Catholic thanatophilia
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops insists on exactly the same murderous policy that the rebarbative bishop of Phoenix does. The CCB is very clear about it. The CCB doesn’t mess around.
“Surgery to terminate the life of an innocent person, however, is intrinsically wrong… Nothing, therefore, can justify a direct abortion. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.”
No circumstance whatsover, including the circumstance that the fetus is already doomed and will not survive no matter what, can make it licit to remove the placenta to prevent the woman’s death, since it is contrary to something that does not exist.
The bishops don’t know that there is such a thing as “God” or that it exists or ever has existed. They don’t know what the “Law” of that “God” is. They know nothing whatsoever about it. They know they’ve been told things, but anyone can tell anyone anything, and often does. Mere telling is not enough, especially when ordering medical workers to let patients die on the authority of the telling.
The putative law of the putative God is not “written in every human heart.” It’s not written in mine, and the bishops have no business saying it is. They’re bullshitting, and they’re doing it in aid of backing up a rule that would let women die when they could be saved, on the grounds that their fetus can’t be saved too.
Defenders of this revolting policy are bullshitting, if not outright lying, too: they are calling this policy a “right to life” policy, but of course it’s not, because the whole point is that it kills a woman and a fetus instead of only a fetus. That’s not “pro-life.” This policy results in the death of an adult, not life for a fetus.
“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with surgery to remove a malfunctioning organ. It is morally justified when the continued presence of the organ causes problems for the rest of the body” is particularly contradictory. An awful lot of these sorts of cases are caused *by the malfunctioning of the placenta*. It is not the case that normal pregnancy is putting a strain on the mother’s body. Rather, the placenta *is itself a malfunctioning organ*.
The placenta is a pregnancy-derived organ, but it doesn’t “belong” to the fetus. They’ve just decided it does because they don’t understand placentas very well at all.
Sure. Look at their policy in Latin America for the past century.
I’ll agree with that. Few accounts of the story make it clear that what the hospital is held to have done wrong is saving a woman’s life. Interesting, Grinchik’s little statement is less opaque than many.
But I’m guessing that he’s counting on most Catholics thinking that he’s making the distinction between allowing the death of a fetus to save a woman’s life and performing an abortion.
It is past time for the various Colleges that comprise medicine in the US and Canada (and elsewhere) to put an end to this sort of evil instruction to physicians and surgeons. Particularly the American College of Surgeons, the College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American Academy of Pediatrics need to state as baldly as possible that medical ethics does not consist of complying with dictates of the RCC, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Diocese of Phoenix, or any other religious body, and that any practitioner who does follow such barbarous decrees is in violation of his/her professional duties and should recuse him/herself from further participation. This sort of thing is absolutely anti-human and needs the strongest possible condemnation from all rational people. As soon as I get home in a week or so, I will ask my own Colleges (Surgery, Neurological Surgery) to weigh in on this matter (no, not all neurosurgeons are as intellectually bereft as that lunatic from New York!).
A fetus is not a person!! How many frackin times does it need to be said?
Even if it were true that it’s morally impermissible to intentionally kill an innocent person, a fetus does not qualify as a person.
How can a mass of cells that has no reasoning ability, is not self-conscious, and has no conscious goals or aims be a person?
A magic spirit jumps in through the hole when the sperm penetrates the egg, duh.
No. No. Not. NOT! This is not reason, this is magisterial unreason. It is dictation, declaration and authoritarian. It’s priestly demandation that we all do things their way!
It is meannes of spirit from a criminal organization that seeks control of every aspect of our lives, from an organization that denies the existence of natural homosexual desires and homosexual love, that considers its own “image” to be above the law and covers up rape to hide the damage done by its most cruel of predators and offers up a “salvation” of its own prescribed obeisance through sacraments.
There is no reason in allowing a woman to die in this situation. Unless she deserves it, of course, for being of the wrong gender; the gender with uterus and fallopian tube and vagina.
Don’t any of these bastards have sisters, mothers, family (mistresses) for whom they would have compassion were they in their shoes. They hasten the death of childbirthing mothers in medical distress, while fighting to preserve the “dignity” of the painfully, terminally ill.
I wish I could deny that I were ever a Catholic.
I would like to know what the law says about Catholic authoritarians asking medical staff to let mothers die rather than save their lives.
