Edward Feser's Blog, page 16

In defense of culture war

FromMarxists on the left to former House Speaker Paul Ryan on the right, manyvoices in the political discussion assure us that the “culture war” is a distractionand that what matter most are economic issues. But economic order has cultural prerequisites, and indeed economicphenomena themselves cannot even be conceptualized apart from cultural presuppositions.  I make the case for the priority of cultureto economics in my essay “InDefense of Culture War,” which appears this week at Postliberal Order .

The associationist mindset

WhenAristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by naturerational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reason logically(which, of course, is obviously not the case). They mean that human beings by nature have the capacity for reason, unlike other animals.  Whether they exercise that capacity well isanother question.  Human beings are oftenirrational, but you have to have the capacity for reason to be irrational.  A dog or a tree doesn’t even rise to the levelof irrationality.  They are non-rational, not irrational.

Rationality,on the Aristotelian-Thomistic account, involves three basic capacities: tograsp abstract concepts (such as the concept of being a man or the concept of beingmortal); to put concepts together into complete thoughts or propositions(such as the proposition that all men aremortal); and to reason logically from one proposition to another (as whenwe reason from the premises that all menare mortal and that Socrates is a manto the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).  Logic studies the ways concepts can becombined into propositions and the ways propositions can be combined intoinferences.  Deductive logic studies,specifically, inferences in which the conclusion is said to follow from thepremises of necessity; and inductive logic studies inferences in which it issaid to follow with probability.

Any adequatephilosophical or psychological theory of the human mind has to be consistentwith our possession of these capacities. Many such theories fail this test, but might accurately describe somenon-human creatures.  For example,Skinnerian behaviorism is hopeless as a theory of human nature, and isn’t evenplausible as a description of many of the higher animals.  But asDaniel Dennett suggests, it might be true of simple invertebrateslike sea slugs.  (It is also possible fora theory to do justice to our rational capacities, but still fail in some otherrespect accurately to describe human nature. For example, Cartesian dualism does so insofar as it wrongly takes the humanintellect to be a complete substance in its own right stocked with innate ideas.  But this is at least an approximation of whatangelic minds are like.)

Then thereare theories which get the human mind wrong, but nevertheless afford an approximatedescription of what a certain kind of disorderedthinking is like.  Consider the disputebetween voluntarism and intellectualism. For the intellectualist, the intellect is prior to the will in the sensethat the will is of its nature always directed at what the intellect judges tobe good.  Voluntarism, which comes indifferent forms, seriously modifies or denies this claim. Like other Thomists,I take intellectualism to be the correct view. But asI have argued elsewhere, with a certain kind of irrationality it is as if the person’s will floated free ofhis intellect.  (I’ve labeled this “thevoluntarist personality.”)

Anotherexample, I want to suggest here, is afforded by associationism.  Associationisttheories attempt to account for all transitions from one mental state toanother by reference to causal connections established via experience.  For example, David Hume famously positedthree principles of association: resemblance,contiguity in time or space, and cause and effect.  Resemblance has to do with how one idea mighttrigger another because of some similarity between the things represented bythe ideas.  For instance, seeing anorange might cause you to think of a basketball because they are similar inshape and color; smelling the marijuana smoke wafting from a nearby apartmentmight call to mind a skunk because the odor is similar; and so on.  Examples involving contiguity in time orspace would be the way that thinking about World War II might bring to mind thesound of swing music (since it was popular at the time of the war), or the waythat seeing the White House might generate an image of the Washington Monument,since they are in the same city. Examples involving cause and effect would be the sight of a puddle onthe ground triggering the thought of rain (since that is often a puddle’scause) and the thought of a gun generating a mental image of a dead man (sincethat is often a gun’s effect).

Notice thatall of these relations are sub-rational.  Suppose that, by way of the operation ofHume’s three principles, some particular person somehow developed a strongtendency to have the thought that it’sraining in Cleveland every time it occurred to him that it is now five o’clock just as heremembered that Charles is the currentking of England.  Obviously, thatwould not entail the validity of the following argument:

It is now five o’clock

Charles is the current king of England

Therefore,it’s raining in Cleveland

That is tosay, the causal relations by whichone thought might come to generate another are not the same thing as the logical relations by which oneproposition might entail another.  As aresult, associationist theories, even if they might provide plausible accountsof the mental processes of some non-human animals, simply cannot account forthe rational powers that set human beings apart from other animals.  For the causal relations they posit do notsuffice to guarantee that the right logicalrelations will hold between the thoughts governed by those causal relations.  

This is alongstanding problem for associationist theories.  In contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitivescience, and artificial intelligence research, the most influential variationon associationism is known as connectionismor the “neural network” approach.  It hasbeen vigorously criticized by thinkers like Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn forits inability to account for the rationality of thought.  What connectionist models (and the AI builton them) are good at is patternrecognition.  But sensitivity topatterns is not the same thing as a grasp of the logical relationships betweenconcepts and propositions.  If all we didwas pattern recognition, we would not be capable of the valid inferences thatwe carry out all the time.

Likevoluntarism, though, associationism is not a bad approximate description ofcertain disordered habits of thinking.  For many people’s minds seem to operate as if they were governed by purelyassociationist principles.  Inparticular, those chronically prone to fallacious reasoning are like this.  For many logical fallacies involve a kind ofjumping to conclusions on the basis of an association between ideas that seems tight but is in fact too weak to grounda deductively valid or even inductively strong inference.

The mostobvious example involves a fallacy that happens to go by the name of “guilt byassociation.”  Suppose someone reasons asfollows: “Chesterton criticized capitalism, and communists criticizecapitalism, so Chesterton must have been a communist.”  The premises are true but the conclusion isfalse.  The speaker is assuming thatbecause communism is associated with criticism of capitalism and Chesterton isassociated with criticism of capitalism, it is reasonable to associateChesterton with communism.  The reasonthis is fallacious, of course, is that though all communists are critics ofcapitalism, the converse is not true – not all critics of capitalism arecommunists. 

Sometimeswhen people commit this fallacy, they give it up immediately once it is pointedout to them.  That is a good indicationthat the psychological source of the error is simply that they made theinference too quickly or inattentively, nothing more.  But sometimes people are very reluctant togive up such an argument even after the error is explained to them.  For example, suppose someone argues: “Racistsare opposed to illegal immigration and you are opposed to it, so you must be aracist.”  The fallacy here is exactly thesame.  Even if all racists are opposed toillegal immigration, the converse is not true, so the conclusion does notfollow.  But people can be very reluctantto give up this argument even though it is a straightforward case of thefallacy of guilt by association.  That isan indication that there is more going on here than merely too hasty aninference.

I’d proposethat an additional factor is a further association in the speaker’s mind.  It’s not just that the speaker associates theidea of opposition to illegalimmigration with the idea ofracism.  There are, in addition, strong emotional associations at work.  The speaker has a strongly negative emotional reaction to opposition toillegal immigration, and one that is similar to the strongly negative emotionalreaction he has to racism.  Hence eventhough there isn’t the needed logical connection to make the inference frompremise to conclusion valid, the emotionalconnection between the ideas makes it hard for the speaker to give up theconclusion that you must be a racist.  Thisassociation is merely psychologicalrather than logical, so the inference remains fallacious, but the strength ofthe association makes it nevertheless difficult for the speaker to see that.

Otherfallacies too involve jumping to conclusions on the basis of an associationthat seems logical but is in fact merely psychological, rendering the inferencefallacious but easy to fall into. Consider the “straw man” fallacy, wherein the speaker attacks acaricature of his opponent’s position rather than anything the opponent has actuallysaid.  For instance, suppose you express theview that the Covid lockdowns did no net good but caused grave economic andpsychological harm, and in response someone accuses you of being a libertarianwho puts individual freedom ahead of the lives of others.  The speaker is misrepresenting your position,making it sound as if your view is that even though the lockdowns saved lives,your right to do what you want trumps that.  But that is not what you said.  What you said is that they did not save lives and in addition causedgrave harm, and you made no appeal to any libertarian premises.

Here too itis psychological associations rather than logical connections that account forthe error.  The speaker associatesopposition to lockdowns with libertarianism (perhaps on the basis of a furtherfallacy of guilt by association, or because the lockdown critics he’s dealtwith before happen to have been libertarians, or for some other reason).  The one idea simply happens to trigger the other one in his mind, andthus he supposes that you must be a libertarian and attacks the straw man.  The causalconnection between the ideas makes the inference quite natural for him, but itdoes not make it logical.

Yet other fallaciesare plausibly generated by such associationist psychological mechanisms.  Take the “circumstantial ad hominem” fallacy, also known as the fallacy of appeal tomotive.  This involves rejecting a claimor argument merely on the basis of some suspect motive attributed (whethercorrectly or incorrectly) to the person advocating it.  For example, suppose some writer gives anargument to the effect that cutting taxes would promote economic growth, andyou dismiss it on the grounds that it reflects mere self-interest on his part,or because the writer works for a think tank which is known for advocating suchpolicies.  The problem with this is thatwhether the argument is sound or not is completely independent of the motivesof the person giving it.  A person withbad motives can give a good argument and a person with good motives can give abad argument.

However,motives are not alwaysirrelevant.  For example, they areimportant when evaluating the reliability of testimony or expert advice.  If the sole witness in a murder trial isindependently known to be hostile to the suspect, then that gives at least somereason to doubt his testimony implicating the suspect.  If a salesman assures you that the product hesells is the best on the market, the fact that he has a motive to sell it toyou gives you reason to doubt him despite his expertise regarding products ofthat kind.

In a fallacyof appeal to motive, what no doubt often happens is that, on the basis ofexamples like these, the person committing the fallacy forms a psychologicalassociation between having a suspectmotive and being untrustworthy.  Then, when he encounters an argument given bysomeone he suspects of having a bad motive, he goes on to associate being untrustworthy not just with theperson in question but with the argumentthe person gives.  But again, thesoundness or otherwise of an argument is independent of the character of theperson who gives it, so that this transference is fallacious.  Once again, the causal connection between theideas makes an inference seem natural, despite it’s not actually being logical.

There areyet other kinds of irrationality that can plausibly be said to reflectassociationist psychological mechanisms. ElsewhereI’ve argued that “wokeness” can be characterized as “a paranoid delusionalhyper-egalitarian mindset that tends to see oppression and injustice where theydo not exist or greatly to exaggerate them where they do exist.”  An example would be the way that mild or evenentirely innocuous language in some vague way related to race is frequentlyshrilly denounced by wokesters as “racist.” For example, the well-known market chain Trader Joe’s sells a Mexican beerlabeled “Trader Jose’s,” and Chinese food products labeled “Trader Ming’s.”  To any sane mind, there is nothing remotelyobjectionable about this.  In particular,there is nothing in these labels that entails the slightest degree of hostilitytoward Mexican or Chinese people.  Butthe woke mind is not sane, and, unsurprisingly, therewas a call a few years back to drop these labels (which, wisely, the chaindecided to ignore).

What seemsto be going on is that in the mind of the wokester, labels like these triggerthe idea of race, which in turntriggers the idea of racism, and thestrongly negative emotional associations of the latter in turn set up asimilarly negative emotional association with the labels.  There is no logical connection at all, but the strength of the psychologicalassociations makes the fallacious inference seem natural.  The woke mind is analogous to an overlysensitive smoke alarm, which blares out its obnoxious warning any time someonemerely breathes too hard.  (In the articlelinked to, I discuss some of the disordered psychological tendencies which leadto the formation of such bogus associations.)

Anotherexample of fallaciously associationist thinking would be the construction of fanciful“narratives” that seem to lend plausibility to dubious conspiracy theories ofboth left-wing and right-wing kinds.  I’veelaborated on this elsewhere and so direct interested readers to thatearlier discussion.

Naturally,since they are human beings, even people who exhibit what I am calling “theassociationist mindset” do in fact possess rationality, which is why they cancome to see their errors.  Their mindsare not in fact correctly described by associationist psychologicaltheories.  But reason is so weak in themand the mechanisms in question so strong that they can often behave as if these theories were true ofthem.  They seem to be disproportionatelyrepresented in social media contexts like Twitter.  And in fact such social media seem to fosterassociationist habits of thought, inways I’ve discussed before.

Reconsidering corporal punishment

Debatesabout crime and punishment today typically concern disagreements about thedeath penalty, or about the length, and in some cases the appropriateness, ofprison sentences.  Largely neglected isthe topic of corporal punishment – the infliction of bodily pain as a penaltyfor an offense.  No doubt many willregard the very idea as a relic of a less enlightened age.  But that is not a view shared universally.  And the practice made headlines in the Westwithin living memory, when, in 1994, the American teenager Michael Fay wascaned in Singapore for vandalism (specifically, for stealing road signs anddamaging a number of cars).

Vandalismmuch more grave than the kind Fay was punished for has become rife in Westerncountries in recent years.  The riots ofthe summer of 2020 saw widespread defacement and pulling down of statues andother monuments.  The riot of January 6,2021 saw the U.S. Capitol vandalized.  Environmentalistsfrequently deface or glue themselves to works of art, or block traffic bysitting in major roadways and refusing to move. That the physical damage caused by such acts is often worse than thesort of thing Fay was punished for is bad enough.  But these acts are worse in another way.  Fay’s actions were mere obnoxious hijinks ofthe kind boys are sometimes prone to. The political vandalism of recent years is much more sinister, being anassault on the social order itself and on works of art that are the heritage ofthe human race.

