Category: Moral Theology

THIS STORY HAS TO BE ONE OF THE DUMBEST I’VE READ IN A WHILE.

EXCERPTS:

Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.

Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.

“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The statement “If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should” is fatuous on three grounds:

1) It is extraordinarily dubious that the phrase "conscious robot" can
be ontologically realized. In other words, "conscious robot" is quite
likely to fall into the same category as "square circle"–something
that’s simply not possible. You can get a robot–or anything with an
AI–to mimic the responses of a conscious being, but that’s not the
same thing as being conscious, any more than your image in a mirror or
a playback of you on video tape is a conscious being. Things like that
mimic your behavior, but they ain’t conscious. They lack the proper
substrate for consciousness.

2) The "they would want to have rights" is similarly dopey. The obvious response is "Not if they’re programmed not to!"

I know, there are some theories of how to develop artificial intelligence that wouldn’t involve us programming every single aspect of the AI’s "consciousness" but instead computationally modeling the human brain, but

a) We will still have substantive control over what we allow it to think, and

b) It may act like it wants rights but that’s not the same thing as actually wanting them. See previous remark about the phrase "conscious robot."

3) "And they probably should [have rights]" is just wrong.

Yes, I know. I saw the episode of Star Trek where they had that stupid trial that determined that Mr. Data has rights.

I’m sorry. He’s a machine. A toaster. He has advanced algorithms but no rational soul and thus is not the subject of rights.

Even if you build an AI capable of passing the Turing test, that doesn’t mean it’s conscious. It only means that it’s good at mimicing the responses of a human.

Big deal. Chatbots do that today, and with increasing skill, but they have absolutely no understanding of what they are saying because they’re not conscious. Some are already being used to trick people as part of identity theft schemes in Instant Messaging services. If you make a really sophisticated chatbot that’s capable of mimicking rights-talk then you’re one step closer to passing the Turing test, but you haven’t actually created anything conscious or deserving of rights.

There’s also a practical issue here: Humans ain’t gonna share their rights prerogatives with AI’s. The social costs of doing so would be so enormous that society will not in the foreseeable future be stupid enough to extend legal recognition of rights to entities that can be mass produced.

Witness:

“If granted full rights, states will be obligated to provide full social benefits to them including income support, housing and possibly robo-healthcare to fix the machines over time,” [the report] says.

A reader writes:

As Holy Innocents Day approaches, I take the liberty of presenting for your consideration a problem which is currently exercising me.

The morality of intentionally shooting-down passenger aircraft believed to be under the control of suicide hijackers.

Post September 11, it is assumed that if a passenger aircraft failed to respond, and appeared to be heading towards a ‘big’ target eg a city, the government would assume it had been taken over by suicide hijackers and, as a last resort, order the Air Force to shoot down the passenger aircraft to reduce the loss of innocent life at the assumed target. This seems the ‘sensible’ utilitarian things to do.

But…

Is this a Utilitarian calculus, where the laudable end (preventing the deaths of thousands of non-combatants) is gained via the impermissible means of the deaths of hundreds of non-combatants? or are the passengers’ deaths a double-effect ie a foreseen but not (primarily) intended consequence?

The prohibition against intentionally killing innocents (ie non-combatants) is absolute.

Intentional = as a means towards an end (not whether one likes or loathes the means). The definition of non-combatant is not always black and white, but the ordinary passengers of a normal civilian airliner eg those used on 9-11 are clearly protected non-combatants.

I don’t know that aircraft are automatically assumed to be under the control of hijackers simply because they fail to respond by radio and are heading toward a city. I think that they’re looked at and fighter jets are scrambled to intercept them and determine whether they are under the control of hijackers. There are a variety of ways that this can be assessed by an interceptor, such as looking into the cockpit (do the people at the controls look like real pilots? are they awake and in control of the plane or could they have just passed out?), sending hand signals to the pilots, using wing waggles and message lights, etc. I’m no expert on all the techniques that can be used, but I know that they do exist.

In some cases there might not be time to try all of these things, but my understanding is that, even post 9/11, the assumption is not automatically made that a plane has been hijacked just because it isn’t responding by radio. There can be innocent reasons for that, most notably equipment failure.

What if it turns out that the plane has been hijacked?

