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Ectopic Airliners

Much ado has been made about my position on the morality of shooting down civilian airliners. Some commentators seem to think that because I am a priori wrong about shooting down airliners (they suppose), therefore the Hiroshima bombing was morally licit. Some others seem to think that because I am a priori wrong about airliners I am unpatriotic. In either case I think the nonsequitur is so obvious that commenting on it makes me embarrassed for my interlocutors.

I've already written a lot of comments on the matter in other peoples' posts, but I thought it might be useful to relate more succinctly (he hopes, as he begins writing the post) my position on shooting down airliners, despite the rather obvious fact that neither my patriotism nor the moral status of the Hiroshima bombing depends upon it.

Consider an innocent child, ensconced in a tube. The child is headed for certain and imminent death; a death as certain as any prediction of the future of empirical reality can be. Furthermore, if we simply allow matters to continue as they are, at least one additional person, another innocent in addition to the innocent child, will die.

The child is clearly innocent: the child is not choosing to behave in a way which attacks others. (The child is at this point likely not choosing anything at all, just as a man who is asleep isn't choosing anything, though at least the latter is capable of having chosen some attack which remains underway).

If our scenario is an ectopic pregnancy we have multiple options, not all of which are morally licit. If we simply crush the tube with the child in it, directly killing the child, then the child's remains will wash free of the fallopian tube and the mother will be saved. An additional good result is that the fertility of the mother is fully preserved. But this would be a direct abortion - albiet one undertaken under severe duress to save the life of the mother - and would therefore be morally illicit. We are morally prohibited from taking this specific action, no matter that we foresee (though we do not choose) that an additional innocent will die if we do nothing.

But we are not stuck with doing nothing. Indeed, there is a different procedure involving removing the tube intact which does not attack the child directly. It is different as a particular chosen behavior from the other procedure. The child will still die - that is, at this point as a technological matter we have no way of rescuing the child. (Lets stipulate this point, since I am not entirely convinced that it is true. Our obligation to attempt rescue ceases only once the child actually dies.) The overall this-worldly consequences of the salpingectomy are worse than the salpingotomy: the child is dead, and the mother loses half her fertility. But the teleological consequences are the difference between Heaven and Hell.

If the tube in question happens to be a Boeing 757 hurtling toward a building with an innocent person in it, our moral obligations are the same. We cannot licitly directly attack and kill the child by crushing or destroying her in our immediately chosen behavior. It is always immoral to directly kill the innocent in one's specific chosen behavior, independent of any other considerations.

However, again, it does not follow that because we may not directly kill the child that we may not do anything at all. We might attempt to disable the plane without directly killing the child. There are numerous ways to do so. It is arguable that shooting out the engines, even though it carries a risk of explosion, is one of them. The airplane will likely crash. (Though not necessarily: a pilot of a Bonanza was rendered unconscious by exhaust fumes in one accident of my acquaintance. His airplane eventually ran out of fuel and glided to a landing in a field of its own accord. Instead of waking up dead the pilot woke up with a big headache and quite a hangar story to tell). But whether we are deciding to kill the child or not in the actual behavior we choose makes all the moral difference in, well, eternity.

Some commentators, typically those who have never engaged with moral relativism seriously, seem to think that these distinctions - without which moral absolutism cannot be preserved, and without which every moral question becomes a question of situational ethics - are hairsplitting nonsense designed to make people feel good about themselves. Others recognize them as necessary in order to preserve moral absolutes; and some of those may further recognize moral absolutes as an indispensible attribute of Christendom.

But however you slice it, struggling with ectopic pregnancy as a moral conundrum doesn't excuse simply adverting to the idea that abortion is sometimes morally acceptable as long as someone argues that the stakes are high enough. And struggling with passenger airliners as a moral condundrum doesn't excuse simply adverting to the idea that incinerating cities of civilians is morally licit as long as someone argues that the stakes are high enough. No matter what one may claim to be at stake, one can (I say "can" here, not may, since I am invoking literal impossibility) never claim that it is licit to violate an absolute moral imperative and at the same time claim to be other than a moral relativist.

Comments (152)

This analogy of the plane to an ectopic fallopian tube occurred to me during The Right Call dialogue, but I didn't bring it up to avoid sidetracking from the scenario under discussion, and to keep Lydia on my side and off my case. I will have to say, though, that in my essay (Who Are the Innocent) to which Paul links in his original post, I raised the ectopic pregnancy as an analogy to legitimate self-defense, and I would now have to seriously modify that analogy after watching you and she discuss it. There were simply things I know now that I didn't then. I leave it in the original essay (even though it reveals flawed thinking) because I want to remember my state of mind at the time I wrote it. Perhaps I could add a parenthetical update.

..doesn't excuse simply adverting to the idea that abortion is sometimes morally acceptable as long as someone argues that the stakes are high enough...No matter what one may claim to be at stake, one can..never claim that it is licit to violate an absolute moral imperative and at the same time claim to be other than a moral relativist.

This is the area into which you and I both were trying to lead Mr. Auster re his claim to be a moral absolutist, but he refused to engage. Disappointing, but no longer surprising.

I hope Lydia will engage on this ectopic thing, for in her you will find a genuine absolutist.

Actually, I've tried to avoid this issue, too, because after all, no one _likes_ being considered a kook. I would for the moment here add only a couple of medical/empirical points: As I understand it, the best option to preserve the woman's fertility is actually a chemical abortion. I forget the name of the drug, but basically it causes the child to separate from the wall of the tube. The second best option for preserving fertility wouldn't (again, as I understand it) be to "crush" the tube but rather to open it and directly remove the child. This, I gather, Zippy also rejects (as of course do I).

The other thing I just want to point out is that my very strong impression is that if you had a metabolizing, heart-beating embryo at all prior to removing the ectopic pregnancy (and in some cases you may not), by the time you have operated to remove the entire tube, you have a dead child. Period. It isn't just that the child _will_ die (e.g., at some later time) but rather that the physical act of the removal of the tube causes the child's instant, immediate death. I think it's just important to face that up front, because I think it does make it more difficult to treat the embryo's death as a separate "consequence" or "result" of the action. This is one reason why nobody talks about "saving the child." Because the child's dead by the time you're done with the surgery. That's also the reason why nobody blanches at sending the remains off to the lab and ultimately to the bio-incinerator rather than doing anything else with them. (That plus the fact that we in our culture probably aren't concerned enough about respectful disposal of human remains anyway.)

If I'm wrong about this as a medical fact, I'll accept correction. But as far as I know, it's a direct result of the earliness of the pregnancies we are talking about.

If I'm wrong about this as a medical fact, I'll accept correction.

As will I. Any chosen behavior which directly, knowingly and as a chosen behavior itself, kills the child would be morally unacceptable in my view.

A more fundamental issue is that if someone is engaging in these kinds of acts without understanding them at this level, as chosen behaviors and means to ends, and asking beforehand whether a chosen means is or is not evil in itself; anyone who is not doing this while engaging in modern technological life-and-death behaviors is clearly doing wrong simpliciter. If a guy shoots down the plane without having genuinely understood the matter and "split the hairs" if you will, that leaves no doubt that he has done evil.

You mean, if you were convinced that the embryo is alive at the beginning and dead at the end of the tube-removing surgery, because its oxygen is cut off, you would condemn it?

Re. shooting out the engines of the plane, I wanted to add that if we stipulate that there is no way to save the ectopic embryo, I suppose the parallel in the case of the plane wd. be stipulating that all the passengers will either die instantly when the plane hits the ground or else be so badly injured that they cannot be saved by any available medical technology. If you _stipulate_ that as part of the scenario, then I hardly see how you can justify shooting out the engines.

We might attempt to disable the plane without directly killing the child. There are numerous ways to do so. It is arguable that shooting out the engines, even though it carries a risk of explosion, is one of them. The airplane will likely crash.

I am trying to understand what is going on here. It is never licit to intentionally kill an innocent person, so directly targeting the plane to blow it up would be no different than directly targeting the innocent person on the plane. It is therefore not acceptable to argue that the chosen behavior was to blow up the plane and the death of the innocent person was simply a foreseen, but unintended consequence. The chosen behavior of blowing up the plane is thus identical to the chosen behavior of killing the passenger. Do I have this right thus far? However, if the chosen behavior is altered not to blow the plane up entirely, but to simply shoot the wing of the plane, this act is permissible because the act of shooting the wing does not directly kill the innocent person, even though it is forseen that the plane will crash and the passanger will die?

You mean, if you were convinced that the embryo is alive at the beginning and dead at the end of the tube-removing surgery, because its oxygen is cut off, you would condemn it?

That is still a tough call, to me. Though for reasons already expressed I think it is probably moot: that is, I rather suspect that the way these things are done is almost always immoral for other reasons. There is too much conviction that if it can be done, and one's intentions are good, that doing it is necessarily licit. That after all is what drives the whole Hiroshima debate. But I don't claim to be able to clear up for all time where behavior stops and effects start in every conceivable case, and this one is an archetype precisely because (unlike nuking cities) it is a difficult one.

You probably know more about the details of ectopics than I do though.

I suppose the parallel in the case of the plane wd. be stipulating that all the passengers will either die instantly when the plane hits the ground or else be so badly injured that they cannot be saved by any available medical technology.

Well, that isn't actually true though. It is possible, and not merely in principle, for the plane to reach the ground with survivors. That won't happen if you just indiscriminately blow them up though. But in this particular case you actually make that more likely if you can disable the plane without destroying it. The odds go from zero to something, and as they say in the Lottery you can't win if you don't play. Just about any act which increases the chances of survival for the innocents on the plane would (other things equal) surely be licit.

...but to simply shoot the wing of the plane...

I didn't propose shooting the wing off as a probably licit act though. I proposed disabling the engines, a risky procedure which might accidentally result in the explosive destruction of the plane, not because of explosive ordinance fired into the plane in the act but because of the jet fuel on board. Turbine engines are sensitive things. A bird flying through one will destroy it, most often leaving the plane in flying condition but with reduced climb capability and range from the remaining engines. Knocking out all of the engines turns it into a glider, not a rock. (Of course someone, or some autopilot or trim system, still has to make it glide. Which it might).

Edge-case morality in a technological world requires precise technical knowledge about specific proposed acts and a deep understanding of moral principles, it seems to me. Indeed, that dual requirement is what leads me to suspect that most people aren't practicing it. For every technical practice involving life and death decisions there is a correspondingly technical morality of the specific acts in that practice. This is the case because it is the specific nature of human acts, in addition to intentions and consequences, which determine the morality of those acts.

I didn't propose shooting the wing off as a probably licit act though. I proposed disabling the engines

No you did not. I brought it up because I did not see the difference in the act of shooting the wing and disabling the engines. You assure me there is one, which is what I trying to understand. Does the difference in the acts have to do with the probability of survival?

Does the difference in the acts have to do with the probability of survival?

No, it isn't a probability issue as I understand it. Just about anything admits of possibility in a quantum world, and people appeal to "but if a miracle happened" all the time in discussions of double-effect (I've done so myself in the past. I don't think that appeal validly comprehends the issue though, unless the appeal-to-miracle is somewhere outside of the chosen behavior itself). It is a question of whether the chosen behavior itself falls under a species of acts which are intrinsically evil (which is itself determined by the interior moral quality of the behavior being chosen itself: it is per se impossible for an intrinsically evil act to cohere internally in the person with the truth about man and God). If the chosen behavior isn't intrinsically evil, then and only then can we start analyzing the act under double-effect.

Any behavior which inherently, in the behavior itself, attacks the bodily integrity of an innocent person in a way that will knowingly kill him falls under the species "killing the innocent". Lydia's question is trickier if and only if the procedure to treat the ectopic does not directly attack the child. If it does directly attack the child then it is a slam dunk in her favor, and I get to be even more of a kook than my old friend Larry Auster now thinks I am (which I suppose would be something of an accomplishment). Thus the devil is (literally) in the technical details.

If the chosen behavior isn't intrinsically evil, then and only then can we start analyzing the act under double-effect.

Shooting an inanimate object (the wing) is not intrinsically evil, so there must be something intrinsic to the act of shooting the wing that equates it to an act of attacking the "bodily integrity of an innocent person." I assume that an innocent person being on the plane is enough. If a husband wanted to murder his wife by blowing up the plane she was one, nobody would believe that he only attacked an inanimate object. My confusion is that I do not understand how shooting the wing and shooting the engines are not the same type of act. Both acts tamper with the proper functioning of the plane, which will result in the death of anyone on the plane. What difference is there other than that turning off the engines allows the possibility that the plane may 'eventually run out of fuel and glide safely into a field of its own accord.'? The only difference I see is that shooting the wing will result in the death of the innocent passanger and shooting the engine will most likely result in the death of the innocent passanger.

The the devil is certainly in the technical details and I really appreciate your time going through them with me.

X: A commenter on the cross-post on my blog brought up the same point about the comparison between shooting off the wings and treating an ectopic pregnancy. My only answer to both of my astute questioners on this point at the moment is "I haven't worked that out".

"It is possible, and not merely in principle, for the plane to reach the ground with survivors."

Right. That's why it's so difficult to make up an analogy between treating an ectopic pregnancy and trying to bring the plane down carefully.

Of course, I agree that the physical facts make all the difference. If it were medically possible to remove the embryo from the tube and reimplant it, if there were any such technology or any way of even plausibly trying to do this, any point in making any such attempt, then I'd be 100% for it.

And here's an interesting point: If it were possible to remove the embryo from the tube and reimplant it elsewhere, then a salpingotomy would be _preferable_ morally to a salpingectomy. That is, if you're going to remove the embryo from the tube to move it elsewhere anyway, you might as well do so at the outset and leave the woman with that fallopian tube, rather than removing the whole tube. The difference between salpingotomy (removing the embryo from the tube) and salpingectomy never had anything to do with the idea that in the latter case there is some hope of saving the embryo. Rather, the idea was that analytically the salpingectomy could be thought of as "surgery on the woman's body" because the surgeon doesn't make contact with the child directly. But there never has been any greater chance of the child's survival in the one procedure than in the other.

I've just dreamed up a project in animal research for some enterprising scientist: See if you can transplant a significant section of an animal's fallopian tube to its own uterus (no rejection issues with the same animal), attach it fully all along the length of the section of tube to the endometrium (uterine lining), and have the tubal tissue live. If this works, induce a tubal pregnancy in the same type of animal and see if you can transplant the tube section with embryo to the uterus, attaching the section of tube to the uterine wall in the same way. See what happens. It would at least be worth finding out. My guess is the tube lives, the embryo dies.

If the tube in question happens to be a Boeing 757 hurtling toward a building with an innocent person in it, our moral obligations are the same. We cannot licitly directly attack and kill the child by crushing or destroying her in our immediately chosen behavior. It is always immoral to directly kill the innocent in one's specific chosen behavior, independent of any other considerations.

