Public Discourse: Marc Thiessen, Double Effect, and the Torturer’s Dilemma by Christopher O. Tollefsen, February 26, 2010

Both Marc Thiessen and his critics have misunderstood an important moral distinction on the question of torture.

"Aristotelian Liberals"

A FB group:

Aristotelian Liberalism is a burgeoning tradition in political philosophy, an Aristotelian form of classical liberalism or libertarianism.

Aristotelian Liberalism synthesizes the best features of Aristotelian ethical and political thought and liberal political and economic thought. Aristotelian Liberals argue that a neo-Aristotelian philosophy not only provides liberalism with a sounder foundation, it also provides liberalism with the resources to answer traditional left-liberal, communitarian, and conservative challenges by avoiding some Enlightenment pitfalls that have plagued it since its inception: atomism, an a-historical and a-contextual view of human nature, license, excessive normative neutrality, the impoverishment of ethics and the trivialization of rights.

Aristotelian Liberalism attempts to transcend the liberal/communitarian debate by embracing liberalism's commitment to pluralism, diversity, and the free market while grounding politics in a eudaimonistic theory of virtue ethics and natural rights. Aristotelian Liberalism avoids the specters that continue to plague communitarianism – paternalism and totalitarianism – and the traditional communitarian and conservative criticisms of liberalism – atomism and license – while promoting freedom in community and human flourishing.

Aristotelian Liberalism holds that man's natural end is a life of eudaimonia (flourishing); that virtue is constitutive of one's own flourishing but must be freely chosen to count as such; that man is a profoundly social being, but nevertheless that individuals are ends-in-themselves and not means to the ends of others; that the right to liberty is a metanormative ethical principle necessary for protecting the possibility of all forms of human flourishing and an interpersonal ethical principle such that rights-respecting behavior is constitutive of one's own eudaimonia. Thus, unlike most Enlightenment versions of liberalism, Aristotelian Liberalism is not solely concerned with rights or political justice narrowly conceived. It is also important to identify ethical and cultural institutions and principles necessary for bringing about and maintaining a free and flourishing society.

Hence, Aristotelian Liberalism embraces free markets and free enterprise but not statist capitalism; it is severely critical of the state. There is still an excessive focus on the State and what it can and should do for us. Our focus, rather, needs to return to a notion of politics as discourse and deliberation between equals in joint pursuit of eudaimonia and to what we as members of society can and should do for ourselves and each other. True immanent politics presupposes liberty. Thus, Aristotelian Liberalism seeks to shift the locus of politics from the state to civil society. The market is not the whole of society, however; nor is politics - rather, both are aspects of society while the state is an antisocial institution.

Some prominent Aristotelian liberals are:
Douglas Rasmussen (http://new.stjohns.edu/academics/graduate/liberalarts/departments/philosophy/faculty/bi_phi_rasmussend.sju)

Douglas Den Uyl, VP of Educational Programs at Liberty Fund (http://www.libertyfund.org/)

Roderick Long (http://www.praxeology.net/)

Chris Matthew Sciabarra (http://www.dialecticsandliberty.com/)

Fred D. Miller, Jr. (http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/phil/faculty/miller/miller.html)

Ayn Rand (http://www.objectivistcenter.net/)

Fellow Travelers:
Murray Rothbard (http://www.mises.org/content/mnr.asp)

For your convenience, edification and reading/viewing pleasure, I have created an Aristotelian Liberal Amazon.com Store (http://astore.amazon.com/geofallaplau-20), which includes books on this burgeoning political philosophy, on market anarchism and the Austrian school of economics, and liberty-themed fiction - especially fantasy and science fiction (books and dvds).

Edward Feser on Fr. Pinckaers

From the comments to his latest:

Hello all,

Bwall and Anon 1, I agree that Pinckaers intends to be fair-minded and doesn't indulge in the knee-jerk Neo-Scholastic bashing others do. But I still think he's just wrong to pit the manualists' understanding of obligation against the other themes mentioned -- as if what existed was an incompatibility, as opposed to a mere difference of emphasis -- and gravely wrong to insinuate that the manualists' position somehow presupposes Ockhamism (especially given that he concedes, as of course he must, that they were not nominalists). In general, I am utterly opposed to the mentality that holds that Catholic thought -- here or elsewhere -- somehow got way off track between Trent and Vatican II, a mentality which you find in writers like Pinckaers no less than in dissenters like Curran and Co. And this sort of mindset has, unfortunately, contributed to a contemporary tendency of even some conservative Catholic thinkers to want to distance themselves somewhat from the manualists. This nonsense has got to stop.