In that case it must be assumed, post 9/11, that the hijackers are planning to use the plane as a weapon of mass destruction (assuming that there is anything within the plane’s range that is a plausible target or target of opportunity–which will be the case almost anywhere). Prior to 9/11 it would have been assumed that the hijackers weren’t planning this, but that presumption changed as soon as the second plane slammed into the World Trade Center, and we’ll have to live with it for the foreseeable future. Even if the hijackers get on the radio and say that they just want to negotiate the release of prisoners or something, you can’t take them at their word. It could just be a ruse to let them get near their target.

So can you shoot them down, even knowing that there will be civilian lives lost in the process?

This is a situation in which a straightforward application of the law of double-effect is possible.

The law of double-effect can be formulated various ways, but let’s formulate it like this:

1) An action is morally permissible if it has two effects, one good and one bad, if and only if
2) The action itself is not morally impermissible and
3) The bad effect is not an end in itself and
4) The bad effect is not a means to the good end and
5) The good effect is proportionate to the bad and
6) There is no better, alternative solution

BTW, for folks keeping score at home, note that we just used the word "proportionate." This term or a synonym is always present in articulations of the law of double-effect, showing that proportion is a valid consideration in Catholic moral theology. Not all reference to something being proportional means that a person is committing the error of proportionalism. Proportionalism treats the proportion of good and bad as the only morally relevant criterion in a moral system. The truth is that it can be a criterion in a moral system but not the only criterion, as is the case here, where we’ve got conditions (2)-(4), which are clearly non-proportional.

So let’s look at conditions (1)-(6) and ask if they are fulfilled, or potentially fulfilled, in the case of shooting down a plane whose hijackers must be assumed to plan on using it as a weapon of mass destruction.

Is condition 1 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. Shooting down the plane will have the good effect of stopping it from being used as a WMD. It also has the bad effect of killing everyone (or virtually everyone) on board, as well as additional possible people on the ground who might get killed or injured when the plane comes out of the sky.

Is condition 2 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. It is not immoral in itself to shoot down a plane. If it were then it would be immoral for the British to shoot down Nazi bombers in World War II.

Is condition 3 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. The deaths of the people in the plane and on the ground are not an end in themselves. The object of the moral act is stopping the plane.

Is condition 4 fulfilled or fulfillable? Yes. The deaths of the passengers and those on the ground are not the means by which the plane is stopped. The plane itself is stopped, and the people’s deaths are a side-effect of that.

With the fulfillment of this condition we pass into the realm whereby the act of shooting down the plane is potentially morally justifiable. We have established that the act (physically disabling a WMD) is not wrong in itself (condition 1) and that the deaths that will ensue from this act are neither a means nor an end, meaning that they are a side-effect of the act, which is what needs to happen for the law of double-effect to apply.

There are still two conditions that need to be fulfilled, though, before you can actually fire the missle.

Is condition 5 fulfilled or fulfillable? Whether it’s fulfilled in a particular case would depend on the circumstances, but it’s certainly fulfillable in some circumstances. If there is a target within range of the plane that would result in more harm being done than the cost of the lives that would be incurred by shooting the plane down then the good to be achieved (keeping it from its target) is proportionate to the bad effect of the act of shooting it down.

Is condition 6 fulfilled or fulfillable? It’s fulfilled if you don’t have any better way to stop the plane from reaching its target than shooting a missle at it. I suspect that, much of the time at present, this is the most effective and least harmful way to keep it from its target. However, I suspect that in some circumstances, and increasingly with time, it will be possible to find other, better solutions.

For example, means might be found of denying the hijackers control of the plane without totally disabling it. This could happen if there was a way to kill or render unconscious everyone in the cockpit and still have the plane be flyable afterwards. Or devices might be built that would allow people on the ground to gain remote control of the plane and safely bring it down.

I’m not an expert in such matters, or knowledgeable about what may already be possible in these respects, but the advance of technology should allow more "surgical" and less-lethal solutions to the problem that may not be practical at the moment.

A reader writes:

What is meant by the phrases “full consent” and “sufficient reflection” as two of the three conditions necessary for something to be a mortal sin?  I have read spiritual authors who imply that it means that if you have immediate remorse after doing something gravely evil, then you obsiously did not have full consent or sufficient reflection.  I have also read authors who say that true mortal sin is very rare for committed Christians because they almost never give full consent to a grave evil, when factoring in mitigating factors like anxiety, compulsion, etc.

On the other hand, if this is true, then how can anyone ever be considered to have commited mortal sin by giving in to temptation?  Wouldn’t the temptation itself, by exerting influence, cause one not to have had full consent or sufficient reflection?  And what are the implications of this for confession?

