse?
I do neither know A Sinners gender nor if A Sinner has a spouse.
This was obviously not meant as a particular serious comment.
I have to admit thatover the years I grew a bit tired of the impression given by many commenters around the catholic part of the blogsphere that they all find HV to be full of wisdom, great practical guide and that they really follow it – the numbers consistantly tell a different story.
Perhaps the 90% using one form of birth control or the other do not even bother to engage – on one level it is perhaps funny when in responds to the request to bring the best argument for natural law to the point we read the kind of stuff we read – but on another level it tells a different story.
This sort of thing has no change to stand.
I think it is high time to start being honest and develop a sexual ethic that is realistic, thoughtful and sustainable.
What I read from the Vatican for the last 40+ years aint it.
What I read from wellmeaning folks like A Sinner aint it either.
Explain, then, WHY genital stimulation is desirable/pleasurable. But without reference to mating and without getting into a self-enclosed explanatory circle.
A Sinner for me this line of argument – an argument strictly along a evolutionary path is rather shortsighted. Clearly as humans what sets us destinctly apart is that we developed tools and means to significantly extend our strictly biological evolutinary trajectory.
People use hands and feet to play musical instruments, they create art, run ultra marathons with no enemie or sabertooth tiger in sight. We engage in all kinds of sports, climb mountains, risk our lifes in order to fly to the moon. We do all kinds of ‘crazy’ things that clearly expand on the natural intention for our body.
You are correct of course we have to develop a moral framework around all these things – we have done this and do this – it is never ending work in progress.
We constantly chance – this sort of discussion is a tiny part of it.
It is all good.
I’m not talking about the “uses of body parts” though, grega. That is the “externalistic” understanding which I have clearly rejected, if you’ve been paying attention to this thread, as fallacious.
I asked about the REASON for DESIRE (and, by extension from desire, pleasure which is it’s fulfillment).
It’s clear and intelligible why one would want to use one’s hands to play music, create art, or climb a mountain. There are perfectly intelligible goods (aesthetic goods, or goods of experiential knowledge) obtainable in all these things. The desirability/enjoyability of these ends is perfect straightforward.
But tell me if you can, without reference to mating and without getting into an explanatory circle, why stimulation of the genitals is desirable, why it is THAT desirable.
(in other words, we’re not talking about adapting body parts here, that’s a red herring. We’re talking about co-opting a drive/desire, gutting it of the substance which explains the good the desire is ordered towards in the first place, and co-opting it’s pleasure for it’s own sake in a drug-like fashion).
(the disorder isn’t in the external positioning of material parts, as if a mere material situation can be wrong or bad or have moral quality. The moral issue is in the choice of disordering desire relative to its ends, relative to the good).
A Sinner – you really want me to explain REASON of DESIRE to you in a post? Perhaps for starters drop your negative attitude – I do not know what your personal situation and marital status is but I will not waste my time parsing this issue along the negative outline you have set out for yourself. Some of us actually have experienced live a bit to the point that we would never describe our most intimate moments with our spouse in the way you do in your head games envision.
And yes that is one of the bones we as living active practicing Catholics have with our church leaders.
Yes, explain the reason for desire. Make it intelligible. By describing what good the actions are ordered towards and why THOSE actions specifically are ordered towards it.
If you can’t or won’t, that stance in itself proves my point to me, and is itself the very consequence (a loss of reason, a turning-in-on-itself of desire becoming an end-in-itself) these teachings would predict for such actions.
You know what – for me this is like explaining to you why for most of us human beings it is enjoyable to listen to Beethoven’s Ode of Joy.
One could of course take your tack and insist that this is all just a bundle of acoustic waves – since that is what it is – right? – Or to paraphrase you: why mechanical stimulation of the inner ear is desirable for you?
Do not get me wrong I think I have a pretty good idea where you want to go with this line of ‘reasoning’ – I happen to fundamentally not agree with this direction.
You are free to pursue it – for me life is too short to psychoanalyze the reason of desire – other than over a nice glass of wine of course with my beloved wife. Sorry for keeping you in the dark – you have to figure it out yourself. Cheers
Why listening to music is enjoyable is perfectly intelligible. There is a clear Aesthetic good, a good which points us to the creator who is Beauty Himself, in perceiving complex patterns and well-orderedness in material phenomenon, in associating emotions with their sensory relations, and in recognizing the significance and intelligence behind such creations. Recognition of the sublime is a perfectly intelligible good.
Humor works in a similar way, except it is a reward for perceiving a different type of pattern; one of what me might call “well-ordered dissonance.”
However, it’s pretty clear to me WHY the act of thrusting penis in vagina is desirable for a man, and there’s really only one reason why that specifically (from which act other more remote derivatives can be derived).
However, going through those motions, but adding a condom, for example, is to empty that act of the reason which makes going through those motions desirable in the first place, the good that desire is ordered towards. Even science, without making a moral judgment, would tell you that the reason humans want to do THAT (and its derivatives) is because of mating. I think anyone reasonable would admit that, even if you see no moral problem with going through the motions and activating that reward-circuit in the brain for its own sake (ie, while also “short-circuiting” the process).
But this is, in essence, to take the signifier but gutted of its significance, instead co-opted, fragmented into its constituent phenomenological elements, which are instrumentalized and then sold as incoherent fragments to be taken out of context like a drug for pleasure. It is to basically assert that man’s Last End is not the objective transcendent goods to which desire points, but merely the subjective fulfillment-of-desire IN ITSELF. This ultimately makes human life meaningless, and makes happiness nothing more than nursing vestigial urges for their own sake, finally cut off from the “roots” which gave Reason to those urges in the first place, as if our happiness really did consist just in creating itches in order to scratch them, like this is all just soma in some Brave New World, like we are all rats in a Skinner Box with electrodes on our brain and a button that makes us feel subjective good for purely neuro-mechanistic (as opposed to transcendent and meaningful) reasons.
A Sinner – I feel sorry for you if you indeed think we act like rats in a skinner box – going through the motions huh? I feel sorry for your spouse . I can honestly say what you concoct above does not reflect my lived experience – I actually flat our reject such mental coldblooded nonsense.
If you think you are onto something great with your ‘insights’ you are in my opinion sadly mistaken. You suck the live out of a perfectly divine natural feeling.
But that’s just the problem, grega: your account of the good here is ultimately about feeling.
You are essentially asserting that such an act is meaningful because it feels meaningful, and that it brokers no account of itself beyond or outside of the subjective experience in itself.
But that is exactly what the Church considers so dangerous in such a stance.
Your refusal to dissect or analyze it on rational terms is in itself proof for me of exactly the sort of construction of the nature of the good and of desire relative thereto which my analysis of the situation would suggest you would have to take, holding the positions that you do; namely one which makes the entire thing utterly subjective, without any sort of communicable intelligibility outside the subjective (or even intersubjective) experience itself.
