What’s Wrong with the World

Brilliant.

Some of these phrases -- "natural conception is related to the meaning of the child," "when they start telling you to strap on the bomb and go blow yourself up in the shopping mall, you have an opportunity to think again" -- are truly inspired here, Lydia. I really liked that "chamber a round" one some thread back, too.

Lydia,

You had me at your first few paragraphs. It's so refreshing to find someone that shares my opposition to IVF. In one of my undergrad ethics class I was rather stunned to be the only person in the class that had any sort of hesitation against IVF.

Sorry to go off the main topic. =/

I owe "chamber a round" to Zippy, Paul, I cannot tell a lie.

Robert, thanks. And no problem. It's funny how many even among Christians think that if it has something to do with procreation, and if you don't enjoy it, it can't be wrong. Kind of a reverse Kantianism.

There are three conditions for something to be a sin: it must be grave matter, it must be performed by a free act of the will, and it must be done with full understanding. Any defect in these three conditions renders the act less culpable, but not necessarily inculpable.

The first condition is not in question, here, because all of the acts under discussion are grave matter involving the taking or perverting of a human life.

The second condition may minimize culpability if the person has been made so afraid by their environment that they feel coerced into performing the act, such as in slave prostitution where one fears for their life or when one is acting under the influence of a severe psychiatric disorder, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It is in the third category where all of the mischief occurs. A person may be less culpable of a sin if the act is committed under invincible ignorance. If the ignorance is merely vincible, the sin remains culpable. In order for an act to be committed in invincible ignorance, one would have had to have done due diligence with regards to informing one's conscience. Once a sure conscience if formed, it must be acted on, even if it is in error. Since acts contrary to the natural law, such as murder and rape, are of such a nature that the common man should be able to understand them as first principles, the ability to be invincibly ignorant in these areas is very slight. It may happen in cases of mental retardation, for example. Ordinarily, if one performs an act against the natural law one is culpable to the extent that common sense may be applied, however, as stated, above, some acts may be objectively sinful, but subjectively inculpable. It depends on circumstances and must be judged on a case-by-case basis.

If one acts against the natural or Divine law, with regards to the third criteria of knowledge, it is usually, due to one of three factors: pride or arrogance (one is better or above the law), crass negligence in forming the conscience, or extreme despair (one believe one is beneath the law and not worthy to be upheld by it).

Unfortunately, ideology provides a cover that makes it look like one has performed due diligence in forming the conscience, when, in fact, one has simply adopted, without proper reflection, the conscience of another. In each of the cases cited in Lydia's post, the principle defect in the ideology is to remove the dignity of the Other at the expense of exulting one's own supposed dignity. In fact, a suicide bomber may believes he will go to Heaven surrounded by 72 virgins, but in reality, he cares not a wit for the other person, but rather reduces him to someone whose soul is no longer of concern to him. There are few people in Islam, it would seem, who would die for another's conversion.

This lack of sacrificial love is really at the heart of most of these moral defects. Another, is the lack of a proper concept of grace. I may not be able to convince someone to become a Christian, but ultimately, I know the battle is not entirely in my hands. A person comes to Christ by virtue of prevenient grace. I may be a tool in that process, but I do not own the blue prints for how things will play out, so I must, sometimes, simply entrust the person to God's mercy. Islam does not, I think (I may be corrected on this), have a concept of mercy that allows God to act over time, apart from any individual efforts. The infidel must be killed, now. They cannot be trusted to the mercy of God.

Ideologies have a notorious habit of being passionate, but not merciful; of looking for riches while exploiting the poor; of exulting self while debasing the Other. All ideologies are formed in the crucible along with of the defects of Original Sin, save one. All ideologies will eventually reveal their defect, most often at the expense of life. When Christ said, "I have come that you may have life and have it to the full," he basically said that any ideology that does not do the same is defective and at some point must product sin.

The Chicken

Should read:

Ideologies have a notorious habit of being passionate, but not merciful; of looking for riches while exploiting the poor; of exulting self while debasing the Other. All ideologies, save one, are formed in a crucible along with all of the defects of Original Sin. All ideologies will eventually reveal their defect, most often at the expense of life. When Christ said, "I have come that you may have life and have it to the full," he basically said that any ideology that does not do the same is defective and at some point must product sin.

The Chicken

Not to mention, it's nigh impossible to talk about this with anyone outside the most academic of discussions because of the personal nature involved. Even more so than abortion, where it's easier to take a strong stance because the direct implications are dead children, whereas with IVF the most /visible/ result is living children.

"What, are you saying /these particular children/ shouldn't exist?" Talk about a discussion-ender. The whole discussion seems magnetic for emotional gotchas and heartfelt ad hominems like, "Well you didn't have any problems having children, so you can't understand what people go through!"

I've never, in more than a handful of discussions, made even the slightest progress in getting someone to even recognize the remotest of connections between IVF and any of the multiple ethical problems that have spawned from, or in parallel with it.

About every other month we get into some kind of discussion like this in my small office (no cubicles, small room, desks facing each other) and I am usually the one with an ethical uneasiness about and consequently am told, consistently that I'm just heartless, or that "everything always has to be black and white with you," as if my opposition to abortion is only academic and removed from the understanding that children are actually involved.

[end frustration vent]

And I finished reading your post; and I agree. =)

Sorry, I was responding to Lydia. I expected my reply to be right after hers, Mr. Chicken.

Sorry, I was responding to Lydia. I expected my reply to be right after hers, Mr. Chicken.

