[Cross-posted at ReligousLeftLaw] On the way home, I heard an interesting NPR story on brain imaging and moral judgment. Here's how it starts:
A person's moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by
delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear,
according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. People in the study read stories designed to
produce moral judgments. One such story begins with a woman named Grace
putting powder in her friend's coffee. After that, the story can go in
several different directions. In one version, Grace believes
she's putting sugar in her friend's coffee. But it turns out to be
poison and her friend dies. In another version, Grace believes she's
putting poison in the coffee but it turns out to be sugar and her friend
is fine. People who hear these stories generally forgive Grace
for unwittingly poisoning her friend, says Liane Young, a researcher in
the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. And, she says, they usually condemn Grace for
the failed attempt to do harm.
Here's a description of the scientists' manipulation:
Young and her colleagues used a technique called transcranial
magnetic stimulation, or TMS, to temporarily decrease activity in an
area of the brain called the right temporoparietal junction. It's near
the surface of the brain, above and behind the right ear, and it seems
to helps us decipher another person's beliefs. Twenty volunteers
got TMS before or during the time they were listening to stories like
the one about Grace and the coffee. The stimulation caused people to pay
less attention to Grace's intention and more attention to the outcome,
Young says. "If no harm was done, then subjects would judge
[Grace's behavior] as OK," she says, even if the story made it clear
Grace was trying to poison her friend. That's the sort of moral judgment
you often see in kids who are 3 or 4 years old, Young says.
I took this to suggest that strictly consequentialist moral reasoning is a sign of either (1) moral immaturity or (2) mental impairment. NPR's "expert," however, read the results somewhat differently:
"Moral judgment is just a brain process," [Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene] says. "That's precisely why
it's possible for these researchers to influence it using
electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain." . . . If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, Green
says, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.
In my twenty-five years at Princeton, I've been privileged to teach some truly extraordinary students. None, though, is more gifted than 2008 Princeton grad Sherif Girgis, who is currently doing graduate work in philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Sherif's senior thesis, entitled "Why Bad Sex is Like Torture," won Princeton's prizes for the best thesis in ethics and the best thesis in philosophy. By "bad" sex, Sherif meant morally bad sex. By morally bad sex, he meant non-marital sex (including forms of sexual conduct that are intrinsically non-marital and are, as such, immoral even when engaged in by persons who are married to each other). Sherif reads MoJ and noticed the posting of my pal Andy Koppelman's paper criticizing the idea that coitus is a reproductive-type act (i.e., an act that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation, even when the non-behavioral conditions do not happen to obtain) which, as such, makes possible marriage as the two-in-one-flesh union of a man and woman as husband and wife. Patrick Lee and I are composing a formal critique of Andy's paper and response to his criticism of our views, but in the meantime Sherif has sent me a short piece he has written rigorously criticizing Andy's key claim. With the pride in a star student that I know all of the MoJ writers have had the joy of feeling, I will post Sherif's piece below this message.
------------------------------
By Sherif Girgis
Robert George and Patrick Lee have argued that marriage is possible only between a man and a woman because it must be capable of being consummated by behavior “suitable for” or “oriented to” reproduction—i.e., a “reproductive-type act”: coitus. In a message posted last month on MOJ, Andrew Koppleman answers that this conception of marriage cannot coherently include the unions of infertile heterosexual couples: “A sterile person’s genitals are no more suitable for generation than an unloaded gun is suitable for shooting. If someone points a gun at me and pulls the trigger, he exhibits the behavior which, as behavior, is suitable for shooting, but it still matters a lot whether the gun is loaded and whether he knows it.” Qtd. in “Careful with that Gun: Lee, George, Wax, and Geach on Gay Rights and Same-Sex Marriage” (January 11, 2010). Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 10-06. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1544478.