A couple having natural sex, however, is able to both have that subjective experience AND understand its significance with ordered reference to an objective and transcendent good, and would likely find your obfuscating non-answer baffling.
A sinner I do not think that the majority of couples would find my non answer baffling at all and yes it is very much about feeling – that is the point – it is not about primarily about some philosophical or theological dissection – you got that right.
Would you mind telling me if you are married or if you have personal experience in this area beyond reading about stuff and thinking about stuff? I can assure you that most of us – catholic or not – who decide to engage in marital sex do not think about the stuff you imagine we should think about. Yes to feel and to love and to embrace and to very much not analyze the situation is almost a prerequisite. Perhaps you do not understand . I hope you will one of these days.
Grega, being moral, even according to this analysis, does not require taking the spontaneity out of life.
I will quote again: “it must be noted that there is no obligation to formerly and explicitly have before one’s mind a motive which will immediately relate our actions to God. It is enough that such an intention should be implied in the apprehension of the thing as lawful with a consequent virtual submission to Almighty God.”
As I said earlier in the thread, one need not be motivated primarily by cold-blooded Reason, exactly because good feelings ORDINARILY signify good things. The whole point of having the lower/sensitive appetite is because it acts as an encouragement for the person-as-corporeal to pursue the good. As the Catechism says, “The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind. ”
However, we do have to be careful and morally aware, because the passions without reason do not have any organizing principle to ensure that it is the good of the whole being pursued. There’s nothing wrong with passion, but the passions should magnetize our acts only in regard to good not evil.
They are certainly not an end in themselves, but that is what your account of life seems to be claiming (and this is often the line that people end up taking) that the goodness of sexual experience admits of no interrogation and requires no justification external to itself.
That may be your position, and if it is there is no further arguing with you. But I can say with certainty that that has far reaching implications for how you construct or understand The Good in general, and it is certainly not the Catholic understanding of The Good.
And I’m quite serious when I say that. Note: the only Good (in a Catholic, or even theistic worldview generally) that is not required to provide an account of itself, that is not required to justify itself with reference to anything outside itself…is God Himself. In fact, that is His metaphysical function as the Final Good.
If you ever find a good, therefore, that brokers no account of itself, that admits of no interrogation (and that gets so indignantly defensive when one does try to find if it has any intelligibility to it, that pleads, essentially, “It’s a mystery! You’re not allowed to dissect it! Ignore that man behind the curtain!”)…this is very good evidence that one is finding oneself in the presence of a false god.
A Sinner I appreciate your calm and composed answer and the overall tone of your posts throughout. We might have to agree to disagree here.
And yes 90% of the catholic populance in position to have marital sexual relations with a clear intend to avoid pregnancy in essence all agree to disagree with the official catholic church position.
This will not change – in my view ever – so what is the best step forward?
The official Church in its ‘infinite wisdom’ came up with a widely rejected moral compromise – NFP. Much of this was of course pointed out earlier with much greater elegance and transperancy by Turmarion.
There isn’t really a way forward except to accept what Our Lord taught us: “Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat. How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it!” and what Our Lady told us at Fatima, that souls are falling into Hell like snowflakes on account of sins of the flesh.
I’ll add two thoughts:
1) I think people use “intent” incorrectly. Intent is one of the three fonts of the morality of an action (along with moral object and foreseen consequences) and has a very specific technical meaning in terms of the act of the will. The Church has never taught that an “intent” to conceive is necessary in every sex act, nor is an intent to avoid pregnancy necessarily bad. The intent, in itself, is not what is condemned in contraceptive acts, it’s the moral object (though, as I say with pre- and post-coital methods of contraception, the intent to later choose a bad moral object renders the sterilization virtually one act with that object).
2) The fact that people using contraception etc feel the need to reject Church TEACHING on the subject in theory perplexes me. I mean, we’re all sinners, and I know plenty of Catholics who, say, masturbate and look at porn, or even fornicate, while nevertheless believing its wrong. So, you just go to confession and try harder next time.
The fact that modern man seemingly can’t hold the cognitive dissonance of admitting he’s wrong, that people not only sin but insist on “calling evil good”…is much more troubling than the sin itself, to me. Is it really that hard for people to mention one more four syllable word in confession?
But, of course, as I said, what is invested in this question is really two diametrically opposed accounts of The Good. It’s not that people have that hard a time admitting they have sinned, it’s that people genuinely want to believe these experiences are good, exactly because they SEEM so good. And I’m not just talking about physical pleasure, I am indeed talking about even on the level of the relational and sentimental. It’s such an intense interpersonal experience, and often constructed by our culture as an “expression of love”…that people want to buy into it, even when that requires turning away from Reason and taking this “I don’t need to explain myself to the likes of you!” attitude (even when that “you” is, ultimately, the Supreme Good who is the measure of whether the other goods we embraced were really objectively so, or mere solipsistic illusions).
On the one hand, part of this is heartening. It means people see value and significance in interpersonal relationship and love. However, again, as Grisez said, ““sexual intercourse cannot be a communion of persons if it is little more than the juxtaposition of instruments used by isolated self-conscious subjects to reach individual and incommunicable enjoyable sensations” even when each has the feeling that the experience has been “shared.” However, this construction of sex as an almost MYSTICAL experience (that thus requires no intelligibility outside itself) is exactly what the Church sees as problematic, exactly why it sees a false god there.
Furthermore, as another article by Alexander Pruss I like points out, “Even if a billion people were to unite in striving for some closed end, say for the pleasure of this billion, the people would be united in loneliness, for even though they would be together, still taken as a whole they would be alone.” And without God to act as the objective transcendent end of each of our acts, each of our choices, that’s all even humanity-as-a-whole can ever be in our merely subjective value: alone together.
A Sinner – you seem to read a lot …
plenty of theory for sure – lets just agree to disagree-
have a good evening.
I’m not sure what we’d be agreeing to disagree on.
Obviously, I can’t prove to you, living in a pluralistic culture with no externally “enforced” (ie, constructed) notion of a unitary Good…that the good you ought to pursue is the traditional Catholic transcendent Good, or even just the one the Catholic system sees derivable from Reason rather than Revelation (according to a certain understanding of Reason).
However, to argue that contraception is part of THAT Good strikes me as silly and to miss the point anyway. Argue that my definition of The Good (which used to be the common understanding in Catholic cultures) is not really a good thing, fine. But to pretend like it can be made “relevant” by loosening it to include things that are foreign to it is just counter-intuitive.
As Tumarion says, you can prove (and, really, I have) that something is against a given system of values. But there’s no real way to prove or argue that system itself to people if they don’t accept your basic values or premises, and so pluralism ends up appealing to the lowest common denominator.
