[T]he underlying problem with this humanist impulse is that it is based upon an entirely false view of human nature—which, contrary to the humanist insistence that it is malleable, is immutable and impervious to environmental forces. Indeed, it is the only constant in politics and history. Of course, progress in scientific inquiry and in resulting human comfort is a fact of life, worth recognition and applause. But it does not change the nature of man, any more than it changes the nature of dogs or birds. “Technical progress,” writes Gray, again in Straw Dogs, “leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.”I've always argued that a claim of moral progress -- as opposed to scientific progress -- was unlikely to be a true claim. It shouldn't be surprising that we see things that look like moral progress, because civilizations that are more distant in time are like civilizations that are more distant in space: we have less in common with them because we are more widely separated. If you travel away from home, people will share your views less and less the further you go. On your return trip, you'll find people are more and more like the way you think people ought to be, because they're more and more like the people you grew up with who think more or less as you do yourself. As La Rochefoucauld said, "We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us."
Of course then we should see things that look like progress as we move from a civilization of a thousand years' distance to one of five hundred years', then two hundred years', then fifty, then ten, and then to our neighbors of last week and this afternoon. Why, those people nearer to us in time are much more like us than our more distant ancestors! They must be better people, because they agree with us.
A clear example of this problem was on display yesterday afternoon on Erick Erickson's radio program, which I was listening to while on the road. He made a claim of exactly this type about the Voting Rights Act: he made an analogy to braces for your teeth, which you need until you get them straight. We needed the VRA in 1965 because we were -- I believe I have the quote right -- "a morally corrupt people." Now that we're all straightened out, we get rid of the braces and make do with more gentle remedies to keep us on the straight and narrow.
That is of course complete nonsense. The people of 1965 weren't morally corrupt compared to us, neither the white people nor the black people of that era. They were more likely to get and stay married. They were more likely to attend church. They were far more likely to keep their families together and fulfill their duties as parents. They dressed better than we do, on average. They had more robust standards of politeness and courtesy and manners. They had no tolerance for pornography in public life.
We disagree with them about race policy -- indeed, many of us disagree with them about the existence of race as a real category. They disagreed with us and with each other vehemently, but look at what they accomplished in their disagreement. We have the world we are pleased to think of as morally superior to theirs precisely because of what they did, not because of what we did. For or against the VRA, no matter to what lengths they went to support or oppose it, they held together a civilization that wrote and enforced a hard law against itself.
It's preposterous to say that we are better than them.
Are we worse? Well, we are different. We're worse in all the ways described above, if indeed it is worse to fail to attend church, or to break up marriages, or to pursue self-interest instead of duty to family. We're worse if it's worse to dress worse, or to be rude in public over trivial matters.
I'd like to believe there is a final standard that could measure progress, but it can't be any human standard. We lack the perspective, and we are too given to self-flattery. If there is an objective standard it must be divine, as Socrates held against Protagoras, and as Aquinas held against us all. By that standard, though, we are an objectively worse people than our ancestors, and getting worse yet all the time.
If you reject that, then there is no reason to believe that we are better or worse at all. Difference is all there is.
28 comments:
In my opinion, we got *worse* (for lack of a better word) the first time the word "race" was accepted to define different color variations of skin (a natural defense mechanism like sneezing to expel histamines and irritants from the nasal passages or blinking to keep dust out of our eyes) within HUMANS. That's like saying a white Malamute is a different race of dog than a black Labrador.
I'm on the same side of your view of race as a real category. However, I know or knew several people who were alive in 1965. Whatever their position on race, they weren't morally corrupt compared to me. I suspect that generalizes, although it is possible that I'm just especially morally corrupt. :)
The Left took over the NAACP pretty easily. No matter how pure the cause, the Left can turn it to evil.
Back then they had Democrats like Byrd and his predecesors cooking things up in power and fire against blacks.
Now they have Democrats like Byrd, except they command the NAACP, black caucus, or if they lack the power to do so, merely are "allies" of such.
The Left has never had a problem consolidating and integrating members who had 180 ideological goals.
