Author: Lee M.

John Lukacs is a grouchy European-style conservative who doesn’t go in for what he deems the populist demagoguery of the American Right. Read a profile of him here.

A debate in the American Conservative between Robert Locke and Daniel McCarthy.

Locke:

Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.

McCarthy:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a complete system of ethics or metaphysics. Political philosophies address specifically the state and, more generally, justice in human society. The distinguishing characteristic of libertarianism is that it applies to the state the same ethical rules that apply to everyone else. Given that murder and theft are wrong—views not unique to libertarianism, of course—the libertarian contends that the state, which is to say those individuals who purport to act in the name of the common good, has no more right to seize the property of others, beat them, conscript them, or otherwise harm them than any other institution or individual has. Beyond this, libertarianism says only that a society without institutionalized violence can indeed exist and even thrive.

Thanks to some comments from Marcus and a conversation with the wife, I’m now convinced that the argument in this post doesn’t show the impermissibility of “collateral damage.”

For if C (the innocent bystander) doesn’t have a duty to sacrifice himself to save A, it doesn’t seem like we can say that A has an obligation to sacrifice himself to save C. In other words, what we get is a kind of “lifeboat” situation where two people’s rights come into irreconcilable conflict and one person has to be sacrificed.

However, this would only seem to be the case in instances where the use of lethal force is the only way for A to save himself. If A can defend himself in some other way, he has the obligation to take that route (even perhaps at considerable risk to himself).

Looks like pro-life Democrat Bob Casey Jr. will be running for US Senate next year. There has been a minor controversy because the Party bigwigs have been pushing for Casey and trying to get other possible candidates not to run, clearing the field for him. (Casey doesn’t want a draining and expensive primary before going up against Santorum.)

However, two possible challengers to Casey, former state treasurer Barbara Hafer and Rep. Joe Hoeffel (who ran unsuccessfully against Arlen Specter last year) have balked at bowing out of a primary. Hafer is a former Republican who left the GOP over the abortion issue (Hoeffel is also pro-choice).

Though I would definitely be pulling for Casey in the primary and the general election, I think the Democrats would be doing the voters a disservice by trying to squash a primary contest. Some of us are still ticked at the PA Dems for going to such great lengths to kick Ralph Nader off the ballot last fall.

UPDATE: The Inquirer reports today that Hafer and Hoeffel will step aside to clear the way for Casey.

An interview at CT. I read and liked his Answering God. This makes me want to read more of his stuff.

This bit is good:

Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.

That’s a naïve view of spirituality. What we’re talking about is the Christian life. It’s following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we’ve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It’s just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it’s like any other intimacy; it’s part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don’t feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn’t primarily a mystical emotion. It’s a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

Doesn’t the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?

One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She’s sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she’s got it with both hands, and she’s gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she’s doing this, behaving this way. She said, “When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray.”

If you read the saints, they’re pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it’s a surprise to them. They didn’t do anything. We’ve got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It’s a wonderful life, but it’s not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.

Yet evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a “personal relationship with God.”

That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.All these words get so screwed up in our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don’t have veils, or I don’t have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that’s wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life. Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable. Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just screws the whole thing up.

It’s very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We’ve got a pretty good vocabulary and syntax, and we’d better start paying attention to it because the way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.

There’s been a lot of “I told you so’s” form war-hawks and even a few mea culpas from war opponents in the wake of the Iraqi elections, and now the apparently hopeful signs in Egypt and Lebanon.

In a recent TCS piece, war supporter Michael Totten avoids gratuitous I-told-you-so-ism, but goes on to make this curious argument:

Iraq has made morons out of a lot of people, as perhaps it should. Getting history right in the present tense is hard work. It’s probably impossible for any one person to do it consistently. And if somebody could do it, how would we know? In the 1960s Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought of the French Revolution. He wisely said “It is too soon to tell.”

Great events should shake people and change them. I have a hard time trusting someone who says this never happens to them. After the toppling of Saddam’s regime, it happened first to the hawkish right. And now the anti-war left has had its turn.

The good news is that the latest earth-shaking news is good news. The Iraqi election was flawed, to be sure, but it still exceeded the expectations of most of us. The case for optimism is therefore stronger than it recently was. But the existence of unexpected and earth-shaking events should remind us that — ultimately, as always — it is still too soon to tell.

What I find curious is the assumption that making moral decisions is somehow equivalent to “getting history right,” as though we’re dealing with some Hegelian dialectic. Too soon to make judgments about the French Revolution? I’d say the Reign of Terror was aptly named.

Totten’s argument, in fact, makes the case against consequentialist thinking. If we can’t evaluate the outcome of events until years (or centuries) down the road, then consequentialism doesn’t seem to provide a very good guide to moral decision-making. We’re stuck having to evaluate actions based on their intrinsic character, not as something that “history” might someday judge to be right.