I appreciate it if you can make this more clear.

I’ll do what I can, but I’m not sure how much light can be shed on this question. The fact is that the Church has a stronger grasp on the principles involved in this area than it has on how they are to be applied in practice. This is one reason that the Church is reluctant to judge that a person has actually committed a mortal sin. It can recognize that he has committed an objectively grave act, but it is hard to assess his personal level of culpability (i.e., his understanding of what he was doing and how freely he did it anyway).

It may be that further doctrinal development will clarify how the consent and knowledge criteria are to be concretely applied, or there may just be something intrinsically slippery and subjective about these that will always make it hard to assess these matters.

Because of the difficulty we have in assessing them, the general rule for most people (i.e., those with a lax conscience or a normal conscience) is that if you think you may have committed a mortal sin then go ahead and confess it, just to be safe.

The exception to this rule is people who have a scrupulous conscience. For them the rule is do not confess unless you are sure that you have committed a mortal sin.

Whether a person has a lax, a normal, or a scrupulous conscience is something that is best determined in consultation with his spiritual director. It is also something that may change over time in his life. (E.g., most people who are serious about their faith go through at least temporary periods of being scrupulous; most people who are sons of Adam go through at least temporary periods of being lax).

When it comes to the subjective two criteria for mortal sin–that you need adequate knowledge of the moral character of the act and that you need to give adequate consent to it–I can offer these thoughts:

1) I don’t like the way these are sometimes phrased. For example, you sometimes read about a person needing to have "complete knowledge" of the moral character of the act. I think this is misleading because it can make it sound like if you aren’t a thoroughly catechized moral theologian who has thoroughly studied a situation and has all the relevant facts at his fingertips then there is no mortal sin.

Nonsense.

Suppose I’m a poorly-catechized ordinary guy who’s out hunting in the woods and I see a shape in the forrest in front of me that I think might be a man, but it might also be a deer. I am not excused from mortal sin if I shoot at it anyway, even though I didn’t know for certain whether I was objectively shooting at a human being or not.

Same thing goes for aborting a baby if I’m not sure whether it’s a human being or not.

I thus prefer to speak in terms of "adequate knowledge" of the moral character of the act. There are a lot of things that we can know in an intuitive or incomplete way and still be mortally responsible for them. If this were not the case then St. Paul would never have been able to speak in the terms he did in Romans 1 about pagans who "do not have the Law" (i.e., the Torah) and yet are gravely responsible to God for their actions.

One of the things that can hinder adequate knowledge, though, is a lack of what the reader terms "sufficient reflection." It may be that we do know that an act is gravely wrong and yet we haven’t reflected on it sufficiently to realize this at the particular moment.

The classic example of this is having impure thoughts creep into your head. They can just kind of start, without you even realizing it, and then you catch yourself and go "No! I don’t want to be thinking about that!" The general rule here is that if you catch yourself and immediately start resisting the thoughts then you weren’t engaging in them with sufficient reflection to result in a mortal sin.

2) I similarly don’t like the formulations that one needs to give "complete consent" or "full consent" before a sin is mortal. This is also misleading and can convey to a person that you have to be going, "Yes! Yes! YES!!! I know this is mortal sin AND I LOVE IT!!!"

That’s not true either.

Suppose I’m robbing a liquor store and I’m pointing a gun at the cashier, and to keep him from identifying me to the cops I shoot him in the heart, and just before I pull the trigger I have a little twinge of remorse about what I’m doing.

The fact that I had at least somewhat mixed feelings does not let me off from having committed a mortal sin.

I thus like the phrasing that the Catechism uses on this point, saying that we need to give "deliberate consent" to the act.

Some examples of when we do not give deliberate consent include:

1) When we do something on the spur of the moment, without thinking about it first.

2) When we do it when we are asleep.

3) When we do it when we are really groggy (e.g., just going to sleep or just waking from sleep)

4) When we are intoxicated or under the influence of a substance that makes us groggy (e.g., certain allergy or other medications), though this one raises the question of how we got into a state like this and whether we committed a sin in doing so.

5) Under the influence of reason-depriving emotion (e.g., walking in on someone sleeping with your spouse; thinking that your life is in imminent danger)

6) Under the influence of strong psychological illness.

Just how strong some of these have to be for deliberate consent to cease to exist is not easy to determine. Look at grogginess or intoxication as examples. The impairment those involve exists on a spectrum, and it is not easy to say just where on the spectrum deliberate consent stops. Being just a little tired or just a little tipsy is not going to be enough. Yet at some point one reaches a state where one does not have enough possession of one’s faculties to commit a mortal sin.