Whether one sees a given person as morally praiseworthy or morally corrupt depends not just on our values, but on the relative priority we place on those values.
Judging a whole race (or a whole sex) to be inferior is a pretty bad thing, morally. That you stayed married (or didn't tolerate porn in public) weighs in your favor, but doesn't wipe the debits on your slate clean.
I agree that human nature is the one unvarying constant in life. It doesn't change, but our incentives and outward behavior and even our beliefs about what's right or wrong or worth defending DO fluctuate along with those of the surrounding culture.
Are we "better people"? Heck, no. Are we a better culture? In some ways, absolutely yes.
In others, no way.
It has been said, I believe by William F Buckley, that Liberals are those who believe that human nature has a history.
Judging a whole race (or a whole sex) to be inferior is a pretty bad thing, morally.
This is an interesting claim, Cass.
Normally we would say that morality isn't about what you think, but how you act. Moral behavior looks something like this: You think that your co-worker is an annoying nitwit that the world would be better off without, but you treat him courteously in spite of what you think of him. You're not a bad person for thinking badly of him, but you would be if you acted on your thoughts in a way that was inconsistent with your duty.
Now it is possible to make a distinction between thinking and judging, whereby judging is the kind of act that triggers morality. But it's not clear what the distinction really is, in cases like this one. It might be something like 'it's OK to think about the question, so long as you never come to any resolution'; or it might be 'it's OK to think about the question, so long as you only come to the right resolution.' Both of these are problematic, though, both because they clash with the example above, and because the distinction between thinking and deciding (or judging) is kind of hard to keep stable. Deciding, or judging, seems like a part of thinking. It's not a case in which you have two separate things, but rather a single thing (thinking) with a part/whole relationship to a subordinate part (judging).
Now, as a counterpoint to that, we have Jesus' dictum that lusting in your heart is a sin. Lust is perhaps a kind of judgment, but only if you think that emotions are a kind of thought. That's questionable, but the orthodox position is that arriving at the thought that someone is lust-worthy is not itself a sin. The sin is in deciding to entertain and dwell upon the lust, which I suppose is a mental act.
There's also the problem that moral harm is usually harm done to someone specific. If I insult my co-worker, I'm harming a particular person, not the category of 'annoying co-worker.' If you're lusting you may be harming yourself. But you're not harming any abstract category of people, you're harming a particular soul.
I would be more comfortable saying that they made an error of thought, or of judgment, that was not itself a moral error because thinking isn't an immoral activity. That may have led to immoral acts, if we accept that God's law can serve as a standard for what is moral. (If we don't, then we just have a disagreement with our ancestors about what was moral. Our descendants might side with us or with them, and be no more right nor wrong whichever they choose -- just different.)
But the judgment itself doesn't seem to me to be the kind of thing that can be immoral. It can be wrong in the sense of being an error (which is what Sly believes, and indeed what I do: they were just wrong to think that way). It was in acting against individuals, based on that error of thought, that they were immoral.
This seems right to me because I know some older men who -- I don't doubt, because they were men of their age -- held some version of the old beliefs about race, but who nevertheless went to a lot of trouble to treat individual men they knew with respect and decency. And that seems like the real core of what morality requires of us (again, assuming the divine law holds as a standard). We're doubtless very wrong about some things, for reasons that may seem clear to later generations: I think abortion is one of those things. But what matters is how we treat the individuals we encounter, whether unborn babies, or mothers who have aborted with whom we have to discuss the perilous issue.
The idea that there's some sort of absolute firewall between thinking and acting seems naive at best. No one's self control is that strong, and a person who honestly believes another to be vastly inferior has no real reason to erect such a firewall unless that person *also* thinks there is something wrong with acting on such a belief.
And there's a huge difference between thinking one person is a nitwit and believing an entire race (or an entire sex) are nitwits. You can know another person, and judge based on what you observe.
With an entire race or sex, you are judging people you do not know based on (at best) some superficial observation of some subset of the group.
That it's an approach objectively unlikely to be accurate is not in dispute. The question is whether it's immoral to think certain thoughts.