That's alright. I have no ideological bias :)

The Chicken

Chicken, I had contemplated talking about invincible ignorance in the main post but decided against it. But it's pretty obvious that what I'm saying is that there are certain wrongs no human being with working mental faculties can be invincibly ignorant about, and especially when it comes to actually doing the act. I tend to think that God has built in a braking system for human beings to certain acts, and that this kind of instinctive withdrawing from actually pulling the trigger (possibly literally) is the cry of conscience, that, "Don't do it!" that gives you a chance to pull back, look at yourself, and say, "What in the world am I doing? What have I become?" And if you push through that and do the thing anyway, you have stifled real information that was given to you. Sitting around chattering is bad enough--it may be very bad indeed. Actually signing the order for the trains to start to run to the camps is something else, something more, and you have to sit on your conscience an extra time to push the pen across the paper.

Robert, I'm sorry to hear about the conversations in the work cubicle. It sounds like the arguments are particularly poor, too. For example, the fact that a child exists as a result of an act obviously doesn't mean that the act itself must be right. Children have been conceived by rape. The child is a good to come out of it, but the rape is evil. Children have been conceived in all kinds of bad ways--quite heartlessly, for example, and without affection, purely for reasons of guaranteeing the succession to a throne or dukedom. The good of the child does not justify the heartlessness of the act of his conception. As for your allegedly not caring about the infertile, the ad misericordium just doesn't get any better as an argument for being popular.

Hate to nitpick such a well-put point. But did you mean Moloch rather than Baal?

Moloch was probably Melquart, the Baal of Tyre. There were lots of Baals, just like there were lots of local versions of the Greek gods. Baal is just Bar-El, "Son of God"; and mlk in the various languages of the ancient Near East seems to have meant just, "King." Back then, many towns considered their King to be God incarnate, or the Son of God, or at any rate an incarnation of the angel or god of the local tribe (these were the 70 angels or shepherds of the Nations). So the King, mlk, was a bar-el incarnate.

Human sacrifice figured in the religion of lots of those towns, and since most such cults emphasize that the victim must be unblemished, young animals were often preferred for the purpose; so virgins were good, too. Cf. Theseus.

Anyway, there was lots of human sacrifice to Baal, all over the Phoenician diaspora. That's what the horns of the altar were for: to bind the victim, as Abraham bound Isaac. So the horns are a type of the Cross.

Keep in mind that secularists use this argument in another way: They say that, since men having committed long-term sexual relationships with other men is so obviously beneficial to both parties, it is a falsification of Christianity that it opposes it.

That doesn't hold water under examination using natural law principles, of course!

But I thought I'd mention it, lest anyone reading this thread get the idea that "obviously morally wrong conclusions" could falsify an ideology when the only reason you had for thinking a conclusion was "obviously morally wrong" was an instinctive one. For many of us, raised in a fallen world and a corrupt society, have poorly-trained moral instincts in certain areas. The only person who can rely on instinctual reactions in order to falsify an ideology out-of-hand is the person with the perfectly-formed conscience, and sadly, there aren't a lot of those around.

That whole prescinding-from-all-horror approach seems to me (a non-philosopher) the right approach for a philosopher to take when doing philosophy. Your ethical foundations should always be questionable, if not questioned. That's one reason I don't trust philosophers (nothing personal). But maybe that's just my own pop image of what a philosopher is.

Anyway, Lydia's approach to all this seems right only provided it's narrowed to a specific context. Her approach may be generally reasonable in a society like ours where everyone's expected to be an enlightened moral philosopher. I agree that it is reasonable for those people who do consciously choose their own ideology, people like Muhammad Atta. But I don't believe that there are some acts so "glaringly, obviously wrong" that any mentally competent person could see that - and note that Lydia said not "could", but can. That statement does not follow logically from the premise that there's a "reductio for a worldview or religion". (I accept Lydia's premise but not her conclusion.) If acts such as child sacrifice or genocide are included in this "glaringly, obviously wrong" category, then entire nations full of people have been either deceiving themselves or consciously doing wrong in their everyday lives. Which I take as a reductio ad absurdum of her claim.

So to answer Lydia's question: Not only don't I think the typical Phoenician child-sacrificer was guilty of a merely intellectual error; I don't think he was guilty of an error at all. He believed what he was taught by unchosen authority, and I don't fault him for following that authoritative moral code. Not guilty by reason of ideology. More precisely, not guilty by reason of authority. Muhammad Atta, on the other hand, was guilty, ideology or not.

It's not clear which law Lydia says is written on our hearts. The Torah as prophesied by Jeremiah? The natural law? Whatever the law, Lydia seems to imply that the paragraph against in vitro fertilization is practically written in invisible ink. Even if child sacrifice is against natural law - I certainly don't think it is, but let's assume so - then it's a big leap to suggest that the No Child Sacrifice law is written on our and the Phoenicians' hearts more legibly than is the No In Vitro Fertilization law. I don't see evidence to support that idea, and strong evidence against. That evidence is, of course - Phoenicia. And also Carthage, by the way, where child sacrifice increased as the society flourished.

When we get to exposing infants on hillsides, killing one's daughter for apostasy from Islam to Christianity, or taking one's elderly spouse off to a euthanasia clinic, I think we have crossed a line. Suppose you don't like my examples. Then I invite you to think up examples of your own.

Slaughtering all the inhabitants, including infants, of a city you've just conquered?

If acts such as child sacrifice or genocide are included in this "glaringly, obviously wrong" category, then entire nations full of people have been either deceiving themselves or consciously doing wrong in their everyday lives.

Yup.

I recommend the book _Witness_. There's a wonderful, terrifying passage in which a young woman tells about how her father stopped being a Communist. She is baffled. "He started hearing screams in the night. Simply, he heard screams." But Chambers understands.

