instruere...inlustrare...delectare Disputations

Saturday, January 10, 2015

We haven't reached disagreement about torture yet

Mark Shea writes about "more wearying attempts to avoid the bleeding obvious" about the CIA enhanced interrogation program. It could also be called the same wearying attempt that's been repeated over and over for a dozen years.

Directly countering a bad argument rarely changes the mind of the one offering the bad argument. It might, though, sway an undecided onlooker.

But if I might introduce one of my King Charles's heads into the discussion, I wonder if part of the problem is that a lot of people think of morality in terms of rules. If your idea of a good Catholic is a Catholic who follows the rules, and you are or try to be a good Catholic yourself, then you'll want to follow the rule, "Torture is prohibited."

If you've ever met a human being, you know what we do to rules. We get around them when we want to. "Torture is prohibited" offers two broad avenues for getting around. To the left we have "torture" and the endless arguments about definitions and fine lines and boundaries and splashing water in faces and making prisoners uncomfortable for a few hours. To the right we have "prohibited" and the endless arguments about exceptions and circumstances and differences in objectives and historical examples that overthrow the soft-hearted heresies of the last fifty years.

The arguments are endless because the counterarguments don't get at the actual point of disagreement. The one side says, "The rule 'Torture is prohibited' has not been broken," while the other side says, "No! Torture is objectively evil!"

If that's right, then the way out isn't to keep showing the logical weaknesses of the one side. It's to walk them past the rule-based morality to the more fundamental questions of virtues, vices, and the goods of human nature. Find some behavior everyone in the conversation agrees to call torture, find out whether everyone in the conversation agrees that that behavior is objectively evil and therefore always prohibited, and then -- rather than testing the rule just agreed to with real-world or hypothetical examples -- go into why that behavior is objectively evil, what makes it everywhere and always contrary to the good of a human being and God's will for him.

If you can get that far, then you can start looking at other real-world or hypothetical examples, not for whether they follow the rule, but for whether they are objectively evil. And when you reach disagreement, you have a chance of understanding why.

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Sunday, April 17, 2011

A perspective to be set aside

Several years ago, I came across an article by Michael Sherwin, OP, that included this simile:
Just as a compress stops the bleeding, but does not heal the wound, so too the theology of the Baroque period kept the faithful from spilling into the errors of the day, but it did not heal the wounds caused by nominalism, voluntarism, and the rationalism of the early Enlightenment. For this reason, just as a bandage must be removed before the wound can fully heal, so too the perspective of the manuals had to be set aside before the wounds in moral theology could be healed.
A wounded man may need a bandage, but we should never mistake the bandage for something essential to the man.

We don't worry much these days about the theology of the Baroque period, or how manualism opposes nominalism and voluntarism without itself being a full expression of moral theology. But maybe we should worry a little bit more.

I say that because I think some Catholics are opposing the errors of the day by asserting the manualism of the day as the One True Faith. The manualism of the day, which for the most part rests on little or no ecclesial authority, is a rule-based morality of a notably rigorist bent, with a whole set of ad hoc rules of orthodoxy and orthopraxis tacked on.

You might guess that I don't think much of the manualism of the day. I'd think a little more of it if its proponents made the proper distinction between it and the Catholic Faith, but I'm not sure they realize they aren't the same thing.

And that's where the theology of the Baroque period comes in. The manualism that arose in response to the needs of the Counter-Reformation lingered on in various ways until the Second Vatican Council, to an extent (I would suggest) that a lot of people today think that manualism constitutes Catholicism.

If you understand Catholicism in terms of adherence to rules, though, you need a rule for everything you understand. And it's hard to tell when you don't understand something, because the rules will always tell you whether something is part of Catholicism. And if the rules give you an answer you think is wrong, you can add a rule to correct it (the correct answer being the evidence of authority for the rule).

But Baroque manualism was never intended to be the whole of moral theology, any more than question-and-answer catechisms were intended to be the whole of Church teaching on divine revelation.

To the extent today's manualists fail to understand the function and limits of a manual, they misrepresent the very Faith they are trying to preserve and restore. They wind up denouncing positions that are perfectly legitimate within the Catholic tradition because they are personally unfamiliar with the whole of that tradition.

