Edward Feser's Blog, page 49

ORDER NOW: Aristotle’s Revenge

Amazon has the U.S. release of my new book Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science scheduled for March 22.  You can pre-order now.  The book has already been available for a few weeks at Amazon.co.uk and other European outlets.   
Some pre-publication reactions to the book: “With characteristic clarity and panache, Feser argues that the principles of Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, especially metaphysics and the philosophy of nature, are not challenged by developments in modern and contemporary science.  Indeed, Feser thinks that a proper understanding of the natural sciences discloses the enduring value of these very principles.  The book offers an excellent analysis of many of the key philosophical questions that lie at the heart of discourse about the implications of the physical and biological sciences. It is a very important resource for philosophers and scientists.”  Dr. William E. Carroll, Aquinas Institute, Blackfriars, University of Oxford
“Scientists seek explanations for why nature is the way it is.  In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Ed Feser provides explanations both for why contemporary science is the way that it is and for why modern scientists think in the way that we do. It would be a pity if scientists did not read this book. It would help them realize that their often unacknowledged philosophical assumptions and idiosyncrasies actually reveal that they are closet Aristotelians at heart.” Rev. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., Ph.D., S.T.D., Professor of Biology and of Theology, Providence College, and Director, ThomisticEvolution.org
“A welcome sequel to Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics, this book argues convincingly that modern science has not overcome Aristotle's philosophy but rather presupposes it.  Feser shows that, far from being vanquished, Aristotle provides ‘the true metaphysical foundations for the very possibility of that science.’” Fr. Michael Dodds, O.P., Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, California
Here are the cover copy and table of contents:
Actuality and potentiality, substantial form and prime matter, efficient causality and teleology are among the fundamental concepts of Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  Aristotle’s Revenge argues that these concepts are not only compatible with modern science, but are implicitly presupposed by modern science.  Among the many topics covered are the metaphysical presuppositions of scientific method; the status of scientific realism; the metaphysics of space and time; the metaphysics of quantum mechanics; reductionism in chemistry and biology; the metaphysics of evolution; and neuroscientific reductionism.  The book interacts heavily with the literature on these issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, so as to bring contemporary philosophy and science into dialogue with the Aristotelian tradition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS   0. Preface
1. Two philosophies of nature
1.1 What is the philosophy of nature? 1.2 Aristotelian philosophy of nature in outline 1.2.1 Actuality and potentiality 1.2.2 Hylemorphism 1.2.3 Limitation and change 1.2.4 Efficient and final causality 1.2.5 Living substances 1.3 The mechanical world picture 1.3.1 Key elements of the mechanical philosophy 1.3.2 Main arguments for the mechanical philosophy
2. The scientist and scientific method
2.1 The arch of knowledge and its “empiriometric” core 2.2 The intelligibility of nature 2.3 Subjects of experience 2.4 Being in the world 2.4.1 Embodied cognition 2.4.2 Embodied perception 2.4.3 The scientist as social animal 2.5 Intentionality 2.6 Connections to the world 2.7 Aristotelianism begins at home
3. Science and reality
3.1 Verificationism and falsificationism 3.2 Epistemic structural realism 3.2.1 Scientific realism 3.2.2 Structure 3.2.3 Epistemic not ontic 3.3 How the laws of nature lie (or at least engage in mental reservation) 3.4 The hollow universe 
4. Space, time, and motion
4.1 Space 4.1.1 Does physics capture all there is to space? 4.1.2 Abstract not absolute 4.1.3 The continuum 4.2 Motion 4.2.1 How many kinds of motion are there? 4.2.2 Absolute and relative motion 4.2.3 Inertia 4.2.3.1 Aristotle versus Newton? 4.2.3.2 Why the conflict is illusory 4.2.3.3 Is inertia real? 4.2.3.4 Change and inertia 4.3 Time 4.3.1 What is time? 4.3.2 The ineliminability of tense 4.3.2.1 Time and language 4.3.2.2 Time and experience 4.3.3 Aristotle versus Einstein? 4.3.3.1 Making a metaphysics of method 4.3.3.2 Relativity and the A-theory 4.3.4 Against the spatialization of time 4.3.5 The metaphysical impossibility of time travel 4.3.6 In defense of presentism 4.3.7 Physics and the funhouse mirror of nature
5. The philosophy of matter
5.1 Does physics capture all there is to matter? 5.2 Aristotle and quantum mechanics 5.2.1 Quantum hylemorphism 5.2.2 Quantum mechanics and causality 5.3 Chemistry and reductionism 5.4 Primary and secondary qualities 5.5 Is computation intrinsic to physics? 5.5.1 The computational paradigm 5.5.2 Searle’s critique 5.5.3 Aristotle and computationalism
6. Animate nature
6.1 Against biological reductionism 6.1.1 What is life? 6.1.2 Genetic reductionism 6.1.3 Function and teleology 6.1.4 The hierarchy of life forms 6.2 Aristotle and evolution 6.2.1 Species essentialism 6.2.2 Natural selection is teleological 6.2.3 Transformism 6.2.4 Problems with some versions of “Intelligent Design” theory 6.3 Against neurobabble