Where that line is is something that’s really hard to determine, which gets us back to the practical rules mentioned earlier: If you think you may have committed a mortal sin then confess it just to be sure, unless you are scrupulous, in which case don’t confess it unless you are sure.

We may see further doctrinal development (or pastoral distortion) on this question with the progress of time. Three things in this regard strike me as particularly noteworthy:

1) The development of psychology and cognitive science is going to play a role here. The Church already acknowledges in its pastoral practice that we have learned more about the psychological pressures and conditions people can suffer from than we previously knew and that this has an impact on how we assess the personal responsibility of people in various situations. The progress of the cognitive sciences is likely to deepen this awareness, as it has been shown that some decisions seem to be made by us before conscious thought even happens.

The danger in this area is allowing psychology and cognitive science to eliminate the concept of personal responsibility. This is something that is inconsistent with the Christian faith, and up with it the Church cannot put. We’re likely to see further Magisterial interventions at some point to try to clarify the role that psychological and biological factors can and cannot play in assessing moral culpability.

2) The Church is now living in a world in which it is much more acutely aware of the existence of people of good faith who are not Catholic or even Christian. This is a development that has been underway for several centuries–beginning with the age of exploration and the discovery of vast populations who had never heard the gospel–and the Church has become much more sensitive to the role of education and cultural conditioning in forming peoples’ consciences, such that many more people than were previously thought are recognized as being innocently ignorant of the objective moral character of their acts.

The same is true of the collapse of proper catechesis in the developed world. There are now large groups of people who are objectively Christian but who–through no fault of their own–have absorbed very little of the teaching of the Christian faith, and this has to be taken into account in assessing their personal moral culpability.

3) The Church has become more optimistic about the possibility of salvation–particularly in the last century. The previous two factors–greater awareness of psychological and informational impediments to full personal responsibility–have played a role in this, but even beyond that, the Church is just more optimistic.

I’m not fully comfortable with that. I’d love to think that more people will be saved rather than less, but I have a hard time squaring that with the way Christians have traditionally regarded matters and with certain statements in the New Testament.

Nevertheless, I have to acknowledge that doctrinal development may be underway on this point.

A while back I was reading an interview with Pre-16 in which he was taking note of this greater optimism and saying that we may hope (note the word "hope") that a large majority of people today are saved and that only a few go to hell.

If that’s the case then it has implications for how we read the criteria for mortal sin. You have to say that those who are properly catechized have a greater chance of getting to heaven than those who don’t (otherwise catechesis and evangelization would harm the good of souls, and we can’t say that), so you can’t chalk the optimism up to the fact that more people don’t know their faith. Neither do we have evidence that more people suffer from psychological impediments than in the past (it’s almost certainly the opposite).

So if you want to be more optimistic than previously about salvation then you’d have to say that it’s harder than previously thought to commit mortal sin or easier than previously thought to be reconciled with God–or (more likely) both.

Like I said, I’d love this to be true, but I’m not comfortable with saying that it is. Consequently, I fall back on the principle of erring on the side of caution and assuming in my own life that the traditional understanding of these matters is correct.

Part of what we have to do in a situation like this is just do the best that we can. Follow the best advice that we can obtain, even if it is fuzzy and unsatisfying advice, and then trust the results to God.

Remember: He’s a God of Mercy. God is Love. And unless we knowingly and deliberately hold something back in confession, he forgives us. If we do the best we can in confession, that’s good enough for him.

For further reading,

HERE’S THE CATECHISM’S DISCUSSION OF THE ISSUE (INCLUDING THE ROLE THAT TEMPTATION–I.E., THE PASSIONS–CAN PLAY IN AFFECTING OUR CULPABILITY).

LINK.

A reader writes:

On last weeks Battlestar Galactica they had to wrestle with whether to commit genocide against the Cylons.  Let’s posit that the Cylons are living beings rather than just machines.  As we know they have tried to commit genocide against the humans.  Would it be just under Catholic teaching to commit genocide against the Cylons?  Might be good to get this decided before the Borg show up on our collective front door.  🙂

Uh . . . I think you mean our non-collective front doors. 🙂

That being said, if (God forbid) we were living in the Battlestar Galactica universe, I would feel compelled to argue that Cylons (at least the humanoid ones) must be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether they are living beings with rational souls–given all that we (or at least we, the viewers) know about them–and so the question of genocide becomes relevant.