Sorry, I don't buy your basic premise. It simply is not always immoral to kill the innocent directly, independent of any other considerations. The other considerations make all the difference. Most notably, one innocent may certainly be sacrificed in order to save many other innocents.

Zippy: One thing that has to be taken into account is the limited range of possible choices that may actually exist for preventing a plane from going in its chosen direction: I would guess that currently, shooting off a wing (or similar structural damage) may be the only practical way of doing this. But if it were somehow possible to simply disable the engines, that would be preferable, since it enhances the passengers' (slim) hopes.

Lydia: Good point about the salping-whatever operations. There should always be the constraint that any operation should give the foetus the maximum chance of survival, however slim. It's important to keep looking for the greatest possible good. (So, salping-whatever is just like the plane, isn't it?)

Lugo: you say "Most notably, one innocent may certainly be sacrificed in order to save many other innocents." But I suspect Christians may think of John 11:47-50 and not be so convinced. And besides, how to decide on which innocents should be sacrificed for which other innocents is an intractable problem. For example, one might argue that anyone believing and publicizing incorrect ethical principles about life and death should be killed in order to protect the others. And that would lead us who knows where.

I really don't get it. Maybe I'm just obtuse, but I don't see why we shouldn't shoot the plane down.

I don't think it's just proportionalism at work, either: I don't think it's right to deliberately kill one innocent person to save twenty.

But if I'm the President, and a hijacked plane is going to smash into a building somewhere, I have the obligation to stop the terrorists. I can't send a SEAL team on board to capture them, and as far as I know the techniques for forcing a plane down all involve the pilot worrying about whether he's going to die.

The hairsplitting between shooting off a wing, disabling the engines, and shooting a sidewinder all appear to be distinctions without differences.

If it were my family on board, I would blame the terrorists for their deaths, not the President. And I know somebody will say, "it doesn't matter whom you blame", and I get that, so let me say it more strongly: the culpability for their deaths would be on the terrorists, and not at all on the President. I think I would need a worldview shift (and I have accommodated worldview shifts before, so I acknowledge that I could be wrong) to accept otherwise.

I said: The hairsplitting between shooting off a wing, disabling the engines, and shooting a sidewinder all appear to be distinctions without differences.

Sorry, that's not quite true. Unlike the other actions, disabling the engines still might allow the terrorist to accomplish his goal: a glider full of fuel smashing into a building can still do a lot of damage. So I think the best and most prudent course is to knock it down cleanly.

So I think the best and most prudent course is to knock it down cleanly.

Then you must think, like Lugo and against two millennia of the tradition of Western Christendom and the full authority of the Catholic Church, that it is sometimes morally licit to directly kill the innocent. You must think that "kill the innocent" is not a species of intrinsically immoral acts.

Do you think adultery is a species of intrinsically immoral act? Would it be wrong for a woman to commit adultery with a terrorist in order to steal the trigger for a doomsday weapon he intends to activate and destroy the world?

Is directly killing an innocent child on the plane somehow not as bad as Doomsday Woman's act of adultery?

Do you think abortion is an intrinsically evil act? N.B., the only reason abortion is intrinsically evil is because it entails directly killing the innocent. Abortion is morally wrong in all cases; yes, even in cases of rape and when the life of the mother is at stake. Give ground on the intrinsic immorality of killing the innocent and you can pretty much say goodbye to moral absolutism tout court. The physical facts of what acts are possible are quite different between the fleshy tube and the metal one; but the moral constraints are the same.

"I don't get it" isn't an argument. Lugo argues (or at least asserts) that sometimes it is morally licit to directly kill the innocent. It seems to me that though he is wrong about that as a matter of fact, he is right that in order to justify ignoring the kind of act-centered casuisty ethicists make in hard cases like ectopic pregnancy you have to be a moral relativist: you have to adopt situational ethics when it comes to the matter of killing the innocent.

And by the way, once you say goodbye to moral absolutism you say goodbye to everything in Western Christendom that matters. So Auster is wrong that principled moral casuistry is abstract, unimportant, and suicidal. Auster's own situational ethics approach to the exercise of war power is itself a suicide bullet in the brain of Western Christendom.

Paul asks, "So, salping-whatever is just like the plane, isn't it?"

I say, yes and no. Yes, because the same overall moral constraints apply to both. Also, yes, because on my view you can't morally do either--either shooting down the plane with a sidewinder or any of the surgeries to treat the ectopic pregnancy.

No, because as a matter of empirical fact there are now, as Zippy describes, ways of trying to get the plane down with some survivors, which is actually trying to _help_ the passengers. But there are not as a matter of empirical fact now any ways available of trying to treat the ectopic pregnancy with the child's surviving. My own rather gloomy prediction is that no such ways will ever be found, as a result of a) the exceedingly early stage of development which is all the embryo reaches before the tube bursts, b) the great difficulty of getting out intact an embryo that is attached to the walls of a narrow passage like the fallopian tube, and c) the fact that no way that I know of has been found to remove early mammalian embryos from one place where they are implanted and to re-implant them elsewhere. Note that the treatment of premature babies is of an entirely different kind. The preemie is not reimplanted elsewhere; rather, the cord is cut at birth as in any other birth and the child is then attached to various life support systems. But these require the existence of some operational lungs or other (even a ventilator has to have some lungs to ventilate), differentiated organ systems, and so forth. Even if an artificial womb ever is developed, a new zygote would be implanted there in the first place. This still would not in itself make unimplantation and reimplantation possible.

Nevertheless, I could wish that we would hear of more animal research on this problem, perhaps along the lines I've described. Of course, it might have been tried and I just never heard of it. But I get the impression no one is motivated to do it because the moral issues don't bother most people that much and there is no money in it.

But I get the impression no one is motivated to do it because the moral issues don't bother most people that much and there is no money in it.

I think that is exactly right, and I think your research idea is intringuing. Perhaps the embryo simply cannot be "un-implanted"; on the other hand, perhaps opening the section of tube into a flat sheet and adhering it to the uterine wall would take the survival odds from zero to something greater than zero. It is a very interesting question.

how to decide on which innocents should be sacrificed for which other innocents is an intractable problem.

This is only an intractable problem if one has an intractable lack of basic reasoning skills. Any situation where the deliberate killing of a small number of innocents results in saving the lives of a large number of innocents is a moral and intellectual no-brainer.

In the specific case of the airliner scenario, this is much more of a no-brainer because the innocents on the aircraft will die anyway if you take no action. If the terrorists cannot reach their target, they will crash the plane into the ground and kill everyone on board. It is morally obligatory to take action to save the lives of the innocents on the ground at the terrorist target - because they will NOT die if you take action - even if that means killing the innocents on the plane - because they are going to die no matter what you do.

I am profoundly unimpressed with this idea that somehow shooting the wing or an engine off is not the same as shooting the plane down and killing the passengers. Aside from the fact that the plane will most likely crash immediately and kill all on board if you do this, if the plane is damaged and unable to reach its target, the terrorists will crash it into the ground. The end result is that all the passengers will be dead as a direct result of something YOU did, and you cannot escape moral responsibility for the outcome.

Lugo argues (or at least asserts) that sometimes it is morally licit to directly kill the innocent. It seems to me that though he is wrong about that as a matter of fact,

Absolutely not! I am only wrong about that as a matter of your opinion.

Any situation where the deliberate killing of a small number of innocents results in saving the lives of a large number of innocents is a moral and intellectual no-brainer.

An excellent statement of the doctrine of situational ethics and its concomitant rejection of moral absolutes.

Just war theory is a situational ethic which makes homicide licit. It is hardly modernist. A conditional pacifism is also situational ethics.

Just war theory is a situational ethic which makes homicide licit.

There you go again, KW, conflating killing enemy soldiers in battle with killing the innocent.

I can't help it if you must think so.

Did you ruminate about suicide? Does the self as "deontological object" render the intention of sacrifice illicit?

Did you ruminate about suicide?

Yeah. It's wrong.

Does the self as "deontological object" render the intention of sacrifice illicit?

The deontological object in my discussion in the other thread is an act, not the self. But no, self-sacrifice isn't illicit as far as I know.

Were you under the impression that this validates the proposition that "[a]ny situation where the deliberate killing of a small number of innocents results in saving the lives of a large number of innocents is a moral and intellectual no-brainer."? If so, see either of my posts on how not to construct a sequitur.

No need to be defensive or impute ideas to me. You're practice has been duly noted.

You clearly gave the impression that you were going to do some further ruminations and I haven't read anything except your radio voice.

...or impute ideas to me.

I didn't impute anything to you, I asked you a question about whether you were drawing a particular conclusion from your own premeses (since if you weren't, it made little sense in my mind for you to present them at all).

I've pointed this out to you before, though perhaps not in precisely these words: the JWD is not a situational ethic. No absolute moral norms properly understood are suspended - ever - under the JWD.

Are you evading the question, Zippy?

I didn't impute anything to you.

This is a lie. You shouldn't justify the truth with such means.

Are you evading the question, Zippy?

No. As far as I can tell, I haven't eveded any question in any of these discussions, quite unlike many of my key interlocutors and, in fact, you.

I have expressed my ignorance when asked a question to which I do not have an answer: I do not propose a specific deontological account of self-sacrifice, for example. Leaving that "ignorance hole" in the discussion has no bearing whatsoever on my other claims. None. I am not a positivist. In order to be able to answer some questions, I do not require myself to be able to answer all conceivable questions.

This is a lie.

If you falsely accuse me of lying again, I will delete all of your comments. See the posting guidelines.

See for yourself. You said, "There you go again, KW, conflating killing enemy soldiers in battle with killing the innocent." I did no such thing. My claim was that just war theory is situational. If you dispute it, fine.

See for yourself.

Disagreeing with you, and disagreeing with you about the implications of the things you have said, is not lying.

I've changed my mind. If you do not apologize to me for accusing me of lying, I will delete all of your posts.

I have expressed my ignorance when asked a question to which I do not have an answer: I do not propose a specific deontological account of self-sacrifice, for example. Leaving that "ignorance hole" in the discussion has no bearing whatsoever on my other claims. None. I am not a positivist. In order to be able to answer some questions, I do not require myself to be able to answer all conceivable questions.

There, now you're finally thinking. I understand you didn't propose such an account. I think such an account should be forthcoming.

I'm waiting.

Perhaps you have a different understanding of lying than I do. I had no idea where you came up with that conflation which you imputed to me. If that isn't imputing ideas to me, I don't know what is. You have acknowledged that I didn't conflate ideas as you said, so there is no matter. Shake hands?

"There, now you're finally thinking. I understand you didn't propose such an account. I think such an account should be forthcoming."

KW, what's the point? That you can't know one thing in ethics if you don't know everything? Heck, I supposedly _am_ a positivist (though I'm never sure quite why people think so), and _I_ don't believe that. In fact, it's usually the other guys who are implying that we have things radically wrong because we have only partial knowledge.

Zippy,

"Perhaps opening the section of tube into a flat sheet and adhering it to the uterine wall would take the survival odds from zero to something greater than zero."

I wouldn't suggest that as a line of research at first (though in animal research many things can be tried), if only because it could easily be destructive in itself. Those tubes are small, and there could be (I'm pretty sure) adhesion on both sides at once. This is one of the problems with the whole idea of moving a section of tube to the uterus and one of the zillions of reasons it seems not very promising and worth research only because of the importance of the issue.

Perhaps you have a different understanding of lying than I do.

My understanding of lying is that it involves deliberately telling a falsehood to further one's agenda.

"I am sorry I accused you of lying" would be more acceptable.

KW, what's the point?

Sigh. New knowledge? I'm actually interested to understand more about this than before. So yes, the deontological description of intent, direct object, and so on seems to bog down when applied to sacrifice. That is of some concern, I reckon. Partial knowledge, yes, but belligerence over partial knowledge, no.

Heck, I supposedly _am_ a positivist ...

I'd be happier saying that you may have positivist tendencies around the "edges" of things, particularly when it comes to human institutions like government. You are probably as much a positivist as Steve Burton is a Christian.

...once you say goodbye to moral absolutism you say goodbye to everything in Western Christendom that matters.

Saying goodbye to moral absolutism? Have we ever said "hello"?

Auster's own situational ethics approach to the exercise of war power is itself a suicide bullet in the brain of Western Christendom.

Considering that the Western Christendom in its long history of war virtually has always followed the limited “situational ethics” (when it, at all, followed ethics) rather then the angelic “absolute morality” of Zippy, that “bullet in the brain” seems to have quite a delayed effect.

KW said: Just war theory is a situational ethic which makes homicide licit.

Zippy replied: There you go again, KW, conflating killing enemy soldiers in battle with killing the innocent.

This statement isn't the conflation that you describe. Just war theory states that homicide is licit in certain situations. As far as I can see, KW's statement is accurate and doesn't do what you say it does.

I know you're looking for an apology, but you might consider that KW also has reason to take offense.

Lugo said: Any situation where the deliberate killing of a small number of innocents results in saving the lives of a large number of innocents is a moral and intellectual no-brainer.

Zippy replied: An excellent statement of the doctrine of situational ethics and its concomitant rejection of moral absolutes.

I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on you, Zippy, but Lugo's statement doesn't look "situational" (as I understand it) at all. It seems pretty absolute: If killing people A saves people B, and A [is less than] B, kill A. I think he's wrong, but I don't think it's situational ethics. No?

[Note: reformatted by editor to remove less-than sign]

Reposting because I had a greater-than sign in the original post that apparently through the HTML rendering off.

Lugo said: Any situation where the deliberate killing of a small number of innocents results in saving the lives of a large number of innocents is a moral and intellectual no-brainer.

Zippy replied: An excellent statement of the doctrine of situational ethics and its concomitant rejection of moral absolutes.

I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on you, Zippy, but Lugo's statement doesn't look "situational" (as I understand it) at all. It seems pretty absolute: If killing people A saves people B, and A is smaller in quantity than B, then kill A. It's wrong, but I don't think it's situational ethics. No?

Then you must think, like Lugo and against two millennia of the tradition of Western Christendom and the full authority of the Catholic Church, that it is sometimes morally licit to directly kill the innocent. You must think that "kill the innocent" is not a species of intrinsically immoral acts.

How do square that up with the fact that the Catholic Church has allowed salpingectomy?

Btw; until quite recently, this was bread and butter stuff for Protestants as well.

I do not propose a specific deontological account of self-sacrifice, for example. Leaving that "ignorance hole" in the discussion has no bearing whatsoever on my other claims.

I disagree; a filling of that "ignorance hole" would go a great way towards a mutual understanding and a better grasp of double effect. All men of goodwill on this forum agree that deliberate killing of the innocent is evil no matter what the reason; however not all foreseen bought upon deaths are killing.

"You are probably as much a positivist as Steve Burton is a Christian."

I feel like Bilbo Baggins's audience at the birthday party, trying to work that one out and see if it comes to a compliment. :-)

Zippy said: "I don't get it" isn't an argument.