Byrne on gender identity

What is it to have a “gender identity”?  At Arc Digital, Alex Byrne examines some proposed definitions of the concept and common assumptions about it, and finds them problematic.  In earlier posts, we looked at Byrne’s views about whether sex is binary and whether sex is socially constructed.  As his earlier articles did, Byrne’s latest piece brings the cold shower of sober philosophical analysis to a discussion that is usually overheated and muddleheaded. Byrne begins by considering various proposed characterizations of “gender identity.”  As he notes, they are often circular, or too broad, or define the notion in terms of other notions which are no better defined than the notion of gender identity is, or make reference to an unexplained and dubious “intrinsic sense” or “internal sense” of what one’s gender is.  The clearest conception, in Byrne’s view, is the notion of “core gender identity” as one’s belief or supposed knowledge that one is male or female or of indeterminate sex.
However one defines gender identity, Byrne notes that what has become the “standard picture” among people who comment on this issue comprises the following three theses:
(a) Everyone has a gender identity, and for “cisgender” people it matches their sex,
(b) “Transgender” people have gender identities that don’t match their sex, and
(c) This mismatch causes gender dysphoria.
But each of these claims, notes Byrne, is problematic.  The first problem, Byrne says, is that (b) is false, at least if we think of gender identity as the belief that one is male, female, or of indeterminate sex.  For there are cases in which (b) is not true.  For example, at least some “trans women” would affirm that they are males (though not men), and indeed would affirm that one cannot be a transwoman without being a male.  And in that case, Byrne says, it is not true of all transgender people that their gender identities don’t match their sex.
In order to salvage (b), Byrne argues, one would need a fairly loose criterion of gender identity that amounts to one or more of the following: feeling a kinship with a certain sex, exhibiting behavior stereotypically associated with that sex, feeling satisfaction at being treated as a person of that sex, etc.  On this interpretation, “trans women” would be males who have a female gender identity in the sense of feeling kinship with women, exhibiting stereotypically feminine behavior, feeling satisfaction at being treated as a woman, and so forth.
The trouble with this, though, says Byrne, is that if that is all that “gender identity” amounts to, then (a) will not be true.  For there are “cisgender” women who don’t feel an affinity with other women, don’t exhibit stereotypically feminine behavior, don’t feel satisfaction at being treated as women, etc.
So, in Byrne’s view there does not seem to be a notion of “gender identity” on which both (a) and (b) are true.  Jargon like the terms “transgender” and “cisgender” is thus not well-defined, since it presupposes that (a) and (b) are both true.
Then there is (c).  One problem with it, says Byrne, is that at least some boys who suffer from gender dysphoria say, not that they are girls, but that they want to be girls.  In that case, there is no mismatch between their gender identity and their sex, if gender identity amounts to a belief about what one’s sex is.  Another problem is that in at least some cases it seems that gender dysphoria is the cause of a mismatch between gender identity and sex rather than the effectof such a mismatch.  Then there are cases of resolved dysphoria that don’t seem plausibly interpreted in terms of a mismatch, as opposed to some other kind of confusion.  Again, the notions in question are simply not well-defined.
Another indication of how ill-defined these notions are – one that Byrne does not discuss in this current article – is the parallel between the notion of being “transgender” and the notion of being “transracial.” Transgender activists tend to resent this comparison, but they have a difficult time explaining what is wrong with it.  Rebecca Tuvel and others have defended the notion of being transracial, precisely on the grounds that it is no moresuspect than the notion of being transgender.  But of course, one could just as well argue in the opposite direction, to the effect that, since the notion of being transracial is suspect, so too is the notion of being transgender.  
And then there are other parallels that could be drawn.  Since they endorse the notion of being transgender and see that the notion of being transracial is on a par with it, Tuvel and others bite the bullet and endorse the latter too.  But would they also endorse the notion of being “transspecies”and affirm that if a person self-identifies as a reptile, we ought to go along with that?  What if a person tells us that he self-identifies as a stone, or as a pencil, or as the number 3?  Should we go along with that too?
Presumably even the most progressive of progressives would admit that a guy who tells us that he is a snake or a pencil or the number 3 is just deluded (though I admit that these days you really cannot be sure).  There is a point at which they will acknowledge the absurdum to which a thesis about one’s “self-identity” has been reduced, rather than embrace it.  There really is no difference between a person claiming to be a snake or a pencil and a person who is merely pretending to be a snake or a pencil or who is merely deluded into thinkingthat he is a snake or a pencil.
To clarify the notion of transgender identity, then, we need an explanation of exactly what the difference is between, say, a male who claims to be a woman and a male who is merely pretending to be a woman or who is merely deluded into thinking he is a woman.  And the trouble, as Byrne shows, is that the key notions needed in order to do this are themselves not well-defined.
Byrne notes that an analogy is often drawn between the notion of gender identity and the notion of sexual orientation, though he does not say much about the latter.  In an earlier post, I suggested that the notions are indeed parallel in such a way that if the former is problematic, then the latter will be similarly problematic.  And it does seem that difficulties of the kind Byrne raises in his latest article when considering the notion of gender identity might also be raised when considering the notion of sexual orientation, at least if sexual orientation too is regarded as a kind of “identity.”
To a first approximation, “sexual orientation” has to do with the stable object of one’s sexual desires.  Someone who is only ever sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex is said to have a heterosexual orientation, and someone who is only ever sexually attracted to people of the same sex is said to have a homosexual orientation.  So far so good.  But sexual orientation is commonly thought also to involve a kind of identity.  For example, it is held that having same-sex desires is in some sense constitutive of what one is, of one’s nature.  The idea seems to be that to be gay is to be a man who is naturally attracted to other men and to be lesbianis to be a woman who is naturally attracted to other women.  People don’t just happen to desire to eat and drink.  Having such desires is part of their nature as human beings.  And in a similar way, according to the common view, someone who is gay or lesbian doesn’t just happen to be sexually attracted to people of the same sex.  That attraction is, the view says, part of their very nature.
Now, from a purely biological point of view, a “trans woman” is male.  That is why gender is usually distinguished from biological sex.  Similarly, from a purely biological point of view, sexual organs and appetites have a heterosexual function.  Specifically, sexual organs have the biological function of enabling copulation with someone of the opposite sex, and sexual arousal has the biological function of prodding people actually to copulate with someone of the opposite sex.  
(Naturalists typically analyze a trait’s biological function in terms of the reason why it was favored by natural selection, and evolutionary psychologists have speculated about whether homosexual desire might be explained in terms of natural selection.  But even if these theories were more than speculations, they wouldn’t cast doubt on the claim that sexual desire has the biological function of getting people to copulate with someone of the opposite sex.  For the theories hold, not that natural selection favored same-sex attraction per se, but rather that it favored some other trait causally correlated with same-sex attraction.  That sexual attraction of any kind came to exist in the first place would still have to be explained in terms of natural selection favoring creatures who had a disposition to copulate with people of the opposite sex.  Same-sex attraction would be an alteration of an appetite that serves a heterosexual biological function, just as pica is an alteration of an appetite that serves a nutritive biological function.)
Note also that, just as gender dysphoria is said to be caused by a mismatch between gender identity and sex, so too it is said that distress and confusion about one’s sexuality can result from a mismatch between sexual orientation on the one hand, and the sexual desires that as a matter of biological fact are usually correlated with being either male or female on the other.  And just as it is said that the solution to dysphoria is to embrace one’s gender identity and have others embrace it too, so too it is said that the solution to distress and confusion about one’s sexuality is to embrace one’s sexual orientation as a kind of identity and have others embrace it too. 
Now, with all of this in mind, it seems that the conventional wisdom about sexual orientation can be summed up in claims that parallel claims (a), (b), and (c), which Byrne identifies as part of the conventional wisdom concerning gender identity.  The claims would be:
(d) Everyone has a sexual orientation, and for heterosexuals it matches the biological function of their sexual faculties,
(e) Homosexuals have a sexual orientation that doesn’t match the biological function of their sexual faculties, and
(f) This mismatch causes distress and confusion about one’s sexuality.
Interestingly, these three claims seem to be problematic in a way that parallels the difficulties Byrne sees in claims (a), (b), and (c).  Start with (e), and recall that Byrne pointed out that the problem with the parallel claim (b) is that some transgender people would deny that they have a gender identity that doesn’t match their sex (e.g. some “trans women” would assert that they are males, even if they do not regard themselves as men).  Similarly, if sexual orientation is supposed to involve a kind of identity (such as a gay identity or a lesbian identity), then it isn’t true that all homosexuals have a sexual orientation that doesn’t match the biological function of their sexual faculties.  For some people with same-sex desires reject the very idea of a gay or lesbian identity.  They don’t see same-sex attraction as somehow constitutive of what they are or of their nature.  Rather, they see it as just something they are afflicted by, which conflicts with the inherently heterosexual function they take their sexual faculties to have.  (Of course, gay rights advocates would object to this attitude, but what matters for present purposes is simply that some homosexual people do in fact have the attitude, whether or not one thinks they should.)
So, in order to make (e) come out true, one will need a looser notion of “sexual orientation,” one that doesn’t involve a kind of identity.  Presumably that looser notion would simply involve stably having sexual desires of a certain kind.  A heterosexual orientation would involve stably having sexual desire for or attraction to people of the opposite sex, and a homosexual orientation would involve stably having sexual desire for or attraction to people of the same sex.  (The desires have to be stable because a heterosexual person can have fleeting same-sex desires – say, as a result of drunken experimentation, viewing some titillating pornographic image, or what have you.)  
The trouble now is that, just as (a) came out false given the looser interpretation of “gender identity” needed to salvage (b), so too (d) will come out false given the looser interpretation of “sexual orientation” needed to salvage (e).  For there are heterosexual people who simply don’t have much in the way of sexual desire at all.  They may rarely if ever think about sex and shrug with indifference at the prospect of never engaging in sexual activity.  And yet, if they were put into a situation in which sex was in the offing, they would be willing to engage in sexual activity with the opposite sex but be put off by same-sex activity.  So, they are heterosexual, but they lack a “sexual orientation” in the looser sense of stably having sexual desires of a certain kind.  
Then there is (f), which faces difficulties in some ways analogous to those that Byrne says face (c).  For in at least some cases, it seems that it is not that having a homosexual orientation causes distress and confusion about one’s sexuality, but rather that feeling distress and confusion about one’s sexuality causes a person to judge that he has a homosexual orientation.  And sometimes this judgement is reversed later on.  As with the notion of transgender identity, so too with the notion of gay or lesbian identity, the question of what exactly the causal relation is between the identity on the one hand and feelings of distress and confusion on the other is not as clear-cut as is often supposed.
So, as Byrne argues, while notions such as exhibiting behavior stereotypically considered feminine (or masculine), feeling satisfaction at being treated as a woman (or a man), etc. are clear enough, the notion of “gender identity” is not well-defined.  And in a similar way, while the notion of feeling sexual attraction for people of the same sex is clear enough, the notion of “sexual orientation” as a kind of identity is, arguably, also not well-defined.
Related posts:
The sexual revolution devours its children
Byrne on why sex is not a social construct
Byrne on why sex is binary
Love and sex roundup

