Are there absolute moral axioms?

[Tomdstone]

I like to believe I can choose and pray at the same time.

In the case of Sophie’s choice, I believe that would be the only thing to do: choose and pray that the butcher will change his mind and kill neither child.

No there are other things to do. For example, Sophie could alert her husband of the threat so that he would come and disarm the butcher before he was able to do any harm.
In any case, although you can choose and pray, you can also refuse to cooperate with evil and pray and place your fate in the loving Hands of God.

 

[Tomdstone]

You have to shovel manure to keep a stable clean so the horses won’t die. The shoveling is the lesser evil.

Shoveling manure is not in any way evil, but part of the honest work of the farm. The last time I checked accepting and doing honorable work is a virtue, which will be rewarded. The bad person is the one who refuses to do the honorable work appropriate to his station in life. Anyone who says that doing the honest work required on a farm is evil is completely and totally wrong. Where would the world be without the hardworking farmers who labor long hours so that those of us who live in the city can have what to eat and drink.

 

[inocente]

By the way, is it your view that waterboarding should be considered immoral, or that it is the view of the Catholic Church that waterboarding is forbidden?

Is there a specific reference to waterboarding by the Catholic bishops as torture and therefore forbidden?

You didn’t comment on my post #223 and the Catholic Answers article and Gaudium et Spes.

Torture objectifies and dehumanizes both the victim and the torturer by treating them as means to an end. Imho it is alien to Christian ethics. To see why, simply replace the tortured victim with Christ.

You appear to be claiming that the Church has no absolutes, no line in the sand, that it would be capable of anything if circumstances demand. But that’s also kind of the definition of pure evil. Abort a healthy eight month fetus if it saves 1000 lives. It’s the lesser of two evils after all.

But wouldn’t that mean the Church has no moral authority, it’s just another bunch of well-meaning people who would do anything and everything if circumstances demand in a world where morality is just opinions about the best way to shovel manure?

I don’t think you really believe that. So, where is your line in the sand?

 

[Tomdstone]

Torture objectifies and dehumanizes both the victim and the torturer by treating them as means to an end. Imho it is alien to Christian ethics.

Did Pope Innocent IV approve of torture to extract confessions and didn’t the Inquisition use the rack?

 

[Nihilist]

Being executed is better than being water-boarded? :bigyikes: Whew! I’ve never heard that one. How would you extract the information from a terrorist (to prevent a calamity) by killing him?

Why is capital punishment not torture when the prisoner is psychologically tortured by his increasing fear of the execution?

You have a lot of 'splainin to do!

By the way, did you know that killing in a just war is approved by the Church?

So by your logic, instead of wounding our enemies and causing them (and their surviving families) to be tortured by their pain, we should just kill them all because that’s better than to inflict pain?

Yes, killing someone (in war, for justified capital punishment) is typically down as quickly and painlessly as possible. At least there is no intention to cause pain (although it sometimes happens accidentally).

Torture is degrading. By definition, it sets out to cause pain.

Pain, by definition, is an evil. But simple death (as something inevitable), is not in itself an evil.

I am would have no major moral objection to executing a terrorist in non-painful way (or other criminal)- but torture, that’s just wrong.

 

[inocente]

Did Pope Innocent IV approve of torture to extract confessions and didn’t the Inquisition use the rack?

I think JPII apologized. The policy changed. But it’s a bit weird that I, as a non-Catholic, am having to defend the Church here! On a Catholic forum too!!!

CCC 2298 In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for their abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormentors. - vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm

 

[Charlemagne_III]

No there are other things to do. For example, Sophie could alert her husband of the threat so that he would come and disarm the butcher before he was able to do any harm.
In any case, although you can choose and pray, you can also refuse to cooperate with evil and pray and place your fate in the loving Hands of God.

If Sophie is separated from her husband, or her husband is dead, she has to fall back on God’s mercy and her own judgment as to which child shall live.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I think there’s a misunderstanding here. I’m not saying the morals would cancel out. Let’s use the example of lying to a murderer about the location of your friend. Kant argued convincingly that lying and killing are wrong in most cases, as I’m sure most deontologists are capable of doing. For most people’s sensibilities, these imperatives are what he called “hypothetical”; they apply only in certain situations. So how do we decide when certain rules should be applied?

This wouldn’t be an issue if we had a way of deciding which moral takes precedence over another. As you say, we don’t need morals to cancel out, we just need a way of arranging them in a hierarchy. For example, our hierarchy could give the moral against killing priority over the moral against lying. The problem is that, while deontologists do argue for their rules effectively, they don’t do it in such a way that the importance of the rules relative to each other is obvious. For example, both lying and killing are wrong by the Categorical Imperative. The Imperative doesn’t say “Lying is wrong unless it’s done to prevent murder.” That would be a consequentialist ethic, not a deontological one. Likewise, deontology gives us no way to gauge how bad lying is compared to how bad killing is.

