Bart Stupak has finally gotten (or reacquired) a spine!
If the reporting from Politico is right, he’s finally stood up to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama!
He’s un-caved!
A little too late.
He’s decided, you see, not to run for re-election.
Politico reports:
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who had a central role in the health reform fight as the leader of anti-abortion Democrats, plans to announce Friday that he will not run for reelection, a Democratic official said. Without Stupak on the ballot, the seat becomes an immediate pickup opportunity for Republicans.
President Barack Obama called Stupak on Wednesday and asked him not to retire. Stupak, 58, also resisted entreaties from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the dean of the Wolverine State delegation.
Now get this:
Friends said Stupak was not leaving because of the health fight but because of the exertion that would be required to hold his sprawling Upper Peninsula District.
Uh . . . right.
This guy is waaaay incumbent. He’s been in the House for 18 years (9 terms) and has never won with less than 57% of the vote—just three percent from landslide territory.
So tell us how this year it is different and it’s become much more difficult—but not because of the health care fight.
This year was shaping up to be a different story, with Stupak becoming a leading target on both his left and right flanks. Abortion rights supporters were rallying behind Charlevoix County Commissioner Connie Saltonstall after Stupak insisted on pro-life language being inserted in the health care legislation.
Er . . . so I guess he’s facing a fierce challenge from the other side—the right—that isn’t due to the health care fight. Right?
And Republicans have rallied around surgeon Dan Benishek, a Tea Party favorite, who received very little attention until Stupak voted for the health care legislation even without receiving anti-abortion language in the bill itself. Benishek is expected to raise over $100,000 this quarter, according to GOP sources, a large amount for a first-time candidate who had virtually no campaign infrastructure before Stupak received national attention over his health care positioning.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on what (if any) ethical obligations are due to a mortage contract in the current environment. I bought a home, and it's now severely underwater; worth maybe 50 – 60% of the purchase price. The payments are affordable to me for now, but much better homes can be had for much less now. Banks are not very accommodating to restructuring loans; many people in this situation are choosing to walk away. It makes a lot of financial sense to do so.
While at least I'm on a fixed-rate mortgage, it still features several of the creative financing schemes so popular at the time. Payments for now are 100% interest — not a penny is going to pay off the house itself (not that I would want to sink any more money into it than I have to). Then there's a big balloon payment due in a few years, and monthly payments go up at that time as well. So this mortgage is a ticking time bomb. The balloon payment is a few years off, but it's doubtful that the value will recover sufficiently by then, barring rampant inflation.
I can't give advice about what to do in the reader's specific situation (and I've edited out some additional details for purposes of protecting the reader's identity), but I can offer thoughts on the principles involved.
The Church recognizes the institution of private property and the legitimacy of sales and contracts. All of these require respect for the institutions in question that require respect for agreements made, the keeping of one's word, and respect for the property of another.
Society couldn't function if people took each others' property willy-nilly, never honored their word, etc.
So there is a basic obligation to honor one's agreements in business matters.
But just as private property is not an absolute (a starving man may steal food to feed his family provided he is not stealing it from someone who also can't afford to lose it), so contracts are not an absolute).
The truth is that in a mortgage, both parties are taking risks, but at the time they judge the risks acceptable.
Circumstances may change, however, such that terminating or breaking the contract becomes rational.
This is something to be discouraged–because society needs contract-keeping to be the norm in order to function–so there are penalties spelled out in contracts and in civil law more broadly to discourage people from doing it.
This is analogous to the penalties that are inflicted for stealing. Society needs those to discourage widespread stealing. Yet sometimes it is morally permissible to take and use another's property without his permission.
Theft is the taking of another's property against the reasonable will of the owner (meaning, it's no longer the sin of theft when it is not reasonable for the owner to prevent you from using his property).
I would suggest that a parallel principle applies here: One is obliged to fulfill one's mortgage obligations provided it is within the reasonable will of the lender.
But if one's family or personal finances will be gravely harmed by failure to walk away, if the consequences that you will suffer due to walking away are less than those of failing to do so, and if you will not be inflicting similar grave harm on others by walking away, then it is legitimate to do so.