Many have heard those screams. Many have heard that voice that cries out to them, "Stop right here. There's a fork in the road. I don't think you want to get lost." Some go on. Some turn back. And upon that choice hangs the fate of their souls.

Don't deny the existence of the screams, Aaron. You might think there aren't so very many chances in our easy, prosperous, Western world for committing grave evil and ignoring all the warnings. But you would be wrong.

Yes, Keith, that's an example. In fact, it's bothered me for years. The Israelite soldier comes home to his tent at night covered with the blood of Canaanite infants, hugs his wife and kids... Something wrong there. I don't know what to do with those passages, but I'll tell you one thing I _don't_ do: I don't affirm as part of my religion that slaughtering those infants was not wrong. This must mean that God didn't really order that to be done. The alternative that has been presented to me is that the soldiers in doing that were not acting on their own but merely as agents of God, but I am strongly disinclined to buy that, nor do I affirm it as part of Christian doctrine. If that be heresy, make the most of it.

If acts such as child sacrifice or genocide are included in this "glaringly, obviously wrong" category, then entire nations full of people have been either deceiving themselves or consciously doing wrong in their everyday lives.

Of course this has happened. The entire Jewish nation, except Elijah, was sacrificing to Ba'al.

The Chicken

Oh, to Joe: Hannibal, the hero of Carthage, has a name that means "the grace of Baal." And we have lots of archeological evidence of the slaughter of children as sacrifice by the Carthaginians. (Chesterton has quite a long passage on the "demonic" god of Carthage in connection with the Punic Wars.) So I did mean Baal, though when you asked, I had a momentary qualm as to whether I had made an historical mistake.

Sounds like we may be pretty close on this issue--the issue of (at least apparent) Old Testament divinely commanded/permitted atrocities. For those interested, they had a conference on this issue at Notre Dame, and they put videos of it on-line. I especially liked Peter van Inwagen's presentation: it was the reply to Ed Curley, so to find it, first follow the link to Curley's talk. My own approach to the OT on this issue isn't the same as van Inwagen's, but in some ways isn't far off, and PvI raises some very interesting considerations. For those who prefer a position that tries to preserve inerrancy (while still holding that God didn't command those acts), try Nick Wolterstorff's talk. I don't think Nick's, or any attempt to preserve any form of inerrancy worth the name while holding that God didn't really command those acts, works, but maybe that's just me, and this is an interesting attempt.

I'll try posting the link to the Notre Dame conference videos:
http://www.nd.edu/~cprelig/conferences/video/my_ways/

Lydia, I don't doubt that many people see the problem with "glaringly, obviously wrong" (GOW) things, especially in modern times. I still say that most people, especially in pre-modern times, saw nothing wrong with many of their own GOWs (GOWs by our standards, of course). If, as you say, all - all! - mentally competent people could see GOWs as wrong, there would be an extensive record of this fact, along the lines of Witness but way, way more extreme: attempts by elites to justify GOWs against their "obvious" wrongness, etc. "Do this, it's really right, don't listen to the screams!"

Instead, what I see especially from pre-modern times are commandments and chronicles of GOWs lacking any suggestion that they may be problematic. And the rare suggestion that a particular GOW is problematic only shows that such considerations are possible, thus highlighting even more the usual absence of doubt. So I still see that as a reductio ad absurdum of your claim.

Lydia,

What if you think of it like intoxication? Someone takes a drink, and they are responsible for the first drink. Even though they lose their judgment along the way, they are still responsible for every drink they took and for being intoxicated. The get into their car and drive and kill someone. They are responsible even though they lost control. You can map on the loss of control onto the ideaological grip that an ideaology gains over a person. o even granting the premises, the lack of culpability doesn't seem to follow.

Merry Christ's Mass

I think that's an imperfect analogy, Perry, because I don't think you lose your mental faculties from ideology in anything like the same sense or the same way that you lose the ability to control a car when you are intoxicated. The analogy has its uses, but I think it implies a final state of non-responsibility that is incorrect. When the Nazi goes to drive the Jews into the gas chamber, his mind isn't impaired. And I don't think that his Nazi ideology impairs his mind in the relevant sense. He sees what he is doing; he knows what he is doing. I think he has a chance to draw back and stop.

So to answer Lydia's question: Not only don't I think the typical Phoenician child-sacrificer was guilty of a merely intellectual error; I don't think he was guilty of an error at all. He believed what he was taught by unchosen authority, and I don't fault him for following that authoritative moral code. Not guilty by reason of ideology. More precisely, not guilty by reason of authority. Muhammad Atta, on the other hand, was guilty, ideology or not.

Atta was not guilty by reason of ideology as well due to the fact that his actions were roughly more in line with devout Islam than "moderate Muslims."

I don't have a problem with theodicy just because God commanded the extermination of a race. God has ultimate command life and death at His pleasure. If we are going to find God unjust for ordering the extermination of a race, then we must also find Him unjust for sentencing all mankind to physical death at the Judgment on Adam's sin.

The Phoenician lacks the Divine command to kill people, so he has no excuse. Rather, the Phoenician's sin of idolatry is perfected in the child-sacrifice.

Rather, the Phoenician's sin of idolatry is perfected in the child-sacrifice.

If Paul can be taken at face value, (I know, how fundamentalist of me):

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Then not only is Aaron's perspective false, but the very notion that ideology or environment is a mitigating factor is false.

"The Israelite soldier comes home to his tent at night covered with the blood of Canaanite infants, hugs his wife and kids..."

Waitaminute, there. Is that correct? I was under the impression that the Old Testament practices included a period of time in which the returning soldiers could not just come right back in; a period outside the camp or some such. Perhaps it was due to their having encountered the blood of non-Israelites? I don't recall, and I have no access to my usual materials where I am now.