There is no doubt that Catholicism’s opposition to contraception is INTERNALLY consistent with our logic and our notions of the Good. This, at least, I would like people to admit, even if they question the premises of our logic in the first place, even if they question our notion of the Good. But at least admit its an internally consistent vision, even if you then go on to say it’s irrelevant from a pluralist meta-perspective because other value systems are possible. But don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Fwiw, this week’s Commonweal has an interesting article about the personal correspondence between French philosopher Jacques Maritain and Cardinal Journet on this very issue just before Humanae Vitae was promulgated (http://commonwealmagazine.org/good-authority). It seems both men believed the usual natural law arguments against contraception were weak, Maritain holding that the moral distinction between natural family planning and the Pill is untenable. Even though they both gave assent once their friend Paul VI had spoken, neither seemed to base such assent on anything other than papal authority, a situation that’s still the case for many faithful Catholics today, no matter how hard it is to jusify, given the Church’s past claims that all such moral teachings are based on “the law written on all men’s hearts.”
I saw this years ago. As I recall, Maritain doesn’t see the difference between NFP and the pill because he doesn’t see the difference between intentionally sterile coitus and abstaining from coitus. I was surprised at that – I expected better from Maritain. The problem is that he is comparing an act of coitus on the pill with an act of coitus during an infertile period rather than an act on the pill with an abstention from acting.
Once again, though, this is I think a problem with external analysis.
EXTERNALLY, sex on an infertile day, or with an infertile woman, is exactly the same as sex on the pill. Considered purely physically like that.
But moral analysis has to involve what’s going on in the WILL of the moral subject.
And in one case the will has actively chosen to CAUSE infertility, therefore specifically making a choice orienting the will away from the good which renders its sexual desire intelligible in the first place, whereas in another case it chooses the act ordered towards that good, with the infertility being a circumstance known but not chosen by the Will, and which then doesn’t enter into the moral consideration (we should note: no conception would result on an infertile day whether sex took place OR NOT, so the infertility can hardly be called an end chosen by the will; it exists either way!)
But don’t you think as great a scholar as Maritain was quite aware of the other issues you speak of and perhaps just didn’t see them as relevant, normative, or applicable? That maybe it’s not that he didn’t grasp the internalistic argument but that maybe he found it incoherent or problematic? That he might have just considered your analysis wrong?
Well, we can imagine anything, but in what Chas references he doesn’t provide any arguments against an “internal” reading, merely against an external understanding. And, as I said, an externalistic understanding is obviously wrong: physically, sex on the pill and sex on an infertile period…are materially the same. It’s only within the will of the subject making the choice that there’s a clear difference. Whether that difference is morally relevant is a different question. You don’t seem to think so, I think you’re wrong, but as for Maritain…well, at least as Chas describes his position, it doesn’t address this one way or another.
a situation that’s still the case for many faithful Catholics today, no matter how hard it is to jusify, given the Church’s past claims that all such moral teachings are based on “the law written on all men’s hearts.”
But this is precisely the point; in any form of natural law theory the principles are written on all men’s hearts, but people’s actual conclusions are heavily affected by culture, temperament, and self-interest, and therefore accurate conclusions about particulars of life often require either (1) a considerable amount of careful reasoning or (2) the possession of heroic virtue, and particularly prudence, or (3) the guidance of good authority or (4) the right mixture of reasoning, virtue, and authority to make up for any defects in each. From a natural law perspective one would expect that every culture in this fallen world will obscure some kinds of good reasoning, raise some kinds of interests (often genuinely moral interests) to such a high pitch that anything that has even a superficial opposition to them is attacked, indulge certain kinds of weaknesses in human nature, and facilitate some sides of a moral dispute and hamper others in ways that don’t actually have much to do with which sides are right.
This sort of disagreement is not historically unusual; the most obvious example is the case of usury — which took centuries to work through (and there are people still trying to re-raise it). Some of the problems in that case were (1) original arguments that were entirely legitimate for original practices needed refinement to deal with new practices; (2) a lack of clarity about the precise bounds of some key concepts, particularly that of interest; (3) genuinely legitimate prudential differences about details; (4) economic and cultural pressure to find ways to justify any kind of interest (which is what led the Church to start treating the denial that usury was a sin as a heresy, and why it is the single most-condemned moral issue at Church council after Church council, beating out even simony); (5) the complicated nature of the actual arguments on the subject, which made them difficult to communicate to people not able to take the time to study them properly, combined with events that made it difficult for people to take Church authority seriously. We’ve been here before; this is not a unique type of situation.
“Usury” is wrong though, there was just the question of how to precisely define it. Any “taking of interest” may be an imprecise way, as “interest” can be different things in different systems and economic contexts.
I’ve proposed, however, that the condemnation of usury be reemphasized, especially in our current economic crisis, through the formulation as a social teaching that: “Credit is an inherently Social rather than Private good.”
Usury’s precise definition, I think, would be treating credit (or, at least, the creation of credit) as a private good.
I’ve actually read this, Anne, and it’s an excellent point. If one of the greatest neo-Thomist scholars of the last century failed to see any moral difference between NFP and the Pill, I feel a little bit justified as a non-theologian and non-philosopher who nevertheless takes these issues seriously and devotes much time to studying them that just maybe I’m not a gibbering yahoo speaking of matters he doesn’t understand when he reaches the same conclusion!
Even though they both gave assent once their friend Paul VI had spoken, neither seemed to base such assent on anything other than papal authority (emphasis added)
Which is my exact point. This is what all post Humanae Vitae arguments, if taken far enough, ultimately boil down to: “You just have to accept that we’re right when we say the moral object of contraception is inappropriate, or that contraception is intrinsically evil, etc.”
As to usury, some of us would say that this wasn’t a matter of the Church working out concrete implications of a complex teaching of natural law in changing circumstances, but just a matter of the Church getting it wrong–and looking at today’s economy and the success of no-interest Islamic investment in comparison to the mainstream, I think a good argument that this is indeed the case is self-evident.
As I said, it depends what the “essence” of a condemnation of usury is. Applying it to all cases of interest, may not be correct, but I am convinced that private creation of credit can be called the essence of usury, and is the source of most of our economic woes today. Credit should be social. The Church wasn’t wrong, in fact it could be prophetic on this point, and it’s a shame they’ve been cowed into near silence by the capitalist usurers.
As for not being a gibbering yahoo, I don’t think anyone would say you are. Indeed, my position is that the Church has done such a terrible job explicating it’s moral teachings over the past century or centuries (specifically, in pushing an externalistic/physicalist understanding of the Moral Object as a font of moral evaluation) that it’s no wonder no one can understand it. When even our great theologians are operating on faulty theological paradigms, it’s no wonder that consequentialism or a palsied ethic based merely on “right and wrong” (as opposed to good and bad) has won the day.