If relativelymilder vandalism of the kind Fay was caned for can merit corporal punishment –and I would argue that it can – then the political vandalism of recent yearscan hardly merit less.  It might seem anextreme way to deal with the current problem. But the current problem is itself extreme, and calls for a proportionateremedy.

To see whythis is a remedy worthy of consideration, let’s consider the natural law moraljustification of the use of corporal punishment, and also what the tradition ofthe Church has to say about it.  Beforedoing so, however, we need to put aside a potential red herring.

Not the same thing as torture

In thedecade or so after 9/11, a rather nasty debate arose in Catholic circles abouttorture.  Surprisingly, few seemed ableor willing to define it, including those who were extremely confident in theirpronouncements about its moral status. My own view is that the most plausible definition is along the linesendorsed at the time by Thomists like James Chastek, who definedtorture as “the use of physical pain to break the will of another”(though I’d alter this to note that the pain could also be psychological innature). 

The will isalso known as the rational appetite –that is to say, the power by which a rational being pursues what its intellecttakes to be good or avoids what it takes to be bad.  To break someone’s will is essentially tosubvert its operation, either by clouding the intellect so thoroughly that thewill has no target to aim at, or by preventing the will from locking on thetarget where it exists.  Torturingsomeone involves inflicting physical or psychological pain severe enough to disruptthe will’s operation in one or both of these ways.  It approximates reducing him to an animal bypreventing his rationality from functioning.

Oneadvantage of such a definition is that it both captures the paradigm cases oftorture – actions that pretty much everyone would agree count as “torture”whatever they go on to say about its moral status – while not including actionsthat most would not regard as tortureeven though they involve inflicting physical or psychological pain. 

Inparticular, no one would say that merelyhitting another person amounts to torture, even if this is done for a badreason and even if the blow is severe enough momentarily to distract themind.  For example, we don’t think of twoboys engaged in a schoolyard fistfight as torturingeach other.  For the pain they inflict isnot severe or sustained enough utterly to subvertthe will’s operation, even if it obviously can distract the intellect fromfocusing on what is reasonable. Inflicting physical or psychological pain can in some cases even help torestore the will’s proper operation,as when one slaps or yells loudly at a hysterical person in order to make him“snap out of it.”

Anotheradvantage of the definition, from the point of view of Catholic moral theology,is that it indicates why torture isinherently wrong, as the Church has taught in recent decades.  For example, in Veritatis Splendor, Pope St. John Paul II characterizes “physicaland mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit” as “intrinsically evil” insofaras they “radically contradict the good of the person made in [God’s] image”(80).  It is precisely insofar as we havereason and will that we are made in God’s image.  Hence to subvert these faculties is toattempt to destroy what is distinctive about us and God-like in us, and thusinherently contrary to our good.

It does notfollow, however, that all inflictionof physical or psychological pain is contrary to the good of the person made inGod’s image, or otherwise intrinsically wrong. In particular, it does not follow that an infliction of pain that does not break the will or subvert a person’srational faculties is inherently wrong. And these things cannot besaid to be inherently wrong, for such an extreme claim would contradict bothnatural law and divine revelation, as we’ll see presently.  In any event, to defend corporal punishmentis not to defend torture (which I most certainly am not doing and would notdo).

Corporal punishment and natural law

The naturallaw justification of corporal punishment is pretty straightforward.  Essentially it is just a further applicationof the same reasoning that justifies the harsher penalty of capitalpunishment.  Adapting the basic argumentfor capital punishment that I’ve presented in several places, the reasoninggoes like this:

1.Wrongdoers deserve punishment as a matter of retributive justice.

2. The moregrave the wrongdoing, the more severe is the punishment deserved.

3. Someoffenses are so grave that nothing less than corporal punishment would beproportionate in its severity.

4.Therefore, wrongdoers guilty of such offenses deserve corporal punishment.

5. Governingauthorities have the right to inflict on wrongdoers the punishments theydeserve.

6. Therefore,governing authorities have the right to inflict corporal punishment on thoseguilty of sufficiently grave offenses.

Theconclusions 4 and 6 clearly follow from the premises of this argument.  But obviously, a skeptic will demand justificationfor the premises.  I’ve defended premises1, 2, and 5 in ByMan Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment(the book I co-wrote with Joseph Bessette), and in my recent article “TheJustice of Capital Punishment” (in Matthew Altman, ed., ThePalgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment).  In the same places, I’ve also defended thepremise that some crimes are so grave that nothing less than the death penaltywould be proportionate in its severity. And if that is true, then it follows afortiori that premise 3 above is true. So, readers in doubt about any of the premises are directed to thoseother writings of mine.

Notice thatthe conclusion of the argument is notthat governing authorities mustinflict corporal punishment whenever it is deserved.  That is not my position (just as it is not myposition that the death penalty mustalways be inflicted where it is deserved). The claim is only that governing authorities have a right to inflictit.  But that one has a right to dosomething does not by itself entail that one ought to exercise that right.  And there can be good reasons, includingmoral reasons, for refraining from exercising a right. 

Thomisticnatural law theorists who defend the death penalty typically argue for using itonly where necessary (even if thequestion of why and when it would be necessary is itself a matter ofcontroversy).  That is my ownposition.  Similarly, I would not arguefor actually exercising the right to inflict corporal punishment wherever it isdeserved, but only where it is necessary. 

When wouldthat be?  The most obvious sort of casewould be the very mild corporal punishment we inflict on children when we spankthem.  Parents are in this case therelevant governing authorities (of the small-scale society that is thefamily).  Sometimes spanking is necessaryinsofar as some children are so unruly that they don’t respond to milderpunishments.  In my view, while spankingshould be used where needed, it is better to avoid it where it is not necessary.  And usually, even when it is necessary itneedn’t be done very often.  Evenunrulier children often “get the message” after one or two spankings.

But whatabout governments?  When would it benecessary for them to resort to corporal punishment, as a way of dealing with criminals?  I’ll come back to that.

Corporal punishment and Catholictradition

Sincenatural law theory has traditionally been central to Catholic moral theology,one would expect that the legitimacy of corporal punishment has been recognizedin the Church’s teaching.  And that isindeed what we find, from the very beginning.

Forstarters, the legitimacy of corporal punishment is repeatedly taught inscripture, which the Catholic Church says is divinely inspired and thus cannotteach error (particularly on matters of faith and morals).  Here are some relevant passages (alltranslations from the Revised Standard Version):

If there is a dispute between men,and they come into court, and the judges decide between them, acquitting theinnocent and condemning the guilty, then ifthe guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall cause him to lie down andbe beaten in his presence with a number of stripes in proportion to his offense.  Forty stripes may be given him, but not more;lest, if one should go on to beat him with more stripes than these, yourbrother be degraded in your sight. (Deuteronomy 25:1-3)

He who spares the rodhates his son, but he who loves him is diligent todiscipline him.(Proverbs 13:24)

Do not withhold discipline from achild; if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.  If youbeat him with the rod you will save his life from Sheol. (Proverbs 23:13-14)

He who loves his sonwill whip him often, in order that he may rejoice at theway he turns out.(Sirach 30:1)

Of the following things do not beashamed, and do not let partiality lead you to sin… of much discipline ofchildren, and of whipping a wickedservant severely.(Sirach 42:1, 5)

In the temple he found those who wereselling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at theirbusiness.  And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen,out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers andoverturned their tables. (John 2:14-15)

Notice thatthe corporal punishment countenanced in these passages is in some cases prettysevere (and certainly more severe than anything I think appropriatetoday).  Notice also that it will not doto contrast the Old Testament passages with the purportedly gentler message ofJesus, since we are told that Christhimself inflicted a whipping on the money-changers!

Naturally,the legitimacy of corporal punishment is also upheld by the Church’s moraltheologians.  For example, here are somerelevant passages from Aquinas:

It is licit to inflict harm onsomeone only in the manner of a punishment for the sake of justice.  But no one punishes anyone justly unless thatindividual is subject to his authority.  Andso to strike or beat someone is not licit except for an individual who has somesort of power over the one who is being struck or beaten.  And since children are subject to the power oftheir father and servants are subject to the power of their master, a father can licitly strike or beat hischild – and a master can strike or beat his servant – for the sake ofcorrection and discipline. (Summa TheologiaeII-II.65.2, Freddosotranslation)

Vengeance is lawful and virtuous sofar as it tends to the prevention of evil. Now some who are not influenced by motive of virtue are prevented fromcommitting sin, through fear of losing those things which they love more thanthose they obtain by sinning, else fear would be no restraint to sin.  Consequentlyvengeance for sin should be taken by depriving a man of what he lovesmost.  Now the things which man lovesmost… [include] bodily safety… Wherefore, according to Augustine'sreckoning (De Civ. Dei xxi), “Tully writes that the laws recognize eight kinds of punishment”… [including] “stripes”… (Summa Theologiae II-II.108.3)

The virtuous – who of their own freewill comply with what is honorable – should be aroused to good by means ofpre-existing customs, by showing the goodness of what is proposed.  But theinsubordinate and the degenerate are allotted physical punishments likebeatings and other chastisements, censure and loss of their possessions… Itis this way because the virtuous man, who adjusts his life to the good, heedsthe mere counsel by which good is proposed to him.  But theevil man who seeks pleasure ought to be punished by pain or sorrow like a beastof burden – the ass is driven by lashes.  (Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,Book X, Lecture 14, par. 2151-2152)

Thisteaching was reiterated in manuals of ethics and moral theology in the periodprior to Vatican II.  For example, Fr.Thomas Higgins’s book Manas Man: The Science and Art of Ethics tells us:

Correction necessarily impliescorporal punishment.  For all authoritymust have the power of coercion, physical as well as moral.  The young child in many ways is inclined toact like an animal rather than a rational being.  When he persists in acting irrationally bycontinued disobedience, physical pain is the only effective corrective.  Spare the rod and spoil the child is as truetoday as it was in Solomon’s time. (p. 409)

Similarly,in volume II of their MoralTheology: A Complete Course, Fr. John McHugh and Fr. CharlesCallan write that “bodily harms (wounds, blows, restraint)” may be inflicted aspunishment if three conditions are met: the one inflicting them must have theauthority to do so (e.g. as parents or the state do); there must be sufficientreason for doing so (such as the public good); and there must be “moderation inthe harm or pain inflicted” (pp. 129-30). For example, “the father, or those who hold his place (e.g., teachers)may administer corporal chastisements that are not of an irreparable kind tohis children (such as beatings, whippings)” (p. 130).  Addressing what would count as excess, theysay:

While children should not be spoiled,nor prisoners pampered, the other extreme of maltreatment or torture must beavoided.  It is cruel to box childrensoundly on the ears, or to push them roughly about, or to tie them up in thedark, as they may suffer permanent injury from such methods.  Likewise, it is barbarous to send convicts toa place or prison so horrible that they lose their minds or fall victims tolingering disease, or to inflict excruciating punishments by rack, thumb-screw,prolonged scourgings, etc. (p. 130)

Recent popestoo have affirmed the legitimacy of corporal punishment.  In a 1957 address to Italian jurists, PopePius XII stated:

The penal justice of the past, thatof the present to a certain degree, and – if it is true that history oftenteaches us what to expect in the future – that of tomorrow as well, makes use of punishments involving physicalpain.  (Quoted in John McDonald, Capital Punishment (London: CatholicTruth Society, 1964), p. 15)

PopeFrancis, in 2015,affirmed that mild corporal punishment in the form of spanking can sometimes bea legitimate way to discipline children. 

This is byno means an exhaustive survey of the tradition, but it indicates how consistentthe Church has been in affirming the legitimacy in principle of corporalpunishment, and that this legitimacy is grounded in divine revelation no lessthan in natural law.

Caning vandals?

Let’s return,then, to the question of whether corporal punishment might be an appropriateresponse to the current wave of political vandalism.  Obviously, existing punishments for suchbehavior are not a sufficient deterrent. Now, as Aquinas and Higgins note in a couple of the passages quotedabove, one reason for resorting to corporal punishment is that the guilty partywill not listen to reason, and that the infliction of physical pain is morelikely to get his attention.  It ishardly implausible to suppose that at least many of those who are willing totopple statues, deface artworks, or block traffic when they think the most they’llface is some jail time might be deterred if instead they faced the prospect ofa caning like the one inflicted on Michael Fay.

TheSingaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew noted that caninghas an additional benefit, which is that it is humiliating.  It isn’t justphysical pain that the offender faces, but public shame.  Now, this is an especially appropriatepenalty to inflict on political vandals. They evince a haughty contempt for the social order, the symbols thatrepresent its ideals, the decent feelings of their fellow citizens, and in somecases even the ability of those citizens safely to get on with their daily tasks.  Such vandals deserve to have contempt shownfor them in return.  And the prospect of public shame as well as physical painmay be necessary to counter the moralistic delusions that prod them even toconsider carrying out their public tantrums. If they act like spoiled children it is fitting to treat them as such.

There is astrong case to be made, then, that corporal punishment for political vandalismof the kind that we have seen in recent years would be deserved and may benecessary.  Of course, it is neverthelessunlikely that Western society in its current state would reconsider corporalpunishment any time soon.  The trend today,at least among the intelligentsia and governing elites, is in the opposite direction,toward ever greater discomfort with the very idea of punishment, let alonecorporal punishment.  Things will likelybecome much worse before Western societies are willing to do what is needed tomake them better.  Refraining frominflicting harsh punishments when they are not necessary is a mark of civilization. But refraining from inflicting them whenthey are necessary is a mark ofdecadence.

Hell and conditional prophecy

In a recenttalk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube),Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches that somewill in fact be damned.  He notes thatcertain prophecies of Christ might seem to imply this, but suggests that theymay plausibly be read as conditional prophecies rather than descriptions ofwhat will in fact happen.  Let���s take alook at his argument.