Correct. That's why I didn't say, "I don't get it: therefore, Zippy is wrong." :)

I'm saying that I don't get it. And you can beat me up with the against two millennia of the tradition of Western Christendom and the full authority of the Catholic Church bit, but that's unhelpful; this is a question of Natural Law, which is supposedly written on our hearts. I'm no Fideist, and I'm no Muslim: the moral commands of God aren't inscrutable, and it's my duty to scrutinize them. So if you're telling me that He commands one thing, and I can't see how the contrary isn't so, then I think the issue needs some exploration.

You must think that "kill the innocent" is not a species of intrinsically immoral acts.

Yes. More precisely, I think that knowingly committing an act that will result in the deaths of innocent people may, in some circumstances, be warranted. Salpingectomy is an example. Your description of shooting down the airliner as "killing the innocent" seems to be much like calling a salpingectomy "killing the innocent". If you disagree, I'd be interested in knowing why.

Do you think adultery is a species of intrinsically immoral act?

Yes.

Would it be wrong for a woman to commit adultery with a terrorist in order to steal the trigger for a doomsday weapon he intends to activate and destroy the world?

Yes.

Is directly killing an innocent child on the plane somehow not as bad as Doomsday Woman's act of adultery?

Yes. It is also not as bad as killing the child through a salpingotomy. It is about the same as killing the child through a salpingectomy.

Do you think abortion is an intrinsically evil act?

Yes.

N.B.,

You calling me a newbie!? :)

the only reason abortion is intrinsically evil is because it entails directly killing the innocent. Abortion is morally wrong in all cases; yes, even in cases of rape and when the life of the mother is at stake.

Yes.

Give ground on the intrinsic immorality of killing the innocent and you can pretty much say goodbye to moral absolutism tout court.

That seems doubtful to me. The principle "all people who have eaten penguin flesh are immoral" can be absolute without being true. Tell me that I'm wrong, of course, since you think I am; but don't call me a relativist. That would be like Auster telling you that you're a pacifist.

I maintain that soldiers are innocent -- I use this in the ordinary sense of "non-criminal", since I don't know how St. Thomas used the term and am not arguing with him -- and a just war shows that "killing the innocent" in that sense may be necessary.

If this is a sticking point, perhaps we should define what we mean by "innocent".

The physical facts of what acts are possible are quite different between the fleshy tube and the metal one; but the moral constraints are the same.

Not really. In the fleshy tube, there is no actor trying to blow up the entire city around the woman in question. If there were -- I'm having flashbacks of Alien -- it might be reasonable to shoot the woman in the area where the creature was known to be, even though it would almost certainly kill her and her child. That it might be reasonable doesn't mean that it is, but once we see (if we do) that it isn't automatically illicit, it becomes one thing to consider, along with all other options and all of the known consequences.

[Lugo] is right that in order to justify ignoring the kind of act-centered casuisty ethicists make in hard cases like ectopic pregnancy you have to be a moral relativist: you have to adopt situational ethics when it comes to the matter of killing the innocent.

I think you're fighting a straw man here. Nobody is arguing relativism. When Lugo said it was a "no-brainer", I would be willing to bet that he meant that anyone holding another position is wrong. That's not relativism. I can also hold that "killing the innocent is sometimes licit", define when it's okay (possibly enumerating the specific situations, or providing criteria for licitness), and hold that these are moral absolutes. Unless I'm misunderstanding the way you're using the terms?

Regards,
Jake

On self sacrifice, I speak only for myself here: I'm not immediately feeling this overwhelming necessity to defend throwing yourself on a grenade. I mean, maybe it is suicide. Seems plausible to me on the face of it.

"Self sacrifice" comes in many different sorts. When a fireman runs into a building to save a baby, sure, he's risking death. But if he expected to die in the building, his act would be pointless, because he wouldn't be able to get the baby out, either. Lots of acts of self-sacrifice have this quality that while they involve significant risk they also involve the real possibility that one will survive, though perhaps maimed or injured seriously. Throwing oneself in front of another person when shots ring out is this sort of act.

Another variety is of a kind that I believe Zippy has discussed before at his blog, where he said that if someone else's choices come _after_ your choices and determine what happens, then we are definitely talking about indirect results and not about the object of an act. Many of the most important fictional and real acts of self-sacrifice fit here. If a missionary to some wretched spot stays with his flock when the bad guys are coming, he may know that the bad guys will kill him, but what he is doing is no act of violence against anyone, including himself. He's praying, preaching, helping the sick, etc. The bad guys choose to kill him afterwards, but that's entirely separate from his acts of continuing his missionary work. I think that even the ending of _A Tale of Two Cities_ can be fitted in here. Sidney Carton changes clothes with Charles Darnay, knowing that this will _lead to_ his death, but that is clearly the indirect result of his act, not its object. The revolutionaries themselves have to come in after the change of clothes, take Carton off in the tumbril, put him on the guillotine, and chop his head off. The whole set of violent acts against him is carried out by other people, subsequent to his act of changing clothes, and they could choose not to carry them out.

When you take out those two licit categories--acts that involve risking your life with a real chance of survival and acts that involve doing entirely good things that are followed by acts of (foreseen) violence against you by other people--I have no immediate and great stake in defending the throw-yourself-on-the-grenade set that is left.

Jake:
This statement isn't the conflation that you describe. Just war theory states that homicide is licit in certain situations. As far as I can see, KW's statement is accurate and doesn't do what you say it does.

"Homicide" as a descriptor doesn't even describe an act. It describes something that is true about any number of acts, some of which are licit and some aren't.

JWD is not a situational ethic, period. A situational ethic attempts to take an absolute moral prohibition and make it relative to the situation; to remove the prohibition based on the situation. JWD properly understood doesn't do that.

[...]
It's wrong, but I don't think it's situational ethics. No?

Of course it is. It makes the morality of directly killing innocent people dependent upon the situation, rather than taking it as absolutely prohibited. (Another description of it is as proportionalism; I use the more colloquial term "situational ethics" because more people understand it).

Not really. In the fleshy tube, there is no actor trying to blow up the entire city around the woman in question.

If you carefully read my scenario above, you wil note that there are no terrorists in it. I did that on purpose. Adding a terrorist doesn't change anything though. Suppose the terrorist armed the autopilot and parachuted out, leaving a single innocent child on board and a single innocent on the ground who will be killed when the plane crashes. It makes no difference. Adding to the numbers on the plane and the numbers on the ground makes no difference either.

I maintain that soldiers are innocent -- I use this in the ordinary sense of "non-criminal", ..

Then you might as well speak Jabberwocky, because that isn't what it means. What it means is "not choosing/having chosen an attacking behavior against which any licit defensive violence is directed".

SP:
How do square that up with the fact that the Catholic Church has allowed salpingectomy?

First of all, it is simply false to say that the Church has allowed salpingectomy. No magisterial document states this to be the case. However, moral theologians tend to see salpingectomy as licit and salpingotomy as illicit precisely because as acts, the former at least plausibly does not directly attack the physical integrity of the child while the latter clearly does. Quite similarly, in fact, to how blowing up the plane attacks the physical integrity of the passengers while shooting out the engines doesn't.

Jake:
I think that knowingly committing an act that will result in the deaths of innocent people may, in some circumstances, be warranted.

The answer indicates a misunderstanding of the question. The key words indicating as much are "will result in". Intrinsically evil acts of killing the innocent are not understood as acts which result in some outcome. They are understood as chosen behaviors to which killing the innocent is intrinsic.

Your description of shooting down the airliner as "killing the innocent" seems to be much like calling a salpingectomy "killing the innocent". If you disagree, I'd be interested in knowing why.

Think the opposite. Salpingectomy is more like my description of shooting out the engines as not directly killing the innocent (unlike salpingotomy/blowing up the plane). The whole point to the post was to set up this correspondence as an analogy. (Partly to provoke Lydia. Everyone always learns a lot when I provoke her).

I think you're fighting a straw man here. Nobody is arguing relativism.

Maybe they don't think they are, but in fact they are. JPII describes in detail how jettisoning a proper understanding of the object of the act as what morally defines it results in moral relativism (that is, a moral understanding in which no acts are absolutely prohibited under all circumstances).

If my position in fact led to absolute pacifism then Auster wouldn't be wrong to say that it does, even if I didn't agree with him. But it doesn't, in fact. And in fact Auster's approach to the moral prosecution of war is proportionalist (that is, it is situational ethics).

I know you're looking for an apology, but you might consider that KW also has reason to take offense.

As far as I know, I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever intentionally or unintentionally accused KW of doing moral wrong. If I have, I apologize abjectly and without reservation or qualification.

("Conflating" isn't a moral wrong, it is an intellectual error).

He in fact did accuse me of lying. I am still waiting for him to retract that unequivocally with an appropriate apology.

Zippy and I debated the ectopic pregnancy thing on his own blog a couple of months ago. That's one reason I haven't reproduced that debate here. My own position is that the bodily integrity issue just isn't sufficient to remove the tube-removal surgery (salpingectomy) from the realm of illicit acts. Analogies I have used have been to throwing a person in a bag out of an airplane at a mile up (or whatever)--you touch only the bag and don't dismember the person, but you kill him nonetheless--hermetically sealing a room containing an innocent person, who then suffocates to death, and cutting the life-line of a space-walking astronaut.

I mention this here only to bring on-lookers up to speed on why Zippy thought this would provoke me. Actually, I get _much_ more provoked when people say anything remotely nice about post-modernism. :-)

First of all, it is simply false to say that the Church has allowed salpingectomy. No magisterial document states this to be the case.

Positivism?

Positivism?

Nope. Just a complete lack of any Magisterial evidence whatsoever on your part. Rejecting positivism doesn't imply postmodernism: it doesn't mean that the Church allows whatever you say it allows.

I mention this here only to bring on-lookers up to speed on why Zippy thought this would provoke me.

I should say though that Lydia's position is at least tenable (and perhaps even convincing), whereas the idea that any act to bring down the plane is licit simply because of the urgency of the matter is utterly unfounded intellectually, implacably hostile to the moral tradition of Western Christendom, and an instance of proportionalism/situational ethics. In order to take such a position one has to either adopt moral relativism w.r.t. killing the innocent or simply refuse to really think about the matter. I expect - perhaps I should say I hope - that the latter obtains most commonly.

Nope. Just a complete lack of any Magisterial evidence whatsoever on your part. Rejecting positivism doesn't imply postmodernism: it doesn't mean that the Church allows whatever you say it allows.

Let me get this straight; Salpingectomy is performed in Catholic hospitals in full knowledge of the overseeing bishops, salpingectomy is listed as an example of an action justified under double effect in all of the manuals and as I understand it, there has been no formal Magisterial objection to the practice despite it going on for close to a century. I think the burden of proof rests on you Zippy and not me. I don't think that the Magisterium has issued a formal document on computer piracty--I could be wrong--but I know it's wrong. I'm not waiting for a formal declaration.

By the way, I got an interesting email from an anonymous reader, approximately two weeks ago on my blog. It concerned "The Right Call" discussion, it's here:

http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2007/08/verdict.html

it may help matters.

Me: This statement isn't the conflation that you describe. Just war theory states that homicide is licit in certain situations. As far as I can see, KW's statement is accurate and doesn't do what you say it does.

Zippy: "Homicide" as a descriptor doesn't even describe an act. It describes something that is true about any number of acts, some of which are licit and some aren't.

That was the point, right? That saying "Just War doctrine says that in some situations homicide is licit" is (a) true, and (b) is not talking about innocents and therefore does not conflate killing innocents with killing soldiers?

JWD is not a situational ethic, period. A situational ethic attempts to take an absolute moral prohibition and make it relative to the situation; to remove the prohibition based on the situation. JWD properly understood doesn't do that.

...and...

Me: It's wrong, but I don't think it's situational ethics. No?

Zippy: Of course it is....Another description of it is as proportionalism; I use the more colloquial term "situational ethics" because more people understand it

Except me, apparently.

If I understand correctly, "proportionalism" is the same as "consequentialism". If you're using "situational ethics" as a synonym for "consequentialism" -- and a little research shows that that's probably okay to do -- then I accept the correction.

Almost. As I see it, the problems with those systems is that they end up being relativistic, and that's what I want to avoid. (I've thought before that Utilitarianism and Natural Law theory cohere if you calculate utilities to include closeness to God, stability of society, etc.) Even a supposedly relativistic system like consequentialism isn't relativistic if you rest it on absolutes. Lugo's statement of a moral principle is a "situational ethic" (in the technical sense) but isn't relativistic.

So the question is, is anyone who says that killing an innocent person might be licit in certain circumstances, depending on the consequences, instantly a consequentialist? I think not. When we say that liberalism is wrong because it puts "equality" above all other values, we don't also say that equality isn't something to consider. Thus it would be wrong to cry "Liberal!" when someone argues that you aren't treating people equally when they should be. Similarly, when we say that consequentialism is wrong because it puts consequences above all other determinants, that doesn't mean that consequences (and situations) should never be considered.

Pulling a trigger is sometimes licit, sometimes not.

Pulling a trigger when the weapon is pointed at a person is sometimes licit, sometimes not.

Pulling a trigger when the weapon is pointed at an attacker is sometimes licit, sometimes not.

Pulling a trigger when the weapon is pointed at an attacker who is advancing toward you is sometimes licit, sometimes not.

Pulling a trigger when the weapon is pointed at an attacker who is advancing toward you while holding a small child is sometimes licit, sometimes not.

Pulling a trigger when the weapon is pointed at an attacker who is advancing toward you while holding a small child, and when you are a sniper who could easily choose which eye to put the bullet through, is sometimes licit, sometimes not.

The potential choices of action that are licit depend on the situation. That does not mean that they depend on who you are, it doesn't mean that everyone chooses their own morality, and it doesn't mean that, as Wikipedia puts it, "absolute standards are considered less important than the requirements of a particular situation."

More later.

P.S. I think Lydia's position is the most clear and consistent I've heard so far on the -ectomy / -otomy scenarios. I'm not sure she's right, but it seems to be much less "have my cake and eat it" oriented. She points out, rightly, as Zippy has done before, that sometimes the answer to "what can I do to fix it?" is "nothing."

I don't think that the Magisterium has issued a formal document on computer piracty--I could be wrong--but I know it's wrong. I'm not waiting for a formal declaration.

I agree. But I would's say "the Church teaches that computer piracy is wrong" without some actual evidence that the Church asserts that specific teaching as a teaching. Praxis, by the way, isn't teaching. People make the same mistake w.r.t. torture.

So the question is, is anyone who says that killing an innocent person might be licit in certain circumstances, depending on the consequences, instantly a consequentialist?

With respect to acts which fall under the species "killing the innocent", yes. He may not be consequentialist w.r.t. other acts: he may still believe (e.g.) that adultery is always wrong, for example. But when it comes to the absolute moral norm prohibiting killing the innocent, including the absolute prohibition of abortion, he is asserting moral consequentialism. Period.

