Monday – student letter day!

Question:

I am an incoming college freshman who has a philosophical disagreement with my dad (whom I respect dearly).  After receiving a large graduation donation from my southern grandparents, we discovered that I differed from his approach to integrity in reactions to gifts.  As someone who we both respect, I'm asking if you can answer this:  Should we show fake or overreacted gratitude in order to fulfill the desires for validation of the giver?  My thought is that not only is showing your honest gratitude more valuable, but also deceiving others is clearly wrong.  He says that you should over-act to show value to the recipients if their culture values overreaction.

Reply:

Well, I don’t know what you mean by excessive gratitude, but I think you are asking the wrong question.  Instead of asking whether you ought to act more grateful than you feel, you should be asking how grateful you ought to feel -- and then acting that way!  The answer to the question “How grateful should I feel for a generous gift?” – by the way, it is a gift, not an obligatory “donation” -- is “very grateful indeed.”  So act very grateful indeed!

For starters, you might write your grandparents a letter thanking them warmly for their gift and telling them all about your college plans.  If they live nearby, you could take them out to lunch at your own expense and tell them over the meal instead.  A letter now and then while you’re at school, telling them how things are going, would be a good idea too.

Your objection is that you ought to act how you feel.  You’re wrong -- there is no such moral law as “Always act how you feel.”  Sometimes the moral law requires us to act differently than we feel; in fact, sometimes it even requires us to try to change our feelings.  Gratitude is something you owe your grandparents, and you should give to each person what you owe.  So you should act with gratitude, and also try to feel grateful.  If you don’t yet feel grateful, you should at least act as though you do.  You should be concerned enough about the fact that you don’t feel that way yet to want to become a different person.

Before I end this letter, let me clear up two other confusions in yours.  One of them concerns the meaning of sincerity.  Of course we shouldn’t tell lies.  Sinful creatures that we are, however, our feelings are often at war with the persons we ought to be.  One of the things that we can do about this is wear a mask, just as beautiful as we can make it.  This is called courtesy.  Masks, of course, can be used to deceive, but in courtesy, our motive is different.  As C.S. Lewis pointed out, I wear a courteous mask partly in the hope that my true face will gradually grow to fit it, and partly in the hope of not setting a bad example in the meantime.  The words of courtesy, such as "If you please," "thank you," and "the pleasure is mine," may be mere formulae, but they rehearse the humility, gratitude, and charity that I know I ought to feel, do not feel yet, and hope to feel in the future.

The other confusion concerns the meaning of selfishness.  You suggest that your grandparents’ expectation of gratitude is merely a selfish desire for validation.  That’s a little bit like a husband viewing his wife’s expectation of faithfulness as a selfish desire for security, a customer viewing the shopkeeper’s expectation of being paid as a selfish desire for income, or a big fellow viewing a little fellow’s expectation of not being hit in the nose as a selfish desire for physical comfort.  On the contrary, gratitude is a moral law, just like faithfulness, justice, and consideration are moral laws.  It isn’t selfish for your grandparents to hope that you will be a virtuous grandson who appreciates their gift.  There would be something wrong with them if they didn’t want that.  The real selfishness lies in thinking their hope selfish.

I’m glad you have respect for your dad.  Try to have a little more for your grandparents.  I hope this is helpful.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I criticized the use of evil means to combat the evil of abortion.  Let’s return to the evil of abortion itself.

Even a few abortion supporters are stunned by the complacency of the Planned Parenthood officials caught on video negotiating the sale of aborted baby body parts.  A talking head on one of the interview programs declared that although she was “staunchly pro-choice,” she was horrified by the desecration of human tissue which these sales involve.

We should welcome the opportunity such shock presents to achieve a short-term tactical alliance to press for the enforcement of existing laws which prohibit such sales.  But the strategic purpose is to change minds about abortion.

And that can be done.  After all, it’s not easy to believe that it “desecrates human tissue” to market it after it is dead, but doesn’t desecrate it to slice it into quivering pieces while it is still alive.  Logically, if one is desecration, then both are.  Even so, as progress must be measured in times like ours, this is progress.

Something of the truth must still be glinting through the cracks and crevices of conscience, or else not even the lesser desecration could be seen for what it is.  The task is to pry open those cracks and let out the rest of the light.

So What Does This Explain?

