No one is permitted to ask
Eric has an excellent post on Catholic casuistry, compassion, and authority today. It’s a bit like Google Earth, examining this subject – we get closer and closer and closer. The closer we get, the more ridiculous Karen Armstrong’s claim that compassion is central becomes. Compassion is not only not central, it’s nowhere. Compassion is beside the point altogether.
Ronald Conte, as I pointed out yesterday, simply says what the rules are, over and over again, and quotes popes also saying what the rules are. He quotes JP2 saying what they are:
Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral…
The deliberate decision to deprive an innocent human being of his life is always morally evil and can never be licit either as an end in itself or as a means to a good end. It is in fact a grave act of disobedience to the moral law, and indeed to God himself, the author and guarantor of that law…
Authority and obedience are the issue here, not compassion, not the needs and sorrows of the pregnant woman and her four young children, but the authority of an imaginary god and that imaginary god’s putative representatives.
In the same passage, the pope said something perhaps even more chilling:
Nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying. Furthermore, no one is permitted to ask for this act of killing, either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or her care, nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or implicitly…
No matter what the torture, no matter how certain the end, no one is permitted to request escape. We’re not even allowed to ask. This is the demand for absolute authority run totally amok.
I saw the start of some adventure or espionage movie on tv not long ago – I didn’t watch the rest and don’t know what it was, but the opening was striking: a father and his daughter and son were mountain climbing, the father lowest down on the rope; he fell and pulled the other two off with him, and then the pitons started to pull out of the rock. The drop was huge, survival impossible – but the younger two could almost reach a hold – but not quite. The father cut the rope above his head while the daughter and son screamed at him “No no no no don’t!”
Was that “immoral”? Please.
As an aside, the film is Vertical Limit.
Isn’t it rather odd that a religion founded on a man killing himself for others would find such actions immoral?
But it’s okay to let a woman die, rather than save her life? Here is a clear contradiction in the Bishop’s muddled thinking, who simply fails to see the obvious, and committed a gross act of irresponsibility and evil, by using his ‘authority’ to try to end the life of a woman who was fortunately saved by the superior ethics of the medical staff.
Does the Bishop consider the murder of a cow when he sits and eats a steak? Probably not, because killing life is only absolute in context of his narrow stupid thinking.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by James. James said: RT @OpheliaBenson: No one is permitted to ask http://dlvr.it/CRfJF […]
This seems far too inclusive to make any sense, even for a religious mind. As Tulse (#1) pointed out, Christianity is based on the main character killing himself. Fully God/Fully Human, right?
And what about the vast numbers of innocents killed every day by disease, war, famine, and natural disaster? Not only didn’t God move to save them, he was presumably the cause. Just as he is for all those spontaneous abortions.
The spotlighting of this case, and of the intransigent attitude of the Catholic Church, makes me realise that the Catholic authorities aren’t the least interested in morality. They’re not prepared to consider anything remotely nuanced about the case. To them it’s black and while, open and shut. The rules are the rules, and they’re there so you have no need whatever to consider morality, either as a whole or in relation to any particular case. Don’t think, just follow the rules.
This kind of set-in-stone thinking is an abomination.
Could one go any further to get to the diametrical opposite of compassion?
Eric rightly points out that the never-mentioned feeling that drives M. Therese Lysaught’s analysis (she thinks the hospital was right in what it did) is compassion for the mother, and more broadly compassion in connexion with a very difficult situation that includes both mother and foetus; but this compassion, this driving force, can never be stated because that would render the purely intellectual and rule-following operations that one is required to follow in theological argumentation suspect: it is only the intellect – and a pitifully narrow and unimaginative one – that is trusted. What one feels about people like those execrable bullies, Olmsted, Nadal and Conte is that as a result of their exposure to this required approach and their acceptance of it they simply do not have a moral life in any true sense of the world and have become in fact profoundly immoral and cowardly men. What is so sad is seeing catholic women (not Alexis, who took the man to task) writing to Nadal as he splutters away in what he calls his drawing-room (from which my first comment was banned for not being civil enough for his tastes) to say that they agree with his hateful rhetoric.
The Catholic Church is asking us to believe (among a great many other unlikely or impossible propositions) that morality can exist where thought (other than the bare minimum required to comprehend the rules that are without exception to be followed) and consideration have been outlawed.
‘Isn’t it rather odd that a religion founded on a man killing himself for others would find such actions immoral?’
Its a faith which grants those who threw away their lives a sainthood when they could simply have lied to their persecutors and said no, they don’t believe in god.
And anyway, if ‘no-one’ can permit the deaths of the innocent does this include god himself? He seems pretty happy to sit by while innocent people die.
A perfect case of do as I say, not as I do.
Exactly – what everyone just said. That’s what’s becoming clearer and clearer the more I read of the apologetics surrounding this case. The stupid ruthless absolutism is the whole point. They pride themselves on it.
Yes, Ophelia, surely you are right: they pride themselves on this intransigence, partly, I suppose, because it allows then to feel morally superior to the wicked world about them aa well as to non-catholics, but also, surely, out of fear: without that armour casing, that shell about them, they would be mere naked molluscs, lacking the spine that they should have grown among the world’s complexities.
