Though they are not alone, the most obvious culprits are some of my fellow Roman Catholics. It is pretty serious when a Catholic says, “I am personally opposed to same-sex unions; nonetheless, I will not only support such unions, but I will sponsor the bill to make it happen.” Most people would automatically, and reasonably, come to the conclusion that such a person is not being honest: he is neither personally opposed, nor following the faith he professes. For this person, “personally opposed” must have a very peculiar meaning, unshared by most of the population.

Such an accusation rankles the fervent “personally opposed” devotee, because he sincerely believes that his is the proper course of action. His argument about marriage, for example, tends to look something like this: Civil marriage is completely different from religious marriage. If a religion thinks it is proper to keep marriage between one man and one woman, that is no concern of civil authorities. Similarly, religion has no authority to say what civil marriage is. Since it is a purely civil affair, it must be ruled by purely civil laws, especially the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. The push for same-sex unions and polygamy, then, is just a case of providing equal rights.

Let us leave aside the question of whether these statements accurately reflect the faith tradition in which our “personally opposed” friend claims membership. (Catholic teaching, for example, holds quite the opposite: that as a natural institution, marriage is the union of one man and one woman.) If you are truly opposed, yet you truly believe that the Constitution will not permit your position to be enshrined in law, then your task is to change the law—including, if necessary, the Constitution—to reflect what you believe to be the truth for human beings and the best for society. At the very least, your duty is to not exacerbate the situation.

Yet our “personally opposed” congregant operates according to a strange moral arithmetic in which his professed moral stance is canceled out by current law, to the point that he is not even permitted to try to change the law. These people are then left to follow a lesser law as though it is an absolute. It is as though they feel the need to do something, and since their own vision of the good has been stymied, they start working to forward someone else’s vision of the good.

What could so definitively stop their acting on their own asserted beliefs, according to their own conscience, that they are compelled to act according to someone else’s conscience? For, if we take them at their word, that is what they are doing. The claim seems to be that no one who believes something to be right or wrong based on a faith-claim or based on someone else’s authority may act and vote according to his or her own conscience. One person put it to me this way: “Please spare me the lecture about natural law. We live in a multi-faith democracy and not a theocracy. Catholics do not, under our system of government, get to dictate what kind of marriage non-Catholics can have.”

This is a strange argument, for several reasons.

First and most obvious, this argument is utterly at odds with the long-standing tradition in this nation of opposition to the status quo (e.g., to slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to war, to the death penalty, to immigration or economic policy), grounded precisely on religious moral principles.

Second, faith is not opposed to reason. Many people are nervous about any claim rooted in faith, because they take faith to be something opposed to reason. It is not. Faith is an act of trust in the sobriety and authority of the person who bears witness to certain news. This puts our “personally opposed, but …” acolytes in an uncomfortable position, for there is no one who does not believe in many things based on the authority and testimony of others. We cannot possibly go about rediscovering every claim in science, history, and philosophy. We all accept many things on testimony and authority, without direct and independent evidence. We cannot thereby rule out such testimony and authority when it comes to making public policy.

Third, the natural law is not, in itself, a matter of faith. It has been with us in one form or another since before Plato and Aristotle. It is the basis for the entire Anglo-American legal system (although many practitioners within that system have been influenced by legal positivism). Admittedly, many faith traditions accept some version of natural law. Admittedly, many of the faithful accept the natural law based on the authority of others. But that does not mean that the natural law is itself an article of faith, since many accept it without any reference to faith.

Fourth, the argument abuses the notion of theocracy. The Founding Fathers took certain truths to be not faith-based but self-evident, available to any reasoning person—including the claim that we are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator. They also believed, by and large, that a religious citizenry is the only possible grounding for a working self-government. If this is theocracy, then the United States has been a theocracy since its inception, and working toward a solution according to faith-based principles of right and wrong is not only clearly constitutional, but also expected of every caring citizen. If, on the other hand, the Founding Fathers did not found a theocracy, then the Constitution clearly affords us the wherewithal to accommodate both religious freedom and a robust application of our moral beliefs to the law.

Furthermore, in our system, members of any faith could tell everyone what marriage is—if they have the votes. What they certainly would not do is tell others what to believe or how to worship.Freedom of conscience and of worship is a fundamental human right that is part of the truth about the human person and preexists the law, and the law must recognize and defend that freedom in order to have any claim to legitimacy. However, when it comes not to thoughts and beliefs but to human actions with public consequences, law must have something to say, and therefore the people who are ruled by the law must have something to say, as well, no matter what their faith tradition or lack thereof. In that regard, a majority of Americans, when given the opportunity to vote, demonstrates a belief that there is a truth about the human person and human marriage that preexists human law and that human law must respect, if it is to be fully justified.

There are other possible interpretations of “personally opposed” that some might think could justify the “but.” We might remember that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in its Goodridge decision (2003) accepting same-sex “marriage,” denied its own long-established precedent, quoting the United States Supreme Court’s Casey decision (1992) in support of its conclusion that morality could no longer be considered a rational ground for law. In that ruling, we find this passage: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”

At first glance, this passage is merely a defense of freedom of thought, but given its context as a defense of the abortion regime, it is so much more. Taken to its logical conclusion, it affirms that, to be a person, one has to be able to decide for oneself what is important and then act on it. Just having the right to decide for myself who counts as a person is not enough; I must be able then to kill those I find do not measure up, lest I have no liberty, and thus no personhood. In the marriage context, it apparently means that, whatever I believe or want marriage to be, it can be that, and the law is powerless against my desires.

This is a passage that goes beyond utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill and his followers held that human beings are only fulfilled in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and that the way to maximize pleasure is to allow as much liberty as practical so that people may pursue these ends. But even Mill thought that one’s right to swing one’s own arm ended at someone else’s nose. There are no such brakes on one’s actions in the “heart of liberty” passage. Taken literally, the passage demands that the law never forbid an action if there is any disagreement about its justification. Since there will always be someone who disagrees, there really can never be laws about anything. In such a world, the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful.

Those in favor of such an expansive version of liberty, and thus an expansive version of marriage and sexuality, seem to recognize this fact and use it to their advantage over those who think that civil law and ordered liberty are grounded in some truth about human beings and moral law. This latter group continues to believe that there are such things as human rights that preexist the civil law, including rights to freedom of conscience and worship. Thus, they tend to respect these rights in those with whom they disagree—that is, they tend to a certain level of tolerance.

The former group, while ostensibly extolling tolerance, cannot tolerate that which threatens their own practices of liberty, including points of view that oppose their own. Such thoughts become the crime of hate speech. Many across the globe, and an increasing number in this country, are facing the wrath of these lovers of pure liberty (for themselves).

Under such a regime, only the conscience of one side can be tolerated. All opposing consciences must be silenced. Today, the intolerant have not simply silenced a surprising number of opposing consciences; they have convinced those silenced people to join with them, and rejoice at the opportunity. As we have shown, such people are either dishonest about their opposition or mightily confused. But make no mistake: when the apostles of the “heart of liberty” come to full power, the “but” is not going to save you if you are “personally opposed.”

Stephen J. Heaney is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, MN.

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O’Brien gives us a “pithy summary” of Thomas Aquinas’s ethics by quoting from the Summa Contra Gentiles: “We do not offend God unless we act contrary to our own nature.” That is indeed a good summary of much contemporary Thomistic ethics, according to which we consult our nature for the content of moral norms, and God’s commands for the obligatory force of those norms. And it is a rare point of disagreement between O’Brien and myself, since I agree with him on many things: that there would be no morality without God; that part of morality involves giving God what is due to Him; that in the absence of divine revelation it would be difficult to adhere to absolute moral norms in situations of emergency; that God has legitimate authority; and that His commands “make perspicuous” what we ought and ought not to do.

But we get a better picture of Aquinas’s ethics if we accurately quote Thomas, who writes that we do not offend God “unless we act contrary to our own good,” (nisi ex eo quod contra nostrum bonum agimus). This situates ethics squarely on a foundation of human good, rather than human nature, which is a good thing, since human goods give reasons for action in a way that “conformity with human nature” does not. It becomes intelligible why absolutely impermissible actions are never to be done, since in themselves (i.e., apart from their consequences) such actions are intended to do nothing but damage, destroy, or thwart basic goods, basic aspects of human well-being.

How are those goods related to our final end? It is difficult to see how if one takes our natural end as human beings to be the beatific vision. Better, in my view, is the idea that our natural end is life in communion with all persons, enjoying and pursuing all the goods of persons. We know by revelation that this end will be realized in the Kingdom of Heaven in a way it can never be on earth; but that end provides a focal point for human willing even now: willing that is compatible with such a final end is upright, but willing that is not so compatible is deficient, disordered.

Here we see a great difference between my account of absolutes and Miller’s. Miller says rightly that what is important is the ordering of action to the final end; but he sees that order as largely causal: “claims that certain actions are always wrong are based on claims about the causal structure of the world—claims that certain causes will not have certain effects, regardless of circumstances.”

This sets up the difficulty of establishing what effects we are responsible for, and which consequences of acts are relevant. Miller settles for those effects that are ours, relatively proximate, and, as regards the particular acts in question, ut in pluribus—i.e., for the most part, knowing that effects oft go astray.

But I think that the order that matters for morality is the order of willing, not the order of natural causality. Morality is a matter of the heart, of willing in accordance with our final end. The norm for such willing could be put thus: will only in a way that is in accordance with integral personal fulfillment. An agent who only willed in accordance with this norm would will, in fact, the natural end of man; and would be, in so willing, suited for that end, were that end to be realized. One who wills contrary to human goods, by contrast, unfits himself for that end, a circumstance certainly to be repented of.

So my account of moral absolutes is not that they involve acts whose consequences are, for the most part, contrary to the end of man, but that they involve acts the willing of which is always contrary to that end. I think Miller could (and should) embrace my view, without difficulty: what could be more out of line with a “community of good will” than intending the death of an innocent human being? Accordingly, the will of any who intended, for example, the deaths of innocents in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to say nothing of the many other allied bombing campaigns that targeted innocents—was deficient, disordered; no one, ever or anywhere, should will what they willed.

Let me turn to the question of God’s commands, of which O’Brien makes much. In my earlier discussion, I made the traditional argument that divine commands cannot generate obligations unless there is some reason to obey such commands, a reason that cannot be generated by the commands themselves. O’Brien counters that “a divine command gives you a new reason for doing what the command requires, because God has legitimate authority.” I agree with this: God does have legitimate authority. But both legitimacy and authority are already fully loaded normative notions, and it seems to me that God has neither by virtue of His commands.

I have also argued that God’s commands are not necessary for understanding the obligation-making force of the prescriptions of the natural law. But it is a view common to natural law thinkers that God, recognizing epistemic and motivational deficiencies in human beings vis-a-vis the natural law, provides revealed commands as a supplement. So, if we abstract from the Miller-like suggestion of natural causality, I agree with O’Brien’s claim that God’s “commands make perspicuous to you those acts and omissions without which you cannot reach your final end.” But “making perspicuous” and “making absolutely obligatory” are not the same thing.

My final remarks on the subject of divine commands will be brief and tentative. As is obvious, the idea of divine command exercises a strong hold over both theistic ethics and Christian practice; I will call that idea the “dominant picture.” I want here to investigate whether the dominant picture should be resisted in certain ways. Specifically, I want to raise some perplexities in which I find myself when considering the image of God as divine commander, which can be summarized as follows: why must God’s authoritative and directive speech acts to us be thought of as commands or imperatives?

Well, what are the options? One might think that commands just are the form of speech act—the only such form—by which an authority directs as an authority, and as I have said, I agree that God has authority. So it might seem obvious that the dominant picture is correct.

Nevertheless, consider the following: I have authority over my children, and while I sometimes command them, sometimes I direct without command. I say, for instance, why don’t we do it this way? Or: it would please me if we were to do it this way. Or: I’ve decided that we’ll do it this way. Not everything that I say to them is in the imperative voice.

Perhaps my alleged counterexamples are disguised commands: when I say “Why don’t we do it this way?” I might just be commanding politely. But we should consider the possibility that at least some of the counterexamples are instead authoritative invitations. I have authority, and it is not just the authority of expertise, of knowing what is the best way: my decisions constitute in some cases what will now be the common—and hence best—way in the family, and my announcement of that common way is an act of authority. But I take myself not to be commanding the way but announcing it as an available option for those in the family who wish, in the choice itself, to continue their cooperation with me as the head of our merry little band, and to play their part in that band.

In so acting, I announce no external sanctions for those who fail to comply, as I do on other occasions when I tell my children that they must do such and such, or suffer some punishment. But there is an internal sanction built in, that of failing to act (a) in cooperation with me; and (b) in accordance with the common way, which is partly constitutive of our existence as a family. Because following my will is necessary to avoid these internal sanctions, and for familial well-being, we can further speak of the necessity, or virtue, of obedience for members of my family. God, it seems to me, speaks in this way to us when he shows us His way, and invites us to join Him in it.

But what about when God supplements the natural law with His commands? The precepts of the natural law are obligatory not because they are commanded, but because they are necessary for our well-being with one another and with God. What is added by God’s commanding them? For one thing, we now know we will be separated from God if we willingly disobey the precepts of the natural law, and this is undesirable: friendship with God is a human good to be pursued. So a reason for obedience is thus superadded to the obligations internal to the natural law itself. But how is God’s revelation of precepts of the natural law better understood here as a divine commanding, rather than, say, a divine reminding and authoritative inviting?

One might say: because God’s commands are backed by the threat of coercive sanction, the threat of hell. However, a more plausible view is that hell is the separation of the sinning self from God’s presence; so hell is not an imposed punishment, and threats about hell are actually warnings. In the commandments, God reminds us what the natural law is, and what the intrinsic consequences of failure in the natural law are.

The image of God that emerges from these reflections, and of His relationship to us as we share in His providence through our acts of practical reason and choice, is rather different from the image of God as one who commands obedience and is offended by disobedience. So perhaps what I am really trying to articulate is this: that our view of God’s communication of the law, natural and divine, has been somewhat deformed by our relying too closely on an analogy to the imperative form of speech act associated with human positive law. Echoing O’Brien, I would suggest that the debate over moral absolutes is only one among a number of areas in which that deformation has had its effect.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is the author, with Robert P. George, of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, the second edition of which recently has been released. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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A law is unjust only if the distinction it creates is not essentially related to a legitimate purpose of law. But whatever one holds about the morality of homosexual acts, it is clear that the state does have an interest in promoting and regulating marriage as traditionally defined, and that the sexual relationships of same-sex couples are distinct in kind from that. So, even if—contrary to fact—the state did have an interest in promoting same-sex sexual relationships, that interest would be different from the one served by promoting marriage. And so the two types of relationships or arrangements should not be lumped together. Moreover, falsely to equate the two is to obscure the nature of marriage.

What is marriage? The traditional view of marriage is: the union of a man and a woman, who have consented to share their lives, on the bodily (sexual), emotional, and spiritual levels, in the kind of community that would be fulfilled by having and raising children together.

Two points need emphasis here. First, marriage is a bodily union, as well as emotional and spiritual. For in sexual intercourse—which consummates the marital union—the spouses become biologically one: they complete each other to form a single subject of a single biological action, the kind of action that could procreate, provided conditions outside their conduct are present. This biological union (a procreative-type act) embodies their procreative-type union (provided they have consented to share their lives in that kind of union).

Second, marriage is the kind of union whose fruition is procreation. It is the kind of union that would be fulfilled by having and raising children together; the union of the spouses is embodied, prolonged, and enriched by enlarging into family. Still, marriage is not a mere means in relation to procreation, but a sharing of lives (bodily, emotionally, and spiritually) that is good in itself—and so a man and a woman who have consented to such a multi-leveled union are genuinely married, and have an intrinsically fulfilling marital union, even if it turns out they cannot procreate together.

Now of course not all agree with the traditional definition of marriage. But the point I want to make is simply this: marriage, as traditionally defined, is a distinct type of community and not an arbitrary set. Unmarried cohabitators have a different type of relationship. Alliances to raise children also are not necessarily marriages: a group of celibate religious women running an orphanage, for example, are not married. And, plainly, same-sex sexual relationships are a different kind of relationship: they cannot become biologically one, nor is their relationship of the kind that would find its fruition in conceiving, bearing, and raising children together. (True, same-sex partners can form an alliance to raise children—for example, those from a previous marriage or produced by artificial reproduction; but that alliance is not an extension or prolongation of a bodily-emotional-spiritual union already begun, as is the case in marriage.)

Now it is precisely the distinctive features of marriage that ground the state’s interest in promoting and regulating it, and that make the general strength or health of marriage a public good. First, marriage is a distinctive way in which men and women are fulfilled, an irreducible aspect of their flourishing, and one that can be easily misunderstood. And so marriage needs cultural support—and can be harmed by cultural confusion about it. Clarity within the general culture about the value and nature of marriage enables young men and women, as well as those already married, to participate more fully than they otherwise would in this distinctive good—just as a clear public understanding of health or learning assists individuals and families to participate more fully in those goods.

Second, while good in itself, and not a mere means to an extrinsic end, marriage also provides the crucial social function of encouraging parents (and potential parents) to commit to each other and to whatever children they may have. A healthy and strong marriage culture will provide the safest and healthiest environment for children. For these reasons it is in everyone’s interest for the state to promote a sound understanding of marriage, and certainly to avoid obscuring its nature.

Since a same-sex couple is unable to form the kind of union marriage is, not granting same-sex couples marriage licenses is simply a decision by the state not to engage in a confusing and harmful fiction. Marriage is a certain kind of union. Denying a marriage license—or the privileges, protections, and obligations of marriage—to those who are unable to marry is not unjust discrimination. The state denies marriage licenses to threesomes or foursomes (refraining from declaring polyamorous groups marriages) and denies marriage licenses to twelve-year-olds (requiring valid consent for a marriage). These denials are not unjust because threesomes, foursomes, and twelve-year-olds are unable to form the kind of union that marriage is. But the same is true of same-sex couples. So, just as the distinction between eighteen-year-olds and twelve-year-olds is relevant to the purpose of marriage—because the former but not the latter are actually able to form the union that is marriage—in the same way, the distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples is relevant to the purpose of the marriage laws, because the former but not the latter can actually form the kind of union that marriage is.

According to same-sex “marriage” proponents, the public interest served by marriage laws is the stability of households. For example, in striking down California’s pro-marriage constitutional amendment called Proposition 8, Judge Vaughn Walker claimed: “The state regulates marriage because marriage creates stable households, which in turn form the basis of a stable, governable populace.” Stability of households might of course be a legitimate public aim, but laws to promote that (and to provide benefits and privileges for stable households as such) are not marriage laws. Such laws, benefits, and so on, would—if applied justly—have to be given also to groups who do not have sexual relationships and groups not pledging permanence and exclusivity.

Clearly, though, same-sex “marriage” supporters want much more than certain benefits and privileges. Discussion of concrete benefits such as hospital visitation, inheritance rights, and so on, is really a side issue—such benefits could be secured by other means for individuals who need them (for example, a durable power of attorney for health care, a will, etc.). Nor—contrary to how it is usually portrayed—is the same-sex marriage proposal aimed at tolerance, since persons with same-sex attractions are already free to engage in private sexual behavior and to establish for themselves long-term romantic and sexual relationships. Rather, what proponents of same-sex “marriage” principally desire is the social affirmation and endorsement of homosexual relationships as such. Judge Walker indicated this point clearly in his Proposition 8 decision: “Plaintiffs [some same-sex couples] seek to have the state recognize their committed relationships . . . . Perry and Stier seek to be spouses; they seek the mutual obligation and honor that attend marriage.”

So, the proposal is for the state to promote something called marriage, and that marriage is to be understood in a way that will include same-sex partners. This sounds like old news. But what, on their view, is the thing called “marriage,” and why should the state promote it? What distinguishes marital unions from others, such that the state should promote them? One cannot just pronounce that these couples will now count as married; there must be something one means by “being married,” something held in common by all married couples. But the same-sex “marriage” position cannot provide a coherent account of what that something is.

If marriage is not a bodily, emotional, and spiritual union of a man and a woman, of the kind that would be fulfilled by procreation, then what makes a union marriage and why should the state support it? It is not simply a union that is formed by a wedding ceremony: that would be a circular definition. Nor is every romantic and sexual relationship a marriage, and certainly there is no point in the state promoting all such relationships. Perhaps one will say that it is a stable, committed, and exclusive romantic-sexual relationship. But how stable would a romantic-sexual relationship need to be in order to be a marriage? Suppose John and Mary have a romantic-sexual relationship while college students but plan to go their separate ways after graduation: is that stable enough to be a marriage? If not, why not?

