Edward Feser's Blog, page 59

Reelin’ in the links

At Catholic World Report, my co-author Joseph Bessette on the death penalty, recent popes, and deterrence.
The New Yorker on the late Jerry Fodor and his critique of Neo-Darwinism.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder announces her forthcoming book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.  She also has a blog.Rolling Stone interviews Donald Fagen about his late partner Walter Becker and the future of Steely Dan.

Conservative philosopher Robert Koons has a column at Newsmax.
At Project Syndicate, economist Robert Skidelsky calls attention to some inconvenient truths about migration.  John O’Sullivan on Europe and Muslim immigration, at the Claremont Review of Books.
Commentary on the thirtieth anniversary of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.
The Dictator Pope is reviewed by Robert Royal at The Catholic Thing, Dan Hitchens at Catholic Herald, and Philip Lawler at Catholic World Report.  Hitchens, Ed Condon, and Damian Thompson discuss the book in a Holy Smoke podcast.
This summer, The Berkeley Institute will be hosting a seminar for students on the theme of sexuality and gender.  The seminar will be led by Candace Vogler and Neville Hoad.
In defense of St. Junipero Serra, at First Things.
Vanity Fair uncovers the secrets of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and presents an oral history of how the Marvel movie juggernaut got started.  But the New Republic thinks bringing Marvel and Fox together will be a disaster.
Meanwhile, at Marvel’s publishing arm, progressive politics collides with market reality.
Aeon on Philippa Foot’s critique of modern moral philosophy.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Harrison on the dialogue between science and religion.
Sociologist Mark Regnerus on sex scandals and sex differences, at Public Discourse.
The Weekly Standard talks to philosopher Roger Scruton about conservative environmentalism, Brexit, and his farm.
Something to bring all Trump haters and Trump fans together.  Except for the ones who don’t like Talking Heads.
At Free Inquiry, Susan Haack asks whether philosophy can be saved.
Anthony Gottlieb on the correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth on the mind-body problem, at Lapham’s Quarterly.
Vulture ranks every episode of Black Mirror.   Electric Dreams doesn’t necessarily stick closely to Philip K. Dick’s original stories.  The Punisher is reviewed at Forbes.
Han Thomas Adriaenssen’s Representation and Scepticism from Aquinas to Descartes is reviewed by Dominik Perler at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
From armchair to reality?  Thinking about thought experiments, at Aeon. 
“But the pope said so!”  Philosopher Peter Kwasniewski on what not to say on Judgment Day. 
David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt debate gun control in a new book reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
The National Interest on dictators and the intellectuals who love them.
The Atlantic on the lazy filmmaking of Woody Allen.
At The Washington Post, Alan Lightman on Karl Sigmund’s new book on the Vienna Circle.
The Atlanticreviews David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the New Testament.  So does First Things.
City Journal on the man who ran the Strand.
Jerry Coyne does not like A. N. Wilson’s new book on Darwin, at The Washington Post. 

The best New Atheist book?

The New Atheism, one hears from time to time (e.g. here, here, here, and here), is dead.  Maybe.  It depends on what you mean by “New Atheism.”  I would say that its key marks are three: first, an unreflective and dogmatic scientism; second, an extremely shallow understanding of religion; and third, an obnoxious, evangelical fervor.  The third probably has by now worn out its welcome.  Even many secular people are tired of hearing the ever more unhinged rants and calls to action of the likes of Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers, and appalled by the lemming-like behavior of the kind of people who show up at a Reason Rally or Jerry Coyne’s combox.  As a self-conscious movement the New Atheism might be a spent force.On the other hand, the first two marks of the New Atheism seem to me to be by no means on the wane.  Many, and indeed I would say most, secular people do not have a very deep understanding of the religious ideas they reject, and neither do they have a very sophisticated understanding of the philosophical problems inherent in the scientism they take for granted.  Unlike Dawkins, Myers, Coyne, and Co., they are not shrilly and militantly dogmatic and ignorant.  But they are politely and complacently dogmatic and ignorant. 