Moreover, manualism is inherently non-evangelical. It is inward-looking, with nothing to say to those who are not already in the Church. To the extent non-Catholics are told that the Faith is a set of rules, it will be an ugly and unappealing proposition for human happiness. And, frankly, non-Catholics would be right to judge it a false proposition as well, since (as we can know both by faith and reason) following rules does not constitute human happiness.

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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Against rule-based rules

Regarding questions about "just how close you can get to the intrinsic moral evil of torture without crossing the line," Mark Shea endorses Zippy's maxim,
To merely pose the question is to already have assented at least in part to torture, to abortion, to adultery.
I'm not entirely sure the question itself is immoral, as Zippy asserts, but I'm pretty sure it's ill-posed.

To ask, "How long can we make a prisoner stand before it becomes 'torture'?," is to pose a kind of sorites paradox, akin to the old, "How many grains of wheat can we place on the floor before it becomes 'a heap'?" There's no way to answer that question; what separates acts of torture from acts that are not torture is not an infinitesimally thin line. There is no number T such that forced standing for T seconds is not torture and forced standing for T+1 seconds is torture. The question asks to define something that doesn't exist.

Let me repeat that: Questions of the form, "How long can a behavior be engaged in before it becomes torture?" have no answer. It's not just that we don't know the answer, or can't determine it, or disagree on what the answer is. It's that there is no answer. It's a nonsensical question, like, "Does blue weigh more than middle C?"

The problem is that the question also asks to define something that is needed. If we all agree it is immoral to force someone to stand for fifty straight hours, and if we all agree it is absurd to suggest it is immoral to force someone to stand for fifty straight seconds, and if we want to proscribe immoral treatment without being absurd, then we need a way to proscribe standing for fifty hours without proscribing standing for fifty seconds.

It's bad, you know, when you need something that doesn't exist.

Fortunately, in this case the need is only illusionary. We don't need laws of the form, "More than X amount of Y is illegal"; that's simply the form we've become accustomed to thinking in terms of.

Rather, as Mark suggests, we need laws that encompass virtue:
The moment we go from framing the question in terms of trying to bargain our way out of damnation and instead frame it in terms of seeking virtue, all the fog disappears. We no longer have to wonder just how close to hypothermia we can push our victim, nor how man hours they should be forced to sit in their own feces, nor if leading them on a leash crosses the line into torture. We are trying to be humane, not trying to get away with inhumanity. And you don't do that kind of stuff to people you are trying to treat humanely.
True, that means we need virtuous judges to interpret the laws. But if we don't have virtuous judges, all the laws in the world won't make our justice just.

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Monday, September 11, 2006

Priorities and balance

St. Thomas begins his study of morality, not with the question, "What ought man do?," but with, "Why does anyone do anything?" Though he's writing as a teacher of beginning students of sacra doctrina, his approach is also pastorally congenial, as I suggested below.

You do things because you want things, and above all you want to be happy, a state St. Augustine defined with deceptive simplicity as "the complete attainment of all we desire."

Of course, people desire all sorts of things, good and bad, many of which are mutually incompatible. To achieve happiness, then, isn't merely a matter of obtaining everything you might happen to desire. You first have to make sure that everything you desire can be completely attained.

This fact is a big reason virtue-based morality -- expressing what man ought do in terms of virtues (good habits we should cultivate) and vices (bad habits we should eliminate) -- is preferable to rule-based morality -- expressing what man ought to do in terms of proscriptions and prescriptions. You can follow all the rules and still not be happy.

Which is not to say proscriptions and prescriptions are unimportant, but that they work neither as a starting point nor as an ending point if the human moral life is to flourish. As Fr. Romanus Cessario, OP, puts it in A Short History of Thomism [p. 22]:
In moral philosophy, Thomists agree that by nature man enjoys the right to dwell in community and to pursue personal happiness within the common good, and that the right conduct of human beings is best described by appeal to the virtues of human life, although laws, both natural and positive, also legitimately direct human action.

