Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category

Is There a Christian Response to the Organ Shortage?



















The Justice of Restricting Welfare Spending














Cyberbullying and the Limits of Law

A few days ago, Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate posted a video of him making out with another male student. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, and another classmate have been charged with two accounts of invasion of privacy for using a secretly-placed webcam to view and transmit a live image, without Clementi’s consent. The maximum charge is five years.

The Clementi case follows close on the heels of a related case involving several Massachusetts high school students who bullied 15-year old Phoebe Prince both physically and over Facebook and other social networking sites, allegedly pushing Prince to hang herself. For many young students who die, their Facebook page becomes a memorial for friends and family to post messages and keep the memory of the deceased alive, but with Prince, bullies continued to post disparaging messages on her wall even after she died. Eventually, her Facebook wall had to be disabled.

Massachusetts lawmakers hurried to draft anti-bullying legislation as a result of this incident, and the NYTimes asks in this week’s “Room for Debate” whether the Clementi case too demands tougher laws for those who commit online acts of bullying. Laurie Levenson, the first contributor, raises an important point in answering the question of anti-bullying legislation:

Cyberbullying is growing and our legal system does not seem ready for it. With legitimate concerns about the First Amendment on one side, and equally legitimate concerns about the dangers of such conduct on the other, prosecutors are often left to shoehorn this new wave of behavior into laws created long before there was an Internet.

Because it is difficult to draft a law that allows the full range of free speech, but also serves to deter the type of behavior recently in the news, the government is left to use statutes that don’t quite fit, like false statements to Internet service providers or invasion of privacy or civil rights violations. All of these are weak substitutes for crimes that really involve psychological warfare.

Bullying in general, and cyberbullying in particular, are clearly heinous acts with potentially devastating consequences. But is the criminal justice solution the right place to turn? Levenson goes on to note that bullying is an antisocial behavior that is learned and practiced. Better laws are not necessarily the solution to antisocial behavior.

Another contributor, John Palfrey, also questions whether the criminal justice system provides an adequate solution to the problem of bullying. Turning to the social sciences, Palfrey writes,

Cyberbullying is just bullying that happens to be mediated through digital technologies. There’s nothing fundamentally different about it.

What we know from research is that the incidence of kids harming one another psychologically in ways that are mediated by new technologies is going up over time. But those same data do not tell us that the overall incidence of bullying is going up, nor that it is getting worse. We also can’t say that kids are meaner today than they were in the past.

I want to suggest that the problem of cyberbullying points to the limit of law-based approach to solving some of our moral problems. There are a number of reasons that laws are insufficient to address issues like cyberbullying. First of all, laws must be crafted incredibly specifically to ensure that they actually achieve justice. For Aquinas, laws were mutable rules which were highly dependent on particular circumstances. Second, Aquinas recognizes the limit of law in getting rid of every evil. By getting rid of certain evils, we also get rid of certain sometimes greater goods. For example, stricter laws on cyberbullying may get rid of some cases of evil, but they may also limit free speech, which in a liberal society is considered a great good. In light of these two points is a third point: the best laws are those which are absolutely necessary for the state to achieve its ends. Other issues of interpersonal regulation not necessary for the state to achieve its ends better addressed through custom and the development of moral character.

Law and virtue work together to create good citizens. Whereas law is an external restraint on a person’s actions, virtue is an internal disposition of the person to act in ways conducive to their overall flourishing and the common good. Virtue is developed through practice. That is, by acting in certain just ways, one learns justice. Law and virtue are mutually compatible and mutually necessary because good laws require virtuous lawmakers, but also, good citizens cannot be made simply through good laws. People must be trained through action and custom (consuetudo) to be good.

The case of cyberbullying strikes me as an opportunity to reflect on the necessity of virtue in our society to solve this problem, rather than simply the creation of new laws. After Phoebe Prince took her life, her high school and others created programs to teach people the danger of online bullying. Schools must continue to develop strategies to teach young people about the nature and dangers of online bullying. They must learn courtesy and respect in their homes and classrooms, and courage to stand up when a classmate is being abused.