As Bruce says, though, the mentality is to be found in surprising places, and I think you're right, Bruce, to see a tendency toward Platonism as part of the problem, at least among conservatives who evince hostility to Aristotelianism, Thomism, Neo-Scholasticism, etc. In conservative Catholic circles, this "Platonic" mentality manifests itself in a tendency to pit Augustinianism and the Church Fathers in general against the period between Trent and Vatican II. This is standard nouvelle theologie shtick, for example, which one finds in de Lubac, Balthasar, et al.

Part of the motivation here is ecumenical -- a desire to minimize Catholic-Protestant differences. Part of it is a tendency toward mysticism and a temperamental dislike of the rigor and systematic quality of Scholastic thinking. And part of it reflects, I think, a moral rigorism of its own -- a dislike of the realistic and down-to-earth quality of the manualists' approach to ethics, and an insistence on something more high-falutin' and touchy-feely.

This is why in sexual morality, for example, these folks often fling around the same sorts of caricaures of Neo-Scholasticism that theological liberals do -- "All those horrible manualists cared about is what body part goes where" blah blah blah -- and prefer to talk instead about a communion of persons, "one flesh union" etc. That's all fine as far as it goes, but sure enough, the moment they have to explain why exactly this rules out homosexual acts, marital sodomy, and the like, they are themselves back to talking about... why this body part is supposed to go here rather than there etc. But they do so in a way that is totally unconvincing to those who don't already agree with them, because they've chucked out the A-T metaphysics that makes the appeal to natural function intelligible. The whole thing is farcical.

In other ways too I think the decision of many Catholic conservatives after Vatican II to abandon the Neo-Scholastic tradition has been rather obviously a disaster. The disappearance of general apologetics is only one example: In response to the militant secularism that has only increased since Vatican II (all the "dialogue" with "modern man" notwithstanding), too many conservative Catholics have nothing to say except that Christianity is a better way of upholding "the digity of the human person" -- which, of course, secularists don't buy for a moment, because they disagree in the first place about what counts as upholding the dignity of the human person. To settle that question requires getting into the metaphysics of human nature, the metaphysics of the good, and all the other stuff the Neo-Scholastics did so well and their successors do so badly when they do it at all. There is also the collapse of catechesis and the disappearance of a general understanding among the faithful of what Catholic theology teaches and how it all fits together into a rational system -- something R. R. Reno lamented in a recent First Things piece, and traced to the abandonment of Neo-Scholasticism.

Is it merely a difference in emphasis? Or is obligation/law taken to be the foundational principle for the science, around which everything else is "organized"? Which offers a better moral theology, the Summa Theologiae or the manuals?

Edward Feser, Scholastic’s Bookshelf, Part III

Zenit: On St. Bonaventure
"Proposing This Theme I Feel a Certain Nostalgia"

St. Thomas Aquinas must be coming up soon; perhaps next week?

Francesco Sisci, A new battle for Confucius

A new battle for Confucius By Francesco Sisci (via the Western Confucian)

A new translation of Mozi's corpus has been made available by the Chinese University Press:
The Mozi: A Complete Translation by Ian Johnston (Translator). The Chinese University Press (December 15, 2009). ISBN-10: 9629962705. Price US$85, 1,032 pages.

It looks like the same translation is being published by Columbia University Press here in the States. Too bad it's not bilingual.

Mr. Sisci writes:

Furthermore, Mozi's doctrine of "universal love" sounded like the idea of Christian love propagated in the 17th century, as well as like the drive to egalitarianism by the communists in the 20th century.

The Confucianis criticized the Mohists for obliterating social relations -- if this charge is accurate (I haven't read the complete Mohist corpus, only selections), then Mozi and his followers are more like liberals than Christians. The Christian tradition has a doctrine of universal love (which is not identical with Confucian ren, given that the object of charity is primarily God), but it also recognizes that there is an order in charity. Moreover, we have different duties to people, according to their relation to us, or what they have done for us. Hence, the allied virtues to justice. I do not recall what the Mohist account of justice is, and whether they recognize these duties. It's something I'll have to research, if I obtain a copy of the complete corpus.

He also contrasts Mozi with Sunzi:

Importantly, the book provides a basis to reconsider an important aspect of Chinese traditional thinking - military strategy. Johnston is the first person to provide both a credible Chinese textual reconstruction and a translation of Mozi's military chapters. Mozi theorized about defensive wars and his followers, the Mohists, were renowned tacticians who helped organize the defense of small states being attacked by larger ones.

This was at a time when small states were being gobbled up by large ones competing for dominance in the Chinese central plain. The aggressive theories of famous strategist Sunzi helped conceive those and many other future wars of attack, whereas Mozi argued against aggressive wars.