The final condition I mentioned–not inflicting proportionate harm to others–is somewhat tricky to evaluate, but in general, pain is more bearable the more it is spread around. Generally an institution like a mortgage lender can bear the pain of a mortgage going bad than can an individual family–even though it means the pain of that loss is going to be passed on to those who own or invest in the lender or (given the involvement of the government) to taxpayers more broadly.
What happens when there are massive numbers of such mortgages going bad means there is a lot of pain being heaped on the system, but in general terms it is more likely to be handled well if distributed broadly rather than concentrated narrowly.
That's just a general principle of pain management.
So, short answer: One in general should keep one's mortgage obligations, but there are circumstances in which it is both rational and moral to walk away. This should not be done lightly (and one should not underestimate the negative consequences of doing so), but one is not obliged to drive one's finances into the ground or otherwise do grave harm to them by continuing to try to do so.
. . . that when I first read about "abortion doulas," I wasn't sure about the meaning of the word "doula."
Well, I recognized the origin of the term. It was clearly derived from the Greek word "doula," which means "female slave" or "female servant" or "handmaiden" or things like that.
But I wasn't aware of what it meant in a twenty-first century, English-speaking context.
It turns out that doulas are women who aren't midwives but who assist pregnant mothers during the act of giving birth and/or after the child has been born.
Unfortunately, I'm not a father. My wife died before we were able to have children, so I'm not up on some of the terminology . . . at least in the home-birth movement.
I suppose my recognition of the origin of the term reveals me as a nerd, while my failure to know its current meaning reveals me as a n00b.
So there's a news story from across the pond explaining how Parliament has just inserted a provision in a sex-ed bill that allows "faith schools" (i.e., Catholic ones, etc.) to tell their students that things like contraception are wrong.
Terribly nice of them, isn't it?
Mind you, they're not letting the schools refuse to teach how to contracept. Oh, no. Children must still have to have a full, robust course of the how-to's.
So the message that "faith schools" will be required to give is, "Contraception is wrong according to our faith. Now here's how you do it anyway . . . "
I'm glad to be able to report some good news on the case of the abortion nun. (CHT to the person who e-mailed!)
While she hasn't repented (so far as I know), it appears that action is being taken regarding her case. The following statement appears on the Sinsinawa Dominican sisters' web site:
Public Statement of the Sinsinawa Dominican Congregation
11/2/09
Several months ago, the leadership of the Sinsinawa Dominicans was informed that Sister Donna Quinn, OP, acted as a volunteer escort at a Chicago area clinic that among other procedures, performs abortions. After investigating the allegation, Congregation leaders have informed Sr. Donna that her actions are in violation of her profession as a Dominican religious. They regret that her actions have created controversy and resulted in public scandal. They are working with Sr. Donna to resolve the matter appropriately.
Congregation leaders offer the following statement on behalf of members of the Congregation. We as Sinsinawa Dominican women are called to proclaim the Gospel through the ministry of preaching and teaching to participate in the building of a holy and just society. As Dominican religious, we fully support the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding the dignity and value of every human life from conception to natural death. We believe that abortion is an act of violence that destroys the life of the unborn. We do not engage in activity that witnesses to support of abortion.
My guess is that "resolv[ing] the matter appropriately" will mean getting Sr. Quinn to resign from the order, but at least that's one way of ending the scandal of a nun ferrying frightened mothers into a child-killing facility.
The woman on the left is a Dominican sister. She helps escort women into abortion clinics so that they can have their children killed.
As Ed Peters writes,
[S]uch are the times we live in: a Catholic religious can act for years as an abortion clinic escort and cause barely a ripple in her religious community, the local church, or in Rome. History won't believe it.
Indeed it won't.
Once this is all sorted out, history won't be able to understand how a situation like this could arise or continue.