Or suppose Joe, Jim, and Steve have a committed, stable, romantic-sexual relationship among themselves—a polyamorous relationship. On what ground can the state promote the relationship between couples, but not the relationship among Joe, Jim, and Steve? The argument here is not a slippery slope one. Rather, the point is: There must be some non-arbitrary features shared by relationships that the state promotes which make them apt for public promotion, and make it fair for the state not to promote in the same way other relationships lacking those features. Without this the distinction is invidious discrimination. The conjugal understanding of marriage has a clear answer: (a) marriage is a distinct basic human good, that needs social support and that uniquely provides important social functions; (b) marriage’s organic bodily union and inherent orientation to procreation distinguish it from other relationships similar in superficial respects to it. But the same-sex marriage proposal’s conception of marriage has no answer. In fact, its conception of marriage is actually an arbitrarily selected class, and so the enactment of this proposal would be unjust.

The problem is not solved if one adds to one’s description or definition of marriage, that it must be a permanent commitment (as Judge Margaret Marshall did in her decision striking down Massachusetts’ marriage law: “It is the exclusive and permanent commitment of the marriage partners to one another, not the begetting of children, that is the sine qua non of civil marriage”). For it is fair to ask: why should the commitment be exclusive and permanent? The college students’ relationship (lacking permanence) and the celibate monks’ relationship (lacking exclusivity—others can join the religious order), both form households and contribute to social stability. In contrast, the conjugal understanding of marriage allows a clear answer to these questions: since marriage is a bodily and procreative-type union, and an irreducible basic good, it is non-arbitrarily distinct from other types of relationships. The promotion of this kind of relationship, for its own sake (because it is a basic good), and for the sake of children generally (since a strong marriage culture provides a safe haven for children), makes it in accord with justice to recognize, as marriage, only a relationship between a man and a woman, pledged to be permanent and exclusive. The conjugal conception of marriage is just and coherent; the same-sex marriage proponents’ conception of marriage is unjust and incoherent.

Patrick Lee is John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

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First, the areas of agreement: O’Brien and I agree that human beings have a definite nature, that this nature implies a certain final end for human beings, and that human actions are morally right or wrong depending on whether they are ordered as means to that end. We further agree that human nature was created by God, who ordains human nature to its final end and commands us to attain that end. Thus, by acting well, we perfect our nature and obey and please God, but by acting badly, we act contrary to our nature and disobey and displease him. A complete moral theory therefore involves God in various important ways, including in giving a full description of the final end (which involves contemplating God) and in explaining the nature of moral obligation (which involves obeying Him).

Moreover, O’Brien and I also agree that, notwithstanding the foregoing, in treating many ethical issues we can avoid referring to God. I believe that this is possible because we can work from a description of the final end that theists and atheists can both accept as being true as far as it goes (e.g., that the end is rational activity in a community of goodwill) and then consider the relationship of actions to that end.

O’Brien and I disagree about whether, having restricted our premises in this way, we can show that there are some actions that are always wrong, regardless of the circumstances. I think this can be done; O’Brien thinks it cannot.

Before going into why we disagree, it’s worth recalling why, in a eudaimonistic system, some actions are always wrong. The reason is that, for at least some ends, there are actions that are never ordered as means to those ends, regardless of the circumstances in which the action is chosen. For instance, if the end is winning a baseball game, intentionally walking in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth is never ordered to the end. Hence, given a description of the final end, if there are some actions that are never ordered to that end, these actions will be always wrong. In a eudaimonistic system, therefore, claims that certain actions are always wrong are based on claims about the causal structure of the world—claims that certain causes will not have certain effects, regardless of the circumstances.

Now, in an earlier article, O’Brien had argued that, in order to demonstrate that certain actions ought never be done, “you need to be able to appeal to God’s legislation of the moral law.” This is not so, and the reason is that God’s legislation does not affect the causal structure of the world, does not change which actions are ordered to which ends. Hence, unless we are adopting some kind of divine command theory of morality, an absolute divine prohibition on a certain kind of action will not help explain why such actions are always wrong. Given a kind of action, either such actions are never ordered to the final end, or else sometimes they are. If such actions are never ordered to the final end, then for exactly that reason such actions are always wrong, and there is no need to rely on a divine prohibition to ground their wrongness. On the other hand, if such actions are sometimes ordered to the final end, then God would not absolutely prohibit them, for it would be senseless to prohibit such actions in those circumstances in which they are actually ordered to the final end, and God does nothing senselessly. Hence, I stand by the conclusion in my earlier article that bringing in divine prohibitions does not help us explain why some actions are always wrong.

But as O’Brien ably shows in his latest article, God can figure in moral theory in various ways, not just as a legislator. Thus, in this article O’Brien has a quite different argument about why we need God to show that certain actions are always wrong. He writes that, if we bracket the existence of God, “it is difficult to see how the final end could be specified determinately enough to demonstrate that certain kinds of injustice, such as intentionally killing the innocent, could never be chosen in order to advance the final end.”

Now, this seems to be an attractive line of argument, for it is true that the less definitely the final end is specified, the more difficult it becomes to show that certain actions are wrong. The assumption, however, is that complete ethical theories that mention God give very definite descriptions of the final end (thus supporting arguments that some actions are always wrong), but that these descriptions are weakened and made vague when we re-describe the final end more generally to avoid mentioning God (with that result that such arguments no longer go through).

This, however, is simply not the case. In his full-blown and expressly theological ethical theory, Aquinas describes the final end as “the vision of the divine essence” (Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae.3.8), which is surely a much grander thing than my “rational activity in a community of good will,” but it hardly provides a more determinate basis for explaining why certain actions are always wrong. Indeed, in explaining why intentionally killing the innocent is always wrong, Aquinas has but the briefest and simplest of arguments: he merely says that the lives of the innocent conserve and promote the common good (and so the attainment of the final end), and that therefore killing them is always wrong (Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae.64.6). This argument makes no use whatsoever of the theological character of the final end, and so such an argument is quite as open to me with my definition of the final end as it was to Aquinas with his. If it suffices for him, it suffices for me as well.

Of course, O’Brien will say that it does not suffice, that such arguments prove not that killing the innocent is always wrong, but only that it is generally so. We still have to worry about the extreme cases, like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which killing the innocent seems to advance the final end. What are we to say about such cases?

As Aquinas’s argument about killing the innocent suggests, the description of the final end employed—whether it be theological or not, and regardless of its specificity—is largely irrelevant. For, no matter how the end is specified, we can always invent sufficiently bizarre circumstances such that, in those circumstances, performing the action reputed to be always wrong will in fact advance the end.

For instance, take Aquinas’s ethics, in which the final end is the vision of the divine essence, and then assume that, if I but kill this one innocent man, untold millions will receive the grace of repentance and so come to share the beatific vision in heaven, thus greatly glorifying God. (Indeed, if he had had more insight into the Scriptures, Caiaphas might have seen himself as being in precisely this situation.) In such a case, killing the innocent seems to advance this fully theological final end. Or again, I said above that walking in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth is never the way to win a baseball game. But what if I know that the opposing team has been cheating, that the man at bat has a bad conscience about it, and that, if I walk him in, he will be overcome with remorse and will confess the whole scheme, with the result that the umpires will declare that the cheating team has forfeited the game and my team wins after all? In such circumstances, walking in the winning run actually wins the game for my team.

The problem with such examples, just as with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki problem, is that they trace the consequences of our actions too far. Only philosophers think that I am responsible for all the foreseeable consequences of my actions, and thus that all of these consequences must be taken into account in determining whether my action advances the final end. Normal people realize that my responsibility is more circumscribed. Which consequences of my action are properly attributed to me—and so count in determining whether my action advances the final end—and which consequences are too remote is an extremely difficult question. The answer in any particular case will depend heavily on the particular facts, but saying that all foreseeable consequences count goes too far.

There is a clear parallel in the law, for there is an immense body of legal doctrine concerning what lawyers call proximate causation, the whole purpose of which is to determine for which of the consequences causally following from his actions a defendant may be held liable. (See Prosser & Keaton on Torts, §§ 41-45.) Although, in general, defendants are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, as when a man who builds a fire on his own property on a windy day is held liable when the wind carries the fire to his neighbor’s house, this is not always the case. One clear exception is that defendants are not generally liable for the intentional wrongdoing of others, even when such wrongdoing is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the defendant’s action, the idea being that the subsequent wrongdoer is the responsible party.

This principle, incidentally, suffices to dispatch the Hiroshima and Nagasaki problem: President Truman’s dropping the bomb should be evaluated taking into account its natural and inevitable consequences—such as the death of thousands of innocents—but not taking into account other consequences that are properly chargeable to others, such as the deaths of even more thousands of innocents who would have been killed in an American invasion of the Japanese home islands. Those deaths, had they occurred, would have been the responsibility not of Truman but of the Japanese authorities, who wrongfully resisted American forces waging a just war. It is a mistake, therefore, to count them in considering whether Truman’s action advanced the final end.

As I said above, determining for which consequences of his actions an agent is responsible (and thus which consequences need be counted in determining whether the agent’s action advances the final end) is a vexed question about which it is extremely difficult to generalize. But merely pointing out the existence of this question suffices, in a general way, to solve the puzzle of how, in a eudaimonistic system, certain actions can be said to be always wrong. To wit, to show that an action is always wrong, we need not show that such actions never advance the final end, including in the most bizarre circumstances; we need show only that such actions do not advance that end in normal and usual circumstances—that is, in all cases except those in which the advancement of that end would be beyond the responsibility of the agent. Under that standard, it becomes fairly easy to justify the proposition that intentionally killing the innocent—that is to say, murder—is always wrong.

Robert T. Miller is a Professor of Law at Villanova University, and as of August 2012 he will be a Professor of Law and Sandler Faculty Fellow of Corporate Law at the University of Iowa.

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In our present intellectual climate, where rival atheist and theist camps disagree about whether God exists, why not circumscribe God’s role in this picture, bracket the question of his existence, and focus upon the ethical requirements of human nature alone? I want to consider a few reasons why this strategy is flawed, if it is adopted as a general method of ethics. It is, of course, possible to address many individual ethical problems in piecemeal fashion and on theologically neutral terms. There is no reason why vexed contemporary debates about abortion or gay marriage, for example, need to implicate theology. But the construction of an ethical theory, as a general matter, inevitably implicates what natural human reason can know about God.

This claim would appear to Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas as obviously true. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contends that the highest end of man is the contemplation of God. Even Plato’s Euthyphro, which is superficially interpreted by modern readers as critical of theological ethics, is in fact entirely consistent with a theological law conception of morality, as Elizabeth Anscombe argues in a posthumously published essay. For Aquinas, ethical theory necessarily implicates revealed theology in addition to natural theology, because he thinks that the final end of human beings is supernatural communion with God, which transcends the knowledge of God available through natural reason; the imperfect happiness afforded by merely natural goods is incapable of grounding an autonomous ethical theory. Even in the Summa Contra Gentiles, which does not presuppose the truth of biblical revelation, Aquinas suffuses moral discussions with natural theology. For example, Aquinas argues that the duty of human beings to act in accordance with their natures arises from the debt they owe God as their providential creator (see SCG II, 29, 17). In contemporary reconstructions of medieval natural law and classical virtue theory, however, God’s place in morality often becomes vacant or ambiguous.

Contemporary theorists hope that bracketing the question of God’s existence will clear the way for agreement on a conception of the natural world, which they assume will be less controversial than natural theology. But theists and atheists disagree about the existence of God because they already disagree about the nature of the world, including the nature of morality. To put it roughly, theists think that natural phenomena are not fully explicable apart from God, because they are finite and contingent. To explain why natural phenomena are what they are, and why they exist to begin with, it is necessary to appeal to an uncreated, necessary being—that is, to God. These natural phenomena include moral experience, such as the binding force of conscience, which is explicable only by inference to “the authority of divine precept,” as Aquinas argues. Atheists reject this inference, like the inference to a creator generally, because they assert that such ultimate explanation of nature is superfluous. There is no theologically neutral conception of the natural world that convinced theists and atheists share, therefore, because the disagreement about God’s existence, when it gets clear, is really a disagreement about how to characterize nature. For theists, nature’s finitude and contingency needs explanation, and for atheists, nature explains itself.

Let’s assume that the criterion of moral action is the final end, or ensemble of ends, that perfects human nature, and actions are good or bad insofar as they contribute to or frustrate the attainment of the final end. Actions will be intrinsically bad if they can never be ordered to the final end. At this point, the disagreement between theists and atheists about nature becomes morally acute. On atheistic assumptions, the final end must be some merely human good. Given this restriction, it is difficult to see how the final end could be specified determinately enough to demonstrate that certain kinds of injustice, such as intentionally killing the innocent, could never be chosen in order to advance the final end. Robert Miller, in his reply to my earlier essay on Public Discourse, says that this can be done, but he does not even hint at what the substance of the argument is supposed to be.

A lucid example that highlights this problem is John Rawls’s treatment of “supreme emergencies” in The Law of Peoples (1999). Rawls develops an account of just war that is similar to traditional theistic natural law theory, but different in a crucial respect: he allows for intentional killing of the innocent in supreme emergencies where the very possibility of civilized life hangs in the balance. The United States’ nuclear attacks against Japan did not meet this standard, Rawls argues, but the British attacks against Nazi Germany’s civilians earlier in the war did:

First, Nazism portended incalculable moral and political evil for civilized life everywhere. Second, the nature and history of constitutional democracy and its place in European history were at stake. Churchill really did not exaggerate when he said to the House of Commons on the day France capitulated that, “if we fail [to stand up to Hitler], the whole world including the United States … will sink into a new Dark Age.” This kind of threat, in sum, justifies invoking the supreme emergency exemption, on behalf not only of constitutional democracies, but of all well-ordered societies.

Whatever the merits of Rawls’s analysis of the historical examples, the principle of his argument is powerful—if his atheistic assumptions are granted. Rawls recognizes that intentional killing of the innocent is bad, perhaps intrinsically bad, and ordinarily should never be considered. The prudent statesman may nevertheless, in supreme emergencies, decide to kill innocent civilians, because Rawls’s political liberalism rules out trust in God’s promises or obedience to his commands as too sectarian for pluralistic politics. (Never mind Rawls’s sophistical appeal to “public reason,” elsewhere in the book, that allows him to exclude philosophical theology.) I simply want to point out that the non-theological arguments for moral absolutes do not hold up against a position such as Rawls’s. Early in the war, Churchill may have reasonably thought that he faced a tragic dilemma: kill some innocent Germans in the course of defeating the Nazis or let the Nazis kill countless innocent people everywhere. If the traditional prohibition against killing the innocent is to be compelling in such a situation, then the blinkers of methodological atheism must be removed.

Consider Peter Geach’s argument in his essay “Moral Law and the Law of God,” which I alluded to in my previous essay. Geach points out that non-theological arguments for exceptionless moral prohibitions, such as Aristotle’s, fail to show that it is unreasonable for someone to sacrifice his own moral integrity by doing something he takes to be bad if the action will seriously benefit others; Churchill could have plausibly thought that he was in this position. But suppose that natural reason can establish that God exists and, like human beings, is a voluntary agent, as many philosophers have thought. From this premise, Geach argues that it is reasonable to conclude “that God will not only direct men to his own ends willy-nilly like the irrational creatures, but will govern them by command and counsel.” Now given that we can know that practices such as intentional killing of the innocent are generally bad, we should infer that this knowledge “is itself a promulgation of the Divine law absolutely forbidding such practices.” This inference must be valid, because otherwise God would have created most people without promulgation of his commands about acts that they must never choose, which would contradict the initial conclusion that God is a voluntary agent who commands and counsels his creatures.

Geach’s argument needs to be developed at much greater length, of course, but it strikes me as promising; in any case, I have already pointed out flaws in Christopher Tollefsen’s attempt to justify exceptionless moral norms by appeal to the logic of “basic goods.” Tollefsen’s reply to my critique leaves the substance of my argument untouched. First, he repeats the common mistake that Anscombe dispatched in her famous essay “Modern Moral Philosophy”: divine law cannot generate a moral obligation unless there is already a moral obligation to obey divine law. This is like saying that a doctor can’t give you a prescription unless there is already a prescription for you to go to the doctor. On the contrary, for traditional theists such as Aquinas, a divine command gives you a new reason for doing what the command requires, because God has legitimate authority. His commands make perspicuous to you those acts and omissions without which you cannot reach your final end.

Second, Tollefsen misunderstands what tragic dilemmas are. They need not be cases where two moral absolutes conflict. They can be cases where a defeasible moral duty conflicts with an absolute prohibition. Rawls’s analysis of Churchill’s position early in the war provides just such an example: Rawls doesn’t claim that Churchill’s duty to protect the United Kingdom and her democratic allies was absolute; presumably this duty could be overridden in different circumstances. Rather, his argument is that this duty, although defeasible, justifies the intentional killing of the innocent in the circumstances of World War II, given what was at stake. The route to refuting Rawls is blazed by Aquinas, and it requires establishing that the universe, and man’s place within it, is providentially ordered, which would imply that “tragic” dilemmas are avoidable because they are either merely apparent or the consequence of prior wrongdoing.

What I have been arguing for here is an approach to ethical theory that is broadly in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Geach, Anscombe, and others who recognize that God’s existence is directly relevant to both the force and content of the claims that morality has upon us. Furthermore, this tradition also recognizes that the criterion for moral action is human nature and the goods that perfect it. The crucial question is whether or not human nature is created, for if it is, then the reasonable norms of nature are really obliging laws in a providential universe governed by the commands and counsels of the Creator. As John Finnis rightly points out in his book Aquinas, conceiving of human nature as created by God “enhance[s] both the content and normativity” of morality. His mistake, which Tollefsen echoes, is to think that the force of exceptionless moral norms can be demonstrated before broaching philosophical theology. The debate over moral absolutes is only one among a number of problems that illustrate the implications of how the question of God’s existence gets answered.

Matthew B. O’Brien is a postdoctoral fellow at Villanova University.

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After King was arrested for parading without a permit, he took a moment, from the confines of his jail cell, to pen a response to his fellow clergymen and offer a justification for his resistance to segregation ordinances. Like any civically minded lawbreaker, King faced vexing moral and philosophical questions from the outset: how did he know whether a law was just or unjust, and when, if ever, was it morally permissible to disobey? In his now-celebrated “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” King’s answer was that “a just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” “To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas,” King explained, “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.”

Those who praise the modern civil rights movement, but who also want to keep morality and theology absent from public discourse, seldom mention King’s reliance on natural law in his justly famous letter. Scholars such as the late John Rawls were at great pains to show how their thoroughly secularized theories of justice and public reason could make room for King, but in fact they could do so only at the cost of minimizing the seriousness of King’s argument. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, King had studied the Western philosophical tradition while completing his doctorate in philosophical theology at Boston University, and his defense of civil disobedience drew from the work of Thomas Aquinas in particular.

Human ordinances, Aquinas argued in his Treatise on Law, can be contrary to the human good—and therefore unjust—by way of their end, author, or form. The first mode of legal injustice, according to this schema, is a law designed to bring about private gain at the expense of other members of the community. Otherwise benign laws can also be terribly unjust if made by someone without legitimate lawmaking authority or enforced in an illegitimate or partial manner. King, of course, had in mind Jim Crow laws when he spoke of legal injustice, but the concrete examples he marshaled in his letter followed the general contours of Aquinas’s natural law theory.

First, King suggested, “a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself” is unjust, because the end of the law is some private good rather than the good of the community. Second, “a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because they did not have the unhampered right to vote” is unjust, because such a law, in a republican regime, was made by an illegitimate authority. The final mode of legal injustice—and perhaps most obvious given King’s arrest for marching without a permit—was “a law just on its face and unjust in its application.” There was of course nothing wrong with requiring permits for marches, but it was unjust, King thought, to specifically deny permits to civil rights protesters in an attempt to silence their message.

Following Augustine and Aquinas, King famously claimed that unjust laws were no laws at all. Rather, they were acts of violence and usurpations of law that damaged the human good and failed to instill a moral responsibility to obey. And yet even in the face of legal injustice, Aquinas cautioned great prudence and forbearance when deciding whether to engage in disobedience. For the sake of avoiding scandal or the breakdown of public order, Aquinas taught, it may be appropriate in many circumstances to simply suffer injustice. Aquinas’s thought on this point seems to be that the good of individuals and communities will often be more secure under an imperfect but stable order than in a broken, unstable, and scandalized community.