In order to decide which is worse, killing or lying, you would have to refer to the consequences. Thus consequentialism is inescapable. If you agree with this, then we can move on.

The deontologist and consequentialist approaches to morality need not exclude each other, and I don’t think they do. The only consequentialist position that is too extreme is the notion that “the end justifies the means.” For example, Hitler believed that his empire needed more breathing room, and so he used his military to conquer Europe. He wrongly proposed that the end justified the means. That is not the same as being obliged to choose between a greater and a lesser evil. He did not have to use militarism to give Germany more breathing room. Rather, he was using militarism to fulfill his own greedy and insane lust for power over all of Europe. It was not necessary that he choose that evil over the evil of Germany’s “suffocation” and need to purge Europe of the Jewish menace as he perceived it. So there are consequential moral acts that are not justified, and that happens mainly when “the end justifies the means” comes perilously close to the utilitarian argument of the greater good of the greater number of Germans over the lesser good of the lesser number of Jews.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

All people consult themselves for moral guidance. It is like you said: You cannot avoid making a choice. If you choose the Church as your moral guide, that is a moral decision made by you. You are making a judgment call, just like someone trusting themselves is making a judgment call.

Indeed, trusting yourself is a prerequisite for trusting your decision to trust someone else’s decisions.

As a matter of fact, “no man is an island entire unto itself.” We have to trust the judgment of others because we cannot each of us re-invent the moral wheel. The question is whom we are to trust. I’ll go with the Catholic Church over the Society of Moral Relativism.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

You appear to be claiming that the Church has no absolutes, no line in the sand, that it would be capable of anything if circumstances demand. But that’s also kind of the definition of pure evil. Abort a healthy eight month fetus if it saves 1000 lives. It’s the lesser of two evils after all.

You’ve done this before, posed a hypothetical that makes no sense. How would aborting a healthy 8 month old fetus save 1,000 lives.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Yes, killing someone (in war, for justified capital punishment) is typically down as quickly and painlessly as possible. At least there is no intention to cause pain (although it sometimes happens accidentally).

Torture is degrading. By definition, it sets out to cause pain.

It’s quite true that if the torture is to cause pain, it is senseless and degrading.

During the Civil War, many soldiers on the battle field were brought to tent hospitals (this was before anesthesia) and doctors sawed their limbs off to save their lives. I believe these men thought they were being tortured, and doubtless they swore angrily at their sawbones. But the aim of the physicians was to save lives, not to needlessly torture men. Many lives were saved because the doctors chose the lesser evil of amputation over the greater evil of letting the soldiers die of their wounds. These doctors were acting morally both by deontological and consequentialist motives.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I think JPII apologized. The policy changed. But it’s a bit weird that I, as a non-Catholic, am having to defend the Church here! On a Catholic forum too!!!

Not weird to me.

 

[Oreoracle]

The deontologist and consequentialist approaches to morality need not exclude each other, and I don’t think they do.

They do exclude each other. The deontologist says that morals cannot be justified by consequences. The consequentialist disagrees.

Wikipedia offers the following description of deontological ethics:

Deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on the action’s adherence to a rule or rules. It is sometimes described as “duty” or “obligation” or “rule”-based ethics, because rules “bind you to your duty.” **Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to consequentialism **and virtue ethics. Deontological ethics is also contrasted to pragmatic ethics. In this terminology action is more important than the consequences.

"Charlemagne III:

The only consequentialist position that is too extreme is the notion that “the end justifies the means.”

A simple counterexample is spanking one’s child. The end, having a disciplined child, presumably justifies the means, inflicting pain. The discipline of a child is particularly special in that you can’t argue that you’re “doing justice” to the child. Children don’t know any better, so you can’t even argue that they deserve the spanking. Rather, they are spanked so that they will know better in the future.

As for your example of Hitler trying to justify his means, that is a case of the means outweighing the end. There is no morality that says you can ignore the means altogether, at least none that I know of. You have to compare the evil of the means with the good of the end.

So there are consequential moral acts that are not justified, and that happens mainly when “the end justifies the means” comes perilously close to the utilitarian argument of the greater good of the greater number of Germans over the lesser good of the lesser number of Jews.

This is a flagrant strawman of utilitarianism. As I’ve said numerous times, utilitarianism doesn’t care about one’s nationality, race, etc. It attempts to maximize the happiness of all sentient beings, not just Germans, or Americans, or Jews, or Caucasians, or even humans.

As a matter of fact, “no man is an island entire unto itself.” We have to trust the judgment of others because we cannot each of us re-invent the moral wheel. The question is whom we are to trust. I’ll go with the Catholic Church over the Society of Moral Relativism.

My point is that you cannot deflect your own responsibility to choose a moral code onto another entity. You can follow the Church’s teachings. When a bishop speaks, you can agree with what they say. But following and agreeing are your choices. You are still ultimately using your own judgment, so you are still the arbiter of your own morality. You are no better off than the atheist who chooses his own morality.