What would be interesting and remarkable would be a secularism whose best intellectual expressions were typically as sophisticated as, say, Walter Kaufmann, J. L. Mackie, or William L. Rowe, to cite three writers I admired in my own atheist days.  These were thinkers who recognized the intellectual and/or moral attractions of religious ideas and who also tried to grapple with the moral and intellectual problems posed by atheism.  They respected their opponents even when they disagreed with them vehemently – not out of mere politeness to the other side, but rather out of an informed perspective on it.  These thinkers are, of course, still known and their works still in print.  But even most (though of course not all) civil and educated atheists these days seem to lack their depth.
Anyway, if a postmortem on the New Atheism is in order, we might start by asking if anything of intellectual interest ever came out of it.  And the answer, I would say, is: Not much, but not quite nothing either.
One of the remarkable features of philosophy is that it is possible for a philosophy book to be well worth reading even if it gets things wrong, and even very badly wrong.  To take just four famous examples from early modern philosophy, Spinoza’s Ethics, Leibniz’s Monadology, Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature each put forward philosophical positions that are, frankly, nuts.  And yet every philosopher considers them classics, and for good reason, because each of these works is brilliant and worthy of careful study.  For though each starts from erroneous premises (in my view, anyway), each also makes the premises seem plausible, and also plausibly draws out their (often bizarre) implications. 
You can learn a lot from this sort of thing.  For one thing, if certain premises can be shown to have absurd consequences, that of course gives us reason to rethink those premises.  But there is more to the study of works like the ones in question than merely the caution against error that they afford.  A thinker who falls into a deep error can also sometimes see certain truthsthat others miss.  Why?  Precisely because he often focuses obsessively on some aspect of reality.  His mistake is that he exaggerates its significance, but precisely because he pays it far more attention than a more balanced thinker would, he notices things the more balanced thinker doesn’t.
Then there is the mundane fact that it is difficult for an intelligent thinker to go totally wrong, even when he is beholden to serious errors.  He is bound to get something right, even if it is not always what he thinks he is getting right.  For example, Hume’s account of the mind is ridiculous if applied to human minds, but it can be an illuminating way to begin to think about animal minds. 
A truly bad philosophy book, or a bad book of any kind for that matter, is one that not only gets things wrong, but fails to be interesting in any of the ways just described.  It simply has nothing going for it.  Now, a lot of New Atheist work is like that.  Consider, for example, Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact, which I reviewed for First Things and commented on further here at the blog.  For the reasons I set out in those places, it is possibly the worst of the New Atheist books.  The only thing that is interesting about it is that there is nothing at all interesting about it, and that fact – the fact that an otherwise intelligent man could produce so worthless a piece of work – is alone worth pondering. 
You might think I am just being abusive out of some animus toward Coyne, but that is not the case.  For one thing, I certainly don’t deny that Coyne is worth reading when he writes about something he actually knows about, such as biology.  For another thing, if I have been hard on Coyne, I have also been very hard on other New Atheists, such as Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett.  But I would not say about their New Atheist volumes what I say about Coyne’s.
For example, while Krauss’s A Universe from Nothingis cringe-makingly bad as an argument for atheism, it has some value as a pop science summary of some current ideas in cosmology.  I’ve often pointed out how ill-informed and dishonest is Dennett’s treatment of theistic arguments in Breaking the Spell, but that book too is not entirely without interest, because of Dennett’s account of the cognitive science of religious belief.  The theory is not plausible at the end of the day, but it is at least a theory, with substantive claims and arguments that are worth evaluating.  It is not a complete waste of time to read these books, the way reading Coyne’s Faith versus Fact is a complete waste of time (other than as a source of blog fodder, anyway).
Unfortunately, most New Atheist stuff is closer to Coyne’s book in value rather than to these other books.  For example, what is probably the best-known New Atheist book, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, is a step or two up from Coyne, but not as good as Dennett, say. 
None of the books named so far is really a goodbook, though.  Some are just less bad than the others, that’s all.  None of them is really much worth reading all things considered, and that is true of almost everything in the New Atheist genre. 
I would make one exception, however.  Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Realitycertainly counts as a New Atheist book, at least if we take the three marks identified above as definitive of the New Atheism.  But it is also of real intellectual interest, and worth reading and thinking about.  Like the books by Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, the philosophical position it defends is nuts.  Indeed, it is far more crazy even than anything those writers have to say.  That is because it draws out the extreme, eliminative materialist implications of scientism far more consistently than other New Atheists do.  And though it is semi-popular in style, its arguments are also more philosophically interesting (however badly wrongheaded) than those of other New Atheist books.
That is not to say it ranks with the classics by Leibniz, Hume, et al. mentioned above.  Few books reach that status.  Nor is it to say that its arguments are very challenging.  They aren’t.  I did, after all, devote a long series of blog posts several years ago to cataloguing its failings.  However, it was worth examining in such depth because it very clearly and systematically articulates certain common errors, and shows how they, and even more radical consequences, follow from yet other and more fundamental common errors.  And it does so with much more sophistication than most other books informed by scientism.  It is in many ways a work that is representative of the intellectual pathologies of our age, and its study helps one to understand our age.  It is probably the only New Atheist book that might still be read years from now, and it is certainly the only one that will deserve to be read.
So, in my opinion, Rosenberg’s book stands out as clearly the best book in the New Atheist genre.

A lexicon for the capital punishment debate

This year, readers of this blog have been subjected to a long, heated, and sometimes confusing series of debates on the subject of Catholicism and capital punishment.  To help you take stock, here’s a guide to the key terms and concepts, in the spirit of Daniel Dennett’s famous Philosophical Lexicon :
harty, adjective.  Gratuitously vituperative, especially toward straw men.  “David is so erudite.  Why does he have to be harty all the time?”
sheameless, adjective.  Harty to the point of spittle-flecked incoherence.  “Mark has been harty ever since the Iraq war, but these days he’s absolutely sheameless.”

bruggered, adjective.  Hopelessly lost in a novel theological construction of one’s own invention.  “It’s so sad.  Chris showed such promise, but he’s gotten bruggered senseless.” 