In any event, I remember a friend remarking on the wisdom of that: Give your soldiers some time to readjust from battlefield to family mode.

RC, it's possible that I'm forgetting that part. I can well imagine that they would be _ceremonially_ unclean after battle, but that's a different matter. In any event, the image was meant to bring home the problem. Even supposing the soldier is _thinking_ about hugging his own kids while sitting around after slaughtering Canaanite children, maybe thinking about one of his own kids when confronted with the Canaanite child whom he's supposed to stab to death...a problem there. Imagine finding a two-year-old hiding under a bed somewhere...Reminds me of the scene in _Schindler's List_ with the little girl in the red coat. Perhaps you've seen it.

"We can charge him only with an intellectual error rather than with the moral wrong of the act itself," says Lydia's interlocutors.

There is a related habit of blaming ideologies and -isms rather than vices or actions: "Gnosticism" instead of pride, "socialism" instead of envy or theft, "indifferentism" instead of sloth or impiety, "objectification" instead of murder, wrath or lust. I suspect keyboard commandos like to think in terms of intellectual error because it's very hard to refute a vice but easier to argue against a system of ideas.

TomH: the child-sacrificer definitely has divine approval for the practice, assuming you're talking about Baal, Saturn, or whoever, and that's obviously a big part of his (valid) defense. But if you're talking about YHWH's approval, then why should that even matter to the sacrificer, unless he freely and actively rejected it? And therefore, why should it matter to us, even those of us who worship YHWH, in assessing his moral guilt?

Mike T: the key word in the passage you quoted from me is unchosen authority - parents, priests, etc. Muhammad Atta, unlike a typical ancient child-sacrificer, actively chose his ideology. Presumably he could have rejected it at any time. It's irrelevant whether his ideology was "true" Islam or some modern perversion of it or something in between; what matters about the ideology itself is that it's morally wrong. I think this is about the only place I agree with Lydia.

St. Paul's assertion (explicated here by Lydia) is, to me at least, glaringly, obviously wrong, for the reason I sketched in my previous comment. Not only is Paul's statement demonstrably false, it's extremely dangerous. The idea is that a child-sacrificer is not just ignorant, much less just different, but is fully, consciously evil. That idea justifies holy wars, wars of annihilation, as in the Book of Joshua (whatever its historical accuracy). It also helps justify an apocalyptic view of the world, divided into Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness. So it's not surprising that an apocalyptic theologian like Paul would take such an extreme view of natural law.

This "no excuse" doctrine is also destructive to tradition and to pietas. Our fathers throughout history committed "glaringly obvious wrongs", or at least condoned them. Slavery is one popular example, whether or not it's on Lydia's list. There are many who conclude that slave-owners were evil, because slavery was evil. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. But if the institution of American slavery was not just evil but glaringly, obviously wrong, then slave-owners were fully, consciously evil. That's just one example which shows how this "no excuse" doctrine is subversive to our own civilization as well.

I'm not sure one can take St Paul's statement noted above and apply it willy-nilly to the entire moral law. He does not seem to be saying that all men are without excuse for whatever they do, but rather that they are without excuse for disbelieving in the Creator. Therefore, it may follow that whatever they do as a result of that disbelief is w/o excuse as well, but I'd be hesitant to apply this principle to every single individual.

"There are many who conclude that slave-owners were evil, because slavery was evil. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. But if the institution of American slavery was not just evil but glaringly, obviously wrong, then slave-owners were fully, consciously evil. That's just one example which shows how this 'no excuse' doctrine is subversive to our own civilization as well."

The problem with a universal, unnuanced version of the 'no excuse' doctrine is that it can cause one to demonize one's opponents. If that's what you're getting at, Aaron, I'd agree with you. But I don't think you're correct in gainsaying the Apostle here.

I find it amusing that those who would excuse some crimes on the grounds, that the perpetrator was just doing what is right according to his Weltanschaaung, are also advocates for specific legislation against hate crimes.
Isn't the Nazi just doing what is right according to his world view?

There are many who conclude that slave-owners were evil, because slavery was evil.

Slavery was evil, but a given slave owner might inherit his slaves without his own will and without doing anything at all. He didn't do anything to enslave them and had then, even if he were a man with the best of intentions, to decide what was best to do for them.

In general, I am far more inclined to say that _acts_ rather than _failures to act_ fall into the "glaring" category I describe. Certainly there can be failures to act that fall into it--the classic case of the top-notch swimmer who simply goes on his way to a party while ignoring the cries of the drowning child in the lake he passes by. But failing immediately to emancipate all the slaves one inherited from one's father does not seem to me to fall into such a glaring category and, indeed, might result from a sincere (and to some extent correct) belief that the slaves would be worse off if suddenly emancipated with nowhere to go. Naturally, I believe that the slave owners were culpable for not _trying_ to find a way of emancipating their slaves, perhaps training them for a life of freedom and helping them to the means of independent life, but the practical difficulties were very great, as the age of Reconstruction amply showed, and a failure to grapple with them and make efforts in that direction, while wrong, does not seem to me to fall into the category of horrific acts I'm trying to describe.

The Portuguese trader who bought the slaves on the block at the coast and then packed them into tiny berths, gradually throwing off the bodies of those who did not survive the passage across the Atlantic, is a different matter, and he, I am far more inclined to think, was indeed committing an evil that cannot in any way be excused by any ideology.

And ordering one's overseer to cut off a slave's foot for attempting to run away also seems to fall into such a category.

