Under duress, the Secretary of State has finally turned over her private email server to the FBI.  Her apparent serious violation of national security laws should certainly be investigated – but in an executive branch in which the administration of justice is so regularly harnessed to political ends, why does the FBI bother?

People will say “This shows that the system is working.”  No, the system is not working.  What one must remember is that the Clinton and Obama machines despise each other.   The Secretary had to be accommodated for a while, but now that the Vice President is expected to run, she has outlived her usefulness.  The wolves are finally ready to bring down the buffalo.

Examples of Telltales

We have been discussing Thomas Aquinas’s claim that the moral basics are universally known.  I have suggested that even violators who deny that they are doing wrong give evidence of suppressed guilty knowledge.  The hypothetical objector has suggested that so-called guilty behavior can be just as easily explained in other ways.  I have promised to provide examples of cases in which alternative explanations are implausible.

Each of these examples is drawn from the annals of a single hot button issue in our culture, abortion, which is rather obviously the deliberate taking of innocent human life, but which many claim to view as entirely blameless.

• The pro-life young woman who gets pregnant, has an abortion, suddenly reverses her views and becomes pro-abortion, looks for opportunities to tell everyone how her abortion solved her problems, but falls into depression around the time the baby would have been born.[12]

• The abortion clinic operator and head nurse who write an article about the psychological burdens of doing such work in an article revealingly titled, “What About Us?”[13]

• The clinic workers mentioned in the article who have dreams of vomiting up fetuses.[13]

• The ones who report suffering from an obsessive need to talk about their experience.[13]

• The ones who refuse to look at the fetus.[13]

• The one who reports increasing resentment because some of the clients don’t seem to feel as bad as she does.[13]

• The women in the clinical trials of the abortion pill who seem glad to submit to the protracted bleeding and cramping of this method of abortion because it makes them feel that they are accepting punishment for what they are doing.[14]

• Other women in the trial, as well as some members of the clinical staff, who refuse to use the term “abortion” and call what is happening a “miscarriage.”[14]

• The pro-abortion counselor, quoted by a pro-abortion journalist, who is frustrated by clients who have had abortions and subsequently feel guilty about not feeling guilty.[15]

• The abortion clinic operator who publishes the bizarre proposal that pregnancy be socially redefined as an “illness” which “may be treated by evacuation of the uterine contents”[16] – a suggestion one finds hard not to view as desperate.

• The pro-abortion activist who insists that the act is not wrong and yet proposes that feminists “hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.”[17]

Do such phenomena provide airtight proof that everyone who claims to consider abortion blameless knows better?  No.  However, I think most reasonable persons would agree that the hypothesis of moral denial explains them much better than the hypothesis of moral ignorance does.

Notes

12.  Anecdote passed on by the young woman’s college chaplain.

13.  Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., and Billie Corrigan, R.N., M.S., “What About Us?  Staff Reactions to D & E.”  Advances in Planned Parenthood 15:1 (1980), pp. 3-8.

14.  Wendy Simonds, Charlotte Ellertson, Kimberly Springer, and Beverley Winikoff, "Abortion, Revised: Participants in the U.S. Clinical Trials Evaluate Mifepristone," Social Science and Medicine 46:10 (1998), p. 1316.

15.  Nicci Gerrard, with Kim Bunce and Kirsty Buttfield, "Damned If You Do ...", The Observer (22 April 2001),

16.  Warren M. Hern, M.D., "Is Pregnancy Really Normal?" Family Planning Perspectives 3:1 (January 1971),

17.  Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic 233:16 (October 16, 1995), pp. 26–35.

Link to Part 11 of 14

A number of comments have been emailed to me or posted online about Lying for Life? and Lying for Life, Continued – some in support, some in protest.  To those who supported the argument:  Thank you for your thoughts and encouragement.  To those who protested:  Allow me one more post to explain why I think your arguments faulty.

My argument was a surgical strike, but some of its critics seem to have misidentified the target.  I criticized only lying -- deliberately saying what one knows to be false with the intention to deceive.   An ambush deceives, a silence withholds information, a statement about the time of day in the context of a stage play may be known by the actors to be false, but these are not lies because the other conditions of lying are not met.  So my criticism of lying is not refuted by pointing out that these other acts are sometimes right.

A variation on that mistake was posted by a reader at the excellent online journal MercatorNet who commented, “It's my understanding that the pro-life people in the videos were paid actors. Pretending is what actors do.  It is very different from lying.”  Yes, it is different, but from the fact that what actors say in a play isn’t lying, it doesn’t follow that what they say offstage isn’t lying.  That is like suggesting that if a locksmith burglarizes a safe, it isn’t theft because opening locks is what locksmiths do.

Quite a few critics object that if lying is wrong, then we must also condemn all “stings” and exposés, which seems to them extreme.  But the inference is mistaken.  Since there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the commission of an illegal act, one may certainly make a secret video of the people who are committing it.  There is no obligation to announce “Look what I am doing!”