megivern, adjective.   Portmanteau of meshuga and forgiven.   Taking mercy to an extreme that defies common sense.  “Good grief, that’s the most megivern argument against the death penalty I’ve heard yet.” 
Swetland, proper noun.  An imaginary magical realm where a reversal of doctrine counts as a development of doctrine.  “Father means well, but I’m afraid he’s bought a one way ticket to Swetland.” 
imbergoglio, noun.  A pointless, entirely avoidable doctrinal mess.  “Hmm, by my count that makes seven imbergoglios this year alone.”
peters, plural noun.   Eminent canon lawyers.  “Good luck refuting my book.  I’ve got all the peters on my side.”
flannery, noun.  Praise from a distinguished theological authority.  “Even flannery will get you nowhere with some people.”    
schall, noun.  An uneasy mood created by flannery for an unpopular theological opinion.  “The unexpected flannery the book received cast a schall over the whole discussion.”
royal, noun.  Flannery disseminated by way of mass media.  “After the book got the royal treatment, the schall was bound to spread far and wide.”
long, verb.  To yearn for a return to theological sanity. “Steve longed day and night for a neoscholastic revival, and the more baroque the better.”
longnecker, noun.  Someone thought to long in private, but who in public theological controversies tends to look on with detachment.  “Fr. Dwight is something of a longnecker.” 
Petri dish, noun.  Dominican device for reviving dormant theological truths.  Used in seminaries and study centers. “Fr. Thomas carefully placed the thesis in the Petri dish, but sometimes it takes a decade or two to see results.”
griffeth, verb.  Archaic form of griff, to engage an opponent with unjustifiable condescension.  “O friend Paul, methinks thou dost griffeth too readily.”
grisez, adjective.  Portmanteau of griff and blasé.  Excessively confident in the consistency of a novel view with orthodoxy.  “Germain casually waves aside millennia of consistent Catholic teaching, which strikes me as grisez.”
finnis, noun.  The end result or inevitable consequence of adhering to a grisez school of thought.  “When John caved in on capital punishment, he crossed the finnis line.”
tollefson, noun.   A docile student or follower of a grisez school of thought.  “The Master declared the death penalty contrary to a basic good, and all of his tollefsons have fallen into line.”
armstrong, verb.  Boldly but casually to insinuate a falsehood in the hope that others will go along with it.  “Dave tried to armstrong me into a debate.  Can you believe that guy?”
bessette, adjective.  Overwhelmed by the force of evidence and argument for an unpopular thesis.  “I hoped I could find a way around the arguments for capital punishment, but I soon found myself bessette on all sides.”
feser, verb.  Relentlessly to drive home a point that should be obvious.  “Dude, I get the point already.  Stop fesering it!”
MORE COMEDY GOLD IN THEM THAR ARCHIVES:
Pick-up lines from the philosophers
Very informal fallacies
The metaphysics of the martini
Pop culture roundup

Five Proofs on CrossExamined

Recently I was interviewed by Frank Turek for his show CrossExamined on the subject of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  You can now listen to the podcast at the CrossExamined website.Other recent interviews about the book include those on The Ben Shapiro Show , The Andrew Klavan Show , The Dennis Prager Show , The Michael Medved Show , The Patrick Coffin Show , Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd , Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley , and many others.  Further media appearances forthcoming.  Stay tuned.

A Hart that pumps bile

Strangely, as David Bentley Hart has gotten more gratuitously nasty and unhinged in his attacks on me, I find myself less offended, or even having much of an affective reaction at all.  It’s like dealing with a mental patient or a surly neighborhood dog.  You simply navigate the situation, aware that there is no point in getting angry with someone or something that isn’t rational.   It’s too bad.  Our last contretemps, on the subject of eternal damnation, ended with a pleasing amicability in the combox here at the blog.  I had real hope that our future exchanges could be more positive.  Alas, fast forward a few months and Hart is suddenly spitting venom at straw men again in his review of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed in Commonweal (to which I recently replied at Catholic World Report).  And now, at Church Life Journal Hart doubles down on the vitriol and the caricatures.  Perhaps he can’t help it – just as, when reading Hart, I can’t help thinking of the fable of the scorpion and the frog.What comes out of the mouth proceeds from Hart, and this defiles a man