Theological concepts play an important supplementary role in King’s case for overcoming the heavy prudential burden against civil disobedience. After offering specific examples to demonstrate why Jim Crow laws were unjust in end, author, and form, King suggested that these laws were also unjust in a much more fundamental sense. Even if some of the procedural aspects of justice were fulfilled, King insisted, these laws would remain “morally wrong and sinful,” because, as he argued, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”

Although the reference to human personality here may seem a bit out of place, King’s comments were rooted in a tradition of philosophical personalism, which emphasized the personal—rather than material—nature of ultimate reality. Under the tutelage of Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Harold DeWolf, and other philosophical personalists at Boston University, King came to believe that ultimate reality was necessarily personal. The philosophy to which King was exposed in Boston buttressed his belief in a personal God, which he had long ago developed as a child growing up in the Christian church. In fact, the “two greatest formative influences on King’s thought and action,” King’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Garrow notes, were “the biblical inheritance of the story of Jesus Christ, and the black southern Baptist church heritage into which King was born.”

King was, first and foremost, a pastor, nurtured in the Christian tradition and sharpened by his encounter with the classic texts of Western philosophy. His description of segregation ordinances as “morally wrong and sinful” occurred within a theological framework, and his justification of civil disobedience was indebted to the tradition of natural law philosophy. Indeed, the cogency and persuasiveness of King’s letter depend on such controversial and contested theological and philosophical claims.

These aspects of King’s letter provide a challenge to modern theorists who would, as a matter of principle, scrub the public sphere clean of all philosophy and theology. Lest their insistence on a naked public square appear to be merely an unprincipled attempt to silence conservative moral and religious arguments, they must reluctantly exclude much of King, as well. Attempts to erase or diminish King’s theological and philosophical commitments will not do, for although he was famous for declaring that he had a dream, we sometimes forget that his dream was of a world in which “every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.” One of the most famous passages of King’s most famous political speech comes verbatim from the fortieth chapter of the book of Isaiah, and the original context was a prophetic vision of one preparing the way for the political rule of God.

King is of course the kind of historical figure that practically everyone wants to claim as his own. Reality, however, is often complex, and the truth about King is that his primary motivations, his most fundamental commitments—the very core of his thought—were rooted in a worldview repugnant to many of those who now claim his legacy. Despite his personal failings, many of which have come to light in the years since his assassination, we should remember King for who he was: an imperfect man and a Christian pastor who, in the best tradition of American politics, fought for justice by appealing to a law higher than the state while respectfully and thoughtfully engaging his interlocutors on the principles of a just political order.

Justin Dyer is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri and author of Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge University Press). Kevin Stuart is a political consultant at Teddlie Stuart Media Partners in New Orleans, LA and a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Fr. Miscamble notes that my critique is “hardly original.” Without a doubt: He cites as precedent the work of Anscombe, Grisez, Finnis, Boyle, and Veritatis Splendor. I had quoted Gaudium et Spes, but could have instead quoted Pius XII, or any major figure from the Catholic tradition who had considered the matter. Aquinas, for example, writes that it is “in no way lawful to slay the innocent” (ST, 2–2, q. 64, a. 6, c.). The condemnation of the intentional killing of the innocent is as firmly taught a moral precept in the Catholic tradition as any.

In fact, this utter lack of originality points to my deepest underlying worry with Fr. Miscamble’s book, at which I gestured toward the end of my review. The question I put to Fr. Miscamble is whether the demands of pro-life, and indeed Catholic, integrity should call forth more than the casual dismissal that the teaching of Veritatis Splendor receives in his essay. Because I think it renders both absolute opposition to abortion and any demand to absolute obedience to the Church incoherent, I am deeply disturbed by his willingness, also displayed by other Catholic reviewers of his book such as Fr. Michael Orsi or Michael Novak, selectively to abandon Church teaching on the ethics of killing when the good of the nation is at stake.

Miscamble rests his defense of Truman, it seems, on a willingness to accept that Truman pursued the least of the evil options available to him. Miscamble’s judgment is that the atomic bombing was “in isolation … a deeply immoral act.” Because it resulted in the least loss of life and ended a bloody war, however, Miscamble apparently believes Truman’s decision to have been justified.

At the same time, Miscamble denies that he accepts a utilitarian approach to morality, “in which good ends can justify certain immoral actions.” But either Miscamble believes that the bombing was not immoral precisely because it brought about the least bad state of affairs, in which case his reasoning is indeed utilitarian, or he thinks that Truman’s action was both immoral and somehow justified. His advertence to Machiavelli suggests the latter; but here again we have something deeply contrary both to the Catholic moral tradition and, I think, to sound reason.

The insistent voice of the New Testament is one demanding moral perfection: “as my Father in heaven is perfect.” Such demands are met with astonishment by the apostles: “if that is true, better that no man should marry.” But Christ never backs down from these demands, never softens them with the counsel to choose the “lesser” evil.

Nor does subsequent tradition embrace “lesser evil” thinking; rather, with St. Paul, it embraces the principle that evil is never to be done that good—including, surely, the good of avoiding a greater evil—come about. How that tradition can be squared with the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be “forced by necessity to enter into evil” eludes me entirely, and we are given no indication in Fr. Miscamble’s essay of how to square this circle.

Rather, we are given the red herring that my approach is too “abstract,” and the accusation that I have offered “no serious proposals regarding a viable alternative.”

The charge of “abstractness” is truly a red herring. If there are moral absolutes—principles asserting that certain kinds of acts are never to be done—they are unavoidably general, and their applicability is not changed by circumstances, so long as the kind of act in question remains the same. No amount of “getting into the head” of the adulterer or abortion-seeker, no amount of attention to the “hard circumstances” of the contraceptor, will change the moral judgment of the licitness of adultery, abortion, or contraception. Such sympathetic engagement is certainly necessary in order to avoid unwarranted judgment of the person; but that is a different matter, and I did not, I should note, ever “denounce Truman as a ‘mass-murderer.’”

Moreover, I deny the responsibility to give much consideration to viable alternatives in this case. What the best options were for Truman, once immoral options had been ruled out, was a matter of military expertise and prudence. I am doubtful that those options would have been whittled down to doing “absolutely nothing.” After all, it is something of an historical contingency that the atomic bomb was completed when it was, and Truman should have been prepared to do something, again within the bounds of the moral, without it.

I want again to reiterate my admiration for Fr. Miscamble and his pro-life witness; it is because I share with him a recognition that this most radical cause is also today’s most important moral issue that I am as “forthright” as I am in voicing disagreement with his judgment about Truman’s choice. For the reasons I have detailed above, I do suspect that the pro-life garment is in danger of unraveling, a suspicion that seems confirmed by consideration of the record for human life in the years since World War II. “Forced by necessity to enter into evil” has been a justification every bit as available to private individuals as to heads of state, with lethal consequences for the unborn.

Matthew O’Brien joins the debate over the intentional killing of the innocent to make a more general point about moral absolutes: They cannot be “justified” without belief in a divine legislator.

O’Brien holds this view while also holding that it can be known without such a belief that certain acts are intrinsically evil. I take this to mean that in themselves—apart from their consequences—such acts do nothing but damage human beings or their basic goods. One can know, according to O’Brien, that such acts are intrinsically evil, but without belief in a divine law-giver, one will not be able to know that such acts are never to be done.

Let me identify a thesis, similar to O’Brien’s, with which I agree: Without situating our practical understanding of, and adherence to, moral absolutes, within a larger theistic framework, I think it unlikely that many people, today or ever, will have the moral fortitude to maintain their allegiance to such absolutes in the face of strong temptations. Refusing to lie, though one’s life will be forfeit; refusing to kill an innocent man, though the nation will suffer; or refusing to make use of modern technologies for baby-making or baby-avoiding when great goods and evils are at stake—the price, in many people’s minds, will be felt as simply too high, and they will lose their grip on the moral absolutes. (Robert Miller makes a similar point in his response to O’Brien.) Remembering that, as Christian tradition teaches, for example, our good acts will be redeemed in the Kingdom of Heaven is, I think, essential for most, if not all, of us to keep a motivational grip on our allegiance to moral absolutes.

But recognizing that an action is intrinsically evil seems to me to involve recognition that therefore it is not to be done unless a rational justification for doing it can be provided. And this is what seems impossible. If deliberately killing tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese is itself “intrinsically evil” (quoting O’Brien) or “deeply immoral” (quoting Miscamble), then there is in it, as such, no good. So it must be justified, if at all, only because the good of its consequences promises to outweigh the evil of the act itself.

In the specific case of Hiroshima, say, as in all other cases of absolutes, I deny that such an outweighing is possible. What, for example, in the lives of Americans saved was as such a greater good than the lives of the Japanese women and children who were killed? Did the lives of those Americans leave the world with all the good of the lives of the killed Japanese and more? Surely not: Those Japanese lives were lost, never to be recovered on this earth. The idea of a “greater good” here makes no sense.

So no justification exists for asserting that something intrinsically evil may or should be done. But some will deny this; should they be convinced if they come to believe that God has commanded that such acts be avoided? I do not see, in O’Brien’s essay or elsewhere, why God’s command should suffice to justify, unless (and here again I admit to an argument that is “hardly original”) it were independently intelligible—justified—that God’s commands were not to be flouted. Otherwise, God is merely being appealed to as someone with the biggest stick, who can offer sufficient rewards and incentives to make doing something otherwise foolish become desirable and rational.

O’Brien makes a second point about the need for God: to hedge against the possibility of tragic dilemmas. I understand such dilemmas, if there are any, to be circumstances in which, whatever an agent does, he will do wrong through no previous fault of his own. Here is where it is essential that moral absolutes are always framed in terms of what is not to be done; positive obligations—to feed one’s family, to show reverence to one’s country, to care for the poor—by contrast, are not, at an abstract level, absolute, and are always limited by the need to comply with the negative absolutes. If feeding one’s family requires murder, then one may not feed them.

Can universal, negative, absolute moral norms ever conflict? O’Brien says that I do not argue for this. But I ask whether anyone has ever shown that not lying means that one will thereby intentionally kill an innocent, or that not intentionally killing an innocent means that one will forswear one’s faith, or that not committing adultery means that one will thereby contracept, and so on. It seems clear that in the limit case, refraining from willing and doing that which would violate every applicable moral absolute will always be a possibility, even if the consequences threatened by other bad men will be awful and such that, in some other set of circumstances, one might have a positive responsibility to prevent them.

There is much else to say here, but, alas, the stocking is full. Disagreement with my pro-life friends is no treat in itself, but I am grateful for their patience, and for a forum such as Public Discourse where internal differences can be aired with honesty and civility. I wish nothing but the best for Fr. Miscamble, Matthew O’Brien, and all others with whom I have had constructive and truth-seeking conversation here over this past year.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is the author, with Robert P. George, of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, the second edition of which recently has been released. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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O’Brien is clearly right that theists such as Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen eschew theological premises in moral argument in order to win a hearing among non-believers. In so doing, they follow a tradition going back at least to St. Paul at the Areopagus. Not all theists follow this line, however. Tim Tebow, for instance, explains his moral views in expressly, even flamboyantly, Christian terms.

The difference here is not merely one of temperament or rhetorical strategy or intellectual sophistication; it goes much deeper, even to the very foundations of morality. For some people—including many Protestant Christians under the influence of Martin Luther—believe in what might be called a divine command theory of morality. On this theory, it is not that some actions are right and others are wrong, with God commanding us to do the right ones and avoid the wrong ones, but that right actions are right precisely because God has commanded them and wrong actions are wrong precisely because God has forbidden them. God’s commanding or forbidding makes actions right or wrong. On a theory like this, it is obviously impossible to argue that a particular action is wrong without invoking the divine command, for there is nothing else to which to appeal. No wonder, then, that people who accept a divine command theory are quick to invoke God and His commands in moral argument.

But divine command theory is in many ways unlovely. Suppose God had commanded us to slaughter our firstborn sons and feast on their roasted flesh marinated au jus; would this be morally permissible? On pain of inconsistency, the divine command theorist must say that it would be not only permissible but obligatory. If his good sense takes over and he says that God could not or would not command such a thing, then there must be some reason for this, and that reason almost certainly is a reason why such actions are morally wrong. But if there are reasons independent of the divine command why certain actions are morally wrong, then divine command theory collapses. Thus, philosophers going back to Plato in the Euthyphro have generally rejected divine command theory.

Now, even without divine command theory, most moral philosophers prior to the twentieth century, theists and non-theists alike, have held that there are some actions that ought always to be avoided, regardless of the consequences or the circumstances. Aristotle and Kant, who agree on very little else, agree on this. I suppose O’Brien could say that the accounts that these philosophers offer all fail and only an appeal to divine legislation will suffice, and, to be sure, the idea that only theistic ethics succeed is trendy nowadays, as in the work of Michael Perry and Nicholas Wolterstorff. I, however, am not convinced.

Consider O’Brien’s treatment of Aristotle on this issue. Noting that Aristotle thought that adultery, theft, and murder are always wrong, O’Brien says that Aristotle does not try “to demonstrate the truth of such absolute prohibitions by appealing to some more basic set of moral reasons.” Rather, “for Aristotle … the grounds for absolute prohibitions bottom out in the perception of actions as base and shameless.”

This makes Aristotle sound rather like G. E. Moore, and O’Brien quite aptly describes the view he attributes to Aristotle as “intuitionism.” But as far as I can see, this account bears no relation to what Aristotle actually says. In the relevant passage in the Nicomachean Ethics (1107a8–1107a27), Aristotle makes no mention of perceiving the baseness of these actions but rather produces a substantial argument about why such actions are wrong. Appealing to his doctrine that virtuous actions lie in a mean between opposing vices, Aristotle says that actions such as adultery, theft, and murder connote vice (i.e., either excess or defect), and so to say that these actions could be right (i.e., lie in the virtuous mean) would be to say that there could be a mean of excess or a mean of defect, which he evidently regards as a contradiction in terms. Whether this argument for absolute prohibitions on such actions succeeds is, of course, open to debate, but Aristotle clearly intended it as an argument, not an appeal to intuition, and Thomas Aquinas accepts and repeats the argument in his commentary on the passage.

Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean is an unhelpful metaphor, but, in the larger context of Aristotle’s moral theory, it can be interpreted in a straightforward enough way. Aristotle is a eudaemonist, meaning that he thinks that man has a natural final end and that actions are right or wrong depending upon whether they are ordered as means to that end. Now, for any given end, an agent’s action may fail to advance that end for any number of reasons, e.g., because the agent does the wrong thing, or acts at the wrong time or at the wrong place, or performs the action in the wrong way, etc. In order to advance the end, the agent’s action must simultaneously be the right kind of action, done at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, etc. When Aristotle says that the virtuous action lies in a mean relative to the agent, he means primarily that a virtuous action must be right in all respects in the totality of the actual circumstances if it is to advance the agent’s natural final end.

In a theory such as this, it is not hard to see how some actions will be absolutely prohibited. For, given any end whatsoever, if the end be sufficiently specified, we can identify actions that will never advance it, regardless of the circumstances. For instance, if the end is delivering medical services in a hospital, embezzling the hospital’s funds for personal consumption will never advance that end. There is nothing mysterious about such claims; they are ultimately causal claims that certain causes (i.e., certain actions) cannot produce certain effects (i.e., the given end). Thus, if the final natural end for man is sufficiently specified, there will be some actions that cannot be means to that end, and these actions are thus always wrong and so absolutely prohibited. That is how Aristotle, at least as interpreted by Aquinas, thought about the matter. And if this is right, we can indeed know that some actions are absolutely prohibited without relying on the divine command.

This is good news, for if we had to rely on the divine command even for the limited purpose of explaining why some actions are not merely usually wrong but always wrong, we would involve ourselves in all the unloveliness of divine command theory. Why, after all, does God prohibit certain actions absolutely, even if on balance their consequences are so good? Is it just because He hates consequentialism the way He hated Esau? This would be a hard saying. In my view, if God prohibits some actions absolutely, regardless of the circumstances, He does so not arbitrarily but for a very good reason—for instance, because such actions cannot be ordered to the final end for man. And if this is the case, then the absolute prohibition can be justified without reference to the divine command after all.

That said, I think O’Brien is on to something important here. For, in our fallen state, when we are faced with an action that, although absolutely prohibited, has consequences that seem to us to be on balance very good, we are sorely tempted to ignore the absolute prohibition or to rationalize some exception to it and proceed with the action. Recall that Tollefsen, to whom O’Brien was responding, was arguing that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally wrong because it involved intentionally killing the innocent, even though it likely saved tens of thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. I agree with Tollefsen on this point, but I do not judge President Truman harshly, for I recognize how easily even a good man might make the decision he did.

Some actions are incapable of being ordered to our final end, and these actions are always and everywhere wrong. God absolutely prohibits such actions, but the divine legislation functions not to ground the absolute prohibition but to enforce it.

Robert T. Miller is a Professor of Law at Villanova University, and starting in 2012 he will be a Professor of Law and Sandler Faculty Fellow of Corporate Law at the University of Iowa.

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Christopher Tollefsen’s recent argument in Public Discourse for moral absolutes flatters the expectations of today’s methodological atheism, because his argument purports to demonstrate on non-theological grounds that it is irrational ever to choose certain intrinsically bad actions. Although I agree with many of Tollefsen’s conclusions, and in particular his judgment that the WWII nuclear attacks were unjust, I think his argument is unsuccessful. Before addressing Tollefsen’s argument directly, however, I need to explain more precisely what aspect of moral knowledge depends upon knowledge of divine law, for a considerable portion of morality is demonstrable apart from knowing that God exists.

A moral absolute is an exceptionless norm against choosing a certain type of action that is intrinsically bad. Recognizing a moral absolute therefore involves two stages of evaluation: first, seeing that some act, such as killing an innocent person, is intrinsically evil, and second, seeing that one ought never to do evil. My contention is that a demonstration of this second stage of evaluation will need to appeal to God’s legislation against doing evil that good may come. This appeal of course assumes that God exists and that He legislates the moral law. Without this appeal, it remains logically possible for someone to think that there are intrinsically evil acts, and to think that virtuous people will habitually refuse to consider committing such acts, while yet refusing to infer that such acts must be avoided in every situation whatsoever.

It is instructive at this point to consider Aristotle. Aristotle thought that there were intrinsically bad actions that nobody ought to consider choosing, and although Aristotle was a theist, his conception of God was not as a providential creator or moral legislator. Aristotle’s example is noteworthy because it shows that it is possible to arrive at the conviction that intrinsically bad actions exist without appealing to God’s legislation. But Aristotle’s example is noteworthy also because of what he does not try to do, which is to demonstrate the truth of such absolute prohibitions by appealing to some more basic set of moral reasons. This is what Tollefsen mistakenly thinks he can provide, and on non-theological grounds. For Aristotle, however, the grounds for absolute prohibitions bottom out in the perception of actions as base and shameless. Such intuitionism is as far as I think non-theological ethics can go. Receiving the correct upbringing will get you to see that certain acts are intrinsically bad, and you ought never to choose them; but in order to go further and demonstrate why this is true, you need to be able to appeal to God’s legislation of the moral law, which is what proves the reasonableness of forbearing from evil in the extreme tight-corner situation.

It is not a criticism of Aristotle to say that his belief in exceptionless moral norms bottomed out in intuition. This is true of most ordinary people for the entirety of their moral convictions, which is unproblematic unless you share the widespread but mistaken view that everyone needs to be a philosopher and have demonstrative knowledge of whatever he believes. Aristotle was unable to demonstrate the exceptionlessness of moral norms because he lacked a philosophically adequate conception of God as a providential creator. Tollefsen may ultimately think that God is a providential creator, but because this thought is idle in his defense of exceptionless norms, the argument falters. Let’s grant his assertions that there is a list of basic goods such as life, friendship, religion, work and play, aesthetic experience, etc., and that these basic goods comprise human well-being and are the ultimate reasons for doing whatever we do. From the fact that we must choose between pursuing mutually exclusive combinations of these various and distinct goods, Tollefsen says it follows that:

one should be always and entirely open to all the goods, in all persons, and never act directly or intentionally against any of the goods in any persons. “Openness” here should be understood to encompass the demand of the goods that they be promoted and protected: one is not open to basic aspects of human well-being if one always does nothing. The goods call, in various ways, for action on their behalf. But in all such action, the core negative requirement of morality is that one never intentionally act so as to damage or destroy an instance of a basic good.