First, though,a comment on terminology.  Fr. Gaine usesthe label ���infernalism��� for the view that at least some human beings will infact be damned, and ���universalism��� for the view that all human beings will ultimatelybe saved, or at least may be.  There isnothing necessarily wrong with this usage, but it seems to me that it does notcorrespond exactly to the way others have used these labels in recent online discussionof the topic of hell.  My impression isthat ���infernalism��� is usually used in a broader way today, to include even theview that some might be damned, andthat ���universalism��� is often used in a narrower way, for the view that all must be saved.  The view that we can reasonably hope that allhuman beings are saved but that it is nevertheless possible that some aredamned ��� commonly associated with Hans Urs von Balthasar ��� would in that casecount as a (more optimistic) version of infernalism.  The way Fr. Gaine uses the terms, though, itwould count instead as a (more pessimistic) version of universalism. 

The issue isperhaps essentially semantic, but the differences in usage are worth callingattention to so that the listener does not misunderstand what Fr. Gaine issaying.  Hence, when Fr. Gaine suggeststhat the scriptural passages he refers to leave the debate between infernalismand universalism open, this does not entail that scripture is compatible withthe view (put forward by David Bentley Hart and others) that the damnation ofanyone is impossible, so that all must besaved.  Fr. Gaine is claiming only thatthese passages are compatible with the weaker thesis that it might be that all are saved, even ifthey also teach that at least some might be damned.

Where thescriptural evidence is concerned, Fr. Gaine���s focus is on Christ���s propheciesabout the Last Judgment, such as his famous statement in Matthew 25:31-46 aboutseparating the sheep from the goats and consigning the latter to eternalpunishment.  Don���t such prophecies showthat some will in fact be damned?

Fr. Gaine notesthat there are two kinds of prophecy in scripture.  First, there is what he calls ���Mosaicprophecy,��� which flatly and unconditionally foretells that a certain event willoccur.  He gives the example of Christ���sprophecy that Peter will deny him three times. Second, there is what Fr. Gaine calls ���Jeremianic prophecy,��� whichstates only that a certain event will occur ifcertain conditions are met.  For example,in Isaiah 38 it is prophesied that King Hezekiah will die imminently.  But Hezekiah repents, and God adds fifteenyears to his life.  Another example isthe repentance of the Ninevites in response to Jonah���s prophecy of thedestruction of their city.  As Aquinas notes(in Summa Theologiae II-II.171.6),prophecies of this kind are not false even though the predicted event does notcome to pass, precisely because they are conditional.  Had Hezekiah not repented, he would have died very soon, and had theNinevites not repented, their city wouldhave been destroyed.

Fr. Gaineproposes that prophecies like Christ���s statement about the sheep and the goatscan reasonably be read as Jeremianic in character.  If that is so, then while they certainly teachthat it might turn out that some aredamned, they do not flatly and unconditionally teach that some will in fact be damned.  They teach only that some will be damned if they do not repent ��� just as the prophecyabout Hezekiah is to be understood as saying only that he would die if he did not repent, and the prophecyabout Nineveh is to be understood as saying that the city would be destroyed if its citizens did not repent.  Fr. Gaine also acknowledges that one couldinstead argue for reading prophecies like the one about the sheep and the goatsas Mosaic prophecies.  But his point isthat either interpretation is compatible with orthodoxy, so that such passagescannot be said to settle the dispute between infernalism and universalism(again, as he is using those terms).

What shouldwe think about this argument?  Since Fr.Gaine does not discuss most of the scriptural passages relevant to the issue, Iam not certain that he is claiming that scripture as a whole is compatible with either infernalism or universalism,or only that certain specific scriptural passages are.  But even if we were to grant for the sake ofargument that a passage like Matthew 25:31-46 might be Jeremianic orconditional in character, I think that that cannotplausibly be said of all the relevantscriptural passages.  And thus I thinkthat, taken as a whole, scripture clearly favors infernalism over universalism. 

I have assembledand discussed the main relevant scriptural passages in anotherarticle.  Here I will focus on a fewof them to show how Fr. Gaine���s argument is problematic.  First, there are a handful of cases wherescripture seems clearly to teach that certain specific people will in fact be damned, not merely thatamong people in general, some mightbe damned. 

For example,consider Judas, of whom Christ says: ���Woe to that man by whom the Son of man isbetrayed!  It would have been better forthat man if he had not been born��� (Matthew 26:24).  It is hard to see how it could be better forJudas not to have been born if this were a conditional prophecy.  For if Christ knew that Judas would in fact repent(which, being omniscient, he would have known if that is in fact what Judasended up doing) wouldn���t it obviously be good that Judas was born?

But even ifsomeone were to claim that Christ was here merely trying to prod Judas torepent by way of an especially frightful conditional prophecy, that cannot besaid of John 17: 11-12, where, praying to the Father, Christ says: ���HolyFather, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me��� I have guarded them,and none of them is lost but the son ofperdition.���  Notice that Christ notonly flatly states that Judas is lost, but says this to the Father, and not to Judas or any other human being.  Now, the point of conditional prophecies,like the ones made to Hezekiah and the Ninevites, is to encouragerepentance.  And that requires that thosein need of repentance hear the prophecy. But in this passage, it is the Father alone who is addressed, andneedless to say, he needn���t have beenwarned about the need for repentance!

This bringsus to a second problem, which is that a prophecy can plausibly be read asconditional only when it is addressed to listeners who might benefit from it.  And as we���ve just seen, this is not the caseof all the relevant scriptural passages. For another example, consider Revelation 20:10, which states that thebeast and the false prophet of the end times will, together with the devil, betormented day and night forever and ever. Not only does this name specific people, but it does so in the contextof a book addressed, not to those particular people, but rather to Christianswho are being persecuted by those people, to reassure them in the face of the persecution.  Hence it cannot plausibly be said that thispassage is meant as a conditional warning to the persecutors, the way that theprophecies to Hezekiah and the Ninevites were intended as conditional warningsto them (and thus were addressed directly to them).

A thirdproblem is that in at least one case, people who were already dead at the timethe passage was written (unlike the case of Judas or that of the beast andfalse prophet) are said to be damned. Hence it cannot be characterized as a prophecy at all, let alone aconditional one.  Jude 7 states that ���Sodomand Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally andindulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.���  It can hardly be said that this was meant toprod the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah to repentance (as in the cases ofHezekiah and Nineveh), since those inhabitants were long dead when Jude���sepistle was written.  To be sure, thelarger context of this passage plausibly contains a conditionally propheticelement, insofar as Jude���s readers are being warned what will happen to them ifthey follow the example of Sodom and Gomorrah. All the same, the statement that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah suffered���a punishment of eternal fire��� is not itself a prophecy but the assertion of afait accompli.

A fourthproblem is that even in the case of conditional prophecies concerning hell, wecan reasonably hope that the people in question are not damned only if we canreasonably hope that they repented (as we know that Hezekiah and the Ninevites repented).  That means that we can reasonably hope thatall are saved only if it is reasonable to think that every single person who has died so far in human history repented beforedeath.  But it is not reasonable to think this. There are simply too many people who have died in what to allappearances is a state of grave sin unrepented of.  True, of any particular person, no matter howapparently hardened in evil to the bitter end, we cannot be absolutely certain that he did notsomehow find repentance in the nick of time. It is, considered in the abstract, theoretically possible.  But it simply doesn���t follow that it isremotely plausible that every singleperson who seems to have died unrepentant really repented in an unseen way. 

Now, if we���regoing to use uncontroversially conditional prophecies as our model for interpretingprophecies concerning damnation, then we should note, first, that the cases wherethe prophecy did not come to pass are cases where the people to whom theprophecy was directed clearly andexplicitly repented (as with Hezekiah and the Ninevites).  Meanwhile, cases where such prophecies didcome to pass (as with predictions about the punishment of the Israelites by wayof foreign aggressors) are cases where the people, to all appearances, did notrepent.  Therefore, where conditional propheciesconcerning damnation are concerned, the reasonable interpretation is that, withpeople who to all appearances did notrepent before death, it is highly probable that at least some of them aredamned.

All told,then, Fr. Gaine does not seem to me to have made a plausible case that the viewthat all human beings might be saved can be reconciled with the scripturalevidence.  At the very least, thetotality of the scriptural evidence clearly more strongly favors infernalism.

Relatedposts:

Howto go to hell

Does Goddamn you?

Whynot annihilation?

A HartlessGod?

No hell,no heaven

Hart,hell, and heresy

Nourgency without hell

Scriptureand the Fathers contra universalism

Popes,creeds, councils, and catechisms contra universalism

Geach onHell

Afallacy in Balthasar

Hell isnot empty

Capital punishment and the law of nations

What is thenature of Pope Francis’s 2018 change to the Catechism’s teaching on capitalpunishment?  Does it amount to a reversalof traditional teaching?  A developmentof doctrine that is consistent with that teaching?  A prudential judgment?  And if the latter, is assent to the newformulation binding on the faithful? Barrett Turner offers an important analysis in his Nova et Vetera article “Pope Francis and the DeathPenalty: A Conditional Advance of Justice in the Law of Nations.”  Let’s take a look.

The text ofthe revision, at paragraph 2267 of the Catechism, reads as follows:

Recourseto the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fairtrial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certaincrimes and an acceptable, albeit extreme, means of safeguarding the commongood.

Today,however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is notlost even after the commission of very serious crimes.  In addition,a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposedby the state.  Lastly, more effective systems of detention have beendeveloped, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time,do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently,the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty isinadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of theperson”, and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.

Endquote.  The crux of this passage is thestatement that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack onthe inviolability and dignity of the person.” Turner identifies three basic ways to interpret this.

Three interpretations

The firstwould be to read it as teaching that capital punishment is intrinsicallyimmoral.  This would amount to anoutright reversal of the traditional doctrine of the Church, and thus anendorsement of the position of “new natural law” theorists like Germain Grisez,John Finnis, and E. Christian Brugger, who have long argued for such areversal.  Turner rejects thisinterpretation.  In a letter announcingthe change to the Catechism, Cardinal Ladaria, Prefect of the Congregation forthe Doctrine of the Faith, stated that the revision was not in contradictionwith prior Church teaching and instead reflected a change in historicalcircumstances.  As Turner points out, hecould not have said this if the revision had been intended as an endorsement ofthe view of Grisez, Finnis, and Brugger that past teaching was wrong and thatthe death penalty is intrinsically evil.

(It is worthnoting that Finnis, despite his own view that capital punishment isintrinsically immoral, agreed that the revision did not change past teachingand wasvery critical of the reasoning behind it.  In any event, as Joseph Bessette and I showin our book ByMan Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment,the arguments of Grisez, Finnis, and Brugger fail, and their position cannot bereconciled with Catholic orthodoxy.  Turnerindicates that he agrees with us about this much.)

A secondinterpretation of the revision identified by Turner would be to regard it as anerroneous or at best imprecise prudential application of Catholicteaching.  As Turner points out, thisinterpretation cannot be dismissed out of hand, because the revision falls intothe category of non-definitive acts of the ordinary Magisterium.  Moreover, if the revision is not intended tocontradict past doctrinal principles and reflects instead a change in judgementabout how to apply those principles to concrete circumstances, then thiscurrent judgement could, in the nature of the case, hardly be more definitivethan the past judgments it replaces.

Toward theend of his essay, Turner identifies several respects in which Pope Francis’steaching on this subject is indeed problematic. However, the bulk of the essay is devoted instead to exploring a thirdpossible interpretation of the revision to the Catechism.  On this interpretation, the revision, on theone hand, does not reflect any change in the fundamental doctrinal principlesconcerning capital punishment.  Itremains Catholic teaching that the state has the right in principle to executeoffenders for sufficiently grave offenses. But on the other hand, the revision is more than merely a prudentialapplication of these fundamental principles to concrete contemporarycircumstances.  It is a prudentialjudgment of a deeper kind than that, one concerning what the Thomistic naturallaw tradition calls the ius gentiumor “law of nations.”

The law of nations

The law ofnations is a middle ground level of moral principles, coming in the between thefundamental and immutable principles of natural law on the one hand and thevarious local laws and customs of individual political communities on theother.  Its function is to mediate theapplication of the former to the latter. Like local laws and customs, it is contingent and changeable.  Unlike them, it has universal application,and a higher degree of durability even if it falls short of strictimmutability.  It is a kind ofconventional wisdom about how best to apply the principles of natural law, and widelyregarded as more or less settled even if not infallible.

Turneroffers a few examples, including the practically universal agreement today thatsubjecting those defeated in a just war to servitude is not morallyacceptable.  Even if such servitude weretheoretically justifiable as punishment of those guilty of unjust aggression,the moral downside of such a practice is so grave that it is better simply torule it out as beyond the pale in a decent society.  As Turner notes, a change in the law ofnations (such as the change from permitting this kind of servitude toabolishing it once and for all) can reflect not merely a change incircumstances, but a deeper application of distinctively Christian moralprinciples.

Now, thereis a further distinction to be drawn here, because as Turner also notes, thereare, within the Thomistic natural law tradition, two ways that the ius gentium has been interpreted.  On the first interpretation, the law ofnations is concerned with entirely man-made principles that are practicallyindispensable for applying the natural law. The ius gentium is, on thisview, essentially a matter of positive law rather than the discovery of anythingstrictly there in natural law itself. Turner associates this interpretation with thinkers like Francisco deVitoria, Domingo de Soto, Melchior Cano, and Domingo Banez.  On the second interpretation, the ius gentium goes a bit deeper than this,and involves the discovery of what justice strictly requires given certaincivilizational conditions.  Turnerassociates this interpretation with thinkers like Jacques Maritain and YvesSimon.