This is nonsense; it is manifestly false that “all post Humanae Vitae arguments, if taken far enough, ultimately boil down to: ‘You just have to accept that we’re right when we say the moral object of contraception is inappropriate, or that contraception is intrinsically evil, etc.’” That you disagree with the particular arguments that it is wrong or intrinsically evil doesn’t mean that the arguments just boil down to claims that it is wrong or intrinsically evil; it’s logically impossible to characterize either Chas’s presentation or A Sinner’s argument as doing this, because they give specific reasons for saying this that are not equivalent to the conclusion. Whether an argument is question-begging is something that admits of logical analysis; just claiming that arguments are such does not make them so.
I have no clue what in particular you have in mind when saying the Church got “it” wrong in its condemnation of usury, especially since you go on immediately to praise Islamic banking, which is not, in this context, no-interest, but collects interest of exactly the kind that the Church came to regard as not usurious — Islamic theology and Catholic theology are closely convergent evolutions here, with the major difference being that the Old Testament explicitly allows some kinds of interest on some kinds of loans and the Koran, unlike the Bible, has explicit condemnations of usury as such. The only way to say that the Church was wrong on this and that Islamic banking is right is to claim that the narrow margin by which the Church is more permissive than the more permissive Islamic schools is outright wrong, which in turn requires saying that Bl. Bernardino of Feltre’s life-work was immoral. That is not “self-evident” and needs actual argument instead of handwaving. Merely saying that something is self-evident doesn’t make it so, either.
Your comment precisely confirms my point; it suggests strongly that no possible argument will convince you on this subject — either you will simply keep rejecting premises in order to avoid having to accept the conclusion, or you will completely make up diagnoses of logical ‘flaws’ that manifestly have no basis in the actual logic of the arguments. And this is precisely why moral life can’t rest on argument alone: it’s child’s play for a person to reject any argument they don’t want to hear — all they have to do is either arbitrarily reject assumptions, or repeatedly mischaracterize the argument, until other people get tired of giving yet another and yet another correction. For whipping cream, one can start complaining that the other side is giving too many reasons, as you did above, and thus treat the fact that the other side has arguments as evidence that their arguments are worthless; or that they are making the argument too complicated, thus taking the fact that such complications are the inevitable result of actually answering objections as evidence that they cannot really answer the objections; or that someone or other rejected it somewhere along the line, regardless of whether there is any answer to that worry or objection, thus using laxist casuistical principles to evade having to consider any arguments at all. And then, of course, to add the cherry, one can complain that the conclusions to the argument are confirmed with appeal to authority, and voila! A perfect recipe for having any moral position one wants. All moral reasoning fails under conditions in which no premises are accepted, no logical structure respected, the use of argument is taken as evidence for the failure of argument, and any disagreement, regardless of whether it is answerable, is taken as proof that a conclusion is false. You tell me what one is to do in such a situation.
Brandon, I’m pretty sure Tumarion’s point was that Islamic Banking has NOT been successful compared to the mainstream when they are compared.
I will say though that your (Brandon’s) analysis of how people argue against logic to get the conclusions they want…is rather brilliant and spot-on.
Actually, A Sinner, my point was that Islamic banking has been more successful (though it’s still kind of a niche market, globally speaking). Islamic investment funds weathered the bust of ’08 better than Western organizations–see here for a brief discussion.
My (obviously ill-expressed point) was that a financial system can easily be imagined which is more just and stable than ours and which achieves this by severely limiting usury and this is demonstrable since it accurately describes Islamic banking.
Btw, I’m aware that Islamic banking does have interest that it just calls something different (much as it was with the Templars)–when I called it “usury free” I was compressing for space. The point is that a system not only can be imagined but actually exists that seems to function in a fairer and less bust-prone manner.
Oh, well then we agree. I think the Church was wrong to stop emphasizing the condemnation of usury completely (or to just define it as “exorbitantly high” interest rates).
However, as I’ve said, I’m not sure a simple condemnation of all interest in all systems, is the “essence” of usury, but rather the private creation/selling of credit that interest has often been part-and-parcel with.
@ Brandon –
You might begin by presenting premises that can’t be rejected because they are universally accepted as irrefutably true. Obviously there can be no agreement possible in an argument where that is not the case. You must begin at a mutually agreed upon Point A and then argue about how to get from there to a hypothesized Point B.
All I can say is that theologians who were trained in the Catholic, Aristotelian method at a far higher level than any of us–e.g. Maritain and Charles De Koninck, to say nothing of the majority of the bishops in the commission called by Paul VI prior to Humanae Vitae–seemed to think there was no difference between NFP and the Pill from a moral perspective. Obviously someone who accepts the teaching would have to say that they were all wrong; but one ought at least hesitate, in light of this, before saying that the illicitness of the Pill is the obvious outcome of Scholastic analysis. It seems to me, anyway, that it’s a bit over-simplistic to in effect blow all of them off by saying, in effect, “Oh, they were all externalists” or “Even the greats were corrupted and weakened by modernist assumptions”.
Others who have studied the matter more than I have make what are, in my judgment, sound arguments that the Church’s de facto teaching on usury has not developed, or altered to fit changed circumstances, but outright changed. Once again, I assume many here will disagree with this, but the overall argument is extremely complex, probably deserving of book-length treatment. Certainly many people more learned in the issues, better, and holier than I do indeed think that there needs to be a massive re-evluation of Church teaching, and more importantly, practice in this area.
As to what premises I accept or reject, etc., I do not seek “any moral position” I want. Many moral positions I adhere to remind me all too well of how much in the wrong I am and how much of a sinner I am. However, if one wants to argue X as being immoral and to further claim that it is universally immoral to all people regardless of religion or lack thereof, then one needs to be able to argue it without having to cleave to only one philosophical school. I could argue that murder, for example, is wrong from deontological, consequentialist, or virute-ethic perspectives; I could argue it as a Kantian, a Thomist, a Platonist, or a Confuciaon; I could argue it to a Hindu, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Zoroastrian, a Daoist, an agnostic, or an atheist.
The claim here is the contraception is intrinsically evil and never acceptable under any conceivable set of circumstances, and that this teaching is binding on all, whether the recognize it or not. Now most such universal intrinsic evils–murder, rape, theft, falsehood–could be argued successfully on many grounds from many perspectives, as I discussed in the previous paragraph. Most religions and philosophies agree that such things are wrong. Most philosophies and religions do not condemn contraception completely and in all cases, let alone consider it an intrinsic evil. To me this is a severe weakness in the teaching.
If the purported wrongness of contraception is indeed “written on the heart” and universal, then it seems exceedingly strange that it seems highly difficult to make an argument to that effect outside of a Christian, specifically Thomist Catholic, framework. I (as well as many others of good will) don’t reject given frameworks just to get the results I want; but I don’t accept all frameworks, either, for various other reasons. If you tell me or a Jew or a Hindu or an agnostic that contraception is wrong, but are unable to convey that outside a Scholastic Catholic framework–something easily done for most grave sins–then I or the Jew or the Hindu, IMO, are quite right to be suspicious. If it’s universally wrong, why do I have to buy your metaphysic for you to prove it, whereas that doesn’t seem to be necessary for anything else. Do you see what I mean?
