Monday – Student letter day!

Question:

Secular humanists deny God, holding that nothing is greater than human beings.  However, do they think that some humans are greater than others?

Reply:

Some do.  A good example is the influential jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, founder of the school of thought called legal realism (which would more properly be called legal anti-realism, because it denies the reality of moral law).

Holmes did not believe there was anything above human beings, but he didn’t think there was anything special about them either.  He wrote, “I see no reason for attributing to a man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.”  Having thrown moral and spiritual values out the window, he had nothing left to believe in but lethal force:  “The world has produced the rattlesnake as well as me; but I kill it if I get a chance, as also mosquitoes, cockroaches, murderers, and flies.  My only judgment is that they are incongruous with the world I want, the kind of world we all try to make according to our power.” 

The same rule of conquest applied in his view to the relations of strong humans with weak ones:  “All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man.”  “I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio.”  “Every society rests on the death of men.”  What he called “my starting point for an ideal of the law” was “taking in hand life and trying to build a race.”  In practical terms, this mean killing everyone “below standard”:  “I can imagine a future in which science … shall have gained such catholic [universal] acceptance that it shall take control of life, and condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy.”

Bear in mind that secular humanism is not a single ideology but a family of ideologies.  Although certain kinds of secular humanists do claim to recognize the dignity of the human person, in practice they find it difficult to keep from being sucked into the black hole of HHHolmesian brutality.

Consider for instance the widely-circulated “humanist manifestos.”  Although the signatories of Manifesto II devote an entire section to ethics, they insist that ethics is “situational.”  This means there are no exceptionless rules; so given the right situation, anything might be permitted.  In the same oxymoronic spirit, they declare that “the preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value” and affirm belief in “the principle of moral equality,” but at the same time insists on the right to abortion.  So all humans are equal, but some are more equal than others.

The quotations from Oliver Wendell Holmes are taken from Albert W. Alschuler, “A Century of Skepticism,” in McConnell, Cochran, and Carmella, eds., Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought (Yale, 2001).  A condensed version of the chapter is available here.  Humanist Manifesto II can be found here.  Next time:  The Same as to Knowledge, Part 2 of 14.

Last month I wrote about my conversation with a federal judge who told about the many defendants in his court who weep when they hear the pre-sentence report.  Subsequently I asked him for details, and here is his reply.

“Yes, I was telling you about the experience I've had on many occasions of sentencing an adult male for a crime and watching him cry over what a mess he's made of his life.  Often he has been in the county jail awaiting sentencing while a pre-sentence report is being prepared.  As a result, he typically lacks access to drugs and alcohol and has a forced period of sobriety.  Sometimes he will tell me at his sentencing that this is the longest time he's been sober in years.

“The pre-sentence reports are very thorough and include sections on the individual's family of origin, education, employment, his own children and relationships, health (including mental health and history of substance abuse), finances, a detailed account of the offense he is being sentenced for, and his prior criminal history.  I've described it as a version of the old TV show ‘this is your life.’  The offender goes over the report with his attorney before sentencing and is forced to confront what he's done to others and what its impact has been not only on them but on his own loved ones, i.e., wife (or more often ‘fiancée’), children (often multiple, each with a different mother), and his own parents.

“The result can be sincere remorse and resolve to change, often accompanied by a discovery of, or return to, Christianity.  Unfortunately, once the sentence is completed, sobriety is no longer forced but is a choice, and given the failure to form any habits of discipline and self-restraint, as well as the environment that the offender returns to, the resolve is often short-lived until age, illness or death overcomes the propensity to abuse himself and others.

“I think I also mentioned that when I read the social history, which often begins with a single mother (sometimes a child herself, alcoholic, drug addicted or all three), no father or, worse, an abusive, neglectful or criminal father (or again all three), I can't help wondering what I would be like if I had so little in life.

“On many occasions, I've thought of the old saying ‘don't remove a fence unless you know why it was put up.’  As a society, we have removed many fences over the past fifty years because we thought they were relics of an oppressive past that unreasonably restricted human freedom.  Anyone who works in the courts should be able to recognize the empirical evidence that shows why those fences were put up.  Instead of promoting human freedom, removal of the fences has robbed many, especially the poor and uneducated, of the freedom to become what human beings are capable of being.

“Unfortunately, too many people have a vested interest in the fences remaining down, and no one knows how to put them back up, even if we wanted to.”