Aaron: "For when the Gentiles...show the work of the Law written in their hearts...." (Rom. 2:14-15) There is no excuse for any of us for violating God's Law which is written in our hearts. I don't deny that we have the capacity to sear our consciences so that we are less aware of our sins than would be the case if our consciences weren't seared. However, I don't see conscience-searing as providing justification for ignorance-based sin. In that case, ignorance is no excuse.

However, jurisdiction applies. What right to we have to judge anyone not in our jurisdiction? Do we even have a jurisdiction? That seems to preclude the sort of militant religion that you warn against.

The alternative that has been presented to me is that the soldiers in doing that were not acting on their own but merely as agents of God, but I am strongly disinclined to buy that, nor do I affirm it as part of Christian doctrine.

Lydia, I can understand a grave reluctance to attribute the standard literal reading of God commanding the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites as fully accurate. However, I don't believe there is any shred of a hope in extracting out of the standard understanding of the story of Abraham and Isaac the clear reception of the fact that God told Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham was absolutely willing to obey, and that obedience was greatly rewarded by God. If you extract out of that story Abraham's obedience, you destroy his faith, and you ruin the entire salvation history through the Jews to Jesus.

So the understanding of God's commands must have room in them for God to command direct intentional killing by us humans, and for us to obey precisely because it is God's word.

To give (in brief) one of the standard explanations of this: God owns each human's life - nobody is owed a nanosecond more life than God chooses to allot to them. God can, with perfect justice, snuff out a persons's life simply by ceasing to continue will them to be alive, but normally He chooses instead to bring about death through instruments. Most often He uses natural means as an instrument, especially accidents and illness. Sometimes, as in war, He allows humans intent on murder to be the instrument of a death that He intends, but while He intends to allows the death of the victim (for otherwise no such death could occur), He in no way intends the evil will of the murderer. Rarely, he uses humans as His instrument by giving them direct command to kill, and in this case His chosen instrument, if acting wholly with interior obedience rather than with interior pleasure in the slaughter, is absolutely blameless because he is simply doing God's will. He is also blameless because there can be no moral evil in bringing about the death that God intended through the means that God commands.

So Abraham, while remaining in perfect obedience willed absolutely to follow God's order and kill Isaac, did not take any pleasure in the anticipated death. So also, for the Israelites like Gideon commanded to make war on the Canaanites and slaughter them, if they killed out of obedience and not out of bloodlust, they remained completely free of moral taint. There is no record that I recall of those who are upheld for approval taking delight in the mass death of the victims: David who slew Philistines is rather applauded for his interior restraint. And God later says that it is not the death of the evil men that He delights in, but their conversion.

Nonetheless, I DON'T agree with Aaron's thesis either. While there is plenty of something that passes close to invincible ignorance on the part of those raised in a wholly Muslim society that preaches death to the infidels, even there: does the preaching of Islam require that a man take delight in the mass death of infidels rather than their conversion? Does not the Koran rather suggest that conversion is even better than death for those who do not yet believe in Islam? I think (so far as outward actions can speak to inner state of soul, which I do not claim to see) that God will condemn Atta and his ilk on their own stated beliefs , because their own beliefs as such do not give a Muslim the license to take pleasure in evil.

Further, I suspect that both for the Muslim and the worshiper of Ba'al, that a man who is truly attempting to turn his will to the true Divinity will come across opportunities and graces to see concerns in the typically observed order in their religion, and have opportunities to raise their behavior and thinking above that of sheer blind outward obedience with inward dullness. And therefore a man who continues on in dull, unconsidered blind actions without attempting to discipline his interior to true worship of the true Divinity is condemned, not for his initial error of putting faith in the teaching of his God-given parents, but for his own personal failure to make the best of the opportunities he had to respond to the truth, which he omitted out of laziness or hatred or fear which are his own personal sins.

Still further, it is generally the case that even when a religion teaches directly contrary to a specific truth of the natural law in such wise that a believer is deformed and made to be invincibly ignorant on that point, no religion does so for the entirety of the natural law. In specific, no religion could of its own teaching undermine the part of the natural law that says "honor divinity with the deepest obeisance", which (if a man would only consider the question) should obviously include one's interior disposition even more than one's exterior actions. Therefore, no adult is _excused_ from the understanding that he has an obligation to God that includes a discipline over his thoughts and chosen desires. That is to say, nobody is free of blame for failing make the attempt to raise his heart and mind to God insofar as his own capacities and learning allow, and this will condemn the actions of many who follow Islam in outward actions that defy the natural law because they also interiorly delight in evil (oh, by the way, it will also condemn many Christians who obey the natural law outwardly but make no effort to conform their spirit to that outward obedience).

Tony, I can't really agree that the taking delight exhausts the evil in other cases. For example, a mother who wept and felt terrible while burning her child to Baal is not excused in that case because she doesn't take delight in burning her child alive. A doctor who calmly and believing himself merely to be acting "objectively," without any delight in so doing, administers a lethal injection to a disabled infant, is not absolved from the charge of doing murder.

I agree with you that the the Abraham case is far more difficult for theological reasons, given its tight interconnection with Christian teaching and the whole history of God's working with His people. I tend to take a "divide and conquer" strategy here. If I "whittle it down" to the Abraham case, I have taken care of 90% of my problem, as it were. A couple of differences in the Abraham case are a) that according to the author of Hebrews, Abraham believed that Isaac would be resurrected in order to fulfill God's promise to Abraham and b) that God stopped Abraham from actually killing Isaac. How much one can get out of these differences I'm still not sure, but it does seem to me that the case is less problematic than a case of a soldier who literally walks through the streets of a city, routing out little children, tearing them from their mothers' arms, and hacking them to death or dashing out their brains. Pleasure or no pleasure. You wouldn't do it. (I hope.)