The first thing to note about this argument is that, if it is correct, it generates too many exceptionless moral norms. If the basic good of life generates a concrete norm against intentionally killing people, then does the basic good of aesthetic experience generate an exceptionless norm against destroying artworks or interrupting the contemplation of paintings? This would be an absurd consequence that is at odds with the “common morality” that Tollefsen invokes. But if this consequence doesn’t follow, then the generation of exceptionless norms from the list of basic goods becomes obscure, and the theory of goods fails to provide any independent guidance for identifying or justifying exceptionless norms.

A second weakness in Tollefsen’s argument is the bald assertion that genuine tragic dilemma is impossible. Tollefsen needs to rule out the possibility of tragic dilemmas, because otherwise it would be impossible not to choose to act against some basic goods some of the time, so he asserts without argument that “one can always refrain from intentionally damaging instances of basic human goods.” Why should we think this is true? This assumption might be at home in Aristotle’s metaphysically harmonious universe of eternal species and natural purposes, or in Aquinas’s cosmology of divine governance, but Tollefsen is otiose to front-load his ethical theory with this sort of ontological presupposition. From the bare fact that we perceive life, religion, knowledge, and so on as basic values, it does not follow that these values will never conflict unavoidably in concrete cases.

To many people, the choice faced by the United States during World War II, between invading Japan or attacking it with nuclear weapons, appeared to be just such a tragic dilemma. The common morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition rejects the possibility of tragic dilemmas because it trusts in a providential God who ensures that we will not face them if we always avoid doing evil. Many philosophers and ordinary people outside of this tradition also reject tragic dilemmas because they perceive the world as a gift, or, like many naturalistic scientists, they simply assume that the world is ordered rationally without vagueness or contradiction. But if the aspiration is to produce a demonstrative argument, beyond simple perceptions or assumptions, then the only route is via philosophical theology.

It is possible to demonstrate that practices such as lying, killing the innocent, and adultery are generically bad and that everyone should avoid thinking of engaging in them. And it may be that, as Peter Geach has argued, “the rational recognition that a practice is generally undesirable and that it is best for people on the whole not to think of resorting to it is thus in fact a promulgation to a man of the Divine law forbidding the practice.” But if this sort of inference to morality’s divine source gets ruled out or postponed, then I don’t see any other avenue to justifying the exceptionlessness of absolute moral prohibitions. Domesticating God by placing Him in the anthropological category of “religion,” as one good among many, enervates the normative force of morality.

Truman’s goals in ordering the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were noble: to hasten the end of the war and to avoid the terrible casualties that were predicted as the result of an Allied invasion of Japan. The means he chose for the sake of these noble goals included the murder of civilian populations, however, which Tollefsen is right to condemn as unjust. To demonstrate why such injustice must never be considered, even in wartime emergency, requires a philosophical theology of a providential legislating God.

Matthew B. O’Brien is a post-doctoral fellow at Villanova University.

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Of course, Tollefsen references the work of Finnis, Boyle, and Grisez on nuclear deterrence, but, in the end, he largely repeats the fundamental criticism mounted against President Harry Truman by Elizabeth Anscombe over a half-century ago: Violating the moral absolute against the intentional killing of the innocent is always wrong. The atomic bombs involved such killing and so should not have been used––end of story. It is all neat, and clear, and logically consistent. And, it now has the seeming added advantage of having Veritatis Splendor to back it up.

Yet Tollefsen’s critique is rather abstract and detached from a real understanding of the war against Japan in 1945 and the courses of action open to Harry Truman. Some philosophers undoubtedly see such an understanding as completely irrelevant. A good historian is more charitable, and so struggles to understand something of the world of policymakers such as Truman with its inevitable compromises and constantly competing pressures. (In this regard let me recommend Michael Burleigh’s recent Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II.) The historian accepts the complexity, the uncertainty, and the sheer messiness of policymaking during wartime and acknowledges the tense atmosphere in which policymakers operated. Before this particular historian condemns, he, at least, wants to understand what occurred and why, for this surely aids the task of moral analysis. Let me provide some sense of my book’s conclusions, and then I will present specific reservations about Professor Tollefsen’s argument.

By July of 1945, the Japanese had undergone months of devastating attacks by American B-29s. Their capital and other major cities had suffered extensive damage, and their home islands were subjected to a naval blockade that made food and fuel increasingly scarce. Japanese military and civilian losses had reached approximately three million, and there seemed to be no end in sight. Despite all this, Japan’s leaders and military clung fiercely to notions of Ketsu-Go: a plan that centered on inflicting such punishment on the invader in defense of the homeland that he would sue for terms. In fact, even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet attack in Manchuria, the Japanese military still wanted to pursue that desperate option, but Emperor Hirohito broke the impasse in the Japanese government and ordered surrender. He came to understand that the atomic bomb undermined (as the brilliant historian Richard Frank has noted) “the fundamental premise” of Ketsu-Go “that the United States would have to invade Japan to secure a decision” in the war. Ultimately, the atomic bombs allowed the emperor and the “peace faction” in the Japanese government to negotiate an end to the war.

Of course, the United States eventually could have defeated Japan without the atomic bomb, but all the viable alternate scenarios to secure victory—continued obliteration bombing of Japanese cities and infrastructure, a choking blockade, the likely terrible invasions involving massive firepower—would have meant significantly greater Allied casualties and higher Japanese civilian and military casualties. These casualties would likely have included thousands of Allied prisoners of war whom the Japanese planned to execute. Notably, all of these options also would have indirectly involved some “intentional killing of innocents,” including the naval blockade, which sought to starve the Japanese into submission. Hard as it may be to accept when one sees the visual evidence of the terrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese losses probably would have been substantially greater without the A-bombs.

Moreover, the use of these awful weapons abruptly ended the death and suffering of innocent third parties throughout Asia. Rather surprisingly, the enormous wartime losses of the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Javanese at the hands of the Japanese receive little attention in weighing the American effort to shock the Japanese into surrender. The losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific, but they pale in comparison to the estimates of seventeen to twenty-four million deaths attributed to the Japanese’s hideous rampage from Manchuria to New Guinea. The thoughtful scholar Robert Newman explains that “the last months were in many ways the worst; starvation and disease aggravated the usual beatings, beheadings and battle deaths. It is plausible to hold that upwards of two-hundred-fifty thousand people, mostly Asian but some Westerners, would have died each month the Japanese Empire struggled in its death throes beyond July 1945.” Surely these persons also are “innocents” deserving of some concern in our moral calculations?

Bluntly put, the atomic bombs shortened the war, averted the need for a land invasion, saved countless more lives on both sides of the ghastly conflict than they cost, and brought to an end the Japanese brutalization of the conquered peoples of Asia.

Subsequent to their use, Harry Truman maintained that dropping the bombs had been necessary, having ended the war and saved numerous lives. This conviction, however, did not stave off his own serious moral qualms about the action. He never again spoke of the atomic bombs as military weapons to which the United States could make easy resort. He rightly indicated some retreat from his pre-Hiroshima view that the A-bomb was just another military weapon.

Some evidence suggests that Truman also worried that he had blood on his hands. In this, of course, he hardly stood alone among the participants in the enormous, ghastly struggle of World War II. Well over fifty million people lost their lives in that conflict, which descended to new lows of barbarism in both European and Pacific theaters. Restraints that previously had directed soldiers to spare non-combatants were thrown off as the Allies battled to defeat their powerful foes. As a number of writers have noted, a “moral Rubicon” had been crossed long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945: Churchill and Roosevelt both approved the harsh endeavors to break the morale of their foes, which they hoped would ultimately secure victory and save lives. The devastating Tokyo fire-bombings took place on FDR’s watch, after all.

Surprisingly, however, in the moral assessments of the war, Churchill and FDR escape much of the condemnation heaped on Harry Truman for using the atomic bombs. Truman’s critics should refrain from putting him in some singular dock of history. They might instead carefully consider the responsibility of the Japanese government for its people’s fate. In moral terms, the Japanese leadership had a responsibility to surrender by June of 1945, when there existed no reasonable prospect of success and when their civilian population had suffered so greatly. Instead, the neo-samurai who led the Japanese military geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population as combatants of sorts in a national kamikaze campaign. Their stupidity and perfidy in perpetrating and prolonging the war should not be ignored.

Of course, the question remains: Was it right? I suggest that, in retrospect and within the privacy of his heart, Truman likely understood that he had been forced by necessity to enter into evil. And so, I argue in my book, he had. He ordered the bombing of cities possessing significant military-industrial value, but in which thousands of noncombatants, among them the innocent elderly and the sick, women and children, were annihilated. Evaluated in isolation, each atomic bombing was a deeply immoral act deserving of condemnation. The fact that the bombings entailed the least harm of the available paths to victory, and that it brought an end to destruction, death, and casualties on an even more massive scale, cannot obviate their evil; it should, however, satisfy those who accept a utilitarian approach to morality, in which good ends can justify certain immoral means. I am not in that number.

Yet I remain sympathetic in evaluating Truman and his decision. He was a person who knew that the confusing fog of war sometimes places the policymaker in circumstances where he has neither a clear nor an easy “moral” option. Perhaps Truman had his A-bomb decision in mind when he wrote fifteen years later, in a discourse on decision-making (in his Mr. Citizen), that “sometimes you have a choice of evils, in which case you try to take the course that is likely to bring the least harm.” That is how his decision regarding the atomic bombs should be assessed.

From the perspective of over six decades, Truman’s use of the bomb, when viewed in the context of the long and terrible war, should be seen as his choosing the least evil of the options available to him. Admittedly, he did not weigh these options in a careful moral calculus at the time and proceed forward with that understanding, but fair-minded observers will see that he chose what he might have termed a necessary evil—the one that did the least harm. Henry L. Stimson had it exactly right when he wrote in 1947 that “the decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. No explanation can change that fact and I do not wish to gloss over it. But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice.” “Abhorrent,” for sure, but it must be understood, the “least abhorrent” as well so as to bring the bloodshed to an end.

Truman, along with many others, has blood on his hands, but he also stopped the veritable flood of blood on all sides. The reality that he prevented much greater bloodshed must be acknowledged. So, too, it must be appreciated that, in choosing to employ the atomic bomb, he did not turn his back on some obvious and feasible “moral” course of action that would have secured a Japanese surrender.

It is when one turns to alternate courses of action that the abstract nature of Tollefsen’s criticisms becomes apparent. He criticizes Truman’s actions as immoral but offers no serious proposal regarding a viable alternative. Elizabeth Anscombe had naively suggested that Truman alter the terms of surrender, but such an approach only would have strengthened the hand of the Japanese militarists and confirmed their suicidal strategy. Tollefsen concedes that “it might well be true that greater suffering would have resulted from a refusal to use the atomic weapons in Japan,” but he backs away from any genuine discussion of what Truman should have done and of what that “greater suffering” might have involved. He provides no evidence that he has considered this matter at all. But should philosophers be able to avoid outlining what they would have done in the demanding circumstances that Truman confronted? I have always thought that moral reflection wrestles with the awful and painful realities. Tollefsen seems to want to stand above the fray, to pronounce Truman’s actions as deeply immoral and to leave it at that. It would have brought greater clarity to this discussion if he had confronted the alternatives seriously.

If Tollefsen were to engage the military issues involved in the war in the Pacific, I suspect he would be forced to raise further objections to the American military practices pursued well before the Enola Gay flew toward Hiroshima. Take as but one example the early 1945 Battle for Manila, in which approximately one hundred thousand Filipino civilians were killed. Some were killed by the Japanese, but many of this large number were killed by aggressive American air and artillery bombardments used, without particular regard for civilian casualties, as the American forces sought to dislodge an established enemy that refused to surrender. These harsh tactics could not meet Tollefsen’s criteria with regard to means. Given his unbending approach on moral absolutes, I assume he would condemn the action; but just what military means would he support in trying to defeat a foe that considered surrender the ultimate disgrace and who fought accordingly? Similarly, Tollefsen could hardly approve of the military force utilized in the taking of Okinawa and the high number of civilian casualties that resulted.

I suspect that Professor Tollefsen would be willing to say that it would be better to do absolutely nothing and to live with the consequences, if I may use that word, than to use morally questionable tactics. But the decision not to act undoubtedly would have incurred terrible consequences. Surely such inaction would carry some burden of responsibility for the prolongation of the killing of innocents throughout Asia, in the charnel house of the Japanese Empire. Is it really “moral” to stand aside, maintaining one’s supposed moral purity, while a vast slaughter is occurring at the rate of over two hundred thousand deaths a month? Isn’t there a terrible dilemma here, namely, which innocent lives to save? Would Tollefsen really have rested at peace with the long-term Japanese domination of Asia? Would that be a pro-life position?

Let me confess that I would prefer that my position had the clarity of Professor Tollefsen’s. It is a large concession to admit that Truman’s action was the “least evil.” Arguing that it was the least-harmful option open to him will hardly be persuasive to those who see everything in a sharp black-and-white focus. Yet this is how I see it. If someone can present to me a viable and more “moral way” to have defeated the Japanese and ended World War II, I will change my position. I suppose my position here has some resonance with my support for the policy of deterrence during the Cold War. I could recognize the moral flaws in the strategy but still I found it the best of the available options, and the alternatives were markedly worse. Interestingly, I think the author of Veritatis Splendor thought the same thing and he conveyed that view to the American bishops as they wrote their peace pastoral letter.

I trust that my pro-life credentials will not be questioned because I refuse to denounce Truman as a “mass-murderer.” Unlike Tollefsen, I do not think that my position initiates the unraveling of the entire pro-life garment. I believe Truman pursued the least-harmful course of action available to him to end a ghastly war, a course that resulted in the least loss of life.

In closing, let me admit that I hold Harry Truman in high regard for his efforts during the Cold War, of which I have written at some length. I endorse my friend Alonzo Hamby’s view that “Truman’s mobilization of the Western world against the Communist challenge” was an achievement “Churchillian in its significance.” He was certainly worthy of the Oxford degree that Elizabeth Anscombe sought to deny him.

Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., is a priest in the Congregation of Holy Cross and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

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Through it all, one voice of pro-life sanity—certainly not the only one, but a voice to take seriously—has been Fr. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., a professor in the history department. Fr. Miscamble vigorously protested the Obama honors; he has been an important figure in the history of the Center for Ethics and Culture, a pro-life bright spot on the Notre Dame campus; and he leads the campus chapter of University Faculty for Life. His pro-life witness at an essential moment in Notre Dame’s history has been exemplary.

So it is with no pleasure that I venture here to make some criticisms of his recent book, a short history of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Most Controversial Decision is, as history, a great read. Miscamble presents a concise but clear narrative of the events leading up to the attack, especially Truman’s elevation to the duties of the presidency after Roosevelt’s death, for which his preparation at Roosevelt’s hands had been, in Miscamble’s words, a “disgraceful failure.” The race to get Truman up to speed proceeded neck and neck with the race to get the first atomic weapons ready for use. Truman received word of a successful test while returning from the Potsdam conference with Stalin and Clement Atlee, Churchill’s successor. Before he had finished that voyage, Hiroshima became the first city to be attacked with an atomic bomb.

According to Miscamble, neither Truman nor his secretary of state James Byrnes “raised any questions regarding whether the atomic bomb was a legitimate weapon of war.” And, as he points out later, “indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945.” I believe that referring to the Japanese attacks, and indeed, previous attacks on Tokyo and Dresden, as “indiscriminate” misstates the matter, to the extent that the word suggests merely a lack of care. Rather, the cities were attacked precisely because they had not only military targets of value, but also because they were large population centers—and thus the label “terror bombing” was aptly applied. Truman himself would describe the atomic bomb as “far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them by wholesale.” Yet Truman remained ready to drop more bombs than the two that were necessary; and he remained ready to drop more into the future, while praying that “he would never have to make such a decision again.”

What are we to make of this, from a moral point of view? Miscamble rightly distinguishes the question of “necessity” from the question of “morality”; even if the use of the bomb were necessary to shorten the war and save many Americans, and perhaps even some Japanese and other Asian lives, was it a morally defensible decision that Truman made?

By the standards of what philosophers call “common morality,” the answer is clearly in the negative. Common morality is that part of morality that been articulated, developed, and promulgated by the Judeo-Christian tradition, but which also can be known by natural reason. By well before the twentieth century, common morality had coalesced around a principle of just war that those who pose no threat are absolutely not to be intentionally targeted or killed. This principle was acknowledged, but certainly not introduced, by the Second Vatican Council, in its document Gaudium et Spes: “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” So common morality, and at least the Catholic Church’s magisterial teaching on the matter, agree that non-combatants should never be intentionally targeted for death.

And “never” means “never.” As John Finnis, Joseph M. Boyle, and Germain Grisez explain in their book on nuclear deterrence, “Moral impossibility is as absolute a limit on responsibility as is any other sort of impossibility, and there are kinds of actions which are of themselves wrong, whatever the circumstances and good intentions.” So, as I noted in a recent Public Discourse essay, if one is convinced of the truth of moral absolutes, one must completely rule out their violations from options for action.

No doubt Truman, like Roosevelt before him, was in a difficult position in considering the invasion of Japan. Some philosophers, like Elizabeth Anscombe, have pointed to the Allies’ demand for “unconditional surrender” as contributing to this difficulty: faced with such a demand, with its implied willingness to absolutely dismantle the Japanese state even if it were to surrender (for “unconditional” means, on its surface, that nothing was off the table), there could be little motivation for the Japanese to lay down their arms.

Miscamble directly takes up this challenge, and his portrait of the Supreme War Leadership Council of the Emperor suggests an astonishing willingness on the part of some members to continue the fight even after the second atomic bombing; change in the demand would, he argues, have been interpreted as a sign of weakness. But Miscamble does not, in criticizing Anscombe, address her more fundamental point: that Truman had “certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end,” a claim for which the evidence is overwhelming; nor does he take on her moral evaluation of this as “always murder.”

Instead, Miscamble approaches the issue through a Machiavellian lens, suggesting that a statesman “must come to ruin” if he is not able to make the hard decisions and “learn to be able not to be good.” Miscamble writes of Truman: “within the privacy of his own heart and soul it is likely that Truman understood he had been forced by necessity to enter into evil. And, so indeed, he had.”

But the idea of being faced with and forced by necessity into doing evil—such as violating the moral absolute against intentional killing of the innocent, or indeed any other moral principle—is no part of common morality. In fact, moral absolutes are framed, as I argued in my previous essay, in terms of intentional acts precisely because it is always possible to refrain from an action whose intention would be contrary to a human good. The deliberate killing of “the innocent elderly and the sick, women and children” is precisely such an action: always and deeply contrary to the good of human life, always and everywhere to be avoided in one’s choices and actions.

The Machiavellian idea, in fact, is deeply opposed to common morality and the tradition of moral absolutes in its pretense that the life of the successful public servant is incompatible with adherence to such absolutes (and to other forms of virtue as well). Common morality does indeed identify acts that only public authorities can perform, such as taxation and imprisonment of felons, but never on grounds that public authorities are exempt from an absolute that governs all agents.

The Machiavellian position, like the position that accepts that moral absolutes must be violated in cases of “supreme emergency,” is also unstable. If no moral absolutes for public servants, who are, after all, only human beings, then no moral absolutes at all. So if one can be forced by necessity into killing the innocents on a grand scale for the great good of the state, then why cannot one be “forced” into such killing on a small scale for the sake of one’s career, education, mental well-being, or family stability?

Thus we come inevitably to the more immediately pressing issues of pro-life consistency and witness. Consistency because the pro-life view identifies a universal moral claim as underwriting its commitment to the unborn: all innocent human beings are to be held absolutely immune from intentionally inflicted harm or death. Snip that thread in the ethics of war, and the entire pro-life garment, covering the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly, begins to unravel. And witness because the pro-life cause is furthered not only by arguments, but by a willingness on the part of pro-life citizens to live out their commitments with an acknowledgment that sometimes those commitments require difficult choices: choices of personal, and even political, sacrifice.

