Double Effect –“It is permissible for Catholics to choose the lesser of evils. When they do so, their choice gets accounted for as avoiding the greater evil, not favoring the evil that is lesser.” Reason Amid the Ruins (The Catholic Thing)
Different Liturgical Theology – “What is the problem with allowing what is by all measures a small fraction of Catholics to participate in a licit Mass that they find beautiful, reverent, and holy?” Data and the Traditional Latin Mass ( What We Need Now – Substack)
Utopians Were Unsuccessful – “The twentieth century has a history of Babel building. The various Marxist and fascist movements sought to create utopias on earth.” A New Golden Age of Conversion (Word on Fire)
Lost Is Us – “I’m going to maintain that the deep, continuing appeal of ‘Lost’ lies, not in monsters or numbers or secrets, but in its profoundly humane vision…” Twenty years later, remembering the golden age of ‘Lost’ (Angelus)
Go To the Principles Office – “There’s a difference between nominating electable candidates and abandoning principles – especially such fundamental notions as protecting all innocent human life, at every stage of development, in any and all conditions.” If It’s Not the Apocalypse (The Catholic Thing)
Eucharistic Adoration – “Surely one sign of hope of Eucharistic revival is the ever-increasing interest among U.S. Catholics in the practice and theology of Eucharistic adoration.” Adoration and the Struggle of Prayer (Homiletic and Pastoral Review)
Our Sexual Ethic – “Ours is an age of sexual insanity. Men compete in women’s sports, male nurses share dressing rooms with female nurses, and anyone who objects is a bigot.” Restoring Sexual Sanity (First Things)
Crowdstrike – “On Friday we all woke up to one of the largest IT failures in the history of computing.” Global IT meltdown raises profound moral questions about future threats in the digital world (The Catholic Network)
Uncharted Territory – “President Joe Biden is the second incumbent president in history to not be his party’s nominee after running for reelection—the first was the 14th U.S. president, Franklin Pierce.” The Last Time an American Political Party Declined to Nominate Their Incumbent President for Reelection (Town & Country)
Bishop Ciro Quispe Lopez – “A bishop in Peru is under investigation by the Vatican after a former employee spoke to local media and alleged that the bishop had carried on affairs with multiple adult women.” Vatican to investigate Peru bishop over claims of affairs with multiple women (Catholic Herald)
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy – “Francis’s reign originated precisely from those who, today, contest him and even out-and-out fight him, and find themselves marginalized and even expelled.” Pope Francis, a paradox at the origin of the pontificate (Monday Vatican)
Get This Memo? – “President Joe Biden released a statement on Friday indicating that he has no plans of dropping out of the presidential race as calls for him to do so continue to mount from members of his own party. ” Biden Releases Statement Indicating He Is Not Dropping Out Of Race ( The Daily Wire)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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@ Double Effect.
Your enemy has been plotting to kill you. It would be expedient if he were to die. With relief, you realize you can kill him under cover of double effect! If your intention changes in this way, your action becomes corrupt (Michael Pakaluk in Reason Amid the Ruins).
Pakaluk makes the assumption that killing an enemy who plans to kill you is permissible according to the doctrine of double effect. As long as we don’t delight or boast over it. That is a misconception of both the permissibility and meaning of double effect. As a starter it’s immoral to murder someone we believe is planning to kill us, despite its praise in Westerns and gangster movies. However, if a person in the act of attempting to kill you and in self defense you unintentionally kill him the assailant’s death is not a crime or a sin. It reaches back to St Thomas Aquinas on such an act, in which the person, who by natural right defends himself without the intention to kill, causes mortal injury. Aquinas taught that we should moderate our defense as far as possible. Thereby employing the right to defense while observing the commandment Thou shalt not kill.
Pakaluk employs his understanding of an act that has a double effect, a good and an evil effect [the latter generally used in medical care and physical evil v a physical good such as amputation of a gangrenous limb]. However, here Pakaluk discusses moral evil in context of the Republican Party changing its platform on universal condemnation of abortion. His discussion addresses the presumed rationale that the lesser evil is preferable to the greater. In terms of political expediency it would consist in the idea that in order to be electable the Party had to modify its position on universal condemnation of abortion. Pakaluk addresses a vital moral issue, comparing it to Lincoln’s premise that slavery cannot be legal in one state and illegal in another as in a house divided. Slavery then is either just or unjust. Certainly we must argue the same for abortion policy.