Koppleman’s objection presupposes that if artifacts and artificial processes would lose their orientation to some goal (i.e., their function) under certain circumstances, then organs and natural processes would lose their function under analogous circumstances. But this overlooks a key difference: The latter have their function by nature; the former, only by human choice. The latter retain their function as long as they exist; the former, only as long as humans can and do intend to use them for a particular purpose.
In other words, unlike knives and guns, natural organs are what they are (and thus have their natural function) independently of what we intend to use them for and even of whether the function that they serve can be brought to completion. A person’s stomach remains a stomach—an organ whose natural function is to play a certain role in digestion—regardless of whether we intend it to be used that way and even of whether digestion can be successfully completed (which depends, e.g., on the health of the person’s intestines).
By contrast, insofar as it makes sense to speak of artificial objects and processes having functions, they do so only in virtue of our intending to use them for certain goals—which in turn presupposes that we think them capable of actually realizing those goals. (After all, we cannot intend what we think impossible, and our intention is all that gives artifice its function.) So the functions of man-made objects and processes are imposed on them by the people who use them.
Thus, I agree with Koppleman, a gun has its function of shooting and killing only when and because we intend to use it for that purpose; and a precondition of our intending to use it for that purpose is its being materially and otherwise apt for it. So if we deform its barrel, empty it of bullets or even simply resolve to use it only as wall decoration, it loses to varying degrees that man-imposed function of, and "orientation" to, shooting and killing. And the corresponding (artificial) process of pulling its trigger is no longer an act apt for, or “oriented to,” shooting.
The same goes for surgery, another example cited by Koppleman in the message posted on MOJ. Though its goal is the healing of a natural organ, heart surgery, for example, is an artificial process. So it retains its function of, or “orientation to,” healing hearts only when and because we (intend to) use it for that purpose; and a precondition of our intending to use it for that purpose is its being apt for it. Thus, if we radically change the procedure (e.g., switch it to just waving our hand over someone's chest) or change what it is performed on (e.g., a ragdoll or a corpse), it loses its function of, or “orientation” to, healing hearts.
Clearly, though, genitalia, unlike guns, are not artifacts but natural organs. And sexual intercourse, unlike trigger-pulling or heart surgery, is not an artificial but a natural process (though the particulars of its performance may be matters of human choice). So male and female genitalia retain their natural functions to play certain (complementary) roles in the reproductive process regardless of whether we intend that they be so used and even of whether reproduction will be successfully completed (which depends, e.g., on sperm count). Since genitalia, like stomachs and other organs, have their functions by nature, they retain those functions so long as they exist as organs—so long as they remain parts of living organisms.
Likewise, if natural processes (or stages thereof) have their function by nature, they have it whenever they occur. And this makes sense of George and Lee’s view: the behavioral stage of the process of reproduction (penetration and ejaculation) can consummate a marriage, for it is a reproductive-type act—an act oriented to reproduction. Relatedly, genitalia remain organs oriented to playing their complementary roles in the natural process of reproduction regardless of whether later steps in that process can or do succeed. So George and Lee’s argument, whatever its overall soundness, is, pace Koppleman, innocent of the charge of incoherence.
For Koppleman’s objection to succeed, he would have to produce examples of living organs and natural processes that lose their natural function when that function cannot be completed—and by analogy to which the same would be true of genitalia and of intercourse. But there are none.
A final note: My defense of this aspect of George and Lee’s view relies in no way on the “perverted faculty” argument, according to which it is immoral to use body parts against their natural function. With George and Lee, I consider that argument clearly fallacious. And anyway, I have said nothing directly about the morality of same-sex relations. I have only relied on the idea that organs have natural functions, in order to defend the intelligibility of the concept of reproductive-type acts, in which a man and a woman can cooperate by way of their reproductive organs, regardless of their fertility.
There were some posts about Jesuit Keenan's book a while back, including one by me. Now, this review appears in AMERICA, by Richard Gula, S.S., professor of moral theology at the Franciscan School of Theology of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. Some excerpts: "Participants in sabbatical programs, clergy
conferences or workshops for religious educators often ask me to recommend an
article or book that will bring them up to speed on recent thinking in moral
theology and the roles various contributors have played in developing the field.