I really want to like Sojourners magazine. The whole radical, neither-left-nor-right, consistent-life ethic thing really appeals to me. But when I actually read it I tend to find the articles rather flimsy and insubustantial. This could have to do with their more activist stance – they’re not likely to run thick, meaty “think peices.” Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that it often reads like preaching to the choir.

Which leads me to ask – where’s the liberal First Things? Say what you will about FT, it runs high quality pieces from some of the best Christian (and Jewish) thinkers around. (And, contrary to what is often claimed, it isn’t monolithically conservative, much less narrowly “neoconservative;” they have, for instance, run pieces quite critical of various aspects of the war by Stanley Hauerwas, Rowan Williams and Paul Griffiths as well as articles from younger scholars critical of the corporate capitalist order.) So, what I’m after is something comparable from a more liberal (or just non-conservative) perspective.

Is there a left-of-center magazine that fills such a niche? Maybe I should be reading the Christian Century?

Camassia gets best blog post title of the week award with “Fear of a Liberal Planet.”

Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity is back to semi-regular blogging (huzzah!) with a post on David Brooks, public life, family, and individualism.

Marcus reads Thomas Woods’ book so we don’t have to!

Eve Tushnet on the mystery of sin.

A short bit on Lutherans and Dispensationalism at Lutheran Confessions.

The return of Just War blogging! Hosannas all around!

One crucial element of modern just war theory (JWT) is the so-called doctrine of double effect (DDE). Though DDE has been applied to other areas of moral concern (such as medical ethics), its application to JWT is particularly important, since it purports to justify a great deal of killing.

Put simply, DDE attempts to outline conditions under which it is permissible to kill an innocent person. The conditions usually include:

• The death of the innocent person is unintentional but foreseeable (i.e. it is a reasonably expected outcome of the action undertaken)
• The death is not a means to the end sought by the action (i.e. you can’t kill innocents in order to bring about some purported good; their deaths can only be a side-effect of the action)
• The good accomplished by the action “outweighs” the evil of the death(s) of the innocent bystander(s) (this is also known as the requirement of proportionality)

The paradigm case of “collateral damage” that is licensed by DDE runs like this: person A, in order to fend off an attack by B, elects to use deadly force. However, A foresees that doing so will result in the death of C, an innocent bystander. Because A does not intentionally kill C as a means to defending himself, but only kills him as a foreseeable but unintentional side-effect, DDE permits A to act in a way that brings about C’s death.

This example rests on a crucial premise: that A has the right to self-defense, the enforcement of which permits the use of deadly force. That right has as a correlate that everyone else has a duty to refrain from aggressing against A’s person, so long as A has done nothing to infringe the rights of others (e.g. If A aggresses against B, then A loses his right of immunity from attack).

However, the assumption of a universal right of self-defense introduces a wrinkle (here I am following the argument of philosopher Camillo C. Bica). If A has the right of self-defense, then so does C (the innocent bystander in the example above). And it surely makes no difference to C that A doesn’t intend to kill him. C has the same right to respond to an attack on his person as anyone else (including A), even using deadly force if necessary.

As Bica argues, to assert a right of A to kill C as “collateral damage” implies (because rights and duties correlate) that C has a duty to give up his life to save A. But to give up one’s life to save another is, most of us would agree, an act of supererogation, not obligation. That is, above and beyond the call of duty.* Why (barring a special relationship) should C be obliged to sacrifice himself to save A?

But then it seems to follow that if C has no duty to give up his life to save A, then A has no right to take C’s life, even as an unintentional and foreseeable consequence of his actions (since “A is right in doing x” and “A has a right to do x” seem, for all intents and purposes, to be equivalent statements). And that seems to rule out the permissibility of “collateral damage,” at least in cases relevantly similar to the above.**

This argument doesn’t entail total pacifism, but, if correct, it would seem to entail a kind of “antiwar pacifism,” since virtually all modern wars involve killing innocents, even if unintentionally.***
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*Some utilitarians seem to deny that there is any distinction between obligation and supererogation. That is, they argue that we are obliged to bring about the state of affairs that will maximize utility, full stop. I happen to think this is a strike against utilitarianism, since the distinction between obligatory and supererogatory actions is so deeply embedded in our moral intuitions.

**It might require further argument, for instance, to show that collateral damage is impermissable in cases where multiple lives are on the line. Here questions of proportionality might be judged dispositive. However, that would mean abandoning the perspective of rights talk since, if my “right” not to be killed can be overridden by considerations of proportionality, it doesn’t seem to be much of a right.

***”Unintentionally” obviously does not here mean the same thing as “accidentally.” We are not, it is generally held, culpable for the unforseeable consequences of our actions.

Spider-Man’s Greatest Bible Stories!

(via Unqualified Offerings)