Politics is not religion, although theoretically it should be monitored by traditional Judaeo Christian principles of morality. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Pakaluk’s views are praiseworthy, although are they practical? Does modifying a sacred premise corrupt? For one, the lesser evil v the greater is proportionalism, a principle that underlies the contemporary understanding of double effect theory. On this same subject Feser suggested preserving the general principle of defending the rights of the unborn while leaving it vague how or when this would be done at the federal level. Reasonable, and more compatible with our Catholic principles. Or it could simply be held, Abortion is evil.
Otherwise, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI judged it permissible to vote for the lesser evil in politics – if by doing so one can avert the greater. This is a matter of the proportion of evils. When we have no choice except to abstain, on principle, and allow the greater evil to succeed, the two pontiffs thought otherwise by making it clear that expediency – when there’s no other choice – is the justifiable route. This actually conforms to Pakaluk’s initial analogy of the train conductor switching rails to avoid greater tragedy.
I qualify whether “expediency is the Justifiable route”, to expediency is [a] justifiable route, in deference to those who would conscientiously abstain from voting. Republicans represent a diversity of beliefs, Catholics frequently offered the opportunity to vote or abstain on similar issues. In this writer’s opinion it seems that participation in an evil is sufficiently remote when couched within Pakaluk’s analogy, “switching rails to avoid greater tragedy”.
Fr., just in case – I wasn’t (below) getting at your offering. I was getting at the particular item of what went on with the Kennedys and the Jesuits.
Also, I couched it in terms of being Catholic; yet then let me qualify, HOWEVER, THE HOLY FATHER CAN SPEAK TO IT IN THE NAME OF GOD, OF HOLY CHURCH AND OF ALL HUMANITY. Thank you Fr.!
Appreciate your usual attentiveness to kindness Elias. Let’s hope a miracle of national conversion occurs with the turning away from abortion as a right. It is the murder of a human life.
@Eucharistic Adoration
We read: “Recently, Fr. Carter Griffin put forward the idea that ‘adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is so popular today . . . because it is a powerful counterweight to a visually coarse culture’”. The author then goes on to connect Adoration to a life of prayer.
Another perspective might be this: In a coarse world dissolving into alphabetical personal “identity,” and even digital disintegration and AI, might we finally remember that Jesus Christ is analogue and not digital? The Real Presence of “Do THIS in remembrance [!] of Me.”
The Incarnation, adoration and prayer are a call to ground ourselves in the non-digitized analogue of “the Word made flesh”—the fully divine and fully human “person” of Jesus Christ—who really DID leave real footprints in our universal human history and who really IS the total Resurrection.
This Ultimate Reality versus the digital universe of modernized Nominalism, or even the halfway-house doormat that “time is greater than space.”
@ Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Gagliarducci sees the complaint against Vatican governance evolve into bureaucracy and finally centralization of authority by Pope Francis. Gagliarducci perceives a self fulfilling in the fight against as self fulfilling, apparently alluding to overreaction but Francis, “Worried about governance, they did not think that the new government might also want to centralize everything from decisions to the life of the Church. Any different point of view becomes, thus, ‘schismatic,’ And that leads to overreaction and actual schism. After all, the Church was already living in a practical schism. The Viganò paradox only made it more evident” (Andrea Gagliarducci).
Gagliarducci perceives a pope overreacting to overreacting dissident cardinals and bishops Archbishop Viganò the primary example. Although Gagliarducci acknowledges ‘practical schism’ was already in existence. But that practical schism was initiated by Francis with Amoris Laetitia footnote 350 followed Fiducia Supplicans and Dignitas Infinita. Since governorship has been reduced to a weakened Vatican in effect a weakened papacy, was the irony of self fulfillment the expectation of craft?
To Self-fulfilling prophecy
Pope Francis must correct the error of the Jesuits who helped engineer legalized abortion with the Kennedys in the early ’60’s. He must end the pretense that it doesn’t have to be corrected or a correction can wait until some opportune time. He must end the other pretense that the Jesuits who did this, as with anyone else involved or so purposed and engaged, can be given a go ahead even once.
Correct it and condemn it.
Catholics can not legalize sin. Or killing of innocent children. Catholics can not say it’s okay since they’re avoiding imposing their private faith on anybody; nor that it’s a mode of being open to being understanding of limitations and heartache.
Catholics MUST legislate pregnancy protections AND a fostering kind of medical practice AND a cogent body of law. Catholics must demand these topics. There is nothing else for it. My writing about it is not a sufficient thing for the Holy See.