This book meets that need.
James F. Keenan, S.J., professor of theological ethics at Boston College, is
already well known to readers of America. He is a prolific
author with that special gift of being able to write for the academy and for
people in the pews. His keen insight, fair hand, comprehensive grasp and
friendly style make even the most intricate argument accessible to the reader.
In this book you will find more of the same.
With this volume, Keenan joins the ranks of John Mahoney (1987) and Charles
Curran (1997 and 2008) in providing another towering history of moral theology. . . .
The encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) marked the turning point in
re-examining the method and concepts of the manualists, and in reconsidering the
location of moral truth in norms proposed by the magisterium. The turbulent
period between Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor (1993) was
dominated by intense discussions of the notion of moral objectivity and of the
process of moral reasoning. Keenan deftly handles the controversies of this
period to show that what distinguished moral positions was not theology but
philosophy, especially the anthropology that influenced interpretations of
natural law. The essentialist anthropology of the classicists posits an a priori
human nature with a fixed end that does not yield to experience or
social-scientific claims. For them the principle of action is the laws of
nature. For the historically minded revisionists, human nature is not a static
object. Rather, human nature is the relational, embodied person in a historical
world that we come to know only gradually and partially. The principle of moral
action is not a fixed nature but reason discovering moral value by reflecting on
experience.
As virtue ethics gained in ascendancy during the latter part of this period,
prudence took its rightful place as the foundation of moral objectivity. Moral
truth is found where prudence takes into account the totality of the moral
reality (act, intention and circumstances, including consequences). In his last
chapter, Keenan shows how virtue ethics serves as the most appropriate mode of
moral reflection to meet the challenges of cross-cultural dialogue about how to
express moral truth.
A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century is a
remarkable achievement."
Mark Osler, Professor of Law at Baylor University School of Law,
has accepted a tenured position at St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis.
Professor Osler publishes in the area of sentencing law. He has been
at Baylor since 2000 and is a graduate of Yale Law School.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin called on his episcopal
colleagues to take responsibility for the Irish Catholic Church’s
failures in dealing with child sexual abuse by priests. “Without
accountability for the past there will be no healing and no trust for
the future,” Archbishop Martin told reporters on March 20 following Mass
at St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin after Pope Benedict XVI’s
pastoral letter to Irish Catholics on the abuse crisis was released.
Just a few days later, on March 24, the Vatican announced that the
pope had accepted the resignation offered on March 9 by Bishop John
Magee of Cloyne. Magee, 73, had served as personal secretary to three
popes. He was accused in a 2009 investigation of mishandling reports of
sexual abuse in his diocese. Four other Irish bishops had offered their
resignations to the pope in December because of their mishandling of
sexual abuse of children by clerics. The pope has accepted only one of
these resignations.
Cardinal Sean Brady of Armagh, Northern Ireland, has been under
pressure to resign since he admitted on March 14 that he had been aware
of allegations of abuse against a priest as early as 1975 and did not
report them to police. Cardinal Brady has apologized, but he has
resisted calls for his resignation.
Archbishop Martin described the pope’s letter as “part of a strategy
of renewal of the church.” Many people “felt it was much stronger than
expected,” he said. Asked why the pope did not make any reference to a
Vatican role in the crisis in Ireland, Archbishop Martin said the
responsibility “very much” fell on the Irish church. “The Vatican had
produced the norms of canon law and they weren’t respected in the
management of these cases,” he said.
The pope’s letter was read in full during Masses on March 20 and 21
in parishes across Ireland. Copies were snapped up quickly by
parishioners.