Anyway, I think that’s about covered it for me by now. I don’t say this in regard to everyone, but I do get a bit tired (given that I actually agree with most here on the vast majority of Catholic theology, and even some of the underlying assumptions regarding contraception–e.g. I don’t think it’s an unalloyed good nor do I think it ought to be used to abet promiscuity) only to have it stated or implied here and in other places that anyone who thinks contraception might be acceptable in some cases is a promiscuous hedonistic immoral blackguard who gleefully is abetting the destruction of the Church and the fall of Western Civilization and probably ought to get the hell out of the Church since he’s not a “real” Catholic anyway. I make no claim to be anything other than an abject sinner who can but trust God’s mercy; but I think we could all use a lot more humility and charity.
I’m not sure your idea about other cultures is entirely accurate.
This article (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201105/weird-masturbation-habits) is very interesting in this regard, suggesting that in pre-modern cultures (both in the past, and those which still exist today) the very structure of life and community seem to make the idea of masturbatory orgasm (whether alone or with someone else) less of a draw, and it is the sequel to another article which says:
“Neurohistorian Daniel Lord Smail points out that one can view the entire history of civilization as an accelerating trend toward greater use of mood-altering (psychotropic) substances and activities, including shopping sprees and gorging on empty calories. Pursuit of frequent, sex-aid-enhanced orgasm is but one of many—although a particularly compelling one.
Both our tendency to self-medicate and the stressfulness of today’s circumstances appear to be accelerating rather than leading us to contentment. If so, are we wise to assume peace of mind lies in more frequent climaxing to ever more potent stimuli? Recent research suggests this course may, in fact, be futile.”
only to have it stated or implied here and in other places that anyone who thinks contraception might be acceptable in some cases is a promiscuous hedonistic immoral blackguard who gleefully is abetting the destruction of the Church and the fall of Western Civilization
This, of course, is entirely in your head. My criticism is not that your position makes you immoral but that your mode of argument in this thread has been irrational — in particular, that it is clearly rigged so that any move by the other side can be used as an excuse to reject any kind of argument that would be made; carried through consistently, your manner of approach would make any moral reasoning impossible, and allow people to take moral positions without regard to actual arguments. The reason for this is that several of your responses to A Sinner involve taking entirely ordinary features of argument and pretending that they are evidence against the argument. Your point about Maritain and De Koninck is simply a case in point: it is standard even with good arguments to find informed people in apparent disagreement with a position. What conclusion can be drawn from this depends entirely on (1) whether we can clearly rule out that the disagreement is merely terminological; (2) whether the apparent disagreement is due to issues that were confused at the time but have since received clarification; (3) whether the particular arguments in question have been addressed by others; and (4) whether the positions in question were overlooking, by accident, some significant distinction. Failing to consider these issues leads to collapse of moral reasoning; even good Homer nods, and the mere existence of an authority who says something tells us nothing until we’ve looked at the circumstances. This was, again, precisely the issue that was dealt with in the dispute over laxism: a learned authority could be found for almost anything, so if that were enough it would make almost everything permissible. You yourself haven’t presented any arguments that would meet the standards you’ve demanded of A Sinner; and this is not surprising, because no arguments meet those standards, since they are not coherent.
Turmarion:
Hi! It’s Hector from Alexandria. I just found this blog, and I must say that I love this high level discussion about contraception. I should start reading/commenting here more often.
One quibble: it’s not true that the objection to contraception is strictly a Catholic thing. Some Orthodox Christians (e.g. the Patriarch of Moscow) object to it too. So do some Hindus, including Gandhi. As an Indian (by descent) I’m not particularly fond of Gandhi, and I don’t quite understand the hero-worship that some Americans seem to attach to him, but it seems fair to point out that his Hindu asceticism took a very dim view of contraception, or for that matter NFP (he was essentially with Tolstoy on ‘sex is only for procreation, period’.)
A Sinner:
I should tell you that the arguments you make here (and in the past on Arturo Vasquez’ blog) are more or less the best arguments I’ve ever seen against contraception. I still don’t *agree* with them (or more accurately, I don’t fully agree with them), but I definitely think you’re on to something. I used to be more enthusiastic about Thomistic ethics, but I’ve grown more skeptical about Scholasticism in the last few years. I think that your more Platonist, virtue-ethics arguments about contraception are actually really good, and even though I don’t fully agree with them I think that the framework you suggest could definitely be a good framework for talking about sexual ethics.
I actually think condoms, in this context, are more problematic than the Pill (or the male equivalent, which would be vasectomy). Partly because putting oneself into a temporary or permanent state of infertility isn’t actually denaturing the sex act itself; it’s not different, to me, than having sex with an infertile or lactating person. The condom, by contrast (and other barrier methods) seem to actually interfere with the sex act and its completion, in a way which is morally troublesome. (On top of that, of course, condoms facilitate strictly casual hookups and such in a way that the Pill doesn’t, which I also think is more problematic). I don’t really have a moral objection to the Pill, but I do think there are serious moral issues to be raised about barrier methods. (FTR, I’m Anglican/Episcopalian, not Catholic).
I also think you’re pretty much dead right about usury. I’m a socialist, in terms of economics, and part of my solution to the Christian dilemma about usury would to be to have interest be controlled by the state, through publicly owned banks and credit institutions. As long as no private individual is actually profiting from lending at interest, and the profits from interest go into the common treasury for the common good, and as long as interest rates are tempered by social concern for the good of the debtor as well as for society as a whole, I think this doesn’t violate the Christian prohibition on usury.
“I actually think condoms, in this context, are more problematic than the Pill (or the male equivalent, which would be vasectomy). Partly because putting oneself into a temporary or permanent state of infertility isn’t actually denaturing the sex act itself; it’s not different, to me, than having sex with an infertile or lactating person. The condom, by contrast (and other barrier methods) seem to actually interfere with the sex act and its completion, in a way which is morally troublesome. (On top of that, of course, condoms facilitate strictly casual hookups and such in a way that the Pill doesn’t, which I also think is more problematic). I don’t really have a moral objection to the Pill, but I do think there are serious moral issues to be raised about barrier methods. (FTR, I’m Anglican/Episcopalian, not Catholic).”
I myself at one point held the position that there are actually two types of sins here: sterilization vs. contraception
In contraception, I thought, the sin was in the sex act itself being disrupted or frustrated; seminal deposit was not completed, so the sort of act ordered towards its proper end was cut off from its transcendent meaning. In sterilization, on the other hand, the sin was in the initial act itself (as a sin something like mutilation) of sterilization, but the sex afterwards (being identical to sex on NFP, etc) was not necessarily unchaste (after all, the Church does not require men to have vasectomies reversed after confession in order to resume the marital act).