It is not the Pope’s role to offer dualistic pronouncements on such things.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/07/07/pope-francis-in-politics-catholics-cannot-live-a-private-faith/
@crowdstrike
I read the article, “Global IT meltdown raises profound moral questions about future threats in the digital world,” hoping that it would discuss the problems caused by the large-scale failures cascading out from the Crowdstrike update that crippled systems around the world. However, it doesn’t address software or technology, but technology policy, and that is different: for instance, citing issues like cyber attacks and retaliation by governmental agencies, including the deployment of malicious software, then veering into nuclear deterrence, the accumulation of weapons, just war practices and so on.
There are serious moral questions to be raised about what might constitute a legitimate response to “an attack on a nation or group of nations from a cyber enemy.” But these have nothing to do with an emerging technology company releasing what looks like a badly flawed software update that collapsed Microsoft products on which people depend. Policy decisions by governments about how technology will be used are not usually made by the IT companies who design, build and promote the technology.
As a result, the people who build software will likely tune out this type of discussion because it is not directly relevant to what they do. Crowdstrike IT teams are not bad actors choosing to release malware on the world; they are creating software intended to detect and neutralize malware. Most developers hate malware because it makes their lives harder.
As the author notes, “As the world has started piecing itself back together, there have been global sighs of relief that this catastrophe was the result of a human error in the programming and implementation of a relatively minor overnight update to Crowdstrike.” But that overlooks a major problem. One might consider the scope involved. Crowdstrike’s software update turned out to be a disaster and unleashed disruptive repercussions across the globe. What the company’s staff may find useful are well-grounded, consistent moral insights that could help them understand how to assess their responsibility in this mess and identify appropriate means of making reparation and remediation for the damages and injuries caused. So here was a missed opportunity for a moral theologian to make an impact. Considering unintended consequences of technical and architectural decisions, and assessing potental negative impacts is a standard part of the software development lifecycle, so that provides an immediate entry point.
Here are several questions that might catch the interest of IT staff in this type of situation. When a critically-needed product by a company with major market share that produces software used by many separate systems fails, who is responsible for the failure? This becomes complicated because software is often collaboratively created by many contributors working across scattered teams. Sorting out who did what is complicated, so being able to identify who is responsible and accountable when something fails and produces unintended impacts around the globe can lead to better decisions in the future.
If competitive pressure to release updates causes a company to rush testing and other quality control and quality assurance procedures, and a major defect slips through, how can that be better thought through and understood to avoid future catastrophic outcomes? How does a company balance strong quality processes when resources are limited and they must decide how to allocate resources across all needs? Should the risky of major catastrophic software failures be assigned a higher priority in order to limit damage to innocent parties?
These are nuts and bolts questions with moral and ethical dimensions that IT staff may not be fully aware of and may neglect as a result. So moral theologians can help think through these questions in a way that can guide developers, data scientists and architects, all sorts of analysts and others involved in developing technology. Provided that the theologians acquire a working understanding of what IT teams actually do. And provided that any inquiry is framed within an applicable sphere of influence. Few if any of these people will be deciding whether to unleash malicious code to undermine an enemy, nor will they be crafting policy to shape how the impacts of artificial intelligence can be limited and constrained. Instead, they design, build and deploy technology based on the interests and requirements of the people who make those policy decisions.
About systemic “unintended consequences”…
One solution consists of system REDUNDANCY plus INCREMENTAL introduction of interventions like system updates:
Redundancy requires that the same level of security be supplied by more than one service like Crowdstrike, so that when one silo is victimized by whatever, the rest of the system (e.g., the entire airline industry) is insulated. About this learning experience, over a century ago the Titanic would not have sunk had the sixteen “watertight” compartments not been open to each other at the top from stem to stern.
And, about incrementalism, instead of loading the “update” in one click, a segmented and incremental approach could have detected glitches and minimized the one-shot damage to millions of screens around the world. But, hey, the name of the game is monopolies and cost reduction, which works except when it doesn’t.
Two common sense adages:
“[U.S. Navy Officer-of-the-Deck training poster] Attention to details, gentlemen, a collision at sea can ruin your whole day!” And, “If reality worked the way software engineers write software, then the first woodpecker that came along could destroy all of civilization.” You won’t find these in any thousand-page, fine-print software or systems manual.
And there is no reason at all for individual power plants to not be insulated from the outside world. All operational systems can be localized. Supervision for remote monitoring by control centers can be independent with layered independent scan points and telemetry that do not affect essential operations. It is only cost saving that minimizes local operations control.
Operations for grid load sharing can involve systems that do not affect the local operations.