I've given some reasons why I don't think it can be immoral to think, even if you do it badly. Here's another one: we have to be morally free to think bad thoughts as well as good ones in order to decide which one is good and which one is bad. It's by thinking through the choice, and how it interacts with our duties and responsibilities, our virtues and the consequences for others, that we are able to judge the morality of the action at all. So we must be able to think bad things in order to know they are bad things, and thus in order to elect to be good instead.
It's also not plausible to fault them for having judged 'an entire race' based on their interactions with only a few individuals, plus whatever they thought they knew from science or culture. The reason is that we all still do that -- there's no alternative to judging in this way. None of us have the capacity to judge any other way, because we cannot know all the members of the 'race' or sex. To say that they are immoral and we are not is simply to like the decision we came to, not to say that we have a better process. We're using the same process. We hope our science is better and our arguments stronger, but it's still an inductive judgment to the 'whole race' based on knowledge of only a few particulars and some scientific and cultural facts. We're doing just the same thing as them, in terms of how we think; we just come to a different result by the same process.
It would be nice if we could find a difference in process. I agree that a bad thought process is likely to lead to immoral acts, and that a good way of avoiding those immoral acts might be to correct the thought process. But I don't believe we can fault the person for thinking whatever he or she really does think: the freedom to think and to try to understand the world is one of the only absolute rights we have from nature (the other one is the right to die, which nature will guarantee you no matter what).
We can fault someone for thinking badly in the sense of pointing out that they aren't thinking well. But if their error is limited to thinking badly, I don't believe that can make them a morally bad person. Immorality is tied up with an act of will, and thinking isn't willing for example, there's a huge difference between "I think I'd like another few beers before driving home" and ordering the beers -- you can have and recognize the thought, but choose to be responsible.
The difference isn't that the good man doesn't have the thought. The virtuous man -- expressing the virtue of temperance -- is virtuous precisely because he does have the thought, but controls the action.
The RC formulation for "sin" requires both: 1) knowledge that the act is evil, and 2) doing the deed.
Seems that that formulation allows "thought" w/o "action" as harmless.
That's a useful framework, Dad29, but as I'm not Catholic it's not really dispositive in my personal evaluation of whether a thought can be immoral or not.
As Grim as already said, no less an authority than the son of God said that looking lustfully upon a woman is to commit adultery in the heart.
Being human and therefore hubristic, I would perhaps modify that a bit and say that perhaps what Christ meant was that entertaining lustful thoughts of a woman is sinful. We all have passing thoughts - what we do about them (dwell on them, distract ourselves, immediately remind ourselves of our values) not only matters but very likely has an effect our our decisions and on the way we treat others.
If dwelling on (or not resisting) thoughts is a decision - I think it is, as my response to sporadic thoughts of cheating on my husband has always been to remind myself that cheating is wrong and would hurt us both in the long run, then I'd say a person who entertains wrongful thoughts is sinning.
Just my opinion though. That's how I've lived my life. I have zero ability to force others to agree that that's a good way to live.
To the extent that they are not countered or resisted by policy, I do consider some thoughts actively sinful. Entertaining bad thoughts about my husband makes it more likely that I'll treat him badly. These thoughts are normal and even justified upon occasion, but they certainly don't help me to be the kind of wife I believe I have a duty to be.
I had another thought (watch it, Grim :)...
"Thou shalt not covet". Isn't that an example of a thought being sinful or wrong?
Again, Cass, is coveting or lusting a thought, or an emotion?
Before we explore that, though, let's notice that we can have this discussion only by assuming the truth of the divine law. All our example of clear wrongs are rooted in Christian teachings. If the SCOTUS were right that 'mere tradition' won't do for a moral standard, then we can't assume it's wrong to lust or to covet. We just may disagree about that.
But I have no problem making the assumption, and I think we ought to be able to make it as a society too. So I'll pick it back up here.
Three things are going on in these cases.
1) Emotion: you have a feeling of wanting something to which you have no right -- another person's property, or another person's wife (or husband; or even just another person who might be free to consent, but has not consented).