Using myself as an example, I’m puzzled that you think we atheists isolate ourselves. What do you think I’m doing right now? I’m debating morality with someone whose opinions are vastly different than mine. I’m exposing myself to different perspectives, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. How is that isolation?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

They do exclude each other. The deontologist says that morals cannot be justified by consequences. The consequentialist disagrees.

Wikipedia offers the following description of deontological ethics:

Wikipedia also says this, if that is your best source:

“Some argue that consequentialist and deontological theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, T.M. Scanlon advances the idea that human rights, which are commonly considered a “deontological” concept, can only be justified with reference to the consequences of having those rights.[3] Similarly, Robert Nozick argues for a theory that is mostly consequentialist, but incorporates inviolable “side-constraints” which restrict the sort of actions agents are permitted to do.”

I don’t accept the view that deontological and consequentialist ethics are mutually exclusive. Deontological ethics derives integrity from both the law of God. Consequential ethics derives its integrity from the laws of men which right distinguish good and evil consequences of our actions. In the case of sodomy, for example: it is condemned by divine law (deontological) and human law (consequential) as unnatural. Attempts have been made to justify sodomy, but the arguments are really very poor ones.

Am called to lunch now. Will try to answer the rest of your post later.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

My point is that you cannot deflect your own responsibility to choose a moral code onto another entity. You can follow the Church’s teachings. When a bishop speaks, you can agree with what they say. But following and agreeing are your choices. You are still ultimately using your own judgment, so you are still the arbiter of your own morality. You are no better off than the atheist who chooses his own morality.

Using myself as an example, I’m puzzled that you think we atheists isolate ourselves. What do you think I’m doing right now? I’m debating morality with someone whose opinions are vastly different than mine. I’m exposing myself to different perspectives, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. How is that isolation?

I certainly didn’t mean to imply that re-inventing a moral code means choosing from those that already exist. I choose the one that already exists: the Catholic moral code. I choose to obey it as superior to anything I could come up with on my own. I’m not shopping around for other moral codes.

What are you doing here at Catholic Answers? Are you looking for ways to figure out “what works and what doesn’t”? That’s good. But as an atheist you are not then an island unto yourself, as so many are who boldly say, “Nobody can tell me how to behave. I can figure it out on my own.” At least when I was an atheist, I heard that claim made by many a fellow atheist. So I’m glad you are not in that category.

By the way, I did not say that Utilitarianism is inherently racist. All I said was that it could be adopted by a racist to justify the persecution of a racial minority by a racial majority.

There is the same tendency toward the misapplication of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Superman. Hitler applied it to the Aryan race and the need for the Superman to exterminate a race of sub-humans and “vermin.” … the Jews. But Nietzsche was no racist with respect to the Jews. In fact, some of his best friends were Jews. If there was any super race of humans, Nietzsche would have put the Jews in contention for that honor.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

My point is that you cannot deflect your own responsibility to choose a moral code onto another entity. You can follow the Church’s teachings. When a bishop speaks, you can agree with what they say. But following and agreeing are your choices. You are still ultimately using your own judgment, so you are still the arbiter of your own morality. You are no better off than the atheist who chooses his own morality.

Actually, I am better off. I have the assurance of the infallible teachings of the Church. As an atheist, do you have an infallible assurance of your morals? I don’t think you would claim that. So are you a moral relativist or a moral objectivist?

 

[Tomdstone]

I have the assurance of the infallible teachings of the Church.

The problem is that not that many things have been declared infallibly. Take for example, the morality of torture. Is there an infallible moral prohibition against torture by the rack? Is there an infallible moral prohibition against slavery? I understand that even infallible Popes held slaves.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Again, here’s a dilemma for choosing the lesser evil.

Imagine a rapist kidnapping a mother and her teenage daughter. The rapist takes them to a house and locks them in separate rooms. He goes into the mother’s room and makes her an offer. Either she can let him rape her, or if not, he will go to the other room and rape her daughter. If the mother lets him rape her, he promises not to rape her daughter. This is an either/or situation. What’s a mother to do? And by what critera of morality should she choose? Would she not be obliged to choose the lesser of two evils? Which is the lesser of two evils? Could she say no to the rapist’s offer? But that is a choice for her daughter to be raped. Could she say yes to the offer, but that is a choice for herself to be raped. Could she say nothing? Then the choice is left to the rapist, and he may choose to rape either or both of them.

What’s the mother to do?

Anybody?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The problem is that not that many things have been declared infallibly. Take for example, the morality of torture. Is there an infallible moral prohibition against torture by the rack? Is there an infallible moral prohibition against slavery? I understand that even infallible Popes held slaves.

I’ll ask you not to turn this thread into a discussion of papal infallibility, though that would be a good topic for another thread if you are so inclined.

 

[Tomdstone]

I’ll ask you not to turn this thread into a discussion of papal infallibility, though that would be a good topic for another thread if you are so inclined.

???
Take a look at post #255. In particular, the second and third sentences.