No one has ever accused Hart of rhetorical subtlety, but passages like this one do make one wonder whether there has been an outbreak of rabies in his vicinity:
[Feser’s] book… is, to put the matter simply, an exorbitantly bad book, one that contains not a single compelling or solvent argument… [I]ts uses of scripture, theology, and the Church Fathers are almost fantastic in their awkwardness and crudity…It is also a book whose moral coarseness borders at times on the surreal… Hence the poor, or at least lukewarm, reviews the book has tended to receive.
Yikes.  To start with the latter claim, it is discouraging to see that Hart can’t go three paragraphs without once again succumbing to the temptation to play fast and loose with the truth.  In fact, almost all of the reviews so far – those of Janet Smith in the Claremont Review of Books, Daniel Lendman in the American Academy of Religion’s publication Reading Religion, James Jacobs at Crisis magazine,  William M. Briggs at One Peter Five, and Christopher Manion at The Wanderer – have been strongly positive.  Even the mixed review by David McClamrock at Today’s Catholic made some very positive remarks about the book.  Furthermore, as anyone who has looked at the back cover of the book knows, it has received warm endorsements from many prominent scholars and writers: theologians Steven Long, Fr. Kevin Flannery, and Fr. Thomas Petri; canon lawyers Edward Peters and Fr. Gerald Murray; philosophers Fr. James Schall, Michael Pakaluk, and J. Budziszewski; professor of criminal justice Barry Latzer; and Robert Royal, Fr. George Rutler, and Fr. Robert Sirico (this despite Fr. Sirico’s personal opposition to capital punishment). 
Then there are the further positive notices about the book at Catholic Herald , Catholic Culture , Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s blog, and elsewhere.  And as regular readers of this blog are aware, the book has also gotten a fair amount of attention on radio, television, and other media, and been the subject of a recent academic panel discussion.  Naturally, not everyone who has commented on the book in these contexts has agreed with it, but the general tendency by far has been to treat it as serious and worthy of respectful engagement. 
Meanwhile, the only “poor” reviews have been those of Hart himself and of Paul Griffiths – who, not coincidentally, is as notoriously cantankerous as Hart.  A Thomist getting a bad review from either Hart or Griffiths is about as surprising as Hart or Griffiths getting a bad review from Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins.  And it tells you about the same vis-à-vis the actual quality of the book under review, viz. absolutely nothing.  (I replied to Griffiths in the same article in which I responded to Hart). 
It is also true that E. Christian Brugger and Christopher Tollefsen – prominent Catholic opponents of capital punishment, whose views are subjected to detailed criticism in the book –have replied to that criticism.  But it would be tendentious to call their replies “reviews” of the book, much less “poor” reviews.  For one thing, their concern was primarily to respond to what the book says about their own work, rather than to comment one way or the other on its other contents or its general merits.  For another, where they do comment on the book, they by no means trash it, but simply express polite and scholarly disagreement.  In any event, it would, of course, be rather silly to take the disagreement of two scholars who are themselves major targets of attack in By Man as an objective indicator of the quality of the book.  (I replied to Brugger and Tollefsen at Public Discourse.) 
So, Hart is simply badly misrepresenting the reception the book has been getting.  But then, he knows that most readers sympathetic to his position and hostile to mine won’t bother to fact-check his assertions.  Hart isn’t one to let a scrupulous concern for accuracy get in the way of a useful rhetorical trick.
As to the alleged “moral coarseness” of the book, Hart tries to justify this characterization by once again fulminating at length about the excesses of Giovanni Battista Bugatti – the 19th century executioner for the Papal States, to whom Joe and I briefly allude a couple of times in By Man.  Bugatti looms vastly larger in Hart’s two articles about the book than he does in the book itself, for reasons that are, once again, transparently rhetorical.  Since, in my Catholic World Reportpiece, I already said everything that needs to be said about this red herring, I’ll leave Hart to his Bugatti fixation and move on. 
Coming to the overheated stuff about the book lacking “a single compelling or solvent argument,” etc., this would cause eyes to roll even if Hart were able to develop a single compelling or solvent objection to the arguments of the book.  Which, as it happens, he is not.  For when one looks past the invective to the substantive criticisms Hart raises, one finds that in nearly every case Hart either misses the point or begs the question. 
Because he does so at tedious length, the unwary reader is bound not to see this.  As his longtime readers know, prolixity is one of Hart’s stock rhetorical techniques.  Another is showy scholarship. (To quote from Hart’s widely consulted Rules for Rhetoricians: “Rule 3: Impress the rubes with some Greek.  If you really want to wow ‘em, leave it untransliterated.”)  Hart counts on his fans being so impressed with his erudition that they overlook the fact that his entire case rests on premises which he has not defended, and which only people who already agree with his conclusions would accept.  A Hart essay is like an elegant and solidly constructed chandelier that someone has hung from a paperclip.  You’re so distracted by the light and all the shiny baubles that you don’t see it crashing down at your feet until it’s too late.
What part of “Catholic” didn’t you understand?
Here’s the main problem.  Late in his article, Hart makes a concession which – though, amazingly, he does not realize this – gives away virtually the entire game.  He writes: “It is perhaps easier for me as an Orthodox Christian than it is for a Catholic to dismiss Feser’s arguments.” 
Bingo.  Hart speaks as if this were an incidental point, when in fact it is the whole point.  Perhaps Hart’s copy of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed was missing the subtitle, but here it is: “A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.”  Perhaps he also failed to notice that it was published by a Catholic press, Ignatius.  To be sure, there is much in the book that a non-Catholic should find of interest, such as its purely philosophical arguments and its treatment of the social scientific evidence.  Even some of the theological material will be of interest to non-Catholic readers who take evidence from scripture and/or Christian tradition seriously.  All the same, Joe Bessette and I do not expect many of the theological arguments to be compelling, at the end of the day, to non-Catholics.
In particular, the theological arguments in the book presuppose a Catholic approach to the interpretation of scripture, a Catholic understanding of the authority of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and a Catholic conception of the authority of the popes and the magisterium.  Of course, these presuppositions stand in need of justification, but since you can’t do everything in one book, we take that much for granted and go from there.  The reason this procedure is legitimate is that the book is primarily aimed at a specifically Catholic audience and concerned to address current controversies in Catholic theology.  Joe and I are defending one side of an intra-Catholic dispute.  Non-Catholics are of course welcome to look on, but we aren’t trying to convince themin the first place.
Hart almost entirely ignores this crucial context.  He’s like a guest who shows up at a funeral and loudly complains about the absence of birthday gifts and party hats.  Take, for example, remarks like the following:
Feser is incorrect in saying that what the Pope demanded from the Waldensians was assent to a “doctrinal” point(at least, if the Enchiridion Symbolorum is to be trusted)…
“Orthodoxy,” “doctrine” … these are fairly unequivocal terms.  Yet neither is actually appropriate.  There is in fact not a single dogma of the Catholic Church that requires the liceity of the death penalty.  The Pope could tomorrow declare all capital punishment sinful and incompatible with Catholic teaching ex cathedra, and he would not be contradicting a single recognized doctrine.  If you doubt this, tolle, lege any copy of Denzinger .  And the current catechism of the Church bears this out.
End quote.  Now, as his remarks and links to Denzinger illustrate, Hart is here using the term “doctrine” very narrowly, as a synonym for “dogma.”  But that is not how Joe and I or other Catholic writers use the term.  As we explain at length in our book (building on Cardinal Avery Dulles’s discussion of the CDF document Donum Veritatis), there are five categories of magisterial statement in Catholic theology.  “Dogmas” (such as the Trinity and the Incarnation) are the first category, but two other categories of statement would also count as “doctrinal” in a broader sense (while the last two categories are “prudential” statements of varying types). 