"Pulling a trigger" suffers from the same problem that "homicide" suffers from. You can always come up with discrete facts about acts which are morally neutral that can be expressed in a verbal manner. But those things are not the act. You have to start with the act as a deontological object first and determine what species it falls under.

We can give all sorts of verbal examples of factual car-neutral attributes which apply to car objects and other objects; but who cares? The whole approach is backward when you are attempting to class objects as cars or not. You must start first with an actual object (act), and then see if its intrinsic properties make it fall under the species.

This is why it is so critical to understand an act as a deontological object. Moral evaluation involves taking a specific object: the actual act that Captian or Doctor Fred engaged in as a chosen behavior, and evaluating its moral species.

You can play the game of "my act was to move my finger, and the pulling of the trigger was an effect of my act, so therefore I get to invoke double-effect" all day. It is completely specious. As consciously acting corporate beings we choose behaviors in discrete acts, and attempting to squeeze the "behavior" part into a small enough descriptive box that we can call it morally neutral doesn't describe the reality. When I run a red light it is ludicrous to say that my chosen behavior was to refrain from putting my foot on the brake.

Understanding the object in discursive terms is very difficult going. Understanding it in human terms, as actual acting subjects ourselves who perform acts, is not all that difficult. If you chose a behavior to which killing the passengers is intrinsic, you killed them. If you did something that was neutral, accidental, or of a rescuing nature w.r.t. their impending deaths, then you didn't kill them. A big part of the problem is the obsessively linguistic nature of modern discourse.

But in the end, we all know what we've done.

Can I talk about deontological objects as I would other objects? They exist, and I can describe them, and their descriptions may correspond to reality, but they aren't the reality? Same basic idea?

Can a deontological object belong to more than one species?

Same basic idea. Though there are differences, just as there are differences between mathematical objects and physical objects. (Acts as objects are unique inasmuch as they involve interior knowledge and will in addition to a physical carrying out of he will).

Can a deontological object belong to more than one species?

Sure. We can arbitrarily define species- probably an infininte number - into which to fit cars in order to suit our purposes, but any actual car remain a car independent of that activity. The species "yellow convertible" doesn't change the object into not-a-car. The thing about absolute moral norms is that once you recognize that an act falls into an intrinsically evil species it is prohibited, period, independent of intentions or circumstances. (We may not have a complete enumeration of all conceivable intrinsically evil species, but there are some - e.g. killing the innocent, rape, adultery - which we do have at the disposal of our reason and affirmed by our tradition).

I don't mean more than one species, in a natural hierarchy: I mean more than one type of thing altogether.

I think that blowing up the airliner is of species "destroying a threat", which is licit in many cases. Are you telling me it is also a case of "destroying the innocent", and thus illicit?

I think that blowing up the airliner is of species "destroying a threat", which is licit in many cases. Are you telling me it is also a case of "destroying the innocent", and thus illicit?

As a chosen behavior it falls under the species directly killing the innocent, so it is moraly illicit no matter what other species it falls under, no matter what the intentions are of the person acting, no matter what circumstances obtain, and no matter what consequences will result from refraining to do it.

There are two valid avenues of disagreement that my interlocutors could take, though in general in these discussions they are roads less traveled.

One is to argue that blowing up the passengers living bodies themselves with military ordinance as an act - independent of intentions and circumstances - doesn't fall under the species "killing the innocent". I don't think it is tenable, but it is the one tack that can be taken without clinging to premeses which ultimately lead to moral relativism.

The other approach is Lugo's, which is to simply assert that it isn't always wrong to kill the innocent. That makes one a moral relativist with respect to killing the innocent, but it does leave the option of being a moral absolutist on other matters. This option is not available for Catholics.

But I'm not directly killing them. I'm destroying a bomb that is in their plane, and it's very unfortunate that I don't have a way to do that without causing their deaths. I have no intent to kill them; their deaths aren't the cause of the bomb being destroyed; destroying bombs and aircraft isn't inherently evil; and the destruction of the bomb mitigates a greater evil than the death of one child.

At the very least, if you disagree, I can't see how you could possibly say that salpingectomy isn't of the same species.

But I'm not directly killing them.

If choosing to blow up their living bodies with military ordinance (independent of whatever other things you are choosing to blow up in addition) isn't directly killing them then the words "directly killing" have no meaning, and there is really no point in trying to define species of acts which are intrinsically immoral. If we can't even talk to each other then we aren't going to be able to talk about the moral law.

I have no intent to kill them;

Your intentions (other than the "choice" part in "choice of behavior") are irrelevant unless we are invoking double-effect. We can't invoke double-effect until we have determined that the act is not evil in itself, because double-effect only applies to acts which are not evil in their object.

At the very least, if you disagree, I can't see how you could possibly say that salpingectomy isn't of the same species.

But it isn't, or at least isn't as manifestly.

It isn't my position that salpingectomy is definitely licit; it is my position that it is manifest and undeniable that salpingotomy is illicit, and less manifest that that salpingectomy is illicit. The argument that salpingectomy is licit has some plausibility, whereas the argument that salpingotomy is licit is manifestly wrong.

Likewise it isn't my position that every act of shooting out the engines is definitely licit; it is that every act of blowing up the plane is manifestly illicit.

This has been bugging me, too, and Lydia's new post that refers to your piked heads and floating corpses crystallized it for me:

Me: I maintain that soldiers are innocent -- I use this in the ordinary sense of "non-criminal",

Zippy: Then you might as well speak Jabberwocky, because that isn't what it means. What it means is "not choosing/having chosen an attacking behavior against which any licit defensive violence is directed".

(For someone who sometimes uses words as technical terms when they look ordinary, and who uses language that many people would consider Jabberwocky, you get a little snarky about language use.)

My question is, is it only reasonable to use defensive violence against non-innocent people? That seems to be implied in your "Jabberwocky" response, but I can't be sure.

Jake is pitching well.

I mean, think more closely about salpingectomy as a chosen behavior. Lydia is right to liken it to cutting off the oxygen of the child, as opposed to directly dismembering the child's body. Cutting off the oxygen to the airliner would pretty clearly (much more clearly than in the salpingectomy case) not be intrinsically immoral. After all, the terrorists might pass out before a particularly hearty passenger, who might be able to save the day.

It isn't my position that there are no "gray area" acts. Of course there are. I don't think simply destroying the airliner with ordinance is one of them; and that goes in spades for Hiroshima. And certainly the former is far more disputable, because it fails only at the level of the object of the act and not under double-effect. Even if we took Hiroshima as not intrinsically immoral - fat chance - it still fails under double effect.

My question is, is it only reasonable to use defensive violence against non-innocent people?

Under a broad understanding of the term "defensive", yes. Criminals, like enemy soldiers in a just war, attack society and the social order in their behaviors. They are not innocent, and may be both prevented from acting and punished after due determination of guilt, using proportionate violence, in order to prevent harm to the common good. It is a whole different discussion.

Zippy: The argument that salpingectomy is licit has some plausibility,

To paraphrase someone I know, If choosing to destroy the child's life support system by removing it from the mother's body (independent of whatever else the fallopian tube may be) isn't directly killing him then the words "directly killing" have no meaning. Also, in the end, we all know what we've done.

If we can't even talk to each other then we aren't going to be able to talk about the moral law.

Well, true, and if I can't say something without you saying that I'm making discussion impossible then we aren't going to be able to talk about the moral law, either. :)

You have claimed that that blowing up the plane with innocents on board is directly attacking them. I have claimed that it is not. To defend your position, you have said, "it is manifestly so, and cannot be otherwise without descending into gibberish." To defend my position, I have said that my attack is not directed at them, but at the bomb, and they are unfortunate (and I am unfortunate) that I can conceive of no other way to destroy the bomb. If your reply is that I am speaking gibberish, then we will have to smile and wave.

I just read your 4:41 post, and I find its defense of salpingectomy (which I know you don't mean to be definitive, you are only describing why it seems more plausible) completely implausible, too. Killing someone by cutting off their oxygen or exposing them on a mountaintop is not substantially different from killing them with ordinance.

Me: killing them with ordinance -- that's the way we should solve the dilemma: bury the plane in paperwork. The terrorists will be so frustrated by filling out their forms that they'll be unable to fly the plane efficiently, and we'll be able to arrest them as they cry into their beards on the ground.

I mean ordnance, of course. And Zippy, you spoke Jabberwocky on that one first. :)

I just read your 4:41 post, and I find its defense of salpingectomy (which I know you don't mean to be definitive, you are only describing why it seems more plausible) completely implausible, too. Killing someone by cutting off their oxygen or exposing them on a mountaintop is not substantially different from killing them with ordinance.

It seems to me that your only plausible conclusion, then, without descending into gibberish, is to adopt Lydia's position.

...have said that my attack is not directed at them, but at the bomb...

Again, by using the term "directed at" you signal that you are not referring to the object, but to your intentions.

If I accept that it is never licit to commit an act that directly entails the death of an innocent, then yes, I see no way to support salpingectomy any more than salpingotomy.

If I accept that it is never licit to commit an act that directly entails the death of an innocent...

Well, do you accept that it is intrinsically immoral to kill the innocent? Still undecided? Inquiring minds want to know.

Zippy at 5:06: Again, by using the term "directed at" you signal that you are not referring to the object, but to your intentions.

Zippy at 10:25 yesterday: The answer indicates a misunderstanding of the question. The key words indicating as much are "will result in". Intrinsically evil acts of killing the innocent are not understood as acts which result in some outcome. They are understood as chosen behaviors to which killing the innocent is intrinsic.

Is killing the innocent somehow not intrinsic to salpingectomy?

If the reason for my choice doesn't matter, then salpingectomy is as bad, in every way, as salpingotomy. If the reason for my choice does matter, then -ectomy might not be as bad as -otomy. So it seems to me. Am I missing something?

Fine. You've concluded that salpingectomy is intrinsically immoral. As I've said many times in many forums, I respect that conclusion. Do you go on to say that blowing up the airliner is licit?

I think I said this at the outset: I don't currently believe that it is always illicit to commit an act that entails the death of an innocent.

Whether "commiting an act that entails the death of an innocent" is morally the same as "killing the innocent" is the part that's still up for grabs. If I were convinced that they were the same, I might change my mind. So far, I don't think I have a reason to be convinced.

If salpingectomy is intrinsically immoral, then blowing up the airliner is as well.

Let me help out some more. Not all acts which knowingly result in the deaths of innocents are intrinsically immoral. (See here.) If killing the innocent isn't built into the behavior, then the act may be licit under double-effect even when we know with moral certainty that innocents will be killed -- as long as the killing-of-innocents isn't intended, as long as the killing-of-innocents doesn't cause the good outcome we are looking for, etc. The clearest examples are when the actual killing is done by someone else: our act which leads up to this other person's act may be morally wrong, but it isn't intrinsically evil. The actual abortion is intrinsically immoral as a deontological object in itself; the mother's act in procuring it is formal cooperation with that intrinsic evil, much like hiring a hit-man.

The thing that makes this case interesting is that all of the criteria for double-effect would apply, if and only if the act is not evil in its object. Most people wave their hands and mentally walk away at that point, giving no genuine thought to what that first step may mean. It is all double-effect, all the time.

And I maintain that you can't knowingly kill a bunch of civilians by firing ordinace into them without the killing of those innocents being intrinsic to the act. Other people may disagree, but I think they are kidding themselves. And I am sympathetic to the idea that supporters of salpingectomy are kidding themselves. What I am absolutely certain about is that in virtually all cases where people are presently engaging in these kinds of acts, the matter hasn't been thought through at this level; that in itself renders the acts evil, because due prudence hasn't been exercised in evaluating them.

This whole hubbub - the one here at any rate - started with Bill Luse's post on Cheney's decision to give the shoot order against Flight 93. Cheney's justification was nakedly consequentialist; basically identical to Lugo's above. We've got a long way to go to cure this ill.

At the very least, there is a reversal of the burden of proof in these sorts of discussions in the modern world where everyone is a consequentialist. Anyone who claims that the act is licit had better have a rock-solid and convincing account of what the object of the specifically proposed act - object meaning chosen behavior distinct from intentions and circumstances - is, and of how killing the innocent isn't intrinsic to it.

Let me help out some more. Not all acts which knowingly result in the deaths of innocents are intrinsically immoral

Can you give us an example?

Just war theory is a situational ethic which makes homicide licit.

There you go again, KW, conflating killing enemy soldiers in battle with killing the innocent.

There is no such thing as a war in which only enemy soldiers on the battlefield are killed. War always, without exception, entails killing innocent non-combatants, if not deliberately then as a byproduct of combat operations. If you accept Just War theory, then you must accept that there are situations in which the killing of innocent civilians is just - because this will happen, even in the most just and carefully prosecuted of wars.

Can you give us an example?

I linked to one.

If you accept Just War theory, then you must accept that there are situations in which the killing of innocent civilians is just - because this will happen, even in the most just and carefully prosecuted of wars.

Jus in bello requires no attacks on civilians. When civilian deaths are accidental they may be licit.

When we drive on the freeways, there are always fatal traffic accidents. We know with certainty that barring a miracle they will occur. That doesn't make driving morally illicit.

Sorry, couldn't find the link. I've had a bit of a rummage through the threads, is this it?

That isn't to say that accidental civilian deaths in wartime - civilian deaths where nobody is choosing in a specific behavior to kill civilians - are morally illicit. They aren't: they are accidental.

But you can't specifically choose a behavior on purpose and then claim that it was an accident.

The link was to Bill's post > > > here < < < .

I think that occasionally in these comments a critical reason that salpingectomy (with included fetus) is allowed has been lost sight of. It's necessary that the fallopian tube have a medical reason for the removal of the tube -- i.e. it has to be a medical fact that the fallopian tube is somehow functioning in a life-threatening way. Without such a condition, salpingectomy would not be permitted.
For example, if it were the case that the fallopian tube was always capable of expanding as the fetus grew, and would never dangerously rupture, but that (hypothetically) precisely because the fetus was in the fallopian tube, somehow toxins would be released by the fetus that would kill both mother and child, there would be no medical reason for a salpingectomy (since the tube itself was not a problem), and it would not be permissible.
Once there is a sufficiently serious medical reason for removal of the tube, it can then become the direct intention of the operation, though the death of the fetus is foreseen.
The US Bishops have this in their Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services: "Operations, treatments, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

So for sufficiently serious reasons, selling peanuts, driving a car, inoculating children, salpingectomies, and shooting the wings off planes can all be permitted, even though the involuntary death of innocents can be foreseen.

Zippy said: Fine. You've concluded that salpingectomy is intrinsically immoral. As I've said many times in many forums, I respect that conclusion. Do you go on to say that blowing up the airliner is licit?

I've already responded to this a little bit, but it kept bugging me, and I wasn't able to put my finger on it until now.

It seems that you're still open on the licitness of -ectomy. If so, why? Why do you think -ectomy is possibly licit, but that it's incoherent to think of shooting down the plane as not "killing the innocent"?