Genocide is killing people because they belong to a particular genus (ancestry, race, kind). If you were to kill Cylons simply because they are Cylons then this would be genocide and it would be wrong.

However, if an entire species consists of aggressors then it is not genocide to kill all of the aggressors. The fact that they happen to constitute a species is extrinsic to the essential moral character of the act. What you are doing is eliminating aggressors, which is legitimate defense.

It may help to think of this in the small scale. Suppose one day a
flying saucer showed up above Earth and started using a mass driver to
destroy our cities. We would be morally justified in nuking the saucer
out of our sky. But suppose we discovered that the saucer had only
one occupant, and he was the last member of his race, so eliminating
him meant killing a whole species. He would not thereby possess an
exemption from legitimate defense. If he had a few more members of his
species helping him work the weapons, that wouldn’t change matters.
Neither would it if he had billions of fellow-helpers in a fleet of
saucers.

In real life, some argued during World War II that the entire population of Japan was functioning as combatants and so we could nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is not tenable, given human nature, but when it comes to the Cylons or the Borg, you really do have a species (or meta-species) that consists entirely or almost entirely of aggressors, and releasing a virus to kill the aggressors would be legitimate defense.

Of course, one would want to protect individual members of the species who are not aggressors (e.g., Athena and 7 of 9), but the mass elimination of aggressors, even when the aggressors form a single species or meta-species, would be legitimate in principle.

Please remember this during the next alien invasion.

P.S.  Be careful, though, that you aren’t dealing with aliens like the Jaffa
or the Tok’ra, who may seem like aggressors but who actually can be turned into valuable allies.

A reader writes:

I found your site through a Google search a while ago when I was in
the throes of depression, anxiety, and the terror known as
scrupulosity.  First and foremost, thank you for your advice; your
site is great and full of very helpful information.

You posted an e-mail on your website (http://www.jimmyakin.org/
2005/04/a_crown_of_thor.html) that I could totally relate to, and it
helped me realize that I am a scrupulous person.  I strive to live
life the way that God wants me to, so this brings me to the
meaningful part:

Is it a sin to shave one’s body hair? I bought a
Norelco body groomer and use it to shave my chest, back, and stomach
on occasion.  Can this be considered sinful, or is my scrupulous mind
trying to lure me into something akin to super-sensitivity?

When I
went to confession, I told my confessor that I shave that area and
asked for forgiveness (if it is indeed a sinful act).  He didn’t have
any advice, so I figured I’d ask you.  Please help.

First of all, thanks for writing, and I’m glad that my site has been helpful. Most people go through scrupulosity at various points in their lives (at least morally thoughtful people), and some have a chronic problem with it. So, you’re not alone. As always, I recommend Scrupulous Anonymous for those who need help.

Regarding your question, it had not really occurred to me that a man might want to shave his body hair. I’m afraid that when it comes to personal grooming, I’m a retrosexual (see picture top left).

I did a little thinking and research, though, and realized that body builders often shave their body hair for competitions, as do swimmers, and probably some male models and movie actors do, too. I discovered also that some men today apparently shave their body hair as part of a metrosexual personal style.

That being said, what’s the morality of it?

Well, despite the fact that we naturally grow hair, this is something that God has put within our control. It is not a sin for a man to shave his beard or his scalp–if it were then the Church would have told us this long ago, and would never have required the tonsure–and so it is not in principle a sin to shave hair elsewhere on one’s body.

I would put this in the same category as other stylistic/appearance related things: It’s a matter of cosmetics, and God has given us the authority to make cosmetic decisions regardiung our bodies. We can’t mutilate our bodies–that is, tamper with them in a way that interferes with their basic functions–but we can do cosmetic things to them like cut our hair in particular ways, have pierced ears, tattoos, and even circumcision (which was even the mark of God’s covenant with the Jewish people). None of those things harm bodily function, at least not in an impermissible way, as long as they’re done properly, and shaving one’s body hair is mild by comparison to some of these.

Of course, individuals can develop an unhealthy preoccupation with cosmetic matters, but for a scrupulous person the greater danger is becoming unhealthily preoccupied with whether or not one is unhealthily preoccupied.

The thing to do, then, is to stand up to one’s scrupulosity and not worry about it.

Do not confess this. Do not worry about it. Devote as little thought to the subject as possible. Stand up to your scrupulosity and realize that this is not a sin. Period.

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