Ed isn't very hopeful that anything will be done to rectify her situation, but I'm more optimistic. The Internet is a wonderful thing, and now that
I have a dilemma at work. I work in a school. Part of my job is to do photocopies for teachers. I am sometimes asked to make photocopies of worksheets whose legal status – whether they are copyrighted or not – is unknown to me. The teachers, who don't seem to know about the copyright issue, generally intend to distribute the copies at a later time. That gives me the chance to do a little research to check the legal status of the document and get the nerve to refuse to do something which is certainly wrong, if it is the case.
This situation of uncertainty gets thougher to deal with when, out of the blue, one of the teachers asks me to copy a worksheet for a kid who was absent at the time the sheet was distributed, on a previous day. The teacher expects me to come back as soon as possible so that this kid can do his work like the others.
If the copying were clearly a violation of the author's copyright, I could stand up to the teacher and diplomaticly say "I'm sorry but I cannot do this because …". And if it were okay, I'd go ahead and make the copy.
But in a case of uncertainty, what should I do ? Is it a case of remote material cooperation with evil with a proportionate reason, the proportionate reason being the need for the kid to get an education ? I do not want to infringe copyrights nor make a trouble in class without "sufficient" reasons.
Also, I wonder if making a copy of a collection of images previously copied by the teacher herself would change anything in the remoteness of my cooperation. (Pffeeww! I hope it is clear to you).
First, I'm pleased to say that I think I can cut the Gordian knot on your dilemma by noting that in U.S. copyright law fair use is considered to include significant copying of copyrighted works for classroom distribution. According to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
So . . . work sheets, collections of pictures, whatever . . . if you're making copies for educational purposes, it looks like the activity is covered by fair use. I thus wouldn't scruple about it.
While this would seem to take care of the reader's issue, not everybody works in a school, so let's look at the moral principles that would apply if one's employer asks one to copy copyrighted material and it is not covered by fair use. What then?
If one is not approving of the act then one is not formally cooperating, which satifies one element of the moral calculus. One's cooperation would be material.
For material cooperation in evil to be justified it is traditionally held that it needs to be remote rather than proximate and that there needs to be a compensating reason of sufficient weight. Also, the act you are doing must not be intrinsically evil.
Making a copy is not intrinsically evil–it's something that can be justified by the circumstances, so that criterion seems satisfied.
What is not satisfied is the traditional remote/proximate distinction. One's action in this case is not remote. If the law one is breaking is against copying and if you are the one doing the copying then your action seems proximate (or more than proximate), violating the traditional requirement that the cooperation be remote.
So I don't think that at least the traditional understanding of the doctrine of cooperation provides a defense.
What I do think provides a defense, morally speaking (the civil law is another matter), is this:
Copyright violation is a species of theft, and the definition of theft is as follows:
CCC 2408 The seventh commandment forbids theft, that is, usurping another's property against the reasonable will of the owner. There is no theft if consent can be presumed or if refusal is contrary to reason and the universal destination of goods. This is the case in obvious and urgent necessity when the only way to provide for immediate, essential needs (food, shelter, clothing . . .) is to put at one's disposal and use the property of others.
Now, if you're in a situation where the copying your employer is asking you to do will not strongly affect the income of the copyright holder then you could presume the consent of the owner. Few copyright holders would want people to lose their jobs or be denied promotions because they stood up to their bosses and refused to do the copying. I know I wouldn't want someone losing a job or being denied a promotion because they were defying their boss in defense of the copyrights I hold. My problem is with the boss issuing the order, not the employee carrying them out.
But suppose that you know you're dealing with an inflexible, irrationally strict copyright holder, or suppose you're doing something that will substantially impact the copyright holder's income–like making ten thousand illegal copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. What about those cases?
The irrational copyright holder situation is taken care of by the "reasonable will of the owner" condition. He's not reasonable, so you can act on what a reasonable owner would say.
That leaves the case of substantially affecting his income. Here you might have to refuse the order even at the cost of a promotion or a job. The decision would be based on the relative harm to you of having to find another employment situation versus the harm being done to the copyright owner. That's something that could go either way.
I point it out not to encourage people to scruple over this question–quite the opposite. The great majority of the time one will not be morally at fault for complying with an employer's orders, for the reasons specified above. I merely mention it to point out that these considerations would not (apart from extreme circumstances) justify one working for a business whose principle purpose is copyright piracy, like a mass video or software bootlegger.