I think it's the strength of the objection that mystifies me: I'm used to being told that I'm wrong -- you're no worse than my brothers, believe me -- but to be told that my comment makes all discussion meaningless means that we've gone from "ambiguous" to "beyond the pale" in a fraction of a suffix, over two types of actions that are similar enough for people to argue over whether they're morally equivalent.

If you've had so many opportunities on so many forums to respect the notion that salpingectomy is murder, and you feel the way you do about what it means for moral objects to be of the species of "murder of innocents", what keeps you from agreeing that it's murder?

I don't currently believe that it is always illicit to commit an act that entails the death of an innocent.

Then you are on good ground. And Zippy (just to reinforce his response) has never claimed that it does. He wants "always illicit" to apply to acts that take the innocent as the target, and contrary to some commenters' contentions, I think that Zippy has been very fastidious about maintaining the distinction. I know you think the bomb is your target, but it's really the plane and everything and everyone in it. You can't take one without the others.

SP marvels that salpingectomy would be "performed in Catholic hospitals in full knowledge of the overseeing bishops" without implicit approval from Rome, while knowing, I presume, that dehydration of PVS patients was also taking place in Catholic hospitals in spite of Rome's explicit disapproval. As Anscombe pointed out, permission deduced "from the silence of the Holy See has itself been condemned by the Holy See." And this leaves aside the licitness of salpingectomy; it may in fact be. But the reason won't be that Rome was silent.

However, Zippy, in this parallel between the plane and the tube, I can't leave it aside anymore. The only way I can see that Lydia might be wrong is in the event that we are able to judge the tubal baby's death an accident, in a way that we cannot with the deaths of those civilians on the plane. If we shoot down the plane, the passengers die. If we remove the tube, the baby dies. All seems parallel thus far. But could what we actually know for certain distinguish the two cases? In the scenarios offered, e.g. by Auster and others, there remains much that is hypothetical in addition to the scenario itself. For example, there is a nuclear bomb on the plane. So we are told. How do we know? The Flight 93 passengers finally figured out that the bomb one of the terrorists was wearing was a phony. We also don't really know what the outcome of letting the plane finish its flight will be. It might crash into the White House or...a field in Pennsylvania. Further, I don't find the alternatives suggested by you and others utterly implausible (disabling an engine). My own suggestion re 93 was that the fighter pilot might shoot through the cockpit window in an attempt to kill the terrorists and aid the passengers in their attempt to gain control of the plane. However low the probability of success for any of these, it cannot be said that a prudential consideration of them ought to be completely out of the question, or that any of them is exactly the same kind of action as simply blowing up the plane, the results of which we are absolutely certain, and the consequences of which we absolutely intended even if the act is unsuccessful.

But in the ectopic pregnancy which does not resolve itself (I have heard that some do), or in which the baby does not first perish in the tube, after which he is removed without harm to the mother, the uncertainties that plague the airplane scenarios are denied us here. Let us take the case that the baby is still alive, that the tube has ruptured and hemorrhage has begun, one that will, if left untreated, kill the mother. The surgical option (I presume) is to remove that section of the tube containing the baby in order to treat the hemorrhage. To many, this sounds like blowing up the plane. But, unlike the passengers, we know for a certainty that the baby will die, may in fact be in the process of dying. In taking this action are we weighing the life of the baby against that of the mother, or preferring one over the other? I say (actually, I am merely proposing) that the answer is no because, again, unlike the passengers, the rupture initiates the death of the baby and the outcome can be no other. An aberration of the mother's biology has put her under attack (her specifically, not people in general, as with the plane), in which the baby is an innocent but unwilling participant, and removal of the diseased section of the tube is not a direct attack upon the child in the same way as some of our scenarists had a soldier shooting through a child to kill the terrorist, but is rather a legitimate act of self-defense. For it to be legitimate at all, however, it seems we would have to wait for the crisis to occur (that thing which initiates the baby's dying) rather than taking pre-emptive action early on simply because we know what the likely outcome will be.

So, what say you? And Lydia, too, of course. I take pride in getting smacked down by her.

It seems that you're still open on the licitness of -ectomy. If so, why?

The argument that Kaczor makes (IIRC) is that as a simple physical matter, tearing apart a person's body is a direct attack on the person in a way that moving her intact from one place to another is not. It may not be a convincing argument, but it isn't an argument that there is nothing to at all on the physical level of the chosen act.

I am dubious, but it isn't a point utterly without merit. One way to think about is that when the chosen act is complete, would it be possible at least in principle for the person to survive?

Lydia has done a good job throwing ice cold water all over that. But I'm still open to counter arguments consistent with a deontological morality of the object.

(Usually I get into trouble for not being open enough to counterarguments as my interlocutors see it, but there you go).

The acts are different enough. Salpingectomy - simply as a behavior - respects the integrity of the tiny person enough to sacrifice part of the mother's fertility just in order to acknowledge in the act itself the personhood and bodily integrity of the child. Salpingotomy just crushes the child as if she were nothing, much as blowing up the plane in the act itself treats the passengers as if they are nothing. Altering the act itself in a way which respects the bodily integrity of the innocent persons may not be enough to make the act licit, but it is enough to make the act different, internally to itself, in what might be a morally significant way.

One way of thinking about the morality in the object is to ask if there is a lie built into the chosen behavior. A chosen behavior which intrinsically treats a person as not-a-person has a lie built into it. That may or may not be helpful here, but I'll throw it out there as a heuristic which can be sometimes illuminating.

Maybe I missed something, but I thought Lydia said that we can cut open the tube and remove the baby? Or was that just a hypothetical?

Maybe I missed something, but I thought Lydia said that we can cut open the tube and remove the baby? Or was that just a hypothetical?

She'll have to answer that one. Nota bene, if we don't have the physical facts right we won't be able to even guess properly at the right thing to do. My understanding of -ectomy/-otomy comes from Kaczor and is not at the level of medical knowledge. (One clear sign that in these life-and-death cases the acting subject is not acting morally is when he treats the specific physical facts as irrelevant).

Zippy thanks for the link to the thread, it was the same one I culled the example from. A yes would have been sufficient.

I gather that the accidental death of civilians in wartime is permissible; and by accidental I think you mean, unforeseeable and unintentional.

Clearly then salpingectomy is morally out of the window, since the death of the fetus is foreseen even though it is unintended. Your reasoning is consistent; though in opposition to the tradition of the Church.

However by your reasoning; if it is to be consistent, I don't see then how you could justify any form of warfare in which there is foreseeable death to civilians, since by your definition if it is foreseen it must have been intended. Now fighting in urban areas is foreseeably going to cause civilian deaths, except in exceptional circumstances. Therefore warfare in urban areas is a form of behavior which is intrinsically evil by your definition and therefore out, except in exceptional circumstances.

Suppose we have a room from which a group of terrorists are shoot at us. In that room are a group of civilians some of whom have managed to escape, we know that some are left in the room however we lob a grenade in, killing the terrorists and some of the civilians. We can't predict which civilian we are going to kill but we know we will probably kill some unintentionally.

A city is a bit like that room and by your definition, the act is wicked. Most of the fighting against the Germans in WWII, must be by your thinking--as I see it-- wicked.

Now before you start accusing me of being an apologist for evil, I would like you to reconsider that "intellectual hole" you and KW were talking about previously, for I really think this is where the problem lays. Could I get an answer to these three questions, which I keep harping on:

1) How do you determine the moral object of an act which has a double effect? Heres the example that wasn't answered:

Scenario 1: A person deliberately jumps on a live hand grenade to save his friends: Intent of act is to save friends.

Scenario 2: A person deliberately jumps on a live hand grenade to kill himself but as side product saves his friends: Intent of action is to kill himself.

Same behavior in both instances. What is your moral evaluation of both events, given that objectively the behavior is that same?

2)How do you square up your interpretation of double effect with Father Hardon's, who was more of an authority of Catholic teaching than either you or I?

3)Could it be conceivably possible that your understanding of Veritatis Splendor could be flawed?

I'm not hammering you for my benefit, but for yours.

However by your reasoning; if it is to be consistent, I don't see then how you could justify any form of warfare in which there is foreseeable death to civilians,...

A lot of people have said that to me in a lot of different discussions, despite the fact that I've addressed and rejected it every time. "Forseeable death to civilians" happens on the highways too, and yet it doesn't render every act of driving illicit. The problem is at least partly in treating "war" as a specific act. War isn't an act. A specific act in a war which intrinsically targets civilians in the act itself, independent of intentions and circumstances, would be illicit.

I would like you to reconsider that "intellectual hole" you and KW were talking about previously, for I really think this is where the problem lays...

At some point I'll have something to say about self-sacrifice and suicide, but since the content of an act of suicide or self-sacrifice is the self it is necessarily in a different category from acts of violence against others. It just isn't relevant to the present discussion, at all. It is as if in a discussion about airplanes someone insisted that I had to give an account of ant farms.

Bill, good post, and I'm mulling.

And Zippy (just to reinforce his response) has never claimed that it does.

I understand that. The reinforcement doesn't hurt, of course.

I know you think the bomb is your target, but it's really the plane and everything and everyone in it. You can't take one without the others.

I can't take the fallopian tube without taking the child, either. Your discussion about when you take the tube has some merit, but I'm bothered a bit by the role certainty plays in your discussion. It's as though odds make a difference; but they shouldn't, if the act is intrinsically evil.

As Anscombe pointed out, permission deduced "from the silence of the Holy See has itself been condemned by the Holy See." And this leaves aside the licitness of salpingectomy; it may in fact be. But the reason won't be that Rome was silent.

This is all good stuff, and can't be said often enough.

An aberration of the mother's biology has put her under attack (her specifically, not people in general, as with the plane),

I don't think "people in general" are under attack with the plane: specific people are, and although the terrorist may miss, the attack is against specific people.

I still think (though we haven't discussed it for several dozen posts) that we're missing any notion of the transcendent entities involved. We have a city or a nation under attack by another people. Do we only ever consider everyone as singularities? Is a city merely an aggregate of individuals? Is a nation, a race, a people? If not, why don't we talk about them as larger entities?

Could it be conceivably possible that your understanding of Veritatis Splendor could be flawed?

It is conceivably possible that I am a brain in a vat, and this entire experience is just Lydia in her laboratory toying with me.

Do I have any significant doubts? About particulars here and there where I have expressed them, e.g. on where salpingectomy comes out in all of this. Sure. About whether just blowing up the airliner might be licit? Maybe a little. I'm open to counter arguments, though I haven't heard one that would inspire any doubt. About whether Hiroshima was immoral? Not even a slight one.

Eclipse of the moon on Tuesday.

You don't have a problem with me on Hiroshima, though for different reasons.

.....since the content of an act of suicide or self-sacrifice is the self it is necessarily in a different category from acts of violence against others. It just isn't relevant to the present discussion....

I disagree; it's vitally important, the understanding of the principle of double effect is at stake. The particulars of Hiroshima or of Flight 93 are of marginal relevance to this discussion, the moral reasoning that leads to their justification or condemnation is. More importantly the stakes are higher than this, If Christ deliberately and knowingly took a course of action in which he foresaw his own death, even though he did not intend it, he must by your reasoning--and interpretation of Veritatis Splendor--have committed suicide. Other commentators have raised the same issue when looking at your thinking. My words are hard, but the stakes are high. It changes the whole conception of Christianity and furthermore it is being argued as the official teaching of the Catholic Church

Furthermore, this is not a dig at you but rather a dig at your reasoning, for I do believe that you are a person of goodwill, but I do believe an analysis of the suicide/self sacrifice scenario is warranted and is of central pertinence to these threads.

Once again, I think your reading of Veritatis Splendor is in error.

Oh and to avoid argument; one can kill oneself directly--by shooting oneself in the head--and indirectly by failing to take action to save ones life: such as not stepping away from an oncoming train.

I still think (though we haven't discussed it for several dozen posts) that we're missing any notion of the transcendent entities involved.

It isn't that we are missing it, it is that it simply doesn't apply. For example, just wars cannot be prosecuted by individuals but only by a community, which is a transcendent entity. Just executions cannot be performed by individuals, but only by communities. There is a whole moral theology of commutative and distributive justice which parallels (though not as a perfect correspondence) individual morality. For example, under individual morality it can be licit to have a foot removed if it becomes gangrenous and attacks the rest of the body; it is illicit to remove one's own healthy foot. Under community justice it can be licit to execute criminals who are attacking the common good, but it is not licit to kill a citizen for some arbitrary or utilitarian reason.

But an appeal to the justice of transcendent entities cannot make an intrinsically immoral act into a licit act. No person, whether acting on his own behalf or acting as the competent authority of a community, is licensed to commit an intrinsically evil act, ever. This is what "absolute morality" means.

Moral relativism isn't the same thing as no morality or moral anarchy per se: it is the rejection of absolute morality, making all moral questions (and not just some of them) prudential questions of situational ethics.

I disagree; it's vitally important, ...

OK. I think it isn't, and nobody has expressed a reason why I should think otherwise, as far as I can tell.

Once again, I think your reading of Veritatis Splendor is in error.

OK. I think it isn't. Such is life.

And this by the way:

If Christ deliberately and knowingly took a course of action in which he foresaw his own death, even though he did not intend it, he must by your reasoning--and interpretation of Veritatis Splendor--have committed suicide.

... is just nonsense on stilts. I've never claimed anything ever which leads to that conclusion. If someone thinks I have, they have completely misunderstood. That may be because of the obscurity of my writing or the obscurity of their reading. But either way, it is hogwash.

I can't take the fallopian tube without taking the child, either.

I acknowledged this, the difference being that in the tube case (as I've constructed it) the child is dying, and in the airplane the passengers aren't (until you blow them up).

Your discussion about *when* you take the tube has some merit, but I'm bothered a bit by the role certainty plays in your discussion. It's as though odds make a difference; but they shouldn't, if the act is intrinsically evil.

That the act is intrinsically evil is the thing yet to be discovered in the tubal case. I'm not balancing the odds in both cases; I'm balancing certainty in one against the odds in the other.

I don't think "people in general" are under attack with the plane

Yes they are. If you knew who the targets were, you could evacuate them ahead of time, or give a warning, time permitting. You can't do this with the mother. She and we know that if there is to be a target, she will be it and no one else. I'm less certain about the specifics of this as an example, but again, I'm balancing certainty against its absence. I think it's less a matter of whom the terrorists intend to attack, and more of what we know about it as a guide to our actions.

we're missing any notion of the transcendent entities involved

My advice (for what it's worth, of course) is to rid yourself of this concept as an aid to thought. As soon as some transcendant entity becomes paramount, the individuals that make it up get abstracted into unimportance.

I'm hoping Zippy will also respond, as the latter part of my long comment was addressed to him. And Lydia.

Zippy, I can't help it if you can't see the inconsistency in your thinking. I wish you all the best.

Bill: I'm ruminating. It will probably have to wait for the morrow.