Rob G, you may be right that I misunderstood that chapter from Romans, I don't know. Rom 1:32 ("Who knowing the judgment of God...") seems to extend the "no excuse" thing to all the bad things listed in the preceding verses, probably a more extensive list than Lydia's. But it's quite possible I'm just misreading Paul.

In any case, Lydia's "no excuse" doctrine not only can be used to demonize people, it often has been and, I think, almost inevitably will be. Which of course is not to say that all or even most people who believe that doctrine will use it to demonize people. But the doctrine is falsified by experience, it causes harm, and it doesn't seem to do much good, so I don't see that it has much going for it.

TomH, sure, there's no excuse if you know something's wrong but you do it anyway. But my point is that even if child sacrifice is against God's or nature's law, we know from history that the law is not written on all our hearts in any generally legible way. So if people are unable to read what you claim to be divine or natural law on their hearts, it's not necessarily because of a seared conscience or any other defect of their own.

Jurisdiction doesn't apply because we're talking morality, not jurisprudence. I'm accepting the principle that we can sometimes morally judge acts in different cultures (by our own morality, of course). I guess you're right that negating this principle would solve the problem, but people here are affirming the principle when they say that a given act is evil and that the perpetrator (from a different culture) must know that. That implies a moral judgment on the perpetrator, not just the act.

So, Aaron, you're saying that the person in the other culture definitely doesn't know it's evil, but it really is morally wrong? That seems to create certain problems of responsibility. Rather like saying that a tiger is committing murder.

So, Aaron, you're saying that the person in the other culture definitely doesn't know it's evil, but it really is morally wrong? That seems to create certain problems of responsibility.

Exactly so. A sin may be objectively mortal (such as murder), but subjectively, somewhat less, such as in the case of insanity or genuine invincible ignorance. The problem is that people like to make excuses and deceive themselves into thinking that they really aren't as guilty as they might really be. In the case of many young adults, the whole argument for lack of culpability for pre-marital sex is that they were merely showing love to the other person and how can that be bad. While don't understand the nature of the act as being surely evil, nevertheless, they are not excused from culpability because the act is of such import that it demands careful consideration and an informed conscience and they clearly have been either deceived by some adult or peer and have bought into the lie, or they have simply been crassly negligent in forming their conscience in the matter. In these sorts of cases, there is too much common knowledge that this is against Christian behavior that even pagans can learn the truth after five milliseconds of blogging. In fact, in today's information glutted societies, culpability and responsibility should be more, not less. Nevertheless, there are legitimate cases where something may be morally wrong, but the person may be morally inculpable.

Another instance would be in matters of dress. Back in the day, the miniskirt was an extremely immodest form of dress and would never be tolerated inside the doors of a Church. In fact, one cannot, even today, go into St. Peter's Church in Rome without wearing at least a long skirt (which will be provided and insisted on if one shows up wearing a miniskirt). Nevertheless, how many times do we see such dress in modern American Churches? Many young people have become inured to them. Are they morally culpable? Interesting question as dress needs to be determined by culture, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, but we live in such a fragmented culture that some will be scandalized and some will not. I, personally, am scandalized, but it becomes harder and harder as the fashion becomes the norm to explain to young people why this is the case. What about situations such as this?

Some things to think about.

Oh, there is no official Merry Christmas post, so, Merry Christmas to all.

MC a Merry Christmas to you, but also, be patient. There _is_ a Merry Christmas post, but we're trying to be somewhat liturgically correct and not publish it until (nearer to) sundown on Christmas Eve.

A miniskirt is nothing. A year or two ago in the summers we were talking about young ladies with their breasts and, er, derrieres almost wholly uncovered. Not at my church, but that's just because my church is so small. It was to the point where the girls were pretty much walking about half naked, and I assume plenty of them went to church that way, for what it's worth. I certainly don't count that as being _as wrong_ as their committing a suicide bombing, but I think they were grossly negligent in thinking and acting in these areas. Modesty is one of my "things." Styles have swung back a _bit_, so that now they are still very _ugly_ but less hideously immodest. Or let us rather say that lots of cleavage showing is still considered just fine, but long undershirts with the pants half off are now also stylish, which covers up some things. The mothers, to my mind, bear a great deal of responsibility and blame.

But my point is that even if child sacrifice is against God's or nature's law, we know from history that the law is not written on all our hearts in any generally legible way.

If that's true, then resign yourself to moral chaos. If a universal moral prohibition against murder cannot be demanded of all people everywhere, then nothing can. I suspect, btw, that those who practice child sacrifice to propitiate a ravenous god do it precisely because they know it is the worst possible thing they can do.

I second Bill Luse's point. C. S. Lewis said something similar about both the lust for black magic and about sexual perversion. Roughly, he said that it does not help to tell the man caught up in these lusts that what he desires is contrary to nature and hence, wrong, because it is the very flavor of "turning the clocks backward" that he desires in the act. Similarly, I think that people who sacrificed their children to idols were moved by that sense of abandoning all moral norms as of the very nature of the worship involved, and demanded, by that sort of god. This is why Chesterton refers to the gods of the Carthaginians as the demons.

Interesting post Lydia,

I would add that the argument as you have defined it, and indeed as I have also heard it repeated, was never intended to mitigate the moral weight of a crime; rather, it was interested in identifying the root of the evil, which often times is not the ultimate act itself but an intellectual forerunner. Moral weight remains intact, merely an identification question.

It is also worth reiterating the traditional Christian belief that a consequence of sin is the darkening of the intellect. An applicable corollary for those who are eager to deploy the ideology made him do it defense might be that earnest and willful belief in a gravely wrong ideology must be accompanied by gravely moral sin--if the belief is in fact earnest. So this defense is no defense at all. There is of course a separate argument about the role of ignorance, but this is an entirely different question.