It is very likely that, as popularly described in the unsuccessful 2006 Chinese-Japanese movie production Mo Gong, in the Third century BC Mohist militants aided small states to withstand attacks and then tried to apply radical political and social reforms that went against the interests of the local elites.

Johnston's translation of Mozi could cast new light on Sunzi's theories and Chinese strategic thinking. It's possible that gong, a word commonly understood as aggressive war, at the time meant more precisely war by a large force against a small one, as Lu Xiang, a modern student of Sunzi argues in a forthcoming essay. This kind of war is what Sunzi preferred and Mozi opposed.

Sunzi does not appear to be in favor of unjust wars of aggression, as he does discuss the moral component of victory. Teachers of maneuver warfare and 3GW claim Sunzi as one of their own; numbers may be important if one is one the attack, so it is not clear to me that this is a justification of conquest of smaller polities by larger polities. Did Mozi advocate a purely reactive form of warfare? If so, he would seem to be a bit too idealistic, to the point of causing defeat for anyone who followed his teachings. I remember reading one issue of Lone Wolf and Cub in which the protagonist tells a dying samurai who was disgraced because he did not stay with his lord's palaquin but chose instead to go on the offensive against assassins that attack and defense are the same, since they have the same object.

(How deep is Mr. Sisci's understanding of contemporary Chinese society and classical Chinese culture? He seems to be an apologist for the present government and the Patriotic Associations.)

I'd like to read up on Mohist logic. (Indian logic too.)

Related links:
墨子
Mozi - Chinese Text Project
SEP
Mozi and Confucianism

The Meaning of Life

At the reception for xiao Jimmy's wedding one of his high school friends asked for an update on my life, and remembered I had been studying philosophy. He jokingly asked, "What's the meaning of life." That is the question Americans associate with philosophy, I suppose. This question can be understood in two ways: an existential question that aims at knowing what the purpose or end of human living is, and thus it relates to ethics. Or a more "general" question that pertains to metaphysics -- why do things exist. (Of course, this is a question which does have import for how we live.) The short and simple answer for both questions is God. It might have been a good opportunity to talk about God being our ultimate end. But would this have been well-received, even if I were to approach as a philosopher rather than as a Christian? Would it have been prudent to talk about our Lord then? I regret not taking the conversation to a more serious level.

The FSSP is running a series of articles originally written by Dr. Dennis McInerny for their letter.

Qui non est mecum, contra me est; et, qui non congregat mecum, spargit.

Matthew 12:30

Yesterday at school I was struck by the absence of God during the school day -- that is, He is not mentioned at all. It is what you would expect at an American public school, but how can this be acceptable to any right-thinking person of good will? The other day a student said, "Oh my God," and I told him not to say that. Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to explain to him way, that we should not take His name in vain; we should instead reverence it. (I wouldn't want to give him the impression that being a secularist or anti-theist is the norm.)

At any rate, man can come to know that he has a duty to pay due homage to God as Creator of the universe, to perform the acts proper to the virtue of religio. This is a precept of the Natural Law, even if it cannot be fulfilled perfectly without from grace and charity. Our public schools, in ignoring God and refusing to discuss Him (as opposed to teaching about "religions"), thereby belittle His importance and foster the lack of proper respect. God has no place in the daily life of our public schools, and students are habituated accordingly -- much potential spiritual growth for beginners is hampered with God is effectively excluded for half of the day (7 or 8 hours out of the 16 during which we are awake). If we are already living as if God is not important to us, then how can we take His commandments seriously when we are confronted with severe temptation?

False religions, those which teach polytheism or atheism or monism, may be tolerated, but they should never have been granted equal status with Christianity. The reaction against Christianity entails a rejection of God (or right monotheism). One cannot preserve the latter in a formerly Christian society.

Discussion of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware's lecture at CUA at Eirenikon.

What’s black and white and misread all over? by Edward Feser

Desires Natural and Unnatural: A Reply to Paul Griffiths by R. J. Snell

James Chastek, The basis of Aristotle’s logic

Aristotle’s whole system of logic starts from two premises:

Logic is the direction of the act of reason

The direction of reason is from what is more universal in predication to what is less so.

