Back to Eduardo's issue: on narrow and broad intent

Dear Eduardo--

 

Basically, what is at stake in your condom conundrum is the question of whether morality is solely a matter of the narrowest of intentions, i.e. whether intent always includes every direct effect. Grisez and Finnis are the luminaries in favor of the narrow meaning while I believe that Peter Geach and his late, great wife are the main thinkers on the other side (but I could be wrong on this). Anyway, I think it all comes down to whether you can blow up the fat guy who is stuck in the mouth of the cave, with rising waters inside about to drown a party of spelunkers. Your INTENT is said by the “narrow school” to be only to use a stick of dynamite (the only means available) to dislodge him, even though you know it will have an immediate and directly lethal effect on him. As I understand the debate, Grisez and Finnis would say “If your heart is pure, go ahead and light the wick.” Geach and Anscombe would say that in such a case one cannot not be intending a direct attack on innocent life.

Probing further, in my personal view (N.B.) the issue is whether we are “polluted” only by our intentions or also by any strong causal connection between us and a violation of the Holy. Nowadays, we think that we think it silly to worry about whether the thirty pieces of silver should be put back in the Temple treasury, whether a sword that has accidentally killed somebody must become a deodand  in order to be redeemed, whether my running my car over a child wholly without any fault on my part nevertheless requires some reparation from me, etc. But in fact we would not want the silver or the sword in our home, and (much more than any passenger–onlooker in the car) we would be in deep moral agony and desirous to make reparation to the child’s parents.  Again: our law rightly demands reparation (retribution, if you will) from a negligent archer who has killed someone; he DESERVES significant punishment, we think, while his equally negligent companion archer (who was lucky enough to cause no harm) gets off with little blame and no punishment at all. So, although on many issues I end up with the same conclusions as the “broad school” of intent (because such intent includes all known direct effects of the act in question), I do so because of the directness itself and not solely because of any necessarily broad intent. (I actually agree with Grisez and Finnis that intent itself can be narrow enough to exclude direct effects, but I also think it blameworthy to cause unintended direct harm to human dignity.) Causing evil, as well as intending evil, is, in my own view, blameworthy. (I do not think this is the explicit view of the Church, but it may lurk in the background, as it does in our secular criminal law, as discussed above.) The Eastern Church, for example, in every Liturgy asks pardon for all "voluntary or involuntary" transgressions. Or think back to St. Augustine, et al.

Our Church should not jettison the ancient teaching (and still deeply felt intuition) that it is wrong intentionally OR directly to violate human dignity. Modernity is only a saeculum; the Church must endure in saecula saeculorum.

 

Richard