The bishops’ intransigence is symptomatic of what you get when you insist that laws are absolute. But all rules have exceptions — that’s why they are rules and not exhaustive instructions as to what to do in every conceivable case. Religion, however, is all about absolutes and therefore no exceptions will be permitted. Don’t bother arguing that strict application of the rules will in some cases result in patently immoral outcomes, because the rules are derived from scripture, which must by definition be moral.
Evil, it seems, was invented by religion, and you only have to examine religion to find plenty of examples of it.
Sorry to spoil the general condemnation by pointing out the Bishops might have a point to make. Surely they’re right in saying that it certainly seems wrong to use a person to derive good ends. Most people find it really hard to conscience pushing the man onto the rails to stop a trolley in the Trolley Problem for example.
No, there isn’t anything wrong with the argument per se it is, as several people have pointed out, the rest of their terms that don’t work. In particular I don’t think they’ve got a working definition of a person; sorry mates, ensouled being doesn’t quite cut it.
Me, I’m curious to see what this means for my current monkey which is my curiosity about Thomism. I know it’s the official Catholic moral theology, but I’m wondering how exclusive it is especially considering the argument the bishops are giving doesn’t appear to be strictly theological.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Camus Dude, Kausik Datta. Kausik Datta said: Confirms my suspicion: religious beliefs rapidly erode away human conscience RT @OpheliaBenson: Catholic thanatophilia http://dlvr.it/CGgYj […]
But this isn’t comparable to the Trolley problem because the fetus is dead anyway. I certainly don’t think a fetus’s life should trump that of a person, but we can bracket that for the purposes of this discussion, because the fetus’s survival is not an option.
And the bishops aren’t saying “it seems wrong to use a person to derive good ends.” They’re saying “to terminate the life of an innocent person is intrinsically wrong” no matter what, meaning, in this case, no matter that the potential person, which is actually a fetus, is going to die anyway. They sure as fuck don’t use the word “seems” anywhere. This isn’t reasoning, it’s ruling.
Paul:
I don’t think you think that if it had a chance of coming up with actual cures it would make Nazis experimenting on Jews okay would you. I know you could maybe argue that it’s unlikely that human experimentation would lead to positive results or more ethical methods were available, but that still strikes me as a lot less satisfying than “don’t treat people as things.” I’m not sure if I could stomach a world where that was anything less than absolute though that’s a tricky admission to make.
But Montag, you’re talking about genuinely hard cases and the bishops are not.
OB
I don’t think we can get away from the Trolley Problem that easily though because the distinction they’re making is <a href=’http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_effect’>Double Effect</a> which is one of the possible answers. That does however unfortunately mean we’re right back into arguing with Thomas Aquinas because it’s pretty much his principle.
I don’t want to disagree too strongly with you Ophelia because I can’t agree with you more on the broad scope of this argument, there’s something wrong here and it’s damn right that you’re there keeping the spotlight on that fact. I can’t help however noticing that one thing these Catholic bishops seem to manage time and time again is to stick to doctrine, which is no mean feat, so I will say it’s unfair to say it’s unreasoned, though that’s not to say it’s not wrong.
Don’t. I’ve worked for the Church and have stood in solidarity with the Catholic left. It is through those associations that I was introduced to the most compassionate and selfless people I have known. I no more hold lay Catholics responsible for these depravities than I would any slave for slavery.
Montag, did they say anything about Double Effect?
OB:
No, but it’s the transparent logic behind the distinction between a permissable and impermissable abortion:
As the Wikipedia article summarises it comes from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and his argument for killing in self defence which is that killing is allowed, but only as the side effect of an intended good act. If you accept it, it also successfully describes the two conflicting intuitions in the standard trolley problem.
As I said before, if there’s a weak point in the argument it’s that it fails to have a decent concept of what a morally relevant person is.
Crud, that came out wrong. There’s another weak point, that it completely fails to recognise the needs of the woman. I genuinely think that Thomism and Divine Law arguments are sickening. One of the things that angers me about them is say that take the condom issue. For someone who is committed to the Thomist argument that what makes condoms wrong is the fact that they contravene god’s intended plan, pointing out the suffering that campaigning against condom use causes has no purchase. This person would willingly, by his own doctrine, walk over a pile of corpses for that principle. Let’s not mistake it is an evil and ghoulish philosophy, everything you describe, that doesn’t stop it being philosophy.
Right; this entirely follows from the doctrine of double effect; it’s explicitly laid out in the statement the bishops made after the St. Joseph’s bs went down.