That, of course, all deals with the moral aspect of the question, apart from considerations of civil law. If you break the civil law you still run the risk of getting nailed by the authorities.
This post is going to be about the current dustup in the blogosphere regarding Christopher West and the recent ABC News piece on him.
Before I get to the controversial stuff, though, let me say a few words about the task Chris is undertaking.
Christopher West has a difficult job. As a chastity speaker, he's got to juggle several things at once:
1) He's got a very sensitive subject
2) On which different audiences have different sensibilities
3) The audience that most needs his message is very hard to reach
4) Part of the reason why they're so hard to reach is that they have a pre-existing stereotype of Christian sexual morality that they think gives them a license to tune out anything a Christian says on the subject
5) To reach this group you have to effectively batter your way past this anti-Christian prejudice and get them to take you seriously while simultaneously
6) Not offending the sensibilities of those who already take Christian sexual morality seriously
7) Some of whom have rigorist views on the topic
That's a tall order. It is humanly possible to juggle seven things at once (SEE HERE), but it's not easy.
Sometimes the task is especially treacherous, such as when being interviewed by the mainstream media, which is going to try to sensationalize every subject it deals with, but especially the subject of sex.
They'll also selectively edit the stuffing out of an interview with you and leave the audience with carefully chosen, out-of-context quotations.
That's what happened to Christopher West in this ABC Nightline piece . . .
I've been interviewed by the press, and misquoted by it, often enough that when I first watched this piece, I employed the only safe rule when dealing with an MSM story of this nature: Ignore everything that doesn't come out of Chris's mouth. Do not rely on summaries of his position offered by the reporter.
The summaries that reporters use to link quotations are key means by which they distort, sensationalize, and just plain get stuff wrong.
And, as one would expect, the most controversial stuff in the piece is not stuff that Chris says but that the reporter attributes to Chris in a summary.
The statement that Hugh Hefner is one of Chris's "heroes" or "muses," for example, is something the reporter says–and it's exactly the kind of erroneous "observation" that a reporter in search of a sensationalistic angle would make.
Similarly the statement that Hefner and John Paul II, each in their own way, "rescued" sexuality is something that the reporter says, not West.
Even when one eliminates reportorial summaries and observations, though, and just sticks to the quotations of an interview subject, there is a significant risk of out-of-context presentation.
I know that firsthand because back during the priestly sex abuse scandal I was interviewed by a news program that took an answer I gave to a question on one subject and juxtaposed it with video that made it appear that I was commenting on something that I had never even been asked about.
I was livid.
And so I've always got in the back of my mind, "What's the context for the quote I'm seeing? Could this be taken out of context?"
An example of that is West's statement "I love Hugh Hefner."
Jerkily introduced, without seeing the discussion that led to this statement, after the reporter has just been telling you that Hefner is one of West's heroes, the quotation creates the impression that West endorses Hefner.
But . . . c'mon. I'm guessing that Chris West loves Hefner in the same way that Fundamentalists love Catholics–that is, they love them so much they want them to repent of their lifestyle.
And that's hinted at by what West says next: "I really do. Why? Because I think I understand his ache. I think I understand his longing because I feel it myself. There is this yearning, this ache, this longing we all have for love, for union, for intimacy.&q
uot;
So this is not an endorsement of Hefner and what he's doing. It's compassion toward him, a recognition that there is something broken in Hefner–and all of us–that needs to be addressed.
The language about "feeling his ache" doesn't strike me as the best way to say this. I don't really want to get into Hugh Hefner's head in quite that way (though that's what the language invites me to do).
And there is a danger of spiritualizing away the sexual urges to which Hefner caters if they are presented as just longings for love, union, and intimacy.
But it's clear that West intends to be expressing a sentiment of Christian love towards a broken individual with whom we all share various forms of brokenness.