Why does Hart ignore this explicit explanationthat we gave of our usage?  Here is what he has to say about the section of the book in question:
Feser complains that Griffiths and I do not deal with the fifty pages of arguments he and Bessette devote to their procrustean attempt to blunt the catechism’s piercingly unambiguous statements on the matter.  But that was a mercy on our parts.  To refute those arguments it is enough to recite them.
End quote.  I would say that this is shockingly dishonest and frivolous, except that after much bitter experience, nothing about Hart shocks me anymore.  If Hart has actually read the pages in question, then he knows that we there make it crystal clear how we are using the term “doctrine,” in which case he is deliberately misleading his readers about what we meant when we characterized the Waldensian-related statement as “doctrinal.”  If he has not read the pages in question, then he is once again guilty of breathtakingly sloppy scholarship.  The only third alternative is that, in addition to his manifest “anger management” issues, Hart is suffering from a memory disorder. 
In any event, it should go without saying that to dismiss fifty pages of scholarly, non-polemical argumentation with a single bitchy remark like “to refute those arguments it is enough to recite them” is the kind of stuff one expects from a Facebook pissing match or Jerry Coyne’s combox – not from a man some people seem to fancy a veritable St. David Bentley Chrysostom. 
Then there is Hart’s response to what I said in my Catholic World Report article about Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.  Hart appeals to what he claims to be “Christ’s repeated prohibitions against retributive justice,” and asserts that a distinction between “public and private morality for Christians” is “a ridiculous anachronism” when applied to the Sermon, “as any good scholar of the New Testament or of late antiquity could tell [Feser].”  Hence, he alleges, I have failed to reconcile capital punishment with Christ’s moral teaching.
But all of this simply begs the question.  Yes, in the context of first-century Judea, people didn’t draw a sharp line between the public and private spheres.  So what?  They also didn’t use words like homoousios, or pray with icons.  Now, Hart would acknowledge that the latter are perfectly legitimate extensions and applications of the Christian teachings and practices of the first century, or are at the very least perfectly compatible with those principles. 
But traditional Catholic moral theology would say the same thing about distinctions like those Hart either ignores or dismisses.  “Retribution” can mean either (i) the infliction by public authority of a deserved penalty on an offender, or (ii) a private individual taking the law into his own hands or someone punishing out of hatred rather than justice.  Rightly understood, what Christ’s teaching in the Sermon rules out is “retribution” in sense (ii), not in sense (i).  Similarly, the way mercy is shown differs depending on whether the person showing it is a public official responsible for preserving social order, or private individuals in their everyday dealings with each other. 
These are just standard, longstanding principles of Catholic moral theology, and they are explicitly spelled out in By Man.   If Hart wants to argue against them, fine.  But instead Hart simply asserts, without argument that they are wrong, and writes as if Joe and I hadn’t already considered and responded to claims like the ones he makes.  In any event, since they are longstanding ideas in Catholic moral theology, they are available for deployment in the intra-Catholic debate that Joe and I are concerned with, whatever non-Catholics like Hart think of them.
Nor is it remotely reasonable for Hart to be so dismissive of these ideas, given another concession he makes in his latest article.  In my Catholic World Reportresponse to his review, I noted that Hart’s interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount would, if consistently applied, entail giving up all punishments (not just capital punishment), which would be incompatible with even the most rudimentary social order.  In response, Hart is at first flippant, writing:
[N]onsense.  Twaddle.  Dare I say, Balderdash?... [T]here is no dilemma here to resolve.  Forgiveness precludes the principle of retribution, but not every form of punishment or coercion… It is quite possible that there is such a thing as force that is purely non-retributive in intent...
End quote.  There is a serious problem with this position, though, which Joe and I already set out in the book (in yet another passage that Hart simply ignores without answering).  As C. S. Lewis pointed out, when retributive justice is entirely left out of consideration, punishment necessarily becomes unmoored from desert.  The sequel is that, in principle, offenders might be given little or no punishment for heinous crimes, and extremely harsh punishments for minor infractions, if we decide that this is conducive to getting them to do what we want them to.  Offenders cease to be free and responsible moral agents, and become instead cases to be managed or objects of social engineering.  Hart would, presumably, be as horrified at such a prospect as Lewis, Joe, and I are, but if so he says nothing to show how to avoid it. 
He is also once again missing the point, since Catholicteaching certainly insists that retributive justice must always be part of the story where punishment is concerned, even if it is not the whole story.  Again, that is all that matters for the intra-Catholic debate Joe and I are engaged in, whether Hart agrees with this teaching or not.
And yet, no sooner has Hart made the “balderdash” remark than he goes on to write:
That said, and perhaps somewhat shockingly, I am willing to grant that here Feser has at least raised an interesting point…
I confess too that my understanding of Christianity (at least, that of the earliest centuries) is far more otherworldly and socially irresponsible than Feser’s is.  On the whole, he assumes that Christianity must be compatible with a well functioning society, and that therefore Christianity in some larger neutral sense “works” as a way of promoting the social good.  But perhaps Christianity, as presented in the New Testament, does not “work” very well at all, or at least would not do so if it were consistently applied to life in this world…
[I]t seems likely that a genuinely Christian social order [as Hart understands it]… might be impossible in practice, and therefore unimaginable in theory.  I really do not know.  I do not pretend to have any clear sense of whether a Christian social order could ever flourish this side of the Kingdom.
End quote.  Now, how what I said can be both “nonsense, twaddle, and balderdash” and at the same time “an interesting point” is a puzzle I leave for the Hart adepts to solve.  Suffice it for the moment to note that the Catholic moral tradition that ended up interpreting the Sermon on the Mount the way Joe and I do was concerned precisely to address the difficulty Hart admits not having an answer to.  Since that tradition at least has an answer and Hart by his own admission does not, you would think that he’d show a little more humility when evaluating it.  Or rather, you would do so if you could stop laughing once you’ve put the words “Hart” and “humility” together in the same sentence.
What part of “intrinsically” didn’t you understand?
Over and over again in our book, Joe Bessette and I emphasize that there are two fundamental questions that we are addressing.  First, can a Catholic hold that capital punishment is always and intrinsically wrong, wrong even in principle?  Second, even if capital punishment is legitimate at least in principle, does Catholic teaching allow it to be applied in practice, and if so, under what conditions?  Some of what we have to say is meant to address the first question, and some of it is meant to address the second, and we try always to be clear about exactly which of them we are addressing at any particular moment.
The reason the first question is so important is that a large and influential school of thought in contemporary Catholic theology and philosophy – the “new natural law” theory represented by Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Robert P. George, as well as Brugger, Tollefsen, and many others – has taken the extreme view that capital punishment is contrary to natural law and thus always and intrinsically wrong, wrong even in principle, wrong for everyone and at all times and not merely wrong for Christians or in contemporary society.  The “new natural lawyers” would like the Church to adopt this novel position, and writers like Grisez and Brugger have exerted much effort to try to make such a doctrinal reversal plausible.  This is a matter of great controversy in Catholic circles, because in the view of the critics of the “new natural law,” such a doctrinal change would contradict the clear and consistent teaching of scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and two millennia of papal teaching.  It would thereby undermine the credibility of the Church and have a ripple effect across the entire body of Catholic teaching. 
