If you have a chance can you track that down for me,
I’m glad to find some of them when we’re back at the LA house. Of course, then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a bit more provacatively. However, all his writings about moral relativism and proportionate reasons are worth reading anyway. Though he is admittedly not as easy read as JPII.
Sure. I was referring specifically to
**2263 **The legitimate defense…
My point was not rather or not the principle is valid, but that all the cases were it is applied (expressely by the Church, or by theologians in situations that the Church has not commented on) are potentially morally difficult - even the ones that seem simple.
Consider an unjust attacker. Let’s say you are walking down the street and someone grabs you from behind. You struggle to free yourself, the ‘attacker’ falls, strikes the back of the head on a concrete planter, and dies. Simple?
I’d say it all depends on a lot more information than above. What if it was just a friend who happened to see you and decided to startle you, just as you had done to him on many occassions? What if it was was a mute woman who was trying to get your attention because you had dropped your wallet? I’d be racked with guilt, regardless of what the Catechism says.
My conscience wouldn’t be simple even if it wasn’t clearly a mistake. Consider a desperate person trying to rob me. He is committing a sin, but I have so much and he has so little. Think of the wealthy man and the cripple at the door in the Bible. The wealthy man ends in damnation, not because of any direct act or sin, but because of mere oblivion and indifference. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who would feel (or at least claim to feel) no guilt. But I am not one of them. Death, the loss of a most fundemental and precious gift from God, is a dissproportionate result and I would feel bad.
Even if the attacker meant me physical harm through no obvious fault of my own, my conscience might well trouble me. How about a mentally disturbed vet? You know, like the ones we are scrimping on proper treatment for now…
Or a mentally impaired person (alzheimers, developmental disability, etc.) who somehow just became aggitated? For me, it is very hard to make even ‘obvious’ applications simple. When we move beyond instinctive reaction to contemplated action on my part it becomes more difficult still.
Consider the difference. Let’s say I’m a paramedic, and I am called to treat what seems to be a female drug overdose in cardiac arrest. I inject a needle into her heart, and kill the fetus I knew nothing about. I would feel bad, I would pray for forgiveness, and I would probably seek reconcillation, but I would at least mentally realize that my act was wholly unintentional.
Now let’s revisit the same situation, but make the pregancy obvious. Do I maximize the womans chances for survival at the very high risk of death for the fetus? Do I use much lower probability resucitation methods and hope for the best? Remember, they are two distinct and equal patients, who are possibily intertwined, but possible not. If I can see the pregnancy, the fetus may be developed enough to survive the mothers death. Lot’s of people would have not problem identifying the “obvious” application of double effect. Personally, no matter what I decided on the spot, I would have guilt, second thoughts, and doubt, unless I happened to be lucky enough to save both.
I think that the problem I have with PDE, and the ease many others have, are related. Many people would read the situation above and simply decide that our mystery woman is bad person and a slut. That is not so simple for me. The overdose might be accidental and related to a medical condition. Even if it is ‘the obvious’, addiction is not simple, either physically, emotionally, or morally.
IIntentional killing of the guilty (e.g. an aggressor perhaps) seems allowable certain circumstances: 1. individual combatants engaging in a just war (CCC 2309-2313) ; 2) capital punishment by a lawful authority; 3) armed resistance to oppression (CCC 2243)
If we stop to think about it, are any of these cases clear or easy? I spent 23 months in combat as a medic, with a bat. that saw the highest KIA percentage in USMC history. I was a medic precisely because I had serious doubts about the morality of the war. I can attest that, in my experience, the Church is right, war always carries attrocities and affronts to the human person.
What about a war that the Pope has indicated he believes in unjust? Remember, our current Pope, as Cardinal, has noted that it he finds it extremely doubtful that
any war could meet the just war conditions in the modern age.
We know for a fact that the death penalty claims the lives of some people who are innocent of the crime for which the sentence is given. Are they just a ‘few eggs’ we break to make our omlette? Or do we assume that they must have otherwise deserved it because they couldn’t afford OJ’s criminal defense team?
How about Timothy McVeigh, mentioned elsewhere in this thread? He thought he was fighting government oppression…
The problem, again, is that our own motives are seldom perfect and pure and we cannot, with certainty, look into the heart and mind of another.
It seems like you (and others) may be under a (false) impression that double effect has been used to justify the death penalty. It classically has not been so. Aquinas (who is attributed with the first “modern” articulation of the principle of double effect) deliberately segregates capital punishment out of consideration, because he saw (as the Church saw) that captial punishment is licit for other reasons, not dependent on the principle of double effect.
We have to make a distinction between the opinions of an individual, and the Dogma of the Church. It isn’t that Aquinas’ contributions aren’t important, it is just that it isn’t our place to parse and choose what is truth, and what is not. Look, again, at the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Remember, this is a teaching via eccumenical council, the infallibility of the Church at it’s highest, and arguably one of the most important councils in Church history.
The power of life and death is permitted to certain civil magistrates because theirs is the responsibility under law to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. Far from being guilty of breaking this commandment [Thy shall not kill], such an execution of justice is precisely an act of obedience to it. For the purpose of the law is to protect and foster human life. This purpose is fulfilled when the legitimate authority of the State is exercised by taking the guilty lives of those who have taken innocent lives.
It does not say that it is not killing because they are guilty and evil. It says that it is an “act of obedience” to the commandment not to kill! Killing someone is not killing? Yes, if we apply a principle of double effect. We don’t want to execute people just to execute them, it is an undesired side effect of the just pursuit to “protect and foster human life” as a whole.
We have the same basic teaching 500 years later, but the balance has changed:
Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
The purpose of the law is unchanged, but the most moral and just way to meet it has changed with the general human condition (“Today, in fact…”).
[cont.]
, we could go a long way to safely incarcerating some of these worst ones.
