Catholics Grappling with Consequentialism

A reader writes:

I am a regular reader of your blog and I enjoyed the first of your Mary series. I also have the somewhat dubious privilege of having a blog on the Archdiocese of New York website — dubious because I have two actual jobs at the ArchNY, and this blogging thing takes a lot of time and energy, even though I do post far, far less often than you do.

I recently posted two items about torture that you might be interested in here and here.

Earlier this year I also wrote this one, based on my own experience of interrogations as a state and federal prosecutor.

I’ve mostly gotten good feedback from Catholics about these articles. But I’m very disappointed that so few in the Catholic blogosphere are writing about torture. I just wanted to know that you’re not alone.

Best wishes and God bless you!!

Well done, sir!

In addition, Patrick Madrid does a nice job of disappointing a listener who is laboring to make the case for foggy consequentialism. So refreshing to hear this! Thanks, Pat and God bless you! It’s hard to think on your feet on a radio show but you did an outstanding job!

FWIW Pat, long experience in arguing about torture and consequentialism has taught me that all attempts to define torture in the face of the determined torture apologist will tend to be met with either resistance or (as you discovered from your listener) sarcasm (“So you’re saying we should give the terrorists lounge chairs”). The funniest part is that, after you give him definition after definition, the determined torture apologist will often then claim that you “refuse to define torture”.

There are real definitions of torture. However, the torture advocate doesn’t want a definition. He wants fog. He wants to say, “I oppose torture, but can we ever really know what it is? Who is really sure whether simulated drowning, pulling people’s arms out of their sockets, making them vomit, parading them naked on leashes, threatening to murder their kids and rape their mothers, or inducing hypothermia is *really* torture? I mean, gosh!, the Vice President calls it “dunking”! And Jim Caviezel’s arm was dislocated during the filming of The Passion of the Christ! Was that ‘torture’? And I used to puke at frat parties! And we didn’t *really* kill kids or rape anybody! And don’t get me started on naked frat parties! And hypothermia? So we got them a bit chilly! So what? We’re talking about mushroom clouds over New York!!!!!”

So his strategy will tend to be “Unless you can provide a definition of torture that covers every individual and specific act the human mind can conceive of in a way that will meet unanimous agreement among all the residents of Planet Earth, then it’s not torture.” This is how the pretense is maintained that simulated drowning is not torture, while advocates of it simultaneously boast that it is so efficient at terrifying prisoners into talking that (you guessed it) it’s not torture because it works so fast. And if we subject prisoners to it 183 times? That proves it’s not torture either (because who would endure it 183 times if it were torture)? Of course, these people don’t ask why a woman who is repeatedly gang raped lets it happen more than once, because they aren’t making themselves stupid in the service of evil. Turning their brains back on, they figure out that the number of times you are raped, like the number of times you are tortured, is up to the victimizer, not the victim.

I got tired of wading through such cesspools of filth trying to palm itself off as “Catholic moral reasoning” and decided to be pro-active. Here’s what I did. Instead of falling prey to the dictionary game, where you offer definition after definition and the interlocutor dismisses definition after definition while never offering a definition of his own, the trick is to assert the Church’s positive teaching. That is, instead of letting the moral equivalent of the adulterer wannabe force me on the debating ground of his faux confusion over how close you can get to the hot secretary without it technically precisely being, you know, adultery, I realized that what the defender of Catholic teaching needs to do is emphasize “avoidance of the near occasion of sin”.

So, for instance, when you live in a country (as we do) with regime of legalized torture in which over a hundred detainees have been murdered in cold blood, the question is not “How close can you get to torturing somebody in a ticking time bomb scenario?”

Rather, the question is, “Is it a grave sin for Catholics to make excuses for torture via non-existent ticking time bomb scenarios when the State is currently enacting a consequential program of torture and murder, including threats to murder children and rape innocent women?” I think the case can be made that it is, just as the case can be made that if a famous Catholic goes on TV to speculate repeatedly and publicly about how often an act of killing a fetus might not technically be abortion, he is guilty of giving grave scandal and of leading people into grave sin.

A follow up question is this: “What part of “humanely” is not clear in the Church’s teaching that “Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely” (CCC 2313). If the reply comes “But this is an enemy like no other!” ask the interlocutor, “So our fathers who fought Nazis and Communists were up against cupcakes and only we Baby Boomers know what it is to fight real evil?”

The fact is, we’ve gotten lots of good intelligence over the decades while observing the Geneva Conventions. What we’ve gotten over the past decade since the US gov’t started torturing under Bush (and is now continuing the policies under Obama) is international disgrace *and* lousy intel, plus the side benefit of junk “evidence” that is not admissible in court because it was obtained by torture. Talk about sin making us stupid!

And finally, what the “prolife” Right has gotten by its cowardly embrace of torture is this: the loss of the only thing it had to stand on in it’s fight against abortion. Because once we embrace consequentialism and the notion that good ends justify evil means, what do we have left to say to the abortionist, who holds exactly the same philosophy? Catholics must repent of this monstrous moral theory or they can have nothing whatever to say to the abortionist who replies, “You want to live a long, happy and fruitful life and don’t much care if you commit what some abstract theologian calls “grave sin”in order to get it? So does my client and so do I. So leave us alone.”

Well done, Pat. Thanks for having the guts to speak out on this issue!