Bishop: I beg Mr Biden to repent of his dissent from Catholic teaching on abortion & marriage for his own salvation & for the good of our nation

[HomeschoolDad]

HomeschoolDad:

Coincidentally, my mother turns 90 tomorrow.

But if you were 20, had several younger brothers and sisters, and your mother was 42 and there were 5 other prisoners on the other track? I would not recommend that you pull the lever in such a case. I think it is better to do nothing and let your mother live. There is a commandment: Honor thy Father and thy Mother. Also it would not be fair to your brothers and sisters and to your father.
There are other objections to pulling the lever, (suppose for example it was your young daughter), but a blogger wants this off the thread.

This will be my last comment on the “trolley problem” scenario, not because it’s not a worthy topic that deserves discussion, but as you suggest, it is seen by some to be “off-topic”.

As you describe it, then, the acid test is how closely the people in question are related to you, and how worthy of having their lives preserved the people on the other track are. What if you have to choose between one of your grandchildren, and five people who are not prisoners, but rather members of an elite medical team who are just about to find a cure for cancer, but whose collective knowledge is necessary for the research to continue (i.e., it can’t be replaced by anybody else)? What if it’s your niece or nephew instead of a grandchild?

But you are right in your observation that

HomeschoolDad:

This may sound heartless,

Yes it does sound heartless to kill your mother and to leave your brothers and sisters without a mother and to kill the wife of your father who desperately loves her.

That is indeed a lurid and pathos-evoking characterization, but see my comments above.

I have never been one to “cut and run” from a good discussion that has much merit, nor do I “mute” threads, but all good things must come to an end, so I am not entertaining this topic further within this thread.

Yet one parting thought — what if Mother is a horrid wretch of a person who causes grave problems for other people on a serial basis? What if she has a side hustle of dealing drugs to teenagers in the city park while the police aren’t watching? And so on.

And as John McLaughlin always ended his show, “bye-BYE!”.

 

[AlNg]

I have never been one to “cut and run” from a good discussion

Hmm…

 

[HomeschoolDad]

HomeschoolDad:

I have never been one to “cut and run” from a good discussion

Hmm…

I just don’t have anything I can add to this — or rather, I have both nothing and everything, but the latter would derail the thread beyond any moderator’s willingness to tolerate it.

“Trolley problem” and “lifeboat ethics” dilemmas are very useful in clarifying many moral issues, but this isn’t the thread.

 

[Kei]

Very controversial, indeed.
But it’s a whole outlook change that we’d obviously want the most, away from the contraceptive and abortive mentality.
Anyway here’s an article arguing the opposite.

‘Abortion Restrictions Don’t Work’: A Dubious Claim | National Review

A comforting thought for moderate pro-choicers is not supported by the available data.

www.nationalreview.com

This is outside the scope of the topic so maybe we can stop with one link each giving different perspective.

 

[Lifeisbeautiful3]

So does that mean it is not murder if the abortion takes place prior to ensoulment? I don’t know. It depends on how you define “murder”. But define it as you will, below a certain point, it just doesn’t naturally occur to the average person, uninformed by Christian teaching (or wishing just not to think about it), that “something so small”, so undeveloped, looking nothing whatsoever like a human being, could in fact be one.

Recognizing, of course, that the technology does not yet exist today - How would you feel if someone cloned you (even against your will). Would it be OK to kill your “clone“?

 

[HomeschoolDad]

I would not willingly allow myself to be cloned. As far as how I would “feel” if somebody cloned me against my will, I wouldn’t like it. But no, it would not be OK to kill that clone. I would certainly look to whomever did such a thing, to take full responsibility for that child, financial and otherwise. Or I might go ahead and take the boy to raise, and get a judgment in a court of law forcing that person to reimburse me in full for any expenses I might incur. One thing nobody could reimburse me for, though, is that I am 60 years old and I would never live to see that boy get beyond his 20s. Having had my first child when I was 46 is bad enough.

Rather strange question, I must say, but I have tried to answer it as straight as I can.

 

[Rau]

Yet one parting thought — what if Mother is a horrid wretch of a person who causes grave problems for other people on a serial basis? What if she has a side hustle of dealing drugs to teenagers in the city park while the police aren’t watching? And so on.

All the discussion about who the potential victims are, their relative merits, their number, etc utterly misses the point.