SP: in what possible conceivable sense could the crucifixion be the deontological object of Christ's act? Did he pound in the nails himself?

I'll remind you again of my take on some things that we know with certainty to not be the deontological object of a given act.

in what possible conceivable sense could the crucifixion be the deontological object of Christ's act? Did he pound in the nails himself?

That's an interesting one coming from you Zippy: I'll throw one back at you;

What was the deontological object of Cheney's act?

If one deliberately walks into the path of lethal danger, one can't say that they did not foresee injury. By your line of thinking--not mine--foreseen death is intended death. Christ certainly foresaw that by preaching in Jerusalem he was going to get Killed. That's why the Devil tempted him with an option of self preservation. He had the choice to avoid death, however he freely choose to act in a way that was going to cause his death.

Christ didn't drive the nails in himself but neither does our friend who takes the shrapnel form the exploding hand grenade. Both know however that they are going to get killed. Now if causing ones own death is always and everywhere evil--independent of mode of actuation--it follows by your line of reasoning that deliberately stepping into the path of murderous Pharisee's has the same moral quality as jumping on a live hand grenade.

What was the deontological object of Cheney's act?

The giving of the order. The commander's act of issuing a command isn't intrinsically evil, but if he commands a subordinate to do something intrinsically evil with the expectation that the subordinate will comply, then the commander is guilty of formal cooperation with evil (which is no less evil than actually performing an intrinsically evil act; in fact it is probably worse for reasons discussed in the comments of the post I linked).

By your line of thinking--not mine--foreseen death is intended death.

You keep repeating that falsehood over and over and over again. Do you think repeating it enough times will make it true?

You keep repeating that falsehood over and over and over again. Do you think repeating it enough times will make it true?

Here's a couple of comments from yourself from the The Right Call:

"I may wish that I could engage in a different behavior which does not injure or kill the wall of children. But wishful thinking is not the same thing as intent. I can't claim that I don't intend something that I choose as a direct and specific behavior. If I am choosing it directly in my deliberate and specific behavior then I intend it, whether I wish that some counterfactual obtained or not. Specific behaviors are always directly chosen; what is directly chosen is always intended."

and

You can't fire a missile at a bunch of innocent people and kill them without intending to kill them. To claim that one doesn't intend to kill them or that one isn't choosing to kill them is obvious nonsense.

Your words, not mine.

Sorry, Just so that I'm not accused of misquoting you, the quote below had the section in brackets deleted. I don't think it changes the meaning of the edited first quote.

I may wish that I could engage in a different behavior which does not injure or kill the wall of children. But wishful thinking is not the same thing as intent. I can't claim that I don't intend something that I choose as a direct and specific behavior. If I am choosing it directly in my deliberate and specific behavior then I intend it, whether I wish that some counterfactual obtained or not. [If I wish that I could fly to Tokyo by flapping my arms and without boarding an airliner then when I step out of the plane at Narita I cannot claim that I didn't intend the getting on an airliner part.] Specific behaviors are always directly chosen; what is directly chosen is always intended.

And? That quote doesn't make what you said into not a falsehood.

Bill: Having slept on it, I want to focus on three points from your post.

First, I agree that a great deal of the airliner scenario is hypothetical, and that this is certainly less the case with the ectopic pregnancy, as a general point. And focusing in on what we know is critical.

Second, I don't think the child being unwittingly involved in an attack makes any difference. The "innocent" are those who are not choosing attacking behaviors. There is simply no conceivable way in which the child is choosing an attacking behavior. N.B. a "voluntary human shield" is engaged in an attacking behavior as far as I can tell, placing herself in harms way to try to deliberately take advantage of the fact that we are the good guys in order to give the bad guys an advantage. But involuntary human shields - e.g. the passengers on the plane - are innocent in the required sense, and I just can't see how any argument can take the ectopic child out of that category.

Third, the notion of waiting until the child actually starts physically dying throws in an interesting wrinkle. I am not sure it is dispositive, but it is interesting and it highlights again the distinctness-as-act of the -ectomy from the -otomy. If a patient is actually in the process of physically dying (unlike the passengers on the plane) then it is wrong to say that witholding extraordinary care is killing the patient. (Strictly speaking it is possible that witholding ordinary care is not killing the patient, if we are literally incapable of providing it. Blocking the giving of ordinary care by others who are willing and able in order to make the patient die, however, is always murder in its intent). IOW, for example, turning off a respirator is not (necessarily) an act of murder, specifically when the patient is physically dying and there isn't anything we can do to stop it. I think this is because each "moment" on the respirator is a positive act on the part of caregivers, and while failing to perform a positive act can be evil it always depends on circumstances. It seems to me that if you have one respirator, a patient you can save with the respirator, and a patient you can't; if that is the case then it is a matter of prudence to turn off the respirator (stop acting to save the dying patient you cannot save) and transfer it to the patient you can save. Where this starts to appear dubious as an analog to salpingectomy is when we realize that the mother isn't really acting to sustain the baby's life; the baby's life is sustained by natural causes. But still, the notion of waiting until the baby actually starts to physically die (something which is never the case for the airline passengers until the actual crash) does push salpingectomy as an act still further from salpingotomy. (Is the baby even still getting oxygen from the mother once a hemmorage occurs?)

Like you I'm interested in what Lydia thinks.

Jake, to clarify: Yes, it was just in a hypothetical situation that I said removal of a living embryo from the tube would be licit--that is, if we found a way to move it somewhere else from the tube with some chance of survival.

Bill, as a matter of physical fact, I have hoped (and have gotten a weak medical opinion) that when the fallopian tube is "blowing" the child really is already dead--literally, not just figuratively. This could of course be wrong. It could also be impossible to tell if the embryo had not developed far enough to have a beating heart. If we're talking about something like 3 weeks' gestation, there will not be a four-chamber heart yet in any event, so the death of the embryo would be impossible to determine visually by, say, an ultrasound. Of course, the child dies at some point in the course of the tube's rupturing, if not at the outset. I would be inclined to say that if the tube has ruptured and there is already significant hemmorrhage, it's probably moral and responsible to conclude that the embryo is actually dead (if there's no other way to tell) and to treat the hemmorrhage by either form of surgery. Again, I'm open to correction on this physical conclusion.

But no doctor who deemed himself acting responsibly w.r.t. the mother would deliberately wait to treat until the tube was rupturing. You'd have a terrible time getting him to agree to it if he'd discovered the tubal pregnancy earlier. Usually we're told that "the mother will certainly die" if the tube ruptures, which is why a doctor will always push for treatment as soon as the tubal pregnancy is discovered. This, in fact, is not true at the level of confidence with which it is stated, though she might die and will be at a serious risk.

If you actually knew that the child was still alive after the tube's rupture, I think you should wait a bit to treat the hemmorrhage directly by surgery. Even if someone is dying, you can't take direct action against him. I don't think we'd have to wait long, but the mother might die in the meanwhile. I think this precise situation is probably moot, though, because I just doubt you could get that much minute-to-minute information about the child's state at the time of the crisis anyway. I'm pretty sure you'd have to go with your best information on the state of the embryo from more general considerations.

I don't know if this all makes me seem more reasonable or less reasonable than people thought. What it means in upshot is that I _think_ the embryo is most likely dead when the mother is severely hemmorrhaging, though I suspect there is no direct way to tell at that time, and would not object morally to full-scale surgical treatment. On the other hand, this is just because I think the embryo is probably dead when we have a full-fledged crisis on our hands. I am intransigent on the normal medical practice, which is to treat as soon as the tubal pregnancy is discovered. Matters would be different there, of course, if there were some way to convince me in that case that the embryo was dead already, too. For example, if no growth or development were taking place in a very early embryo, as determined by repeated ultrasounds, that would be relevant information to whether it was alive. Heartbeat is the best way to tell, but we might not have a heartbeat yet anyway.

SP, the business about the death of Jesus seems to me addressed by the point both Zippy and I have made about other people's choices that intervene after your intrinsically innocent actions.

I am trying to understand what is being meant by “moral relativism”. I understood moral relativism to be either that morality is relative to different cultures or that morality is relative to individual beliefs. In short, I understood moral relativism to be moral subjectivism. It is true that utilitarianism is relative to something, but it not entirely subjective. In any given situation there is a right and wrong action for all people. A utilitarian would believe that it is always right to create the greatest good for the greatest number. Given situation X it would hold that action Y is absolutely true for all people placed in the identical situation. It also seems that arguing that there are intrinsically evil acts is relative to something as well. An intrinsically evil act depends on the specific chosen behavior. I am using “relative” far too loosely here?

There is simply no conceivable way in which the child is choosing an attacking behavior.

This is absolutely true, and perhaps I phrased it poorly. I meant that the woman was being attacked by a biological vagary in which the child is a victim of circumstance. So maybe I should remove the notion of self-defense as justifying any effort to save the mother and just stick with the ethics of appropriate treatment. (I suppose it is possible that an innocent person could attack another by accident - say, an insane person comes at you with a knife thinking you're the devil, such that your attempt to defend yourself results in his death, but I don't think that applies here.)

I like your respirator analogy because it returns me to a tactic I tried at your place - the end-of-life scenario. Lydia didn't like it and I surrendered it. The problem was that I wanted to apply it before we knew the baby was dead or dying, i.e., on the assumption that he was as good as dead (as some of our commenters wanted to do with the passengers). And I still surrender that version of it. But once we know that the crisis is upon us, that the baby is dying, this seems to me parallel to a terminal condition in which even ordinary care might be suspended if it merely prolongs the dying process. Lydia says that "Even if someone is dying, you can't take direct action against him." So the question is whether removing the section of the tube containing the baby is taking "direct action against him." In other words, is it an act of killing, or a licit suspension of care? Are we accelerating the baby's dying, or simply co-operating with the inevitable? I incline to the latter. But before we know the baby is either dead or dying, it seems any action would constitute an attack on him. That's the only conclusion I can come to (so far) without weighing one life against the other, and my scale doesn't have a measure for those values.

She also says, "I am intransigent on the normal medical practice, which is to treat as soon as the tubal pregnancy is discovered." I think all three of us are; it may still get us branded as fanatics, though we may escape the charge of liberalism.

Re suicide and self-sacrifice, I found this in, of all places, the Vatican's Declaration on Euthanasia:

"Intentionally causing one's own death, or suicide, is therefore equally as wrong as murder...suicide is also often a refusal of love for self, the denial of the natural instinct to live, a flight from the duties of justice and charity owed to one's neighbor, to various communities or to the whole of society..."

Somehow that doesn't seem to describe Jesus' actions very well for me. But maybe this does:

"However, one must clearly distinguish suicide from that sacrifice of one's life whereby for a higher cause, such as God's glory, the salvation of souls or the service of one's brethren, a person offers his or her own life or puts it in danger."

"She also says, 'I am intransigent on the normal medical practice, which is to treat as soon as the tubal pregnancy is discovered.' I think all three of us are; it may still get us branded as fanatics, though we may escape the charge of liberalism."

Well, I don't know, are we all? My understanding had always been (from summaries and reports) that when Catholic moral theorists defend salpingectomy, they are _not_ insisting that one wait until the woman is hemorrhaging but are defending it as a treatment of the condition, period, on the grounds that it doesn't involve an attack directly on the child's bodily integrity.

And I'd be willing to bet that when Catholic doctors and hospitals carry out the procedure, they don't wait until the woman is bleeding and the tube is blowing if they find out sooner, though sometimes you don't find out until then in the first place. But they'd regard waiting like that when you know earlier as malpractice.

The two defenses--that it's not a direct attack on the child's bodily integrity and that the child is "in the dying process"--are really quite different in nature.

I suspect that epistemically, and given the way these things seem to happen, the latter argument isn't terribly relevant, because one would not be in a position to know that the embryo was dying-but-not-dead. I think if you _did_ know that, it would be wrong to cut a living embryo out of his mother's body yourself, in a section of tube or not. But it's not like the embryo is in front of you and you can check his vital signs. Especially absent a detectible heartbeat, you're making an educated guess.

I'm willing to talk about probabilities. This may be a difference between me and Zippy, but if so, I don't think it's a very great one. One could have probabilistic knowledge that all the passengers on Flight 93 were already dead. Suppose somebody calls up on his cell phone and says, "The terrorists killed everyone else. I'm the only one left. I...." sound of struggle, choking, and a thud. Line goes dead. At this point, we are in a position to conclude responsibly that all the innocents are dead and that we can take out the airliner with a sidewinder without killing innocents. It's a probabilistic conclusion, but I think justified.

I understood moral relativism to be either that morality is relative to different cultures or that morality is relative to individual beliefs. In short, I understood moral relativism to be moral subjectivism.

I suppose I understand it more generally to be the denial that there exist absolute universal moral norms which bind every person in every circumstance: absolute norms which no person may violate. The phrase "situational ethics" doesn't (necessarily) imply subjectivism, it seems to me, but rather the notion that what is and is not moral as a choice of behavior always depends on the situation: that in general a behavior which is immoral in one situation may be morally licit in some (perhaps radically) different situation. I understand that to be tantamount to a denial of absolute morality, that is, a denial of the existence of unqualified universal moral norms which we ought never violate. I understand situational ethics, proportionalism, and consequentialism to all be cognates referring to species of moral relativism if not exact synonyms.

Moral absolutists don't deny that the morality of a great many kinds of behavior depends on the situation. We merely maintain that there exist certain behaviors which in themselves are never morally licit. The denial of this is moral relativism.

N.b., in these recent discussions it cannot be said that my interlocutors (to the extent a given interlocutor adopts a coherent position at all) deny moral absolutes per se, but rather some of them deny that the prohibition against killing the innocent is one of them. But there seems to be ongoing confusion on the matter. At VFR there seems to be an impression that I think the prohibition against killing the innocent is the only absolute moral norm ("single transcendent duty") which no person should ever violate. That isn't the case. The absolute prohibitions of adultery and rape (for example) are others, and there many are more besides.

I'm sorry SP, but how does what you claim Zippy said "foreseen death is intended death" equal what Zippy actually said "what is directly chosen is always intended"?

I am missing the connection. Nowhere have I seen Zippy state that forseeability = intention, nor have I seen him say foreseeability = direct choice.

I have seen him say direct choice = intention. He has repeatedly said that foreseeability does not equal intention (eg, it is foreseeable that driving on the freeway will result in car wrecks which is why you put on the seatbelt, but that does not mean you intend to get into a car wreck by driving or putting on your seatbelt).

Foreseeablity may be a necessary, but alone not a sufficient condition for intention - if something is not forseeable, it cannot be intended. But just because it is foreseeable, does not mean it is intended.

And I'd be willing to bet that when Catholic doctors and hospitals carry out the procedure, they don't wait until the woman is bleeding and the tube is blowing if they find out sooner, though sometimes you don't find out until then in the first place. But they'd regard waiting like that when you know earlier as malpractice.

