Nice analysis.
I have a colleague--a professional philosopher who also happens to be a libertarian--who has seriously argued that any folks who argued for or supported the federal mandating of seatbelts in airliners is guilty of murder. His argument? Well, by making it a federal mandate, the airlines had to comply or go out of business; by complying, they must increase the cost of flying; by increasing the cost of flying they discourage people from flying; flying is known to be much less fatal than driving; hence, by mandating seatbelts we force people to do something much more risky, namely, drive.; hence, etc. etc.
When one is in the grip of a theory, ancillary causes and considerations are given far less weight than they deserve, or far more.
Regarding the particular brand of conservative one-size-fits-all analysis, pointing out that this sort of analysis necessarily produces a deficient view of the will as a faculty of a rational moral agent is evidently verboten. At least, it was for me, since I was banned from the quoted website for having the temerity to point out that "people are entitled to impute to you what results from applying your principles in a consistent way" and that a consistent application of his principles produces exactly the absurd results you describe here. Dr. Carson said it perfectly in his comment above, and it comes down to a sheer lack of intellectual humility. Some people find it easier to rationalize their behavior than to admit that the position to which they have committed themselves is incredibly foolish. God save me from such a fate, because I know I am the chief among sinners when it comes to that temptation.
Jonathan,
Don't take it so hard. I believe that Zippy unfortunately personalized the whole affair. I admire the guy for some of his thought on other matters; however, on this particular one, he may have dwelt too much on his personal emotions rather than to reason.
It happens to all of us.
Fair enough, but the point of the original post is that this is a temptation if you aren't careful and that one ought to be all the more careful about those sorts of temptations. Both rigorism and laxism come from an uncharitable exclusion of the person, and people who aren't even Catholic can detect that sort of thinly-veiled contempt. It's a systematic sort of unkindness to treat a person like a theoretical object rather than a personal moral agent. Reducing actual people and personal situations to "supposals" of your moral theory is the same problem described in the scientific context by Dr. Carson.
That's why, despite his vehement protests to the contrary, I think that Zippy is a thoroughgoing modernist and positivist in the moral sphere (he analogized moral acts to software classes, for example) . If that was indeed his past, he hasn't really escaped it.
And I don''t think this is the sort of isolated behavior that one can chalk up to excessive personalization. The theory begets the result: people who disagree with his rigorism are immoral for doing so; therefore, they are condemned of personal fault in the concrete. That's what positivism in the moral sphere produces. So the personalization in this instance was simply a concrete instance of the theory working itself out. Irritation at me might have provoked it, but what he did was just par for the course for someone who disagrees with his theory. There has to be some ethical violation involved in dissenting from his theory; it can't possibly be his fault. Ironically, the whole anonymity schtick is the ultimate depersonalization; he has made himself into a theory, since we cannot create any personal context.
I think he's in a dangerous situation, and as someone holding out himself (albeit anonymously) with the name "Catholic" on several sites, I think he has some responsibility to correct it. I tried my best to remedy that situation and failed. But I don't think we can gloss over the problem as being personal. This sort of thing corrodes discussion among Catholics and creates a bad impression for non-Catholics. If you're going to define yourself by the label "Catholic," you have a greater responsibility not to do those sorts of things, and I certainly consider that with everything I post on my blog. And of course, people know my name, and they can speak to me personally when I deviate from their expectations.
Thanks for the careful and nuanced discussion of moralism vis Schaivo.
You wrote - “ There is no one-size-fits-all human judgment to make here.”
It
’s an argot from Toulmin’s, “Abuse of Casuistry,” that moralism’s abuses run equally on an axis of picayune fact discriminations made to reach favored results. I suppose today we attach presumptive weight to facts found by medical sciences, which medievalists didn’t have(they had their proxies), but I thought you wove an excellently fine line marshaling medical facts to navigate between the murder and exceptional circumstances cases, avoiding moralizing on either the rule-based or fact-nuanced side.
I
’m not adequately informed on Catholic canon to weigh in on the question of Schaivo’s caregivers and guardians risking judgment of “guilty of murder by ‘formal cooperation,’" but what analogies might apply or overlap between that canon and American requisites that “mens rea” (evil mind: animus) exist in order to qualify the case as properly “criminal,” met-thinks the latter requirement would likely not be met, though arguably it’s no less a close call. Really tough case.
Jim
forgot my personal info (link above)
Cheers
Jim
Just seeing this. It seems to me to miss entirely the point of my post, which was to discuss the nature of formal cooperation: what formal cooperation is and is not.
Formal cooperation with evil is cooperation involving consent to the specific act of another when that specific act of another is objectively morally wrong. Neither remoteness from the act nor disagreement that it is morally wrong can turn formal cooperation into not-formal-cooperation.
If pointing this out to a public in which a great many people formally cooperated in the murder of a crippled woman is 'moralism', well, then sign me up.
Mike Liccione:
Will you be rebutting Zippy's recent post concerning yours? I submit but an excerpt of it below:
Excerpt:
"Spooky Intentions at a Distance
The discussion referenced in the previous post brings to mind the following:
Proposition: There is no such thing as remote formal cooperation with evil.
I disagree with that proposition, and I think the Magisterium does too. That proposition though appears to be an implication of the post where Mike says:
Let's assume what I've already conceded: that what brought about Terri Schaivo's death was an act of murder. Let's even assume, for argument's sake, that writers who influenced others to disagree with that judgment thereby "cooperated" in some remote fashion with Terri's death. Does this mean that any such person is actually guilty of murder by "formal cooperation?" Clearly not.
Note: I agree that the stated criteria are not sufficient in themselves. Continuing:
It depends on the influence they intended to have, the influence they actually had, the degree of their own culpability for their rejecting the moral truth in this matter, and the degree of others' culpability in sharing that error without having themselves done the actual deed.
Whether the cooperation was formal or not depends on none of those things, as far as I know. It depends only on whether the cooperator intended that the act of pulling Terri's tube be carried out by someone.
Now if someone wants to quibble and say that formal cooperation with murder isn't murder by formal cooperation, I'm fine with that. But what we are talking about is formal cooperation with a murder.
Of course Mike's passage might mean multiple things. But if I take it to be an assertion that remote formal cooperation in a murder is impossible, or to be premised on such an assertion, then I disagree. Formal cooperation is when I (the acting subject) intend for an objectively evil act to be done, and I cooperate with it in any way -- however remote. That my cooperation is remote, or that I disagree that the act in question is immoral, does not take the 'formal' out of my cooperation. And - the bit that generates the controversy - it is always wrong to formally cooperate with evil, period. Appeals to subjective culpability are a sidetrack from the subject of the nature of formal cooperation."
Commenting by HaloScan