The reason I keep harping on the placenta bit of the argument is that it’s possible to grant them their view re: double effect and still deny the conclusion.
For That Guy Montag in connexion with those piles of corpses – here’s the soon-to-be-sainted John Henry Newman:
The Catholic church ‘holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no-one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse…’
Much, I suppose, depends upon that ‘as far as temporal affliction goes’. And how nobly unyielding Newman must have felt as he penned that passage, which has often been acclaimed for its ‘brilliance’ – one hopes on stylistic rather than on moral grounds (though I despise that note of certainty which so often mars Victorian prose – though not Darwin’s).
“Surgery to terminate the life of an innocent person, however, is intrinsically wrong …”
And yet according to the pope (as PZ quotes from the BBC):
“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself.”
“evil in itself” is usually referred to in catlick text as “intrinsic evil” (or as the bishops put it, ‘intrinsically wrong’) and is a very very old church tradition (of course – We’re Right, You’re Wrong). So here we have the Chief Nazi saying that the church doesn’t believe in intrinsic evil and his own version of the Hitler Youth (though typically not all that young) saying abortion is an intrinsic evil. And that’s no quote mining – the lot of them are filthy lying bastards. Hey, what do you expect of assholes who say there’s a god and that he’s their good buddy?
Ah, but pope Ratzi was talking about those disgraceful 1970s which grew out of the distressing 1960s when everything was allowed and even poor catholic theologians came to be affected by the nasty, modernising, sexually liberated zeitgeist – but before and since those terrible decades there was – and has been – ‘intrinsic evil’…
I don’t think the trolley analogy fits this situation.
I have another analogy that I find much more appropriate.
The situation is this: a plane, carrying two hundred passengers, has been hijacked by terrorists who have blockaded themselves into the cockpit. The plane is now heading directly towards a skyscraper in a major city. There is one minute before impact and not enough time to empty the building – two thousand people are inside.
You are sitting in the control room of the national homeland security center and have the plane tracked on radar and a surface to air missile in the vicinity of the city is ready to be launched.
What is the moral thing to do?
I think this analogy also demonstrates that the morality of actions depends on the circumstance. It doesn’t matter who the passengers are on the plane (a group of convicted murderers or a group of children on a school trip) they are still doomed but your action or inaction will still have a decisive say in whether the two thousand people in the building live or die.
The intrinsic nature of the evil of abortion seems to be what exercises Catholics like Olmsted, although that intrinsicness is suspiciously arbitrary. It looks like rationalisation, not reasoning.
Consider Olmsted’s discussion of when killing is valid, here, in an article on the just war doctrine. He starts by saying:
How convenient that abortion is intrinsically evil but the death penalty isn’t; in line with his own prejudices, perhaps? Oh to get Catholics to consider every question by weighing the circumstances and the moral principles for or against doing them.
Incidentally, to be fair, I should point out that Olmsted appears to think that the death penalty is not right today. I don’t know if that means he thinks it was right yesterday.
Right. And he can likewise hold that abortion is wrong, and I will respect him for it. He can even hold, personally, the abortion is wrong under all circumstances, including rape and incest. I know plenty of people who hold that position, and they’re not lunatic.
But that’s categorically different from holding that some supernatural command should block a medical team from saving someone’s life. That’s lunatic.
Sigmund:
It’s not meant to be a one to one comparison, more that the trolley problem highlights that we do in fact think certain principles are absolute such as the one that compells us not to use another person to get some good.
Tim:
I’m borrowing that quote, it’s perfect.
Mark:
It’s not quite as contradictory as it sounds because it’s still Aquinas’ doctrine of Double Effect. We’re all agreed that Thomism is a dispicable doctrine because of the degree to which is ignored human suffering; I really can’t do better here than Tim’s brilliant quote from Cardinal Newman. What startles me is how often and how consistently it’s actually applied by Catholic Theologians. I’m not going to suggest anyone else try this because it strikes me as a bit of a waste of time, but I’m curious to do the reading myself to see the real depths of the argument.
Montag – but the Trolley Prob doesn’t highlight that we think certain principles are absolute – the point is that we don’t: that our intuitions shift in ways that don’t make unmistakable sense.
And anyway the principle that compels us not to use another person to get some good isn’t operative here because the fetus isn’t being used – the fetus isn’t a human shield or a stepping stone to get out of a pit or an object to divert a trolley. The fetus is more comparable to the trolley than it is to the person pushed onto the tracks. The fetus is part of a biological process that will kill the woman and the fetus if it’s not interrupted. The fetus is like a virus: it dies when the host dies. There is no independent fetus that can survive the woman.