2) Thought: you work out both sides of the question of whether or not to act on the emotion.
3) Will: you act one way or the other.
The most obvious places to locate the sin are (1) and (3). I think the RC formulation is Aristotelian in locating the sin in (3), because Aristotle's model for virtue is one in which you definitely do think about both sides of the question (see Rhetoric 1, for example) precisely in order to be sure you understand what the consequences would be, and which side has the stronger arguments in its favor.
But Abelard wanted to locate sin in (1), that is, not in what you elected to do, but in your intention in what you did. If you were acting out of a sinful emotion, you might be sinful even if you chose to do something harmless; by the same token, if you were acting out of a pure motive, you might not be sinful even if you chose to do something harmful. (A good example: I kill a man as an act of will. Is it sinful? Depends on why I did it.)
What I'm having a problem with is the idea that (2) is a good location for sin. It seems to me that (2) requires us to think through both sides of the question. It's precisely because you think about what you're wanting that you're able to recognize it as an occasion of lust or greed. The sin isn't in coming to a judgment that you do want whatever you want; it's in willing an act that is wrong, or possibly in having a desire that is in some basic way sinful.
MikeD occasionally makes an argument that's helpful here, when we're talking about utilitarian thought experiments.
You know the one about the trolley, right? You happen to be standing by a switch; a trolley is going to crash and kill everyone unless you throw that switch. If you do, however, it will strike a baby on the alternative (but safe) track, thus killing the one innocent to save thirty or so people.
If this experiment actually came up, and a utilitarian did it, he might explain himself to the jury as follows:
1) Emotion: I had no emotions about doing this, except a desire to act rationally.
2) Thought: I ran through a rational cost/benefit analysis, and came to the conclusion that utilitarian calculus suggests is rational.
3) Will: Therefore, I pulled the switch.
Now, his motives are pure, (1), and his thought process is accurate, (2), but we might still have a problem with what he did. A jury might at least find him liable for a civil wrongful death suit, and perhaps for criminal charges related to the death of the child.
If someone else had been there and done nothing, though, we wouldn't find them guilty. (This is Mike's point.) They might have been motivated by fear or anything else blameworthy, (1); and they might have been very blameworthy in their rational thought about what to do, (2); but they formed no act of will, (3).
Thus, they aren't guilty of anything. Even if they did (2) very badly, their judgment alone isn't enough to establish an act for which they could be praised or blamed.
So in other words, God explicitly set forth a commandment against feeling an emotion?
And you have decided that breaking one of his commandments isn't wrong or sinful?
Is that what you think (or what you think that I think)? That God intended to command you not to feel an emotion? How would you undertake to obey such a command?
One possible reading of the Bible is that the commands can't be obeyed: that we must seek forgiveness because we are so sinful by nature that no obedience is possible. (That's a classically Lutheran reading, by the way, though some of the Calvinists also adopted it.) So one way you could read the problem is by saying that we're just wrong, and we'll always be wrong because we are so bent by original sin. We do feel lust, we do feel greed, and that itself is adequate for sin.
But that makes a hash of morality, because there's no possibility of morality. You can't obey the commandments. All you can do is recognize how sinful you are, and seek forgiveness. In terms of sinning, though, you're already there: so why not go on with the adultery?
After all, didn't Jesus say that having felt the emotion was just as bad as completing the act? Given that the emotion will arise, why not just shrug and act on it? You can seek forgiveness, and anyway you're already just as guilty because you feel the emotion.
I think that cannot be the right way of interpreting the text, because it places the real responsibility for both sin and forgiveness on God. On this view God made you in a certain way, and then God commanded you not to be that way. Then he forgives you, if you ask, for being what you are and breaking commandments you were made to break. That makes God a rather capricious figure, and it robs humanity of any hope of leading a genuinely moral life.
But even if this were the right view, it's a view about (1), and I'm disputing something about (2). Even if just feeling something is a sin, thinking about the fact that you're feeling it -- and what that means, and what you could do about it -- isn't one. Making a judgment that you do feel that way might be the precursor to a moral act of will -- an act of suppressing or avoiding stimuli for that feeling, for example.