I'd bet the same, but practice doesn't always reflect good doctrine. The proportionalists and consequentialists have been a major force in the world as the technology has developed, and rejecting their heresies took an unprecedented papal encyclical addressing the very foundations of moral theology, so it wouldn't surprise me in the least if praxis is still confused. It takes centuries for these things to work themselves out, usually.

At this point, we are in a position to conclude responsibly that all the innocents are dead and that we can take out the airliner with a sidewinder without killing innocents. It's a probabilistic conclusion, but I think justified.

I probably (hah) wouldn't call that a probabilistic conclusion. It is our best guess at what is true. If every best guess at what is true is "probabilistic" then every empirical conclusion we reach is probabilistic and there isn't any sense distinguishing probabilistic from non-probabilistic conclusions.

It is an uncertain conclusion. What we do in the face of uncertainty is in general a matter of prudence. If I have solid reasons to believe (and not just wishful thinking or wild guesses) that the passengers are all dead, I have no reason not to blow the plane out of the sky.

Yes, that was all I meant. I use "probabilistic" very strictly to distinguish from "certain." Though sometimes I get a little loose and permit myself to speak of being "morally certain." (We all have our weaknesses.)

As my information goes right now, it looks to me like the best guess at what is true when a fallopian tube has ruptured and is bleeding is that by that time any previously living embryo in the tube is dead. This is a comforting thought in its own way, allowing treatment morally to commence at the most critical moment, so perhaps I'm overestimating the force of the evidence I have on the point. It's fairly thin, consisting of theoretical considerations and the answer to one question to one doctor.

"However, one must clearly distinguish suicide from that sacrifice of one's life whereby for a higher cause, such as God's glory, the salvation of souls or the service of one's brethren, a person offers his or her own life or puts it in danger."

And there's the rub Bill, How to distinguish when the observed behavior is the the same?

Not to imply that self-sacrifice is in any way relevent to the foregoing discussion of airliners, ectopics, and nukes; it isn't. But recall that the object is the chosen behavior. It is not the behavior observed by a third party, but rather the behavior chosen by the acting subject himself. And whatever else may be true, the self is not an other.

Lydia,
When I said the 3 of us I meant the three of us, not physicians in Catholic hospitals. I have no idea what they do, but suspect the worst. Zippy answered a couple of your points for me. But I don't think you answered my main one, which was that once some symptom (like hemorrhage) indicates that the resolution is upon us, then the question is whether removing the section of the tube containing the baby is taking "direct action against him." In other words, is it an act of killing, or a licit suspension of care? Are we accelerating the baby's dying, or simply co-operating with the inevitable?

I am instinctively uncomfortable with probabilities. People tend to get sloppy with them if they want things to turn out in a particular way. As you say, that the baby is probably dead is "a comforting thought", but it sounds to me as if you're using that probability to get to the same result as I am proposing.


SP, I hope Zippy anwered your question, because I had no idea what it was asking.

SP, I hope Zippy anwered your question, because I had no idea what it was asking.

This is the scenario I put to Zippy;

Scenario 1: A person deliberately jumps on a live hand grenade to save his friends: Intent of act is to save friends.

Scenario 2: A person deliberately jumps on a live hand grenade to kill himself but as side product saves his friends: Intent of action is to kill himself.

The same deliberately chosen behavior is seen in both instances, so how do we determine the moral character of the act?

I'm sorry SP, but how does what you claim Zippy said "foreseen death is intended death" equal what Zippy actually said "what is directly chosen is always intended"?

Foreseeablity may be a necessary, but alone not a sufficient condition for intention - if something is not forseeable, it cannot be intended. But just because it is foreseeable, does not mean it is intended

So did Cheney intend the passengers deaths if he foresaw them?

So did Cheney intend the passengers deaths if he foresaw them?

Not simply through foreseeing their deaths as a sufficient condition in itself, but through formal cooperation with an intrinsically evil act of killing them. Indeed, one need not foresee their deaths as a certainty at all. If Billy says to his girlfriend "if you are pregnant I want you to get an abortion" he has asserted his intent, his formal cooperation with an intrinsically evil act, even if the act itself never takes place. I warned of the moral danger in this kind of formal cooperation in the entertainment of hypotheticals some time ago.

Well, I had thought that Zippy was contemplating an argument from Finnis (is that right?) that salpingectomy is licit because it doesn't involve attacking the child's bodily integrity directly. I thought that was meant to apply tout court. In fact, _if_ it's a sufficient argument, I can't see that it requires waiting until the tube is rupturing. Zippy, if you accepted Finnis's (?) argument on that point, would you take it to require not simply that one do a salpingectomy rather than a salpingotomy but also that one wait to treat at all until the tube had ruptured? Does the guy who proposed it seem to be requiring that?

Bill, I think that to answer your question I have to go back to my analogies, where it's much easier actually to be in the situation of knowing the person is still alive. So suppose the guy in the bag in the plane is bleeding to death. Does this make it okay to throw him out of the plane? It doesn't seem to me that it does. Similarly for the guy in the room. If he's bleeding to death, is it okay to (say) suction all the oxygen out of the room? Is it okay to cut the atronaut's air line if he's got a fatal wound but isn't yet dead? And so forth. I think that these would be taking action against the person, so I have to say the same if you saw, say, a heartbeat on the embryo when the tube had already ruptured.

Certainly people can do screwy things with probabilities, but I see no way around it, especially in a case where you can't get very direct information about the person in question. If I were ever (God forbid) in the situation with a tubal pregnancy, which has never happened, and if I had cooperative medical personnel (which almost certainly I wouldn't), I'd ask for as detailed ultrasounds as possible to try to see what was up. If the embryo had developed far enough to have a heartbeat, then it seems to me the right thing to do is to continue monitoring it by repeated ultrasounds. If the heartbeat stops, you can operate. As long as you have a heartbeat, you can't (IMO).

If the embryo had not developed far enough to have a heartbeat in the first place, then we have to ask whether this is just because it's at a very early stage of development or whether it is an "anembryonic pregnancy" where in fact there is never going to be a visible embryo. In that case, too, if it can be determined, we can consider that if there was a child conceived, it has died and we can operate.

If it's just an early stage of pregnancy and has no heartbeat for that reason, we have to realize that even _defining_ physical death is a strange and tricky matter. A fully developed human being can be physically dead in all of the most stringent senses while still having some living cells. So how do we define physical death for an embryo that does not have differentiated organs? It seems plausible that its normal metabolism will be seriously interrupted when its blood supply is damaged when the tube ruptures. So I think that it's probably licit to conclude that when the tube starts rupturing, an embryo that early has stopped metabolizing as a living physical entity, even if not every individual cell has died, and that it is therefore dead.

It is Kaczor's argument. I don't remember if he meant it to apply tout court, and I don't recall him making a confident pronouncement to that effect. His book uses it as an example to illustrate the points he is making, much as I am doing here, about the kind of reasoning one must go through: the kind of reasoning that is necessary in order to even be in a position to render an opinion on whether (e.g.) shooting down the airliner is morally licit, and what specific kinds-of-shooting-down (if any) are licit.

And rather than agreeing with it as a substantive conclusion, I have been sitting on a fence somewhere between you and he. (I've never been perfectly comfortable with it, and our discussions many months ago pushed its plausibility further away for me). On the substantive matter I am pretty convinced at this point that as the actual crisis begins removing the tube is almost certainly licit, since as a prudential matter we are pretty sure the child is dead at that point. (Physical facts to the contrary would contravene that judgement).

But then, I use it here for a particular polemical or educational purpose. Catholic ethicists are very clear that salpingotomy is morally illicit abortion, as a direct act killing the child. If salpingotomy is morally illicit - and there is virtual unanimity that it is - then one is hard-pressed to argue that blowing up the airliner is licit simpliciter. The question of what may be done is more difficult to resolve, but what may not shouldn't be as controversial, at least among Catholic ethicists.

The problem is that most people simply assume as a foregone conclusion that the airliner may be licitly blown up by any effective means under double-effect. What the -ectomy/-otomy analogue shows is that that is dead wrong, utterly unsupportable by any Catholic ethicist. We may argue until Kingdom come over what specific means are licit. But to say that destroying the airliner -qua- destroying is simply licit under double effect using whatever means are required is absolutely, conclusively, utterly false. If it were true then condemnation of certain treatments of ectopic pregnancy could not hinge on the specific behavior (e.g. -ectomy/-otomy) we are choosing.

But the seedy underbelly of my polemic is to demonstrate (contra well-known Catholic apologists and what appears to be nearly universal de-facto consequentialist opinion to the contrary among the public) that the specific chosen behavior as a deontological object cannot be ignored or dismissed through some perfunctory and self-serving verbal description of the act, at which point we get to start making Anscombe's little speeches about "intent" to ourselves.

Well, I'm probably missing something because I don't get the analogies. The guys in those scenarios are not dying from something that is also killing someone else. Throwing the guy out of the plane really is an attack upon his bodily integrity in a way that salpingectomy isn't, because your only purpose is to kill him, whereas in the other we're ceasing to treat one patient that the other might live. That's why I think Zippy's ventilator analogy has something to it, and that - once the crisis has begun - my proposal to treat the baby as a terminal (i.e. irretrievably dying) patient also has something to it. This is not like blowing up the airliner, because as long as that plane is in the air, there is hope that the passengers might survive, while there is none for the baby in the ruptured tube. The probability that the baby is already dead (in the absence of certainty) still sounds like wishful thinking to me.

That was pretty good link-hunting, Zippy, to find that old post of mine.

SP: The same deliberately chosen behavior is seen in both instances, so how do we determine the moral character of the act?

It might be that in some cases you can't. But I trust you're in no doubt as to the moral character of Christ's act, or any instance of His refraining from it.

I'm afraid I'm just not going to be convinceable that surgery that removes a person from the place where he is alive (at the moment, if only for a brief time) and is receiving oxygen in the way that he has done naturally and by design since the beginning of his life is "ceasing to treat."

As for the fact that what is killing the other guys isn't what is killing someone else, I've never regarded that as relevant. If removing the embryo (even in the tube) is an attack on a living embryo, it is an attack regardless of the fact that someone else is going to/likely to die if you don't. Those two issues must be kept separate. And you can always construct scenarios where that is the case. In the plane, suppose there is some poison in the air that is being released from the dying man's body, from some container that has been surgically implanted in him in a place you can't get at without killing him. He's gradually being poisoned; so is everybody else. You can't land the plane with this stuff on board. Something like that. So he is dying of something that is killing somebody else. Then is it okay to throw him out?

No, not in those circumstances, unless you were certain he'd die before he hit the ground, which you will never be. Some other option would have to be sought.

So if you had a dying patient on a ventilator (i.e., one who would die without it) and another whom you could save by use of that very same ventilator (you only have one to go around), you would not remove it from the dying patient and transfer it to the other?

Likewise, if the ectopic baby is alive after the rupture, you would allow the doctors to do anything they could to save the mother except remove that section of the tube which is cause of the hemorrhage? In short, if the baby's life persists as long as the mother's, you would allow her to die as well?

I deny the analogy between the tube and the ventilator. I think it's very importantly different. Leaving a person in the state for receiving oxygen that is natural to his stage of development is not tantamount to treating him for any disease, much less giving him extraordinary treatment. And it certainly doesn't become extraordinary treatment just because someone else's life is in danger as a result of not taking away this person's normal oxygen reception system. Nor does it become extraordinary treatment because he is going to die very soon. It might be worth pointing out here (though I'm not sure of its exact relevance in addition to what I've already said) that the hypothetical embryo in the scenario you sketch is not dying of any disease intrinsic to himself but is merely going to die because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. His oxygen-and-nutrition delivery system is in the process of breaking down but hasn't broken down completely yet, in the situation as you envisage it.

Yes, if I ever could have (which I probably never would have) very strong evidence before my very eyes that the child was living--heartbeat on an ultrasound screen, for example--and this evidence just kept on a-going, I would say it would be wrong to go in and take the child out, thus stopping that heartbeat, even if this meant the mother would die.

But for various reasons I'm pretty sure that's not ever going to come up, practically speaking, so I wouldn't let it be too disturbing. And a prudential judgement (in Zippy's terms) that the child is dead is certainly licit to make under the appropriate evidential circumstances. What is intrinsically wrong in my view is taking decisive action against the child when you know he's alive.

So as long as the child is alive, you would say that salpingectomy and salpingotomy are essentially the same action.

As long as I know the child is alive, yes.

Oh, and I should add "in the present circumstances regarding what is and isn't medically possible." Obviously, if there were some way developed to transfer the child somewhere else with some hope of survival, and it depended on his still being in the tube, then that would be importantly different. But right now he just dies either way, so it doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned that what you cut is his support system when you take him out rather than suctioning him out directly. But this is to my mind a minor caveat, rather like saying that if you could find some other way to get oxygen to the person in the room, then this makes a difference to the morality of sealing all the windows.

What troubles me with Lydia's position - well, not so much troubles me but keeps me from simply embracing it without reservation - is its twofold dependence upon analogy and upon what we take to be natural. The analogies - throwing a man out an airplane window, putting him in a bag to suffocate, etc. - are just analogies, and they presume that the ordinary ("natural") physical biological functions of the man are healthy and intact. But if someone is dying and his digestive, breathing, and all other life-sustaining functions are imminently breaking down there isn't a positive obligation to go on sustaining him. It would be murder to suffocate him with a pillow, but it would not be murder to remove his respirator, precisely because the physical function is broken.

Is it really natural - in the sense of being the carrying out of its telos - for the mother's fallopian tube to provide sustainance to the tiny developing child? It may be natural in the same sense that some who argue (and in doing so miss the point completely) against the natural law claim that homosexual acts are natural, i.e., it does in fact occur in nature. But it isn't natural in any teleological sense, which is the meaning of "nature" that applies to moral questions. If this understanding of the controlling concepts is correct then salpingectomy could be morally licit even before the crisis occurs: it truly isn't an attack on the child nor on any of the natural physical functions and objects which sustain the child. It isn't teleologically natural for me to sustain my body by literally cannibalizing the body of another, even if I am doing so in my sleep or after having gone insane and not by morally relevant choice.

Meanwhile there is simply no question that salpingotomy is a direct attack on the child. The two cases as specifically chosen behaviors are pretty clearly different in their essential moral character, even if not in a way which unequivocally renders salpingectomy licit.

It's natural for the child to implant in the mother's body and receive oxygen and nutrition from her bloodstream to his. Thus all analogies to cannibalizing and the like won't work, because that position of radical dependence is precisely the intended and designed one, even if the child is in the womb. Moreover, the child at this stage has no functional lungs of his own, so there is no sense in which the mother's respiratory system has been "hooked up" to a person whose own lungs are failing and for whom lung failure is a symptom of dying. In other words, you get put on a respirator because there is something wrong with your lungs, which aren't working the way lungs are supposed to work. But all unborn children naturally are "put on" their mother's respiratory system because, as is natural to their stage of development, they are unable to breathe on their own.