It is also an opportunity to look at the moral exemplars offered to young people in our society. The popular television show GLEE, for example, frequently makes light of bullying if not subliminally glorifying it. When young people watch a show like GLEE, they are learning not only how to bully, but also that bullying in general does not have any negative consequences. They are learning that bullying, at least in some sense, is cool.

No amount of lawmaking can reverse the effect of custom on behavior. Some legislative action may be necessary for extreme cases like this, but the general problem will remain unless there is a similar effort to change the character of those young people who become the bullies.

The Place of the Heart in Lonergan’s Ethics

Despite the fact I hail from Boston College, I have not yet had the opportunity to immerse myself in the study of Lonergan. Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) was a Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian famous for addressing methodological foundations in philosophy, theology, and other disciplines, and in particular for developing an ethical method of the mind. Lonergan wanted to know what the mind was doing when it made a moral judgment. Because of my interest in connatural knowledge and practical reasoning, I am beginning to turn to Lonergan for insights (no pun intended).

I just finished an excellent book by Mark J. Doorley called The Place of the Heart in Lonergan’s Ethics: The Role of Feelings in the Ethical Intentionality Analysis of Bernard Lonergan. Doorley begins by reflecting on how “uneducated” people often were able to teach him more about an existential and moral commitment to God than any of his intense philosophical and theological studies had done. “How did they arrive at such a profound knowledge of God?” he writes in the Introduction. “Each spoke from the ‘heart,’ as they said. It was in their ‘guts'” (xiii). The question of how one could know “in the heart” or “in the gut” is the driving question of this book, to which Doorley turns to Lonergan for answers. He writes,

“Lonergan was interested in the human good and the way in which that good is to be realized through the cooperative efforts of human beings under the sway of the grace of God. His reflections on such a cooperative effort led him to wonder about human feelings. Moral effort is not merely a rational exercise. Feelings are involved as well” (xv).

Lonergan, in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, adopts a middle ground between emotivism and rationalism, rejecting that the emotions are either separate from or superior to reason, while also acknowledging that the emotions play a massive role in practical reasoning. However, this balance is a difficult one to strike (Thomas himself often does not achieve it, leaning more toward rationalism), and Doorley notes how Lonergan’s earlier work also reflects a tendency toward rationalism. In Insight (1957), Lonergan’s study of the conscious operations that function in human knowing, Doorley argues that Lonergan more often than not identifies the feelings “as obstacles to the operation of the unrestricted desire to know.” However, he holds this position with a certain level of ambivalence, recognizing the importance of feelings in decision-making. This ambivalence, as well as the influence of Max Scheler and Dietrich Von Hildebrand, allows him to develop a typology of feelings and an examination of their role in intentional decisions in Method in Theology (1972).

Borrowing directly from the work of von Hildebrand, Lonergan distinguishes between feelings as non-intentional states or trends like fatigue, hunger and anxiety, all of which occur independently of perception and/or apprehension, and intentional states or trends which occur in “answer to what is intended, apprehended, represented” (52, MT 30). Intentional feelings are ones which relate the human subject to an object like an apple, rather than a goal like relieving hunger (as with non-intentional feelings). His list, by no means inclusive, of intentional feelings include

our desires and our fears, our hope or despair, our joys and sorrows, our enthusiasm and indignation, our esteem and contempt, our trust and distrust, our love and hatred, our tenderness and wrath, our admiration, veneration, reverence, our dread, horror, terror . . .(52, MT 31)

The important thing to note about these feelings is that they arise in the subject following the apprehension of some object, either real or imagined. I may wake up experiencing a non-intentional dread which becomes real intentional fear when I open my computer and apprehend my dissertation I am preparing to defend. I may experience non-intentional hunger, but I may also experience intentional desire for piece or rare seared tuna. Intentional responses respond to the specific content of the apprehension. This means that these responses follow knowledge. Citing von Hildebrand, Doorley writes that “one cannot respond with joy at the arrival of a friend unless one first has knowledge of the friend’s arrival” (53).