But you have to come to the judgment that you do feel that way in order to act. And that requires thinking about what you feel, and coming to a judgment that you do have a feeling that you want to control with the will.
Is that what you think (or what you think that I think)? That God intended to command you not to feel an emotion? How would you undertake to obey such a command?
Don't ask me! You're the one who asked whether envy and lust were feelings or thoughts! :)
I think they're both. The feeling is natural. Dwelling on it or allowing yourself to think/fantasize about it is a decision we make every day. I have a negative thought about my boss, and I can dwell on it, expand on it, wallow in it, counter it with reminders of the times my boss has NOT behaved like a jackwagon, decide to think about possible reasons for his behavior that I hadn't considered... the possibilities are endless.
After all, didn't Jesus say that having felt the emotion was just as bad as completing the act? Given that the emotion will arise, why not just shrug and act on it? You can seek forgiveness, and anyway you're already just as guilty because you feel the emotion.
I've already said that's not what I think Jesus meant, so I don't understand this question at all.
In terms of sinning, though, you're already there: so why not go on with the adultery?
Oh come on, that's easy. We all know there are greater and lesser degrees of sin. That's the way a 5 year old thinks, because a 5 year old is too little to know better ("I'm already in trouble..."). We expect more from adults. Or at least we ought to.
Here's what the Catholic church doctrine says about internal sin:
That sin may be committed not only by outward deeds but also by the inner activity of the mind apart from any external manifestation, is plain from the precept of the Decalogue: "Thou shalt not covet", and from Christ's rebuke of the scribes and pharisees whom he likens to "whited sepulchres... full of all filthiness" (Matthew 23:27). Hence the Council of Trent (Sess. XIV, c. v), in declaring that all mortal sins must be confessed, makes special mention of those that are most secret and that violate only the last two precepts of the Decalogue, adding that they "sometimes more grievously wound the soul and are more dangerous than sins which are openly committed". Three kinds of internal sin are usually distinguished:
1. delectatio morosa, i.e. the pleasure taken in a sinful thought or imagination even without desiring it;
2. gaudium, i.e. dwelling with complacency on sins already committed; and
3. desiderium, i.e. the desire for what is sinful.
It's a measure of how far we've strayed that I see conservatives (devoutly religious ones, even!) maintain that actively indulging (3) isn't sinful all the time.
We can always rationalize away what we're not willing to submit to.
. We all know there are greater and lesser degrees of sin. That's the way a 5 year old thinks, because a 5 year old is too little to know better ("I'm already in trouble...").
But that isn't what Jesus says. Mt. 5:28 doesn't say it's a lesser sin, or even a different sin, but that you've already committed adultery. It's not 'you're already in trouble for thinking bad thoughts, so why not commit adultery?' It's that you have already committed adultery.
The Catholic teaching you're citing goes on to say (next sentence) that "An efficacious desire, i.e. one that includes the deliberate intention to realize or gratify the desire, has the same malice, mortal or venial, as the action which it has in view." So that's consistent with Jesus' words, and also with Abelard: it's not just a desire, but a desire coupled with an intention to act (either to realize or gratify the desire).
But this is quite different from what we began with, which was the question of whether you can sin by reaching an erroneous decision as a result of a thought process. It's not that you have a bad desire (you may not), or that you intend a bad action (you may not intend any action, but just be considering the question).
Purely rational activity is usually taken not to be sinful by Catholic teaching, again because it is Aristotelian in form. I still think that thinking something through is not sinful, even if you reach a wrong conclusion via some error.
That's different from deciding that something is evil, and then focusing your attention on it. However, I wonder if you don't run afoul of your third criteria if you erroneously decide that something is good, and then focus attention on the sinful (but thought-good) thing? The flawed judgment is not itself sinful -- the act of desiring or dwelling on the sinful thing is -- but it is a precondition for sin in this case.
I wish the Catholic Encyclopedia cited its sources more carefully. What they're saying is consistent with Abelard, but I don't know that he is their source. The Catholic thinkers who preceded us were very careful to lay out their thoughts on these issues, so if we knew exactly what they were drawing on here, we could find a much more insightful explanation of why they think what they say they think.