The basicidea here (as I understand it) is that on the second interpretation, theprinciples of the ius gentium are absolutely binding given certain conditions; whereas on the first interpretation, theyare never absolutely binding but cannevertheless be, under certain conditions, binding for all practical purposes (and to such an extent that it is as if they were absolutelybinding).  Either way, as Turner pointsout, the ius gentium reflects a moralconventional wisdom that runs so deepthat it can “feel” as binding as the natural law – even to educated people whoknow the difference, and certainly to the average person who does not.

Turner’sproposal, then, is that the revision to the Catechism reflects a prudentialjudgment about the law of nations,specifically.  In particular, it reflectsthe judgment that, in light of both the adequacy of contemporary non-lethalmeans of protecting society and the higher demands of the Gospel as applied tothe law, the principle that resort to capital punishment is never justifiablein practice ought now to be regarded as part of the ius gentium.  Turner alsoindicates, though, that this is better understood in terms of the firstinterpretation of the ius gentium(i.e. the one associated with de Vitoria, de Soto, Cano, and Banez) rather thanthe second, stronger interpretation (i.e. the one associated with Maritain andSimon).  For the latter interpretationmight give the impression that the Magisterium was teaching grave error priorto the 2018 revision.

Still a flawed prudential judgment?

As Turnernotes, though this interpretation attributes to the revision a deeper alterationto the Church’s teaching than most prudential judgments involve, it stillamounts to a kind of prudential judgment, and a non-definitive one that isarguably problematic in several respects. All the same, it is, in his view, the most plausible understanding ofwhat the revision intends –namely, something less radical than a doctrinalreversal or development, but more radical than other prudential judgments tendto be.

As aninterpretation of the pope’s and the CDF’s intentions, Turner’s view seems tome interesting and plausible.  And it maybe the only plausible way to read the statement that “the death penalty isinadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of theperson” in a manner that rescues it from the charge of doctrinal error.  For the appeal to “the inviolability anddignity of the person” gives the impression that the problem with capitalpunishment goes beyond merecontemporary circumstances – and thus involves some intrinsic evil.  The ius gentium interpretation opens thedoor to a middle ground reading, on which the problem does go beyondcontemporary circumstances but nevertheless does not entail intrinsic evil.

But even ifthis is indeed the Catechism’s position, it doesn’t follow that that positionis well-founded or unproblematic.  And infact it is neither.  Turner himself notesseveral problems with it.  One of them isthat the assumption that capital punishment is absolutely never needed today for the protection of society is undefended andopen to serious objections.  Turnernotes, for example, that without the deterrent effect of capital punishment,some prisoners are threats to the lives of fellow prisoners and of prisonguards.  In arecent article, I discussed other ways in which the total abolitionof capital punishment threatens innocent lives. In that case, though, incorporation of such an abolition into the ius gentium could hardly facilitate amore just society.

A secondproblem noted by Turner is that Pope Francis’s frequently reiterated positionthat life sentences should be abolished partially undermines the rationale forthe Catechism’s revision.  For the claimthat capital punishment is unnecessary today for the protection of societyrests on the idea that locking the most dangerous offenders up indefinitelyprovides an alternative way to incapacitate them.  (As Ihave argued elsewhere, there are also other serious problems withthis particular teaching of the pope.)

A thirdproblem identified by Turner concerns the revised Catechism’s appeal to “a newunderstanding… of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.”  It is not clear exactly what is meant bythis.  Is the claim that retributivejustice is no longer among the considerations to be weighed when deciding whatpunishments are suitable?  Turner notesthat this would contradict the traditional teaching of the Church – and as JoeBessette and I show in our book, the teaching that retributive justice is amongthe purposes of punishment is also irreformable.

It is worthadding that Pope Pius XII, who taught more systematically and at much greaterlength about the topic of punishment and criminal justice than any other pope,explicitly addressed the view that modern times call for a new understanding ofpunishment that deemphasizes retribution and emphasizes instead the protectionof society and rehabilitation.  And he explicitly rejected this position ascontrary to scripture and the traditional teaching of the Church.  See pp. 128-34 of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, which quotes extensively from therelevant documents. 

If therevision of the Catechism is taking the opposite view, we would have acontradiction between Pius XII’s teaching and Francis’s teaching.  But Pius XII’s teaching is very clear, isexpounded and defended in detail, and is firmly grounded in scripture andtradition.  But Francis’s teaching on thepurposes of punishment – if indeedthat teaching is meant entirely to abandon retributive justice in favor ofrehabilitation and the protection of society (which is not obvious) – is notclearly expressed, is merely asserted rather than supported with arguments, andis difficult to reconcile with scripture and tradition. 

Theseproblems, which Turner himself acknowledges, are serious enough.  But there are yet other grave problems withthe view that the ius gentium shouldnow be understood as absolutely ruling out the death penalty in practice.  The revision to the Catechism says that“today… there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person” rulesout such a penalty.  But is contemporaryopposition to capital punishment in fact generally motivated by an increasedawareness of human dignity?  Does itreflect moral common ground between the Catholic faith and the secular world?

Some of themost influential contemporary Catholic opponents of capital punishmentthemselves acknowledge that that is the opposite of the truth.  For example, Finnis warns:

We should be under no illusions: theorgans of the European Council, the United Nations, and the European Union,unconcerned to exclude from human society all intent to kill, and disdainful ofGod’s lordship over life and death, are devoted to the opaque language ofdignity. They deploy it constantly, bureaucratically, to promote theirrejection of capital punishment but equally their indulgence towardseuthanasia, suicide, and the many forms of anti-marital sex, and the radicallyunjust promotion of gender fluidity and same-sex parodies of marriage.  And the educational institutions and programsthey promote are nearly unanimous in denying or ignoring the justice ofretribution, with its attention to the continuing and often justly decisiverelevance of past deeds to present entitlement and conduct, attention andrelevance essential to the truth of the Christian faith.

Similarly, CardinalAvery Dulles, who supported the abolition of the death penalty, acknowledgedthat most opposition to capital punishment today reflects, notdeeper moral insight but a move away from Christian morality:

Many governments in Europe andelsewhere have eliminated the death penalty in the twentieth century, oftenagainst the protests of religious believers. While this change may be viewed as moral progress, it is probably due,in part, to the evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice,all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith.  The abolition of the death penalty informerly Christian countries may owe more to secular humanism than to deeperpenetration into the gospel.

Arguments from the progress ofethical consciousness have been used to promote a number of alleged humanrights that the Catholic Church consistently rejects in the name of Scriptureand tradition.  The magisterium appealsto these authorities as grounds for repudiating divorce, abortion, homosexualrelations, and the ordination of women to the priesthood.  If the Church feels herself bound byScripture and tradition in these other areas, it seems inconsistent forCatholics to proclaim a “moral revolution” on the issue of capital punishment.

Endquote.  Nor is the connection betweenopposition to capital punishment and hostility to Catholic morality a recentphenomenon.  As Brugger acknowledges,when the modern movement to abolish capital punishment got started amongEuropean intellectuals two centuries ago, it was closely associated withvarious doctrines at odds with Catholicism, such as utilitarianism andskepticism about the afterlife.  Hence,he writes:

The early organized public efforts toeliminate (or limit, with a view to eliminating) capital punishment, at leastfor ordinary or “lesser” crimes, were almost exclusively secularphenomena.  Early spokesman for the causeinclude Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robespierre, and Diderot in France, Hume andBentham in Britain, and Fichte in Germany – all harsh critics of the CatholicChurch and its orthodox teaching… [The] social movement to abolish capitalpunishment… became associated in the minds of many Catholic thinkers withopposition to orthodox belief and to the Church. (Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition, pp. 130-31)

In short,while the increase in opposition to the death penalty in modern society doesindeed reflect a moral revolution, it is precisely a revolution away from the Catholic understanding ofhuman dignity, not a deeper appreciation of it.

Now, therevision to the Catechism offers three justifications for the change: (a) “anincreasing awareness [of] the dignity of the person,” (b) “a new understanding…of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state,” and (c) “moreeffective systems of detention… which ensure the due protection of citizens”without recourse to capital punishment.  Butas we have just seen, all three of these are seriously problematic. 

And there isyet another serious problem with the revision. Again, the statement that “the death penalty… is an attack on theinviolability and dignity of the person” seems,considered in isolation, to be saying that capital punishment is intrinsicallyevil.  To be sure, it need not be readthat way, and there are good arguments for not reading it that way.  But it takes theological learning andanalytical skill to see that.  To theaverage person, the statement seems to be lumping capital punishment in withabortion, euthanasia, and murder in general. Much of the other recent rhetoric of popes and bishops has the sameeffect.  And while popes John Paul II andBenedict XVI at least occasionally qualified these statements by explicitlyacknowledging that capital punishment is not intrinsically evil, Francis doesnot do so.  Indeed, he and other bishopshave ignored pleasfor clarification.

The problemwith this is that the Church now thus appearsto many people to be contradicting the teaching of scripture and of her ownpast Magisterium.  For orthodoxbelievers, this can cause a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, heterodox Catholics are emboldened, hopeful that a change inteaching on capital punishment will open the way to changes to othertraditional teachings.  Again, therevision does not actually have the implications that orthodox believers fearand that the heterodox welcome.  ButCatholics should not have to havespecial theological expertise in order to see this.  For a magisterial document to require suchexpertise in order to see its continuity with scripture and tradition is thus aserious defect.

As Ihave discussed in detail elsewhere, the CDF instruction Donum Veritatis and the tradition of theChurch acknowledge that non-definitive acts of the Magisterium can sometimes bedefective in this way, and may, accordingly, be met with respectfulcriticism.  I submit that the revision tothe Catechism provides as clear an example as there has ever been of a casewhere the norms of Donum Veritatisapply.

A binding prudential judgment?

There is onefurther question to address.  Again,Turner takes the revision to amount to a non-definitive prudential judgement,and acknowledges that it is problematic. Now, some prudential judgments require only respectful consideration bythe faithful, but neither assent nor obedience. Cardinal Ratzinger, acting as head of CDF, stated in a2004 memorandum that papal opposition to capital punishment was anexample of such a prudential judgment. But as Cardinal Dulles noted in his book Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith, there can also beprudential judgments which “require external conformity in behavior, [even ifthey] do not demand internal assent” (p. 94). He gives as an example past Vatican instructions to theologiansconcerning which methods of biblical exegesis were permissible.  Some such restrictions, says Dulles, wereexcessive and later relaxed.  But thoughsome theologians even at the time may have had good reasons for disagreeingwith the restrictions, they were nevertheless obligated to abide by them intheir published work.  (For a detailedtreatment of the different kinds of magisterial statement and their levels ofbinding force, see pp. 144-57 of By ManShall His Blood Be Shed.)

Now, somemight argue that even if the revision to the Catechism is flawed, and even ifCatholics are permitted respectfully to raise criticisms of it, it neverthelessrequires “external conformity in behavior” (to borrow Dulles’s phrase).  In particular, it might be claimed that thepermission to support the actual use of capital punishment that CardinalRatzinger affirmed in the 2004 memo has now been rescinded.  Hence, it might be argued, every Catholicpublic official must now work to implement a policy of abolition of capitalpunishment, even if he is at liberty to think this policy mistaken.

It seemsthis might be Turner’s view, though this is unclear.  He notes that the precepts of the ius gentium, though they lack theabsolutely binding character of the precepts of natural law, are nevertheless“existentially indistinguishable from the precepts of the natural law to thecommon person in any given age” (p. 1047). That is to say, in practicethey are generally perceived as having the force of natural law, even ifstrictly speaking they do not.  AndTurner later goes on to say that with respect to the abolition of capitalpunishment, the pope “is within his office to make such a prudential judgmentand to enshrine that judgment in the Catechismas existentially binding” (p. 1049). This characterization of the revision as “existentially binding” seemsto imply that Catholics are obligated to conform their behavior to it even ifthey may raise legitimate questions about it – though again, Turner does notsay this in so many words.

In anyevent, there is a serious problem with this interpretation, which I spelled outin arecent article.  TheCatechism, in line with the traditional teaching of the Church, states that warcan be justifiable when necessary to protect citizens against violentaggression.  But it also states that theresponsibility for making a prudential judgment about when the criteria forjust war are actually met lies with public authorities.  The reason is that it is public authorities(and not churchmen) who have the duty under natural law to protect citizens,and it is public authorities (and not churchmen) who have the relevant expertiseconcerning how best to do this.

Now, whenaddressing capital punishment, the Catechism – both in the versions promulgatedby Pope St. John Paul II and in Pope Francis’s revision – states that whetherthe death penalty is ever justifiable depends on whether it is necessary inorder to protect society.  The differenceis that John Paul thought it was only rarely necessary, and Francis thinks itis never necessary.  But as in the caseof war, it is public authorities (and not churchmen) who have the duty toprotect citizens from violent aggressors, and public authorities (and notchurchmen) who have the relevant expertise. Hence, in the nature of the case, it is hard to see how the Church couldmake a binding prudential judgmentwhere resort to capital punishment is concerned, any more than she could make abinding prudential judgment where the application of just war principles isconcerned.  In the one case as in theother, to do so would be to usurp the responsibility that the natural law putson public authorities, not on theChurch.