But, of course, that opens room for arguments that something like taking a Pill is merely a venial mutilation (being, as it is, temporary, reversible, and cumulative in its effect over the course of a month), and even that one could attempt to argue that avoiding pregnancy could be a valid medical reasons for such a procedure, as mutilations can be justified for medical reasons (though I find this hard to argue for sterilization, as one can solve the same problem through abstinence or using the naturally occurring infertile periods, and mutilation is only supposed to be when there are no other options, not merely for convenience).
It was actually some things that Elizabeth Anscombe said that convinced me that this distinction I was making was artificial, however. Interestingly enough, it was something she said about douching. Douching as a contraceptive method obviously does not fit easily into this dichotomy as it is not a method done BEFORE the act, nor one that effects the act in progress, but rather is done AFTER the act. It was this that convinced me that such a sterilization/contraception dichotomy was at best virtual, not actual, morally.
If what matters for morality is the character of the act of the will at the time, that post-contraception may be as distinct as pre-contraception (ie, sterilization). Because, obviously, just as a man might get a vasectomy and then repent before having sex with his wife (separating a bad act of mutilation from a good sex act)…so too a couple might have perfectly chaste sex, only for the wife to decide 20 minutes later that she was going to douche.
In both cases, there is a question of potential temporal separation between what are in effect two different acts of the will (the choice to do something to prevent conception on the one hand, and the choice to actually have sex on the other), whereas in what I was calling “contraception” in the strict sense, the two choices seemed inseparable (ie, there was one choice only: to have an unnatural sort of sex).
And yet, then, I thought…I suppose there could be separate acts even during sex. For example, the choice to start sex with a condom (intending to finish like that) would be unchaste and immoral by that intent, but if the couple had a miraculous change of heart even during the act itself, and removed the condom, the choice to continue and finish naturally would be a new separate good choice (that would not, however, excuse the first bad intent/choice).
So, it seems to me, before-the-fact and after-the-fact methods perhaps cannot be differentiated in kind from during-the-act methods. Although before-the-fact methods, by the nature of their temporal separation, allow for the possibility of the sex being a new act (with a potentially new intent if the couple repents of the contraceptive intent in the meantime)…in most cases the intent of the sterilization will be, obviously, to exclude conception from the sex later, and as such forms virtually one act with the sex itself (and has the character, by that very intent, of unchastity and not merely mutilation as I had argued before) unless, as I said, a new resolve is made in the meantime (which then involves two acts of the will: first bad, then good).
Likewise, though an after-the-fact method might be made separate from the choice to have otherwise natural intercourse itself, if it was intended already before or during the act, it renders the whole act unchaste by intent. And even if the decision is made 20 minutes after, then this decision simply constitutes the “reverse” of the “changing resolves” situation described for before-the-fact methods in the last paragraph: it involves a second act of the will that is unchaste, even though the first may have been moral and good.
So, I would now admit that sterilization and contraception are the same species of sin, and that while before-the-fact methods might allow (by their temporal separation) for a greater likelihood of a second act to take place that is good (in the form of repentance or changing resolve, even without reversing the procedure), in most cases they form virtually one intent with the act itself, and so both do have the character of unchastity by that “standing” intent (unless that intent changes).
For the most part I’ve checked out of this thread because I think I’ve said all I want to say, and am probably at in impasse on getting across what I mean, and vice versa. However, regarding Anscombe I do have to make a point. In her essay reprinted here, which may be the one you have in mind (I know it came up over at Reditus) she has this to say, emphasis mine:
Hence contraceptive intercourse within marriage is a graver offence against chastity than is straightforward fornication or adultery.
I’ve heard it said that in one of her speeches Anscombe even went further and said that non-contraceptive adultery is less immoral than contraceptive marital intercourse because at least the adultery doesn’t have its natural goal impeded! Because, I guess, having a child by your illicit lover is less disruptive to the marital bed than the Pill….
Now I think even among those who consider contraception sinful and who use NFP, almost nobody would agree with this! I think the most zealous promoter of NFP would rather hear, “Honey, I’ve been secretly using the Pill” than “Honey, I’ve been secretly cheating on you”!
Now I’m sure that a sufficiently minutely argued Scholastic argument could be made as to why contraception is worse than adultery; but I’m also sure that this would be totally alien to almost all the faithful, the anti-contraception crowd included. It’s kind of like the argument that you may never outright lie even to protect human life (Kant’s famous example). Any mode of ethical thinking that comes out with results so at odds with what the average moral person would consider obvious (obviously adultery is worse; obviously it’s OK to lie to the Nazis about the Jews in your cellar) seems to me to have severe problems somewhere along the line. This is one of the reasons, frankly, that I have moved away from Scholasticism over time, since it seems more prone than average to such loopy results.
Tumarion, I’ll simply point out that saying contraception is a worse offense AGAINST CHASTITY specifically, considered in itself under that aspect, is different than saying it is a worse sin IN GENERAL because adultery is also a sin against Justice. Adultery is worse than contraception overall, but contraception is more unchaste (esp. Given an understanding of temperance that sees it as about ordering means and ends of desire )
I’ll also add re: lying that framing the question as “lying to save other people’s lives” is usually a self-justifying formulation. In most such scenarios we could imagine, simply remaining silent would protect the OTHER people in question just as well. It’s YOU who would face repercussions for silence. So at that point it becomes about lying to save your OWN life, which garners somewhat less sympathy as an “obvious” argument
“I also think you’re pretty much dead right about usury. I’m a socialist, in terms of economics, and part of my solution to the Christian dilemma about usury would to be to have interest be controlled by the state, through publicly owned banks and credit institutions. As long as no private individual is actually profiting from lending at interest, and the profits from interest go into the common treasury for the common good, and as long as interest rates are tempered by social concern for the good of the debtor as well as for society as a whole, I think this doesn’t violate the Christian prohibition on usury.”
The solution you describe is interesting, and I think comes from the same understanding of the nature of credit that I have. The inequality in distribution we currently suffer is not a problem with the means of production, but rather the means of DISTRIBUTION (ie, money, credit, and who controls its creation), and your solution indicates a keen understanding of what the heart of the problem is.
However, I would beg you to reconsider your “socialism” and the emphasis you place on State control in this. Have you read the Social Credit proposals instead? (http://www.michaeljournal.org/10lessons.htm) They too understand that the nature of the current economic woes is essentially MONETARY, and at heart the issue is usury, is the private control of the creation of credit (which is inherently a social good!)
But they don’t propose some big State Bank lending at interest (the rates of which then may or may not reflect actual production; that’s the problem with a monopoly instead of a market, especially a politicized monopoly)…in order to redistribute the profits to all (which in some ways strikes me as little better than the State taxing the rich to redistribute wealth, except this would be equivalent to taxing borrowers).
Instead it simply proposes that it work in “the other direction”; basically, that the State distribute the necessary new credit each year, in equal dividends to all citizens (as well as government spending without taxes), to represent the new production (based on some metric like GDP or something), and that additional loans people needed could then be done privately (even, perhaps, with interest?) but only from actual deposits, not creating the money out of the private debt itself (as the system currently works).