I would also add that ideology is not subscribed to through a single act of the will, as this common fallacy seems to suggest. Remaining in false belief, just as remaining in faith, requires a continuous act of the will. The allegiance must be continually renewed. It is a blasphemy to suggest that free will should be nullified following some human act like attending a training camp or admiring a tyrant.

Joseph Ratzinger wrote a provocative and succinct work on conscience as a cardinal. In it I believe he says that he first became interested in writing the work because of a discussion he had with a superior faculty member when he was at university. The faculty member had painted himself into a corner after invoking an argument just like the one you brought up; in a final charge the professor even declared that Hitler himself could not be held accountable for his atrocities being driven mad as he was by ideology. This didn't sit well with the young student.

I was in part inspired to write this post because a commentator in a different post said something much like that about Hitler--something to the effect that we should view him not as choosing evil but as mistaking the nature of good.

I agree with you that the the Abraham case is far more difficult for theological reasons, given its tight interconnection with Christian teaching and the whole history of God's working with His people. I tend to take a "divide and conquer" strategy here. If I "whittle it down" to the Abraham case, I have taken care of 90% of my problem, as it were.

Well, intellectually speaking, I am afraid that you will be kind of in the position of Ratzinger's professor who had painted himself into a corner: "I have painted 90% of the floor, I only have to do the last 10% and the job is perfect." Hmmm.... Arius may have thought he had locked down 90% of standard doctrine, too. (And no, I am not trying to suggest that you are another Arius, nor do I think it.)

I can't really agree that the taking delight exhausts the evil in other cases. For example, a mother who wept and felt terrible while burning her child to Baal is not excused in that case because she doesn't take delight in burning her child alive.

I wasn't really trying to make the case that the taking delight exhausts the evil. But now that you raise the point, I would suggest that in most cases of "following your (false) religion" into killing the infant the "taking delight" (say, by the priests offering the sacrifice) is a road-marker, pointing in the direction of the true evil that is present, a sign that is available for reading by those who have eyes to see. Sure, I suppose that there may be a doctor who "objectively" and without satisfaction performs an abortion, but by this point far and away the vast majority of professional abortionists are totally committed to bringing abortion to every pregnant woman they can get in their door. Objectivity is far from their minds.

Lydia, good point with the tiger analogy. The problem is with my labeling. I think I'm saying that the act of child sacrifice is in the same category as you say IVF sometimes is, however you decide to label that category.

William Luse is wrong on historical fact. There might have been sacrificers who fit his description, but that's certainly not all of them. Child-sacrificers, at least some of them, offered their children as a most precious gift, sometimes apparently for the god to spare the life of another family member. The sacrificer saw it as an act of good, not of evil. I haven't studied the subject, so I've only got one (secondary) reference: Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity.

"...Hitler--something to the effect that we should view him not as choosing evil but as mistaking the nature of good."

Actually, the two are not mutually exclusive. Hitler and the Nazis chose to do evil to accomplish what they perceived as a greater good: by eradicating the Jewish race (an evil) they would save their race and their nation (the greater good). That they may not have believed that the former was an evil is immaterial.

Aaron, I'm afraid your view comes close to arguing that there are no inherently evil acts, that their rightness or wrongness is based on the disposition of the actor. This may be true, but only in the very limited sense of personal culpability, and of course only God knows the heart and can judge personal culpability. This is why in the Orthodox Church even the suicide, for instance, is not presumed to be in hell. He has committed a grave sin, and obviously did not receive the sacraments of confession and communion before he died, so he is not buried from the Church -- his final earthly act was, in effect, an act of apostasy.

Yet, the Church takes into consideration that he may have been of unsound mind in one way or another, and thus was perhaps not personally culpable for this action, and thus may still be saved. Despite the fact that suicide is an evil act, in this case the actor may or may not be personally culpable -- only God knows.

You can apply this to almost any human in any situation, but it has only to do with a given person's salvation, and does not extend in any way to the acts that the person commits. Ted Bundy may have been insane and thus not personally culpable, in the eternal sense, for the murders he committed. Yet the heinousness of the actions is not lessened, and as the law declared him sane he is not any less culpable before the law for his acts.

Aaron, I'm afraid your view comes close to arguing that there are no inherently evil acts...

No, Rob G, that's exactly what he's arguing. When he said in an earlier comment that "Even if child sacrifice is against natural law - I certainly don't think it is," the game was up.

It was Lydia who pointed out my error when I said that child sacrifice was morally wrong whereas the perpetrators were not morally culpable. Lydia said, correctly, that that's like saying it's murder if a tiger kills someone. My mistake was to use language that abstracted the actor out from the act. So I'm not just denying that there are inherently evil acts, I'm denying that you can morally judge abstract "acts" at all, if you mean a general abstract act without considering the actor. If you kill someone it may be murder, but if a tiger kills him it's not murder.

Bill Luse means, I would well imagine, to include the person implicitly in the description of the act--e.g., deliberately, knowingly killing an innocent human being. A tiger can't do that. What you seem to be saying is that if a person follows a false religion he can deliberately, knowingly kill an innocent human being but really not know it is wrong because he thinks it's legitimate as commanded by his god.

If you kill someone it may be murder, but if a tiger kills him it's not murder.

God, that's deep.

Thanks, Lydia, for saving me the trouble.

Maybe it wasn't clear above that I was not responding to William Luse's comment. I was responding to Rob G's, which preceded it: "Aaron, I'm afraid your view comes close to arguing that there are no inherently evil acts, that their rightness or wrongness is based on the disposition of the actor."