The response was awkwardly phrased–as likely would be the case when hit by a reporter with a "What do you think of Hugh Hefner?"-type question (you don't want to feed prejudices by coming off as a stereotypical, venom-filled Christian bigot by saying "He's a son of hell," so it's easy to fall back on unnuanced Christian love-type language)–and I think West would be well advised not to make "I love Hefner"-like statements in interviews in the future since we've seen how easily they can be taken out of context or otherwise misunderstood–but it's clear that West is not proclaiming his membership in the Hugh Hefner fan club.
If you want to see what West has to say about Hefner when he's in control of the message, take a look at this video . . .
So I think folks in the blogosphere should cut West some slack and remember that he's on the side of the angels.
At the same time, I think West should use this as a learning experience and take the occasion to purify his message so that he can be even more effective in the future.
Just as a general matter, it's important to keep in mind that there is more than one audience that needs to be (basically) comfortable with what's being said.
Getting through to the people who most need the message of chastity is so difficult that it is easy for chastity speakers to spend so much effort focusing on how to get into that audience's head that not enough attention is paid to the already-convinced crowd and to what will–in the classic Catholic phrase–"offend pious sensibilities."
I think that's at the root of what happened here.
In the TV and YouTube age, the pious crowd is going to see the message being presented to the unpious crowd, and if the sensibilities of the message are too oriented toward the unpious folks then one's relationship with the pious ones ("the Base") will be injured.
Injuring one's relationship with the Base is not a good thing, as our recent former president found out.
The trick, the thing that makes the kind of work West is doing so difficult, is not settling for messages that just please the Base or that just please the worldly target audience. What one has to try to do is find ways of reaching the unchaste without simultaneously alienating the chaste.
That's the challenge.
And it can be done!
You can't please everybody every time, but it is possible to craft messages that will reach the unchaste while not unnecessarily offending pious sensibilities.
In that regard, what I'm about to say isn't specifically applicable to Christopher West. In various points it may or may not apply. It just consists of observations that I've made after listening to the tapes of a lot of different chastity speakers as part of my job.
I was a bit surprised that some commenters on the recent Harry Truman was a war criminal post thought that I was being vague in some of the things I said. I think a careful reading of the post would take care of the confusion, but I'm also aware that sometimes things need to be explained in more than one way for perfect clarity, so I'm happy to oblige.
In this post let me deal with the issue of the moral use of nukes.
First, let's look at something the Catechism says:
2314 "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons – especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons – to commit such crimes.
This passage specifically has in mind the kind of actions that the U.S. committed in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those events are specifically what informs this paragraph.
While this is true, I do think that there are situations in which the moral use of nuclear weapons is morally legitimate, even if it means that a city is destroyed as a result. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't such cases, but I can imagine scenarios in which this obtains.
How would I square that with the above passage from the Catechism?
They key, I think, is the phrase "indiscriminate destruction." So far as I can tell, this means one of two things.
First, it may refer to an indiscriminate intent on the part of those causing the destruction.That is, those causing the destruction intend to kill everybody in the city or area indiscriminately. They want everybody to die. Everybody is the target. In other words, on the level of intent they do not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. That's why the destruction is indiscriminate.
In contrast to this there is the attitude of only intending the death of combatants. In this case it is combatants who are the targets, even though it may beforeseen that noncombatants will also die as collateral damage.
If we take this down from the level of destroying a city or a vast area to just a particular building, the difference in intent will be clear: There is a fundamental difference in intent between a person who wants to destroy a building so that everyone in it dies, combatant or not, and a person who wants to destroy a building in order to take out the combatants in it, even though noncombatants may also die.
In the one case the target is everybody in the building. In the other it is the combatants in the building.
This kind of analysis is what allows the moral legitimacy of bombing combat-related targets in wartime even knowing that a certain number of civilians will die also. The point is: You're not trying to kill the civilians.
How much collateral damage can be tolerated in a particular case will depend on the value of the military target that is being taken out. If the military target is a single, lonely private then less collateral damage can be tolerated than if it's the whole leadership of the opposing war machine.
In any event, on this reading of the text, trying to take out a military target with tolerable collateral damage would not constitute indiscriminate destruction because those carrying out the destruction do discriminate between combatants and noncombatants.