I set out this crucial context very clearly in my Catholic World Report response to Hart’s review, because in that review he ignored it, especially when commenting on what Joe and I have to say about the Fathers of the Church.  I explained that when we cite the Fathers, we do not deny but indeed explicitly acknowledge that many of them were strongly opposed to Christians actually making use of the death penalty.  Rather, our concern was to emphasize that even the Fathers who oppose capital punishment in practice affirm that it is legitimate at least in principle, that it is not per se contrary to natural justice.  Hart had alleged that Joe and I claim that the Fathers are agreed in supporting capital punishment, and that we are therefore guilty of poor patristic scholarship.  As I explained, this allegation rests on an ambiguity.  We do notclaim that the Fathers all support the actual infliction of capital punishment.  We claim only that they are agreed that capital punishment is not intrinsicallyevil.
Bizarrely, and exasperatingly, in his latest article Hart once again ignores all of this, and simply repeats, at tedious length and with even higher dudgeon, the same false allegation that I have already refuted.  For example, he attributes to Joe and I the thesis that “Origen is willy-nilly on the side of capital punishment” and then castigates us for holding such a ridiculous view.  Yet what we actually say in the book is:
To be sure, like other Church Fathers in the pre-Constantinian period, Origen and Cyprian also teach that Christians should avoid bloodshed.  But the right of the state to execute criminals is not denied.  In holding Christians to a more rigorous standard than the (as yet unconverted) governing authorities, these Fathers do not claim that the latter’s resort to capital punishment is inherently wrong.  (p. 114)
There is no way an intellectually honest person could read that and then attribute to us the ridiculous view that “Origen is willy-nilly on the side of capital punishment.”  Hart also misrepresents what we say about St. John Chrysostom and other Fathers.  And all this despite the fact that Hart himself seems to allow that the Fathers did not regard capital punishment as intrinsicallycontrary to natural law.  In other words, on the very narrow issue that Joe and I appeal to the Fathers to help settle, Hart appears actually to be in agreement with us.  And yet he pretends that we are guilty of howlers of patristic scholarship!
How does one explain such weird behavior?  Several hypotheses suggest themselves.  First, I honestly am not certain that Hart actually readsan entire book or article before dashing off a vituperative response to it.  Like Don Quixote, Walter Mitty, or Jerry Coyne, Hart seems always to have some fantasy enemy in view – a manual-wielding Neo-Scholastic Thomist, say – and simply hurls his stock insults and objections at that phantom, certain that he has thereby refuted whatever happens to be there on the pages he can’t be bothered actually to read.
Second, Hart appears to be so enamored of his patented “Trust me, I’m a patristic scholar” shtick that he is hell-bent on somehowconvicting me of getting the Fathers wrong.  Since I am not in fact guilty of that, all he can do is flail at the same straw men in a louder voice and with extra invective thrown in.  He’s like Richard Dawkins: He really knows only one thing (evolution in Dawkins’ case, the Fathers in Hart’s) and he’ll be damned if he isn’t going to make every dispute he gets into a dispute about that one thing.
Third, Hart once again shows a tin ear for the contemporary intra-Catholic debate that Joe and I are primarily addressing.  He writes:
It may be that the greatest problem with Feser and Bessette’s book is that their central argument is not so much false as irrelevant.  They expend a great deal of energy on trying to prove that the death penalty is a just requital for certain crimes, and that both scripture and Catholic tradition acknowledge as much.  But this is not the issue.  Part of the confusion, I imagine, is that they have taken their disagreements with certain proponents of the “new natural law theory” (who do indeed argue that capital punishment is inherently unjust) as applying to the more specific question of whether Christians are allowed to impose or support capital punishment.  But the question of justice has never been a matter of much contention.
End quote.  The trouble with this, of course, is that the question of justice very much is a matter of contention in contemporary Catholic circles, as anyone knows who has actually kept up with the debate.  Again, even some of the most influential “conservative” voices in recent Catholic moral theology – Grisez and his followers – claim precisely that capital punishment is intrinsically contrary to natural justice.  The whole point of the most significant abolitionist work in recent Catholic moral theology – Brugger’s book Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition – is precisely to facilitate the making of this novel view of Grisez’s into the official teaching of the Catholic Church.
If Hart is uninterested in this debate, fine.  But since that is in large part what our book is about, it is quite absurd for Hart to dismiss that debate’s significance when reviewing the book.  In effect, what Hart attacks in his review and follow-up article is some book he thinks we should have written, not the one we actually did write.
When in Rome
Finally, Hart revisits the issue of how to interpret Romans 13:4 (“He does not bear the sword in vain,” etc.), and repeats his linguistic arguments to the effect that the sword-bearing referred to here has to do with the general use of violence by state authorities, rather than a specific reference to capital punishment.  He then comments:
Feser grants that I may be right in my interpretation of the passage, but then cites a host of New Testament scholars (some of whom are indeed very fine scholars) who say otherwise, and so dismisses my observations as debatable.
End quote.  Actually, I never granted what Hart says I did.  He is not right in his interpretation of that passage, and he would not be right even if one were to agree with his remarks about the literal meaning of the Greek words translated “carry” and “sword.”  For one thing, as some of the New Testament scholars I cited point out, even if St. Paul intended a general reference to the state’s power to use violence, that would by no means exclude a reference to capital punishment.  On the contrary, such a reference would – especiallyin the Roman context that Paul had in view – be included, implicitly as one of the several ways the state uses violence.  An indirect reference is not a non-reference.
For another thing, here too it is crucial to keep in mind the specifically Catholic approach to interpreting scripture, according to which an interpretation endorsed by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church carries great weight, especially when they are unanimous.  (See By Man for discussion of the authority the Church attributes to these sources.)  Now, as I noted in my Catholic World Report response to Hart, the Fathers who comment on the subject agree that Romans 13 refers to capital punishment and that it teaches that it is legitimate at least in principle, as a matter of natural justice.  (Remember, contrary to what Hart keeps falsely alleging, I am notusing the patristic evidence to make a larger claim than that.)
The Doctors of the Church who address the subject also agree.  (On top of that, several of them cite Romans 13 in support of the legitimacy of capital punishment even among Christians.  One finds this position in St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, and St. Alphonsus Liguori.)
Now, from the point of view of Catholic theology, if the Fathers and Doctors of the Church are unanimous on some point of scriptural interpretation, then that interpretation cannot be mistaken.  But they are unanimous that Romans 13 refers to capital punishment, and that it teaches that the practice is legitimate at least in principle, as a matter of natural law.  The matter is settled, then, whatever creative reinterpretation this or that 21st century New Testament scholar tries to cobble together.
As I keep saying, what Joe and I are doing in the book is showing what follows from the premises to which Catholics, specifically, are committed.  And as Hart himself admits, “it is perhaps easier for me as an Orthodox Christian than it is for a Catholic to dismiss Feser’s arguments.”  If Hart had only meditated a little on the implications of that concession, he could have saved us all a lot of time. 