When I politely ignored some of William Luse's statements, it was only because I didn't think they even merited a response. But I'll go ahead and respond to his December 25 comment because it's being followed up.

While it's pretty clear what Rob G meant by "inherently evil acts", I can only guess what William Luse meant by it since he apparently meant something different. I'll just point out that "X is not prohibited by natural law" does not imply "X is not inherently evil" if the latter term means (I'm only guessing) evil in the sense of an objective, metaphysically real, morally binding property. For instance, the Judeo-Christian tradition views child sacrifice as banned by revealed law and therefore as what Luse would presumably call "inherently evil", whatever the various Jewish and Christian traditions' views of natural law. If Luse's allegation is that I'm saying that moral properties are not metaphysically real, well, first of all I'm not saying or implying that, and second, it seems pretty irrelevant to the whole topic here.

Lydia correctly summarizes one of my points as,

if a person follows a false religion he can deliberately, knowingly kill an innocent human being but really not know it is wrong because he thinks it's legitimate as commanded by his god.

(Though I'd replace "commanded" by "sanctioned".) But I think this is a trivial and uninteresting point, because it seems so obvious as to be beyond dispute. See, for just one example, 2 Kings 3:26-27, which Levenson discusses in the book I mentioned above. Levenson points out that in a plain reading of the text, even the biblical author is implying that the child sacrifice worked.

My non-trivial assertion is that a killer's belief that the act is morally good may sometimes, but not always, be part of a valid "moral excuse", in the sense of Lydia's example of in vitro fertilization. What matters is not, pace Lydia, how "glaringly horrific" the act is - Mesha might have been horrified at having to sacrifice his son in order to avoid defeat - but how much choice the person exercised in arriving at and maintaining his belief.

While it's pretty clear what Rob G meant by "inherently evil acts", I can only guess what William Luse meant by it

Let me spell it out. An inherently, or intrinsically, evil act (like, say, intentionally killing an innocent child) is one that is always and everywhere wrong, and is permitted by no circumstances whatsoever.

So...that "X is not prohibited by natural law" does not imply "X is not inherently evil"...yes it does, since all inherently evil acts are prohibited by natural law, or else there is no natural law.

What matters is not, pace Lydia, how "glaringly horrific" the act is...but how much choice the person exercised in arriving at and maintaining his belief.

Actually, how glaringly horrific the act is is exactly what matters. The Carthaginians chose to throw their children into the furnaces, and it's rather telling that their contemporaries across the water, the Romans, who were pretty bad themselves at times, were not inclined to excuse the Carthaginians' behavior because they grew up in a bad neighborhood.

...since all inherently evil acts are prohibited by natural law, or else there is no natural law.

This is a quibble, but I think you are claiming access to future knowledge with your statement. Unless the natural law is complete for all time, it seems better to leave open the possibility that some inherently evil acts are yet to be prohibited.

Well, no. The natural law doesn't change like that. Natural law theory is not divine command theory, you understand.

Unless the natural law is complete for all time

What Lydia said. I'm talking about the one in her post that is "written on your heart." It won't be changing, though you may not immediately recognize all its parameters in all cases.

Mike T: the key word in the passage you quoted from me is unchosen authority - parents, priests, etc. Muhammad Atta, unlike a typical ancient child-sacrificer, actively chose his ideology. Presumably he could have rejected it at any time. It's irrelevant whether his ideology was "true" Islam or some modern perversion of it or something in between; what matters about the ideology itself is that it's morally wrong. I think this is about the only place I agree with Lydia.

That key word is not as relevant as you think. Even supposing your opinion, if he starts from an Islamic POV and then discovers that the majority of his peers are following a less Islamic path, he is actually continuing his "unchosen authority's" path when he becomes a jihadist.

Though I guess you could say that since he put his conscious mind into analyzing his unchosen path, and then chose a purer version that that changes everything.

Of course, if you want to go there, you're just being pointlessly legalistic and just arguing for the sake of arguing. Life, morality, etc. are nowhere near as complicated as legalists and philosophers tend to believe.

Hmm, people are still posting in this thread.

This whole natural-law tangent took off from an off-hand, parenthetical remark I made. I think that William is still wrong on natural law and "inherently evil acts", even after his clarification, but I don't want to follow that tangent. My whole intent, which my off-hand remark undermined, was to bracket those questions. That's why I said that even if natural law forbids child sacrifice, that fact was clearly unknown in some places and times.

Mike T, I assume the "he" you're talking about is some generic Islamist, and not Muhammad Atta as in my paragraph you quoted. Otherwise I don't understand your reply, because as I said, Atta chose his ideology. Anyway, I'm saying just what you guessed I'd say: if this hypothetical person's ideology was initially unchosen, but he later chose to maintain it rather than to follow his peers, then he's morally culpable. The presumption is that his choosing it at any time whatsoever indicates that from that time on he could just as freely have rejected it.

You're right that this is legalistic because it infers the person's mental state from his circumstances. A moralist, unlike a jurist, would have direct knowledge of the entire history of this hypothetical person's mental state. A moralist would say that if this person could reasonably have chosen a different ideology but didn't, he's culpable. A jurist would be interested in knowable things like the fact that this person's peers rejected the ideology but this person did not. I said before that I was talking about morality not jurisprudence, but you helped me see that I was really confusing the two kinds of thinking. I was being pointlessly legalistic, not for the sake of arguing, but because I wasn't thinking clearly.

I still see the morality itself as complicated, though. I plead guilty to that. I think there's a spectrum of moral culpability, not an either-or, because freedom of choice is not an either-or. So I see my argument here as extremely simplistic, just a rough outline. (These are blog comments, after all.) I think it would be pretty unjust to try to make this kind of thing simpler than it really is.