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Friday, September 08, 2006

Morality is getting what you want

When St. Thomas begins "to treat of [God's] image, i.e. man, inasmuch as he too is the principle of his actions, as having free-will and control of his actions," the first question he looks at is man's last end, which is, per St. Augustine, happiness.

See how his thinking works? He's writing a textbook on sacra doctrina, on the science of divine revelation, and so begins naturally enough with its object -- viz, God. Man first enters into the discussion as a special feature of God's creation.

The specialest feature of man is his free will, and how he does and ought to use it is basically the subject of the whole Secunda Partis. The thing is, St. Thomas begins this discussion with the question of why man uses his free will. To the fundamental question of moral theology, "What must I do?," St. Thomas replies, "That depends on what you want." Seven articles in, St. Thomas recalls the words of St. Augustine:
But if he had said, You all will to be blessed, you do not will to be wretched; he would have said something which there is no one that would not recognize in his own will. For whatever else a man may will secretly, he does not withdraw from that will, which is well known to all men, and well known to be in all men.
The remaining 303 questions in this part of the Summa look at what "to be blessed" means and how to achieve it.

Note how natural, human, and congenial this approach to moral theology is. Natural, because it situates moral theology in its proper place within the whole of sacra doctrina*. Human, because it considers the human act of moral choice as it is in itself, an act of free will directed by reason. Congenial, because it begins by asking what you want, and everyone, of whatever age and whatever spiritual stage, wants to be happy.




* I use "sacra doctrina" not merely to be pretentious, but because I've been told it's a tricky term to translate to English. "Sacred doctrine," "holy teaching," and suchlike evidently don't quite capture the full scope of the term as St. Thomas used it, and as early as the first article of the first question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas distinguishes between sacra doctrina and theology.

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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

A dumbell model

Prudence, as you know, is right reasoning about a thing to be done. To be prudent requires, among other things, knowing the difference between what must be done and what may be done, between what is prescribed (or proscribed) by law and what you are free to choose.

Sometimes, the moral law is overstated at the expense of human freedom. This can happen by inventing laws where none really exist, as I suggested happens with Grand Theories of Pure Living. It also happens with rule-based morality, where human freedom is for the most part left implied in whatever isn't covered by an explicit rule.

Sometimes, too, human freedom is overstated at the expense of the moral law. Some seem to hold that freedom always trumps the law, others that the law is a very vague and general thing, still others that the law comprises only a small and specific set of edicts (e.g., those found in dogmatic canons of Ecumenical Councils).

And then, sometimes, the proper balance between law and freedom is found, although of course it will look imbalanced to those whose own balance is misplaced.

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Monday, June 26, 2006

Worth a third of a picture

Here, briefly, is my position on the question of pro-abortion politicians and the Eucharist:

To begin with, whoever acts in formal or proximate material cooperation with legalized abortion should not present himself for Communion.

That said, whether a particular person who presents himself for Communion is to be denied on the basis of imputed formal or material cooperation with legalized abortion is a matter of prudential judgment, not Church precept or canon law. A bishop has the authority to make this judgment for the Masses celebrated within his jurisdiction.

The above paragraph contains two concepts I think are often mangled. The first is of something being "a matter of prudential judgment." Being a matter of prudential judgment doesn't mean that the thing is a matter of moral indifference, that an objectively wrong decision can't be made, much less that a viciously immoral decision cannot be made. Intentionally or not, prudence can fail in matters of prudential judgment in ways similar to ways justice can fail in matters of judicial judgment. But it does mean there's no law that can be cited to determine fully what must be done. A matter of prudential judgment is a classic example of the incompleteness of rule-based morality.

The second concept a lot of people seem to mangle is that of episcopal authority. That doesn't merely mean the bishop is the one who gets to make the rules; again, rule-based morality is inadequate. The bishop's authority is apostolic, and the Christian faithful reject that authority at the risk of rejecting the authority of the Apostles, which was given to them by Christ.

Rejecting authority takes many forms that fall short of explicitly denying that the bishop has it. Lumen Gentium goes to far as to say that "the faithful must cling to their bishop, as the Church does to Christ, and Jesus Christ to the Father, so that all may be of one mind through unity, and abound to the glory of God." I don't think the claim that some Catholics today fail to cling to their bishop as the Church does to Christ is very controversial.

