I’m trying out a new format for a few posts.  These are real letters, though slightly edited.

Professor:

There seems to be a certain predictability in the way evil deeds play out -- tyrants create the men who will overthrow them, true peace cannot be gotten through despotism, justice cannot be attained through unjust means, and so forth.

Yet there are surprises too.  Secondary causes can alter the outcome of an evil event, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  How do you view these surprises?

Reply:

Your intuition is that even though people try to justify intrinsically evil acts by their consequences, in the final analysis the consequences of intrinsically evil acts are always bad.  Yet because of the “surprises” you mention, you wonder whether you’re wrong.

I’d say that in certain deep senses your intuition is profoundly correct, but in another sense mistaken.

(1)  Essentially – that is, of itself -- an intrinsically evil act cannot bring about any good results.  The tendency of an act with a wrong object is to bring about wrong.  Sam aims at beating Cynthia, and Cynthia is harmed.

(2) Accidentally – that is, because of circumstances -- an intrinsically evil act may bring about certain good results.  Just because Sam does beat Cynthia, his murderer may spare Cynthia pain.

(3) Providentially – that is, because of the design of the system of natural consequences –the accidentally good results of an intrinsically evil act tend, at least, to unravel.  So far as we know, this unraveling doesn’t always take place, but when it does, the chain of causation can often be traced back to the intrinsic evil of the original act.  Perhaps Fred divorces his wife because he fancies himself more deeply in love with the neighbor lady.  The problem is that love, being a gift of self, is intrinsically connected with faithfulness, so the very thing Fred does for the sake of love renders him unfit for love.  I wouldn’t say that the system of natural consequences works with 100% efficiency; in this life, bad things do happen to good people, and good things do happen to bad.  Even so, the efficiency of the system is amazingly high.  The very things we do to prevent natural consequences themselves have natural consequences.

(4) Ultimately – that is, in view of our final end – an intrinsically evil act always harms the person who commits it more than he could be compensated by any accidental good result.  This is because it cannot be directed to our final end, which is God; by its very nature it separates us from Him.  As John Paul II put it, acts of this sort “contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”

So I’d say that your intuition is incorrect in the accidental sense, mostly correct in the providential sense, and altogether correct in the essential and the ultimate senses.  Does this help?

Professor:

Is there anything to be said for the idea that punishing wrongdoers is justified at least partly by the worth of the persons wronged?  Suppose we let abusers off the hook.  Failure to punish them wrongs their victims; it is out of keeping with their worth as persons.  I haven’t seen much about this in what I’ve read about the retributive purpose of punishment.

Reply:

The intrinsic worth of the victims is certainly important; only beings with intrinsic worth can suffer harm in the sense which would warrant retribution.  We find this view expressed in Old Testament law, for example in Genesis 9:6:  “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.”  You see the point, I’m sure.  A murderer may be executed not despite the fact that man is made in God’s image, but because man is made in God’s image.  The murderer destroyed something of inestimable worth.

However, punishment should be proportional not to the degree of worth of the injured persons, which is beyond counting, but according to the degree of harm which was done to them, or done to the common good.

Back from traveling again.  Thanks for your patience.  I think the three conversational situations you describe need different responses.  Let’s talk about them.

Concerning the first situation:  When an anti-Christian acquaintance says something which is deliberately blasphemous, just explain that his statement offends you.  If he continues, quietly say, “Let’s change the subject,” and begin a new one.  If he persists, quietly say “I’m not willing to talk like this, so I’ll see you around,” and walk away.  Don’t get angry, don’t apologize, and don’t back down.  Don’t justify yourself, don’t stay to listen to his own self-justifications, and don’t explain.  If your acquaintance is worth talking to, he will mend his conversational ways, and if he doesn’t, he isn’t.

Concerning the second situation:  When a lapsed Catholic friend criticizes you for, say, not going with him to strip clubs, he knows perfectly well that going to strip clubs is wrong.  He’s not criticizing because he thinks you’re mistaken, but because his own conscience is accusing him.  Don’t tell him that, because it will merely make him defensive; just bear it in mind.  Whenever he begins to razz you, say “You know why I don’t go to strip clubs, and I don’t need to justify myself.  Should we change the subject, or end the conversation?”  If he keeps at it, deal with him as with the friends I discussed above. 