It might well be true that greater suffering would have resulted from a refusal to use the atomic weapons in Japan, or to firebomb Tokyo, or Dresden before that. In fact, these claims cannot be known with certainty, and also could be false. Commitment to the moral principles of common morality, however, is not, and never has been, conditioned on the idea that adherence to those principles would never be demanding: witness all those killed for their refusal to foreswear their faith. To plead for greater “understanding” of the evils that Truman avoided, or the difficulties that he faced, is one thing; but to excuse his choices as “necessary” evils, required for the greater good, is to abandon our post as witnesses to the truth that pro-life principles are immutable and without exception.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the author, with Robert P. George, of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, the second edition of which recently has been released. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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The natural law view that underlies much of what I have written for Public Discourse is rooted in the idea of St. Thomas Aquinas that the principles of the natural law are directives toward human goods that are aspects of human well-being. Moving beyond St. Thomas, we could say that each basic good gives to human agents a basic reason for action, rooted in those aspects of human well-being and perfection promised by instances of those goods. But there are many such goods: human life and health, knowledge, aesthetic experience, work and play, friendship, marriage, personal integrity, and the good of religion.

Faced with a plurality of goods, the moral question is this: what should one do when one is faced with competing options in the pursuit of goods, options that are not all mutually pursuable? The suggestion that I make here is that one should be always and entirely open to all the goods, in all persons, and never act directly or intentionally against any of the goods in any persons. “Openness” here should be understood to encompass the demand of the goods that they be promoted and protected: one is not open to basic aspects of human well-being if one always does nothing. The goods call, in various ways, for action on their behalf. But in all such action, the core negative requirement of morality is that one never intentionally act so as to damage or destroy an instance of a basic good.

To repeat, basic goods are aspects of human well-being, and nothing but such aspects. In themselves, as I have argued in my discussion of capital punishment, they give us always a reason to promote and protect, and always a reason not to damage. So an ethic of human goods, an ethic that takes human well-being as a touchstone notion, must establish some very strong protections of goods to be respected in human action, for damage to human goods is damage to human well-being or flourishing. An ethic that was concerned with human flourishing but paid no attention to whether an act was damaging or destructive of human goods would make little sense.

Yet it is impossible to go through life in service of human goods and human well-being without having some kind of negative impact upon basic human goods: even the choice to do this, rather than that, means that some goods will go unserved. In some cases, even fulfilling my obligations will have as a consequence some damage to basic goods: I thrust myself between my child and the attacker’s knife, for example, in order to save my child’s life; but I suffer grave damage to my own life in consequence. So a goods-based ethic rooted in human well-being cannot demand that whatever one does, one never in any way do anything that will bring harm upon instances of human goods. Such an ethic would be unworkable.

But one can always refrain from acting; and in this way, if in no other, one can always refrain from intentionally damaging instances of basic human goods. So we should conclude that the core constraint of ethics should and could be framed as a demand that one never intentionally damage or destroy an instance of a basic human good. This conclusion would only be strengthened were one to recognize that in many cases of positive action for the sake of some good, as in the case of my saving my child’s life, the unavoidable damage to the good—my life—is not intended. Rather, the harm I suffer is accepted as a side effect, but it is neither chosen as a means, nor willed as an end; in short, it is not intended.

This line of thought leads not only to the formulation of moral absolutes, but also to the so-called principle of double effect. With regard to absolutes, each will be framed as a negative requirement never to choose a particular kind of act that is always damaging to a basic good. So, a moral absolute regarding human life would be: never intentionally kill an innocent human being. (In fact, I believe that no human being should be intentionally killed, but we can put that aside for now.) 

However, recognizing that some acts that have as a consequence the death of a human being are such that the death is not intended, the principle of double effect teaches that under certain circumstances—if the agent has not been negligent and has no other way to address the problem, and if the goods at stake are great and gravely threatened—then the agent may do something (save my child’s life) that is morally good, even though that action has as a side effect a consequence (harm to my life) that it would be wrong to intend. Particularly where the good of human life is concerned, the principle of double effect has been thought central to the defense of moral absolutes; for example, without it—if we had only a blanket prohibition against doing anything that harmed innocent life—it would be impossible to refuse a medical treatment, no matter how onerous or costly, if the refusal would shorten the patient’s life.

What emerges from the discussion concerning moral absolutes, then, is this: First, moral absolutes are essential to the protection of human goods, and hence human well-being. They are not “mere” restrictions or commands, with no relevance to the goods that matter to us. 

Second, moral absolutes are to be understood as restricting certain kinds of intentional acts: intentional killing, for example. This leads, third, to the following important point: as so understood, moral absolutes are to be framed only by identifying a kind of act that, if it were chosen, would be such always as to involve the agent’s intending damage or destruction to a basic human good. Put another way, the acts picked out by moral absolutes do not themselves include a reference to their moral status; but they are such that they—acts of this kind—may be identified as always and everywhere wrong because of their negative relationship to human goods.

Descriptions of the moral absolute against murder thus go wrong if they identify the act that is prohibited as “unjust killing” or “killing one with a right to life.” Much better is: no intentional killing of innocent human beings. We may designate this kind of action by the name “murder.” And if, as I think, such acts as murder, so understood, are always directed against someone’s pursuit or enjoyment of basic goods, then one can conclude that the intentional killing of an innocent human being (murder) is always and everywhere wrong. Murder is thus not defined as wrongful killing (for then “murder is wrong” would be a mere tautology, trivially true). But, because all murder involves an intentional damaging of an instance of the basic good of human life, it is true that murder is always wrong.

There is, fourth and finally, an implication of the “absoluteness” of moral absolutes, an implication identified by every major figure of the Thomistic natural law tradition up until quite recently: absolutes are never to be violated, regardless of the consequences. This claim might seem almost comically obvious, were it not so routinely questioned, even by very serious proponents of the natural law, and even by members of faith traditions, such as the Catholic Church, who have accepted and promulgated the doctrine that there are moral absolutes. For routinely we find that even such persons of good will are doubtful that moral absolutes should be upheld in situations where many lives are at stake, or where horrible evils are threatened, or in situations, as they have come to be called, of “supreme emergency,” such as the Nazi threat against Europe, the Soviet threat against the free West, or the Islamist threat of al Qaeda.

As John Finnis and others have argued, even a conditional willingness to accept that moral absolutes may be put aside in such cases denudes the doctrine of moral absolutes of all its distinctive content: apparently, if such exceptions are to be contemplated, there will be situations in which the goods protected by the moral absolutes are outweighed or overridden by some conceivable set of harms or other achievable goods. But if such a possibility is available in principle, then not only are there no moral absolutes, there is also no reason to think that the boundary at which we meet restrictions against such actions as intentional killing of the innocent, false assertion, blasphemy, or adultery is far out, distant from our day-to-day considerations. Perhaps there are legitimate goods to be achieved and evils avoided, by, for example, killing a patient to relieve suffering, and not just killing non-combatants to destroy Nazi morale.

So the acceptance of the claim that there are moral absolutes makes a stringent demand on our practical reason: violation of such absolutes is never to be considered a real option for action, whether in hypothetical scenarios scared up to induce conditional violations, or in our day-to-day life, faced with the myriad of temptations to which each of us is subject.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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As Aristotle observed, in order to have fruitful discourse we need to make sure that we really are talking about the same thing in the same respect. For example, those who appeal to various forms of natural-law ethics presuppose both the intelligibility of the very notion of nature and that any sound ethical theory must find its roots in the natural order. In this tradition, nature discloses an inherent intelligibility and purposefulness that, in principle, human reason can discover.

It is, however, precisely the notion of nature and human nature so central to the tradition of natural law ethics that is rejected by many who label themselves “progressives.” Instead, they often embrace a mechanistic view of the world, and a reductionist materialism that denies any inherent purpose in nature, because they see them as necessary correlatives to the rise of modern science. Even if they are dissatisfied with mechanism and materialism, they think that appeals to the traditional understanding of nature and human nature are hopelessly misguided, the product of a kind of nostalgia for a past that the modern world has irrevocably left behind. If one wishes to argue seriously for a traditional understanding of what it means to be human, one must at least recognize (if not confront) a common, often unstated commitment to the view that the modern world, especially modern science, has rendered irrelevant the very principles underpinning any such understanding.

It is easy for us to accept as incontrovertibly true a master narrative of modernity according to which our modern world is born (at least in part) in the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th Century. In that revolution, modern science emerged, versions of this grand interpretation would have it, precisely by rejecting the conceptions of nature and human nature that are at the core of an Aristotelian-Thomistic world-view. Since there is a deep gulf, a fundamental incompatibility, between an Aristotelian notion of nature and the understanding of nature ushered in by modern science, any appeal to what Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas would say about the natural sciences is deemed irrelevant to the intellectual projects of modernity.

The standard version of this narrative tells how Galileo and Newton overturned the antiquated Aristotelian view of the universe and established the principles of modern science. Although the master narrative has many subdivisions, it is useful to focus on what is regarded as the very first principle of the new physics, the principle of inertia: “every body perseveres in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” Alfred North Whitehead called the principle of inertia “the first article of the creed of science, and like the Church’s creed it is more than a mere statement of belief; it is a paean of triumph over defeated heretics.” The defeated heretics, Whitehead explains, are “the Aristotelians who for two thousand years imposed on dynamics the search for a physical cause of motion.” According to this interpretation, Newton’s principle of inertia contradicts Aristotle’s principle that everything which is moved is moved by another. If Newton is right, Aristotle must be wrong.

Scholars often see significant consequences of the new science. Oxford philosopher Anthony Kenny, for example, denies the probative force of Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God because these proofs are based on the principles of Aristotelian science, a science that the modern world has shown to be false. More importantly, for our purposes, Kenny also thinks Aquinas’s ethical theory suffers because Aquinas’s account of appetites in man and in animals depends upon a falsified “archaic physics.” Any notion of the natural agency of inanimate matter cannot be reconciled with the principle of inertia. Newtonian mechanics, according to Kenny, rules out any appeal to a teleological account of all of nature: “The operations of the laws of inertia and gravity and the natural activities of sulphur or uranium are not teleological activities at all. If we today are to seek, as Aquinas did, to locate animal desire and human willing in a hierarchy of different kinds of tendencies toward good, then we must put at the bottom level of the hierarchy not the natural agency of inanimate matter, but the non-conscious teleological activities to be found in the plant world.”

Kenny observes that, for Aquinas, “all action, including the most elemental actions of completely inanimate bodies, was . . . fundamentally teleological. This part of Aquinas’s system is something which must be discarded if we are to make any use of his philosophy at the present time.” Alasdair MacIntyre, despite his sympathies for Aristotle and Aquinas, argued, at least in his early writings, for the necessity of providing a new foundation for ethics, different from the natural philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. The new science, he argued, was a classic case of “systematically different and incomparable observational languages, key concepts, and theoretical structures [which] were framed in terms of rival and incomparable standards . . . [such that] there was no shared common measure [between the sciences of Aristotle and Newton].”

Hans Blumenberg and Wolfhart Pannenberg have argued that the principle of inertia lies behind a radical affirmation of the autonomy of the natural world. Just as motion needs no continuing cause for its existence, so too existence itself is a kind of given (at best only given in some initial creative act). As Pannenberg notes, it was Newton’s understanding of inertia in terms of a force that is inherent in bodies, along with the reduction of force to a body and its mass, that contributed in a decisive way “in the course of the eighteenth century to the removal of God from the explanation of nature.” And Blumenberg observes: “The modern age has regarded self-preservation (conservatio sui) as a fundamental category of everything in existence and has found this borne out all the way from the principle of inertia in physics to the biological structure of drives and the laws of state building.” Self-assertion and human autonomy are the broader cultural correlatives of a fundamentally new principle of explanation—and, for Blumenberg, it is the principle of inertia that lies at the core of this new view of things.

When Blumenberg and Pannenberg expand the implications of the principle of inertia to the realm of creation, they exhibit a deficient view of the kind of metaphysical dependency the doctrine of creation entails. To think that the continuing reality of any motion or change or of a state of rest does not need an explanation in terms of a cause—which is precisely the interpretation given to Newton’s principle of inertia—does not mean that the continuing existence of all that is, as it exists, in whatever way it exists, does not require the causality of God as Creator. Explanations in the natural sciences, however they are understood, do not extend to fundamental questions of existence, which belong, rather, to the domain of metaphysics. Whatever self-sufficiency one might find in nature, it is not an absolute self-sufficiency; it is only a self-sufficiency with respect to principles of the natural sciences, but not with respect to God as cause of all that is. Changes in the world can be explained in terms of causes found in nature. Such explanation is the proper domain of the natural sciences. But these causes are not sufficient to explain why things exist in the first place: why there is something rather than nothing.

What about the principle of inertia and explanations in the natural sciences, especially as these explanations entail notions of nature central to ethical reflections? Newton’s famous three laws of motion appear early in the Principia. He begins with a series of definitions concerning mass, forces, and the like; then states the three laws and deduces corollaries from them. These laws, corollaries, and definitions are expressed in expository prose without those mathematical equations with which we have become familiar. In the preface, Newton reminds the reader that in this work he will “subject the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.” At another place, he observes that he only provides “a mathematical notion of . . . forces, without considering their physical causes.” He tells us that he is considering “forces not physically, but mathematically.” At the beginning of Book III, the section called the “System of the World,” Newton notes: “In the preceding books, I have laid down principles not philosophical but mathematical.”

Immediately prior to his enunciation of the principle of inertia, Newton hypothesizes what would happen in projectile motion “if the resistance of the air is taken away.” In this discussion Newton moves from the world of ordinary experience to imagine the limiting case of motion: viz., that at which the projectile would proceed in its motion forever. Newton describes what obtains in a limiting case, and, thus, he presupposes the concept of limit in the derivation of that case. Newton’s notion of limit is drawn from mathematical modes of reasoning. It is precisely such a mathematical concept of limit which is at the root of the principle of inertia. The principle is an inference drawn from the mathematical-physical approach to a limit. In other words, as the resistance of the medium approaches zero, the distance traveled approaches infinity.

As an idealized, quasi-mathematical concept, the principle of inertia involves an abstraction from the extrinsic forces acting on real bodies moving in a physical environment. The principle also involves an abstraction from any kind of physical causality. Accordingly, the principle of inertia, regardless of its truth, says nothing in support of, nor in contradiction to, Aristotle’s principle in physics that everything that is moved is moved by another. The principle of inertia considers bodies simply as three-dimensional realities devoid of natures. Such an abstraction from nature is possible and appropriate in the mathematical study of nature. Remember the title of Newton’s work: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy [Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica]. Only if one assumes that the principle of inertia is a law of nature and not simply a principle in mathematical physics would one have a problem with its relationship to Aristotelian physics. The application of mathematics to the study of motion necessarily involves an abstract world. And an abstract world is not a false world; but neither is it identical with the world of nature.

Aristotle’s notion of nature, central to his physics and foundational for traditional ethics, is not challenged by the mathematical physics of Newton. Aristotle may be right or wrong on what nature and motion are, but he is not wrong because Newton is right. Newton and others developed a greatly expanded notion of the role of mathematics in the study of nature, but these “new sciences” do not really challenge the principles of Aristotelian physics. Much more needs to be said here about the relationship between mathematical physics and the physics of Aristotle (including the inadequacy of any number of conclusions within Aristotle’s physics). My fundamental point is that the rise of modern science, exemplified by the principle of inertia and the whole of Newtonian mechanics, does not require that we abandon the traditional understanding of nature.

The philosophical commitment to a mechanistic and materialistic natural philosophy is the product of philosophical traditions in the seventeenth century and beyond. Mechanism and materialism represent a radical rejection of Aristotelian and Thomistic natural philosophy, but mechanism and materialism remain excess baggage, not required in order to accept the advances in our understanding of the world that are the legacy of Galileo and Newton.

Distinguishing developments in mathematical physics from the philosophical baggage often associated with the Scientific Revolution allows us to avoid the error of thinking that the rise and development of modern science renders the philosophical insights of Aristotle, Aquinas, and others useless. Modern science does not require us to abandon notions of nature and human nature upon which so much of traditional ethics depends. A better understanding of the limits and inadequacies of the master narrative of modernity can not only help us to recognize the true source of the view that modern science is incompatible with the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, but can also provide the kind of intellectual space necessary to take that philosophy seriously.


William E. Carroll is the Thomas Aquinas Fellow in Science and Religion at Blackfriars Hall and a member of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Oxford. He is author of Creation and Science, Galileo: Science and Faith, and La Creación y las Ciencias Naturales: Actualidad de Santo Tomás de Aquino, and co-author with Steven E. Baldner of Aquinas on Creation.

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Feser argues that the legitimacy of punishment requires the notion of merit, and that the idea of merit requires, in turn, that punishment must be proportionate to the crime. He believes that I implicitly deny what he calls the “principle of proportionality”—that punishment should be proportionate to the crime; I thus evacuate the idea of meriting punishment of any substance, and so implicitly deny the legitimacy of punishment, even while claiming not to—an alleged incoherence.

Feser does not address my account of punishment, which is thoroughly political in its foundations: punishment restores a kind of equality between citizens that the criminal’s overly self-assertive act(s) of will had disrupted, by taking away something of the criminal’s contrary to his will (such as his liberty of action).

Feser’s account of punishment does not appear to be rooted in political considerations, but in something, for want of a better word, more metaphysical: punishment is a harm that must be inflicted on criminals because they deserve it in some absolute sense. “Desert,” for Feser, seems to go beyond the idea, common to my account and his, that it would be wrong to punish those who were not responsible, to something stronger: punishment is the principled harming of someone, proportionate to the wrong that they have done others, because that is what they deserve. Feser makes reference to justice, but not in any overtly political sense: the justice served seems to be justice from the point of view of the universe, not of the state.

Consider, however, the sin of private blasphemy. On a plausible understanding, this could be considered the worst of possible sins, hence deserving of the greatest possible punishment. It is clear, nevertheless, on my account, why it is not to be punished by the state: it does not involve an over-assertion of the blasphemer’s will contrary to the order of wills established by law.

A political conception of retributive punishment makes somewhat softer claims about merit and proportionality than Feser does. Merit is, as I have noted, necessary in this sense: punishment should only be done to those who are guilty of the assertion of will that punishment redresses. Hence, if not deserved (merited), punishment should not be inflicted. Proportionality, too, is somewhat softened by contrast with Feser’s account. Feser supposes there is a precise, or specific, amount of punishment that is merited by the criminal and that ought, barring practical considerations and considerations of mercy, to be exacted. The cosmic scales are finely tuned.

But political scales—not so much. The degree to and way in which a criminal’s will ought to be restricted does not seem, even in principle, subject to such a fine-grained assessment; Aquinas thus considered punishment to be an example of what he called determinatio, determination of the law by decision. Such determinations are required by the natural law, for there must be a speed limit, or designated range of what is permissible. Yet the precise limit, in cases requiring a determination, is not fixed by the natural law but by choice, which can differ from place to place according to custom, prior commitment, or other considerations.

Of course, such determinations must be made within the scope of what is otherwise morally permissible, what the natural law requires; and if the natural law, as a matter of deduction, and not determination, requires that one never intentionally kill, then that choice is ruled out of the range of determinations one might make regarding punishment. This is a perfectly intelligible claim; one might, as Feser does, disagree with it, but the idea that it introduces an incoherence into my account of punishment is false.

I pressed on Feser the following argument to make the general point about the limits of punishment: just as I think intentional killing is not within the realm of permissible forms of punishment, so, I assumed, we both would accept that rape would not be within those bounds. Feser responds by dividing the wrongs of rape into those done to the victim—the wrongs of humiliation and sexual assault—and those done to the character of the rapist in and by his choosing: the “sexual perversion and sadism by which the rapist harms his own character.” By contrast, says Feser, to “take a life is, essentially, to inflict merely a single harm—the taking of the life.”

As an account of murder generally, however, this claim is also false. The murderer certainly deprives his victim of a good, and thus wrongs that victim; but the murderer also wills contrary to the good of life, and this willing is, like the choosing of sexual perversion and sadism, an intransitive harming of the murderer’s character. This can be seen in a number of ways: the attempted but unsuccessful murderer has not harmed his victim, but is morally guilty and corrupted in precisely the same way that the successful murderer is. Also, the one who accidentally kills has harmed the victim, but, in not choosing to do so, he is not guilty of an anti-life willing. His character is unchanged by the accidental death.

Here is a core aspect of my approach to ethics that seems to differ from Feser’s: I think that morality is ultimately a matter of the heart—of the will of the agent. What is the standard by which that agent’s will should be guided and measured? It is the standard provided by the various basic or fundamental goods of the human person, those goods that are constitutive aspects of every human person’s well-being and fulfillment, such as life, knowledge, or friendship. That standard, when reason considers all the goods, in their bearing on all beings who, like us, are fulfilled in those goods, is one of openness: agents should promote and protect as possible all the goods in all persons; and agents should never will contrary to the goodness of those human goods, by a choice deliberately to damage or destroy an instance of one of those goods in a person. Hence the claim on which I rest, ultimately, my opposition to capital punishment: the intentional killing of another human being is always impermissible.