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Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Not just the law

While I'm thinking of it, let me strike a blow for Virtue-Based Morality by taking up a point made by Herbert McCabe in his posthumously published The Good Life (and touched on in a comment below by JohnMcG).

To repeat myself, what makes an act of giving to neighbor his due virtuous is that the act is chosen as an act of giving to neighbor his due. The wicked judge gave the widow her due so she would stop bugging him. He chose his act, not as a just act, but as an act that would shut her up. Even though he did "the right," he did not act with justice.

In addition to virtue and self-interest, there is a third way in which one can choose "the right," which is to choose the act as in accordance with rules. A different judge, for example, might give the widow what she asked for, not because it is the right thing to do, nor because it will get her out of his chambers, but because that's what the law tells him to do. Should the law change, his decision would change.

In effect, such a rule-based justice doesn't recognize natural rights; the positive law defines the set of positive rights, and those are the only rights that matter. From this perspective, "unjust law" is a meaningless expression, and anything that is not contrary to an explicit law cannot be unjust.

Of course it's true that a virtue-based concept of justice follows the positive laws -- at least those that are not "a perversion of law," i.e., those that do not violate natural law -- but it does so because following a just positive law is just. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but it preserves both concepts of "unjust law" and "unjust but legal."

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Thursday, June 16, 2005

Letting the hobby horse out of the barn

In a comment below, blihs asks for a citation for the "begin with the virtues rather than the commandments" concept I'd mentioned. I pointed to the table of contents of St. Thomas's Summa Theologica and of Romanus Cessario's Introduction to Moral Theology as early and recent examples within the Dominican tradition. (With Amazon's "look inside" feature, you can also read a few pages of Fr. Cessario's introductory chapter.)

I need to be a bit cautious with this, since the need for a virtue-based moral theology, rather than the rule-based one most people now living associate with Catholicism, is one of my pet themes, but I am nearly as ignorant as I am enthusiastic on the subject.

My nickel speech is that the presentation of morality was separated from virtue, and therefore moral theology separated from the other branches of theology, largely as part of the Counter-Reformation; at a time of great confusion, it can help to simply have rules to follow.

In the intervening centuries, however, the rules have come to be seen as not merely the pedagogical vehicle for morality, but as the essential basis for morality. And, importantly, an essentially arbitrary basis.

We live now at a time of great confusion, and rule-based morality is being pushed as a part of the Counter-SpiritOfVaticanTwo. But we also live at a time of great interest in our Faith, when people don't (indeed, can't) rely on Father in the confessional and the pulpit to tell them everything they should and shouldn't do. They want and need to know and live the Faith in a whole and integrated way, not in the field-surgery style developed with one eye toward maintaining the distinction between who's a good Catholic and who isn't.

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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Unintended relativism

Zippy draws attention to what he calls ultramontane moral relativism, the
claim that certain moral matters are settled just because the Church has not said anything about the matter…

Our only moral duties, in the view of the ultramontane moral relativist, are those things explicitly required of us by the Magisterium.
He is right to distinguish between what is morally licit and what the Church does not say isn't morally licit. In fact, "moral facts exist objectively and [the Church] reveals ([only] some) of them to us authoritatively." This goes to why what I call virtue-based morality is better than rule-based morality: a man of virtue can operate in areas where there are no rules.

Then, too, authoritative Church teaching on specific moral acts can be a slippery thing. The Church teaches, not just through doctrinal letters, but through liturgy, through custom, through canon law. Even when the Church does give an authoritative doctrinal position on some matter, this usually follows a period in which individual moral theologians and pastors propose various theological and pastoral analyses of the matter, and the prudent Catholic does not ignore these for want of an "authoritative Church teaching."

Now let me qualify all this by suggesting that, if the Church has not spoken on the morality of a particular act, that fact may be included in one's prudent reasoning on whether that act is moral. If "everyone does it," and the Church has not condemned it, that may be evidence that doing it is moral. It doesn't prove it, of course, and the "it" that everyone does may even be moral for most people in most situations yet immoral for me in my particular situation.