Concerning the third situation:  When a Protestant friend makes unfounded and unreasonable claims against the Catholic faith, for example that Catholics worship devils or pray to idols, you need to discern two things.  The first is his motive for speaking.  Is he trying to rescue you from what he mistakenly considers your errors, or does he merely desire to insult your faith?  The second thing to discern is whether he is willing to be corrected about what Catholics really believe.  Putting these two things together, we have four possibilities.

(1) If the friend speaks with the first motive, is willing to be corrected, and is not argumentative, correct him.  Your mode of correction should be to simply and briefly explain what Catholics actually believe.

(2) If he speaks with the first motive, is in principle willing to be corrected, but turns out to be too argumentative to be corrected effectively, tell him nicely that you don’t think the two of you are ready to have this conversation yet.  Don’t end the matter there.  You might suggest that he take a look at the appropriate section of the Catechism; he can find a convenient searchable version at www.scborromeo.org/ccc.htm .  Or refer him to a reliable Catholic apologetics website, such as http://www.catholic.com/tracts .  Perhaps conversation will become possible later.

(3) If he speaks with the first motive but is not willing to be corrected, don’t engage in discussion at all; change the subject.

(4) On the other hand, if he speaks with the second motive, speak to him as you would speak with the anti-Christian acquaintances who sling blasphemies.

It may be difficult to discern just which of these four possibilities is actual.  One way to find out is to ask:  “If you understood what Catholics believe, you’d understand that we aren’t really doing what you think we are doing.  Let me ask you frankly:  Are you interested enough and open-minded enough to listen to my explanation?”

Another way to find out is trial and error.  If you find you were mistaken about a friend’s motive or open-mindedness, shift gears.  Use common sense, because conversations are messier than I am describing them, and so are conversational histories.  A friend may at first seem unable to speak with you reasonably, but as time goes on he may become more open-minded.  Or a friend who at first seems reasonable may as time goes on become belligerent.

Use lots of charity and patience.  It sounds like some of your Protestant friends are fundamentalists who respect you personally but have been taught things about Catholicism which are gravely mistaken.  When I was young, I was taught some of those things too.  If they were taught to your friend by persons whom he trusted, he may even suspect that you have been deceived about the teachings of your own faith!

Is this helpful?  By the way, since many young Catholics find themselves in the same situations, I may use a version of this letter in my blog.

Pax Christi,

Professor Budziszewski

Some people believe that sin isn’t so bad if it is done with a good intention.  “After all, he meant well.”  The problem with this view is that every sin is done with a good intention.  Nobody loves evil just because for being evil; the only way an evil can be attractive in the first place is that is good in some respect.

For example, the thief does not love thievery for its own sake but because it gets him something he wanted, or enables him to give his friends gifts, or even because it gives him the pleasure of sharpening his skills.  Even Milton’s Satan, who says “Evil, be thou my good,” loves evil not for its own sake, but because it seems a way to outwit his Divine foe.

Just as some people fall into the fallacy of good intentions, some thinkers fall into the fallacy of the grain of truth.  They think errors aren’t so bad if a grain of truth is wrapped up with them.  A case in point is a recent book by a Christian thinker which argues that antirealist philosophies such as relativism and pragmatism are good because they recognize the “contingency” and “dependency” of life.

Life certainly is contingent and dependent.  But not in the way that antirealists think.  The problem with the grain of truth fallacy is much like the problem with the good intentions fallacy.  A grain of truth is entangled with all believable error; that’s what makes it believable.  But the grain is only a grain, and it is mixed up with a lot of indigestible chaff.

Buddhists are right that we fall prey to illusions.  Socialists are right that we should use our goods for the good of others.  Pessimists are right that many evils are incidental to life.  But Buddhists are wrong to draw the conclusion that life itself is illusion, socialists to draw the conclusion that private property is theft, and pessimists to draw the conclusion that life is not worth living.