But there is another way in which the phrase can also be taken. Instead of referring to the level of intent, it might refer to the level of result. In this case "indiscriminate destruction" would refer to the killing of everybody in a city or area. Period.
A consequence of this interpretation would be that one could never destroy a city or a vast area as a matter of principle. It would be intrinsically evil to do so.
But this seems wrong because at this point we are dealing with matters of scale. What makes something a city rather than a village or a hamlet or just a shack? The number of people. (Not the buildings; the buildings are not in focus.)
But if some collateral damage is tolerable–ever–(e.g., you can blow up a shack containing a terrorist mastermind and his chief lieutenants even though there is a single civilian in there, too)–then reason indicates that a greater degree of collateral damage will be tolerable if the target to be taken out is more valuable.
If some degree of collateral damage is tolerable when the military target has one value then a greater degree of collateral damage will be tolerable when the military target has even greater value. In other words, the amount of collateral damage that can be tolerable is proportionate to the value of the target to be destroyed.
If this kind of situation obtains then it does not seem reasonable to say that, at some arbitrary level, the amount of collateral damage is such that the act suddenly becomes intrinsically immoral. Anyone advocating such a theory would need to say what this level is and why a mere increase in magnitude–leaving everything else the same–makes the act intrinsically evil regardless of the military value of the target.
Why is a collateral damage amount of X potentially justifiable whereas a collateral damage amount of X+1 is all of a sudden intrinsically unjustifiable?
This being the case, it would seem possible to construct scenarios in which there is a sufficiently high value target to justify the destruction of a whole city, and we will look at such a scenario in a moment.
I therefore would say that the passage from the Catechism and Vatican II that refers to "indiscriminate destruction" either should be taken as referring to an indiscriminate intent (i.e., an intent that does not discriminate between targets; it just wants to kill everybody) or, if it refers to indiscriminate results (i.e., everybody dies, regardless of combatant status) then the passage is simply not envisioning the kind of scenario I am about to postulate.
The latter wouldn't be surprising since the Catechism and Vatican II are pastoral documents that are meant to present Catholic principles in a pastoral manner and they are not always phrased in a rigorously technical fashion designed to cover all imaginable scenarios.
Like the following one (which I am very sure the fathers of Vatican II did not have in mind).
Suppose the following . . .
1) We have colonized Luna (or "the Moon," as everyone who lives there calls it) and have set up a city in the Sea of Tranquility consisting of five million people. We'll call it Sea of Tranquility City.
2) There is an evil alien race known as the Zergamoids. They are really evil. Even their name sounds evil (in a cheesy, 1930s-sci-fi way).
3) The Zergamoids have dropped a planetkiller in the middle of Sea of Tranquility City. This particular planetkiller converts zero point energy into gamma rays and, if activated, it will irradiate the entire surface of Earth with as much radiation as a moderately-nearby gamma-ray burster, totally killing all life.
4) There is a Zergamoid ship in orbit around Mars, and it sent the activation code to the planetkiller ten minutes ago.
5) We have no way to stop the planetkiller from receiving this transmission and, since Mars is at this hypothetical time only twenty light minutes from Earth (approximately on the other side of the Sun from Earth), we've got ten minutes until the go-code activates the planetkiller.
6) This is far too little time to evacuate either Earth or Sea of Tranquility City.
7) The planetkiller is sufficiently resistant to damage that the only way to take it out is to use a nuke sufficiently powerful to not only destroy the machine but also destroy Sea of Tranquility City.
In these circumstances, it would be morally legitimate to nuke the planetkiller even though it would mean that Sea of Tranquility City, with its five million inhabitants, would also be destroyed.
Therefore, there are at least hypothetical situations in which the use of nukes in urban areas is morally legitimate.
In such cases you aren't targeting the civilian population. You're targeting something else–a military target (in this case, a planetkiller) that has sufficient value to make the huge foreseen collateral damage tolerable.
Now, I can see some hands going up in the audience, and I can hear the objection being formulated: "But wait! Nothing like this is likely to happen in real life . . . anytime soon."