The previous paragraph contains a number of points that Feser opposes in closing his essay. These points especially concern the concepts of dignity, goods, and persons, to which I now turn.

Dignity connotes an excellence, and the form of dignity that, in previous essays, I have named “essential dignity” is, I believe, the dignity or excellence of persons, of beings possessed, as Feser notes, of the joint capacity for reason and free choice. It is joint capacity, not as currently exercised, but possessed as a radical capacity by virtue of being a member of this human species, that makes a being a person and hence one of us, a member of the community of human persons to which each reader of this essay belongs.

This community is itself the community of beings whose fulfillment and well-being is to be found in the basic goods of human persons, goods that our capacities for freedom and reason enable us to pursue actively, if we have developed in the way that is characteristic but not inevitable for members of our species. To belong to that community is, therefore, to be protected by the scope of morality’s demand that we be open to the basic goods, and hence to be protected by morality’s requirement that we never intentionally damage or destroy an instance of a basic good: it is to be immune, among other things, from intentional killing.

Are the very freedom and reason that constitute us as members of the community protected by the scope of morality’s demands? Of course they are, because freedom and reason, in the sense that both Feser and I mean, are aspects of our life: to end either capacity is to end our existence as members of this species. So these capacities are to be absolutely protected against all intentional attacks.

But the exercise of freedom, particularly what Feser calls “liberty of action” is not identical to this capacity, and it can be limited without in any way damaging the capacity itself. Indeed, as I am sure Feser would agree, many forms of limitation on the freedom of action are, if only in the long run, enhancements of our ability to exercise that root capacity: such limitation is essential for proper education of children, for example.

So the limitation of liberty is very different from the intentional taking of life. The exercise of liberty, and the presence of a structured form of political freedom, are both instrumental, in a sense: they make possible our free self-constitution as persons of a certain character, and so, being instrumental, they can be limited. But the capacity itself is part of our life and, like the biological part of our life, ought never to be intentionally damaged or ended.

The notion of “dignity”—essential dignity—operates in a summary way to call all the preceding considerations about membership in the human community to mind; the undermining of the idea that this can be done, promoted by those who think of membership in the community as achieved, earned, or bestowed, has been one of the signal, if dismal, triumphs of the modern age. The “dignity” of the human being no longer carries presumptive weight against claims about the permissibility of a number of kinds of killing. This is quite at odds, however, with traditional natural law and specifically Christian thinking about this matter.

Considerations of human dignity seem to be at the root of much natural law and Christian reflection on the wrong of killing in such a way as to make the presumptive baseline position one of opposition to all killing. This presumptive baseline is only strengthened, in early Christianity, by reflection on the mystery of the Incarnation. In light of such considerations, the burden of proof, for those who accept the core idea that all human beings are persons and have essential dignity, is that intentional killing requires a special justification: these justifications typically run by reference to some special authorization to kill, divine or political, or to the loss of dignity suffered by the criminal.

It is only in the context of these considerations that appeals to desert and proportionality can and do get off the ground in the natural law tradition. These notions are not taken to be starting points, because the frame of reverence for human life is not understood in that tradition as already suffused with the relativity of circumstance that proportionality and merit import in a world in which everyone is guilty to some degree or other—particularly from a cosmic point of view. Rather, the presumptive starting point is one of absolute opposition to intentional killing of beings created in the image of God, for which exceptions must be earned.

But the traditional justifications for such exceptions seem to fail. A loss of essential dignity is tantamount to a loss of personhood—certainly not something experienced by the criminal—and the authority claims themselves seem too weak to justify intentional killing, if the criminal retains his essential dignity. Thus many full-fledged adherents to the natural law tradition and many religious, including magisterial, voices have moved continually closer to the claim that capital punishment is not just imprudent but in principle wrong.

Some believe that this position is incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy; Feser thinks the position is incoherent. I think the position is neither, and that it represents an important step in the struggle to acknowledge the worth of every human being, born or unborn, thriving or disabled, old or young, innocent or guilty.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Tollefsen has replied to my article, affirming that punishment as such is legitimate. To maintain his absolute opposition to capital punishment, then, he must reject the principle of proportionality, which he does implicitly if not explicitly in his response. This rejection, however, makes his overall position incoherent.

Consider first how a rejection of the principle of proportionality is indeed implicit in Tollefsen’s position. The crimes of serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, or of genocidal dictators like Hitler or Stalin, are obviously far worse than those of someone guilty only of (say) a single, painless murder or treason. Given the principle of proportionality, then, they merit a harsher penalty. Of course, in practice, such a penalty might be impossible to inflict: there is no way to execute a Bundy or a Hitler more than once. Hence, in practice, a sadistic mass murderer may end up receiving the same punishment as someone guilty of a single murder. On Tollefsen’s view, however, the worst of these offenses ought never, even in principle, to be punished more severely than the others; they do not entail a penalty proportional to their gravity. If Tollefsen is right, life in prison is the harshest sentence that any of the offenders in question could ever receive legitimately, even if it were possible to penalize them in proportion to their offense, and even though it is possible to give a one-time murderer a proportionate penalty. (Some opponents of capital punishment also maintain that life imprisonment is contrary to human dignity; whether Tollefsen agrees with them, I do not know.)

Such a result, unable as it is truly to “fit” the punishment to the crime, hardly seems consistent with justice. Tollefsen’s position, however, is not merely counterintuitive; it is incoherent. As I noted in my original article, “we cannot plausibly reject [the principle of proportionality] without rejecting the notions of desert and punishment along with it.” Tollefsen would no doubt agree that punishment can be justifiable at all only on the assumption that the offender merits it. Harming someone merely to convince him to change his mind, or to discourage others from acting as he does, cannot be just; such corrective and deterrent ends of punishment can be pursued legitimately only if the retributive end is also in view, which presupposes that the harm is deserved. Now there is no such thing as deserving only some degree of punishment or other, any more than there is such a thing as being of some height or other. To have height is to have some specific height, and to deserve punishment is to deserve some specific degree of punishment. Proportionality, then, is built into the notion of desert, and thus is built into the notion of punishment. (While we might not always be able, in practice, to determine exactly what degree of punishment some offense merits, that does not mean that there is no such degree, any more than the fact that some object might be too small or too large for us to measure entails that it does not have a specific height.)

In short, the legitimacy of punishment entails desert, and desert entails proportionality; hence, to deny proportionality is implicitly to deny desert, and thus to deny the legitimacy of punishment. Though Tollefsen affirms the legitimacy of punishment explicitly, he denies it implicitly insofar as he denies the principle of proportionality. If Tollefsen wants to avoid this conclusion, he owes us some account of how he can reconcile his position with proportionality and thus with an intelligible notion of desert.

Tollefsen implies that my own position faces a dilemma. Rape, he correctly notes, is “intrinsically wrong” and thus “not available as an option for punishment, regardless of its feasibility or the proportion of goods to bads it might bring about.” So if I were to claim, on the basis of the principle of proportionality, that a rapist could at least in principle be punished with rape, my position would entail a falsehood. If I acknowledge instead (as I do) that the principle of proportionality cannot justify rape, even in principle, as a legitimate punishment, then (Tollefsen concludes) I should agree that it also cannot, by itself, justify capital punishment, even in principle.

The argument breaks down, however, because there is a crucial disanalogy between rape and the taking of someone’s life. To take a life is, essentially, to inflict a single harm—the taking of the life. (Of course, other harms might follow from this—one’s children might be orphaned, one’s spouse widowed—but the taking of a life would still be a harm, even if such harms didn’t follow.) Rape, however, essentially involves several harms—there are the humiliation and bodily harm inflicted on the victim, but there is also the sexual perversion and sadism by which the rapist harms his own character. Now to indulge in such sexual perversion and sadism is intrinsically immoral; and therefore rape is intrinsically immoral, even if carried out as a punishment. Nor does the principle of proportionality imply otherwise. Rather, it implies, at most, only that a rapist deserves the humiliation and bodily harm he has inflicted on others—just as it implies that a murderer deserves to suffer the same harm he has inflicted on others—but it does not imply that anyone, including those with authority to punish wrongdoers, can legitimately indulge in the sexual perversion and sadism that are also involved in rape.

To be sure, I would say that we should not, in practice, inflict humiliation and bodily harm, sexual or otherwise, on a rapist, both out of mercy and because of the moral hazard that inflicting such a penalty would pose to the punisher. I imagine that Tollefsen, however, might deny that humiliation and (non-sexual) bodily harm can ever, even in principle, be legitimate forms of punishment. These too, he might allege, are inherently contrary to human dignity in just the way he thinks capital punishment is. But unless he provides an argument for such a claim, he will merely have begged the question, and will not have provided a counterexample to the claim that the principle of proportionality suffices, by itself, to tell us that a certain punishment (such as capital punishment) can, in principle, be legitimate.

Tollefsen’s positive argument for his own position is no more convincing than his criticisms of mine. He claims that while “instrumental goods” such as “liberty and money” may be taken away from an offender in punishment for his offense, a “basic or intrinsic” good such as human life cannot be. “As a basic, or intrinsic, human good,” Tollefsen posits, “human life, just in itself, gives us only reasons for its pursuit, promotion, and protection, and no reason for its damage or destruction.” But from the claim that “life, just in itself, gives us no reason ever to destroy life but only reason to protect it,” it does not follow that “There is no reason ever to destroy life, but only reason to protect it.” There may be reasons derived from something other than “life, just in itself,” to destroy life in some cases rather than protect it. Indeed, the principle of proportionality gives us just such a reason. While Tollefsen does not think it is a good reason, he has not yet offered, without begging the question, any grounds for his opinion.

In an attempt to ground his disagreement, Tollefsen repeats the claim from his earlier essay that “human beings have intrinsic dignity,” which gives even the life of a mass murderer a “sacred or inviolable quality.” This is just assertion, however, not argument. What he needs to do is to explain why human dignity—which defenders of capital punishment typically affirm no less than its critics do—forbids ever taking life. After all, life by itself can’t be what gives human beings their dignity; plants and non-human animals also have life, and yet Tollefsen would not deny that it is legitimate to kill them. What is it, then, that makes human beings different from plants and other animals? The traditional answer is that human beings have reason and free will. Unlike other animals, we can understand what various possible courses of action entail, and can choose how to act in light of this understanding. That is why our behavior is uniquely subject to moral evaluation; we alone possess the liberty of choice and action that makes moral life possible. It is why, unlike plants, animals, and inanimate objects, we cannot be treated merely as means to others’ ends—and thus why kidnapping, slavery, and the like are grave evils.

Now, though our liberty flows from the rationality and free choice that are unique to us, and which are surely the source of our special dignity, even Tollefsen agrees that a criminal can justly be deprived of this liberty. Indeed, the very possibility of punishment presupposes this, since even the mildest punishment typically involves inflicting a harm on the offender to which he does not consent. So, if life is not unique to us and thus cannot be what gives us our special dignity, how can depriving an offender of his life be intrinsically wrong? And if life is a “basic, intrinsic good,” then why shouldn’t liberty of choice and action—which flows from the rationality and freedom that are unique to us and do give us our special dignity—also be regarded as a “basic, intrinsic good”? Yet Tollefsen regards this liberty as a “merely instrumental” good, the taking away of which is not contrary to human dignity!

If there is any principled reason for mapping this moral territory in such a peculiar fashion, Tollefsen does not make clear what it is. Given that it is our capacity for rationality and free choice that affords us our special dignity, liberty of action would seem to be no less basic and intrinsic a good than life is. In that case, Tollefsen is faced with a dilemma: He can either say that neither life nor liberty can ever legitimately be taken from a wrongdoer—which would be absurd, and would undermine the very possibility of punishment—or he can say that a wrongdoer can be deprived of his liberty, even though it is a basic, intrinsic good—in which case he will have to admit that the status of life as a basic, intrinsic good does not entail that capital punishment is inherently immoral.

Edward Feser is the author of The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism and Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide.

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Feser assumes that I am not against punishment as such, and this is correct. But in laying out this assumed ground of agreement, Feser articulates an account of punishment with which I disagree. Perhaps not surprisingly, we would both give the same name to our differing accounts of the essential purpose of punishment, namely “retribution.” Feser’s understanding of retribution is that a criminal deserves to have some harm inflicted upon him, and this is the purpose of punishment: to inflict that harm.

By contrast, I think that retributive punishment takes as its starting point an awareness that a political community is constituted by an ordering of the wills of the community’s members, an ordering that is shaped in accordance with the authoritative requirements of the law. This ordering requires, for the sake of the common good, various restrictions of the freedom that citizens might otherwise have, the freedom to do as they see fit. The ordering also requires, for the same common good, those restrictions demanded by the moral law on the freedom of persons to act maliciously against the good of others. By such an ordering and even disciplining of wills, citizens are provided a space in which they may safely, and in an effectively coordinated manner, pursue their well-being in community with others.

A criminal acts beyond the limits on wills so established: he takes more of the freedom that is mutually allotted to citizens than he has in fact been allotted. This is a wrong against the community, distinct from the wrong against any particular person that he might commit, such as the taking of another’s life or property. It is this wrong against the order of the community that the criminal law of the state endeavors to address through retributive punishment, by taking away from the criminal the ability to act as he pleases to a degree that restores, as much as possible, the imbalance that the criminal’s self-assertion created.

This account of punishment, about which much more could be said, does not converge with Feser’s claim that in punishment a criminal is intentionally harmed, at least not if that harm is understood as: intentional harm to a basic good or goods of the person. Rather, instrumental goods, especially liberty and money, are rightly targeted as part of the project of taking away freedom in proportion to the freedom that was unjustly exercised. The ensuing damage to an instrumental good might also have, and usually does have, as a side effect a negative impact on basic goods such as knowledge, friendship, or health. But by my account, it would be permissible to fine, to imprison, and perhaps to shame, but it would not be permissible, for example, to maim, to kill, or otherwise deliberately to attack a basic good in the person of the criminal.

Feser makes a principled argument for the permissibility of capital punishment, which he summarizes as follows: “But since a human being can deserve punishment, and a punishment ought to be proportional to the offense, it follows that he can deserve death if his offense is grave enough.”

Unlike Feser, I do not think this follows at all, for the underlying presupposition behind all just punishment is that the form of punishment in question is not an intrinsically wrong act. That is, not just the general practice of punishment, but the particular form of punishment, must be permissible in any given case.

Feser seems to lose sight of this point when he discusses punishments such as rape that are out of bounds, writing that “Sometimes inflicting such punishments would be impossible (a mass murderer cannot be executed multiple times), or would do more harm than good.” But neither of these is the reason rape is excluded as a legitimate form of punishment: rape is always and everywhere wrong, and is not available as an option for punishment, regardless of its feasibility or the proportion of goods to bads it might bring about.

As I argued in my earlier essay, I believe capital punishment falls into this category. As a basic, or intrinsic, human good, human life, just in itself, gives us only reasons for its pursuit, promotion, and protection, and no reason for its damage or destruction. By contrast, a merely instrumental good gives us no reasons for action in itself; yet reasons for action can be generated by one’s ends, either for the promotion or the intentional destruction of the instrumental good in question. So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with destroying money, or tools, or a house, if we have good reason to do so.

But what could justify the intentional destruction of a basic good, an intrinsic aspect of human well-being, such as human life? The idea that human beings have intrinsic dignity suggests that the answer is “nothing.” Perhaps human life could be intentionally destroyed if the evil of its destruction were outweighed by the good achieved. Yet such outweighing also seems ruled out for those who think that human life has a sacred or inviolable quality to it. And so the norm against intentional killing seems well-grounded.

I noted in my earlier piece that even if someone did deserve death, that did not mean that anyone had the authority intentionally to take life. Feser notes that I did not defend this claim; however, his own defense relies upon the question-begging argument just addressed: “But if the state has the authority to inflict punishment per se, and a punishment ought to be proportionate to the offense, then what reason can there be for denying that the state can also, in principle, legitimately inflict the death penalty for extremely grave offenses?” Only that the death penalty is, because intrinsically impermissible, off the table as a permissible form of punishment.

Still, Feser is right that the issue of authority is essential. It requires more discussion than I can undertake here, so I will confine myself to a few points.

As noted above, a reasonable account of political authority is that it is a practical necessity for securing the common good: absent political authority, and especially the authority of law, a community’s members will be unable to coordinate their actions, defend themselves adequately against malefactors, or provide for the needs of those weak members who are not otherwise being adequately cared for.

I do not see how the death of a human being, even of a criminal, can, just as such, be a part of any common good. While it can bring incidental benefits that might contribute to the common good, death itself cannot be part of that good, and so it does not appear to be within the authority of one publicly charged with the protection and promotion of a common good to seek death as such.

St. Thomas did not see things in this light. For in discussing capital punishment he wrote:

Now every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part is naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we observe that if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away. Now every individual person is compared to the whole community, as part to whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since “a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6).

Central to Thomas’s argument here is the comparison between the citizen and the whole community, and an organ and the organism of which it is a part. Aquinas is certainly correct that the welfare of the organism takes precedence over that of its organs, and that accordingly diseased parts of the organism may be surgically removed. But as many commentators have noted, Aquinas goes wrong in his analogy, for citizens do not stand in relation to the state as organs do to organisms.

This can be seen in two ways. First, we should note that an organism is in an important metaphysical sense prior to its parts; the organism is responsible for the execution of its own self-directed growth and development, from which its organic parts emerge. Moreover, it is the organism’s existence that makes the parts to be what they are; hence Aristotle’s famous dictum that a severed hand is a hand in name only. But neither of these points is true of the relationship between a person and a state. Rather, persons are metaphysically prior to states: they have a real, non-derived existence, whereas there would be no states but for the existence of persons. Put another way, persons do, but states do not, have a life of their own.

And from the practical standpoint, there would be no need of the state save for the needs of persons. The state thus exists for the sake of persons, whereas organs exist for the sake of the organism of which they are parts. It seems to be a practical consequence of this that the state cannot sacrifice its members for the sake of the whole; thus, the analogy fails.

Aquinas limits the “disease” for which a part of the state can be killed to the commission of crimes. His reason for this is spelled out in the following important passage:

An individual man may be considered in two ways: first, in himself; secondly, in relation to something else. If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him. Nevertheless, as stated above (Article 2) the slaying of a sinner becomes lawful in relation to the common good, which is corrupted by sin. On the other hand the life of righteous men preserves and forwards the common good, since they are the chief part of the community. Therefore it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent.

Aquinas makes a crucial point in this passage, that he seems himself to overlook; drawing attention to it will serve to bring my discussion to a close. Note Aquinas’s first claim: “If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him.” This claim presents as clear a statement of the Sanctity of Life and the Essential Dignity views as could be hoped for: it is unlawful to kill any man, considered “in himself.”

But what it is unlawful to do to a man in himself surely trumps any “accidental” consideration; perhaps it might seem lawful to kill a man secundum quid—in relation to something, whether a desired end, or status, or achievement, or the failings of the man in regard to these. Yet none of these can change the man’s nature, or the non-instrumental value of his life: considered in himself, it will, therefore, always remain wrong to kill him. This should be the final judgment of practical reason when brought to bear on the question of capital punishment.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. A second edition of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, co-authored with Robert P. George, has just been published by the Witherspoon Institute. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Traditionally, the aims of punishment are threefold: retribution, or inflicting on a wrongdoer a harm he has come to deserve because of his offense; correction, or chastising the wrongdoer for the sake of getting him to change his ways; and deterrence, discouraging others from committing the same offense. Retribution is necessarily the most fundamental. Strictly speaking, we cannot correct someone who doesn’t deserve correction; at most we might try to affect his behavior (via drugs, say) in a sub-personal manner that doesn’t appeal, as true correction does, to his sense of desert and shame. We also cannot justly inflict a punishment on someone for purposes of deterrence unless he deserves that punishment. That retribution is fundamental doesn’t entail that those with the authority to do so must always exact retribution on an offender. It does, however, mean that retribution may be exacted, all things being equal (though of course things are not always equal); it also means that retribution—inflicting a harm that is deserved—must always be part of any act of punishment, even if it is not the only part.