Other critics propose false analogies.  Yes, I know about the plot to kill Hitler, but the ethical question in that case was assassination, not lying.  False analogies have also been urged from Scripture.  One writer asked, “Was Nathan the prophet wrong to tell King David a made up story -- a lie -- so as to open David’s eyes to his sin?”  But the very wording of the question explains why Nathan wasn’t lying.  He wasn’t trying to shut the king’s eyes but to open them; he precisely described David’s sin in the form of a parable.  That is why it was so devastating when he declared to his ruler, “You are the man!”

I have also been offered the famous “dirty hands” argument, “Don’t moral obligations sometimes come into conflict, so that one way or another, we are compelled to do wrong?”  Certain moral rules have exceptions.  For example, in most cases I should return property which has been left in my keeping when the owner demands it, but it wouldn’t be wrong to hold onto his car keys when he is falling-down drunk.  Other moral rules have no exceptions.  Such are the prohibitions of the Decalogue.  The prohibition of lying has traditionally been understood as a rule of the latter kind.  Rules of the former kind can come into conflict, but acting contrary to a rule in a case to which it does not properly apply is not disobeying it.  Rules of the latter kind can never come into conflict, so we can never be compelled to disobey them.

The “sin boldly” argument is just the dirty hands argument with a Christian veneer:  “Doesn’t our sinful brokenness imply that sometimes we do the wrong thing?”  Certainly, but that doesn’t make it right.

The most chilling lines of reasoning are the consequentialist one, “How could anything that does so much good be wrong?” and its close cousin, “In war, all things are permitted.”  I ask:  Are there intrinsically evil acts or are there not?  If we suppose that we may do anything whatsoever for the sake of results, then the contest is already lost.  We have become our opponents.  There is nothing left to defend.

St. Paul remarks, “And why not do evil that good may come? -- as some people slanderously charge us with saying.  Their condemnation is just.”

I am going to have to stop calling Mondays student letter days, because I make so many exceptions.  But the Canadian author of this letter was a student not too long ago.

Question:

Can you please define "contentment"?  What does being content look like in our daily lives?  Does striving for increase (career advancement, higher education, a better car, a bigger house, etc) narrow contentment?   Is there something as spiritual contentment?  Would contentment be a good thing or bad for our spiritual lives?

Reply:

Most people take for granted that a good life is a life that contains good things.  Whether this is true depends on which kinds of good things we are talking about.  Have you noticed that each of the kinds of good you mention is at best a conditional good?  Having a bigger car, for example, would be helpful if you needed the extra room to pack in all your children, but it would be bad for you if you were going to use it to flee from the police in a life of robbing banks.  To put it another way, the conditional goods can’t make your life a good life – but if you are living a good life, some of the conditional goods might become good things for you.

The goods that do make life good are called intrinsic goods – these are the goods that are good in themselves, the goods that are unconditionally good.  One example of an intrinsic good is virtue, epitomized by wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, faith, hope, and love.  Another example is friendship – not just any kind of friendship, but partnership in a good life, because good is diminished if it can’t be shared.  Such things literally can’t be bad for you.

I am sure you can add to the list of intrinsic goods.  Be careful, though, because we often mistake conditional goods for intrinsic goods.  Consider career advancement.  If I had a calling for administration, then to accept a so-called promotion to an administrative position might be a very good thing.  For me personally, though, accepting an administrative position would be a betrayal, because my calling is teaching and scholarship.  So career advancement, as conventionally understood, is a conditional good, not an intrinsic one.

You might now be expecting me to say that contentment is simply having the intrinsic goods.  Not exactly.  One can have friends, family, and meaningful work in a life of virtue, and still ask “Is this all there is?”  There is only one good so complete and perfect that it leaves nothing further to be desired.  This good is the vision of God, which nobody experiences fully in this life, but which the blessed experience in heaven.  All of the other goods finally come into their own in this beatific vision.  For example, just because it is the perfection of friendship with God, it carries with it perfect friendship with all of His friends.

You close with the question, “Would contentment be a good thing or bad for our spiritual lives?”  Let me put it this way:  To be on the path toward the vision of God is the whole point of our spiritual lives.  But to settle for anything less – to imagine that we can be ultimately contented by anything in this life -- would be the greatest possible calamity; it would be to trade our ultimate good for eternal unfulfilled desire and unrest.

I might add that the very fact that nothing in this life fully contents us forms one of the arguments for the existence of God.  The argument goes like this:  There is exactly one longing that nothing in the created order that can satisfy; anyone who does not recognize it in himself does not know himself.  Assuming that each of our longings is for something -– what would be a point of a longing that nothing could fulfill? -– it follows that the object of this one longing must lie beyond the created order.  This is what we call God.

Hate crimes are crimes committed because of hatred for members of certain social groups.  The premise of hate crimes legislation is that crimes committed from such motives are worse than other crimes.  Consider.

A man beats up a woman because he hates women.  Hate crime.

A man beats up a woman because she was promoted and he wasn’t; because he tried to steal her purse and she resisted; because he derives pleasure from inflicting pain on others; because she was seen in public without a head scarf; because the wife of another man paid him to do it; because he was ordered to do it by the leader of his gang; or because he was rioting and got caught up in the moment.  Not hate crimes.

Each of these acts is despicable.  But how is the first one worse than the other seven?  Answer:  It isn’t.