Quite true.
But the point of a thought experiment is to propose a test case which is clear, regardless of how probable it is. While this situation is quite unlikely to happen any time in the foreseeable future, it does reveal the moral principles needed to show that in some imaginable situations the use of nuclear weapons in urban areas is morally permissible.
That's not to say that we're at all likely to encounter such a situation, or that we ever have or even ever will, but it is to show that such use can be legitimate in a specific kind of situation.
As a result of recent discussion of torture (which is not the subject of this post, so don't veer into that topic in the combox; I may do a post on the subject of torture soon), the question arose on The Daily Show of whether Harry Truman was a war criminal.
He should have stuck to his guns. He was right the first time.
At least, I'd say that with a few of words of clarification.
First, we have to be clear about what is meant by the term "war criminal." This term could be construed in terms of then-existing or current international law regarding war crimes. That is not my area of expertise, and I am not presently interested in whether Truman's actions violated human law.
I am interested in the question from a viewpoint of moral theology, and in that framework the question of what counts as a war criminal will not depend on whether one has violated human law but whether one has violated the fundamental moral jus in bello, or the moral law as it operates in wartime.
A person is a war criminal, as I am using the term, if he commits acts that objectively speaking violate the moral jus in bello.
2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. "The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties."
One of the things that is never licit is the direct and voluntary taking of innocent human life. John Paul II writes in Evangelium Vitae 57:
[B]y the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral.
For purposes of our present discussion . . .
A person is killed directly if that person is the target or part of the target in the act of killing. That is, the person is not killed as "collateral damage" that results from the attempt to destroy a different target.
A person is killed voluntarily if his death is foreseen as a result of the contemplated action and it is carried out anyway.
A person is innocent if he is not a combatant or a person engaged in proximate material cooperation with combat activities (e.g., military officers who, while not directly in combat, do support work for the war machine; civilians working in munitions plants).
Remote material cooperation in combat activities (e.g., as in the case of farmers who grow food that soldiers eat) is not sufficient to deprive a person of the status of "innocent civilian," for in time of war virtually everyone in society has–at least through the payment of taxes–remote material cooperation in combat activities, which would obliterate the very distinction th
at the Church is at pains to draw in its teaching regarding not killing civilians during wartime.
If one accepts these premises then it follows that Harry Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes–that is, they occurred during time of war and they violated the moral jus in bello.
This is because entire cities were targeted to produce the greatest psychological effect on the Japanese and these cities included innocent civilians who were part of the target.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a prude about the use of lethal force or about the use of atomic weapons. I can envision hypothetical scenarios in which their use would be legitimate, but a set of rigorous conditions would have to be met. Specifically, there would have to be a sufficiently high value combat-related target to justify the collateral damage incurred from the use of the Bomb and there would have to be no cost-effective alternative that would result in less collateral damage.
Such conditions were not met in the case of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities themselves were targets, including their innocent civilians.
Harry Truman was thus a war criminal in the sense I am using the term.
In saying this, I don't pass judgment on him. I don't know the state of his soul, and I have no idea whether he has the intellectual formation needed or–given the pressures of wartime–the psychological wherewithal to analyze the issue in the way just presented.
Maybe he did; maybe he didn't. That's between him and his Creator, and I'd be among the first in volunteering to pray for his soul.
But, objectively speaking, he was a war criminal in the sense described.
And I'll go you one better.
The bombings were also acts of terrorism.
While I can't point to an official definition of terrorism endorsed by the Magisterium, it seems to me that sufficient conditions are present for terrorism, morally speaking, if
1) The grave harm of innocents (as defined above) is directly and voluntarily threatened or inflicted and
2) The purpose of (1) is to generate a sense of fear (i.e., terror) in some party and
3) This fear is either an end in itself or a means to accomplishing another goal.
These conditions were present in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grave harm was inflicted on innocents to generate fear in the Japanese leadership as a means of compelling them to surrender.
Bart Stupak has finally gotten (or reacquired) a spine!
The woman on the left is a Dominican sister. She helps escort women into abortion clinics so that they can have their children killed.