An attemptto bind public authorities to abolishing capital punishment thus smacks of akind of clericalism – in particular, of an interference of the Church with the legitimatefunctions of the state, which the Church has otherwise been moving away from inthe period since Vatican II.  The Churchno longer calls upon the assistance of the state to safeguard people’s souls (since, it is said, the state hasno competence in that area).  What sensedoes it make, then, for the Church to interfere with the state’s right to protectpeople’s bodies (where, the Churchsays, the state does havecompetence)? 

Furthermore,the revision to the Catechism has been presented as just an extension of whatJohn Paul II already taught and of his reasons for teaching it (such as theadequacy of non-lethal means of protecting society and a better understandingof human dignity).  The difference,again, is just that John Paul thought the death penalty was rarely if everneeded and Francis thinks that it never is. But as Ratzinger’s 2004 memo makes clear, John Paul II’s teaching wasnot of such a nature that Catholics were obligated to behave in accordance withit.  So, how can Francis’s teaching,which differs from John Paul’s in degree but not in kind, impose any stricterobligation?

For thesereasons, then, it seems to me that the claim that Catholics are obligated toshow the revision “external conformity in behavior” is theologicallyproblematic.  All the same, this is, ofcourse, not my call to make.  Like theother difficulties I’ve described, it is ultimately a matter for theMagisterium of the Church to clarify.  Isuspect we will have to wait for a future pontificate before that happens.

Substance, teleology, and intentionality

There is anilluminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances, artifacts, and aggregates,and the distinction John Searle draws between intrinsic intentionality, derivedintentionality, and as-ifintentionality.  This might seem oddgiven that the Aristotelian distinction is concerned with very general questionsabout the metaphysics of physical objects, whereas Searle is concerned with avery specific topic in the philosophy of mind. But on closer inspection the parallel is quite natural and obvious, andthe connecting link is the notion of teleology. Let’s first consider each distinction, and then we’ll be in a positionto see the parallels.

Aristotle on substance

In the Physics, Aristotle famouslydistinguishes between natural and artificial objects.  Some examples of natural objects would bestones, copper, trees, and dogs.  Someexamples of artificial objects would be tables, paintings, automobiles, andcomputers.  Or to take an example I liketo use, a liana vine (the kind Tarzan swings around the jungle on) would be anatural object, and a hammock Tarzan makes out of living liana vines so as tonap in the afternoon would be an artifact.

There aredifferent ways to explain the distinction. Aristotle characterizes natural objects as those whose principle ofchange and stability is internal to them, whereas artificial objects have theirprinciple of change or stability imposed from outside.  For instance, a liana vine’s tendencies tosink roots into the ground, draw water in through them, and grow upward towardthe forest canopy all arise from within it. But the hammock made from living liana vines will maintain the propershape, remain tied together, etc. only if Tarzan continuously maintains it byretying vines that have come apart, pruning them, and so on. 

Another wayto make the distinction is to note that natural objects have substantial forms, whereas artifactshave merely accidental forms.  The mark of a thing’s having a substantialform is the presence of properties and causal powers that are irreducible tothe sum of the properties and powers of its parts.  Something having a merely accidental form, bycontrast, has properties and causal powers that are reducible.  For example,the distinctive properties and powers of a liana vine cannot be analyzed asmerely a sum of the properties and powers of its parts (such as the cells,molecules, or atoms of which it is composed). But the properties and powers of a hammock can be reduced to the properties and powers of the vines it is madeout of, together with Tarzan’s intention of using the vines to function as ahammock.

A third wayto make the distinction is to note that natural objects have intrinsic or built-in teleology, whereasartifacts have merely extrinsic orexternally imposed teleology.  Thetendencies of liana vines to sink roots into the ground and to grow upwardtoward the forest canopy are intrinsic to them, whereas their tendency to functionas a hammock is externally imposed by Tarzan.

These threeways of making the distinction are closely related.  A natural object’s intrinsic teleologicalfeatures follow from its substantial form, and are manifested in the operationof its distinctive causal powers.  Forinstance, the substantial form distinctive of a liana vine manifests itself inthe vine’s being directed or aimed toward the ends of sinking roots into theground, growing upward toward the forest canopy, etc.  And the change and stability distinctive ofsuch a vine is manifest in the operation of the causal powers by which the vinerealizes these ends.

Similarly,the externally imposed end of functioning as a hammock determines whichaccidental forms Tarzan has to put into the vines (tying them this way ratherthan that, pruning them of these bits but not those) so that it will exhibitcausal powers facilitating that end (e.g. the power to support the weight of anadult human being).

A truephysical substance, for theAristotelian, is an object that has a substantialrather than merely accidental form; which, accordingly, exhibits certain intrinsic rather than merely externallyimposed teleological features; and which thereby manifests certain inherentpatterns of change and stability.  Artifactsare not true substances, precisely because they have merely accidental forms,externally imposed teleology, and patterns of change and stability that are notentirely inherent to them.  Hence a lianavine is a true substance and a hammock is not. (I say more about the distinction between the natural and the artificialin my recent essay “Natural and Supernatural,” in the Simpson , Koons, and Orrvolume Neo-AristotelianMetaphysics and the Theology of Nature.)

Being anartifact is not the only way to fail to be a true substance, though.  This is where aggregates come in.  SupposeTarzan ties a hammock between two trees, but later abandons and forgets about it.  Imagine the vines that make it up die, andthe whole thing comes loose and drops to the ground, forming a pile beneath thetrees.  Imagine that the vines comecompletely untied, dry out and fade, and take on the appearance of an amorphousmass or random tangle.  Since the vinesare dead and no longer exhibit the distinctive properties and powers of lianavines, they are on the Aristotelian view not strictly liana vines any longer at all. They are substances of some other kind instead – bits of fiber,say.  And since the pile no longer hasthe distinctive features of a hammock (and Tarzan no longer even intends to useit as such) it is no longer a hammock either.

What isit?  It is an aggregate of these new fibrous substances – a collection whosepowers and properties are reducible to the sum of the parts of thecollection.  It is like an artifact,except that an artifact has a teleology imposed from outside by some mind,whereas an aggregate does not.  This isso even if it behaves as if itdid.  For example, imagine that the pileof dead vines prevents water from flowing between the trees the hammock hadfallen from.  It functions as if it were a dam, but it is notstrictly a dam since it was not built for that purpose (either by human beingsor beavers, say).

Searle on intentionality

Let’s turnnow to Searle’s distinction.  Intentionality is a technical term forthe directedness or “aboutness” characteristic of mental states and oflinguistic and other sorts of representations. For example, your thought that theEiffel Tower is in Paris is aboutor directed towards a certain object– the Eiffel Tower.  The English sentence“The Eiffel Tower is in Paris” is also aboutor directed toward the EiffelTower, as is a painting of the Eiffel Tower. By contrast, a random string of letters like “gjaargrvma,” or thesplotches on the ground that form when you accidentally spill some ink, have nointentionality.  They are not about anything, but are mere meaninglessmarks.

Now, asSearle points out in several places (such as his book TheRediscovery of the Mind), these examples illustrate two different kindsof intentionality.  The string of lettersthat make up the sentence “The Eiffel Tower is in Paris” has intentionality,whereas the random string “gjaargrvma” does not.  But notice that the intentionality of thefirst string is not inherent toit.  Intrinsicallyor all on their own, the first set of letters is as meaningless as thesecond.  It’s just that, given the conventionsof English usage, the first conveys a sentence and the second does not.  Absent those conventions, the first would beas devoid of intentionality as the second or as an accidental splotch of ink.

Sentencesthus have what Searle calls derivedintentionality.  So too does adrawing of the Eiffel Tower, and representations of other kinds such as symbols(for example, the symbols making up a “No smoking” sign).  Now, the source of this derived intentionalityis the human mind.  The sentence “TheEiffel Tower is in Paris” has the meaning it does because it is used to expressthe thought that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. Thoughts, however, do not in turn derive their meaning from anythingelse.  We use sentences to convey the contentsof thoughts, but nobody uses thoughts to convey the contents of thoughts or ofanything else.  Thoughts just are their contents, as it were.  They have their meaning in a built-inway.  They have intrinsic (or original) ratherthan derived intentionality. 

(The wayScholastic writers like John Poinsot put this is to say that sentences are instrumental signs whereas thoughts are formal signs.  An instrumental sign is a sign that is alsosomething else – a set of ink marks, a noise, an image, or what have you.  Its content is something additional to ordistinct from these other features, and that is why for such features to haveany content at all requires that the content be derived.  A formal sign is a sign that is nothing more than a sign, and in particularnothing more than its content.  It just is its content, which is why its contentis intrinsic rather than derived.)

Searle alsonotes that there are phenomena that do not have intentionality of an intrinsicor even a derived kind, but which it is nevertheless useful to describe as if they had it.  For example, when seeing dark clouds we mightsay “Those clouds mean that it will rain.” Naturally, the clouds don’t have such a meaning in the way that the thought that it will rain has meaning. For the clouds aren’t thinking. But neither do the clouds have meaning in the way that the sentence “Itwill rain” does or in the way that a drawing of rain does.  A cloud is not a sentence, or a picture, or asymbol, or a representation of any other kind. Rather, what is going on is that, since we know there is a causalcorrelation between dark clouds and rain, we infer from the presence of theclouds that there will be rain.  Themeaning (in the sense of the conceptual or semantic content) is in us, not in the clouds.  But describing the clouds as if they hadsemantic content is a useful shorthand. Searle calls this as-ifintentionality, but emphasizes that precisely because it is only as if thephenomenon had intentionality, it is not strictly a kind of intentionality buta convenient fiction.  Another examplewould be when we say that the water wantsto get to the bottom of the hill (as if water really wanted anything).

Naturally,intrinsic intentionality is the most basic of the three.  Derived intentionality exists only becausethere is intrinsic intentionality to derive it from.  And as-if intentionality is a matter ofspeaking of a thing as if it had the intrinsic intentionality that thoughtshave or the derived intentionality that words and the like get from theintrinsic intentionality of thoughts.

Teleology

Now, thereis a parallel between natural substances, artifacts, and aggregates on the onehand and intrinsic intentionality, derived intentionality, and as-ifintentionality on the other.  Considerfirst that natural substances are more fundamental than artifacts andaggregates, because the latter presuppose the former.  In particular, an artifact is essentially anatural substance or collection of natural substances that have been arrangedby someone to realize some end of his (such as Tarzan’s hammock).  And an aggregate is a collection of naturalsubstances that might superficially appear as if it were a natural substance oran artifact but is not, since it lacks the purposes of either (as in the caseof the pile of dead vines).

Analogously,intrinsic intentionality is more fundamental than either derived or as-ifintentionality.  Like an artifact,something with derived intentionality (such as words, images, or symbols)reflects the purposes of some agent. Like an aggregate, something with as-if intentionality can seem like itreflects such purposes but does not.

The reasonfor the parallel has primarily to do with the different kinds of teleological features exhibited by the differentkinds of physical objects.  Teleology essentiallyinvolves directedness toward an endor goal.  But intentionality alsoinvolves a kind of directedness, namely directedness toward an object ofrepresentation (whether representation in thought, in words, or whatever).  The key difference is that intentionalityinvolves directedness of a mental kind, whereas teleology need not (though itcan).  For example, the directedness of aliana vine to the ends of sinking roots into the ground, growing toward theforest canopy, and so on is in no way conscious or otherwise mental.  For a liana vine has no mental properties ofany kind.

If we thinkof directedness as the genericfeature that both physical objects and intentionality can possess in differentways, then what the members of the two sets of distinctions have in common isthis: natural substances and intrinsic intentionality both involve an inherent or built-in directedness;artifacts and derived intentionality both involve a borrowed or derivative directedness; and aggregates and as-ifintentionality both involve no genuine directedness at all, but at most onlythe appearance of it.

Theseparallels also manifest themselves in the way Aristotelians and Searle wouldobject to the notion that the human mind is literally a kind of computer.  The Aristotelian would say that rational animalsare substances of a kind, whereas computers are a kind of artifact.  The former have substantial forms, intrinsicteleology, and irreducible causal powers; whereas the latter have merelyaccidental forms, derivative teleology, and reducible causal powers.  So, it is just a category mistake to think ofthe mind as a kind of computer.  Similarly,Searle has argued that minds have intrinsic intentionality, whereas computershave only a kind of derived intentionality. (Actually, the relationship between Aristotelianism and Searle vis-à-viscomputers is somewhat more complicated than this.  I have discussed it in detail in my Nova et Vetera article “From Aristotle to JohnSearle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature.”)

An awarenessof the parallel I’m calling attention to is at least implicit in some commentsDaniel Dennett makes in his essay “Evolution, Error, and Intentionality” (fromhis collection TheIntentional Stance).  FollowingW. V. Quine and others, Dennett holds that the meaning or semantic content ofthoughts and utterances is indeterminatefrom the physical facts about human beings and their larger environment.  That is to say, if the physical facts are allthe facts there are, then there simply is noobjective fact of the matter about what any of our utterances mean or aboutthe content of any of our thoughts.  (RecallQuine’s famous “gavagai” example.)  Sincethese thinkers hold that the physical facts are indeed all the facts there are,they conclude that there is indeed no fact of the matter about what we meanwhen we say or think something.