Me, quoted by Brandon: only to have it stated or implied here and in other places that anyone who thinks contraception might be acceptable in some cases is a promiscuous hedonistic immoral blackguard who gleefully is abetting the destruction of the Church and the fall of Western Civilization….
Brandon: This, of course, is entirely in your head. My criticism is not that your position makes you immoral….
Well, the following quote from you earlier, my emphasis, implies that, if not immoral, I’m either deluded or in bad faith—not too complimentary either way:
And this is precisely why moral life can’t rest on argument alone: it’s child’s play for a person to reject any argument they don’t want to hear…. And then, of course, to add the cherry, one can complain that the conclusions to the argument are confirmed with appeal to authority, and voila! A perfect recipe for having any moral position one wants.
More generally, I think you dismiss Mairitain and De Koninck too easily; but there are Catholic theologians (you’d call them dissenters) that do look at the developments over the last forty years and still conclude the Church decided wrong—e.g. Curran, Küng, Arraj, and many others. Most of them not in the good graces of the current Magisterium, of course, but most with many interesting things to say.
As to what I accept or dismiss, consider. Utilitarians and pragmatists argue the morality of acts on the basis of the so-called “greatest good for the greatest number”; where said “greatest good” means the purportedly quantifiable pleasure, seen in purely material and sensate terms, that the largest number can attain. Of course, such a premise can lead to horrid conclusions—read Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” for a powerful fictional presentation of the logical extreme of such an ethos. I think that you and A Sinner would join me in roundly rejecting this premise as the basis of an ethical system.
Now, if a dyed-in-the-wool utilitarian was trying to make an argument for something I found repellent—or even just disagreed with—and insisted on making it in terms of his premises of “greatest good” with “good” defined as above—then am I supposed to accept it, no matter how impeccably argued, if I find the whole basis itself immoral, or even just plain mistaken? And if every time he argues it, he always comes back to justifying his views only in terms of his system, am I not right to reject it unless and until he can make such an argument in terms of a system I do accept? To say otherwise would imply that I need to accept a Nazi’s argument, based on Nazi premises, as long as it’s logically constructed! Do you understand what I mean?
Now I’m not saying the Scholastic system and particularly the “moral object” is as horribly wrong as the basis of Utilitarianism, or evil like the basis of Nazism; but the same principle holds. If the only way the argument can be constructed is in terms of a system I reject as being incoherent and/or mistaken, am I supposed to accept it anyway?
As I’ve said, most non-Catholics and even Orthodox Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians don’t reject contraception as intrinsically evil in all circumstances; nor did Aristotelianism or any pre-Christian philosophical system. If our closest religious and philosophical “relatives” disagree on this, then it seems to me there is greater room for questioning a doctrine that seems to be most full-bloodedly and of late loudly held by only Catholicism. I mean, if one wants to say it’s a matter of revelation, or of Magisterial fiat, then at least I can respect that; but to try to argue it from natural law and then twist it around so that only the Church’s interpretation of natural law gets the right result is really a farce. Either the Church needs to make the argument on grounds that other religions and the non-religious can at least find intelligible (and I don’t think it has yet done this—a weakness, since as I’ve said before most other “intrinsic evils” such as murder, etc. are easily defended as true on non-Scholastic grounds), or just admit it’s a case of “because we say so”. In short, very many would argue that it’s the Church itself that “argues against reason” to “get the answers it wants”.
A Sinner: In most such scenarios we could imagine, simply remaining silent would protect the OTHER people in question just as well. It’s YOU who would face repercussions for silence.
Whether this would indeed be true of “most such scenarios” is debatable; but I’m inclined to think that in Kant’s example or the Nazi example, silence would be more likely to cause one to face repercussions. In any case, even if self-preservation is less noble, I think most would still find it, in such an extreme case, ample motivation for lying! I’d also point out that Catholic, Thomist philosopher Peter Kreeft not only argues that a lie in such a scenario is not sinful at all, but that it’s not even a lie. From here, an extended but instructive quote, my empahses:
But can’t we solve the problem of the Dutchmen and the Nazis by saying that all lying is wrong but the Dutchmen don’t have to lie to save the Jews because they could deceive the Nazis without lying by a clever verbal ploy? No, because effective deception by clever verbal ploys cannot usually be done by ordinary people, especially by clumsy Dutchmen. I know; I’m one of them. Our moral obligations depend on abilities that are common, not abilities that are rare Besides, the Nazis are not fools. They would suspect clever prevarications and sniff out duplicitous ploys. They could be reliably deceived and deterred from searching every inch of the house only by an answer like “Jews? Those rats? None of them in my house, I hope. Please come in, and if you find any, please give them rat poison. I hate those vermin as much as you do.” You promised the Jews to hide them from their murderers. To keep that promise, you have to deceive the Nazis. Physical hiding and verbal hiding are two sides of the same coin, whether you call it lying, or deception, or whatever you call it. What it is, is much more obvious than what it is to be called. It’s a good thing to do. If you don’t know that, you’re morally stupid, and moral stupidity comes in two opposite forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.
At this, I think we really have reached an impasse and there is probably no point in beating it into the ground further. I can honestly say that this discussion has clarified my understanding of many of the issues, and tended to confirm my original perspective more firmly. If I am wrong, then I’m honestly wrong, as I try hard to understand the issues and follow them through honestly; and if I’m wrong I ask God’s help to straighten me out, and to forgive me if I’m unstraigtenable. I also ask the same for those on the other side if the truth does lie on my side.
“If the only way the argument can be constructed is in terms of a system I reject as being incoherent and/or mistaken, am I supposed to accept it anyway?”
No, but you should admit that the system in question is at least internally consistent.
The system in question is Catholicism and its notion of natural reason and the good. Say you don’t accept that system, fine, or its totalizing claims. But trying to argue with a system you ultimately disagree with on terms INTERNAL to that system…is just silly. The system will always win on its own terms, at least if it isn’t totally idiotic as a system.
What annoys me is people who don’t even accept the premises of Catholicism as a totalizing system…trying to argue against its INternal consistency on the basis of assumed “common” values (pluralist values) that Catholicism itself does not, in fact, accept or hold. Or people who try to have their cake and eat it too, wanting to co-opt the history or most of the doctrine or the liturgy…while maintaining some breathing room in the form of still holding to certain values from OUTSIDE the system, and use those to deconstruct WITHIN the system itself.
You’re acting as if our claim to totalism, as a system, requires appealing to some Meta-value, prior to the system, that we can all agree on. It doesn’t. That’s the whole point of a totalizing claim: we don’t recognize that there is a meta-value that can be appealed to outside the system itself, because that value would, by definition, have to be PART of the system!