Next time:  Undermen and Overmen

For some years I have been building a case about moral knowledge, moral denial, and the revenge of conscience.  In this new series, I will simply and concisely put all the pieces of the argument in one place.  It will run only on Thursdays, with posts on other topics several other times a week.  This is all copyrighted, of course.

The Same for All

In the Summa Theologiae, First Part of the Second Part, Question 94, Article 4, St. Thomas Aquinas – asking whether the natural moral law is the same for all men – makes the very strong claim that “the natural law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.”  Let’s unpack this statement to see why it is so astonishing.

To say that the general principles of the natural law are the same “as to rectitude” means that they are right for everyone.  For example, just as it would be wrong for me to murder, so it would be wrong for you to murder.  This claim is already quite strong, and a good many people in our time consider it pretty dubious.  We hear every day that “what’s right for you may not be right for me,” and that this is why we must not “judge” anyone else’s acts by our own standards.

But St. Thomas makes this already-strong claim stronger still.  For to say that the general principles are the same for all “as to knowledge” means that everyone knows them.  For example, not only is it the case that theft is wrong for everyone, but everyone knows that theft is wrong, even thieves.  I take this to mean not only that everyone knows that theft is wrong for him, but that everyone knows that theft is wrong for everyone.  Of course we are not speaking of persons incapable of reason; “all men” means everyone with an undamaged adult mind.  Nor are we speaking of the remote, detailed implications of the general principles; I may understand the wrong of theft in general, yet be confused about whether it would always be theft to refuse to return property entrusted to me at the time it is demanded.  Notice, too, that we are speaking of knowledge of the natural law itself, not the knowledge of the theory of natural law.  For example, people in general may not know that “Do not steal” is a natural law; they may not even know that there is such a thing as natural law.  They may, in fact, steal.  Nevertheless, they know that they ought not steal.  This is the claim.

If St. Thomas is correct, then no matter which kind of denier we are speaking of – whether the universal denier, who denies that there are any true moral universals, or the particular denier, who denies particular true moral universals such as the wrong of adultery or murder – the denier knows better.  Though he may give seemingly rational accounts of his objections, he is unreasonably resistant to solutions, because the obstacles that prevent him from acknowledging true moral universals lie less in the realm of the intellect than in the realm of the will.  He may even desire to concoct intellectual obstacles, because they give him a pretext for refusing to admit to himself that he knows what he does, in some sense, know.

And if this in turn is true, then we have an enormous problem.  It implies that a good portion of contemporary ethical and meta-ethical debate is not carried on in good faith.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.  Here I am worrying about the implications of the proposition that persons who deny true moral universals know better, when I have not even presented any reasons to think that they do, in fact, know better.  Some people would say that I am even further ahead of myself than that, because I have not established that St. Thomas really means what I say he means when he states that the general principles of the natural law are the same for all as to knowledge.

Here then is what I propose.  First I will reply to possible arguments against my interpretation of St. Thomas’s claim; then I will present objections to his view and offer replies; then a more general argument for thinking that he is right; then why it is so important that he is right.  Finally I will return to the question of what to do about all of this.

Link to Part 2 of 14

Why was former President George W. Bush so resolute in assembling a coalition and a massive accumulation of force to achieve regime change during the Second Iraq War – but so irresolute (though not so irresolute as his successor) in stabilizing the country afterward?

To be sure, he radically underestimated the difficulty of the latter task.  He expected the coalition troops to be greeted as liberators, which for a short time they were.  But this is not a complete explanation.

He realized that the Americans and their allies might not have the moral nerve to stay the course in a protracted conflict.  But through the new military doctrine of “shock and awe,” heseems to have believed we would get in and out so quickly, with such overwhelming dominance, that there would be no course for us to stay.  As to the Iraqis, he expected our manner of waging war to impress them so thoroughly that even after the shock had dissipated, the awe would persist, transforming their civil society.

In short, he was attempting to apply a technological solution to a pair of moral problems – on our side, weakness of will, and on the Iraqi side, unreadiness for self-government.  And that is why he failed.

Tomorrow:  The Same as to Knowledge, Part 1

Many a louse parades his exquisite capacity for compassion, and I have taken my turn among the louses.  So you will understand that I am not boasting of my virtue when I remark that ever since coming of age I have been acutely uneasy about social wrongs.

When I was young and leftist, however, my attention was taken mostly by sins of omission, especially the neglect of the poor.  As I have grown older I have become much more painfully aware of sins of commission, especially hurting the poor in the name of helping them.  God have mercy on us all.

Tomorrow:  Moral Problems, Technological Solutions