At last, another open thread!

Long overdue (sorry), it’s the latest open thread.  Talk amongst yourselves.  Unlike Linda Richman, I won’t give you a topic.    From Aquinas to Quine, Cheap Trick or fine wine, bad puns and lame rhymes – the field is wide open.  Though, you know, maybe capital punishment is a little played at the moment…As always, keep it civil, keep it classy, no trolling or troll-feeding. 

A stocking stuffer for your Romanian friends

Just in time for Christmas: A collection of several of my essays has been published in a Romanian translation, under the title De la Aristotel la John Searle și înapoi. Patru articole filosofice.  More information here.Since we’re on the subject of translation (not to mention stocking stuffers), it is worth reminding interested readers that The Last Superstition is available in a German translation and a Portuguese translation.

The latest on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed

Last month, Joe Bessette and I participated in a panel discussion about our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment at the Fall Conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.  The other participants were Gerard Bradley and John O’Callaghan, and the session was moderated by Matthew Franck.  The session can now be viewed at YouTube.Recently I responded to David Bentley Hart and Paul Griffiths’ negative reviews of the book.  In his “While We’re At It” column in the January issue of First Things, Rusty Reno expresses his own disagreement with Hart and (to a lesser extent) Griffiths.  (You’ll need to scroll down to find the relevant section.)