Now, what a wrongdoer deserves as punishment is a harm proportionate to his offense. If we allow that someone guilty of stealing $100 deserves to be punished, we must also acknowledge that he ought not to be punished by having $100,000 taken from him, or by having merely ten cents taken from him; he has not done anything to deserve the harsher punishment, but he does deserve more than the lesser punishment. In short, the punishment should fit the crime. This does not mean that a wrongdoer should have the same wrong inflicted upon him that he has committed against others—that rapists should be raped, or that arsonists should have their houses burned down. Sometimes inflicting such punishments would be impossible (a mass murderer cannot be executed multiple times), or would do more harm than good. The point is rather that the gravity of the punishment should reflect the gravity of the wrongdoing. Hence those guilty of large thefts should be punished more severely than those guilty of small ones, those guilty of inflicting serious bodily injury should be punished more severely than those merely guilty of theft, and so forth. This principle of proportionality might, in some cases, be difficult to apply practically, but we cannot plausibly reject it without rejecting the notions of desert and punishment along with it.

If wrongdoers do deserve punishment, and if punishment ought to be scaled to the gravity of the crime (harsher punishments for graver crimes), then it would be absurd to deny that there is a level of criminality for which capital punishment is appropriate, at least in principle. Even if it were claimed that a single murder would not merit it, it is not difficult to imagine crimes that would. Ten murders? Ten murders coupled with the rape and torture of the victims? Genocide? If wrongdoers deserve punishment and the punishment ought to be proportional to the offense, then at some point we are going to reach a level of criminality for which capital punishment is appropriate at least in principle. To claim that no crime could justify capital punishment—to claim, for instance, that a cold-blooded genocidal rapist can never even in principle merit a greater punishment than the lifelong imprisonment inflicted on a bank robber—is implicitly to give up the principle of proportionality and, with it, any coherent conception of just punishment.

Obviously, questions might be raised about whether capital punishment is advisable in practice, even if it is allowable in principle. Enough has been said, however, to show that it is not intrinsically wrong to resort to it, at least not if punishment as such is legitimate. (For a more detailed defense of capital punishment along similar lines, see chapter 4 of David Oderberg’s Applied Ethics.)

Now, why does Tollefsen think that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong? He appeals to what he calls the “Essential Dignity View” of human beings, according to which “human beings … possess dignity, or excellence, in virtue of the kind of being they are; and this essential dignity can be used summarily to express why it is impermissible, for example, intentionally to kill human beings: to do so is to act against their dignity.” On this basis, Tollefsen concludes that “it is always wrong intentionally to kill a human person,” from which it follows that capital punishment is wrong.

It is one thing merely to assert that capital punishment is against human dignity; it is quite another actually to show that it is. To be sure, it is plausible to say that to kill an innocent person is to act against his dignity. It is also plausible to say that imprisoning or fining an innocent person is contrary to his dignity. Suppose, however, that someone claimed that imprisoning or fining even a guilty person would be contrary to his dignity. I assume Tollefsen would disagree; certainly he should. The reason is obvious: A guilty person deserves such punishment, but an innocent person does not. So if a guilty person can, consistent with his dignity, deserve imprisonment or a fine, why could he not also deserve capital punishment, if his offense is grave enough?

Tollefsen notes that a defender of capital punishment might claim that a guilty person has lost his dignity. But the defender certainly need not say this. On the contrary, to regard a person as deserving of punishment is implicitly to affirm his dignity as a human being, for it is to acknowledge that he has free will and moral responsibility, unlike a robot or a mere animal. If inflicting lesser punishments is not incompatible with human dignity and even implicitly affirms it, then given the principle of proportionality, capital punishment also can be compatible with (and indeed an affirmation of) human dignity.

Allowing, at least for the sake of argument, that some offenders might deserve to die, Tollefsen objects that the legitimacy of capital punishment still does not follow, for “it could well be that no human being has the authority to warrant intentional killing, even of the guilty.” Yet Tollefsen gives us no reason to doubt that the state has such authority, and there is ample reason to think that it does. Presumably, Tollefsen would concede that the state has the authority to inflict lesser punishments—imprisonment, fines, and the like. But if the state has the authority to inflict punishment per se, and a punishment ought to be proportionate to the offense, then what reason can there be for denying that the state can also, in principle, legitimately inflict the death penalty for extremely grave offenses?

Tollefsen also suggests that there are difficulties in determining which offenses merit capital punishment and which do not, if any offenses merit it at all. The same, however, could be said of any punishment. We do not need to settle the question of whether an embezzler deserves fifteen years in prison or only ten in order to know that imprisonment as such can be a legitimate punishment. Similarly, we do not need to settle the question of exactly which offenses merit capital punishment in order to know that some offenses will. The principle of proportionality suffices to show that much.

In Tollefsen’s view, however, “the deepest reason to be opposed to capital punishment” is that “action directly (intentionally) contrary to any human good [such as the good of life] makes no sense, is void of practical intelligibility.” But since a human being can deserve punishment, and a punishment ought to be proportional to the offense, it follows that he can deserve death if his offense is grave enough. The fact that he, through his own freely chosen actions, has come to merit capital punishment is precisely what gives sense and intelligibility to the act of inflicting this punishment on him.

When the human dignity that Tollefsen rightly champions is considered in light of the principle of proportionality, it is clear that the intentional killing of a human being is not intrinsically wrong. What is intrinsically wrong is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. That is why, contrary to what Tollefsen insinuates, those who oppose abortion and euthanasia but support capital punishment are perfectly consistent in their thinking. If anyone’s position is incoherent, it is Tollefsen’s—at least if he allows that punishment as such is legitimate and accepts the principle of proportionality. The late philosopher Ralph McInerny once noted that when probing the thinking of some students who were opposed to capital punishment, “what I detected, rightly or wrongly, was an animus against punishment as such.” This makes a kind of sense, for as I have argued, the legitimacy of punishment per se and the legitimacy of capital punishment in particular stand or fall together. I presume that Tollefsen would agree that punishment is legitimate and that it ought to be proportional to the offense. What is doubtful is whether he can have any reason for doing so.


Edward Feser is the author of The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism and Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide.

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The sanctity of life view is often accompanied by a set of claims about human dignity, namely, that human beings possess essential, underived, or intrinsic dignity. That is, they possess dignity, or excellence, in virtue of the kind of being they are; and this essential dignity can be used summarily to express why it is impermissible, for example, intentionally to kill human beings: to do so is to act against their dignity.

This view—call it the Essential Dignity View—should be distinguished from a more deeply theological account of human dignity, which holds that our dignity comes from our origin in divine creation, and from our destination in eternal life with God. While defenders of the Essential Dignity View frequently assert these additional claims, they typically hold that human freedom and reason, even if well-described as rendering us “in the image of God,” can be understood and appreciated without reference to their divine origins.

The Essential Dignity View should also be distinguished from accounts of dignity according to which dignity depends upon some achievement or some bestowal of status by others. Many philosophers who use the language of “personhood,” for example, appropriate the language of dignity, and speak of the loss of human dignity when a human being, though remaining alive,  ceases to possess those properties upon which “personhood” is dependent. Similarly, one might think that dignity is a property dependent upon some form of social recognition; absent that recognition, a human being, such as a zygote, would not be “one of us.”  On both kinds of view, intentional killing of some human beings would not be incompatible with dignity, for those human beings would have no dignity. Such views arbitrarily designate some members of the human family as unworthy of moral respect despite the fact that they are beings of the same kind as ourselves.

By contrast, the Essential Dignity View identifies a much deeper connection between human nature and human dignity, and warrants the claim that all human beings have human dignity, regardless of age, achievement, degree of development, or social status. It thus is a perfectly adequate way of supporting the fundamental claim of respecting the sanctity of human life: no intentional killing of human beings.

However, even among the most important proponents of the natural law tradition, and the most important articulators of the notion of essential human dignity, this inference to the Essential Dignity View has not always been drawn. For according to some such thinkers, human dignity can be lost. Here, for example, is St. Thomas, describing just this loss of human dignity in order to justify intentional killing: “By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood, in so far as he is naturally free, and exists for himself, and he falls into the slavish state of the beasts, by being disposed of according as he is useful to others” (ST, II-II, Q. 64, a.2). Clearly, if taken literally, this claim would justify intentional killing.

A related objection to the Essential Dignity View, advocated by some in the natural law tradition, is that some human beings deserve to be killed. Although not much effort is made to distinguish this view from the view articulated by St. Thomas, there is this subtle difference, assuming that what Aquinas says is literally true: no beast genuinely deserves to die. If it were possible genuinely to alienate one’s dignity and fall into the state of the beasts, one would thereby take oneself out of the moral domain altogether; killing would not be a matter of desert, but only of, perhaps, prudence.

So I will treat the two views separately, in turn. Rebutting them does not serve, of course, to settle fully the morality of capital punishment, but it should serve to raise questions among social conservatives, including those who cheer the state of Texas’s distinguished record for executing criminals.

To begin with Aquinas’s view, it appears to border on incoherence: if “dignity” claims are intended to summarily capture certain truths about what it means to have a particular sort of nature, then one can lose one’s dignity, if one initially has it, only by losing one’s nature. But losing one’s nature just is ceasing to exist as the sort of thing one must be if one is to exist at all: it is to go out of existence altogether. This thought is impossible to sustain of a criminal who is the abiding subject of the drama of crime, investigation, apprehension, trial, conviction, and punishment, as even Aquinas’s language, which refers to “he” throughout, makes clear.

Moreover, the position seems unstable. If dignity can be lost or alienated through wrongdoing, whether through loss of nature or in some other way, why can it not also be lost by other means? That Aquinas’s view is dangerously proximate to the view according to which personhood can be lost is apparent in the work of Nigel Biggar. Biggar is no friend of those views that make personhood dependent upon achievement or status, but he resists the idea that those properties that give our life unique meaning and worth cannot be lost. Thus, he writes, of cases involving severe brain damage or unrelievable pain, that “it could be morally permissible to intend to take human life because, that life having lost its unique preciousness—its sacred value—the intention would not be malevolent.” Most natural law thinkers would resist this strenuously; their ability to do so is compromised, I believe, to the extent that they are committed to Aquinas’s view about criminals.

Finally, there are questions of gradation here. Not every crime is of equal gravity, but possession of a nature, or of essential dignity, is an all-or-nothing thing. What constitutes the dividing line between those crimes that, while wrong and degrading in some sense, are nevertheless insufficiently severe to cause us to fall to the level of the beasts, and those crimes that are so severe? It is difficult to imagine a principled account here.

Now let us turn to the second view and the question of desert. One could hold that some human beings—criminals guilty of extremely great wrongs—are still in possession of their nature as free and equal, and thus still subjects of essential dignity, yet hold that these human beings deserved death. Thus, intentional killing of these human beings would be permissible.

It is clear that the conclusion of this argument does not follow from the premise, even if we grant it. Perhaps some human beings do deserve death; that need not be enough to warrant the permissibility for anyone of killing that human being. It could well be that no human being has the authority to warrant intentional killing, even of the guilty.

Moreover, the ranks of those deserving death might be greater than many think. Looked at from a certain point of view, none of us is so without sin and wrongdoing on our conscience that we could guarantee our own immunity if desert were made the sole criterion for a right to life. And while as a legal matter, we in the West are inclined to think that life should only be taken for the taking of life, it is not obvious why this should be so. Does the adulterer really not deserve death if the murderer does? Again, it is not clear why not. Justifications that rest on the idea criminals deserve death are thus doubly problematic: there are difficulties both with the claim to authority, and with the boundaries of those who deserve to die.

Here, though, is the deepest reason to be opposed to capital punishment. From the practical perspective of an agent reflecting on those human goods that give point to human action and that underwrite possibilities of human flourishing, such as the goods of life, friendship, marriage, and personal integrity, we should recognize the following: each of the basic goods, in each of its possible instantiations, considered just in itself, only gives us reason for action, only is capable of motivating us for action on its behalf, and only is an aspect of genuine human well-being. Just in itself, action directly (intentionally) contrary to any human good makes no sense, is void of practical intelligibility. The same is also true of action against the life of even a seriously degenerate criminal. Insofar as he is a human being, his life gives us reason, and only gives us reason, for its protection and promotion.

It does not seem to me, then, that the Essential Dignity View should be accompanied by the claim that dignity can nevertheless be alienable or be overridden for those who deserve death; the Essential Dignity View and the sanctity of human life thus naturally go hand in hand.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Philosophy and Name-calling

No serious philosopher would deny, in so many words, that to demonize opponents is to betray the vocation of philosophy. Yet some academic philosophers are so bound to the cause of redefining civil marriage that they would marginalize dissenters with epithets and analyze them as specimens of psychological pathology. Chappell, though he goes on to ask serious questions, is at pains to deny that he deems our argument worth engaging. For him, it is, like misogyny, merely unreasonable, subrational, and bigoted. Linking to Chappell’s critique, Brian Leiter repeats the charge and presumes to diagnose us.

The fervent policing of this newfound academic consensus, with its chilling effect on discourse, might be defensible if proponents of the conjugal view were, like Nazis or cannibals, advocates of ideas and policies repugnant to deep, enduring principles of our civilization. Yet even within the small, unrepresentative society that is academic philosophy, the very idea of same-sex marriage would have seemed mostly baffling (perhaps even patriarchally motivated) less than a generation ago. One might see the striking subsequent development as an epiphany of timeless moral principle denied the human race (including the sexual-traditionalist Mahatma Gandhi and other partisans of cruel and complacent class ideologies) these several millennia; or one might judge the cause of redefining civil marriage to be a fashionable application of a perfectly disputable view of sex and human goods that has grown to dominate in the academy from its proximate roots in the ’50s and ’60s, in Sanger and Hefner, Kinsey and Reich.

I happen to think the latter a more reasonable interpretation. Human nature being what it is, there is a light burden of proof on anyone alleging insularity, and I happily accept that advantage; but it’s still worth exploring why anyone in the academy would bear the social and professional risks of a contrarian stance.

Clearly “homophobia” is not the only possible motivation for the conjugal thesis. According to that thesis, we can’t properly understand marriage apart from the procreative sort of bodily communion of spouses achieved in coitus. Some claim this is a gerrymandered definition built to exclude homosexually oriented people, but one might as well claim that Attic Greek grammar was designed to frustrate Victorian schoolboys. Before the 19^th century, as far as we can tell, the very category of the “homosexual” had at best a sketchy existence. Homosexual acts were known and (for centuries in the West) widely condemned, along with analogous acts between a man and a woman, but there is little evidence that a category of people marked by exclusive and enduring homosexual orientation was recognized consistently or sharply enough to stir up group animus. To a man like Samuel Johnson, for example, though sodomy was immoral, “homosexuals” as an object of group hatred did not exist as “Frenchmen” or “Whigs” did, but at best as “drunkards” did, and yet the fundamentals of our marriage law, including the norm that a marriage could be consummated by no act other than coitus (when all the live but rejected alternatives were acts between a wedded man and woman), long predate Dr. Johnson. If this norm did not express belief in a deep link between marriage and the procreative sort of bodily union achieved in coitus, how can we explain it?

Nor can the conjugal view be “blamed” on religion, Brian Leiter’s preferred basis for dismissal and diagnosis. There is a 2,400-year-old philosophical tradition, originating independently of Judaeo-Christian influence, that distinguished the uniquely comprehensive and procreative sort of union consummated by coitus from all others, and affirmed its distinct personal and social value. This is the view to which Plato, Aristotle, Xenophanes, Musonius Rufus, and Plutarch adhere. Especially clear is Plutarch’s statement in Erotikos that marriage is a special kind of friendship uniquely embodied (“renewed”) in coitus (and not other climactic acts, which Plutarch regarded as intrinsically shameful).           

These points are not meant as an argument from history and authority. They are meant to clear ground recently grown thick with sharp, venomous moralism, so that intelligent debate can thrive—including in academic philosophy, to which, after seven years of undergraduate and graduate study, I owe my intellectual formation.

The Argument

Before replying to Chappell’s critique, it is worth orienting the reader with a précis of my positive claims.

A marriage, like any other voluntary personal union (broadly, like any friendship), exists when persons commit to activity toward common ends, and is fostered by such activity. The particular union created by commitment to marriage, however, is uniquely comprehensive in (a) how it unites persons, (b) what it unites them with respect to, and (c) what kind of commitment it demands.

(a) Marriage unites persons both volitionally and bodily. (b) Spouses unite bodily only by coitus, which is ordered to bringing new human life into the world. New life, in a sense, is one human good among others, but in another sense, it transcends and includes other human goods. Thus, unlike other forms of community (e.g., universities or sports teams), marriage is ordered to realizing not just this or that human value (e.g., knowledge or play), but new loci of value—persons—and thus also the broad domestic sharing uniquely apt for their development. (c) Marriage inherently calls for permanence and exclusivity.

To expand on (a), the bodily union of two people is like the bodily union of organs in an individual. Just as one’s heart, lungs, and other organs form a unity by coordinating for a biological good of the whole (i.e., the organism’s life), so a man’s and woman’s bodies form a unity by mutual coordination (coitus) for a biological good (reproduction) of their union as a whole.

As for (b), there is a deep connection between this, the marital (conjugal) act and the core of a distinctively marital common life, also shaped by an orientation toward procreation, onto which cultures and couples graft other practices according to circumstance and taste: Having committed to sharing in the generative acts that unite them bodily, spouses cooperate in other areas of life (intellectual, recreational, etc.) in the domestic sharing uniquely apt for fostering children’s overall development. And of course they cooperate in the tasks of parenting where children do come. Ordinary friendships, however, the unions of hearts and minds embodied in conversations and various joint pursuits, can have more limited and variable scope.

Finally, (c): In view of its comprehensiveness and its orientation to children’s needs, only marriage inherently requires of its would-be participants pledged permanence and exclusivity; thus is marriage, again like the unions of organs into one healthy whole, properly total and lasting for the life of the parts. (Indeed, comprehensive union can be achieved only by two because no single act can organically unite three or more people bodily.) Thus, again, is marriage uniquely apt for the procreation and education of offspring, an inherently open-ended task calling for unconditioned commitment. However, friendships as such require no promise of permanence and are often enhanced, not betrayed, by openness to new members; hence, abandon the conjugal view for a view of marriage as romantic coupling, and you forfeit the basis of all of these other distinctively marital norms.

Now there are many points worth making in response to Chappell, but so as not to overwhelm the reader or lose a sense of relative importance, I will address just three major failures of his argument. First, he does not show that our definition of marriage is arbitrarily restrictive, which fairly clears us of the charge of injustice. Second, he does not show how his own preferred view is any less arbitrary than he considers ours to be. Third, his response to our (rather peripheral and painfully cautious) references to social science is willful and irrelevant. I will demonstrate each failure in turn.

Chappell’s Failure on Conjugal Union

Chappell seems to recognize that much in this debate hinges on whether there could be basic moral significance to coitus chosen as an embodiment of the uniquely comprehensive and, relatedly, procreative sort of union sketched above. Yet Chappell handles this issue with the timeless tactic of simply begging the central question.

We maintain that coitus, as the only human biological functioning chosen and performed in partnership, can unite bodies and therefore persons, in a real and important sense. (Bodies are aspects of us as persons, not just our costumes or vehicles; so in human beings, bodily union can be a real part of a personal union when integrated with a commitment.) So coitus alone can be the distinctive element in the mind-body union, oriented to the full sharing of family life, that we call marriage. Manifestly, two people of the same sex can’t unite this way (any more than three or more can), so they cannot together form a marriage. On Chappell’s view, however, the bodily union of coitus chosen as the completion of such multi-level union has no intrinsic worth, and he dismisses our contrary view as “biological fetishism.”

Is it “biological fetishism” for millions of spouses to find it beautiful and uniquely appropriate that their children are a mixture of their bodies? Or for couples to see their infertility as a tragic limitation even when they can adopt? Or for proud new parents to care which healthy child is handed to them in the maternity ward?

I see Chappell’s “biological fetishism” and raise him “Manichean dualism”; for dualism is what his breezy dismissal of the value of bodily union betrays. I can also point him to book-length arguments in defense of our view that the body is an intrinsic aspect, not an extrinsic instrument, of the human person. Here I can cite other moral conclusions that lend support to this view: What is peculiarly perverse about torture? That it uses one aspect of the person (his body and affects) against another aspect of his self (wishes, choices, commitments). Why is rape gravely wicked even when performed on someone in a coma who never finds out and sustains no physical or psychic injuries? It still involves misusing—abusing—a person, and not merely using and replacing intact his or her property. Why can you licitly relinquish all future rights over your possessions, but not over your body or its capacities for labor? Again, because your body is part of you, not just your property.