Surfing the web

At First Things, R. R. Reno concludes that Francis’s papacy is failing .  Cardinal Gerhard Müller issues a “manifesto of faith” to address the current theological crisis.  Meanwhile, Robert Fastiggi buries his head deeper into the sand.  (And wastes his time.  I already refuted Fastiggi’s position months ago.)
Jeremy Butterfield reviewsSabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math and Hossenfelder responds.  A review by Donald Devine at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Magician and actor Ricky Jay has died.  Reminiscences at The Federalist , Vulture , and NPR .  A personal remembrance by Jay’s friend David Mamet.

In the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Ryan Proctor argues that Catholic judges are not obligated to recuse themselves in capital cases .
Stanley Corngold discusses his new book Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic at the Princeton University Press blog.

Campus follies: Catholic Herald on the attempt to get John Finnis sacked.  The Weekly Standard on the grievance studies hoax.  The Guardian and the British Educational Research Association on the transgender activist threat to academic freedom.

At Quillette, Spencer Case on how certain academics have inflated the meaning of terms like “violence.”

Theologian Matthew Levering is interviewed on Cars, Coffee, Theology.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding , a history of science fiction’s golden age, is reviewed by Gary K. Wolfe at the Chicago Tribune and by Scott Bradfield at the Los Angeles Times.  Big Think recommends ten golden age science fiction novels.

Jacob Hamburger, at The Point, asks: What was the New Atheism?  The Guardian notes its passing.  But Jerry Coyne and some other New Atheists beg to differ.

At Medium, Ellie Murray offers a review in cartoon form of Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum’s book Causation .  

They don’t make Democrats like they used to.  City Journal on Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and on Pat Caddell.

Geoff Dench on the decline of men, also at Quillette.

The Atlantic on the increase in cases of alleged demonic possession. 

At Politics/Letters, Peter Ludlow notes that fascism doesn’t actually work the way Jason Stanley says it does.

Toto’s classic song “Africa” will play forever via an art exhibition in the Namibian desert, reports CNN.

Einstein, Hume, and relativity, at the Telegraph.

James Matthew Wilson on James Chappel’s book Catholic Modern, at The Catholic Thing.

At the Institute of Art and Ideas, physicist George Ellis and philosophers Nancy Cartwright and Hilary Lawson discuss the relationship between mathematics and physical reality.  Wiredon mathematics and causality.

Anthony McCarthy on protecting sex from liberalism, at Public Discourse.

Was it Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, or both?  John Morrow’s new book on the debate over who created the Marvel Universe.

At The Wanderer, philosopher Jude Dougherty looks back at F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Alan Wolfe looks back at Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, at The New Republic.

Dennis Bonnette on free will and the principle of sufficient reason, at Strange Notions.

Walter Ott and Lydia Patton’s edited volume Laws of Nature is reviewed by Heather Demarest at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

At Law and Liberty, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl remember the Aristotelian radical Henry Veatch.

At 3:AM Magazine, Alex Rosenberg suggests that neuroscience might be a bigger threat than artificial intelligence.

Amazon’s Man in the High Castle will get a fourth – and final – season.  Netflix has cancelled the last of its Marvel shows, Jessica Jones and The Punisher – though any or all of them could return in some form on Disney’s forthcoming streaming service, which will feature other new Marvel shows.

Thomas Pink on John Finnis, religious liberty, and the Council of Trent.

Anthony Kenny’s Brief Encounters: Notes From A Philosopher’s Diary is reviewed at The Church of England Newspaper.

At Scientific American, philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin on progress in philosophy.