Aristotle says the major premise everywhere, and at the slightest provocation; the minor is from St. Thomas, and Aristotle simply assumes it everywhere. The conclusion is that logic is the right order from what is more universal to what is less so. This is why Aristotle starts his logic with a study of most universal things (the Categories) Then shows all the ways that one universal thing can relate to another (On Interpretation) and then goes on to speak of arguments as the motion from what is major (or most universal) to what is minor (least universal) through a term of middle universality. The middle only has a middle universality when we speak in a way that follows what is called “the first figure syllogism” and so Aristotle rightly insists that this is the pre-eminent tool for ordering reason, and that all other tools of reasoning are correct so far as they can be reduced to it. Aristotle insists that this is even true of non-categorical reasoning, as Yvan Pellitier proves here (download “PelletierStrategy.pdf”). This is not to say it is the only way that reason can go from one thign to another: there is an ocean of dialectical tools that are used to bring us to the point where we can actually form a valid universal.

We more tend to look at terms like checkers that can be arranged in certain correct ways, and in doing so we can reach conclusions that cannot be reached by the mere categorical method. This is all fine, but it is not logic in the same sense of the term, and it is not clear how we can make one thing called logic relate to the other thing called logic.

Burke Lecture: Stanley Martin Hauerwas

A blog dedicated to him.

Faith Fights Back: A Conversation with Stanley Hauerwas

Dr. Gilbert gives a response concerning Orthodox treatments of the papacy:

Veritas’s comment, that Orthodox views of the papacy run the gamut, is a fair assessment: there is the “papal antichrist” literature, which you can find if you go to almost any monastic bookseller in Greece and, I would assume, in countries like Russia and Serbia as well,* and, at the other extreme, there are people like Soloviev, who more or less accept the pope as being what he says he is, or, at the very least, who think the slogan “first among equals” is not a terribly precise way of describing the role the Bishop of Rome played in the early Church and who would like to see to see communion reestablished on something like the terms that obtained during the first millennium; I myself would fall into this last-named category. Clément’s book, mentioned by Veritas, also takes this view and is worth reading (although there are things in his book that I would criticize, especially his postscript). But I would not go so far as to say, with Veritas, that there is no mainstream Orthodox view. There is, among Orthodox, a common rejection of the claim of the First Vatican Council that the doctrinal pronouncements of the Bishop of Rome are binding ex sese, non ex consensu ecclesiae, that is, of themselves, not from the consent of the Church. Most Orthodox fear that such a doctrine gives the Bishop of Rome a blank check on which he can write whatever he pleases. And I confess that I share that worry, although I recognize that the Second Vatican Council sought to reaffirm the role of the bishop and of bishops’ conferences, and I also recognize that, in the absence of a final dogmatic court of appeal, like that of the Pope, there is a great danger of the Church being unable to speak with one common, authoritative voice on matters of pressing importance.

The first book that came to mind when you raised the question of a “mainstream” Orthodox understanding of the papacy is one of the books Veritas has mentioned, The Primacy of Peter. It is a book I own, but my copy of it does not seem to be immediately at hand; what I remember of it is that it has historical essays by Meyendorff and Schmemann (with Meyendorff, in particular, stating some of the Byzantine responses to the Roman claims), and gives an assessment of the role of what St. Ignatius of Antioch calls “the Church that presides in love” from the standpoint of eucharistic ecclesiology; if I’m not mistaken, there is an essay in the volume by Afanassiev with that title. Granted, not all Orthodox are quite sure what “eucharistic ecclesiology” means, and I probably should count myself among the number of the not-so-sure: when authors affirm that “the eucharist makes the Church” and that the bishop is ontologically defined by his role as president of the eucharistic synaxis, or when they say that the word “catholic” in the early Church referred simply and exclusively to the “fulness” of the faith and not to its “universality” in terms of geographical extent, my mind grows dizzy from the metaphysical heights, and I recognize that I am in the presence of argumentation of such exquisite, self-referential completeness that any attempt to verify or question it by examination of evidence would be pointless. I do not mean to belittle these theses; I only mean to express my concern that, when stated as ideological premises, immune to historical verification, they make the attempt to understand the role exercised by the bishop of Rome in the early Church very difficult.

Some other Orthodox books I might mention are the following:

Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy (Crestwood, NY, 1994). This is a general history of the Church between 1071 and 1453 A.D., but, as the title implies, much of it is in fact taken up with the papal claims and the history of their assertion over the Eastern Church. Papadakis is a writer with whom I have some disagreement, particularly over his assessment of John Bekkos as a theologian; but he makes some valid points in this book; for instance, he notes that the medieval papacy’s policy of demanding personal declarations of submission from Greek bishops was not calculated to reassure the Greek Church that its traditional beliefs and practices, its autonomous ecclesiastical life, would be respected. And those medieval Greek writers who complained that Rome was acting towards their church, not like a loving mother towards a daughter, but like an angry master towards an abject slave, had some genuine grounds for their complaint. Still, Papadakis’s tone in this book, while not as unrelentingly strident as in his book on Gregory of Cyprus, suggests that he has an axe to grind. He seldom condescends to acknowledge that the medieval papacy, or the Crusaders, did some actual good.