Still, Christian freedom includes freedom from scrupulosity and legalism. As part of one's spiritual discipline, one may choose to be a rigorist -- to refrain whenever absolute certainty is not assured -- in matters not bound by explicit Church doctrine, but rigorism is not demanded of us.

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Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Sign of the timeless

For those who were wondering about manualism and rule-based morality, Dappled Things provides a link to an article featuring an advocate for virtue-based traffic flow.
The result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times.
I don’t say Aquinas has all the answers (certainly not on this of all days), but he’s a good place to start, whatever the question.

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Thursday, December 02, 2004

A casuistry of torture

After the New York Times revealed that the "Red Cross has charged ... that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion 'tantamount to torture' on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay," Scrappleface countered with an article headlined, "Red Cross: Al Qaeda May Violate Geneva Conventions."

I suppose tu quoque is good enough for a satirical website. But what's good enough for a columnist writing on a website "endeavoring to evangelize the world via the Internet with the Good News of Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church in obedience to Pope John Paul II's call for a 'Springtime of World Evangelization'"?
What if, for example, we had captured one of the terrorists who held Nick Berg captive while Berg was still alive? Would we have been justified in using whatever means necessary, if he might have led us to rescue Berg?

... The ICRC does not appear to have uncovered anything approaching real torture. But perhaps it's time we put aside our squeamishness on this issue and opened a genuine debate about exactly what methods a humane society is justified in using to save innocent lives.
We have a prominent public figure publicly wondering whether the ends might justify the means and criticizing the squeamish for their reluctance to talk about the difference between evil torture and good torture.

Those who know me will see where I'm going with this:

It's the Jesuits' fault.

See, if we were satisfied with choosing the good and avoiding the bad -- the bad, in this case, being "whatever...attempts to coerce the will itself" -- then we wouldn't need to "draw the line between what are admittedly unpleasant, coercive methods used to elicit information that might save lives — thousands, even millions of them — and actions that are so repugnant they may never be used," as Chavez writes. We wouldn't ask whether, "if such methods [mentioned by the Red Cross] are 'torture,' is the United States justified in using them anyway?" We wouldn't couch our discussion in terms of nomenclature ("real torture") or sensations ("unpleasant," "repugnant"), but in terms of what objectively is.

Instead, thanks to the Jesuits' tourniquet of rule-based moral reasoning (which helped stop the post-Reformation bleeding but has since led to moral gangrene), people argue for a casuistry of torture: Let's draw those lines between good torture and bad torture. Let's matrix all the acts we can perform upon prisoners with all the conditions under which we can perform them. And then, as Chavez reports Andrew McCarthy recommends, let's set up a system whereby "the government would have to apply to a federal court for permission to administer a predetermined form of non-lethal torture."

Yes, by all means let's have the federal courts oversee the application of our torture matrix. Who doesn't trust the federal courts to adjudicate morality? (Sure, they don't do a good job with abortion-related issues, but now we're talking about situations in which thousands, even millions of lives might be saved.)

Update: Catholic Exchange has removed the Chavez column, which may be read here.

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Friday, November 07, 2003

When rules fail

There was a time in Christendom when morality was largely talked about in terms of virtue. The general framework of virtue-based morality (in particular the moral virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude) entered Christianity, as far as I can tell, from the pagan Greeks, but the system was baptized by recognizing faith, hope, and charity -- the theological virtues -- as the greatest of virtues, and in particular charity as the most excellent.

Then came a time when moral theology was dominated by "manualism," which differed from the traditional approach in three ways (according to Fr. Servais Pinckaers, by way of Fr. Michael S. Sherwin):
First, the manuals analyze the moral life in isolation from the study of grace and the great truths of the faith, which are now treated in dogmatic theology, as well as in isolation from aspects of the Christian response to grace and one’s growth in it, which now belong to the domains of mystical and ascetical theology. Second, instead of beginning their analysis with the question of happiness or human beatitude, the manuals begin with the study of individual human acts. Lastly, instead of focusing on the virtues that dispose us to live in harmony with our vocation to beatitude, the manuals focus on law and on how to apply the law in individual cases through the forum of conscience.
As I blogged last month, Fr. Sherwin goes on to suggest that manualism was appropriate for the time of the Counter-Reformation, since it "functioned as a compress that stopped the Church’s spiritual hemorrhaging." There comes a time, however, when a compress must be removed if it is not to do more harm than good.