 

[fredystairs]

Recognizing, of course, that the technology does not yet exist today - How would you feel if someone cloned you (even against your will). Would it be OK to kill your “clone“?

I guess it would depend — does the clone have an immortal soul? This is something I’ve contemplated but it’s way above my pay grade.

Pax

 

[Lifeisbeautiful3]

guess it would depend — does the clone have an immortal soul? This is something I’ve contemplated but it’s way above my pay grade.

Who gets to decide that? Is there any human that doesn’t have an immortal soul?

 

[fredystairs]

I don’t know who decides. As far as whether a clone has an immortal soul don’t know — people created in the usual way , ie joining of sperm and egg, yes they do . But clones aren’t made that way (that I know of).

Pax

 

[HomeschoolDad]

HomeschoolDad:

Yet one parting thought — what if Mother is a horrid wretch of a person who causes grave problems for other people on a serial basis? What if she has a side hustle of dealing drugs to teenagers in the city park while the police aren’t watching? And so on.

All the discussion about who the potential victims are, their relative merits, their number, etc utterly misses the point.

And what point would that be?

 

[Rau]

And what point would that be?

The point (which we’re not discussing) on which proper analysis of the trolley scenario hangs.

 

[jeannetherese]

How abortion is labelled is an important and, at times, overlooked aspect in these arguments.
The abortion pill (morning after) is an abortaficient and is not always factored into the equation.
Such date would need to be included in order to succesfully prosecute the claim that liberal abortion law leads to less abortion.

 

[Freddy]

HomeschoolDad:

So does that mean it is not murder if the abortion takes place prior to ensoulment? I don’t know. It depends on how you define “murder”. But define it as you will, below a certain point, it just doesn’t naturally occur to the average person, uninformed by Christian teaching (or wishing just not to think about it), that “something so small”, so undeveloped, looking nothing whatsoever like a human being, could in fact be one.

Recognizing, of course, that the technology does not yet exist today - How would you feel if someone cloned you (even against your will). Would it be OK to kill your “clone“?

Kill him? Good grief no. Apart from the fact that it would be beyond fascinating to watch myself grow up again, it would give me the opportunity to fullfill that old saw ‘What advice would you give your younger self’.

If you just kept repeating the experiment by ‘cloning the clone’ at age sixty say, then think of all the accumulated knowledge you’d impart over the generations**. It would be like a sixty year version of Groundhog Day.

**For some reason it seems not to have worked with my kids.

 

[HomeschoolDad]

And what point would that be?

The point (which we’re not discussing) on which proper analysis of the trolley scenario hangs.

Are you referring to the principle of “the end justifies the means”? If not, then what is the “point which we’re not discussing”?

I am disinclined to open another “trolley problem” thread, and I am not sure I am going to go down the rabbit hole of “the end does indeed justify the means, at least in extreme, impossible circumstances” — not to say that you are suggesting this — but I am not going to continue further sidetracking of this particular thread.

I will just say that I do not believe Almighty God ever puts us in situations where we must sin, or that sin is “the only way out”. Omission of doing what we should do is also a sin, and I would add as well, taking the life of a human being, or allowing the taking of a human life, is not intrinsically evil. One of the best examples is when a person chooses an action that will inevitably take their own life to save others. He has, arguably, “taken his own life”. But is it a sin? If I swerve into an abutment to avoid hitting a crowd of people, even if I make the split-second judgment that “I can sacrifice my life" or kill all those people in the crowd”, have I sinned? Again, I do not believe that God ever puts us in the situation of “any course of action you take will be a sin”, and at bottom, that seems to be the issue here.

 

[Rau]

I am disinclined to open another “trolley problem” thread, and I am not sure I am going to go down the rabbit hole…

Best you stop right there then.

 

[HomeschoolDad]

HomeschoolDad:

I am disinclined to open another “trolley problem” thread, and I am not sure I am going to go down the rabbit hole…

Best you stop right there then.

Again, the “rabbit hole” seems to be as I have described immediately above — “no matter what you do, anything you do is going to be a sin, unless you are willing to admit that the end justifies the means in impossible circumstances”. Even if you, yourself, are not making this point, that is where I see all of this going.

Unless I’ve missed this point in 45 years of studying Catholicism, we never have to commit a sin. (That proposition, by itself, would be a very good subject for another thread, but not this one.)