But that’s not the issue in the Phoenix case. Do they hold the position that abortion is wrong under all circumstances, including death for both woman and fetus 11 weeks into the pregnancy? Do they hold the position that the woman must die along with her fetus?
I maintain that that position is lunatic.
By the way, that Newman line – Hitchens used it in his debate with Tony Blair. Not admiringly.
Catholics aren’t consequentialists, Ophelia — that’s why they don’t think this is a lunatic position. (Most people aren’t consequentialists, which is why Montag mentioned the trolley problem.)
It is easy to conflate “the pregnancy” and “the fetus” here. But a bad idea.
I do,
To the extent that catholics provide financial and moral support to the rcc they are complicit in the crimes committed by rcc clergy.
While your analogy is a good rhetorical device and I certainly agree with it in spirit, membership in the rcc is voluntary (ignoring for now the initial child abuse indoctrination phase), by definition slavery is not a voluntary association.
This is an important point to keep hammering away at, the rcc leadership is beyond shame and redemption but catholic laity are not. These are the minds that must be convinced of the evil of the rcc and it is they that will change (and hopefully destroy by leaving en mass) the institution.
Caryn – well being a consequentialist is one thing and ignoring consequences entirely is another.
I didn’t conflate the fetus and the pregnancy. I said the woman and the fetus were 11 weeks into the pregnancy. That’s true, surely?
I second what steve said. Lay Catholics don’t set policy, they’re not responsible in the way bishops and the Vatican are, but they do endorse and prop up the institution just by belonging to it. They can’t help it. If they don’t agree with the policy, they really ought to leave the institution, so that it would have less and less power.
in fact these gangsters declare war to democracy. The child and the mother don’t belong to theirselves their belong to a rotten sadistic imaginary god, invented by the same sadistic clergy. Reason has nothing to do with it. It’s the feodal thinking of asexual psychopats with a borderless lust for tyranny.
In a galaxy far away and a long time ago (#10), Montag said:
That’s true, it’s not strictly theological — at least that’s what the claim is. Roman Catholics speak in terms of natural law, and hold that the moral positions they hold and defend apply to everyone and at all times. It’s the natural (moral) law. I won’t go into the problems regarding the idea that there is such a law, and that we can know it. It’s the way that the Roman Catholic Church has, however, of claiming that what they claim is right or wrong is right or wrong for everyone and therefore should be instantiated in positive law, something they have been able to establish in a number of Roman Catholic majority jurisdictions. The threat that the Roman Catholic Church poses to our freedoms should not be taken lightly. Had they their way, no woman would be able to get an abortion whatever the consequences, just as no one would be able to receive help in dying, no matter how grave the suffering. At the same time, the church is quite prepared to conceal the depredations of its priests, and to blame their misdoings on a moral climate which does not uphold what it takes to be the natural (moral) law. It is, without a doubt, one of the most poisonous organisations at work in the world today, and along with the OIC threatens the freedoms of those who have them, and obstructs the increase of freedom where freedom is in short supply. The Roman Catholic Church loves death with an everlasting love and deals it out in liberal quantities where it can.
As to the responsibility of lay catholics. Well, they are not strictly responsible for what their overseers do, but, as Ophelia points out, they enable it and give it the power of their millions. And since opposition within RCC Inc is very difficult — priests are disciplined and others are excommunicated — and the Vatican has, since John Paul II, been becoming more protective and conservative by the hour, it intensifies the moral responsibility of lay people for the crimes of the pope, bishops and priests. Muslims don’t get to plead the infinite varieties of Islam to excuse their silence at the murderous idiocies of the jihadis, nor do RC lay people get to plead innocence in the face of the inhuman moral code of the pope and his acquiescent henchmen.
Some non-consequentialists would allow consequences to decide in cases where whatever non-consequentialist principles they endorse have already been met. But assuming we’re talking about a case where at least one of those non-consequentialist principles has not been met, they’d ignore the consequences, because the principles are more fundamental than the consequences.