Every bunko artist knows that what isn’t true depends on what is.  He folds into his frauds all the truth they will hold, the better to take in the suckers.  The wise man makes use of the same fact, but in the opposite way.  In order to extricate his neighbors from what isn’t true, he seeks out the bits of truth tangled up with it, commends them, but then shows where they actually lead.  St. Paul followed this approach when he was speaking to the Athenians.  “As even some of your poets have said, 'For we are indeed his offspring.'  Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man.”*

The Patristic writers called the technique “spoiling the Egyptians.”  This expression alludes to an incident in Exodus, wherein God instructs the Israelites that before leaving Egypt, their former house of bondage, they should ask their pagan neighbors for adornments of silver, gold, and fine cloth.  According to the Fathers, this could be used as a metaphor for learning the commendable logical methods of the pagan thinkers, but putting them to better purposes than the pagans did themselves.

Why to better uses?  Because learning the logical methods of the pagans is one thing; repeating their errors is another.  As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has remarked, when the pagans, who knew that Christians prayed to only one god, used to ask which one of their gods it was, the Christians answered, “None of them.”    The God to whom they prayed was the God of whom the pagan thinkers spoke but to whom they did not pray.  Why didn’t they?  Because for them the divine Logos wasn’t the sort of god to whom one could pray; the Thought which thought itself could not be troubled to take thought for man.  Christians knew Him better, as the Word made flesh and come among us.**

So if you are going to take spoils from the Egyptians, don’t forget to get out of Dodge.  Gather up those precious things, and then vamoose.  It is surprising how often Christian thinkers forget the vamoosing part.  In order to caress those precious things, they stick around and fall back into bondage.

* Acts 17:28-29 (RSV-CE).

** Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (1970), Chapter 3.

Recently the journal First Things republished an essay of mine which was originally published twenty-one years ago, called “The Illusion of Moral Neutrality.”  Neutralism is the doctrine that the law both can and should suspend substantive judgment about goods and evils, something I take to be impossible.  Since the neutralist error was then -- and still is -- especially prominent on the philosophic left, I made a point of saying that we also find it on the philosophic right, attributing to conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott the view that “the specific and limited activity of ‘governing’ has ‘nothing to do’ with natural law or morals.”

Some weeks after the essay was republished, someone wrote me to suggest that I got the quotation wrong.  When I returned to the passage and checked, I found that this is correct; though I had stated Oakeshott’s view accurately, I had garbled the quotation itself.  Oakeshott doesn’t say that governing has nothing to do with morals; he says what makes the conservative disposition in politics intelligible has nothing to do with morals.  But if we read on, we find that he thinks that according to this conservative disposition, governing should not involve substantive moral judgment either.  So perhaps I can be forgiven.

By way of reparation, allow me to quote from a book of mine published in 1988, The Nearest Coast of Darkness(we are being antiquarian today), where I more thoroughly analyzed the Oakeshottian passage from which I was quoting.  The context of the analysis was a discussion of various common meanings of conservatism.

==============

The third thing that conservatism may mean requires a little more attention than the first two.  In the third sense, conservatism means something very like the “neutralist” liberalism of the avant-garde, which I discussed in the previous essay – but shorn of its activism.  Conservatism of this kind has been well described by Michael Oakeshott:

"[W]hat makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about."

This is an attractive sentence, but also a complicated sentence, so rich in opportunities for the reader’s assent that we will only chase red herrings if we take no care to separate the subsidiary points from the main issue.  In the first place, Oakeshott is talking about three different things:

(1) the conservative disposition, whose emblems, according to Oakeshott, are “all activities … where what is sought is enjoyment springing not from the success of the enterprise, but from the familiarity of the engagement”;

(2) an observation, which, taken together with

(3) a belief, makes politics, in his view, an appropriate field for the exercise of this disposition.