Mt. 5:28 doesn't say it's a lesser sin, or even a different sin, but that you've already committed adultery. It's not 'you're already in trouble for thinking bad thoughts, so why not commit adultery?' It's that you have already committed adultery.
...in your heart. You left out that part.
You have sinned in your heart.
Yes, but that is the only place in which you can sin. The word in the Latin is corde, which is to say both "heart" and "soul" or "mind." All sins are sins of the cor. (Especially if you follow Abelard, but even if you don't: whether it's the act of will or the intention of the act, it's a movement of the soul.)
Another thing you said earlier that I've been thinking about was this:
"You're the one who asked whether envy and lust were feelings or thoughts! :) I think they're both."
There's two ways of reading that: that "envy" and "lust" refer not to one thing but each to two separate things, which we might call envy1 and envy2. One of them is a feeling, and the other is a thought related to the feeling. I don't think that's what you mean, though.
The other way of reading it is that envy is a kind of thing that is both a feeling and a thought. Now that's a very strange claim from my perspective, because thoughts and feelings are completely separate kinds of things -- and on Aristotle's analysis, they pertain to different parts of the soul.
But I wonder if you haven't touched on something important here. One of the ways in which men and women are supposed to be different has to do with activation of the hemispheres. If these studies are correct -- and who knows, really? -- the upshot is that the female uses both hemispheres simultaneously, while male brains that have to think about how logic and emotion relate have to create a gestalt by doing the logic and then doing the emoting (i.e., by using one side of the brain and then the other, in rapid succession).
It could be that the assumption that thoughts and emotions are separate is right only for men (or only for brains that work like typically male ones). That would mean that there can't be a final answer to the question we're asking. For some, there can't be a distinction between thinking and feeling except as an abstract concept, because they experience them as the same thing; for others, it is entirely necessary to distinguish between the things practically as well as conceptually, because they really are two different things they experience.
It could be that the assumption that thoughts and emotions are separate is right only for men (or only for brains that work like typically male ones).
Where are you getting this from? Certainly not from the linked article. It doesn't say that, or even anything like that. I get that men like to say they separate logic from emotion, but I've never known a single man who did :p
Ever. I think this is just something men like to tell themselves, like women like to tell themselves they have some kind of monopoly on compassion or caring (we don't).
Perhaps that's an assumption you're making about 'what they must be doing'? I very often find myself thinking about things without emotional weight -- at least, if there is any it's so far in the background that I can't find it. On the other hand, there are occasions when I'm blindly angry about something, and my thoughts are plainly colored by it. In any case, I'm not making an assumption that 'men can do this and women can't, so men are better'; but rather, I'm wondering if there's a genuine difference that might mean that there really isn't a single answer. It might not be true that thoughts and emotions are different things: or rather, it might be true both that they are for some, and are not (except conceptually) for others.
I wish I could find the original piece; I hoped the NYT piece was on the same study, but it isn't what I was thinking of. The original was an imaging study, though I don't recall if it was fMRI or some other technology, but with photos of the brains in the study at work. In any case, that was the finding. The images were similar to this study that shows that schizophrenic women have brain images much like men in the control group; but it was a different study.
Speaking of brain function, be advised that we have no air conditioning here. So as the afternoon progresses, my ability to construct fully coherent thoughts may temporarily blur. :)
Perhaps that's an assumption you're making about 'what they must be doing'?
No, it's based on years of direct observation of my sons, my husband, my male friends, co-workers, and clients :p
I've never noted that men are any better at recognizing or setting aside their passions than women are. They are better at *ignoring* emotion (i.e., pretending it's not there) but that's really not the same thing at all.
After watching a particularly spectacular train wreck during a mgmt meeting a while back, I came home and asked my husband, "Have you see this happen in the military - guys just losing their sh**"?
And he said, "All the time". So I'm frankly mystified at the notion that men separate emotion from reason. I've never noted it in real life.