A positive implication of this fact is what Chappell denies: that bodily union is integral to comprehensive personal union. What Chappell is pleased to call fetishizing biological functions is our insistence that, in embodied animals, comprehensive union must include bodily union, which must mean joint biological functioning (chosen to embody the spouses’ commitment). There is no other candidate for this than coitus, so the requirement that a comprehensive union—i.e., marriage—be capable of coital consummation is hardly arbitrary. Chappell merely states the opposite and so proves nothing, and the position he so signally fails to justify would render the concepts of a distinctively marital act or form of common life senseless or superstitious.

As for the commenters on his critique, several have carelessly read us (if they indeed have read our paper) as arguing for the immorality of certain conduct based on an organ’s proper functioning; but our article draws no conclusions about the permissibility of non-coital sexual acts, and as it happens, we all reject ‘perverted faculty’ arguments as fallacious. (Perhaps the philosophically minded lose their usual diligence when blasting “bigotry.” Thus, my favorite of the comments on Chappell’s critique: “Thanks for posting this. I haven’t had time to read the paper yet, but it looks like you’ve gotten to the heart of the problem.”)

Chappell’s Failure on an Alternative Conception of Marriage

Chappell also provides an alternative conception of marriage so vague that it forces this dismal choice on all who share his view: Either (i) marriage should be so open and flexible as to be unrecognizable and repugnant to the intuitions and settled beliefs of even most revisionists; or (ii) marriage law must be seen not as a matter of strict moral principle but as one contestable prudence, which deflates the arguments and obliterates the rhetoric of the movement to redefine civil marriage.

Imagine, for a minute, that there were no advocates of a coherent view of sexual complementarity in marriage, a view that has the support of the whole religious, legal, and cultural history of our species. We would still face the fact that marriage, if it is going to have meaningful public existence, must have some definition and some shaping norms. Such parameters risk excluding relationships that don’t meet the definition and stigmatizing people who reject (or for whatever reason don’t honor) the norms, so we had better have extremely good reasons for making them thus and not otherwise. So what does Chappell say? What is marriage?

He is not sure. In some sense, it is a comprehensive union of two persons, your number one relationship, so to speak, but it cannot really be limited, even by something as minimal as sexual exclusivity. He admits that on his view, sexual exclusivity must be a “contingent pragmatic/instrumental consideration (given the possible risk of sexual dalliances distracting or even drawing one away from one’s prior relationship), rather than anything essential to good marriages as such.” So a man who finds out that his wife regularly goes to the movies with another man, and who worries that she might start sleeping with him, has it backwards: He should worry that she’s sleeping with another man only if it means she might start going to the movies with him, and then buying ties for him, and then sampling specialty cheeses with him, and on and on, until the sickening crescendo—when he comes home early from work and finds them in the throes of chess on the marital kitchen table.

Even Chappell’s implausibly thin view is thicker than it has any right to be. For example, he seems to think marriage properly has some sexual component; but why, if sex is valuable only for its affective and expressive effects (which other activities can in principle provide) and not for uniquely making possible comprehensive union? Indeed, why should marriage be between two people? Why not share all your major life experiences and perhaps (but perhaps not) sexual activity with, say, three cohabiting (but why cohabiting?) lovers? Newsweek reports that the United States already has 500,000 polyamorous households. What possible objection could Chappell have to recognizing their relationships?

The problem is simple. Whatever he may say (and, I am sure, believe) about comprehensiveness and so on, Chappell, like most revisionists, can only conceive of marriage impressionistically, as some region to the far right of a spectrum of affective relations. This of course makes it hard to see why the state should care about marriage at all—any more than about baptisms, bar mitzvahs, or ordinary friendships. Exclusive coital relationships at least have a clear and intrinsic connection to children, but why should the state recognize tender relationships qua tender relationships? More devastatingly, this leaves Chappell no ground of principle—none whatsoever—for not including as marriages every relationship type describable in polite English: expressly temporary, multiple-partner, open, or even non-romantic relationships (e.g., between two loving sisters).

Nor is it simply the case that failing to recognize them would be awkward and faintly amusing, like the fact that you can go to war and die for the state before you can purchase alcohol. No, if revisionists are right to say that (a) marriage recognition, or at least equal treatment with respect to marriage recognition, is a basic human right and (b) arbitrariness about it is a grave injustice, then failure to recognize such unions on demand is a grave injustice, for which we shall have to answer to History, that dreaded deity (a liberal Democrat, it turns out) so often invoked against my coauthors and me.

As it happens the more consistent, or candid, revisionists have publicly reached conclusions that harmonize with mine. Five years ago, hundreds of scholars and activists—including Princeton’s Cornel West, Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum, and NYU’s Judith Stacey and Kenji Yoshino—argued that the state should equally recognize polyamorous and multiple-household sexual relationships, as well as a variety of non-sexual ones. These activists and I may well agree that abolishing the criterion of sexual complementarity would indeed ‘weaken’ marriage as the conjugal view’s supporters mean this: that it would leave no basis in principle for privileging (and so may well further erode in practice—cf. Andrew Cherlin’s The Marriage-Go-Round) its distinguishing norms. We only disagree on whether that would be bad, or in fact very good.

At this point in the debate conservative revisionists, alarmed by the prospect that has opened up before them, don the hat of the Pragmatic Man—and with it don his bluster, and his myopia. To his credit, Chappell himself doesn’t, but the move is so common that I should anticipate it. “What,” ask Pragmatic Men, “is all this talk of essences, definitions, and abstract rights and logical entailments? Like all social reality, marriage is a construct. What we owe people on equal terms is marriage as we understand it now. (The state should get involved in the first place because people would be very unhappy and perhaps generally more antisocial, if the state didn’t.) Now marriage, here and now, in the real world, means a sexually exclusive romance between two adults who more or less put each other first in life and have kids, or a dachshund, if they’re so inclined. That contingent notion includes same-sex romantic couples and excludes Laverne and Shirley. It’s as simple as that.”

This may at first sound very realistic and mature, but it is no help at all. First, its rejection of a deeper standard fails even to explain (if only then to reject) important legal and philosophical traditions. Again, these distinguished the class of comprehensive unions consummated by coitus, even when some such unions had no obvious social utility (e.g., the foreseeably and certainly infertile ones), and animus couldn’t have influenced the classifications. Second, the pragmatic aversion to objective standards is usually conveniently selective: many revisionists would accept that friendship, say, is (a) a fundamental human good, (b) distinct in principle from others (e.g., aesthetic experience), which (c) admits of cultural variation even as it (d) retains an objective core in the focal case: mutual and mutually acknowledged willing of the other’s good for the other’s sake. The status of marriage on the conjugal view is analogous in all four respects. If friendship, so understood, isn’t hopelessly mysterious, neither is marriage.

Third, even if there were no such bond objectively distinguishable in shape and value from the run of ordinary friendships, the pragmatic appeal to our current understandings would fail. In every one of the 31 states—including liberal ones like California, Wisconsin, and Maine—where the people have been allowed to vote, a solid majority has shown that their notion of marriage happens to include “intrinsically opposite-sex.” If there are no principled boundaries demarcating some intimate associations as marriages, then these majorities violate no principle in excluding same-sex partnerships. The merest (or, if sense can be made of such aggregations, a net) social benefit would suffice to justify traditional marriage law. Pro-gay-relationship liberals like David Blankenhorn have suggested such a basis for making sexual complementarity a condition for marriage. Have any compellingly argued the same of monogamy or exclusivity?

The real social fact of the matter seems to be that two rival models of marriage are currently in an open war (of doubtful issue). One model is the “romantic coupling” notion sketched by the pragmatists, and the other is the comprehensive procreation-oriented union for which we argue. The main prize in this war is, of course, the legal definition of marriage, which will give enormous social influence to one view or another. Pragmatic revisionists therefore simply ask their opponents to surrender on the grounds that they have already lost. If you find this kind of argument persuasive, I have some lovely Idaho oceanfront you might be interested in buying.

Chappell’s Failure on the Use of Social Science

Finally, Chappell objects to our citation of social science data to support privileging opposite-sex unions with respect to parenting. Of course, the normative issue of which arrangements our policies should privilege as generally ideal for procreation cannot be resolved by descriptive social-scientific studies alone, but such studies would contribute importantly relevant information. What we need, however, are studies that meet the acknowledged gold standard of social-scientific research, by drawing on large, random, and representative samples observed longitudinally. So far, however, as my coauthors and I elsewhere affirm and nowhere deny, none of the studies comparing children reared by same-sex couples in sexual partnerships to children reared by their married biological parents has these features, for reasons acknowledged in this literature review by a sociologist and Jonathan Rauch, a gay civil-marriage proponent.

Yet Chappell treats the issue as if it had been settled. He endorses the idea that it doesn’t matter, even as a rule, whether children are reared by a parent of each sex: “I think it’s important (as a rule) that children be raised in a stable and loving environment. I do not think that the genitalia of the parents matters.”

I would not be so polemical as to suggest that nobody in his five wits could reduce gender to genitalia except under the influence of an ideology contemptuous of reality. Instead I will suggest that, if with imperfect knowledge we are to give the tentative advantage to one side or another, as my coauthors and I do, these facts seem more pertinent that Chappell’s opinion: Every parenting arrangement that has been examined in high-quality studies has consistently been shown less effective than parenting by married biological parents: this is true of single- and step-parenting as well as parenting by cohabiting couples. Moreover, and more relevantly here, studies also suggest that mothers and fathers foster—and their respective absences impede—children’s healthy development in different ways. So, as we tried to show, it would be surprising if same-sex and opposite-sex parenting were equally effective. But let the methodologically sound studies be done, and the chips fall where they may.

Whose Humanism?

This debate is often seen as a struggle between Bigots (me and my ilk) and Humanists (Chappell and his), but though I do not believe Chappell to be a bigot, I do think defenders of the conjugal view are the true humanists. The more the conjugal view prevails culturally, the easier it will be on the unmarried, who will be less susceptible to thinking that what they lack is the most valuable or only kind of deep communion.

There is plenty of evidence that our society would benefit from such an emotional liberation. For example, on his Atlantic blog a few months ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates admitted that his recent historical reading had “actually opened up some portion of my own imagination—the possibility of feeling passionate, but not sexual, about someone who I wasn’t related to.” He confessed: “‘Passion’ isn’t a word that often enters into the description [of] friendships these days. And yet [it’s] present in the writings of previous generations”—when people didn’t equate marriage with intimacy, and intimacy with marriage, but recognized it as the paradigm realization of one type of intimacy among others. The conjugal view, precisely in presenting marriage as oriented to procreation—mothering and fathering—and true bodily union, not just shared experience, keeps from making marriage totalizing. It alone makes clear which activities we owe our spouses in marital love; which we owe it to them not to share with others; and which we could share now with them, now with others, without any compromise of principle.

Chappell’s revisionism would have us blur these distinctions. If marriage differs only by degree (and not in kind) from other bonds, then non-marital relationships, as between sisters or close friends, are diminished, for marriage offers simply the most of what makes any union valuable: shared experience. Those who (for whatever reasons) do not marry just settle for less.

So it is that the contemporary thought police, in their zeal to expurgate and erect barriers against an ideological offense and its perpetrators, miss the richly populated horizon visible from the more traditional perspective, a horizon with space for many types of communion, each with its own depth, passion, and constancy of presence and care.


Sherif Girgis, a 2008 Rhodes Scholar, is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Princeton University and a law student at Yale Law School. He earned an A.B. in philosophy at Princeton and a B.Phil. in philosophy at Oxford.

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Upon reflection, this emptiness provides an insight into one of the great paradoxes of medical practice: On the one hand, medicine is a wonderful profession that provides the practitioner with enormous satisfactions; physicians practice into old age, giving up the art only with the greatest reluctance. On the other hand, medicine is a profession intermingled with tragedy. Men and women present with illness and injury, and one might expect that the weight of this suffering would, over time, grind physicians to dust.

But this does not happen, and for the physician, the frequently wrenching demands of clinical practice are redeemed through service. It was the inability to provide that service that left us with only the emptiness of tragedy. So, a lesson: for the physician, the act of service redeems the experience of suffering.

While I was in fellowship training, I would earn extra money to help pay the rent by seeing patients in a walk-in clinic. I saw all sorts of patients, but one in particular stands out. A 42-year-old man presented with stomach upset. He had experienced abdominal pain and loose stools for two days. On exam, he had a low-grade fever, but his pulse and blood pressure were normal, so he was not dehydrated. As I listened to his abdomen, I heard hyperactive bowel sounds, but his abdomen was soft and non-tender, and when I pressed and then withdrew my hand, he didn’t flinch—his abdomen was benign. There was no blood in his stool and all of this was beginning to look like a relatively minor case of gastroenteritis. I could reassure him and send him home, but something didn’t make sense. This was a 42-year-old who surely had had gastroenteritis before in his life, so why did he take a day off from work to come in for an evaluation? Why now? So I asked him, “What is it that you are worried about?” He hesitated, and then blurted out, “CANCER.”

And as we spoke further, I learned that his family history was not as unremarkable as he had initially suggested, and that his father had likely died of stomach cancer when he was this patient’s age. With this shared revelation into the nature and origin of his fear, the patient could suddenly tolerate his minor illness. We see this: what patients need from physicians is very often not a procedure or a medication; in fact, for general medical evaluations, 90% end in reassurance. As physicians, we listen and learn, we reflect and relate, and we get to know our patients, their illnesses, and their fears. So, the spirit of service manifests itself in a most personal and interpersonal collaboration; and through this shared experience, we relieve, or at least diminish, the suffering of our patients.

When I was in high school, I ran on the track team. During my junior year, I seemed to be sick all the time: sore throats, cough, fever. Then strange aches began to appear in my elbows and shoulders. Still I continued to run. At night, I started waking up to find myself drenched. And these night sweats continued for weeks. I continued to run. Then I started getting pounding in my chest, and I felt as if I were about to choke on my heart. Still I kept running. And then the joints that ached began to swell—first my toes, then my ankles, then my knees—a migratory polyarthritis. Finally, not a moment too soon, I stopped running, told my parents, and presented to my general practitioner, who found a heart murmur on physical exam, and marked abnormalities on my electrocardiogram. Needless to say, he could not quite believe my self-neglect.

I had developed a rather florid case of acute rheumatic fever. Not much shorter than I am now, my weight fell to 113 pounds, and although I never doubted that I was going to get through this, my parents were terrified by the prospect that I would not. My GP and my cardiologist were devoted and compassionate, and the story ends well at many levels: the fevers resolve, the arthritis resolves, the pancarditis resolves, I gain 40 pounds, and I go on to run marathons. Also, it was the experience of my physicians’ devoted care that led me to pursue a vocation in medicine. But all no thanks to me—my neglect of my health and minimizing of symptoms bordered on the psychotic. If anyone did not deserve a break, it was I.

Now describing this undeserved happy ending is what your high school English teacher would have called “development by antithesis”—the gentlest way to share the dark truth already known to all: The stories of our patients frequently do not end well, no matter what our patients do, and no matter what we do. In the end, if not now, then later, all pass from this world. All too often the service we provide, this most personal service, will fall short as we come up against the reality of inevitable decline and decay, a reality that makes the most profound demands on the practitioner. So, all too often, the role of the physician is not the procedure or the prescription, and not even reassurance, but consolation and condolence.

The special demands of medical practice on the practitioner were recognized in antiquity. Last week at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Roehrig, curator of the Egyptian Exhibit, allowed me, in preparation for this address, to examine the Edwin Smith Papyrus, the earliest extant medical treatise. The document dates to the Second Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt, itself a copy of a document likely dating to 2500-3000 BC—almost 5000 years ago. The papyrus is remarkable for its virtually modern, rational, and scientific approach. It outlines 48 cases and, in each, a condition—generally a case of trauma—is presented. The nature of the trauma—a laceration or broken bone—is laid out. An examination of the injury is described. Diagnosis and prognosis are formulated. The majority of the cases conclude with the instruction to declare, “This is a condition I will treat,” and then a specific treatment is described. A few cases deal with life-threatening conditions with an uncertain outcome and conclude with the instruction to declare, “This is a condition with which I will contend”—perhaps a little less confident, but an imperative to try nonetheless. But most remarkable are 10 cases wherein the physician is directed to withdraw and say, “This is a condition I will not treat.”

In the face of a clearly and unambiguously lethal injury, the physician restrained himself from futile actions—actions that would violate human dignity. This activity—medical practice—was not farming or weaving or pyramid building. Special rules applied. The service that physicians offer, this most personal collaboration, this service so frequently humbled by the prospect of decline and death, is grounded in the service of a human person with special dignity, a dignity that governs the purview of a physician and the scope of a physician’s ethical actions.

2500 years ago, Hippocrates articulated an oath for a profession that was already ancient—as an art thoroughly mature, even if still awaiting the infancy of its science. The Hippocratic Oath is formulated as a divine oath. The first third of the oath is reverently devoted to medical education. Reverence for the practice of medicine reverberates in its amazing declaration to reckon the one who has taught this medical art “equally dear to me as my parents.” The oath then moves to the heart of the matter with a set of restrictions:

I will follow that system of regiment which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients and abstain from whatever is deleterious or mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; in like manner I will not give a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and holiness I will pass my life and practice my art.

The oath concludes with the physician swearing to forego a surgical procedure for which others are better trained, to forego any act of corruption, any act of seduction, or any violation of confidentiality. The obligations specified in this oath follow from a profound respect for the special dignity of the human person.

It is this special respect for human dignity that drives the quest for the professional virtues so important to medicine—compassion, caring, intelligence, diligence—virtues essential for helping patients and families cope with the mysteries and crises of human suffering and death. The vocation of the physician, at its core, is little changed in the millennia since the Oath of Hippocrates was first uttered: to give care to another person to the utmost of one’s abilities, respecting the innate dignity of that person and all the while subordinating one’s personal wants in a gift of self. This gift can be as simple as work performed above and beyond fair compensation, as complex as the creation and use of advanced technology for the good of others, or as great as the hazarding of life itself.

Each morning as I go to my office, I pass the medical student common room, and there on display is a stone tablet bearing the inscription Haec mea ornamenta sunt (“These are my ornaments”—followed by 14 names):

Students of the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Died of Pestilential Disease while Serving in the Public Hospitals. This tablet is erected by the Faculty, that the Memory of these Martyrs of Humanity may not die, and that taught by their Example, the Graduates of the College may never hesitate to Hazard Life in the Performance of Duty.

Fortunately, relatively few physicians are called upon to give their lives, but in an age of HIV, Hepatitis C, and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the threats are real, and regardless of your subspecialty, from this day forth you will forever be a most valuable Good Samaritan in moment of need or a first responder in time of crisis.

Walker Percy, the physician-philosopher, tells a telling tale: One morning a man looks at a newspaper, turns to the horoscope page, glances down, and begins to read: “You are the model of decisiveness. You analyze problems crisply. You come to terms with complex situations rapidly. Your gut decisions are unerringly true.” He pulls up from the page and says, “That’s me! That’s definitely me.” Then he pauses and glances back down, only to realize he’s looked at the wrong sign. He now finds his true sign, and he reads, “You are the model of circumspection. You analyze problems with the greatest care. You weigh all the options. You see the risks and the benefits, the rewards and the opportunities. And when you finally decide, your decisions are true.” He pulls up from the page once more, and says, “That’s me! That’s definitely me.” That night, he unpacks a telescope he had purchased the day before. Quickly he assembles it, and points it to the heavens toward a disc that he sees. This disc does not twinkle, and as he focuses on it, he sees four little dots distributed in a line on either side of the disc. He says to himself, “Does not twinkle, must be a planet. A planet with four moons—it must be Jupiter.” And he is right.

Now Percy asks: How can a man recognize a planet 400 million miles away that he has never seen before, and yet not recognize himself? We cannot recognize ourselves. The graduates cannot recognize themselves. We know ourselves only in relation to others. That is why you have family and friends. That is why some of those family and friends are here today—to tell you and to remind you who you are. So our purpose today is not merely to celebrate a completion. It is not merely to inaugurate a beginning. It is to tell you who you are. I recognize you as persons who have pledged to a life of service, a service that redeems the experience of suffering, a most personal service, a most difficult service with special gravity that follows from its intimacy with the human condition. A special gravity flows from the intrinsic dignity of every human life, dignity that calls forth from you the most profound “gift of self.” Our purpose today is to recognize you as you dedicate your life. Today, I recognize you as doctors.


Donald W. Landry, MD, PhD, is the Chair of the Columbia University Department of Medicine. This essay is adapted from the Commencement Address Dr. Landry delivered at the St. Louis University School of Medicine.

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