The RCC is good at conflating “pregnancy” and “fetus” and intends to continue doing it; they’ve defined abortion as the termination of a pregnancy before viability even if the intent is to remove the fetus alive and treat it insofar as medical science allows. But apparently it’s okay to remove a cancerous uterus with a “pregnancy” inside of it, because the intent is to treat the cancer and not to terminate the pregnancy or kill the fetus. Well, then, if in a case of 20 week preeclampsia where a doctor intends to remove the malfunctioning placenta — which is *not* the fetal life — and intends to keep the fetus alive — but of course won’t be able to do so — why isn’t that perfectly congruent with the DDE? The answer from the RCC seems to be that their intuitions tell them that placentas are part of the fetus (“fetal appendages”.)
But of course placentas are not part of the fetus. You can have a placenta and a pregnancy and no fetus (they call that a “blighted ovum”.) You can have twins who share a placenta. Placentas don’t even express fetal DNA. And “the pregnancy” includes fetal cells which have entered the maternal bloodstream and will still persist there decades into the future. So this seems a bit silly. At the same time, the RCC would clearly want to rule out, say, severing the umbillical cord (“I only intended to sever the umbillical cord, not to cause fetal death!”) so they have an interest in defining the whole pregnancy as identical to the fetus.
The DDE is crazy to begin with; they have to start talking about intuitions and run out of principles within two or three moves. Intent is pretty hard to define and they find themselves up to their eyeballs in philosophy of cognitive science.
The flaw with citing the trolley problem is that there is a flaw in the trolley problem. Whether or not you pitch the fat guy over the parapet to stop the trolley depends on who he is. I can think of many trolls, SOBs and just nasty people whose best purpose would be to stop that trolley and whom I would cheerfully help to achieve that purpose. The other big flaw with the Trolley problem is that it is completely hypothetical. There is no downside, whatever one decides. In real-life however (something RCC Inc. ignores) things are not so simple and do have a downside. Those who have to actually make these very difficult decisions have to deal with that downside as best they can. In this RCC Inc. is, as always, completely unhelpful.
BTW: why do the RCC Inc. bishops not castigate their precious doG for all the abortions he carries out?
sailor1031, so you’d be completely happy about the consequences of using awful people to stop trolleys. :)
A lot of this comes down to whether or not you agree that everything has a purpose and that purpose is discoverable through reason alone. Okay, fine — show me the argument from reason alone that establishes that what the RCC says about abortion follows from the natural functions of things.
The argument they provide only seems to make sense to people who are Catholic theologians. Funny, that.
Ophelia:
I just want to see about whether I can clear something up. I want it on the record that I don’t agree with the argument from the Catholic Church and I get the feeling that point might have been lost at some point. I genuinely think that the whole set of natural law arguments are horrifying in their make-up and their effect. The reason I like that Cardinal Newman quote for instance is because it brings out that fact brilliantly.
The only point I’m trying to make is that there is at least some sense where that kind of thinking does work just not quite the way the Catholic Church argues. The trolley problem is the most famous example that teases out that intuition and the places where we intuitively feel it applies. Me, I think that intuition applies in a lot of other places as well. The very obvious example here would be something like Human Rights. I think a lot of people here would find Human Rights compelling and the power of them is precisely that they respect individual autonomy in a non-consequentialist way. There are other examples though from constitutions to say bloodsport to medical ethics where appealing to consequences won’t do the work we need them.
Sailor:
You wouldn’t be the first person to suggest thought experiments aren’t that useful. My thoughts would tend to revolve around the question of what would it mean if we didn’t have a very good grasp of what the terms we were using actually meant? One interesting suggestion is that we wouldn’t be able to know what we’re talking about. All that from being a bit vague about definitions?
Assume then that we’ve established that interesting suggestion that we need to be clear about our terms, how would you propose we start looking at them, examining them and trying to tease out the specificity that would mean we did know what we were talking about?
Thought experiments serve a role. You’re right they can sometimes end up obscuring issues rather the illuminating them, insert pretty much every thought experiment from cognitive science, but the right thought experiment can be an incredibly powerful tool.
Right, that should read thought experiment from Philosophy of Mind. I blame lack of sleep.
No I took it in when you said that yesterday, Montag. I know you’re not defending the Catholic defense.
And I agree about consequentialism and human rights. I had to get to grips with that during the writing of Does God Hate Women? Also when reviewing Sam Harris’s new book, which I did for the next issue of The Philosophers’ Mag. Harris shrugs off way too many difficulties, I think.
Sigmund (#25):
It’s instructive, I think, to consider what the people on the plane would want, if they were fully aware of the situation, and considered themselves moral.
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