Does this require a leap of faith? Perhaps this is the point of Kyle’s earlier question about why the claim that God is knowable to Natural Reason…is also a dogma. And the reason is because the Catholic notion of Natural Reason…is still Catholic! It’s “natural” as opposed to supernatural because it’s a logic with premises that we don’t believe require Revelation specifically (like, that God became Man)…but they are still premises or axioms, and all premises/axioms in ANY system ultimately require a sort of leap of faith (though not necessarily supernatural Faith, the infused virtue).
All men can reach certain conclusions by applying certain rules of logic to certain premises, true, but the question is why accept these premises or logic in the first place. While (but again, I can only say this from WITHIN Catholic logic) it is true, in some sense, that appeal to certain widespread human desires or values can help to make the initial argument even to non-Catholics (“motives of credibility”)…in the end, we can’t, of course, argue with people whose desire or notion of The Good is, itself, constructed in a totally different way, or whose supreme value is from outside the system itself.
If they use that to embrace some other system, we can’t really say anything. But it’s not right to submit a system that claims to be totalizing to a scrutiny based on a meta-value of non-totalization that then reduces all systems (even those with totalizing claims) to merely possibilities that are, then, subject to the scrutiny or deconstruction of some value from outside them.
I will add, however, this doesn’t amount to a magisterial “because we say so” as if the teaching against contraception amounts to merely an arbitrary Revealed divine decree.
There is an internal logic to the system, and indeed (and this is the claim of “natural law”) the premises used to reach the contraception conclusion are not of a supernatural or Revealed variety. They are premises people could choose even without a notion of Revelation.
However, they are still premises, are still axioms, and as such do require the choice of a leap of [natural] faith.
But once such premises are accepted, the system is internally consistent, and it’s simply invalid to subject it to claim that you are “within” the system, while subjecting it to the scrutiny of some pluralist meta-value you hold that comes from OUTSIDE the system (and which the system itself thus doesn’t recognize).
“If the only way the argument can be constructed is in terms of a system I reject as being incoherent and/or mistaken, am I supposed to accept it anyway?”
No, but you should admit that the system in question is at least internally consistent.
Well, thank you for granting the point!
It is consistent as far as it goes, but two points. One, it’s incomplete. No philosophical system or human thoughts can completely encompass God, not only in His essence but in the complexities of His creation here and His revelation. St. Thomas, you’ll recall, quit writing the Summa after his mystical experience, dismissing it as “like straw”.
I think Scholasticism, neo-Platonism, the phenominalism studied by the late Pope John Paul II, and other philosophical systems are useful tools to get to parts–teeny, tiny parts–of the Truth; but they must never be mistaken for it, and we never get completely there in this world.
As to consistency, well, as Emerson said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Not that I’m saying consistency is bad or always “foolish”; but I think Scholasticism does suffer from this fault often (just as all systems suffer their own unique faults). Also, within a system, different people dispute where the consistency lies. To put it another way, they may make the same leap of faith to the same axioms, but they may disagree as to where one proceeds from said axioms. Were that not so, there’d never be philosophical dispute at all–certainly a counterfactual!
So Maritain, Journet, de Koninck, and others thought it was consistent, from a Scholastic point of view, to say that the induced infertility of the Pill is no different from the natural infertility of a woman’s cycle. Thus, when I disagree with you, I consider that the consistency is in saying that there is no intelligible difference between the two types of infertility discussed; for you, the consistency lies in the moral object as it works out in the ramifications for permissible and impermissible intercourse. It’s not that I’m being inconsistent–we disagree on which view “fits” better into the overall picture. Even from a Scholastic perspective, it’s at least eminently possible to make the argument that contraception for married couples in the right context is more consistent with the system than the contrary view. See? I don’t expect you to agree, but do you see the point?
To put it another way, there is an internal logic to the system, but over the centuries there have been, and continue to be, debates about the exact nature of that internal logic. A perfect example of that is Kreeft’s stout disagreement with the logic of lying to the Nazis that you (and for that matter the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser) argue for. Same religion, same system, same ultimate axioms, different views as to just what exactly best exemplifies the “internal logic” of the system.
The older I get, the less interested I am in systems in general. They have their purposes, and they’re needed to a point; but beyond that I think they can cause more harm than good. In this respect, I don’t accept totalizing claims from any system. In a sense, only God has a totalizing claim–everything else, even the institutional Church, is to some extent a mediator. Put it another way–God is the meta-value of all meta-values. We will always “see through a glass, darkly” in this world. The Church and various systems dispell the darkness a little, but never completely.
Maybe it’s being a math person–I tend to go with the idea, following some interpretations of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, that any and all consistent systems must be incomplete. God is, in a sense, the ultimate completion by being ultimate and unbounded openness (Gödel was a Christian in his own eccentric way, BTW). You ought to read Rudy Rucker’s excellent Infinity and the Mind in which he fleshes out some of these ideas.
I agree with what you say about incompleteness and systems not being The Truth.
Ultimately, however, of course…I am a believer in Revealed religion and Magisterium, and so the system (or various systems) come AFTER my conclusions.
I am not a dogmatic Thomist or anything. That way of thinking “connects the dots” best for me, but the dots it is connecting is the dogma of the Church. I am not opposed to people connecting the dots according to a different system (say, Eastern theology, to which I’m very sympathetic), but one cannot go around rejecting any of the dots, which are, ultimately, established or at least confirmed by Authority (including, yes, the natural knowability of God and the natural law).
The “internal logic” I’ve laid out here is not my Faith. My Faith doesn’t rest on these arguments. I can certainly see that there may be other internally consistent logics (with either the same or different axioms) that reach the same conclusions (and that’s fine)…or different conclusions (but that’s not…)
My problem with these, of course, is that they aren’t the conclusions they’re supposed to reach (according to the Church which speaks for God)! Ultimately, things are orthodox which lead to orthopraxy. Ideas are just ideas until they manifest in concrete behavior. However, contraception (for example) is a concrete heteroprax behavior, and thus I must assume that systems which imply it are heterodox (NOT the other way around).
Is this ultimately a “because we say so”? It’s certainly a leap of faith, but again…that’s different from saying things are arbitrary or have no possible internal logic or consistency. It’s a leap trusting that the “math” in question is all actually useful and applicable and won’t mislead my spaceship into the inferno of the sun.
For example (in terms of “alternate” logics)…I can and have sympathized with the argument (as I described above) that sex on the pill is no different than sex during an infertile period (and thus not wrong in itself). However, in such a case I had to conclude that TAKING the pill in the first place (ie, sterilization) was the bad act, rather than the sex following. As I said, I personally later concluded that Anscombe’s logic about a single intent rendering them virtually one act seemed more consisent to me, but if someone held my former understanding, I wouldn’t say they were unorthodox…because this understanding would still have the same PRACTICAL outcome in terms of moral living. If someone tried to use that logic to say “Neither is wrong!” and open pandora’s box regarding sexual morality, then I obviously would have to conclude the argument had made a wrong turn somewhere.