I am firmly convinced that what I call "rule-based morality" ought to be replaced by a virtue-based morality wherever and whenever possible. There are many reasons for this, mostly based on the ideal of a mature Christian as someone formed by Christ's presence in his soul.

It also has some very practical advantages. There has been some strain recently between Minute Particulars and Flos Carmeli on the suitability of straining at gnats when immediate action is needed. When immediate action is needed, the virtuous man acts virtuously. How does the rule-driven man act? Hard to say.

Notice what can happen, though, when the rules are unclear, unknown, or unsatisfactory, and a man who understands morality in isolation from grace, human beatitude, and virtue chooses to act in a way that makes the most sense to him -- perhaps even appearing to him as the obviously right way for anyone with a moral conscience.

Why would we expect his to be the moral choice? The habit he has cultivated is the consultation of rules, not prudence, justice, or charity. It's not that he has no virtues (nor, for that matter, that traditional moral theology has no rules), but that, when the rules fail him, he finds himself ill-prepared to make the right choice.

At the same time, he has a certain reasonable confidence in his moral rectitude, based on all the proper moral choices he has made under the guidance of the manuals. This confidence may well transfer, improperly, to his choice made without that guidance.

I suspect exactly this has happened in the matter of the war against Iraq. There was no unanimity (among U.S. Catholics, at least) on how to apply Just War Theory as a heuristic for determining whether the war was just. For some, I think, JWT simply came up with the wrong answer, proving that JWT needed changing. The correct answer was the one that came forth spontaneously -- and besides, there were plenty of theologians (among U.S. Catholics, at least) who could do the JWT heavy lifting if anyone insisted.

The problem is that the correct answer can be expected to come forth spontaneously only from the virtuous man (it's sort of the definition of "the virtuous man"), and I think the general understanding of the Catholic life (among U.S. Catholics, at least) is too fractured to reliably produce virtuous men.

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Tuesday, August 27, 2002

Anybody who writes a book on the good of leisure is a hero to me

Mark Shea is on a Josef Pieper roll. I hope he, and his readers, keep it up.

Everyone who can should read Pieper's The Four Cardinal Virtues. Everyone who can't should have it read to them.

In a rightly-ordered society, no one would have to read it because everyone would have been taught what's in it it in elementary school. Still, Pieper's book is what convinced me that man is not a rule-based, but a virtue-based creature.

More precisely, it's what made me ask the question of whether man's life is best governed by virtue. The answer is blindingly obvious, once the question is posed.

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Thursday, June 06, 2002

Not just action

The Cardinal Virtue Tour continues at Kairos, today's virtue being Justice.

At my parish festival last weekend, I saw a flier from the social issues group that contrasted justice with charity. Charity, according to the flier, was about good works for people in need, while justice was about "changing the system."

And I thought -- well, no, I said out loud, "That's not right." Justice is not about changing the system, it's about giving to others what is their due. A letter writing campaign for public care for the insane may be an act of justice, but it isn't justice itself. To quote from Kairos, "We mistake the rules for applying justice for the thing itself."

The reason this matters is that, if all we have are rules, without any grounding for these rules, then we have no rational way of knowing whether the rules are just. What is the point of changing the system if we don't know whether the changed system is any more just than the existing system?

What has been lost, to large numbers of good-hearted Catholics, is the need for contemplation prior to activity. By "contemplation," I mean what St. Thomas meant when he wrote, "theirs is said to be the contemplative who are chiefly intent on the contemplation of truth." [ST II-II, 180, 1] By "prior to," I mean both chronological and logical priority. You should start the day in Christian prayer if you want to spend the day in Christian service, and if your service is not based on, understood according to, and sustained by contact with Christ, then it cannot be Christian service.

Our social and cultural systems are far too complex to be addressed by a rule-based approach to justice. If we don't know what justice is, how can we know whether we have the virtue of justice -- that is, the habit of acting justly? And if we don't know whether we have the habit of acting justly, how can we know that our acts are just?

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