Abortion and culpability

Yesterday at The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru responded to a reader who criticizes opponents of abortion who express special outrage at late-term abortions.  If all direct abortion amounts to murder, the reader says, then it is only a cynical political tactic to speak of late-term abortions as if they were especially odious.  I more or less agree with Ponnuru’s reply to this (give it a read, it’s brief), but I would add a clarification and a qualification. Here’s the clarification.  Ponnuru says that late-term abortions are worse, not because an embryo doesn’t have the same right to life that an eight-month-old fetus does, but rather because “people have less excuse for misunderstanding the moral status of an eight-month-old human fetus than they do for misunderstanding the moral status of a human embryo” so that it “shows a deeper corruption of conscience” to approve of aborting the eight-month-old fetus.
I know what Ponnuru means and I think this is true as far as it goes (with a serious qualification I’ll come to in a moment), but I think that he should put the point instead by saying that while the act of aborting an embryo and the act of aborting an eight-month-old fetus are, objectivelyspeaking, equally bad, nevertheless a person’s subjective culpability can, in theory, plausibly be greater in the latter case than in the former.  And that is correct, for while it is obvious just from appearances that an eight-month-old fetus is a human being, it isn’t obvious just from appearances that an early-stage embryo is.  After all, even Aquinas, given his mistaken assumptions about the biology of embryonic development, thought that at the earliest stage of pregnancy a true human being did not yet exist, so that abortion at that stage wouldn’t count as homicide.  (He still disapproved of such abortions because they amounted to a kind of contraception.)  
Here’s the qualification.  We’ve come a very long way from Aquinas in terms of our knowledge of embryonic development, and that knowledge is now widespread enough that while in theory someone could be less culpable for approving of aborting an early-stage fetus than for approving of a late-term abortion, the number of people who are in fact less culpable is in my view smaller than Ponnuru might suppose (though for all I know, Ponnuru might not think the number is actually any higher than I think it is).   
Of course, it’s impossible to come up with a specific figure, but here’s the reason why I think the number of people who are not subjectively culpable is not likely to be large.  Suppose we classify pro-choicers into the following three groups:
(a) those who see that early-term and late-term abortions are morally on a par, and approve of late-term abortions for that reason,
(b) those who aren’t sure whether or not early-term abortions are as morally objectionable as late-term abortions, but who approve of keeping the former legal anyway despite not approving of the latter, and
(c) those who feel certain that early-term abortions are morally permissible even though they believe that late-term abortions are not.
Now, those in group (a) exhibit a “deep corruption of conscience” (to borrow Ponnuru’s phrase).  For it is manifest that infanticide is gravely evil, and it is manifest that late-term abortion differs in no morally significant way from infanticide.  Hence it takes a great deal of self-deception and moral depravity to approve of late-term abortion.  A person of basic decency and intellectual honesty would never approve of such a thing.  But the people in group (a) also realize that early-term abortion is on a par with late-term abortion.  Hence the depravity and self-deception they exhibit in approving of the latter seeps over into their approval of the former.  They have no excuse for favoring even early-term abortion.  Their correct judgment that it is on a par with late-term abortion should obviously have led them to reject early-term abortion rather than to accept late-term abortion.
I think Ponnuru would agree with me about that much.  (I’m aware that some readers will not agree, and that they would need argumentation in order to be convinced of what I say in the previous paragraph.  But this post is not about why we should object to late-term abortion, infanticide, etc.  It’s about what those who already do object to it, as Ponnuru and I do, should think about the subjective culpability of those who approve of early-term abortions but not late-term abortions.)
How many pro-choicers are in group (a)?  It’s hard to say.  Given recent events in Virginia and New York, it seems that a significant number of pro-choicers have moved into this group, but I have no idea what percentage of them that would be.
What matters for present purposes is group (b).  For I would suggest that that is very probably the group that the majority of pro-choicers fall into.  And I would also suggest that this group too is guilty of a “deep corruption of conscience,” of moral depravity and culpable self-deception.  
Consider, after all, the kind of rhetoric that has been standard among pro-choice politicians for decades now.  Bill Clinton famously said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”  Barack Obama said that answering the question about when a fetus has the right to life is “above [his] pay grade.”  Mario Cuomo acknowledged that his conscience and Catholic faith required him to be “personally opposed” to abortion even though he was pro-choice.  
Now, why would Clinton say that abortion should be “rare”?  The reason, surely, is that even many who favor keeping abortion legal worry that it might amount to murder, even if they aren’t sure whether it does.  Even though they are pro-choice, they aren’t comfortable with simply dismissing all moral concerns about the practice.  Hence, in order to appeal to such voters, Clinton evidently thought that he had at least to pay lip service to the idea that abortion is morally problematic enough that we ought to minimize its frequency.  Obama too essentially conceded that abortion might amount to murder.  After all, he didn’t say that fetuses don’t have a right to life, but that he didn’t know whether they did.  Cuomo essentially conceded that abortion does amount to murder – that is, after all, what his Catholic faith tells him – but held that he still wanted to keep it legal anyway.
Now, to borrow an example sometimes used in old moral theology manuals, imagine that a hunter suspects that there might be someone standing behind a certain bush, though he isn’t sure.  Is it morally permissible for him to fire into the bush, since he isn’t certain that someone is behind it?  The moral theologians and common sense agree on the answer: Of course not.  If the hunter even suspects that there might be a person there, he must not fire into the bush, even if he is not certain and indeed even if he thinks it more probable that there is no one there.
Now, Clinton and Obama are like a person who says: “I think there might well be a person behind that bush, but I’m not really sure.  Go ahead and fire into it if you like.”  Cuomo is even worse.  He is like someone who says: “I am personally convinced that there is someone standing behind that bush.  But go ahead and fire into it anyway if you like.”  Now, either of these positions is morally depraved.  But the position of these politicians on abortion is parallel, and thus no less depraved.  Clinton and Obama are saying, in effect: “Abortion might in fact amount to murder, but if you want to, go ahead and have one anyway.”  And Cuomo was saying, in effect: “Abortion is murder.  But go ahead and have one anyway if that’s what you want to do.” 
I submit that it takes what Ponnuru calls “deep corruption of conscience” and culpable self-deception to talk oneself into this kind of position.  It’s just too obviously incoherent to chalk up to an honest mistake.  But it isn’t just Clinton, Obama, and Cuomo who are guilty of this.  After all, they said the sorts of things they did because they wanted to appeal to voters.  And it isn’t pro-life voters they were trying to appeal to, because the average pro-life voter would say exactly what I just said.  They were trying to appeal to pro-choice voters.  And they evidently judged that most pro-choice voters fall into group (b).  For if they thought that most such voters fell into group (c), they wouldn’t have implied that abortion at least might amount to murder.  They would have just confidently asserted that it does not.
Now, skillful politicians know their voters, and these three men were very skillful politicians.  So it seems plausible that most pro-choice voters are in group (b).  But as I have said, the position of people in that group is so obviously incoherent that only a morally corrupt person could adopt it.  Again, saying that “Abortion might be murder, but if you want to do it, go ahead” is like saying “I think there might be someone behind that bush, but go ahead and fire into it if you want to.”  So, it follows that most pro-choice voters, and not just those who favor late-term abortion, are guilty of a “deep corruption of conscience.”
I would argue that only a pro-choicer in group (c) could plausibly be characterized as lacking in subjective moral culpability.  Mind you, I’m not saying that all or even many people in group (c) really arelacking in subjective culpability.  In my opinion, the arguments in defense of abortion are so flimsy that it is hard to see how an intellectually honest person could feel certain that early-term abortions are morally permissible.  The point is just that being in group (c) would be a necessary condition for a pro-choicer’s lacking subjective culpability, even if it is by no means a sufficient condition.  Anyway, as I say, I think most pro-choicers are actually in either group (b) or group (a), and thus are culpable.
So, while I agree with Ponnuru that in theory a pro-choicer who approves of late-term abortion may thereby exhibit greater moral corruption than a pro-choicer who does not, I don’t think that in actual fact there is really much of a moral difference between the two groups of pro-choicers.  In actual fact, the subjective culpability of both groups is probably pretty close.  And again, Ponnuru himself may well agree with that, for all I know.