Now, I haveargued (in my American Catholic PhilosophicalQuarterly article “Kripke,Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” and elsewhere) that while thepremise about the semantic indeterminacy of the physical is true, theconclusion Quine, Dennett, and others draw from it is false, and indeedincoherent.  The right conclusion todraw, I submit, is that thought is not physical.  But for present purposes we can put thataside.  What I want to call attention tohere is that Dennett notes (at p. 321 of his essay) that (given hisnaturalistic assumptions) there can be no objective fact of the matter about natural functions any more than therecan be about the meaning or semanticcontent of thought.  That is to say,the same considerations that entail the indeterminacy of semantic content also entailindeterminacy about the teleological properties of natural objects.  Just as, for Quine, there is no objectivefact of the matter about whether “gavagai” means “rabbit” or “undetached rabbitpart,” so too there is no fact of the matter about whether the function of the heartis to pump blood.

Now thisposition too, as I argue in chapter 6 of Aristotle’sRevenge, is ultimately incoherent. Teleological notions simply cannot be eliminated from biology, and ifthat result is incompatible with naturalism, then that is just another reasonto reject naturalism.  But even if youdisagree with me about that, the point for present purposes is that Dennett’sposition reinforces the idea that there is a parallel between the Aristotelian’steleological notion of a natural substance and Searle’s notion of intrinsicintentionality.  For it is precisely becauseof this parallel that Dennett (who is no fan of either Aristotelianism orSearle) wants to reject both of them together.

A Festschrift for Gyula Klima

My essay “Truthas a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift MetaphysicsThrough Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind: Essays inHonor of Gyula Klima , edited by Joshua P. Hochschild, Turner C. Nevitt,Adam Wood, and Gábor Borbély.  Gyula’swork has contributed mightily to the revival of interest in medieval and Scholasticphilosophy, and this honor is most deserved and welcome!  You can check out the table of contents at JoshHochschild’s Twitter feed or at thepublisher’s website. 

The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett

Some yearsback, in my article “Threequestions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I arguedthat Pope Francis’s statements on the death penalty cannot plausibly be read ina way that would make assent to them binding on Catholics.  This week, in anarticle at Where Peter Is,Tony Annett offers a reply.  Let’s take alook.

Criticizing Catholic teaching?

Let me startout by saying that I appreciate Annett’s attempt seriously to respond to thearticle.  In the years since it waspublished, I have found that its critics almost always simply dismiss itsconclusion without addressing the arguments for that conclusion, or at bestraise objections that obviously beg the question.  Though I don’t think his own objectionssucceed, I give Annett credit for trying to do better than that.  Many readers will be aware that Annett is asparring partner of mine on Twitter, and that our exchanges are sometimesheated.  So I also appreciate that heresponds here in a civil manner.

Having said that,it is unfortunate that Annett misrepresents my position from the get go (evenif, I am happy to allow, inadvertently). He characterizes my article as “criticizing Catholic teaching on thedeath penalty.”  That is notcorrect.  By “Catholic teaching” Annettpresumably has in mind teaching that theChurch requires the faithful to assent to. I do not criticize, and would not criticize, any such teaching.  My article addresses the question whether PopeFrancis’s thoroughgoing abolitionist position vis-à-vis the death penaltyactually is in fact a teaching to which Catholics must assent, or is instead aprudential judgment which they must consider respectfully but are not bound toassent to.  I argue that it is the latter,and that there is no other plausible way to read it when all the relevant evidence is considered.

I realizethat Annett disagrees with me about this. That’s fine, he has every right to try to make the case that I ammistaken.  But charity and justicerequire him to represent my position accurately before criticizing it. 

On Twitter,Annett routinely characterizes all disagreement with the pope’s statements oncapital punishment as “dissent.”  Now, Iam no less opposed than Annett is to dissent from Catholic teaching.  But the Church has made clear that not allcriticism of statements that come from the Magisterium constitutes“dissent.”  The document DonumVeritatis, issued during the pontificate of Pope St. John PaulII, acknowledges that in exceptional cases “it can happen… that a theologianmay… raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contentsof magisterial interventions.”  Thedocument elaborates as follows:

When it comes to the question ofinterventions in the prudential order, it could happen that some Magisterialdocuments might not be free from all deficiencies.  Bishops and their advisors have not alwaystaken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of aquestion…

If, despite a loyal effort on thetheologian's part, the difficulties persist, the theologian has the duty tomake known to the Magisterial authorities the problems raised by the teachingin itself, in the arguments proposed to justify it, or even in the manner inwhich it is presented.  He should do thisin an evangelical spirit and with a profound desire to resolve thedifficulties.  His objections could thencontribute to real progress and provide a stimulus to the Magisterium topropose the teaching of the Church in greater depth and with a clearerpresentation of the arguments.

Donum Veritatis then goes on explicitly to say thatthis sort of respectful criticism “mustbe distinguished” from “dissent” from the Church’s binding teaching.

In anotherarticle, I examine DonumVeritatis in greater detail, along with other relevant teaching fromCatholic tradition.  I show that“dissent” is essentially about trying to subvertthe traditional teaching of the Church, so that those who defend continuity with traditionalirreformable teaching cannot justly be accused of dissent when they merely askthe Magisterium more clearly to reaffirm such teaching.  I also show that the Church allows criticismof deficient magisterial statements to be made publicly under certain conditions. 

I won’trehash all of that here.  Again, see thatearlier article (as well as a couple of follow-up pieces, oneof which discusses in greater detail Aquinas’s teaching on thissubject, and theother of which discusses Pope Francis’s own repeated acknowledgmentthat certain kinds of criticism of popes can be legitimate).  The point for present purposes is thatnothing that I have said about Pope Francis’s teaching on capital punishmentamounts to “dissent.”  All of it fallswithin what Donum Veritatis and othertraditional teaching allow to be within the range of legitimate criticism ofmagisterial statements.

Indeed, Ihave not even accused Pope Francis of doctrinal error, even though that is inprinciple possible when popes are not speaking ex cathedra.  What I havesaid is that some of his statements on the topic of capital punishment are tooimprecise, or ambiguous, or fail to address all the relevant considerations, orare otherwise potentially misleading.  Ihave also said that the change he has made to the Church’s presentation of herteaching on capital punishment is prudential in nature – something Annett seemsto agree with (as we’ll see below).

Now, noting thata prudential intervention lacks sufficient clarity, or fails to address all therelevant aspects of an issue, or is otherwise deficient, is something that Donum Veritatis explicitly says can be legitimate and does not amount to “dissent.” Hence it is unjust for Annett to characterize my position as “dissent”or as “criticizing Catholic teaching.”  Ihave said nothing except what the Churchherself allows to be within the permissible range of debate.

At the veryleast, even if Annett thinks I am wrong about that too, the burden is on him actually to make the case that I amwrong about it.  And that entails that heneeds carefully to read and consider the arguments I have given in articleslike the ones just linked to, and show that I am wrong about what the Churchpermits in the way of criticism of magisterial statements.  Unless he does that, he is simply committingthe fallacy of begging the question by asserting that my position amounts to“dissent.”

A false binary?

So much forpreliminaries.  Let’s turn now to Annett’sobjections.  The main point of contentionconcerns the pope’s 2018 revision to section 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which now reads:

Recourse to the death penalty on thepart of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered anappropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes and an acceptable, albeitextreme, means of safeguarding the common good.

Today, however, there is anincreasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after thecommission of very serious crimes.  Inaddition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penalsanctions imposed by the state.  Lastly,more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the dueprotection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive theguilty of the possibility of redemption.

Consequently, the Church teaches, inthe light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it isan attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”, and she works withdetermination for its abolition worldwide.

Endquote.  There’s a lot that can be saidabout this, as we’ll see.  But the firstquestion to ask concerns the force of the statement that “the death penalty isinadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of theperson.”  As I say in the article towhich Annett is replying, there are two ways to read it.  First, one could read it as claiming that thedeath penalty is always and intrinsically wrong, and thus ruled outabsolutely and in principle.  Or second,one could read it as claiming that while the death penalty is not always and intrinsically wrong,current circumstances support the judgment that it should no longer ever beused. 

As I went onto argue in the article, if the first interpretation is correct, then therevision to the Catechism would contradict the consistent and irreformableteaching of scripture and 2,000 years of tradition that capital punishment canbe legitimate at least in principle.  Inthat case, it would amount to a straightforward doctrinal error (which ispossible when popes are not speaking excathedra) and should not beassented to. 

On the otherhand, if the second interpretation is correct, then the revision to theCatechism amounts to a prudential judgment – an application of doctrinalprinciple to concrete circumstances in light of certain empirical assumptions,such as assumptions about what methods of punishment are sufficient today toprotect society.  In that case, aCatholic need not assent, because theMagisterium has no special expertise with respect to the empirical assumptionsin question.  For example, the empiricalquestion of whether all governments today are in fact capable of protectingtheir citizens without ever resortingto capital punishment is simply not something about which popes or otherchurchmen have any special knowledge.  (I’ll return to this point below.)

To this lineof argument, Annett objects that “this distinction between intrinsic evils andprudential judgments is problematic and offers a false binary.”  Now, one would naturally expect from thisremark that Annett would propose a thirdalternative reading of the revision to the Catechism – a reading on which it isneither teaching that capitalpunishment is intrinsically evil norproposing a prudential judgment about its applicability today.

Oddly,though, Annett proposes no such third alternative reading.  What he does instead is, first, to point out thatnot everything that is intrinsicallywrong is gravely wrong, whereas some prudentialjudgments do concern grave moralmatters.  Now, Annett is right about thatmuch, but I never denied it.  Forexample, I have never claimed that all and only intrinsically wrong acts are gravelywrong acts.  And I have never deniedthat prudential judgments can concern matters of grave moral importance.  So Annett is just attacking a straw man here.

Moreover,Annett says that he is “willing to concede that the death penalty might not beintrinsically evil.”  And after notingthat “prudential judgements… could entail gravely evil acts,” he says thatwhile “in some past societies, it might have been simply impossible toconstrain the malefactor without recourse to the death penalty,” today “thisargument no longer applies.”  Thatindicates that he thinks that the revision to the Catechism does after allamount to a prudential judgment.  Butit’s a prudential judgment about a matter of grave moral importance.

In thiscase, though, Annett has not shown that I have proposed “a false binary.”  On the contrary, he implicitly concedes thatthere really are, after all, only two ways to read the revision to the Catechism– namely, either as claiming that the death penalty is intrinsically evil, oras making a prudential judgment to the effect that it is no longer needed today– and he opts for the second reading rather than the first.

The “falsebinary” charge, then, is incorrect, and a red herring.  On closer inspection, Annett’s real objectionseems to be that while there are indeed only two alternative readings of therevision to the Catechism – and the second, “prudential judgment” reading isthe correct one – nevertheless, Catholics are bound to assent to thisprudential judgment.  Why?  Because it concerns a matter of grave moral importance.

But now wehave another problem with Annett’s argument, which is that it is a non sequitur.  He is implicitly assuming that if aprudential judgment concerns a grave moral matter, then it follows that assentto it is binding on Catholics.  And thatis not true.  Indeed, the Church herself has told us that that isnot true.

St. John Paul II on war, capitalpunishment, and prudential judgments

To see this,let’s take a look at the teaching of Pope St. John Paul II on matters of war,capital punishment, and prudential judgments. This teaching is not only important in itself, but crucial for properlyunderstanding the teaching of Pope Francis. For as Annett himself emphasizes, Francis’s teaching is meant as an extension of John Paul II’s teaching.  Annett thinks that this supports theconclusion that Catholics are obligated to assent to Francis’s teaching.  What he does not realize is that it actually undermines that conclusion, andreinforces the view that Pope Francis’s teaching is a prudential judgment thatneed only be respectfully considered but not assented to.  For John Paul II’s teaching on capitalpunishment was itself clearly merely prudential and non-binding.  And that is true even though it concerned matters of grave moral importance.

Considerfirst what Pope John Paul II had to say about the topic of war.  The Catechism he promulgated reasserts theChurch’s traditional just war teaching, which states that a war can bejustified only under certain conditions – that it is necessary to defendsociety against lasting, grave and certain harm by the aggressor, that there beserious prospects of success, and so forth (section 2309).  This much is a matter of doctrinal principleto which Catholics are obligated to assent. But what about questions concerning whether some particular war meetsjust war criteria?  For example, whoseresponsibility is it to determine whether a particular war really is necessaryto defend society against an aggressor, or whether it has a serious chance ofsuccess?  Here the Catechism states:

The evaluation of these conditionsfor moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who haveresponsibility for the common good. 

Public authorities, in this case,have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary fornational defense. (sections 2309-2310)

It is notchurchmen, then, but public authorities – government officials, militaryleaders, and the like – who have the right and responsibility to apply just warteaching to concrete circumstances.  Why?  Because they, and not churchmen, are the oneswith the relevant competence.  Forexample, popes have special competence to issue the moral teaching that a warcan be just only if it has a serious prospect of success.  But they do not have any special competence to determine whether someparticular war is likely to succeed.  Forexample, their office does not give them any special knowledge about whichmilitary tactics are the most effective ones, what the enemy’s troop strengthis and how able its commanders are, and so on. 

Notice thatthis remains true even though churchmen might, like anyone else, have opinionsabout such matters.  Pope John Paul IIcertainly had opinions about specific wars, having famously opposed the IraqWar, for example.  But even though hestated his opposition publicly, repeatedly, and in strongly moralistic terms,Catholics were not obligated to agree with him, as the Church made clear at thetime.  For example, Cardinal Ratzinger,the pope’s chief doctrinal officer (and later to become Pope Benedict XVI) said,of John Paul II’s opposition to the Iraq War, that the pope “did not imposethis position as doctrine of the Church.” Similarly, Bishop Wilton Gregory, then president of the United StatesConference of Catholic Bishops, stated atthe time that “people of good will may and do disagree on how tointerpret just war teaching and how to apply just war norms to the controvertedfacts of this case.”