During his homily on March 20, Archbishop Martin said: “The church
tragically failed many of its children: it failed through abuse; it
failed through not preventing abuse; it failed through covering up
abuse.” He said: “Child protection measures need to be constantly
updated; more participation of lay men and women is needed to avoid a
false culture of clericalism. We need to develop a fresh idea of what
childhood means; we need to develop a strong horror of what
childhood-lost means.”
“We must face the truth of the past,” the archbishop said, “repent
it; make good the damage done. And yet we must move forward day by day
along the painful path of renewal, knowing that it is only when our
human misery encounters face-to-face the liberating mercy of God that
our church will be truly restored and enriched.”
Reaction from abuse victims to the papal letter was mixed. John Kelly
of the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse said the letter represented a
long-overdue apology from the pope. “We are fed up being victims and
don’t want to remain victims,” Kelly said. “This letter is a possible
step to closure, and we owe it to ourselves to study it and to give it a
measured response.”
But Maeve Lewis, the executive director of the victims group One in
Four, said she was deeply disappointed by the letter “for passing up a
glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the clerical sexual
abuse scandal: the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church at the
highest levels to protect sex offenders.”
She said, “While we welcome the pope’s direction that the church
leadership cooperate with the civil authorities in relation to sexual
abuse...we feel the letter falls far short of addressing the concerns of
the victims.”
AMERICA: The National Catholic Weekly April 5, 2010
Current Comment The Editors
Achieving Step One
Hurrah! The yearlong battle has been won, and the health care reform
bill is now the law of the land. Most Americans will benefit from the
legislation: the insured who could get sick or lose their job; those
with Medicare/Medicaid coverage whose drug payments fall into “the
doughnut hole” gap in coverage; and especially the 32 million Americans
currently without insurance. But this historic achievement is only the
first step in what must be a change of attitude among the body politic.
Americans must abandon the notion that health care is a luxury for the
privileged and a “fringe benefit” from employers but just a wish for the
unlucky rest of the population. The truth is that not only should every
American have health coverage, but that most actually can have
it—thanks to this bill. Our government has completed a major exercise in
“promoting the general welfare,” which the Constitution mandates it to
do.
Part two of the required attitude shift will be more difficult to
achieve. Having decided to provide nearly universal coverage, we
Americans have to decide how to keep expensive health costs under
control. The bill takes steps toward containing costs but does not go
far enough. How the nation exercises fiscal responsibility matters. It
ought not cut off some citizens’ coverage just to rein in costs, any
more than a family facing hard times would let two or three members go
without food while the rest eat up. Major cost-cutting choices lie
ahead. But only a real shift in attitude, one that seeks to promote the
common good, will ensure that the right choices are made.
Here is George Weigel, addressing both the great moral evil that is the sexual abuse of children, and the disturbingly under-inclusive and accuracy-challenged reporting on that evil that is being provided these days by the New York Times and others:
The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).
Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.
The Church itself is in some measure responsible for this. . . .
. . . While the Vatican has been far quicker in its recent response to irresponsible media reports and attacks, it could still do better. A documented chronology how the archdiocese of Munich-Freising handled the case of an abusing priest who had been brought to Munich for therapy while Ratzinger was archbishop would help buttress the flat denials, by both the Vatican and the archdiocese, that Ratzinger knowingly reassigned a known abuser to pastoral work—another charge on which the Times and others have been chewing. More and clearer explanations of how the canonical procedures put into place at CDF several years ago have accelerated, not impeded, the Church’s disciplining of abusive clergy would also be useful.
So, of course, would elementary fairness from the global media. That seems unlikely to come from those reporters and editors at the New York Times who have abandoned any pretence of maintaining journalistic standards. But it ought not be beyond the capacity of other media outlets to understand that much of the Times’ recent reporting on the Church has been gravely distorted, and to treat it accordingly.
During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal,
Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not
aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The
cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the
Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last
1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
Two centuries later, the clergy has taken another shot at it. What
the American and Irish churches have endured in the last decade and what
German Catholics find themselves enduring today is all part of the same
grim story: the exposure, years after the fact, of an appalling period
in which the Catholic hierarchy responded to an explosion of priestly
sex abuse with cover-ups, evasions and criminal negligence.