My concern here is neither the disposition nor the observation, but the belief.  It is not the disposition because one may be conservative in temperament without exercising this temperament in politics, and one may be conservative in politics without possessing a conservative temperament.  It is not “the observation of our current manner of living,” since this is an observation one would hope that people of all dispositions and persuasions might make.  What is key is the belief.

The manner in which this belief is articulated also requires attention.  Oakeshott draws a set of concentric circles which work like a rhetorical vortex.  First he says that the conservative believes that governing is a “limited” activity.  The careless would be content to accept this as a definition of political conservatism; not Oakeshott.  For him the question is not whether governing is limited, but whether it is limited in the right way – it is a “specific” and limited activity.  Specifically what limited activity is it, then?  According to Oakeshott, it is the “provision and custody of general rules of conduct.”  But this is still too broad; one may surely agree, without being a conservative, that the business of governing is the provision and custody of general rules of conduct.  Oakeshott goes on to say that the conservative understands these rules of conduct in a particular way.  First, Oakeshott says what this understanding is not; the conservative does not understand the general rules which are the substance of governing as “plans for imposing substantive activities.”  But we have still not reached the focal point of his concentricities, for many who are not conservative may agree here too.   The sine qua non of conservatism, on Oakeshott’s account, is evidently none of these things.  It is that the rules in question are “instruments enabling people to pursue activities of their own choosing with the minimum frustration.”

What is special about the criterion of minimum frustration is that it is not supposed to be a moral criterion; in fact, rather than standing alongside moral criteria, it aims to exclude them.  Thus, in Oakeshott’s view, the distinctive belief of the conservative is that the rules of conduct can be, and ought to be, neutral; that they need not, and ought not, discriminate among activities of different kinds excerpt on nonmoral criteria.

I suggested in another post that if you already know how someone thinks of his group interests, then you can make a pretty good guess about what political views he may find tempting -- but it is a lot harder to guess how he is going to think of his group interests.

One of the reasons is that the concept of his group is ambiguous.  Everyone belongs to a variety of different groups at the same time, and these memberships may pull in different directions.  Another is that the concept of group interestsis ambiguous.  Are we thinking of wealth, of security, of prestige, of the advance of the beliefs held by the group, or what?  Yet another is that not every member of a group is equally group conscious -- not every member identifies with the group.  So how a person thinks of his group interests is not foreordained; it belongs to the realm of freedom.

I once had a discussion with a person who said he thought of himself first and foremost as a black man, thought of me first and foremost as a white man, and was sure I that I thought that way too.  When I told him that I rarely think about the color of my skin, he scoffed; he thought I was making it up just to put him in the wrong.

But it’s true.   If I am asked “what is your ethnicity,” my first thought is my Polish and Ukrainian ancestry.  If I am asked “what is your identity,” I think first of redemption.  I think a good deal about being a teacher, a husband, a father, and so on.  But I don’t think about being white unless someone else makes an issue of it.

Here is another example.  Silicon Valley executives have an eye on profit.  You would think this would be all you need to know to predict how they will see their group interests.  But it isn’t.  Some resist government regulation of the internet; others, surprisingly, want more.  Apparently the former view themselves as entrepreneurs whose profits depend mostly on competition, while the latter view themselves as firm managers whose profits depend mostly on state policy.  There is no way to forecast ahead of time with which group a given executive will identify, and which arrangement he will prefer.

This is why even though I sometimes discuss how academics view their class interests, I have never presented a deterministic class analysis a la Marx.  For example, I have not predicted how intellectuals will think of their interests; I have only taken note of how they do tend to view them, and tried to connect this observation with others.

By the way, Marx got a lot of other things wrong too.  Let me mention just one more.  Marx thought the course of events is predictable because it is foreordained.  But even if the course of events really were foreordained – which I don’t believe -- even so it couldn’t be predicted.

Why not?  Any genuinely deterministic social process could be modelled as a kind of machine.  In such a process the social theorist would not be genuinely independent of the machine; he would merely be one of its processes.  A readout.

But guess what?  According to the mathematics of computational processes, no machine – not even the most high-powered computer -- can predict its own future state.

So determinism is one thing.  Predictability is another.  And understanding is different from both.