In order to better understand intentional responses, Doorley compares them to insights.

An insight is a supervening act. It adds to the data what is not intrinsic to the data as data, namely intelligibility. . . As with insights, intentional responses operate in relation to a presentation or an image. They operate, as well, in relation to an apprehended object or a possible course of action. Once these feelings occur, they are capable of directing the flow of consciousness. such direction influences the further images, further questions and further insights that might occur. Rather than becoming moments in the formation of a viewpoint, as insights do, intentional responses have the capacity to become vectors in the flow of consciousness (54).

Intentional responses, like insights, go beyond the empirically apprehended data (the empirical residue) and add something to the object, something that goes beyond a merely biological response. Such intentional responses move the subject from mere experience and response to a state of self-transcendence. A dog may desire a steak, and this is a kind of intentional response. But a human may desire a steak, and have that desire “sublated” to a higher level of consciousness which allows her to decide about the goodness of the steak, to transcend the mere empirical data to the immaterial round of goodness.

This brings us to Doorley’s argument that in Lonergan, there are two types of intentional responses, one to pleasure and one to value. The latter orient the subject to that which is valuable independent of the subject. According to the former, the farthest I get in emotionally responding to the steak is whether it is good for me. This is self-oriented response. An intentional response to value allows me to transcend myself and respond to the steak apart from my own subjective pleasure. This self-transcendence is made possible by my unrestricted desire to choose the good. Doorley writes,

The subject who allows this unrestricted desire, in both its cognitional and moral manifestations, to be the primary force in consciousness is one who is able to achieve cognitional and moral self-transcendence with some degree of regularity. Authenticity, then, is achieved when, and insofar as, the unrestricted desire to know and choose the good is the central dynamism of one’s existence. (75)

How does one allow the unrestricted desire to choose the good become part of one’s existence? By practice, by “painful yet persistent, practice” (77). This is the important part. If one does something, say, eats a steak, that action is grounded in a judgment that this action is good. Now, eating a steak could be good for myself in that it is tasty and juicy. But if I just restrict my judgment of value to what is good for me, I never really achieve that truly self-transcendent state where the unrestricted desire to choose the good is completely operative in my existence. To get there, I have to go beyond myself, to ask whether or not eating the steak is good for the cow, good for the environment, good for the economy. And if I decide that it is not, and I choose not to eat the steak out of concerns that go beyond my own pleasure, I am forming the habits necessary for moral self-transcendence:

The judgment of value, then, on the fourth level of consciousness plays a pivotal role between the intentional activity of the subject and his moral activity. A judgment of value presupposes the activities of experiencing, understanding and judging. It presupposes the process of deliberation which allows further questions to arise, discerns the movement of one’s feelings, and grasps the sufficiency of evidence for a judgment of value. The judgment of value is presupposed by a further process of practical reflection which issues a number of alternatives for action. These alternatives are then met by the deliberative question which seeks the best possible option. A comparative judgment of value, different from the simple judgment already mentioned, pronounces which alternative is the best. A decision chooses which alternative will be followed in accord with the prior judgment comparative judgment of value. And action realizes the value in question. The action itself is conditioned by a disposition in the subject to act in accord with the evaluations of conscious intentionality. (77)

Lest this seem too intellectualistic or rationalistic, the role of the feelings play a dynamic role here. The feelings help establish the horizon of a person, that is, the limit of her concern. A horizon is determined by past insights, judgments, decisions, and actions. If I decide to act out of concern for the cow who made my steak, this concern for animal life becomes part of my horizon. This forms the basis of future concerns for animal life. This means that it is possible for such an intentional response to value to arise in the future. We can compare this process with being in love. When a person is in love, their whole being is directed outward towards the beloved. The state of “being in love” provides the basis for all of her actions. This feeling establishes her horizon, expands it beyond herself, so that she acts in a way that is good for the beloved. To return to Doorley question at the beginning regarding the knowledge of God possessed by uneducated people, the reason is that their horizon is constituted by the love of God. As such, their judgments of value or at the height of self-transcendence. What they know, and what they are able to do, is established by an almost-limitless horizon.