The latest on Five Proofs

My book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is briefly reviewed by Christopher McCaffery in the March 2019 issue of First Things.  From the review:
Addressing contemporary and historical objections, Feser explains the logic of each proof with impressive clarity… Five Proofs is a useful resource for anyone seeking an introduction to historical arguments about God’s existence and their relationship to contemporary philosophical scholarship. Glenn Siniscalchialso recently reviewed the book in the December 2018 issue of Religious Studies Review.  From the review:
Although the book can be appreciated by newcomers to the field, the book is chock-full with detailed information that will be of tremendous use to theologians and philosophers...  
Always charitable, clear, and intellectually engaging, Five Proofs of the Existence of Godshould be seen as a welcome addition to books on natural theology.
I was recently interviewed about the book by Pat Flynn for WCAT Radio.  You can listen to the interview hereor here.  It’s a pretty wide-ranging discussion that touches on matters that go beyond the book.

Socialism versus the family

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation on the topic “Socialism versus the Family.”  You can watch the lecture on YouTube or at the Heritage website. The talk has three parts.  In the first, I explain what socialism is (and what it isn’t), and how it can come in degrees.  In the second, I discuss what the family is, and in particular the core notion of the family that underlies the diverse arrangements that have existed in different societies, the general moral outlook that has traditionally governed it in these different societies, and the way evolutionary psychology and social science support the judgment that the family is a natural rather than artificial institution.  In the third, I explain how socialism and the basic structure of the family are incompatible, and how liberal individualism has eroded the family and paved the way for socialism.  As I argue, if conservatives are effectively to oppose socialism, they must also oppose the liberal individualism that opens the door to it.

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part III: Freud

Our sojourn among the Old Atheists was briefer than I’d intended.  To my great surprise, I see that the previous installment in this series dates from roughly the middle of 2016!  So let’s make a return visit.  Our theme has been the tendency of the best-known Old Atheists to show greater insight vis-à-vis the consequences of atheism than we find in their shallow New Atheist descendants.  This was true of Nietzscheand of Sartre, and it is true of Sigmund Freud.  So lay back on the couch and light up a cigar.  And before you start speculating about what hidden meaning lay behind my sudden return to this topic, remember: Sometimes a blog post is just a blog post. Mechanism and mind
Modern atheism is more than just the denial of God’s existence.  It is closely associated with a conception of nature as a vast, meaningless mechanism – to a first approximation, as nothing more than particles in motion, pushing and pulling against one another the way the metal parts of a machine might, but without any purpose of the kind that the machines we construct have. 
As I have often emphasized, the more precise way of spelling out this mechanical world picture is to start with its rejection of the essentialism and teleology that were central to the Aristotelian conception of nature that early modern philosophy and science replaced.  For the Aristotelian, as for common sense, there is a sharp and objective difference in kind between stone, water, trees, grass, dogs, cats, and all other natural objects.  Each of these things has its own distinctive essence or nature, which the human mind discovers rather than invents.  But the mechanical world picture treats them instead as just superficially different arrangements of the same one basic stuff.  There is no sharp essence or nature of being a tree or a dog per se.  These are just loosely cobbled together arrangements of particles.
For the Aristotelian, as for common sense, there are also ends or goals toward which things naturally aim or point, given their essences.  Water aims at being liquid at room temperature, trees aim at sinking roots and growing leaves, dogs aim at eating and mating and running about, and so on.  But for the mechanical world picture, such aiming or teleology is illusory.  Objectively, nothing really aims at or points at or is foranything.
In short, the idea that anything has a natural purpose is an illusion, because natures and purposes are illusions.  Now, few thinkers push this idea through with total consistency.  Indeed, it cannot be made totally consistent, though eliminative materialists like Alex Rosenberg give it the old college try.  The Aristotelians were right, as I argue constantly and in ever greater depth.  The point for the moment, though, is that whether they work out its implications consistently or not, modern atheists tend to be committed to this general mechanical view of nature.
Now, perhaps if you could instead marry atheism to some broadly Aristotelian view of nature, as Thomas Nagel flirts with doing, then you could end up with an optimistic view of the human condition.  Perhaps you could maintain the idea that human beings have an essence, that there is as a matter of objective fact an end or point toward which human beings aim given that essence, and that this can give human life meaning and purpose even in the absence of God. 
But what you can’t do is to defend such an optimistic position given the mechanicalworld picture.  If the mechanical world picture is correct, then there is no reason to believe that a human being is anything more than a roughly cobbled together aggregate, like the random pile of junk you collect from around the house and quickly toss into a closet in anticipation of guests arriving, or like the heap of various unrelated bits of debris you find on the beach after a hurricane.  There is no reason to think that the parts of human nature can ever cohere, and there can certainly be no point or purpose to human existence that isn’t an entirely made-up one (given the assumption that there are no purposes at all). 
Accordingly, any atheism that is informed by the mechanical world picture must, if it is realistic and honest, take a tragic and pessimistic view of human existence.  There ought to be no delusional happy talk of the kind that (as we saw in an earlier post in this series) one sometimes finds coming from New Atheists like Richard Dawkins. 
Reality principles
Which brings us to Freud.  The popular image of the father of psychoanalysis has it that he thought human happiness could be secured if only we would free ourselves of stifling repressions, especially regarding sex.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact Freud believed that human beings were likely doomed always to be unhappy, and that this was probably the inevitable price of our enjoying the benefits of civilization.
This is famously the theme of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents , wherein he avers that “the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (p. 43).  As maturity brings one to follow the sober “reality principle” more than the “pleasure principle,” one will find that merely avoiding pain and suffering as far as one can – as opposed to finding positive fulfillment – is the best that can be hoped for.  “[T]he idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system” (p. 42), Freud says, and since (he thinks) religion is an illusion, there can be no purpose to life and thus nothing the realization of which could bring genuine happiness.
Intellectual pursuits like science and art can provide a few people with some consolation, but the majority of human beings cannot appreciate these things and will likely always need the illusion of religion (pp. 39-41).  And even so, though science and technology have made modern man “almost become a god himself,” they have not thereby produced happiness (p. 66).  Work, too, can provide only relatively few people with satisfaction, and for most people is merely a necessity rather than a source of fulfillment (p. 49). 