The trouble with the other position is that it conflates the fact that the child can't survive for long in the tube with the fact that the child can't survive on his own at all, thereby turning his continued dependence on his mother and receipt of oxygen in that way into a form of "treatment" in his "dying" state. But he isn't dependent on her because his body is dying, as is the case with a person whose lungs are ceasing to function. The fact that the unborn child is going to die soon is *completely separate* from the fact that he needs to be connected to his mother to survive, and the latter (which gives the attempted analogy to a respirator its plausibility) is the case regardless of where implantation takes place or whether the child is going to die soon or not. The fact that he is going to die soon is entirely a function of his location and not something intrinsic to him of which his dependent state is a symptom.

It's natural for the child to implant in the mother's body and receive oxygen and nutrition from her bloodstream to his.

Yes, but that abstraction is too broad. It isn't obvious that it is natural in the morally pertinent sense for the child to implant in the fallopian tube. In fact that is why the problem arises in the first place.

I absolutely agree that the prediction (however certain) that the child will die soon as an abstraction isn't controlling. What is at issue is whether as a deontological object (just object, not object-of-an-act) the fallopian tube is the teleologically natural source of the essentials of physical life for the child. It seems to me that it isn't: the fallopian-tube-as-source-of-food-and-oxygen is objectively in opposition to the telos of the mother, and (like a respirator) represents an unnatural source of sustainence for the child: an unnatural source which (like a respirator attached to a genuinely terminal patient) is physically incapable of realizing its putative telos, which is the sustainance of the physical life of the child until birth.

Interestingly, this might also pertain to the airliner. Now an airliner's purpose is to carry people through the air and land safely at a destination. We know that this isn't occurring here: that the airliner is diseased, in a sense, as under the control of a terrorist pilot acting in opposition to the airliner's (original and legitimate) purpose. We still can't attack the innoncent passengers directly, and we still have an obligation to do everything that we can for them. So no blowing it up, but try to shoot out the engines, and if it gets too bloody close to its (known) target then saw off the tail with the .50-cal.

The airliner is in at least one sense less clear than the salpingectomy, because it is physically possible for the airliner to recover its original purpose if (say) the passengers succeed in taking back control. It is not possible for the fallopian tube to "recover" its purpose of providing sustainance, because that was never its purpose in the first place. (The other way in which the airliner is less clear is that it is not a natural object at all).

I think a proper understanding of "natural" does help here.

The fact that the child doesn't normally (naturally) implant in the fallopian tube doesn't make the tube, IMO, at all analogous to a respirator. I don't see why it should. The reason we even consider removing a respirator is not per se because it is "unnatural" (we don't, for example, have a similar justification for removing a G-tube or an NG tube and allowing someone to dehydrate to death) but rather that the need for the respirator is itself a manifestation of the fact that the person is actively dying. (I'm not at all sure, by the way, that this is always true. Sometimes I think it may indeed be wrong to remove a respirator.) "Actively dying" is an attribute of the person's body, not of his location. But if we have a heart-beating embryo, the fact that he is in the fallopian tube is a matter of location, not a matter of his body's being actively dying. The "unnaturalness" of the situation isn't of the same sort as that in the case of the respirator, where (in some cases, anyway) a person is actively dying and the _need for the respirator_--the radically dependent state of the person on an "unnatural" situation--is a symptom of this fact. They are substituting for his lungs because his lungs aren't working. The need for the tube--the child's radically dependent state--is not a symptom of the child's body's actively dying.

The fact that the child doesn't normally (naturally) implant in the fallopian tube doesn't make the tube, IMO, at all analogous to a respirator. I don't see why it should.

It isn't a matter of analogy, although the respirator did help me to see the essential difference. Respirator, tube, and womb are each different in sometimes morally essential respects from the other.

(I'm not at all sure, by the way, that this is always true. Sometimes I think it may indeed be wrong to remove a respirator.)

I am certain that it is sometimes morally wrong to remove someone from a respirator: that doing so is sometimes rendered murder because of intentions or circumstances. But it isn't intrinsically immoral to remove someone from a respirator. "Not intrinsically immoral" doesn't mean "morally licit".

"Actively dying" is an attribute of the person's body, not of his location.

Agreed.

But if we have a heart-beating embryo, the fact that he is in the fallopian tube is a matter of location, not a matter of his body's being actively dying.

I am not convinced that this is the case. Where precisely does his body leave off and the mother's begin? N.b. this is a rhetorical question to which I don't think there is a morally relevant answer.

They are substituting for his lungs because his lungs aren't working.

The mother's womb, though, is the child's lungs at that state of development (or more accurately is the connection to the child's lungs, which are also the mother's lungs). The tube is (temporarily and futilly) substituting for the womb because the ordinary natural (in what I am proposing to be the critical sense) process isn't working. Unlike a respirator it isn't doing so as the result of the chosen behavior of some person, so it is different, but being different in that respect from a respirator doesn't make it natural in the morally relevent sense. A natural respirator which grew on trees would not I think change the morality of using respirators in some fundamental way.

Anyway, I didn't expect to convince you, and I'm not even sure I've convinced me about the dispositive conclusion. I have to run it through the "siamese twin" scenarios in my head which I have not done yet, and which are more direct correlates to the ectopic pregnancy than he airliner. But I do think this is a legitimate distinction, grounded in the physical facts and in nature not in intentions or circumstances, which could plausibly render salpingectomy prudentially licit in some circumstances while leaving salpingotomy an intrinsically evil act of murder.

"Where precisely does his body leave off and the mother's begin? N.b. this is a rhetorical question to which I don't think there is a morally relevant answer."

The implication that there isn't a morally relevant answer to this question seems to me seriously incorrect. After all, that's why all of us pro-lifers get so rightly angry when people talk about the woman's "doing what she wants with her body." Objectively, there is an absolutely sharp distinction between the mother's body and the child's body. Of course, if you looked at a cell with the naked eye, you couldn't see which was which. But the two are biologically completely distinct from the beginning.

If the child has developed a placenta at this stage of its development, the placenta is the nearest equivalent to its lungs. But the placenta is an organ of the child's, unequivocally. It has the child's DNA in all of its cells, for example.

As for who is dying and who isn't, the distinction between the child and the mother is very important there, too. Sometimes the mother is dying (of cancer, say), or even has been declared brain dead, while the child is as healthy as an unborn child of that age ever is. Sometimes the child is dying (of a urinary tract blockage, for example), but the mother is fine. In the case of the ectopic pregnancy, no one is dying until it bursts. At that point the woman is in danger of dying and is injured (it's her tube that burst), and perhaps for a very brief time the child lives on, until the interruption of the blood flow to the child becomes acute, at which point the child dies. But the distinction between them remains.

I definitely think if one goes this route then one will be able to justify separating siamese twins in ways that are lethal to one. For example, if there is only one heart between the two, biologically belonging to child A then by this logic you could say that the heart in the child A "is" the other child's heart, too, that the child without a heart is "on life support" and "is dying" because he doesn't have a heart of his own, and cut him off. And of course a siamese twin situation is privative--that is, it's unnatural in the sense that the design plan overall isn't working as it's supposed to. It would sure bother me about a position of my own if it implied the legitimacy of that sort of separation, though.

I guess I'm not entirely convinced that the only relevant difference between an ectopic child and a healthy child is location.

And of course a siamese twin situation is privative--that is, it's unnatural in the sense that the design plan overall isn't working as it's supposed to.

Some of them are, at any rate: in particular the cases where as a physical matter either both are going to die or only one can as a physical matter be saved. In other perhaps not.

I haven't really thought it through well enough yet, since I suspect "siamese twins" is too general a category to be capable of carrying the morally relevant distinctions. E.g. in a case where an organ clearly serving only one twin has failed, that twin is physically dying in just the sense we agree does not warrant unnatural measures, the failing organ, though definitely failing, continues to function at some level due to some unnatural feature harmful to the other twin, etc etc etc.

How about (thinking on my feet) a pair of siamese twins with separate stomachs. The stomach of one is not in its natural state, not connected to her esophagus to receive food in a natural way but rather is open into the chest cavity of the other and is slowly digesting her organs. Assume for the gedankenexperiment that it is impossiblt to get nutrition to the first twin in any other way. Would it be morally wrong to remove the aberrant stomach, allow the first twin to die (perhaps with palliative care if possible) of starvation because she can no longer digest her twin's organs, and then upon death remove any dead remains?

It isn't that there is an infinite value on every remaining moment of physical life per se at all, of course, though the position of pro-lifers is often caricatured that way. It is that treating a person as a mere animal, as a disease, or as nothing at all, to be killed in the pursuit of some end, however good an end it may be - and either in intention or as a specific chosen behavior - is evil, that is, is objectively opposed to the telos of he-who-acts.

I find that one too hard to wrap my brain around, because it's so obvious that you _could_ attach a G-tube through the abdominal wall to the stomach of the abnormal twin and get nutrition to her that way, even if you couldn't perform (a surgery performed very frequently) surgery to connect her stomach to her own esophagus. People who have had their esophagus removed because of cancer live this way--with a G-tube directly into the stomach through the side--all the time. E.g. J.P. McFadden of pro-life fame.

But I definitely think that if only one has a heart that is getting overstrained because it's pumping for both, you can't remove the twin that doesn't have a heart of its own.

I find that one too hard to wrap my brain around, because it's so obvious that you _could_ attach a G-tube...

The purpose of my gedankenexperiment isn't realism, it is moral casuistry. I attempted to construct a siamese twin scenario as similar as possible to ectopic pregnancy, if not particularly plausible in itself. (The beauty of the siamese twin scenarios is that they put the lie to our tendency to treat the mother as more intrinsically valuable than the child, when in fact the intrinsic value of neither is measurable or comparable).

Well, I'm certainly not going to starve anyone to death. I place a huge weight on the active-passive distinction, by the way. The reason _I_ would be inclined to say that it's not wrong to take the one child's digestive system out of the other one's chest cavity is that there are so many other obvious things to try in order not to starve and dehydrate the first child to death. For that matter, people can do without a stomach altogether. You can put the nutrition in at the beginning of the small intestine. And some nutrition and hydration can be given by IV.

If you want to make it as much as possible like the ectopic pregnancy case, why not make it one pair of lungs between the two of them? And the lungs and heart are slowly wearing out because they can't stand the strain of oxygenating two bodies.

And then I'm just going to say that, no, you can't cut off the child with no lungs.

Well, I'm certainly not going to starve anyone to death.

The scenario isn't really so simple as "starving her to death" though. The one twin is digesting the other, because of a disorder in her digestive system, and the putative act the morality of which we are attempting to evaluate is simply to surgically bring that to a halt. Perhaps we don't do it by removing the disordered stomach but by sewing it shut or something. That we have no other way to feed the first twin (maybe we are on a spaceship and our surgical and other resources are limited) is merely a (stipulated) part of the circumstances which surround the act.

I'm strongly inclined to say I wouldn't do it.

If both were using one's heart (that is, by the way, a real-world example), would you "surgically bring to a halt" that use of the other's heart by "closing the passage" from the one twin's body to the other's heart, thus causing the death of the heartless twin in short order?

No. That isn't the same kind of scenario though. Both sharing in a natural function isn't the same as an unnatural broken function of one killing them both.

Well, I think I would not do it, in your scenario.

But honestly, I think you're just wrong in calling the ectopic pregnancy a case of an "unnatural broken function of one killing them both." Medically and biologically speaking, location is the nature of the problem in the tubal case--for the mother as well as for the child. To illustrate: I read in NRLC News many years ago a story of a woman whose child implanted ectopically but not in the tube. This one implanted on the outside of the uterus--on the top. She resisted all pressure to have the child removed and brought it to term. There was enough room in the abdominal cavity, and mother and child both survived. As they say in real estate, location, location, location. The reason the tubal pregnancy is so dangerous to the mother is precisely because the mother's fallopian tube is so small that it will burst eventually, not because of anything unnatural that is intrinsic to the child's own body or his body's own functions. Likening it to one person's digesting another's organs makes it sound more unpleasant, but it really just is what it is: one person located inside another in such a fashion that the larger person will hemorrhage, possibly fatally, when the smaller person becomes big enough and an organ of the larger person that contains the smaller person ruptures.

Well, the difference is location, topology, and biochemistry as a physical matter. As I said, I didn't expect to convince you. But to me, the natural-unnatural distinction seems at least morally relevant to the question, if not dispositive.

Is the result then, Lydia, that in any case in which a physician can save one patient but not both, and saving the one requires neglecting the other, he cannot do it? Because that's what's happening in a salpingectomy - a section of the tube is removed with the baby intact, who will now be allowed to die. And you are saying that this 'allowing to die' is in fact an attack upon him?

And are you denying that he is in fact dying, that once the rupture occurs and the mother begins bleeding, the baby's oxygen supply (his respirator) has been cut off (by the chosen act of no person)?

Also, a question about your siamese twins hypothetical in which the two share one set of lungs: suppose the twin to whom the lungs do not 'belong' says to parents and physician, "Separate me. There is no reason we both should die. I want to lay down my life for my friend, my sister." What should the parents and doctor give by way of answer?

(I'm not sure this is relevant to the previous questions; I'm just curious).

"J.P. McFadden of pro-life fame" was a fervent supporter of the Hiroshima bombing. fwiw

When the "neglecting" involves active surgery to remove one person from the way or position in which his existence is harming the other person, I can't look on this as merely "neglect." It's an act. And as you know, even what might be called "neglect" or "failing to treat" when it involves starving or dehydrating a person to death is an absolute no for me.

Early embryos are pretty delicate. If the oxygen were really *cut off*, and you had a heartbeat before, you wouldn't have one then. It's not like there's extra oxygen hanging around. In fact the whole category of a "dying-but-not-dead" early embryo is very difficult to fit in even conceptually. The very most I can even imagine is that we know the tube is rupturing but that the heart goes on beating. But that would mean that the oxygen/blood flow _hadn't_ been fully cut off, despite the rupture thus far. To say that the child is at that point "dying" seems to me questionable and difficult to give a meaning to. Again, we don't have differentiated organ systems at this stage, so we can't define active dying as we do with a more developed person in terms of, say, kidney failure. I suppose objectively there could be some of the cells dying while the heart goes on beating, but even to call this "active dying" is a stretch. A developed person can get gangrene in a toe and not be dying. I've granted you "dying" as part of the scenario--_suppose_ that we could give meaning to the idea that once the tube bursts the child is dying and suppose we could know that this was the case. But I've stipulated that we know the child is alive when I've said it would be wrong to perform the surgery. I've imagined an on-going heartbeat. To me this means that you can't engage in the _act_ of surgical removal, and calling it "failure to treat" or "neglect" is just incorrect.

I wouldn't separate the twins even if the twin could thus speak. Of course, I don't think they could live long enough for that to happen. But again, I regard it as an act of assault against the lungless twin to cut him off from his oxygen source.

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