But why, in the end, should we believe that everyone really knows the general moral principles?  I suggest an argument to the best explanation.  If the hypothesis of moral denial provides a better explanation of how people at odds with moral basics act than the alternative hypothesis of moral ignorance provides, then the hypothesis of moral denial is probably true, and we are justified in accepting it.

I think denial does provide a better explanation than moral ignorance.  I rest this judgment on the observation that people who are at odds with the moral basics tend to “act guilty.”  So strong is this tendency that many guilty people expend enormous energy in the effort not to act guilty.  Although some guilty people are better at this than others are, the strain shows.

Please notice what I am not suggesting.  I am not suggesting that the guilty person is necessarily thinking to himself “I am guilty.”  But according to St. Thomas he does have a natural dispositional tendency to be aware of the first principles of natural law and their proximate, general corollaries, and I am suggesting that he also has a natural dispositional tendency to judge his behavior as wrong when it obviously violates these principles.  He can resist these dispositional tendencies –- for example, he can try not to think of certain subjects, or try to find ways of viewing the obvious as not obvious -- but if he does, then he is also going to have to fight the dispositional tendency to be aware that he is resisting.  Three sets of intellectual “habits” are therefore in conflict:  First, all those associated with the natural habitus of the knowledge of the general principles of the natural law; second, all those associated with what I consider a natural habitus of knowing when I have violated them; and third, all those associated with the acquired habitus to resist the actualization of this knowledge.

Second, I am not suggesting that a dispositional tendency to act guilty proves that the person manifesting it must really be guilty of something; it only proves that he has a dispositional tendency to believe that he is guilty.  Such belief may be unwarranted and false.  For example, I may blame myself because I survived an automobile crash that killed everyone else, even though I was not driving and was not at fault.  However,  when my belief in my guilt is warranted and true, it is knowledge.  So consider a person who has murdered, who claims to believe that murder is no big deal, and yet who acts guilty.  I say that although he claims not to view murder as wrong, he knows better.

Third, when I speak of acting guilty I am not suggesting that it is always easy to tell precisely what guilty knowledge is being betrayed.  To be sure, sometimes it is easy to tell, for example, when a person displays a compulsion to tell everyone about what he did even though he insists that his behavior was innocent.  But sometimes it isn’t at all easy to tell; a person may engage in behavior strongly which is suggestive of self-punishment, but which does not advertise what he is punishing himself for.

Fourth, I am not suggesting that people who are at odds with the general principles of natural law always feel guilty.  Guilty feelings – sorrowful pangs of remorse -- are probably the least reliable sign of guilty knowledge.  No one always feels remorse for doing wrong; some people never do.  Yet even when remorse is absent, guilty knowledge generates other telltales – to which we turn next.

Link to Part 9 of 14

This question is from a doctoral candidate at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands.

Question:

I am fond of your blog and visit it frequently.  Nevertheless, I write to you out of concern with your latest blog post.  I think it unnecessarily condemns an action that is just and hence risks constituting an injustice.  The state in which decent people find themselves in relation to abortion is akin to one of war (it is way past the line of civil disobedience).  The rules of war have generally accepted all sorts of deceptions, and it would be strange to assume that these deceptions are lies.  I do think that criminals don't have a right to the truth in certain contexts, but this can be disputed.  Nevertheless, if this principle is disputed there is a much weaker principle in play, that one cannot lie when there is no reasonable expectation for truth.  Deceptions in games and in war are not lies.  And a person who ignores the nature of the situation has no one to blame for falling into deception.

In any case, I don't think it is worthwhile to pursue this sort of casuistry here.  Although I have not read your work (beyond your blog) I think the appeals to what is "evident" and "written in the heart" are good ways to illuminate natural law thinking.  If this is so, the justice of the actions taken is as clearly written in the heart as any other thing.

Reply:

Thank you; I’m glad you enjoy the blog.  We agree that abortion is evil and we agree that it must be fought.  After that, we differ.  To borrow the words of M.L. King, I insist that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek; no one may use evil means to combat evil.  You aren’t very clear here.  For example, you do not quite say we may use evil means to combat evil.  But you seem to say that if good results, then the means are not evil – which comes to the same thing.  This is not natural law thinking; it is pure consequentialism.

But even setting aside the red herrings in your letter (for example, I did not argue that all deceptions are lies, or that all deceptions are unjust – quite the contrary), your letter presents several grave danger signals.