The three main sources of our unhappiness are, in Freud’s view, natural forces that lie outside our control, the weaknesses of our bodies, and frustration with the ways we relate to other human beings (p. 57).  The idea that civilization is the source of our unhappiness, and a return to primitive conditions the remedy for it, strikes Freud as “strange,” even “astonishing” (p.58).  In fact it is only civilization that allows us to mitigate the sources of suffering to the extent that we can.  Enmity against civilization and nostalgia for pre-civilized times is rooted in resentment at the frustration of desire that civilization entails:
[I]t is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts.  This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships among human beings.  As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle. (p. 75)
Prominent among these frustrated desires are those concerned with sexual relationships, for “civilization threatens love with substantial restrictions” (p. 83).  Needless to say, Freud is no traditional moralist, but neither is he politically correct.  “Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life,” he says, whereas a man is drawn by the demands of modern civilization ever further away from home and family to the world of work, to the extent that these demands “even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father” (p. 84).  Hence, Freud judges, women are on that account likely to resent civilization. 
Civilization has also tended to confine sexual activity to intercourse between one man and one woman within marriage (even if it sometimes winks at transgressions), and this is another source of frustration (pp. 85-86).  Famously, Freud thinks that repressed sexual desire is a source of neuroses, which can be eliminated by indulging rather than repressing the desire.  At the same time, he says:
Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths.  This may be wrong; it is hard to decide. (p. 87)
This last remark illustrates Freud’s tendency often to put things tentatively.  He isn’t surethat sexual dissatisfaction has something to do with the nature of sex itself rather than merely with the repressions of civilization, but he also isn’t sure that it doesn’t.  He even finds it “very understandable” that some would propose that civilization’s restrictions on sexual indulgence “cannot be averted or turned aside and [are something] to which it is best for us to yield as though they were necessities of nature” (pp. 148-9), though he also says that he isn’t certain this is really the case.  In any event, he does not regard sexual indulgence as a panacea.
Another key instinct that civilization represses is aggression.  Freud thinks it a delusion to suppose that this can ever be eliminated from the human condition:
[M]en are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. (p. 94)
For this reason, he regards the psychological assumptions underlying communism as an “untenable illusion” (p. 97).  Competitiveness and aggression were not created by the institution of private property, and if that institution were abolished they would simply manifest themselves in some other way.  Abolishing all restraints on sexual desire, and the family along with it, will not eliminate the “indestructible feature” of aggression either (p. 98).  Any group of human beings, no matter how affectionate toward one another, will always find some other group at which to direct hostility.  Communists themselves manifest this tendency in their hatred of the bourgeois (pp. 99-100).  (In a recent post I proposed my own explanation for the paradox that people prone to sentimental chatter about love and peace are often extremely nasty themselves.) 
The bottom line, for Freud, is that while primitive man was freer to indulge his instinctive sexual and aggressive drives, he also did not live long enough to enjoy this freedom much, and was subject to other restrictions (p. 100).  The security and other benefits of civilization require some repression of instinct and the frustration this entails, and we should “familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform” (p. 101).
An attractive feature of Freud’s Old Atheism, then, is its realism and sobriety.  Science, art, work, a return to primitive living, sexual indulgence, an ethic of nonviolence, socialism, the abandonment of religion – none of these are going to bring human happiness or otherwise substitute for the meaning that religion promised.  Neither Burning Man festivals, nor Reason Rallies, nor Bernie Sanders can save us.  Deal with it.
Ego trip
Freud famously cribs from Plato, transforming the latter’s distinction between the desiring, spirited, and rational parts of the soul into the distinction between id, ego, and super-ego.  That is not to say that the distinction is exactlythe same, but it is similar.  Moreover, a naturalist like Freud is bound to get certain important things wrong, especially where the nature of rationality is concerned.  All the same, you can’t go too far wrong starting from Plato’s classic distinction.  Freud also has some interesting things to say about the social influences on the formation of the super-ego – particularly his analysis of it as a kind of voice of the father figure.  And, let’s face it, id, ego, and super-ego just sounds cooler than desiring part, spirited part, and rational part.
Another merit of Freud’s psychology is its anti-reductionism.  Of course, Freud was highly prone to reductionism in one sense, insofar as he tried to account for vast swaths of human behavior in terms of the instincts for sexual indulgence and aggression.  That was one of his great errors.  But he nevertheless resisted psychological reductionism in the metaphysicalsense of supposing that descriptions at the psychological level could be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, descriptions at the physiological level.  That doesn’t mean he was a metaphysical dualist – of course he was not – but he was nevertheless skeptical of the idea that in the analysis of human nature, physiology is privileged.  He complained that:
The medical profession had been educated to esteem highly only anatomical, physical, and chemical factors….They clearly doubted that psychic things admit of any exact scientific treatment… In this materialistic – or better: mechanistic – period medicine made magnificent advances, but also failed myopically to recognize the noblest and most difficult problems of life. (Quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, Volume 3: Freud, Adler, and Jung, p. 55)
And again:
I always envy the physicists and mathematicians who can stand on firm ground.  I hover, so to speak, in the air.  Mental events seem to me immeasurable and probably always will be. (Ibid., p. 100)
The area where Freud was least interesting was his analysis of religion.  Not because he was an atheist, and not because of his tone or anything like that.  (He was certainly peremptory and condescending, but he was not shrill or sophomoric after the fashion of a New Atheist.)  The reason is just that what he has to say typically has the flavor of anticlimactic out-of-left-field speculation.  For example, all the stuff in Totem and Taboo about religion’s purported origin in a primitive band of brothers killing and eating their father and then feeling guilty about it, is just cringemakingly silly.  Even Walter Kaufmann, a more serious and interesting critic of religion who is otherwise sometimes effusive in his praise of Freud, regarded Freud’s writings on religion as subpar.  (Cf. Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, Volume 3, Chapter 32)
In fairness, though, here too Freud sets an example of intellectual honesty that his New Atheist successors would do well to follow.  About Totem and Taboo, Freud once said: “Oh, don’t take that seriously – I made that up on a rainy Sunday afternoon” (quoted in Anthony Storr, Freud, at p. 86).  You could say the same thing about pretty much the entire New Atheist literature, with one exception. 