We're all capable of doing it, but it requires real effort and is more rare than common.
Well, the question that interests me isn't whether men act on emotion, but whether there are people who experience thought and emotion as separate things, and others who experience them as a unified whole. And the reason I'm interested in it is that it would be a significant challenge to an aspect of Aristotle's ethics.
So yes, men sometimes blow their stacks and lose their minds -- but I suspect if you asked them later, once they were calm, if they were thinking or feeling at the time they wouldn't say, "Why, both at once." They'd say, "Feeling." It ran away with them.
On the other hand, there are people I know for whom how they feel about a subject cannot be separated from what they think about it. I often find what I think and how I feel in conflict, but there are people who don't. I wonder if they aren't unreflective, but rather that there's something about their experience that makes it impossible for the two to come apart. They're of a piece, at least as experienced, a whole.
If that's right, then Aristotle's ethics has some problems that I hadn't thought of before. And given the role of Aristotle in formulating Catholic teachings, it may be that those teachings could be incomplete in just those places where Aristotle is.
I often find what I think and how I feel in conflict, but there are people who don't.
I call those people "emotional thinkers" :p
I wonder if they aren't unreflective, but rather that there's something about their experience that makes it impossible for the two to come apart. They're of a piece, at least as experienced, a whole.
I don't know the answer to that. But I suspect that anyone who never experiences conflict between emotion or though either experiences no emotion, or lets emotion drive the old brain housing group. Most people are conflicted at least some of the time.
Men are trained to disconnect themselves from (or discount) their own emotions. Sometimes this backfires to the point where they are unaware that they're even under the influence of emotion. We ladies aren't stigmatized for feeling certain emotions, but we do the exact same thing with stereotypically "male" emotions like anger or aggression. My Mom can't admit when she's angry. She clearly IS angry, but she disconnects and denies it.
In fairness, I have seen this in myself during deployments. I can't afford to feel sad or scared or lonely (or even resentful), so I deny these feelings or bottle them up. It's not my default response, but rather something I have done to get through certain situations.
So, I looked up the Catechism's sections on sin this morning, and it appears that the Church has a pretty clear position. We reasoned to it approximately, but there are some important differences between what we came up with and what the Church holds formally.
1) 1853: "The root of sin is in the heart of man, in his free will, according to the teaching of the Lord." (Mt: 15:19-20 is their reference here.)
2) 1859: Mortal sins require full knowledge and complete consent. A failure to know fully by unintentional ignorance mitigates (possibly completely) what would otherwise be sinful. However, feigned ignorance makes worse the sin.
3) 1860: "The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary character of the offense," but 1871, "sin is an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law." (Citations here to both Augustine and Aquinas.)
Thus there is a distinction being made between passions and desires. They are probably following the Greek root for passion, pathos, which denotes something that happen to us. Desire has a Latin root -- in fact we've already seen it, in your list of internal sins. I gather they mean to distinguish the active choice of wishing for or choosing to desire from the passion, which arises without choice and acts upon you (and which, apparently, can be mitigating).
4) 1872: "Sin is an act contrary to reason."
So I think, in terms of our first discussion, that the process of reasoning can't itself be sinful. Insofar as we make a correct judgment, we have hope of avoiding sins because we are able to correctly see what is in accord with reason, and sin is an act contrary to reason.
But insofar as we make an erroneous judgment honestly, though we may sin out of it, unintentional ignorance is a mitigating factor (indeed the Catechism says it can sometimes mitigate completely, as mortal sins must be chosen in full knowledge and with complete consent). So a wrongful judgment arrived at honestly is not sinful, but in fact can mitigate sin.
However, a wrongful judgment arrived at dishonestly -- willful ignorance, 'you should have known!' kind of stuff -- worsens sins. This is because your reason really is telling you what's right, and you're choosing not only to do the wrong thing, but to refuse your own reason.
I've known all sorts of people who have reasoned themselves into sin.
Curious language, that.
Me too, Eric. Man is a rationalizing animal, not a rational one.
We're very good at making up completely logical-sounding reasons for doing the wrong thing.
Post a Comment