Now, inhindsight one could certainly argue that the pope and other churchmen whocriticized the Iraq War were in the right. But that doesn’t change the fact that their prudential judgment on thismatter was not binding on Catholics.  Andthat is true even though it concerned a matter of grave moral importance.  The Church herself teaches, in the Catechism,that despite the grave moral importance of matters concerning war, it is governingauthorities, and not churchmen, who have the responsibility to apply just warcriteria to concrete circumstances.  Andconsequently, the Church herself also acknowledged that the pope’s condemnationof the Iraq War, despite being a prudential judgment about a grave matter (andindeed, a judgement that in hindsight was arguably correct), was not somethingthat Catholics were obligated to assent to.

Hence Annett is simply mistaken to suppose, as heimplicitly does, that the gravity of the subject matter of a prudentialjudgment suffices to make assent to it binding on Catholics.

But iscapital punishment different?  Are papalprudential judgments on that topicbinding on Catholics in a way prudential judgments about the application ofjust war theory are not?  No, there is nodifference.  And once again, the teachingof the Church under Pope John Paul II makes this clear. 

For onething, that there is no difference clearly follows from the relevant generalprinciples.  John Paul II famously heldthat in modern circumstances, capital punishment should be used only “if thisis the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against theunjust aggressor” (as the 1997 version of section 2267 of the Catechism putit).  Otherwise, the Catechism says,non-lethal means should be used.  But howdo we know whether non-lethal means are sufficient to protect people fromunjust aggressors?  Is that somethingabout which churchmen have any special competence?  Clearly, it is not, any more than they haveany special competence of a military kind. To know whether non-lethal means are adequate, we need to know, forexample: whether capital punishment has any significant deterrence value;whether all modern prisons throughout the world are secure enough to preventthe escape of dangerous offenders; whether other prisoners can be kept safefrom murderous ones; and so on.  Theseare empirical matters which require expertise in social science, law, criminaljustice, and the like.  Popes are no moreexperts in these areas than they are experts in military strategy and tactics.

In the verynature of the case, then, the question of whether capital punishment is stillneeded today is not something about which popes could issue a binding judgmentany more than they could issue a binding judgment about whether some specificwar meets just war criteria.  By parityof reasoning with the case of applying just war theory, the final determinationof whether resort to capital punishment is ever needed must lie, not withchurchmen, but with “the prudential judgment of those who have responsibilityfor the common good,” namely “public authorities” (to borrow the language theCatechism uses when addressing the application of just war principles).

Moreover,the Church herself explicitly said duringthe pontificate of John Paul II that the cases are parallel. 

The Ratzinger memorandum

This bringsus to an important document that Catholic opponents of capital punishmentroutinely ignore.  During the 2004 U.S.presidential election, the question whether Catholic politicians who supportabortion or euthanasia should be denied Holy Communion became a hot buttonissue.  Some suggested that if thesepoliticians were denied Communion, then Catholic politicians who supportedcapital punishment or the Iraq War should be denied it as well.

To clarifythe matter, Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then Prefect of the Congregation forthe Doctrine of the Faith, sent a memorandum titled “Worthinessto Receive Holy Communion: General Principles” to then-CardinalTheodore McCarrick, who was at the time the archbishop of Washington, D.C.  (McCarrick has, of course, since beendisgraced and defrocked, though that is irrelevant to the present issue.)  Ratzinger noted that the cases are not at allparallel, writing:

Not all moral issues have the samemoral weight as abortion and euthanasia.  For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on theapplication of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would notfor that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive HolyCommunion.  While the Church exhortscivil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercyin imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take uparms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment.  Theremay be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging warand applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion andeuthanasia.

Noticeseveral things about this teaching.  Asis well known, Pope St. John Paul II held that the cases where capitalpunishment is necessary to protect society are “very rare, if not practicallynonexistent” (as the 1997 version of the Catechism puts it).  Indeed, the pope made even strongerstatements at other times, calling the death penalty “cruel and unnecessary”and calling for its outright abolition. All the same, Ratzinger acknowledged that “there may be a legitimatediversity of opinion even among Catholics about… applying the death penalty,”and indeed that a Catholic in good standing could even be “at odds with theHoly Father” on the subject.  He couldnot have said that if assent to the pope’s position was obligatory.  And notice that this is true even though thepope’s prudential judgment concerned a matter of grave moral importance, andwas put forward publicly, repeatedly, and in stern moralistic terms.

Note alsothe reference to “civil authorities,” and how war and recourse to capitalpunishment can in some cases be permissible despite the fact that the Churchurges such authorities to seek peace and exercise mercy on criminals.  The clear implication is that it isultimately civil authorities who havethe responsibility to make a prudential judgment about whether capitalpunishment is necessary, just as they have the responsibility to determinewhether war is necessary.

Now onTwitter recently, Annett dismissed the memorandum as merely “aprivate opinion of Joseph Ratzinger.” But this is clearly not the case. Ratzinger was writing, not as a private theologian, but precisely in hisofficial capacity as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. And he was writing to a fellow bishopprecisely to clarify for him a matter of Church doctrine and discipline.

Furthermore,the passage from the memo quoted above was incorporated almost verbatim into aUSCCB document written by Archbishop William Levada (who would latersucceed Ratzinger as head of CDF).  Thepurpose of this document was precisely to clarify for Catholics the same issuesRatzinger aimed to clarify in his memo. And the fact that a USCCB document incorporates the passage in questionobviously indicates that it has doctrinal weight, and is not merely Ratzinger’spersonal opinion.  It is worth addingthat E. Christian Brugger, who is the preeminent opponent of capital punishmentamong Catholic theologians, acknowledges in the second edition of his book Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic MoralTradition that the memo was written by Ratzinger “as prefect of the CDF” (p.xxviii).

Now, keep inmind that as head of CDF, Ratzinger’s job was to be Pope St. John Paul II’sdoctrinal spokesman.  Hence he was anauthoritative interpreter of the pope’s teaching on the issue of capitalpunishment.  Since he explicitly saidthat there could be “a legitimate diversity of opinion” about the matter evenamong faithful Catholics – and indeed, that faithful Catholics could even be“at odds with” the pope on the matter – it follows that Pope John Paul II’sposition that capital punishment is no longer needed was not somethingCatholics are obligated to agree with.

This bringsus back to Pope Francis.  For the maindifference between John Paul’s teaching and Francis’s teaching is that theformer allowed that there may still be rare cases where capital punishment isneeded in order to protect society, whereas the latter denies that.  Even Pope Francis’s appeal to the “dignity ofthe person” is not novel, because Pope John Paul II made the same appeal whencriticizing capital punishment.  Forexample, the 1997 edition of the Catechism says that non-lethal means ofdealing with offenders are preferable because they are “more in conformity withthe dignity of the human person.”

Now, JohnPaul II’s view that the cases where capital punishment are still needed toprotect society are “very rare, if not practically nonexistent” was of its verynature a prudential judgment concerning matters of social science, law,criminology, etc. about which popes have no special expertise.  For that reason, as Cardinal Ratzinger madeclear, Catholics were not obligated to agree with that judgment.  But Francis’s view that non-lethal means arein every case sufficient to “ensure the due protection” of society is also, ofits very nature, a prudential judgment concerning matters of social science,law, criminology, etc. about which popes have no special expertise.  So, how can Catholics be obligated to assentto the latter view any more than they were obligated to assent to theformer?  What the Ratzinger memorandumsays about John Paul’s teaching applies mutatismutandis to Francis’s teaching.

Development of doctrine?

Annettclaims that Pope Francis’s revision to the Catechism involved a “development ofdoctrine,” one that reflects an “unfolding understanding of the nature of humandignity.”  It is this development, Annettsuggests, that underlies the pope’s moving beyond John Paul II’s allowance forcapital punishment in rare cases to an absolute prohibition of the penalty.

But exactly how does the purported doctrinaldevelopment support this revision?  Theclaim cannot be that this unfolding understanding of human dignity showscapital punishment to be intrinsicallywrong (and thus “inadmissible” for thatreason).  Again, that would contradictthe consistent and irreformable teaching of scripture and 2,000 years oftradition.  And again, Annett himselfexplicitly says that he is not claiming that capital punishment isintrinsically wrong.

LikeFrancis, John Paul II also appealed to respect for human dignity, yet stillstopped short of an absolute prohibition. The reason is that John Paul II allowed that there may be rare caseswhere capital punishment is still practically necessary.  Francis denies this.  But again, that is a prudential judgmentgrounded in empirical claims about modern prison facilities and the like.  There is nothing in the notion of human dignity as such that entails thatsuch-and-such a prison system is effective.

So, it isunclear exactly how a purportedly better understanding of human dignityjustifies the change from John Paul II’s teaching to Francis’s.  Nor does Annett explain how it does.  He just assertsthat it does, and repeats phrases like “human dignity” and “dignity of theperson” as if the repetition by itself sufficed to show that capital punishmentwas somehow a special affront to human dignity.

Sometimes itis claimed that, whatever one thinks of Pope Francis’s revision, Pope John PaulII’s teaching on capital punishment already marked a development ofdoctrine.  But as Joseph Bessette and Ishow in our book ByMan Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment,that is not the case.  At pp. 144-82 ofthe book, we offer a detailed and systematic analysis of all the relevantmagisterial texts issued during John Paul II’s pontificate.  We show that John Paul II’s change to previousteaching was entirely prudential innature and in no way doctrinal. 

To be sure,it is sometimes claimed that John Paul II made it a matter of doctrinal principle that capitalpunishment could never even in theory be used except when strictly necessaryfor the defense of society.  But we showthat the pope’s confining of the use of capital punishment to the defense ofsociety was itself a prudential judgement,not a doctrinal principle.  And theChurch has confirmed this.  After Evangelium Vitae was issued and it wasannounced that John Paul II would be updating the Catechism in light of it, Fr.Richard John Neuhaus inquired with Cardinal Ratzinger about whether thisamounted to a doctrinal revision.  As thecardinal said in reply in a letter published in First Things in October 1995, “the Holy Father has not altered the doctrinal principles which pertain to this issue asthey are presented in the Catechism, but has simply deepened the application ofsuch principles in the context of present-day historical circumstances.”

As we alsoshow in the book, such an alteration would itself contradict the teaching ofscripture, the Fathers, and previous popes, which clearly holds that it can be legitimate at least in principleto use capital punishment even forpurposes other than the defense of society. For example, several scriptural passages (such as Genesis 9:6, Numbers35:33, and Deuteronomy 19:11-13) teach that it can be legitimate simply for thepurpose of securing retributive justice. That does not entail that that is by itself a good enough reason toresort to capital punishment in modern circumstances.  But since the Church holds that scripturecannot teach moral error, it follows that it cannot possibly be intrinsically wrong to inflict the deathpenalty simply for the sake of retribution.

So, theclaim that Pope Francis’s revision to the Catechism amounts to a development ofdoctrine cannot be defended by appeal to its connection with John Paul II’steaching.  For again, John Paul II’steaching was itself not a development of doctrine.  If Annett denies this, I direct him to pages144-82 of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed,where he’ll find the evidence laid out. I’d be happy to listen to any objections he’d raise against thearguments we set out there.

Annett makesanother problematic claim about the development of doctrine when he says that “thecorrect hermeneutic is to read past teaching in light of current teachingrather than vice versa.”  This ismisleading at best.  It is true that theMagisterium is the authoritative interpreter of scripture and tradition.  But that does not entail license to teachjust anything, as the Church herself has repeatedly insisted.  For example, the First Vatican Council teaches:

For the Holy Spirit was promised tothe successors of Peter not so that theymight, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by hisassistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelationor deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.

and

That meaning of Holy Scripture mustbe held to be the true one, which Holy mother Church held and holds, since itis her right to judge of the true meaning and interpretation of HolyScripture.  In consequence, it is not permissible for anyone tointerpret Holy Scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed against theunanimous consent of the fathers.

Similarly,the Second Vatican Council teaches:

[T]he living teaching office of theChurch… is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly,guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully.

And PopeBenedict XVI taught:

The Pope is not an absolute monarchwhose thoughts and desires are law.  Onthe contrary: the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and tohis Word.  He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himselfand the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt toadapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.

This entailsthat while the Church can settle disputes over scriptural interpretation, shecan never teach something contrary toscripture, or contrary to the wayscripture was understood by the Fathers of the Church or to what the Church hastraditionally held scripture to mean.

This is onereason why the Church cannot ever teach that capital punishment is intrinsicallyevil.  For as Joe Bessette and Idemonstrate in By Man Shall His Blood BeShed, scripture clearly and consistently teaches that capital punishmentcan be legitimate in principle, the Fathers unanimously understood scripture toteach this, and the Church has always understood scripture to teach this.  This teaching is thus irreformable.

As such, thetraditional teaching puts constraints not only on what the Church may currentlyteach, but on how to interpret whatthe Church currently teaches.  Forexample, if some recent magisterial statement seems, when considered in isolation, to teach that capitalpunishment is intrinsically wrong, but couldinstead be interpreted in a way that is consistent with capital punishment not being intrinsically wrong, then the latter interpretation must prevail.  In that way, current teaching must, contraryto what Annett says, be read in light of past teaching. 

That is byno means to deny that we must also read past teaching in light of currentteaching.  It means that Annett is posinga false choice when he says that we must read the past in light of currentteaching “rather than” the other way around. It’s not a matter of “rather than,” but of “as well as.”  But where there is any outright conflict orappearance of such a conflict, it is indeed past teaching that mustprevail.  That is not only theimplication of the statements from Vatican I, Vatican II, and Benedict XVIquoted above, but also the teaching of the Church’s great theologians of thedevelopment of doctrine, St. Vincent of Lerins and St. John Henry Newman.