One is your scorn of necessary moral distinctions, which you call “casuistry” which is it not “worthwhile to pursue.”  As soon as we get past the basics, such as “Do good and avoid evil,” morality is nothing but the drawing of necessary distinctions.  I may have drawn them incorrectly, but you hardly make a case for that view by saying that they need not be drawn.

Another is your doctrine that we are at “war,” which is especially alarming considering the fact that you do not follow the doctrine of just war (which does make distinctions).  If you did, you would know that war may be waged only by competent public authority, and that you are calling not for soldiers, but for vigilantes.  If these vigilantes may lie to combat evil, what else may they do?  May they burglarize?  May they kidnap?  May they commit arson?  Would you say that arson by a vigilante is not arson, as you say that lying in what you call “war” is not war?

The final one is your distortion of the doctrine of the law “written on the heart,” which does not mean, as you think, that whatever in the heat of the moment you consider “evident” is really true.

But since you do challenge me in the name of the law written on the heart, let me call attention to one of the things I think we will find written there.  Fiat justitia ruat caelum:  “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."  If this is true, then we may not commit injustice for any reason.  Even against injustice, we must use just means.

You don’t exactly deny the fiat.  How could you?  It is written on your heart too.  But you treat it as meaning that to make sure justice is done, we may do whatever it takes – we may even commit injustice.  To stop those who do evil, we may become just like them.  Unfortunately, in this case, injustice has not been stopped at all.  We have merely joined its perpetrators.

So it seems to me that you have illustrated the point with which I concluded yesterday’s post, when I wrote that there lies the edge of an abyss.  This is why it is so important for both of us not to despair of the help of God.

Question:

My question regards the recent videos showing officials of the organization dickering over lunch about the prices of aborted baby body parts with persons they thought were procurement agents for firms which buy such things, but who were really activists conducting “stings.”

I'm very glad that the videos are out there, not so much because they reveal that planned parenthood is doing something illegal, but because they reveal the moral corrosion of people who work in the industry.  The videos horrify me because of the casual way these officials talk about abortions -- for example about using methods which aren’t as "crunchy” so that the body parts will be more intact.  It isn’t about tone.  It’s about moral evil.

My question, however, concerns the methods used to obtain this footage.  Is lying to obtain this footage justified?  Does it undermine our cause?  I'm not in any way denying how powerful these videos are in shedding light on evil practices, but I wonder if such tactics discredit our calls for truth telling.   I really don't know the answer.

Reply:

The way the abortion trade corrodes the souls of those involved in it appalls me too, and I am glad –- so to speak -- that some of this evil has been exposed.  But that is not what you are asking.  Your question concerns the means.

According to a very long tradition, it is wrong to do what is intrinsically evil so that good will result, and lying is intrinsically evil.  This is easy to misunderstand.  Not all forms of deception are evil; for example, the tradition has held that one may licitly set an ambush in a just war.  Moreover, merely withholding the truth -– by silence, by vagueness, or by equivocation -– is not necessarily evil (although it can be in some cases).

The question, then, is what lying is.  Lying has traditionally been defined as deliberately saying what one knows to be false with the intention to deceive.  The justification of this definition is straightforwardly teleological.  As one of the subordinate powers of rational beings, the power of language has an inbuilt purpose which surpasses any motive we might bring to the act.  Speech must never be used in a way which makes it an enemy of truth.

If this definition is complete and correct, then what the agents provocateurs did to expose Planned Parenthood’s evils was lying, and should not have been done even for the sake of the good result that it achieved.  One must not lie to expose lies.

However, some who are sympathetic to the methods of the sting operations argue that the traditional definition should be understood as including a tacit proviso, such that lying is deliberately saying what one knows to be false with the intention to deceive someone who has a right to the truth.  In this way they argue that what the agents provocateurs did was not lying, because the Planned Parenthood criminals did not have a right to the truth.

In my opinion the agents provocateurs were indeed lying.  But even if I am mistaken – even if they were not lying -- their methods are not ethically in the clear.

Why?  Whether or not deliberately saying what one knows to be false with in the intention to deceive is a complete definition of lying, it certainly corresponds to what people in general understand lying to be.  This makes the act a moral stumbling block, what used to be called a “scandal.”

By exposing abortionist lies even by telling what merely seem to be lies, one encourages the view that the defenders of life are no more honest than the murderers, and at the same time promotes the idea that one may do evil for the sake of good.  I understand the awful sense of desperation -- temptation often feels that way.  But there lies the edge of an abyss.