Early 2019 speaking engagements

I recently got back from Blackfriars in Oxford, where I gave talks on classical theism and cooperation with evil.
This Thursday, January 31, I will be giving the 2019 Aquinas Lecture at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.  
On February 11, I will be speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on the topic of socialism versus the family. On April 17, I will be speaking at a Thomistic Institute event at Stanford University.
I will be one of the speakers at a workshop on the theme Aquinas on Human Action and Virtue, to be held at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Newburgh, New York, from June 19-23.
Further speaking engagements to be announced.  Links to audio and video of earlier talks can be found at my main website.

The Bizarro world of left-wing politics

I have only a little to add to what others have already said about the Kafkaesque Covington affair.  There were, as you all know by now, three main parties involved.  There was the group led by Nathan Phillips, who is now known to be a liar and rabble rouser who appears to have been trying to provoke a confrontation.  There were the “Black Hebrew Israelites,” classified by the SPLC as a hate group and who have been captured on video instigating the whole mess by shouting things that any left-winger would normally denounce as the worst sort of racist, sexist, homophobic, and fundamentalist bigotry.  And there are the Covington Catholic school teenagers, who were there waiting for a bus and got caught in the middle of these two groups of lunatics.  So, at whom do the left-wing press and social media direct their venom?  Not at the liar and not at the racists, but at some poor Covington kid who was… smiling at Phillips.  That’s all he did.  For this act of unspeakable depravity, members of the cybermob opined that he should never be forgiven, fantasized about punching him in the face and putting him and his friends into a woodchipper, hoped for his death and the deaths of the other boys and their families, offered sexual favors to anyone who would assault him, compared him and his friends to Nazis and Jim Crow era racists, called for their doxxing, made death threats against him and his friends and their school, compared him and his friends to the Roman soldiers who spat at Christ, and so on and on.
(That last piece of insanity actually came from a conservativewho was a bit too quick on the virtue-signaling trigger and has since apologized – one Nicholas Frankovich, previously known to me only as someone who once urged his fellow Catholics to be less rigorously logical and more “right brain.”  How’s that advice sound this week, Frankovich?)
It is true that many of these people were initially misled by Phillips’ lies and that many of them have since expressed regret.  But incredibly, some of them are stilltrying to find a way to rationalize the Two Minutes Hate they directed at the teenagers, while continuing to ignore Phillips’ lies and the Black Hebrew Israelites’ undisguised bigotry.  Moreover, even if the initial reports had been accurate, the most that could have been said about the now famous smiling teenager is that he smiled – or disrespectfully smirked at Phillips, we were told, but still a disrespectful smirk is all it would have been.  On what world other than Bizarro world does that make remotely understandable, much less justifiable, all this ghastly stuff about face-punching, woodchippers, doxxing, and all the rest?  What the hell is wrong with these people?
Bishop Robert Barron and Rod Dreher have some interesting thoughts on the subject.  Here are some other ideas.
The hermeneutics of suspicion
James Piereson’s book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution argues that a bizarre inversion of reality changed the face of American liberalism during the 1960s.  John F. Kennedy was shot by a hard-core communist and Robert Kennedy by a left-wing Palestinian nationalist.  Yet the Left spun both assassinations in such a way that they are remembered by many today as having a vaguely right-wing provenance.  The milder form this took was to blame the assassinations on some vague cultural rot that had purportedly set into American life as a consequence of redneck violence and racism.  The more extreme form, of course, was to argue for a secret right-wing conspiracy.  Though the assassinations were in fact driven by hard-left politics, the lesson drawn from them was that we need to be wary of some inchoate sinister alliance between militarists, businessmen, the KKK, etc.  And the paranoid style of politics this reflects has increasingly permeated beyond the left-wing fringes into mainstream liberal politics.
As I have argued elsewhere, the attraction of political narratives that posit vast unseen conspiracies derives in part from the general tendency in modern intellectual life reflexively to suppose that “nothing is at it seems,” that reality is radically different from or even contrary to what common sense supposes it to be.  This is a misinterpretation and overgeneralization of certain cases in the history of modern science where common sense turned out to be wrong, and when applied to moral and social issues it yields variations on the “hermeneutics of suspicion” associated with thinkers like Nietzsche and Marx.  
The result is a kind of Gnosticism, according to which only an ignorant or naïve person would take political phenomena at face value, whereas the person initiated into whatever one’s favored hermeneutics of suspicion happens to be possesses the secret knowledge about “what is really going on.”  Into the bargain, there are, just as in the original Gnosticism, unseen dark forces lying behind the purported illusion – the specters of racism, sexism, capitalism, militarism, fascism, fundamentalism, etc. etc., always lurking offstage somewhere pulling the strings.  Like Gnosticism, the whole thing is a paranoid fantasy, posing as knowledge but in fact a kind of faith-based gestalt.  Speculative political theory drives one’s interpretation of empirical reality rather than the other way around.
(I am not saying, by the way, that no conspiracies of any kind ever occur.  Of course they occur.  But as I have also argued elsewhere, what is philosophically problematic is the kind of conspiracy theory that posits a conspiracy so far-reaching and subtle that it undermines the theory’s own epistemological foundations, in something like the way radical philosophical skepticism undermines itself.)
Again, initially this kind of paranoid thinking was confined to the Marxoid fringes, but since the 1960s it has permeated ever more deeply into the left-wing mainstream.  Hence the tendency to interpret absolutely everything as part of a “larger narrative” of “racism,” “sexism,” “white privilege,” blah blah blah.  To come back to my main topic: The reductio ad absurdum of this mainstreaming of the hermeneutics of suspicion occurs when the ordinary left-wing journalist or Hollywood type looks at what is in reality absolutely nothing more than the face of some innocent teenage kid smiling awkwardly… and sees in it the avatar of the dark forces of oppression which must be annihilated.
Blindness of mind
So, part of the explanation for what happened with the Covington teenagers is that even mainstream left-wingers are increasingly prone to seeing politics through the lenses of an ideological illusion.  But how does one maintain such an illusion?  The motor of self-deception requires potent emotional fuel.  And there is no fuel more potent than sex.  
It is probably no accident that the teenage boys who had aroused such an unhinged response from the Left had just attended an anti-abortion march.  Indeed, some of the most shrill left-wing responses have emphasized this fact.  
Now, abortion involves the deliberate killing of one’s own child, and it is usually done for the utterly frivolous purpose of being able to enjoy the pleasures of sex without the hassle of its natural consequences.  It is about as perverse an act as can be imagined, and even most liberals have until recently halfway conceded its morally problematic character by arguing that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” (in Bill Clinton’s famous formulation).  
Still, they have been relentless in framing the issue in terms of Orwellian euphemisms: Violently to interfere with the normal course of reproduction is, we are told, a matter of “reproductive health.”  To facilitate mothers killing their own babies is to show respect for mothers.  And so on.  And in recent years the disingenuous “…and rare” business has given way to the “Shout Your Abortion” movement.  For these activists, killing your own baby is something to celebrate publicly and have a friendly chat with the kids about.
Such bizarre inversions of what virtually the entire human race until about 20 minutes ago regarded as common sense and basic decency vis-à-vis matters of sex have become increasingly common as the sexual revolution has progressed.  Thus do we now find ourselves in a situation in which someone who has male gametes, male chromosomes, male sex organs, looks paradigmatically masculine, and has for decades thought of himself as a man and been taken by everyone else to be a man, one day declares that he is really a woman… and anyone who responds with even mild and respectful skepticism stands in danger of being shrilly denounced, Maoist-style, as an ignorant bigot who ought to be fired from his job and socially ostracized.  
Examples could easily be multiplied.  The more extreme the departures from traditional sexual morality, the more shrill and moralistic has been the rhetoric in their defense.  You might have expected the opposite – that such disruptions of long-standing institutions and moral assumptions would be proposed tentatively and with humility – but no.  What is going on?
What is going on, I would suggest, is that it takes a morality to beat a morality.  Sexual behavior that is now being mainstreamed and celebrated would, for all of human history up until now, have been regarded instead as a source of great shame and guilt.  Indeed, even now left-wingers lament the feelings of shame and guilt experienced by those who indulge in such behaviors.  Now, natural law theorists and other traditional moralists would respond:  Well, of course… it’s called “the voice of conscience.”  But the sexual revolutionary will have none of that.  It is, he insists, really the voice of the oppressor – of the “patriarchy,” the forces of “heteronormativity,” or what have you – which has been internalized by the oppressed.  
Thus do we have a Marxoid hermeneutics of suspicion deployed in the service of sexual, rather than economic, revolution.  The proletariat, in this story, comprises everyone whose sexual behavior does not conform to the traditional norm of a man and a woman united in marriage for the purpose of building a family.  Alienation is the residual guilt and shame this sexual proletariat feels for failing to conform this norm, and liberation is the overthrowing of the norm and the political defeat and social ostracization of those who still uphold it.
This opens the door to a counter-morality.  The good person, on this narrative, is the person who rejects traditional sexual morality and opposes those who defend it.  The nagging feelings of shame and guilt are magically transformed into a reassuring sense of pride and virtue.  Moreover, you can link arms with those who fight other forms of oppression, and their virtue rubs off on you.  Getting an abortion or publicly declaring yourself “bi-curious” becomes an act of political courage on all fours with sitting alongside Rosa Parks or marching at Selma.
The whole thing is preposterous, of course, but anyone strongly tempted to what would traditionally have been regarded as sexual vice has a powerful incentive to want to believe it.  And the more you can work yourself into a moralistic frenzy against those who uphold traditional sexual morality, the more thoroughly you can overcome any feelings of guilt and shame for flouting it.  
Natural law adepts will recognize in this an example of the “blindness of mind” that Aquinas says is one of the “daughters” or byproducts of lust, and which I have discussed at length in earlier posts.  As the sexual revolution has come more and more to dominate the agenda of the Left, this blindness has increasingly shaped left-wing psychology.  Thus does a visceral, crusading sexual counter-morality become the emotional glue that keeps the ideological blinders affixed.  Thus does some hapless smiling teenage kid come to be demonized as The Patriarchy incarnate.