Now the scandal has touched the pope himself. There are two charges
against Benedict XVI: first, that he allowed a pedophile priest to
return to ministry while archbishop of Munich in 1980; and second, that
as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in
the 1990s, he failed to defrock a Wisconsin priest who had abused deaf
children 30 years before.
The second charge seems unfair. The case was finally forwarded to the
Vatican by the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, more than 20
years after the last allegation of abuse. With the approval of
then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the statue of limitations was
waived and a canonical trial ordered. It was only suspended because
the priest was terminally ill; indeed, pretrial proceedings were halted just before he died.
But the first charge is more serious. The Vatican insists that the
crucial decision was made without the future pope’s knowledge, but the
paper trail suggests that he could have been in the loop. At best,
then-Archbishop Ratzinger was negligent. At worst, he enabled further
abuse.
For those of us who admire the pope, either possibility is
distressing, but neither should come as a great surprise. The lesson of
the American experience, now exhaustively documented, is that almost everyone was complicit
in the scandal. From diocese to diocese, the same cover-ups and gross
errors of judgment repeated themselves regardless of who found
themselves in charge. Neither theology nor geography mattered: the worst
offenders were Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Roger
Mahony of Los Angeles — a conservative and a liberal, on opposite ends
of the country.
This hasn’t prevented both sides in the Catholic culture war from
claiming that the scandal vindicates their respective vision of the
church. Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the
whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame
the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the
1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The
permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries
included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the
blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again,
bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how
to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’s conservative
instincts — the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the
absolute authority of clerics — that allowed the abuse to spread
unpunished.
What’s more, it was a conservative hierarchy’s bunker mentality that
prevented the Vatican from reckoning with the scandal. In a
characteristic moment in 2002, a prominent cardinal told a Spanish
audience that “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in
the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United
States, is a planned campaign ... to discredit the church.”
That cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. Since then,
he’s come to grips with the
crisis in ways that his predecessor did not: after years of drift and
denial under John Paul II, the Vatican has taken vigorous steps to
promote zero tolerance, expedite the dismissal of abusive priests and organize
investigations that should have happened long ago. Because of
Benedict’s recent efforts, and the efforts of clerics and laypeople
dating back to the first wave of revelations in the 1980s, Catholics can
reasonably hope that the crisis of abuse is a thing of the past.
But the crisis of authority endures. There has been some
accountability for the abusers, but not nearly enough for the bishops
who enabled them. And now the shadow of past sins threatens to engulf
this papacy.
Popes do not resign. But a pope can clean house. And a pope can show
contrition, on his own behalf and on behalf of an entire generation of
bishops, for what was done and left undone in one of Catholicism’s
darkest eras.
This is Holy Week, when the first pope, Peter, broke faith with
Christ and wept for shame. There is no better time for repentance.
My mistake was corrected by MOJ reader David Nickol. Here is the language he sent along with a link to the whole interview:
Stupak said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had enough votes to pass the health bill without him and the bloc of six or seven votes he brought with him, and that she released some vulnerable Democrats from voting for the bill after he agreed to support it. . . .
Stupak told The Daily Caller that the president’s order does nothing to change the law as it’s written. “You can’t. It’s the next best thing,” he said.
It was that or nothing, he insisted, saying he knew for a fact that Pelosi released certain House Democrats from voting for the bill after he and his bloc of six or seven votes swung into the yes column.
“A number of them came up and thanked me … said, ‘Thanks for getting us off the hook,’” Stupak said. “I’ve been around here long enough to know that the speaker, Democrats or Republican, always carries a few votes in their pocket.”
According to the article, Pelosi claims that she never lets any Democrats off the hook, but this seems implausible to me. So I think Stupak is telling the truth.