Jeezis – I just thought of something. It reminded me of something, this priding themselves on not being swayed by the mere matter of a woman’s life and her children’s needs. So I tried to remember what, and then I did. It’s from Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Nazis prided themselves on exactly that – to the point that they got maudlin about it. “Nobody knows how difficult it is for us” sort of thing. Seriously. They did a lot of quiet boasting about their ability to rise above their sympathies.
Well. That’s no surprise. It’s not news that the two have a lot in common. Certainly not everything, but a lot.
Of course, Jesus did not <i>kill himself</i>, he <i>allowed himself</i> to be killed by other people. Similarly, all those martyred saints did not <i>themselves</i> take a human life (theirs); rather, other people did it. And allowing others to do something to you is not the same thing as <i>consenting</i> to it, or asking for it.
These distinctions are extremely important, indeed <i>indispensable</i>, when you’re trying to argue from your conclusions to your premises.
As a sometime teacher of ethics who has in the past tried to be ‘impartial’ between opposing positions in the classroom, I wonder if it’s not time for us all to name this inhuman bad-faith travesty of moral deliberation for what it is.
Crap. HTML fail. Sorry about that.
‘And allowing others to do something to you is not the same thing as consenting to it, or asking for it.’
Christianity is built on a myth of Christ ‘dying for our sins’. Without the crucifixion Christianity is nothing. That implies more than Christ ‘allowing’ his own death: its something sought for on the part of himself (or his father). It was an intentional act. God – so the myth tells us – required this sacrifice.
Shatterface: I agree of course. I was trying to replicate the dialectical contortions into which one is forced when, as I said, you take your conclusion as given then try desperately to find a set of premises that will yield it. In particular, people engaging in this kind of apologetics tend to make increasingly odd and counterintuitive ‘distinctions’ which are then assumed to be morally relevant because it makes the difference between something the apologist wants to allow and something similar they want to prohibit.
I remember some years back asking one of these types about ‘suiicide by cop’. The answer was, essentially, that this wasn’t really suicide because mumble mumble shut up that’s why.
I have stated how the idea of authority is important in the thinking (or non-thinking) of the religious, but there is a deeper principle that creates this hierarchy in the first place. This is the principle of ‘purity’ where the moral world view is viewed in terms of the moral and immoral (the pure and impure). And the same principle is applied to language. So that ethical doctrines are made by the ‘pure’ or the most holy and sacred, beginning from God (who is absolute purity of course) down the hierarchy of authority from the holiest of of holy men (the Pope) to the holy men and holy women to finally, the impure lay people.
These doctrines are of course purified to the absolute degree, from which no-one impure can criticise, hence the insanity and madness of this basic religious principle that goes to the heart of all religious thinking.
The fetus (in the minds of the holy men) is far more pure than the wretched non-virgin woman, who of course is the least pure thing of all. And so this is why (in the minds of the holy men) they side on the block of cells rather than a living human being that originated them. In their purified minds, it’s self-evident.
But even the pure fetus is marked by Original Sin.
Well that’s a point. So how can the fetus be “innocent” then? I understand how it can in secular terms, of course, but how can it in Catholic terms?
How does Hitchens put it? Something like “born sick, commanded to be well.” Catholic teaching would have us all born sinners, but to take away an unborn’s chance to redeem itself is really evil. God killing fetuses from shortly after conception and throughout childhood before they could make considered decisions about whether to heal themselves of the mistake god induced in their ancestor (by creating him weak enough to succumb to temptation) doesn’t count, for reasons of… doesn’t bloody matter… it’s His business, not ours.
They call original sin a ‘stain’ of course, on the eternal soul, which turns out not to be eternal (death of the soul). Nothing makes rational sense in Catholic doctrine unless you begin to view it from the point of view of the principle of moral purity.
The irony of all this, the irony of ironies, is that the principle of purity corrupts all knowledge and reason.
Purity is a very bad and dangerous idea for humans to mess with.
[…] mentioned in a comment yesterday that the way bishops and theologians pride themselves on not letting compassion or empathy trump […]
“Innocent” just means “not a soldier or a heretic or a criminal”. The idea is that it’s okay to take human life if the human life concerned is not that of a person who is innocent. There has to be some special justification for killing the person, such as the person being a soldier on the other side in war, or the person being someone convicted of a capital crime.
I’m just saying. Obviously all this stuff takes advantage of the non-technical meaning of “innocent” as in “cute” or something, while formally relying on the technical meaning.
Ophelia,
If I recall correctly, Jonathan Haidt, professor at UVA, did research (it is on Youtube as a video of his presentation) on the difference between the conservative and liberal mindset. I think there were 5 characteristics of the conservative: things like preference for absolutes (instead of ambiguity), preference for hierarchical structures, etc. And one of the 5 was purity, although it may have been sexual purity (in women, naturally).
Although this pertained to political conservatism, there is a clear overlap with religion, especially catholicism.