Problems with the revision to theCatechism

Now, one ofthe problems with the 2018 revision to the Catechism is that some of what itsays does seem, at least consideredin isolation, to contradict past teaching. In particular, it does so when it quotes a remark from Pope Francis tothe effect that the death penalty “is an attack on the inviolability anddignity of the person.”  This statementseems, given its unqualified formulation, to be saying that the death penaltyis intrinsically, or of its very nature,an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.  And thus it seems, at least when consideredin isolation, to be saying that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong.

To be sure,the statement does not have to beread that way.  Given the larger context,it can be read instead as teaching that the death penalty is contrary to humandignity if certain conditions on its useare not met.  And that is indeed theway I think it should be read.  As I havesaid, I do not claim that the pope has taught doctrinal error on this point,but rather that he has spoken without sufficient precision.  And he has a record of doing so.  In thearticle Annett is responding to, I call attention to other examples,such as Pope Francis’s once quoting approvingly a line from Dostoevsky to theeffect that “to kill a murderer is a punishment incomparably worse than thecrime itself.”  Taken at face value, thisstatement is manifestly absurd, and certainly contrary to scripture and thetraditional teaching of the Church.

No doubt thepope was here speaking with rhetorical flourish rather than literally.  And perhaps that is also the case with theline quoted in the revised passage of the Catechism.  But when teaching on doctrinal matters, popeshave a grave duty to speak with precision,especially in documents likeCatechisms.  Hence it is perfectlylegitimate, in light of the norms outlined in Donum Veritatis, respectfully to criticize the 2018 revision of theCatechism for failing to do so.

Anotherproblem with the revision to the Catechism concerns its prudential judgement tothe effect that “effective systems of detention have been developed, whichensure the due protection of citizens” without ever having to execute offenders. This is far from obviously true. Indeed, I would argue that it is false.

There areseveral relevant considerations here. First, the Catechism simply assumes, without argument, that capitalpunishment has no deterrence value.  Butthat is a question of social science, not theology.  And social scientists disagree on the matter,with many holding that the death penalty doesin fact deter when offenders know there is a good chance they really will beexecuted if they commit a murder.  JoeBessette and I set out the evidence in our book, and defend the claim thatcapital punishment has significant deterrence value.

Now if thatis correct, then innocent lives areendangered by abolishing capital punishment, in which case the Catechism’sprudential judgement that “due protection of citizens” can be achieved withoutcapital punishment is mistaken.  Ofcourse, whether the death penalty really does deter is controversial.  But the point is that, of its nature, this isnot a matter of theological principle but rather an empirical question aboutwhich churchmen have no special expertise.  

Anotherimportant consideration is that some offenders remain threats to the lives ofothers even when effectively imprisoned. Organized crime leaders can order murders from behind prison walls.  Some imprisoned murderers kill prison guardsor fellow prisoners.  And if capitalpunishment is entirely off the table, then they have no incentive not to do soif they are already in prison for previous murders.  Then there are those sentenced to life in prisonwho escape from prison.  What is toprevent them from killing while on the run, if the threat of capital punishmentdoes not hang over them?  For theyalready face a resumption of their life sentences if recaptured. 

Having theoption of threatening offenders with capital punishment also gives theprosecutor an invaluable tool for convincing them to plea bargain.  And this can save innocent lives if thecooperation of such offenders helps police catch other murderers.  Then there is the fact that it is simply nottrue that systems of imprisonment sufficient to protect citizens exist everywhere in the world.  Yet the revision to the Catechism does not acknowledgethis.  It simply speaks of abolishingcapital punishment worldwide, full stop, rather than abolishing it when and where it is safe to do so.

Naturally, acritic of capital punishment might try to develop responses to thesepoints.  But again, they are not mattersthat can be settled by appeal to abstract theological principle.  Like the question of how to apply just war theoryto particular cases, determining whether capital punishment is still necessaryto protect citizens requires a prudential judgement about matters that popesand bishops have no expertise about.  Andas with the application of just war theory, the decision must ultimately bemade by the public authorities who have the responsibility for protectingcitizens, not churchmen.  This is why theRatzinger memorandum acknowledges that “there may be a legitimate diversity ofopinion even among Catholics” about capital punishment.  It is simply not the sort of thing the Churchcan reasonably foreclose public debate about. 

Finally, Iwould argue that it is in any event a bad idea to insert prudential judgmentsinto the Catechism, and especially to keep changing them (as the Catechism’sstatement on the death penalty has now been changed two times).  It confuses the average person, who typicallydoes not understand the difference between matters of doctrine and prudentialapplications of doctrine, and therefore wrongly comes to think that the Churchhas changed or could change the longstanding teaching of scripture andtradition.  This makes it seem in turn asif everything the Church teaches might be “up for grabs.” 

Again, thesecriticisms of the revision to the Catechism in no way constitute “dissent” frombinding Catholic teaching.  They areentirely within the range of the respectful criticism that Donum Veritatis acknowledges to be permissible.  And to those faithful Catholics whorespectfully raise criticisms of deficient magisterial statements, Donum Veritatis offers the followingreassuring words:

For a loyal spirit, animated by lovefor the Church, such a situation can certainly prove a difficult trial.  It can be a call to suffer for the truth, insilence and prayer, but with the certainty, that if the truth really is atstake, it will ultimately prevail.

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingersoften characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinelydismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that reflects ignorance ofMarxist theory.  Who is right?  In his book Conservatism:A Rediscovery , Yoram Hazony argues that there is indeed asignificant link between wokeism and Marxism. Paul Gottfried respondsat Chronicles, arguingthat the similarities between the two have been overstated.  Let’s take a look at their arguments.

It isimportant to emphasize at the outset that the question isn’t whether there aresignificant differences between wokeism on the one hand, and the ideas of Marxhimself and the key Marxist thinkers who came after him on the other.  No one denies that there are.  The question is rather whether wokeism isbest thought of as a species of Marxism, or at least whether the similaritiesare significant enough that the comparison with Marxism illuminates rather thanobfuscates.

Here it is crucialto understand the relationship of both movements to liberalism.  The broad liberal tradition from Locke toMill to Rawls is individualist, emphasizing as it does the rights and libertiesof individuals, their basic equality, and their consent to being governed as aprecondition of government’s legitimacy. Hazony notes that the Marxist critique of liberalism emphasizes theinadequacy of this individualism to make sense of real political life.  For Marxism, liberalism is blind to humanbeings’ tendency to form social classes, and to the inherent tendency of oneclass to oppress another and to utilize the state for this purpose.

Wokeism,Hazony points out, takes over this central Marxist theme and simply replaceseconomic status with race, sex, sexual orientation, and the like as the keys todemarcating oppressed and oppressing classes. Where the traditional Marxist focuses on the conflict betweencapitalists and the proletariat, the wokester speaks instead of “whitesupremacy” versus people of color, “patriarchy” versus women,“heteronormativity” versus LGBTQ, and so on. But the emphasis on group identity rather than individualism carriesover from Marxism and marks a break with liberalism.  Furthermore, Hazony points out, wokeism’sdisdain for norms of rational discourse and inclination to cancel and censoropponents rather than engage their arguments differs from the liberaltradition’s idealization of free debate.

Gottfriedacknowledges that all of this is true enough as far as it goes.  He also acknowledges that there is in thehistory of Marxism a precedent for wokeism’s turn to obsessing over race andsex rather than economic class – namely the “Critical Theory” of the FrankfurtSchool, as represented especially by the work of Herbert Marcuse.  All the same, he judges that Hazony andothers overstate the connection between wokeism and Marxism, and fail toappreciate wokeism’s connection to liberalism.

For onething, in the twentieth century, liberalism began to soften its individualism,with universal suffrage and the welfare state marking a turn in a stronglyegalitarian direction.  In recentdecades, and before wokeness took center stage, mainstream liberals had alsoalready themselves become more intolerant of dissent and unwilling rationallyto engage the arguments of their critics. Though many liberals now complain of woke intolerance, the wokesterssimply walked through a door that liberals had themselves opened.

For anotherthing, Marxists of a more old-fashioned stripe had no truck with the directiontaken by the Frankfurt School, much less the obsessions of the wokesters.  Indeed, they could be as censorious of thisdirection as any social conservative. Moreover, during the Cold War, communist countries were often asconservative on matters of sex and family as Western society, or indeed evenmore so.  Nor were communist societies prone,as wokeism is, to destroying loyalty to country or to a general nihilism.  Marxism also put a premium on science andrationality, at least in theory.

Then thereis the fact that wokeism has allied itself to capitalism in a way Marxism couldnot.  Capitalists and corporations havenot simply embraced wokeism out of fear but, Gottfried argues, have found it intheir interests to embrace it.  For it isthe poor and the working class rather than the rich who suffer from theidiocies of woke public policy, and corporations can absorb the costs of suchpolicies whereas their smaller competitors are destroyed by them. 

Finally,while the narrative of oppressor and oppressed is indeed a feature of Marxism,it is also, Gottfried points out, a feature of the rhetoric of fascism andNazism.  And in all three cases, heclaims, what we have is a modern and secularized variation on the ancientbiblical distinction between the righteous and those who persecute them.  So, that a narrative of oppression is centralto wokeism does not suffice to make it in any interesting way Marxist, any morethan these other views are Marxist.

Hence, Gottfried’sview is that in order to understand wokeism, it is more illuminating to studyits origins in the breakdown of liberalism than to look for parallels withMarxism.

What shouldwe think of all this?  I am myself inclinedto what might be a middle ground position between Hazony and Gottfried, thoughperhaps the differences between us are more matters of semantics and emphasisthan anything deeper than that.  On theone hand, when writing on these matters myself I have not characterized wokeismas a species of Marxism, but rather havemerely noted that there are Marxist influences on wokeism and parallels betweenthe views.  On the other hand, whileGottfried makes some important points, I think that the influences andparallels are more important and illuminating than he seems to allow.  I think he also overstates the differences.

For example,Gottfried contrasts Marxism’s notional commitment to science and reason withthe irrationalism of wokeism.  But on theone hand, wokesters in general do not explicitlyreject science and reason any more than old-fashioned Marxism did.  On the contrary, they typically claim thatscience supports their views (about gender, for example).  To be sure, these claims are bogus and the “science”pure ideology tarted up in pseudoscientific drag.  But the same thing was true of Marxist claimsto scientific respectability.  (Lysenkoism,anyone?)

Moreover,though the Marxist theory of ideology was claimed to be part of a scientific accountof social institutions, in practice its “hermeneutics of suspicion” tends tosubvert rather than facilitate rational discourse.  Criticisms of Marxism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens for thevested interests of capitalists, just as criticisms of wokeism get dismissed a priori as mere smokescreens forracism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc.  Thenthere are the parallels many have noted between the mass hysteria of wokeism(manifested in Twitter mobs, cancel culture, and the riots of 2020) and Mao’sCultural Revolution.

To be sure,the postmodernist influences on wokeism are a point in favor of Gottfried’sview that there is an important difference at least in theory between traditional Marxism and wokeism in their attitudestoward reason and science.  But the recordof actual Marxist and woke practice (whichGottfried himself appeals to in making his case) supports the judgment thatthey are less far apart on this score than Gottfried supposes.

The samething is true where the other differences Gottfried describes are concerned.  Yes, during the Cold War, communist countrieswere far more socially conservative than any wokester could tolerate.  But that was in spite of Marxist theory, not becauseof it.  Engels, after all, famouslyattacked the traditional family and the bourgeois moral order.  And Marxist theory emphasized internationalworker solidarity over national loyalties, even if this is not how thingsworked out in practice.  Even thealliance between corporations and wokeism finds a parallel in actual Marxist practice,in the Chinese Communist Party’s adoption of capitalist means to socialistends. 

Then thereis the fact that woke theorists explicitly acknowledge the Marxist tradition asamong the influences on them.  Forexample, Critical Race Theorists acknowledge such influence, especially that ofAntonio Gramsci (even if there are, of course, also differences withMarxism).  And Gottfried himselfacknowledges the parallels between wokeism and the neo-Marxist FrankfurtSchool.

These pointsdo not entail that wokeism is a childof Marxism, exactly, but that does not mean it is not a relation of some othersort – a brother or a cousin, say.  And notingfamily relations of those kinds can be illuminating too.  Eric Voegelin famouslyargued that Marxism, National Socialism, and other modern politicalideologies are best understood as variations on Gnosticism.  Ihave argued elsewhere that wokeness, too, is best understood as a kind ofGnosticism.  And Ihave also argued that the parallels between woke ideas about race andNational Socialism are no less striking or disturbing than their parallels withMarxism.  That does not mean that wokeism justis a kind of National Socialism, anymore than it just is a kind of Marxism. It is its own thing, not quite the same as either of those noxious worldviews.  But it is no less irrational, and potentiallyjust as dangerous.

Furtherreading:

Howto define “wokeness”

Counteringdisinformation about Critical Race Theory

TheGnostic heresy’s political successors

WokeIdeology Is a Psychological Disorder

Socialismversus the Family

Adventuresin the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

AllOne in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory

What is a Law of Nature?

Some timeback I gave a lecture at Fermilab on the topic “What is a Law of Nature?”  I’ve posted the text of the lecture atmy main website.  You can watch thevideo of the lecture either at the Fermilab websiteor at YouTube.