The Claremont Review of Books has posted its annual Christmas Reading List with suggestions from a variety of writers and thinkers.  Two of them, The Witherspoon Institute’s Matthew Franck and C. J. Wolfe of North Lake College, refer to By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed.  Franck says, among other things, that “this is the book that must be refuted if further steps are to be taken by Church leaders to condemn the death penalty.”

Manion on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed

At The Wanderer, Catholic writer Christopher Manionkindly reviews By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  From the review:
A highly recommended book that sheds the patient, clear light of reason on the issue of capital punishment.  Every U.S. bishop should read it…
In recent years, position statements and lobbying efforts of the USCCB have ranged across a wide variety of prudential issues, from global warming and tax policy to immigration and the death penalty.
There are many policy approaches to such issues that might conform to the precepts of legitimate Catholic social teaching, so Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Church, requires that action on in this area be left to the laity.However, leaders and bureaucrats at the USCCB routinely violate that magisterial teaching, and pretend that theirs is the only permissible “Catholic” position when they choose a particular agenda item to champion.

Over the years, this bad habit has put the faithful in a position of delicacy, patiently and charitably reminding the bishops that they are trespassing in the realm that is the property of the laity…
Feser and Bessette’s monumental work is so welcome in so many ways.  It offers a model for the thorough, careful, and charitable approach that the faithful must embrace to address the myriad of issues that lie in the realm of the laity…
Regarding capital punishment, the bishops’ strenuous advocacy is well-known…
Yes, Popes St. John Paul II and Benedict have called for its abolition; they stressed that their opinions were not magisterial, but that rational voice has faded.  So today it falls to the laity to explain the principles underlying the issues of crime and punishment, laying out the arguments to explain the principles in the light of the rich tradition of Catholic thought.  After all, the laity has a fundamental right to the truth, including when it comes to capital punishment.
And the truth is exactly what Feser and Bessette offer in their impressive study.  Since popular arguments against the death penalty are often based on sentiment, they take great care in presenting a clear and rational discussion to shed the patient, clear light of reason on the issue.  The authors do a masterful job, addressing the issue of capital punishment from the point of view of the Natural Law, Church teaching, and theological and philosophical anthropology…
Yes, busy bishops must often assign to their staffs, lawyers, and advisers the detailed studies that inform the positions they take publicly.  Well, it’s time for a change: Simply put, every bishop should read this book.
Can he deal with its rational analysis shorn of sentiment and opinion?  The authors have written so clearly and cogently that the reader who supports abolishing the death penalty can at least say that he has honestly considered the best possible arguments against his own position.  In fact, the authors make the bishops’ arguments better than they make them themselves! …
This beautifully researched and clearly written work will now become the standard Catholic work on capital punishment.

Debate? What debate?

Catholic apologist Dave Armstrongseems to be a well-meaning fellow, but I have to say that I am finding some of his behavior very odd.  To my great surprise, I learned this afternoon that he has grandly announced the following on Facebook:
Dr. Feser and I Will be Debating the Biblical Passages Purporting to Support the Death Penalty…
This will no doubt be a vigorous (and possibly voluminous) debate…
I respect Dr. Feser for being willing to vigorously defend his positions. That's as rare as hen's teeth these days. I'm the same way, so I am really looking forward to the discussion.
End quote.  I see that some of his readers are expressing interest in this debate, asking when and where it will occur, etc.   I am sorry to disappoint them, but I have to say that I have no idea what Armstrong is talking about. 
That Armstrong and I are about to engage in a “vigorous” “debate” – and indeed one of “possibly voluminous” length! – is news to me.  I was never invited to debate him, would not have agreed to do so had I been asked, and have zero time for or interest in doing so.  This is entirely an invention of Armstrong’s.
Yesterday at his blog Armstrong had announced that he is opposed to capital punishment and directed his readers to the critical remarks that Fastiggi, Brugger, Hart, and McClamrock have made about By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed .  I posted a comment in his combox to the effect that if he was going to link to those critical reviews, then to be fair he ought also to link to my replies to them.  He has since done so, and we exchanged a couple other remarks in his combox.  That’s all.
Again, where he got the idea that I had agreed to a “debate” with him of possibly “voluminous” length, I have no idea.
I also have to take exception to another remark Armstrong made in his Facebook announcement.  He wrote:
[Feser’s] reply to patristics scholar David Bentley Hart's review of his book was entitled, "Hot Air vs. Capital Punishment: . . ." And he wrote, "Hart’s review in Commonweal is so rhetorically over-the-top and dishonest that the effect is more comical than offensive”…
Low blows such as these poison the well and are unnecessary.  I hope Dr. Feser refrains from them if he debates me.
End quote.  Since Armstrong had directed his readers to Hart’s review, I assume he knows that Hart compared my co-author Joe Bessette and me to Torquemada and attributed to us “a moral insensibility that is truly repellant,” among other unmerited insults.  Why it is OK for Hart to say such things but a “low blow” for me to object to Hart saying them, Armstrong does not explain.  In my response to Hart, I also documented several cases where Hart had undeniably and gravely misrepresented what Joe Bessette and I say in the book.  That is why I used the word “dishonest.”  It was not a gratuitous insult but a conclusion based on evidence – evidence to which Armstrong offers no response.
I would recommend to Armstrong that, if in future he wants someone to take seriously the prospect of debating him, it would be a good idea for him not to make such gratuitous and unfair remarks from the get-go.  It would also be a good idea to announce the debate only after an actual invitation and acceptance, not before.