Washburn contra the “new natural lawyers”

I highly recommend theologian Christian Washburn’s excellent article “The New Natural Lawyers, Contraception, Capital Punishment, and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium,” from the latest issue of Logos .  Is there anything new to say about the “new natural law” (NNL) position on capital punishment?  There is, as Washburn shows. Washburn begins by noting an odd parallel.  John T. Noonan’s influential book on the history of Catholic thinking about contraception showed that the Church’s teaching against the practice has been consistent for two millennia.  And yet Noonan nevertheless proposed that the teaching could be reversed.  Similarly, NNL scholar E. Christian Brugger’s book on capital punishment shows that the Church’s teaching on the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment has also been consistent for two millennia.  And yet Brugger nevertheless proposes that this teaching could be reversed.  
Part of the oddness of this is that both Noonan’s position and Brugger’s are perverse.  In Catholic theology, the more ancient and consistent a teaching concerning faith and morals, the less plausible can be the case for a reversal of that teaching.  Hence both Noonan and Brugger end up taking a position that is precisely the opposite of what the results of their historical investigations can support.
But another oddity here is that Brugger himself, and other NNL writers, see the perversity in the case of Noonan.  In an influential 1978 paper, Germain Grisez, the father of NNL theory (working together with the great Catholic moral theologian John C. Ford, who was not a NNL theorist), argued that evidence like that cited by Noonan in fact shows that the Church’s traditional doctrine against contraception has been taught infallibly.  Other NNL thinkers have followed them in this judgment.  And yet where capital punishment is concerned, Grisez and other NNL writers draw the opposite conclusion from the same sort of evidence!
Indeed, it’s worse than that.  Washburn notes that the evidence for the traditional teaching on capital punishment is stronger than that cited by Grisez in favor of the traditional teaching on contraception.  For example, the number of Fathers and popes who can be cited in defense of capital punishment is larger in each case than the number that Grisez cites in favor of the traditional teaching against contraception.  Furthermore, the NNL writers apply their standards of evidence in an inconsistent way.  For example, Grisez cites the Roman Catechism as evidence that the traditional teaching against contraception is part of the ordinary magisterium, but he and other NNL writers downplay the fact that the traditional teaching on capital punishment is also found in the Roman Catechism.  Indeed, the Roman Catechism presents moreby way of citations from authoritative sources in defense of traditional teaching on capital punishment than it does in the case of contraception.
In short, if Grisez, Brugger, and other NNL writers were consistent in their application of the standards they deploy in criticism of Noonan, they would uphold traditional teaching on capital punishment no less than traditional teaching on contraception.  The reason they don’t apply these standards consistently is, of course, that traditional teaching on capital punishment conflicts with Grisez’s personal theology, whereas traditional teaching on contraception does not.  The NNL theory is allowed to trump the evidence from tradition in the one case, even while it is claimed to be supported by the evidence from tradition in the other.  For Grisez and company, the attitude is “NNL über alles.”
In defense of his proposal that the Church could reverse her traditional teaching on capital punishment, Brugger claims that a doctrine cannot be said to have been taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium unless it has been explicitly taught in a definitive way by all the bishops.  Joe Bessette and I criticize Brugger’s criterion in By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , and Washburn has some criticisms of his own.  First, he says, this criterion of Brugger’s is “a theological novelty” having no support in the tradition.  Second, it is so stringent a standard that it would render impossible a proof of anydoctrine from the ordinary magisterium (including doctrines the NNL writers would want to uphold).  Third, it conflicts with the teaching of Pope Pius IX’s Tuas Libenter, which cites the constant consensus of theologians as evidence of a doctrine’s being an infallible part of the ordinary magisterium.  (Cf. my Catholic World Report article “Capital punishment and the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.”)
Washburn also points out that while Brugger concedes that the evidence from the Fathers, Doctors, and popes all supports the traditional teaching that capital punishment can be legitimate in principle, that evidence is in fact even stronger than Brugger’s survey indicates.  For example, when considering the teaching of the Fathers and the popes on the subject of capital punishment, Brugger tends to focus on statements pertaining to the question of the status of capital punishment under the Christian dispensation.  But Washburn says that Brugger neglects important patristic and papal statements about capital punishment in the Old Testament, some of which refer to the practice as having been a part of “divine law” or “sacred law.”  As Washburn points out, a practice that is part of divine or sacred law can hardly be intrinsically evil (as NNL theory says capital punishment is), whatever one says about its status under the Christian dispensation. 
Washburn also thinks that Brugger fails to consider the weight of the evidence from canon law and the policies of the popes concerning the use of capital punishment in practice.  I think he is right about this, and to what he says, I would add the following point.  Suppose that canon law and the popes had for centuries officially decreed that abortion or contraception is morally permissible, that these practices were approved of and widely adopted in the Papal States, etc.  This would hardly be consistent with the Church’s claim to be an infallible guide to faith and morals.  For she would have been directly leading untold numbers of Catholics into grave moral corruption for centuries.  Yet Grisez, Brugger, and other NNL writers, who claim that capital punishment is always and intrinsically evil, in effect hold that canon law and the popes did exactly this sort of thing where that practice is concerned.
(Note that it is not a good reply to this to point out that there have been many popes and bishops who were guilty of murder, adultery, fornication, simony, etc.  Of course there have been, but they never taught that these things are good in official magisterial statements, made them official policy, incorporated them into canon law, etc.  The Church’s being an infallible moral teacher is compatible with churchmen being personally corrupt, but not with her having officially taught grave moral error century after century after century.)
In my CWR article on capital punishment and the ordinary magisterium, I emphasized the weight that the teaching of the Doctors of the Church has in Catholic theology, and Washburn makes some important points about that matter as well.  He notes that at least 18 of the 35 Doctors taught that capital punishment can be permissible in principle, and in addition to the Doctors I cited in my article, he cites the Venerable Bede, Peter Damian, Bonaventure, Albert, and Lawrence of Brindisi.  Washburn is also critical of the strained – and indeed, sometimes manifestly absurd – reinterpretations of biblical passages that NNL writers have to come up with in order to try to reconcile scripture with their position.
Anyway, as they say, read the whole thing.