Michael Whelton, Two Paths: Papal Monarchy – Collegial Tradition. Rome’s Claims of Papal Supremacy in the Light of Orthodox Christian Teaching (Salisbury, MA: Regina Orthodox Press, 1998). Written by a Catholic convert to Orthodoxy. It is a popular presentation, a work of Orthodox apologetics, and in that sense it probably could be called mainstream.

Methodios Fouyas, Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; reprinted, Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1984). Not a study of the papacy as such, but a general comparison of the three churches. He tends to see greater affinities between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism than between Orthodoxy and Catholicism; this was, of course, written before some of the more notable modern developments in Anglican practice had taken place.

Philip Sherrard, Church, Papacy and Schism: A Theological Enquiry (London: SPCK, 1978). The author argues that there are deep theological differences between “the Greek East and the Latin West” (to cite the title of another of his books), which underlie the differing ecclesiologies. The book is worth reading, whether one agrees with the author or not. On p. 14, he refers to the point about “catholicity” that I mentioned briefly above, and gives a succinct and eloquent statement of this point of view:

“In its original and more profound sense, the word catholic when applied to the Church does not have this quantitative and geographical connotation, or at least it has it only in a secondary and derivative manner. Essentially, the Church is not catholic in relation to topography or space, or in relation to the fact that it embraces a multitude of local communities within a wider collectivity. Catholicity is not a collective term. What it essentially denotes is the interior integrity and spiritual plenitude of the Church. It has, that is to say, a strictly qualitative sense. It denotes fullness, completeness, what is essential rather than what is accidental. It has consequently, like the Church itself, trinitarian and christological roots. The Church is catholic because it lives in Christ. It is the expression of the fullness, the completeness or plenitude of the truth which is Christ. The catholicity of its head—Christ—is the principle of the catholicity of the Church as the body of Christ; and it is precisely its capacity to manifest divine life and truth in their fullness to all creatures that constitutes the catholicity of the Church.”

Those are the Orthodox treatments of the papacy that come to mind. I hope you find this note helpful.

Peter

* To give a brief specimen of this: one of the “famous sayings of Fr. Justin Popovitch” runs as follows: “The three great sins of humanity are the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the treason of Judas, and papism.” This is translated from the dedication page of Métropolite Michel Laroche, La papauté orthodoxe: Les origines historiqes du papisme du Patriarcat de Constantiople et de sa guerre ecclésiologique avec le Patriarcat de Moscou (Paris: Éditions Présence, 2004). Note that, in Laroche’s book, the word “papism” serves to designate an ecclesiastical tendency of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. One wonders: would Constantinople and Moscow still be in communion with each other, if they did not share the same polemics against the West in general, and against Rome in particular?

Veritas had recommended the following: (1) Olivier Clement, You Are Peter: An Orthodox Theologian’s Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003); (2) The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, ed. John Meyendorff (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992); and (3) Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present (Collegville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996).

Eirenikon: Patriarchal and Synodal Encyclical On the Sunday of Orthodoxy

Do the Orthodox have ecclesiastical or canonical problems with religious orders being placed under the direct jurisdiction of the pope?

James Chastek: Garrigou Lagrange-on discussing the Trinity

Insight Scoop: "In Memory of Ralph McInerny" by Charles E. Rice

Byzantine, Texas: Another report from the Met. Kallistos lecture tour

An important aspect of how authority is practiced in the Church, both in the East and the West, is the concept of “protos”, which means “first”. The Church is hierarchical, and therefore in every grouping in the Church, there must be a “protos”. For example, the bishop is the “protos” of his diocese. The Patriarch is “protos” among the bishops in his patriarchy. The pope is “protos” among all the bishops in the universal Church. Both Catholics and Orthodox accept this structure. But what does it mean to be “protos”? How is that role exercised? Metropolitan Kallistos pointed out Apostolic Canon 34 as a model for the role of “protos” in the Church. Apostolic Canon 34 states,

The bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them and account him as their head, and do nothing of consequence without his consent…but neither let him (who is head) do anything without the consent of all.

It should be obvious that the problem arises from the second part of that Canon. In fact, this appears to be in direct conflict with Vatican I, which states that “definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable”. But Metropolitan Kallistos is hopeful that this Canon will be a way in which the Church can find a mutually agreeable means for the pope to practice universal primacy.

(Originally posted at the blog of Eric Sammons.)