It’s complicated stuff but we can break it down to a basic need to be attentive to one’s feelings, because one’s feelings reveal one’s values and the limit of one’s horizon (or sphere of concern). When one discovers that one’s values are self-centered, one can use the activity of reason to direct one’s concern outward, and to act in such ways as to expand one’s horizon and transcend mere self-regard. The feelings and the mind are mutually interdependent in satisfying the human desire to know and to choose the good. As Doorley concludes, the task of integrating one’s feelings into activities of consciousness reveals to a person that “she is the source of the person that she has become and that she is the source of the person that she might want to become. This is the beginning of moral conversion” (99).

The Moral World of the First Christians













A Thomist Take on “The Invention of Lying”

The Invention of Lying, with The Office star Ricky Gervais, imagines a world in which lying does not exist. This is a great premise which has weird, sometimes inconsistent manifestations in the film. For example, the film presumes that since lying does not exist, people automatically speak their mind without provocation, such as when Jennifer Garner tells Gervais’ character Mark Bellison that she is “out of his league” or when Tina Fey’s character greets Mark with a cheery “I loathed almost every minute that I worked for you.” This is an illogical spin to the plot. Just because humans must tell the truth does not mean they must speak their mind.

Other times, however, the lack of lying is used to make interesting social commentary. Nursing homes are called “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.” Individuals, like Mark’s neighbor, cannot gloss over their actual feelings when asked how they are doing, but actually tell the truth: “Actually, I’m doing pretty bad. I spent the night throwing up pills because I am too afraid to kill myself.” Additionally, Jennifer Garner’s character Anna is completely upfront with Mark about her feelings for him. She likes him, she explains, because he is nice and makes her laugh. But, she can’t date him because she wants to marry a genetic winner, not just somebody who makes her feel good. She wants somebody who is rich and successful and most especially, will not give her “short, pudgy children with snub noses.”

The plot of the movie involves Gervais realizing he is the one person in the world who actually can tell a lie, and being the person of relatively decent character he is, after only one minor mishap where he tries to convince a woman to have sex with him by telling her the world will end if she doesn’t (he can’t go through with it because of the sincerity and pathetic nature of her sheer terror), he tries to use his power for good, telling relatively innocent lies to people like his suicidal neighbor to get them to feel good.

The movie takes an interesting turn which ends up not going anywhere when Gervais’ character tells his dying mother, terrified at the prospect of an eternity of nothingness, that she is actually going to a happy place where she will have a mansion and see all the people that she loves. She dies happy, Gervais temporarily becomes a prophet, and then the movie turns romantic comedy.

What this and other similar movies like Liar, Liar do is challenge us to consider our ethical evaluation of lying. Aquinas says that the essential notion of a lie is taken from formal falsehood, “namely, that a person intends to say what is false” (II-II, Q. 110, art. 1). As a realist, he thinks that truth actually exists and is not just in the mind of the agent: “Consequently if one says what is false, thinking it to be true, it is false materially, but not formally, because the falseness is beside the intention of the speaker so that it is not a perfect lie, since what is beside the speaker’s intention is accidental for which reason it cannot be a specific difference” (ibid).

But he also introduces the treatise with the statement that a moral act takes its species both from the object (what is actually done) and its end (what the intent behind the action was; in other words, what the action was done for). Accordingly, Aquinas identifies three kinds of lies: “for some are told for the well-being and convenience of someone; and there is another kind of lie that is told in fun; but the third kind of lie is told out of malice.” The first of these is called an officious lie, the second a jocose lie, the third a mischievous lie” (II-II, 110.2). The intention in making this distinction is not to say that some lies are not sins, but rather, to distinguish in what way a lie may be a sin:

Thirdly, lies are divided in a more general way, with respect to their relation to some end, whether or not this increase or diminish their gravity: and in this way the division comprises eight kinds, as stated in the Second Objection. Here the first three kinds are contained under “mischievous”lies, which are either against God, and then we have the lie “in religious doctrine,” or against man, and this either with the sole intention of injuring him, and then it is the second kind of lie, which “profits no one, and injures someone”; or with the intention of injuring one and at the same time profiting another, and this is the third kind of lie, “which profits one, and injures another.” Of these the first is the most grievous, because sins against God are always more grievous, as stated above (I-II, 73, 3): and the second is more grievous than the third, since the latter’s gravity is diminished by the intention of profiting another.

After these three, which aggravate the sin of lying, we have a fourth, which has its own measure of gravity without addition or diminution; and this is the lie which is told “out of mere lust of lying and deceiving.” This proceeds from a habit, wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. iv, 7) that “the liar, when he lies from habit, delights in lying.”

The four kinds that follow lessen the gravity of the sin of lying. For the fifth kind is the jocose lie, which is told “with a desire to please”: and the remaining three are comprised under the officious lie, wherein something useful to another person is intended. This usefulness regards either external things, and then we have the sixth kind of lie, which “profits someone in saving his money”; or his body, and this is the seventh kind, which “saves a man from death”; or the morality of his virtue, and this is the eighth kind, which “saves him from unlawful defilement of his body.”


This is a fascinating statement: “The greater the good intended, the more is the sin of lying diminished in gravity.” What this allows us to do is commend certain people for their actions, in spite of the fact that their actions involved a sin. for example, the midwives in Exodus, as Aquinas notes in an objection, were rewarded by God, despite the fact that they lied. In reply, he notes, “The midwives were rewarded, not for their lie, but for their fear of God, and for their good-will, which latter led them to tell a lie. Hence it is expressly stated (Exodus 2:21): “And because the midwives feared God, He built them houses.” But the subsequent lie was not meritorious” (II-II, 110.3.2).

He goes on to note that some are commended in the Scriptures, “not on account of perfect virtue, but for a certain virtuous disposition, seeing that it was owing to some praiseworthy sentiment that they were moved to do certain undue things. It is thus that Judith is praised, not for lying to Holofernes, but for her desire to save the people, to which end she exposed herself to danger. And yet one might also say that her words contain truth in some mystical sense” (II-II 110.3.3).

It seems that Aquinas provides a handy way of dealing with the very sticky case approached in Introduction to Ethics classes of the individual hiding Jews in their basement and asked by the Nazis, who are clearly intending to kill those Jews, whether there are Jews in the house. The standard deontological response, hearkening from Immanuel Kant, says that every lie is immoral, no matter how grave the consequences, and so one should not lie. The standard utilitarian argument says that acts are to be judged according to their consequences, and acts that produce greater happiness or utility are to be pursued. Accordingly, lying produces more happiness (by preserving the life of innocent Jews) so lying is therefore the moral option. Aquinas gives us a more nuanced third way. Lying is a violation of the moral law, regardless of the consequences (see II-II, 110.3.4) but we might commend the person who lies to the Nazis not because of the lie, but for their good intention in spite of the lie. In other words, lying is not moral, but the intention to save innocent lives is. The movie implicitly makes this distinction between the lies told by good people and those told by wicked people when Gervais’ character has the opportunity to lie to Anna (Jennifer Garner) in order to get her to marry him. He does not, realizing that such a lie would be told purely from a selfish intention.

The Invention of Lying wants to illustrate that a categorical opposition to lying results in a world that is cruel and inhumane and so lying has to be “okay” sometimes. I think that with the right Thomistic resources, we can say that the person who lies is sometimes morally commendable, not because of the lie, but because of the intention to soothe those who are in pain, shield those from the sharpness of the truth, protect the innocent, etc. Lying is still evil (no Thomist would want to deny this) but people who do lie, according to Thomas, can be good.

Your Local, Eco-Friendly Purchases Aren’t (Necessarily) Virtuous










The Annual Meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics


















The Ethics of Golf













How do Academicians Become Holier? Renewing Hagiography for the Professional Ethicist






• Circumscription: the inclination against universalist or comprehensive claims








Steck concludes:



