Edward Feser

Lawful authority in just war doctrine

2025-12-18T15:47:00.000-08:00

In an earlier article, I set out the conditions that traditional just war doctrine says a war must meet in order to be morally legitimate, and argued that a war with Venezuela would not meet them. Here I want to look more closely at one of those conditions, namely that a war can be just only if carried out by lawful authority. It seems to me that many of those defending a prospective war with Venezuela too glibly assume that this condition has been met, and focus almost exclusively on what they take to be the justice of the cause. I don’t think the justice of the cause has in fact been established, and indeed it has only become more doubtful in the week since my first article appeared. But even if it had been established, that is by no means the only crucial consideration.

When just war doctrine says that a war can be legitimate only if carried out by lawful authority, the point is in part that private individuals have no right to declare and prosecute a war, no matter how just their cause. Only governments have that right. But that doesn’t mean that just anyone in government has the right. As Francisco Suarez writes in his classic treatment of just war doctrine:

[A]n inferior prince, or an imperfect state, or whosoever in temporal affairs is under a superior, cannot justly declare war without the authorization of that superior. A reason for the conclusion is, first, that a prince of this kind can claim his right from his superior, and therefore has not the right to declare war; since, in this respect, he has the character of a private person. For it is because of the reason stated that private persons cannot declare war. A second reason in support of this same conclusion is that such a declaration of war is opposed to the rights of the sovereign prince, to whom that power has been specially entrusted; for without such power he could not govern peacefully and suitably…

[A] war which, according to the preceding conclusion, is declared without legitimate authority, is contrary not only to charity, but also to justice, even if a legitimate cause for it exists. The reason supporting this conclusion is that such an act is performed without legitimate jurisdiction, and is consequently an illegitimate act…

[H]e who makes war without the authorization in question, even if he has, in other respects, a just ground for so doing, nevertheless incurs the penalties imposed upon those who wage an unjust war. (The Three Theological Virtues: On Charity, Disputation XIII: On War, Section II)

Hence, suppose that the mayor of an American city, or the governor of some U.S. state, attempted to take the United States to war with Venezuela. Obviously, such an act would have no legal or moral justification, for mayors and governors simply have no authority to do such a thing. And equally obviously, this would remain the case regardless of the justice of their cause.

But under the U.S. constitution, the same thing is true of the President of the United States. It is Congress rather than the President that has the authority to maintain and fund the armed forces and to declare war. While the President is commander-in-chief, that entails only that he is in charge of prosecuting a war once it is initiated, not that he can himself initiate it. To be sure, the War Powers Resolution – itself passed by Congress – adds that the President can take military action in limited ways such as repelling an immediate attack on the U.S. But he must still consult with Congress and may not continue the action beyond sixty days without congressional approval.

Nor can it be said that custom has rendered such limitations a dead letter. It is true that presidents sometimes have acted in ways that arguably go beyond them. But when they have done so, this has typically been protested and resisted as contrary to the law, rather than accepted as a de facto norm. Moreover, presidents still often do seek congressional approval, and are expected to do so, especially when proposing a major military action. For example, the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against terrorists were conducted under congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). Naturally, one can question whether everything that that administration did was justifiable under just war criteria, but it does seem at least to have met the “lawful authority” condition.

Nor would it do to suggest that the U.S. constitution is merely man-made law and thus irrelevant to just war doctrine, which is a matter of natural law. For it is part of standard natural law teaching that human law, like natural law, is binding in conscience as long as it is not contrary to the natural law. Now, whatever one thinks of the way the U.S. constitution sets out war powers, it is not contrary to natural law. One can argue that a different way of setting them out would have been better, but this gives one no right whatsoever to ignore or disobey the law as it actually stands.

And there are in fact good reasons for the limits the U.S. constitution puts on presidential power where war is concerned. For while war can be just, it is extremely morally hazardous even in the best of circumstances, and the passions associated with it frequently overwhelm reason. It should never be resorted to lightly, without very careful weighing of the relevant moral and practical considerations. Limiting the president’s discretion where war-making is concerned facilitates this. Addressing the question of how citizens can be confident that a proposed war is just, the eminent Catholic natural law theorist Heinrich Rommen wrote:

[F]reedom of the press and freedom of speech… afford a chance for the issue to be presented broadly and objectively and for both sides to be heard. A good opportunity exists also where the representatives of the people have some control over the foreign policy of the government. Another favorable factor would be a constitutional provision that the most concentrated competence of sovereignty – the declaration of war – be exercised “by plebiscite or at least by resolution of representatives of the people” …

Only where these factors in some way operate, has the individual citizen an access to the elements of fact and of law that make the justice of the case… [W]here the public authority is uncontrolled and the citizen is merely the subject of tendentious propaganda, he has hardly any access to the objective facts which constitute the truth and to the justice of the case, and must nolens volens rely upon authority. (The State in Catholic Thought, p. 671)

Now, in the case of possible war with Venezuela, the Trump administration has not only not received congressional authorization, it has manifestly offered only “tendentious propaganda” in support of such action. My previous article noted some examples of this, such as the attempt to stretch the word “terrorism” to cover actions which, while criminal and immoral, are simply not “terrorist” in the legal sense. A similar sophistry was put forward this week, when the administration declared fentanyl to be a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD). This is as absurd as pretending that Saddam Hussein was a WMD (as some defenders of the Bush administration did when no actual WMD had been found in Iraq). Like Saddam, fentanyl is very bad indeed. But like Saddam, fentanyl is nevertheless not a “weapon of mass destruction” in any literal or legal sense.

President Trump also this week suggested that U.S. military action is justified because of Venezuelan theft of American “oil, land, and other assets.” What he appears to have in mind is Hugo Chavez’s taking control of oil assets from various American companies almost twenty years ago. But protecting corporate business interests is hardly a compelling reason to send American servicemen to die. Moreover, some of the companies in question have been compensated, other claims are still being litigated, and the companies have indicated that they have no interest in returning to Venezuela anyway.

Hence the administration has still failed to make the case that war with Venezuela meets the “just cause” condition of just war doctrine. And in any case, as I have argued, it has also failed to meet the “lawful authority” condition. It seems the administration itself may realize that much. The Washington Post has reported that:

administration officials made a concerted push to reassure potential GOP defectors – walking back Trump’s repeated threats of escalation and sharing with them more details about its aggressive activities to disrupt the Latin American drug trade.

Crucially, it appears, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided a classified briefing for select members of Congress where they indicated the administration is not currently preparing to target Venezuela directly and didn’t have a proper legal argument for doing so, people familiar with the meeting told The Washington Post. (emphasis added)

Let’s hope that, Trump’s rhetoric and the massive naval buildup notwithstanding, concerns about the legality of a war with Venezuela will prevent the administration from starting one.

Kant’s claustrophobic metaphysics

2025-12-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

My review of Marcus Willaschek’s Kant: A Revolution in Thinking appears in the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Would a U.S. war against Venezuela be just?

2025-12-10T16:52:00.000-08:00

To all appearances, the United States is preparing for war with Venezuela. For months now, American military forces have been blowing up Venezuelan boats said to be carrying drugs. The U.S. has deployed a fleet of warships off the country’s coast. President Trump has said that “this is war” and that “very soon we’re going to start doing it on land too,” and he has ordered the closure of airspace over Venezuela. He has also declared that Nicolas Maduro’s “days are numbered” as president of Venezuela and ordered him to resign and leave the country. And it has been reported that the administration is planning for a post-Maduro Venezuela.

What are the goals of, and rationale for, the conflict? Trump cites Venezuela’s status as a source of drugs, criminals, and unwanted immigrants entering the United States. Administration officials and Republicans in Congress routinely characterize Maduro’s regime as “narco-terrorist,” and they’ve long criticized the socialist dictator for the human rights violations and economic chaos that have plagued Venezuela. The point of the conflict thus seems to be regime change, in the interest of punishing and deterring state sponsorship of the drug trade.

Yet the administration has sent mixed signals. Trump has also denied that he is seeking regime change, as has Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump’s controversial recent pardon of former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez tells against a serious concern with punishing state sponsored drug trafficking. Trump has also declined to say one way or the other about whether he would send ground troops into Venezuela, or to address just how far he would go in order to oust Maduro.

Hence, whether the U.S. really does intend to go to war – and if so, what the point of the war would be – are murky at best. So too is the legal basis of the war, and of the means used to fight it. There has been no congressional authorization for such a war, though this is required by the Constitution. True, modern U.S. presidents have not much respected the spirit of this restriction. But they have at least still generally felt the need to get Congress to rubber stamp military actions they’ve already initiated or decided they wanted to carry out. It is better if presidents continue at least partially and grudgingly to adhere to the letter of the law in this way, rather than setting a precedent for simply ignoring Congress altogether.

To be sure, the administration’s emphasis has been on the claim that the drug runners they have been targeting are “terrorists.” And it seems that the administration is operating under the assumption that military attacks on these people are therefore legal given congressional authorization, after 9/11, for the use of military force against terrorists. But as Andrew McCarthy has argued, such a defense is specious, because drug trafficking simply does not fit the definition of “terrorism” under federal law. (And it is sheer sophistry to suggest, as some have, that drug trafficking counts as “terrorism” insofar as the drug problem has “terrorized” American families, brought “terror” to addicts, and so on. These loose uses of the term “terror” are completely irrelevant to the question of the legal sense of the term. You might as well argue that producers of crime thrillers and horror movies are “terrorists” insofar as they cause audiences to feel “terror.”)

There are other problems with the attacks on the boats. In at least one case, it has been alleged that the boat targeted was actually a fishing boat rather than a drug-running boat. In another and especially controversial case, it appears that survivors of an attack were killed in a second attack despite having been rendered harmless by the initial attack. This is contrary to jus in bello just war criteria, and even some on the right-wing end of the political spectrum have judged it to be a war crime under U.S. law.

As this indicates, the situation is, to say the least, problematic from the point of view of just war theory. Some readers might be surprised that I would think so, since a few months ago I argued in an article at Postliberal Order that military action against drug cartels could be just. But there are several crucial differences between the sort of scenario I described there and what is going on now with respect to Venezuela. First, the targets I had in view were not merely criminals guilty of running drugs, but violent thugs guilty of actions that really can plausibly be described as “terrorist,” such as political assassination and the murder of civilians as a means of securing control over territory. Second, I was envisaging military action aimed at taking out the specific individuals carrying out or ordering such acts, rather than some expansive program of regime change. Third, I noted that such action would have to be carried out using only morally acceptable means of warfare. Fourth, I also noted that alternatives to military intervention would have to be tried first.

Let’s consider the current situation in light of the just war doctrine developed by thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, which holds that for military action to be justifiable, it must meet four criteria: first, it must be in the service of a just cause; second, it must be carried out by lawful authority; third, this authority must have the right intention; and fourth, the war must be fought using only right means. Each of these calls for elaboration:

1. Just cause: Part of what this first criterion requires is that a war must be fought for a legitimate end. As to what sort of end would be legitimate, the just war tradition came to hold that it could only be the defense of some right violated by the nation against which the war is fought. Naturally, repelling aggression would be an example, since for one nation to aggress against another is for it to violate the rights of the victim nation. But other aims too can count as the defense of a right, and in theory, even some of the ends sought by the Trump administration could count as the defense of a right. For example, it can in principle be legitimate to fight a war in order to stop drug trafficking, since drug trafficking violates the rights of the nation into which drugs are being trafficked. And it can in principle be legitimate to fight a war to liberate the people of a nation from an oppressive government, since such a government violates its own citizens’ rights.

The trouble is that having a legitimate end in view is only a necessary condition for having a just cause for war, not a sufficient condition. The just cause condition includes other elements as well. For one thing, going to war must be a proportionate response to the rights violation. For example, suppose an enemy nation had killed a handful of American citizens. It would be absurd to use this as a pretext to launch a full-scale war likely to result in tens of thousands of casualties on both sides. That would be massively out of proportion to the harm being remedied.

There must also be reasonable hope for success. War is extremely destructive and can easily spiral out of control, so that it should never be entered into without strong grounds for thinking that the desired outcome can be realized. And it must be realized in a way that does not bring about even greater evils than the ones the war is a response to.

The war must also be fought only as a last resort. That is to say, it must be clear that the ends the war is meant to secure cannot be realized short of war.

Finally, the “just cause” criterion requires not only that the goal of a war is just, but also that it must be known to be just. That is to say, it’s not good enough if someone, somewhere might be able to cobble together some plausible rationale for the war. The public authorities taking a nation to war must themselves actually have such a worked out rationale for it.

When all of these aspects of the “just cause” condition are considered, it is clear that the Trump administration has not met it, at least not yet. For example, it has not shown that a regime change war is a proportionate response to the evils it seeks to remedy. Indeed, some of the administration’s rhetoric seems clearly either uninformed or dishonest. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has claimed that destroying the cocaine carried on Venezuelan drug boats has “saved hundreds of millions of lives.” In reality, fewer than 30,000 people die of cocaine overdose in the U.S. each year, and most of this cocaine comes from countries other than Venezuela. Some have also tried to connect Venezuela with the fentanyl trade, but in reality fentanyl is linked with China and Mexico rather than Venezuela (as even one of Trump’s closest political allies has emphasized).

Nor is it clear that a regime change war would remedy rather than exacerbate some of the problems the administration is trying to address. For example, such a war could generate a refugee crisis that would add to, rather than decrease, the number of immigrants trying to enter the U.S. And as recent American military history has dramatically shown, attempts at regime change often yield results very different from those intended.

Nor has the administration made clear why actions short of war would not suffice to realize the ends it seeks to achieve. Indeed, the administration has made no clear and coherent case at all for war with Venezuela (let alone a just war case for it), so that it can hardly be said that its cause for war is known to be just.

2. Lawful authority: As the just war tradition emphasizes, having a good end in view is by no means sufficient for a war’s being just. For not everyone has the right to resort to war as a means to realize such an end. In particular, private individuals do not have that right. Only public authorities have it.

Now, in the American system, the power to authorize war lies with Congress. That is why, as already noted, even presidents keen to act unilaterally often seek some kind of congressional approval, at least where large-scale or prolonged military actions are concerned. For a president to make war altogether independently of Congress is thus contrary to the rule of law. It is analogous to acting on his own behalf, as a private individual would do, rather than as an agent of the lawful public authority (which is what a president is when acting as commander-in-chief in a congressionally authorized war). And as I noted above, it will not do to pretend that the administration’s actions against Venezuela are somehow legitimized by Congress’s authorization of military action against terrorists.

It seems clear, then, that the administration has also not met the second, “lawful authority” condition for a just war, at least not yet.

3. Right intention: The just war tradition insists that even when there is a just cause for war, and the justice of this cause is known, a war will still be unjust if this cause is not the true motivation for which the war is being fought. For example, if there is a clear morally legitimate cause for a war, but the public authorities who publicly appeal to that cause in fact secretly have some other and illegitimate reason for going to war (such as the prospect of financial gain, or of personal glory) the war will be morally tainted.

In the present case, some have suggested that a motivation for war with Venezuela is to get access to its oil. At least one GOP lawmaker has indicated as much, though others have cast doubt on this idea. Given Trump’s extreme egotism, it is also not unreasonable to wonder whether he sees a war with Venezuela as a way to make his mark on history. But that is speculation, and it would be unwise to put much emphasis on it given the points already made. Even if we were to concede that there is no strong reason to doubt that a conflict with Venezuela would meet the “right intention” criterion for a just war, that does not change the fact that it has not been shown to meet the first two criteria.

4. Right means: Just war doctrine holds that even if fought for a just cause, by lawful authority, and with a right intention, a war can still be unjust if immoral means are deployed in waging it. Among the requirements of this fourth condition, the one most relevant for present purposes is the imperative to avoid deliberate attacks on non-combatants.

The Trump administration’s dubious attempt to stretch the definition of “terrorism” to rationalize attacks on drug boats gives serious grounds for doubt about whether a war with Venezuela would meet this condition. So too does the incident in which men already rendered helpless by one strike were deliberately killed in a follow-up attack. Narcotics trafficking is gravely evil, but those engaged in it are not per se terrorists, nor are they in any other way relevantly like combatants in a military conflict. To be sure, the paramilitary forces some drug cartels have made use of can plausibly be regarded as legitimate military targets, but it is sophistry to pretend that this entails that just anyone associated with drug running somehow counts as a combatant. It is also true that a case can be made that drug kingpins are worthy of the death penalty, but what that would justify is execution after due process of law, not indiscriminate firing upon anyone suspected of involvement in the drug trade.

Hence, if the Trump administration does not confine attacks to military targets and continues to blur the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, it is hard to see how a war with Venezuela could meet the fourth, “right means” criterion of just war doctrine.

Given the unique gravity of war and the potential unforeseen harms of even justifiable military actions, the burden of proof is always on those who want to go to war, not on those who recommend against doing so. That burden can sometimes be met, but the Trump administration has so far failed to meet it.

It's an open thread!

2025-12-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

We’re due for an open thread. Now is your chance to bring up matters that would otherwise be off-topic. For example, sometimes readers want to respond to something I said on Twitter/X (and write up such a comment under a post here – where it doesn’t get past moderation if it’s not on topic). But feel free to bring up whatever you like. From Cantor’s continuum problem to Canter’s Deli, from Gertrude Stein to grapefruit wine, from Jack Kirby to Kier Kirby, everything is fair game for discussion. Just keep it civil and classy, as always. Previous open threads archived here.

Liberalism and the virtue of gratitude

2025-11-27T10:39:00.000-08:00

In a new essay at Postliberal Order, I reflect on the virtue of gratitude or thanksgiving and the ways it tends to be eroded in liberal societies.

Pope Leo on immigration enforcement

2025-11-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

Pope Leo was recently asked by a reporter about the deportation and detention of illegal immigrants. In response, he made the following remarks:

I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have. If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts, there’s a system of justice. I think there are a lot of problems in the system. No one has said that the United States should have open borders. I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter. But when people are living good lives, and many of them for ten, fifteen, twenty years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful to say the least, and there has been some violence unfortunately, I think that the Bishops have been very clear in what they said and I think that I would just invite all people in the United States to listen to them.

This is a refreshingly calm, reasonable, and nuanced approach. As I have shown in earlier articles (at Public Discourse and at UnHerd), the Church has traditionally affirmed both that wealthy nations have a general obligation to welcome immigrants to the extent they are able, but also that they are not obligated to let in all who seek to enter, that they may put conditions on entry that take account of the economic needs and cultural cohesion of the receiving nation, and that immigrants must obey the law.

Churchmen who comment on immigration these days sometimes acknowledge the right of a nation to control its borders, but only in the vaguest way, and while seeming to criticize all actual efforts at enforcement. The pope’s acknowledgement is much more concrete. He not only eschews the idea of open borders, but specifically says that a nation “has a right to determine who and how and when people enter.” That entails that not everyone must be allowed in, and that a nation can put conditions on the entry of those who are allowed in. The pope also says that it is legitimate to “treat” the problem of those who are in the country illegally, namely through “courts… [and the] system of justice.” That entails that a country need not, in general, simply accept the presence of those who are in the country illegally, but may resort to the legal penalties appropriate to this particular sort of lawbreaking.

Though he doesn’t explicitly say so, deportation is obviously among these penalties. (It would make no sense to say that people shouldn’t enter illegally but then refuse ever to deport someone, just as it would make no sense to say that people shouldn’t steal but then refuse ever to make a thief give back what he has stolen.) The qualification the pope puts on his remarks on controlling borders is not that the law should not be enforced, but rather that this should be done in a humane and respectful way.

He also puts special emphasis on the need to deal respectfully with illegal immigrants who “are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years.” This seems implicitly to acknowledge that the case for punishment or deportation is stronger for those who are engaged in criminal activity (beyond just illegal entry) and for those whose illegal entry was more recent.

This much is likely to be welcome to those who support the Trump administration’s efforts to use deportation to reverse the Biden administration’s lax border policies. However, many of them are also likely to be unhappy with the pope’s view that illegal immigrants who otherwise obey the law, and who have been in the country a long time, ought to be treated more gently. Some seem to take the view that the only thing that matters is whether someone entered the country illegally, so that deportation is equally appropriate for all such people, regardless of how long they have been in the country or how law-abiding they have otherwise been.

However, the moral issues here are not that simple, and the pope’s remarks reflect important and longstanding principles in natural law and Catholic moral theology. Catholics need to consider these principles and resist the temptation to view everything churchmen say about this issue through a political lens, as if absolutely every expression of sympathy for illegal immigrants reflects liberal political commitments rather than Catholic tradition. That just isn’t the case.

St. Alphonsus on custom

Among the relevant considerations here are what moral theologians have said about the way that custom can, under certain circumstances, override human law. St. Alphonsus Liguori addresses the topic in Book I, Treatise II of his Theologia Moralis. He identifies three conditions that custom must meet in order to have this effect.

First, the custom must not be merely a matter of what this or that individual does, but must reflect the practice of the entire community, or at least the majority. The reason is that if the governing authorities tolerate a custom that prevails within the community at large, that can be interpreted as their having at least tacitly consented to it.

Second, what is in question must indeed be merely human law. Custom cannot override natural law or divine law. However, it is not necessary that the initial introduction of the custom have been sinless. Liguori says that although those who first violated the law in such a case sinned, once the custom of violating it has taken hold and been tolerated, those who later follow this custom do not sin, and if the custom prevails long enough it would not be justifiable to punish them for following it.

Third, Liguori says that “a continuous and long-lasting period of time is required” in order for the custom to take root (Grant translation, p. 192). Exactly how long is a matter of dispute, but Liguori notes that some theologians hold that ten years is sufficient. (In this connection, it is interesting to note that Pope Leo refers to those who have been in the country illegally for “ten, fifteen, twenty years.”)

But how could custom override law even given these conditions? I’d explain how as follows. Note first that in the natural law tradition, promulgation is essential to law. If a custom that conflicts with some human law takes root and the governing authorities do not enforce the law but instead implicitly consent to the custom that is contrary to it, then a kind of virtual promulgation of the custom can be said to have occurred.

Note second that law exists for the good of the social order, and social life requires stability and predictability. When a custom is established and then tolerated by public authorities long enough for people to come to rely on it, suddenly to punish them for following the custom would undermine the stability of the lives they have built. And that would be contrary to the reason for which the law exists.

However, St. Alphonsus also indicates that if the governing authorities begin to enforce the human law that the custom conflicts with, this would undermine the force of the custom. From the context, it seems he may be talking about a case where such enforcement prevents the custom from taking deep root in the first place. But he may also mean that even after the custom has taken deep root, if the governing authorities start enforcing the law again, the force of the custom is nullified. Certainly such enforcement would plausibly amount to the authorities’ once again promulgating the original law.

Though St. Alphonsus does not explicitly say so, the implication of his principles would seem to be that those who violated the law during the long but temporary period when the governing authorities were still tolerating such violation should not be punished, but that more recent violators may be punished.

Application to immigration enforcement

This is, of course, all very abstract. How would it apply to the concrete case of illegal immigration? The idea would be this. For decades until recently, U.S. immigration enforcement was more lax, with public authorities tolerating large numbers of illegal immigrants. And this has been a bipartisan tendency, so that the federal government as such (and not merely this or that party that held power at any particular time) can he said to have tolerated this. To be sure, there has always been some enforcement, so that it cannot be said that the authorities had ever tacitly consented to an open borders policy. But (so the argument would continue) they did nevertheless tacitly consent to permitting large numbers of illegal immigrants to remain in the country relatively unmolested, and to secure employment, build families, etc. A custom of forming such communities had taken root and been tacitly consented to by the public authorities.

In recent years, however, the public authorities have once again begun vigorously to enforce the immigration laws. There has been some inconsistency, insofar as vigorous enforcement during the first Trump administration was followed by lax enforcement under Biden, followed by vigorous enforcement once again during the second Trump administration. But it can no longer be said that the federal government as such tacitly consents to the custom of forming communities of large numbers of illegal immigrants. Those who have entered the country illegally in recent years therefore cannot appeal to the force of custom, in the way that those who have been here illegally since the years prior to Trump might appeal to it.

Applying St. Alphonsus’s principles, then, there are grounds for treating illegal immigrants who have been in the country for decades with more leniency than those who have entered the country in recent years. And this, I believe, is basically the thinking that underlies the pope’s remarks. It doesn’t follow that those who have been here for decades may not be punished at all (through fines, for example), because while enforcement was during that time more lax, it was not non-existent. Hence the tacit message sent was not that the public authorities consented to illegal immigration, but rather that they would treat it leniently. But neither does the pope say that those who illegally entered the country decades ago may not be punished at all. What his remarks indicate is rather that they should not be dealt with in the same manner as those who have entered more recently. Because they have been here so long, peremptorily deporting them can be greatly disruptive (to families, for example) and thus contrary to the good of the social order, in a way that deporting those who entered recently is not.

To be sure, reasonable people can disagree about the details. There are multiple moral principles to bring to bear here, and multiple empirical considerations that have to be taken account of in applying them. As in other areas of prudential judgment, it is wise for the Church to set out the general principles and leave it to the faithful and to public authorities to debate and determine the best way to implement them.

The point, though, is that the pope’s remarks cannot justly be dismissed as a sellout to fashionable liberal political opinion. They have a solid foundation in traditional Catholic moral theology and deserve a respectful hearing.

Searle contra deconstruction

2025-11-13T16:09:00.000-08:00

In a new essay at Postliberal Order, I recall the late John Searle’s critique of deconstructionism and postmodernism more generally, which were major influences on today’s woke ideologies.

Remembering John Searle

2025-11-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

I wrote an obituary for John Searle, which appears in the December 2025 issue of First Things.

Cardinal Fernández on doctrinal clarity

2025-11-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

From Twitter/X today, apropos of Mater Populi Fidelis:

There are two sides to the Catholic immigration debate

2025-10-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that the Catholic Church teaches that wealthy nations ought to welcome immigrants. It is less well known that she also teaches that a nation may put conditions on immigration, that it need not take in all those who want to enter it, and that those it does allow in must follow the law. In an article at UnHerd, I spell out this neglected side of Catholic teaching. Defenders and critics of Trump administration policy alike can appeal to moral premises from the Church’s tradition.

Vallicella on Immortal Souls

2025-10-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

At his Substack Philosophy in Progress, my old buddy Bill Vallicella engages with my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature. Bill kindly opines: “[It] may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it.” All the same, he has doubts about the compatibility of two of the books key themes: the Aristotelian hylomorphic conception of the soul as the form of the body, and the continued existence of any particular individual’s soul after the death of his body. Let’s take a look at his objection.

Hylomorphism in brief

Longtime readers of this blog or of my books will be familiar with the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of physical substances as composites of form and matter, where (to a first approximation) matter is the stuff out of which such a substance is made and form is what organizes that stuff in a way that allows it to manifest its characteristic properties and powers. More precisely, it is substantial form that does so. And the soul is a substantial form of the kind that gives a physical substance the distinctive properties and powers of a living thing.

Matter, on Aquinas’s account, is what makes it possible for there to be more than one instance of any species of physical substance (using “species” here in the traditional broad metaphysical sense, not the narrower biological sense). Different lumps of iron all have the same basic nature, as do different oak trees and different poodles. But if they have the same nature, how can they be different substances? The answer is that there are different bits of matter which have all taken on the same nature. Matter is in this way the “principle of individuation” of physical substances.

When the matter of a purely physical substance loses its substantial form, that particular substance goes out of existence altogether. For example, when you chop down an oak tree and burn it in the fireplace, that particular oak tree is gone. The matter out of which it is made persists, but it has taken on an entirely different form, the form of ash. The substantial form of an oak tree is no longer present in it (even though there are, of course, other oak trees, and they have such a substantial form).

Now, Aquinas thinks of angels as substances that are purely intellectual in nature, and thus (since he takes the intellect to be incorporeal) to be immaterial substances. Because they are immaterial, there is no way to individuate one member of an angelic species from another. There can still be different species of angel, but each will have exactly one member. Hence there are as many angelic species as there are angels.

The human intellect, like angelic intellects, is incorporeal. How, then, can there be more than one member of the human species? The answer, for Aquinas, is that while human beings are not purely corporeal substances (unlike iron, oak trees, and poodles) neither are they purely incorporeal substances (as angels are). A human being is a unique sort of substance that has both corporeal properties and powers (such as eating, walking, seeing, and hearing) and incorporeal ones (thinking and willing).

Because human beings are partly corporeal, they can be individuated from one another as different members of the same species. But because they are partly incorporeal, they do not go out of existence altogether at death. They carry on as incomplete substances after death, reduced to just their intellectual (and thus incorporeal) operations. Because every substance has a form, and human beings continue on as incomplete substances, a human being’s form continues on after death. And since the soul just is the substantial form of a human being, that means that the soul carries on after death. It no longer manifests the corporeal powers that it would normally give human beings (since, absent the body, there’s no matter for it to inform). But the incorporeal powers can still manifest.

Vallicella’s objection

Bill begins his criticism of this view by saying that Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism holds that “substances of the same kind have the same substantial form.” In the case of human beings, he continues, “since these substances of the human kind have the same form, it is not their form that makes them numerically different… It is the matter of their respective bodies that makes numerically different human beings numerically different.”

But in that case, Bill argues, when the matter of some particular human being goes at death, there is nothing left to individuate him. Hence there can be nothing of him, in particular, that carries on. Bill writes:

After death a human person ceases to exist as the particular person that he or she is. But that is to say that the particular person, Socrates say, ceases to exist, full stop. What survives is at best a form which is common to all persons. That form, however, cannot be you or me. Thus the particularity, individuality, haecceity, ipseity of persons, which is essential to persons, is lost at death and does not survive post mortem.

Bill appears to think that if the Aristotelian-Thomistic view were applied consistently, it would have to say of human beings what it says of iron, oak trees, and poodles. Just as the particular individual oak tree that you burn in the fireplace is altogether gone (even though there are other oak trees that carry on), so too, after death, is the particular individual human being altogether gone (even though there are other human beings who carry on).

But there are two problems with Bill’s argument. The first is that it rests on a mistaken conception of substantial form. The second is that it neglects the crucial difference the Thomist says exists between human beings and every other corporeal substance, which is that human beings have incorporeal intellectual powers.

Let’s consider these points in order. When Bill says that, for hylomorphism, “substances of the same kind have the same substantial form,” he speaks ambiguously. That could mean that, while each individual physical substance has its own substantial form, with physical substances of the same species their substantial forms are of the same kind. That would be a correct characterization of the Aristotelian-Thomistic position, but unfortunately it does not seem to be what Bill means. He seems to mean instead that there is one substantial form shared by all human beings in common – not one kind of substantial form, but one substantial form.

But that is not what Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism says, and it is not true. There are, it seems to me, two ways to read Bill’s claim. On one reading, the substantial form of human beings is a kind of Platonic Form, and different human bodies are all human because they participate in that same one Form. The problem with this is that it isn’t an Aristotelian conception of form at all, but a Platonic conception. A substantial form, for the Aristotelian, isn’t an abstract Platonic object in which a thing participates. Rather, it is a concrete principle intrinsic to a substance that grounds its characteristic properties and powers.

The other way to read Bill’s characterization of hylomorphism is as holding that human beings share one substantial form in the sense that they are all part of one big substance – humanity considered as something like a single organism, with different individual human beings as analogous to body parts that that organism gains or loses as people are conceived or die. But this is obviously not Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s view. They take human beings to be substances, not parts of a substance. And as substances, each must have his own substantial form.

I think it’s the first of these interpretations (what I’m characterizing as the Platonic one), rather than the second, that Bill has in mind. But, again, it is a mistaken interpretation. It just isn’t the case that you, me, and Socrates all share the same one substantial form in the sense Bill’s argument requires. Rather, you have your own substantial form (and thus soul), I have mine, and Socrates has his.

The same thing is true of an oak tree. This oak tree has its own individual substantial form, that oak tree has its own individual substantial form, and so on. The reason none of them continue after death is that everything an oak tree has or does – and thus every property or power its substantial form gives it – depends on matter. Hence when the matter goes, there’s nothing left for the form to inform, nothing left for it to be the form of.

This brings us to the second crucial point, which is that a human being, unlike an oak tree, has properties and powers that do not depend on matter – namely, the intellectual properties and powers. Hence, a human being is not an entirely corporeal substance, but a partly incorporeal one. This incorporeal part carries on after the body dies, so that there is in this case (unlike the case of the oak tree) something for the form to continue to be the form of.

And that is the sense in which the soul carries on beyond the death of the body. Yes, the soul is the form of the body, because it is the form of a substance that it partially bodily in nature. But unlike an oak or a poodle, a human being is not entirely bodily in nature, so that there is (as it were) still work for the human soul to do even after the body is gone.

Why does this not make the human soul after death like an angel, the unique member of its own distinct species? The answer is that the soul was once conjoined to its body and always retains its orientation to that particular body. An angel without a body is no less an angel for that. It is complete in its incorporeal mode of existence. By contrast, a human being without a body (that is to say, a disembodied soul) is less of a human being insofar as it is an incomplete human being. Incorporeality is normal for an angel, but not for a human being. This orientation toward matter, which persists even in the absence of matter, suffices to individuate human souls.

Of course, Bill may raise further objections, to some or all of what I’ve said here. The point, though, is to indicate why I think the particular objection he raises in his post fails. (Longtime readers might remember that this issue is in fact a matter of longstanding dispute between Bill and me. I’ve linked to some earlier posts on the subject below.)

I want to add in closing that I have been reading Bill’s recent book Life’s Path with pleasure and profit, and advise you to do the same. Bill is among the rare contemporary philosophers who live up to the traditional ideal of producing both solid technical academic philosophical work (as in his superb earlier book A Paradigm Theory of Existence) and insightful moral, political, and other practical reflections accessible to a more popular audience (as in the more recent book). Read and learn.

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism, Part II

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism, Part III

Fastiggi and Sonna on Catholicism and capital punishment (Updated)

2025-10-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

Recently, theologian Robert Fastiggi was interviewed about the topic of the Church and the death penalty by apologist Suan Sonna on his podcast Intellectual Catholicism. Fastiggi’s views are the focus of the discussion, but Sonna, who largely agrees with him, adds some points of his own. Their main concern in the discussion is to try to defend the changes Pope Francis made to the Church’s presentation of her teaching on the subject.

I appreciate their civility, and Fastiggi’s call at the end of the interview for charity in dealing with those who disagree. But their attempt fails. Much of what Fastiggi has to say are reheated claims that I have already refuted in past exchanges with him, such as the two-part essay I wrote in response to his series on the death penalty at Where Peter Is. (You can find it here and here. The essay was reprinted as a single long article in Ultramontanism and Tradition, edited by Peter Kwasniewski.) Fastiggi simply repeats his assertions without acknowledging, much less answering, my rebuttals. He also makes some new claims, which are no more plausible than the older ones. Let’s take a look.

A straw man

In any fruitful discussion of this topic, it must constantly be kept in mind that there are two questions that need to be clearly distinguished. First, is the death penalty intrinsically wrong? And second, even if it is not intrinsically wrong, is it nevertheless morally better never to resort to it? To answer “Yes” to the first question is to say that capital punishment of its very nature, and regardless of the circumstances, is wrong, and thus can never even in principle be used. But someone could answer “No” to the first question and still answer “Yes” to the second. To take this view is to say that while in theory the death penalty could be justified in certain circumstances, in practice those circumstances never obtain, at least not today, and that the moral considerations that tell against its use outweigh those that speak in favor of it.

People who comment on the topic of Catholicism and capital punishment very frequently ignore this distinction. The result is that they often talk past one another and the discussion generates more heat than light. Now, at the beginning of their conversation, Fastiggi and Sonna are, to their credit, careful to note the distinction. But unfortunately, later in their discussion, they ignore it, and this leads them to attack a straw man.

In particular, Fastiggi claims (after the 35 minute mark in the video) that “people say, well, the Church has always taught, always allowed for the [death penalty].” Arguing against this, Fastiggi cites some Fathers of the Church who were against capital punishment, and concludes that “it’s almost like a myth, this 2,000 year old tradition, but if it’s repeated enough by commentators and writers, then people begin to believe it.” Similarly, Sonna remarks (around the 45 minute mark) that “a lot of people have this impression that the Church, as if it were this uniform block, this constant unchanging permanent wall, has just consistently said the death penalty’s fine, you know, go ahead and do it.” But in fact, he continues, “historically, there was an uneasiness at times with the death penalty.” Fastiggi and Sonna make a big deal out of this theme, as if it is a damning point against Catholic defenders of the death penalty.

But not so fast. For here too we need to distinguish two claims, namely:

(1) The Church always taught for 2,000 years that the death penalty is not intrinsically wrong.

(2) The Church always taught for 2,000 years that the death penalty is not only not intrinsically wrong, but that it is generally a good idea and should be used.

I know of many Catholic defenders of capital punishment who have asserted claim (1), including myself. But claim (1) is by no means a “myth.” It is demonstrably true, as Joseph Bessette and I document in detail in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. Indeed, in his own book on the subject, E. Christian Brugger, the foremost Catholic theologian who argues against capital punishment – and someone who even claims that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong – admits that (1) is true. In fact, even Fastiggi and Sonna appear to concede it. Fastiggi acknowledges that the Fathers he cites “don’t necessarily challenge the state’s right to [execute],” but merely argue against exercising that right. And Sonna admits that “maybe we can’t dispute that the state has the right, technically, to do it.”

By contrast, claim (2) is indeed false, for just the reasons Fastiggi gives. But I cannot think of a single person who endorses claim (2) in the first place. (Certainly Joe Bessette and I explicitly acknowledge in our book that some Fathers and popes held that it was morally better not to resort to the death penalty.) So, when Fastiggi cites what certain of the Fathers say as evidence against a “myth” he alleges many are peddling, he is attacking a thesis that no one in fact holds. It seems otherwise to him and to Sonna only because they ignore the distinction between (1) and (2).

Misrepresenting John Paul II

Sloppiness of this kind often leads Fastiggi to misrepresent the views of his opponents and the nature of their disagreement with him. It also leads him to misrepresent a pope he appeals to in defense of his position, namely Pope St. John Paul II. About seven minutes into the video, Fastiggi suggests that the Church now condemns not only killing the innocent, but “intentional killing” as such. He says:

The reason why the Church has now developed her teaching to be opposed to capital punishment is because it involves intentional killing, and then the question of course of whether or not a murderer loses human dignity and the right to life. And really, the turning point of this was St. John Paul II. In Evangelium Vitae number 9, he says not even a murderer loses his dignity.

After the 50 minute mark, Fastiggi returns to the theme, and says:

I think a leap was made with the understanding that punishing people by intentionally killing them is an offense against the inviolability of life. The theoretical question is, does a serious crime take away the right to life? And John Paul II answered that in Evangelium Vitae 9. That was the breakthrough, that not even a murderer loses his dignity and right to life.

This is sleight of hand. It is true that Evangelium Vitae 9 says that “not even a murderer loses his personal dignity.” But the encyclical nowhere says that a murderer does not lose his right to life. Instead, it speaks of “the absolute inviolability of innocent human life,” “the inviolable right to life of every innocent human being” and again, of “fundamental human rights, beginning with the right to life of every innocent human being”; it says that “as far as the right to life is concerned, every innocent human being is absolutely equal to all others”; it teaches that “a law which violates an innocent person's natural right to life is unjust and, as such, is not valid as a law”; and it calls for “unconditional respect for the right to life of every innocent person” (emphasis added). And it explicitly allows that the execution of those guilty of the gravest offenses is permissible “in cases of absolute necessity.” That would not be possible if the murderer never loses his right to life.

It is true that Evangelium Vitae also says that bloodless means are preferable where possible because they are “more in line with human dignity” and “more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” But notice that that does not entail that capital punishment is not at all in line with human dignity, only that it is less in line with it. (Compare: To say that Ricky is more talented than Fred does not entail that Fred is altogether untalented; to say that Ethel is more intelligent than Lucy does not entail that Lucy is altogether unintelligent; and so on.) So, from the claim that (a) not even a murderer loses his dignity, together with the claim that (b) the death penalty is less in line with human dignity than milder punishments, it simply does not follow that (c) capital punishment is flatly incompatible with the murderer’s dignity, and neither does it follow that (d) the murderer does not lose his right to life. Nor, again, does John Paul II draw those conclusions.

Perhaps Fastiggi would say that John Paul II should have drawn those conclusions, and that in failing to do so he was being inconsistent. But there are several problems with such a response. First, it wouldn’t change the fact that John Paul II did not in fact draw them, and thus did not in fact say the things Fastiggi attributes to him. Second, for the reasons I have given, the conclusions do not in fact follow logically from John Paul II’s premises, so that the pope was not being inconsistent. Third, if there are two ways of reading a papal document, in one of which it contains an inconsistency and in the other of which it does not, the second is to be preferred. Hence, for that reason alone, we should reject Fastiggi’s reading. Fourth, Fastiggi’s reading would imply that John Paul II was not only not consistent with himself, but also contradicted his predecessors – such as Pope Pius XII, who taught:

Even when it is a question of the execution of a man condemned to death, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to live. It is reserved rather to the public authority to deprive the criminal of the benefit of life when already, by his crime, he has deprived himself of the right to live. (Address to the First International Congress on the Histopathology of the Nervous System, 1952, emphasis added)

Certainly, implicitly to accuse one pope (John Paul II) of inconsistency and another pope (Pius XII) of grave moral error is a strange way to try to defend a third pope (Francis)!

In any event, Joe Bessette and I provide a very detailed analysis of John Paul II’s teaching at pp. 144-82 of our book. As we demonstrate there, when one considers the entirety of the evidence (and not just the usual cherry-picked phrases Catholic opponents of capital punishment like to quote), it is crystal clear that the pope’s teaching was in no way an alteration or even development of traditional doctrine, but simply a prudential judgment about how to apply that doctrine to contemporary circumstances. Like so many of our critics, Fastiggi offers no response at all to the arguments we give there, but pretends they don’t exist.

Obfuscating on Pope Francis

Beginning at about 12 minutes into their discussion, Fastiggi and Sonna argue that Pope Francis has, in any event, not actually taught that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong. They focus on the pope’s 2018 revision to the Catechism, and suggest that it implicitly acknowledges that capital punishment is permissible in theory, and simply teaches that it is inadmissible under current circumstances.

This is a defensible position, as far as it goes. I have always myself acknowledged that the revision can and should be read in such a way that it is not teaching that capital punishment is intrinsically evil. But that is only part of the story. For one thing, the problem with the revision is that this is not a natural reading of it. The revised text characterizes the death penalty as “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” On a natural reading, that seems to imply that capital punishment is intrinsically at odds with human dignity (rather than being at odds with it only if certain conditions fail to hold), and thus intrinsically wrong. Yes, it need not be read that way, but magisterial statements should be clearly consistent with traditional teaching, not merely consistent with it on a strained reading.

For another thing, other magisterial statements made during Pope Francis’s pontificate are much harder to reconcile with the traditional teaching. For example, in a 2017 address, the pope asserted that “the death penalty is an inhumane measure that, regardless of how it is carried out, abases human dignity. It is per se contrary to the Gospel” (emphasis added). The italicized phrases are most naturally read as claiming that capital punishment is always and intrinsically wrong.

Some might reply that this entails only that the death penalty is contrary to the higher demands of Christian morality, not that it is contrary to natural law. That would be bad enough, because (as I have shown elsewhere, such as in this article) the traditional teaching of the Church is that it is not contrary to Christian morality any more than it is contrary to natural law.

But to make matters worse, the declaration Dignitas Infinita, issued by the DDF during Francis’s pontificate, implies that capital punishment is contrary even to natural law. For it asserts that “the death penalty… violates the inalienable dignity of every person, regardless of the circumstances,” and that this dignity is grounded in “human nature apart from all cultural change.” The declaration also asserts that human dignity must be upheld “beyond every circumstance,” “in all circumstances,” “regardless of the circumstances,” and so on. Here there is no wiggle room for saying that the document judges capital punishment to be contrary to human dignity only if certain conditions are not met. For it flatly asserts that it violates human dignity “regardless of the circumstances.” Nor is there any wiggle room for saying that the document nevertheless allows in principle for such a violation of human dignity under certain circumstances (which would be a bizarre idea in any case). For it explicitly says that human dignity “prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter,” and so on. The logical implication of all this is that capital punishment is absolutely ruled out as always and intrinsically wrong. And that straightforwardly contradicts traditional teaching.

Sonna, at least, appears to acknowledge that the traditional teaching cannot be reversed. So, if he is going to be consistent, he will have to admit that these statements issued during Francis’s pontificate are problematic – that they are poorly formulated at best, and erroneous at worst (which is possible in non-ex cathedra magisterial statements).

Parallel doctrinal reversals?

Fastiggi is another story. At around 40 minutes in, he says: “But hasn’t the Church definitively taught that the death penalty is allowed? No, it hasn’t.” And earlier, at around 25 minutes in, he says that “even if the Church has not yet, maybe someday she’ll say it’s intrinsically immoral, but because it had been accepted for so long we don’t need to say that right now.”

But Fastiggi is simply mistaken. When all the relevant evidence is taken account of, it is manifest that the doctrine that the death penalty is not intrinsically wrong has been taught by both scripture and the Church in an irreformable manner. I set out some of this evidence in a long Catholic World Report article from some years back, and Joe Bessette and I do so in greater depth in our book. Fastiggi says nothing even to acknowledge, much less answer, these arguments. He merely begs the question against them.

Fastiggi also says that even if the Church does not hold that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong, it doesn’t follow that its teaching against it is merely a prudential judgment which Catholics need only respectfully consider but not necessarily follow. For the Church has the authority to prohibit even certain practices that are not inherently wrong. Fastiggi gives the example of cremation, which was for a long time prohibited by the Church but now is permitted under certain circumstances. He also cites polygamy and divorce, which were tolerated under the old covenant but have been forbidden under the new covenant.

Fastiggi is right about that much, but these facts don’t suffice to show that the Church can do more than issue a non-binding prudential judgment against use of the death penalty. The reason is that it is the state and not the Church which has the responsibility and right under natural law to do what is necessary to ensure the safety of the community. This is why, after setting out the criteria for fighting a just war, the Catechism goes on to say that “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (2309). In other words, the Church can teach that a war is just only when the cause is just, there is a serious chance of success, no other options are likely to work, and so on. But the Church does not have the expertise or authority to determine how these criteria apply in a particular case. For example, it does not have the relevant expertise to determine whether some option other than war would suffice to repel an aggressor in a particular case, or whether a certain military strategy is likely to succeed. These are matters of prudential judgment, and it is the state rather than the Church that has the right and responsibility to make that judgment.

But the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to capital punishment. The revision to the catechism claims, for example, that modern systems of imprisonment are sufficient to protect others against the most dangerous offenders. But the Church has no more expertise on that sort of issue than it does on military strategy. If government officials have good empirical reason to believe that the death penalty saves lives – for example, if they have evidence that it has a significant deterrent effect, or that it is needed to protect prison guards or other prisoners from the most violent offenders – then they have just as much a right under natural law to utilize capital punishment as they do to fight a just war.

This sort of reasoning does not apply to cremation, which is why it is not an interesting parallel to the case of capital punishment. The examples of polygamy and divorce also do nothing to help Fastiggi’s case, and not just because (unlike capital punishment) the state does not need to keep them open as options in order to do its job of protecting society. There is also the following glaring disanalogy: The New Testament explicitly forbids divorce and clearly opposes polygamy too, as has the Church ever since. But the New Testament explicitly allows capital punishment (e.g. in Romans 13), as has the Church ever since. Cremation, polygamy, and divorce thus offer no precedent for an absolute prohibition on capital punishment.

Fastiggi and Sonna suggest other alleged doctrinal reversals that they think provide a precedent for a reversal on capital punishment. But they are all bad analogies that provide no support whatsoever for such a reversal. For example, Fastiggi points to the fact that theologians were once free to disagree about the Immaculate Conception, but later the Church made a dogmatic pronouncement on the matter so that such legitimate disagreement is no longer possible.

The problem with this purported analogy should be obvious. To teach that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong would directly contradict what the Church had consistently taught for 2,000 years and what she had always understood scripture to teach. Proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception involved nothing remotely like that. In particular, it in no way involved the Church contradicting some doctrine she had previously taught.

Fastiggi alleges that there is also a parallel between capital punishment and the case of torture. He contrasts a passing remark on the subject from Pope Innocent I, which left its use open, with the more recent teaching of the Church condemning torture. Here too the alleged parallel is spurious. The Church holds that scripture cannot teach moral error, and she has for two millennia acknowledged that scripture repeatedly sanctions capital punishment. But there is no such scriptural sanction for torture. The Church has also for two millennia herself consistently and clearly taught that capital punishment can under certain circumstances be licit, to the point of including this doctrine in major teaching documents such as the catechisms of Pope St. Pius V and Pope St. John Paul II. The teaching was also endorsed by the Fathers (even those who opposed the use of capital punishment in practice), has been consistently affirmed by the Church’s greatest theologians (including many Doctors of the Church), and routinely endorsed in approved manuals of moral theology. None of this can be said of torture.

Fastiggi and Sonna also suggest that the development of the Church’s teaching on slavery provides a precedent for a change on capital punishment. But this alleged parallel too is phony. For one thing, here too Fastiggi and Sonna muddy the waters by ignoring long-established and crucial distinctions. For the word “slavery” is ambiguous. What most people think of when they hear this term is chattel slavery, which involves claiming ownership of another human being in the way one might own an animal or inanimate object. The Church does indeed teach that this is intrinsically evil, but she has never taught otherwise. Indeed, she has condemned this practice for centuries (as I document in my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory).

There are, however, less extreme forms of servitude that the Church has taken to be at least in theory not unjust. In particular, there is penal servitude, which is forced labor in punishment for a crime. The idea here is that if the state can, in punishment for a sufficiently grave crime, take away an offender’s liberty for a prolonged period of time (even for life), then it can also require him to work. And there is indentured servitude, a prolonged period of labor without payment as a way to repay a debt or in exchange for some benefit. The idea here is that if someone can legitimately enter a work contract, or have his wages garnished in order to pay a debt, then by extension he can make himself a servant in order to pay a debt.

The trouble with these practices is that in concrete circumstances they are fraught with moral hazard, and were often used to rationalize what amounted to chattel slavery (such as when captives taken in war were enslaved on the spurious grounds that they were guilty of the offense of fighting an unjust war, and thus could be forced into penal servitude). Hence, moral theologians settled on the view (quite correctly, I would say) that when all relevant moral considerations are brought to bear, it is clear that they ought flatly to be banned altogether.

There is also the consideration that in scripture, slavery is merely tolerated as an institution that happened to exist, rather than put forward as a positive good. By contrast, the death penalty is not merely tolerated, but in some cases is positively sanctioned (not only in the Mosaic law, but in other contexts such as Genesis 9 and Romans 13).

So, when all the distinctions are made, the argument that “the Church reversed herself on slavery, so she can reverse herself on capital punishment” falls apart. There was no such reversal, and thus no precedent for a reversal on capital punishment.

Magisterial credibility

This brings us to Fastiggi’s remarks about Genesis 9 and Romans 13, where he repeats claims that I have already refuted in my previous exchange with him. And once again, he simply ignores rather than answers the objections I raised there. I direct the interested reader to that earlier essay of mine. (In particular, see the sections titled “Genesis and the death penalty” and “The Mosaic Law versus the Gospel?”)

Fastiggi acknowledges that, in the instruction Donum Veritatis, the Church affirms that Catholics have the right respectfully to raise questions about deficient magisterial statements and ask for clarification. He says that this nevertheless gives Catholics no right to “dissent” from the teaching of the Church. I agree with him about all that. But Fastiggi seems to think that it rules out the sort of respectful criticisms that I and others with the relevant expertise have raised. It does not, and I have many times given arguments that show that it does not. These arguments too are ones that Fastiggi simply ignores rather than tries to answer.

For example, the criticisms I have raised with respect to the 2018 revision of the Catechism have nothing to do with “dissenting” from some teaching of the Church. Rather, the whole point is that the teaching is unclear – that it is far from obvious exactly what it is that Catholics are being asked to assent to. True, the revision declares that the death penalty is now “inadmissible.” But the trouble is that the force of this teaching is not obvious. I have argued that there are only two ways to read it. On the one hand, it might be read as claiming that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong and thus “inadmissible” in an absolute and unqualified way. The problem is that this would contradict scripture and tradition, and thus amount to a doctrinal error (something that can occur in non-ex cathedra statements). Moreover, even Fastiggi and Sonna acknowledge that this is not the right way to read it.

But when we take account of all the relevant considerations (both from within the document and from the larger tradition of the Church), the only other way to read it is as saying that the death penalty is “inadmissible” unless certain conditions hold (such as that resort to it is necessary in order to protect society). And if this is the case, then the teaching amounts to a non-binding prudential judgment. For the “unless” part is not something concerning which the Church has any special authority. For example, whether capital punishment has a significant deterrence effect, and whether modern prison systems really do afford the means of protecting others from all violent offenders, are empirical matters of social science, not matters of faith or morals.

For seven years now, Fastiggi and I have been arguing about this issue, and in all that time I have never gotten a clear answer from him about what a third possible interpretation would look like. In any event, if someone asks me “Do you dissent from the teaching of the revision of the Catechism?” my answer is “No, I do not dissent from it. I assent to it, and interpret it in the only way I know of that makes sense – namely, as a non-binding prudential judgment.” I also say, however, that the revision is badly formulated and potentially misleading. And I have every right respectfully to raise such a criticism, by the norms set out in Donum Veritatis. Fastiggi and others may continue to yell “Dissent!” but yelling is all they would be doing. I have yet to hear an actual argument showing that my position amounts to dissent.

I acknowledge that my criticism of Dignitas Infinita goes beyond this. Here, I think we have a document that is not merely ambiguous, but very hard (at best) to defend from the charge of flatly contradicting scripture and tradition and thus being erroneous. But if someone has a plausible way of reconciling it with scripture and tradition, I’m all ears.

Even if it is indeed in error, however, this is possible in non-ex cathedra documents. Indeed, Fastiggi himself is implicitly committed to this thesis. For, again, he holds that the Church could end up teaching that capital punishment is intrinsically immoral. And if that were correct, it would follow that for two millennia, the Church got things gravely wrong on matters of basic moral principle and biblical interpretation. That is a very radical claim, and indeed far more radical than anything I have said. If I am right, then one pope has gotten things wrong about capital punishment. If Fastiggi is right, then every previous pope who has taught on this topic has been wrong, as have the Fathers and Doctors of the Church (and indeed scripture itself). Fastiggi likes to paint views like mine as extreme, but in fact it is his views that are extreme.

The fact that he presents them politely and under the guise of obedience to the magisterium doesn’t change that one whit. It is the content of the views that matter, and the content is radically subversive of the credibility of the Church, because it implies that the Church may have been gravely in error about a matter of natural law, the demands of the Gospel, and the proper understanding of scripture for her entire history until now. And if she could be that wrong for that long, what else might she be wrong about?

At about one hour and three minutes into the interview, Fastiggi says, with no sense of irony: “There has to be trust in the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the magisterium. And that’s what I find missing in many of these papal critics. They don’t trust the Holy Spirit.” Yet Fastiggi is the one suggesting that the magisterium may have, for two millennia, consistently erred about a grave matter of natural law, Christian morality, and scriptural interpretation. Fastiggi is the one suggesting that the Holy Spirit might have permitted this. But what is more likely – that that is the case, or that a single pope (Francis) issued a badly formulated catechism revision and permitted the DDF to slip a doctrinal error into a declaration? I submit that, if the Holy Spirit truly is guiding the magisterium, the scenario I posit is manifestly more plausible than the one Fastiggi is positing.

The reality is that the critics do trust in the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the magisterium. They trust that the Holy Spirit would not have allowed the Church to be that wrong for that long about something that important, so that it must be those who now contradict the past magisterium who are mistaken. This has always been theoretically possible, because the Church has always acknowledged that non-definitive exercises of the magisterium can fall into error. Indeed this has in fact happened before in the case even of papal teaching, as the famous examples of popes Honorius I and John XXII illustrate. And Fastiggi’s own position entails it. If, as he insists, it may turn out that two millennia of past teaching of the magisterium on capital punishment was wrong, then it follows logically that it is also possible that it is instead Pope Francis’s statements on the subject that are wrong. And as I have shown elsewhere (here and here), the Church has also always affirmed that there can be cases where the faithful may respectfully criticize the magisterium, even a pope, for teaching contrary to the tradition.

What Fastiggi never seems to appreciate is that his approach damages the credibility of the magisterium by appearing to saddle it with what, in logic, is known as a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Suppose I say “No true Scotsman would be an empiricist,” and you respond “But David Hume was an empiricist!” And suppose I reply “Well, then David Hume must not really have been a true Scotsman,” and that I insist that everybody has for 250 years been misinterpreting all the evidence that seems obviously to show that he was an empiricist. Needless to say, this would not lend me or my thesis any credibility at all, but would do precisely the opposite. It would reveal me to be intellectually dishonest and unwilling to look at the evidence objectively.

Now, the First Vatican Council declared that “the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine.” The Second Vatican Council stated that “the living teaching office of the Church… is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on.” Pope Benedict XVI taught that the pope “must not proclaim his own ideas… he is bound to the great community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations that have developed throughout the Church's pilgrimage.”

But the liceity in principle of the death penalty has for two millennia been consistently taught by the Church, and has for two millennia been understood by the Church to be the teaching of scripture, which is the word of God. Hence, for a pope to teach that the death penalty is intrinsically immoral would manifestly be a case of attempting to “make known some new doctrine.” It would manifestly be a case of putting himself “above the word of God” instead of “teaching only what has been handed on.” It would manifestly be a case of attempting to “proclaim his own ideas” rather than being “bound to the great community of faith of all times.”

Fastiggi, however, takes the view that if a pope were to teach such a thing, then the conclusion we should draw is that the liceity in principle of capital punishment must after all not really ever have been the teaching of scripture; that it must not really be a “new doctrine” but somehow implicit in what scripture and the Church have always taught; that it must not really after all have been among “the binding interpretations” to which a pope must conform himself. And that is like dogmatically insisting that Hume must not really have been a true Scotsman after all. It gives aid and comfort to Protestant and skeptical critics of Catholicism, who argue that the Church’s claim to continuity with scripture and tradition is a sham – that at the end of the day, the popes will just teach whatever they like and then arbitrarily slap the label “traditional” on it.

It may be that Fastiggi is not sufficiently sensitive to this problem, whereas I have always emphasized it, in part because of the differences in our academic and intellectual contexts. Fastiggi is a theologian teaching at a seminary, the primary job of which is the formation of priests. And it seems that he writes pretty much exclusively for Catholic audiences. I’m a philosopher teaching at a secular college, who often writes on matters of apologetics. And my writing is directed as much to the general public as it is to fellow Catholics. When Fastiggi sees Catholics criticizing even obviously deficient magisterial statements, even in a respectful and well-informed way, his instinctive reaction appears to be: “It’s unseemly for Catholics to be doing that, no matter what the pope says! Just keep quiet, and trust providence to sort it out.” When I see Catholics tying themselves in logical knots trying to defend obviously deficient magisterial statements, my instinctive reaction is: “Those are manifestly terrible arguments, you’re making Catholicism look ridiculous! Just frankly admit that there’s a problem, and trust providence to sort it out.” What Fastiggi and I agree about is that providence will sort it out, but we disagree about what form this might take and what role respectful criticism of deficient magisterial statements can play.

At the end of the day, though, such psychological speculations are not what matter. What matters is what the evidence of scripture, tradition, and the entirety of the magisterial history of the Church (not just the last few years of it) have to say. And as I have argued, that evidence tells decisively against Fastiggi’s position.

UPDATE 10/18: At Substack, Suan Sonna offers some comments which clarify his position. I thank him for his civil and charitable reply.

Against flag burning

2025-09-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

In a new essay at Postliberal Order, I argue that burning the flag as an expression of contempt for one’s country is contrary to the virtue of piety, is something we therefore have no right to do under natural law, and may, in principle, therefore be outlawed by the state. I also argue that the Supreme Court was, in Texas v. Johnson, mistaken in claiming that a right to burn the flag is implied by the U.S. constitution.

John Searle (1932-2025)

2025-09-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

Daily Nous has reported that John Searle has died. Searle was one of the true greats of contemporary philosophy, having made huge and lasting contributions to several of its subdisciplines, but especially to philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His work had an enormous influence on me in my undergrad and graduate student years. His books Minds, Brains, and Science, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Speech Acts, and The Rediscovery of the Mind were especially formative. And his uncommonly lucid style was the main model for my own approach to philosophical writing. I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to him on several occasions, and Steven Postrel and I interviewed him for Reason magazine over twenty-five years ago.

Searle was famously self-confident, but he had a sense of humor about it. In the Q and A session after a talk I gave at a conference we were both at, he strongly took issue with the Aristotelianism I was defending. After the session I told him I was surprised he was not more open to Aristotelian arguments, given the article his colleague Alan Code had contributed to a festschrift on Searle, arguing that there were important parallels between Searle’s views and Aristotle’s. With a twinkle in his eye, he replied: “Oh yeah, I remember that article. I thought he made Aristotle sound pretty good!”

I’ve had a fair amount to say about Searle’s views in various places, most recently in my book Immortal Souls. Some readers might find of interest a couple of papers wherein I engage with his views in depth: “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist” and “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature.”

Searle suffered enormous harm to his personal reputation and career in the last years of his life. Most who know of this have only heard one side of the story. There is another side to it, which is given by his longtime secretary Jennifer Hudin in an email that has been published at Colin McGinn’s blog.

What I can say with certainty is that philosophy is in debt to his work, and that I am personally in great debt to it. Though I was never formally his student, it feels as if one of my teachers has died. Requiescat in pace.

How not to limit free speech

2025-09-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

I am by no means a free speech absolutist. In an article at Postliberal Order a couple of years ago, I set out the natural law position on the issue, noting that the teleology or final cause of our rational and communicative faculties entails not only a broad range of freedom of expression, but also definite limits. There can be no natural right to expression that is positively contrary to what is good for us given our nature as rational social animals. However, that by no means entails that just any old limitation on free speech imposed in the name of a good cause is a good idea, or even justifiable in principle.

I won’t repeat here everything I said in the earlier article, but the relevant principles are as follows. Natural rights, in general, exist for the purpose of facilitating the realization of the ends toward which our nature directs us. In the case of our rational and communicative powers, that end is the discovery and dissemination of what is true and good. We have a natural right to speech that facilitates this end. And while that entails that there is no right to express erroneous or bad ideas as such, it nevertheless does allow for a wide range of freedom to express even ideas that happen to be erroneous or bad. The reason is that, given the limitations on our cognitive powers, we are bound to fall into error sometimes, and the normal means of correcting these errors is the give and take of discussion and debate. Furthermore, those who would censor erroneous and bad ideas are (since they are no less human than anyone else) themselves prone to error, and therefore may end up censoring true and good ideas.

There is a presumption, then, in favor of free expression, precisely because it facilitates the natural end of our rational powers. However, not all forms of expression are protected by this presumption, because not all forms of expression have anything to do with our rational powers. For example, pornography does not appeal to our rationality and in no way contributes to discovering truth or to debate by which we might root out error. It appeals instead to our appetites, and in a way that corrupts them. In particular, it fosters and even habituates sexual desire that is disordered in its intensity and its objects. It thereby corrupts sexual morals, and thereby weakens the institution of the family, the foundation of all social order. Accordingly, pornography is in no way protected by the natural right to free speech.

There are also ideas which not only happen to be erroneous or bad, but have a tendency positively to frustrate the pursuit of truth and the living of good lives. Examples would be views that deny the very reality of truth or goodness as objective features of the world. Since the purpose of the right to free expression is to safeguard the pursuit and dissemination of what is true and good, it can hardly protect speech that denies the very reality of the true and the good. Hence there can be no natural right to promote such ideas. There may under certain circumstances be good prudential reasons to tolerate them, but not because suppressing them would be inherently unjust.

The case for (certain kinds of) censorship

Which forms of expression should the state prohibit, then? To start with the least controversial examples, it should prohibit libelous and slanderous speech, and speech that directly incites violence against some individual or group.

That pornography should be outlawed is now a more controversial claim than it used to be, but it should not be controversial. From a natural law point of view, this is not a difficult case at all. Pornography should simply be banned. To be sure, there are materials concerning which one can make a case for toleration (for example, novels or mainstream movies that are not pornographic works but do have salacious content). But this is not so where straightforwardly pornographic materials are concerned. (Naturally, the argument for this claim presupposes the general natural law account of sexual morality. I’m aware that not every reader will accept that account, but my point is that if one accepts it, together with the natural law account of the foundations of natural rights, the case for outlawing pornography is obvious. I’ve defended the natural law approach to sexual morality in other writings.)

In an article at Postliberal Order, I argue that governments have a right under natural law to prohibit flag burning, understood as a public expression of contempt for one’s country. On the one hand, such a prohibition in no way frustrates expression of or debate about any idea (since any idea that could be expressed by burning the flag could be expressed instead in words). And on the other hand, showing such public contempt for one’s country offends against the virtue of piety, and can destabilize the social order by encouraging others to have a similar contempt. But whether a particular government should actually exercise its natural right to ban this particular form of expression is a matter for prudential judgment and depends on circumstances.

What about the expression of ideas that positively frustrate the pursuit of what is true or good? Here the clearest cases concern contexts where such ideas might influence the young – who, because they are more ignorant and inexperienced, and governed more by feeling than reason, are least likely to be able to see what is wrong with such ideas. Hence, consider cognitive or moral relativist theories that deny the reality of truth or goodness as objective features of the world. Or consider theories that are inherently subversive of the social order and pit one group against another, such as Nazism, Marxism, and Critical Race Theory. Or theories which promote gravely disordered sexual desires, and thus inculcate sexual vice in the young and destabilize the family. It is simply common sense that there cannot be a right to teach such ideas to young people, such as high schoolers (let alone even younger children). The state may and ought to prohibit the dissemination of such ideas in primary and secondary education.

Things are more complicated where higher education is concerned. Certainly the state should in no way and under no circumstances actively promote such evil ideas in any context, including higher education. But what about merely tolerating them? Here there is no “one size fits all” answer, and much depends on the judgment of prudence. There can be special circumstances where the state has an interest in rooting out such ideas. For example, you would not want to tolerate having many Critical Race Theorists on the faculties of the military academies, because their ideas are positively subversive of allegiance to the country that warriors are supposed to be protecting.

The case against (other kinds of) censorship

But policing academia in general is much trickier. Government regulators are highly unlikely to be sufficiently good judges of ideas, given the people who would be appointing them. Liberal politicians tend to be suckers for every idiotic academic fad that comes down the pike, while conservative politicians tend to be philistines. Any regulation of academic discussion coming from either left-wing flakes or right-wing yahoos would be ham-handed at best and do much more harm than good. Hence in a university context it is, in general, best to combat erroneous ideas through the give and take of free debate.

Something similar can be said of public debate in the world beyond academia, especially in a pluralistic society like the U.S. whose constitution and political culture have long idealized the free exchange of ideas (even if, in practice, not always doing so consistently or well). When it comes to bad ideas concerning political philosophy, public policy, and the like (as opposed to defamatory speech, incitement to violence, pornographic expression, and the like), it is better to fight them through the give and take of debate rather than through censorship.

The COVID-19 pandemic vividly illustrated how dangerous it can be for even intelligent and well-informed people with good intentions to try to police such speech. One side tried, in the name of public health, to shout down critical discussion of policies that imposed severe costs on millions yet whose scientific and moral justifiability was far from certain. The other side, rightly alarmed at this, overreacted by too willingly embracing crackpot medical ideas and conspiracy theories. The first side then condemned this overreaction, arrogantly oblivious to its own responsibility for causing it.

In this case, preemptively shutting down debate was especially unreasonable given how poorly understood the virus was at first, and how draconian and untested were the methods employed for dealing with it. But even in the case of matters that are very well understood, it is generally a bad idea to try to suppress dissent by force of law. Human beings are, by nature, rational animals. True, they very commonly use their rational powers badly, and are prone to all sorts of error and irrational thinking. But because they are rational animals, they are, naturally, prone to accept ideas only when they can see why they are reasonable and have a choice about whether to embrace them. They do not react well to having forced on them ideas they don’t understand or agree with, even when those ideas happen to be correct and resistance to them is unreasonable. For the sake of social harmony, then, there is a strong presumption against censoring public discussion and debate over matters of policy, political philosophy, and the like.

In theory, there are cases where this presumption can be overridden. But I would suggest that a necessary condition for such censorship is that it meets all of the following criteria:

1. It should concern expression that is inherently contrary to the common good, and in particular that attacks the prerequisites of living together as a community of rational animals.

Again, I would argue that examples of expression that meet this condition include: libelous or slanderous speech; the incitement of violence against particular individuals or groups; pornographic expression; direct assaults on the virtue of piety, such as public actions intended to foster contempt for one’s country; ideas that challenge the very reality of truth or goodness; and ideologies that promote social conflict by demonizing entire groups of human beings, or which directly promote grave vices such as sexual immorality. (This list is meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive.) As I have said, there may be pragmatic reasons why a government should tolerate such errors, but it cannot be wrong in principle to suppress them.

Now, the point is that these sorts of expression are direct assaults on the good of individuals and societies. Defamatory speech, by destroying one’s reputation, can make it extremely difficult or impossible to engage in everyday social life (by securing employment, for example). This is even more obviously true of speech that causes others to live under the threat of violence. A culture that is so awash in pornography that even children have easy access to it will inevitably inculcate widespread and deeply ingrained sexual vice, which is contrary to both our social nature (since it destabilizes the family) and our rational nature (given that, as Aquinas teaches, sexual vice has an even greater tendency than other vices do to blind the intellect). The proliferation of ideas that promote hatred of one’s country or of large groups of one’s fellow citizens radically undermines social harmony. And so on.

Contrast these examples with the following: disagreements over particular policy proposals (concerning taxation, immigration, health care policy, foreign policy, or the like); disagreement with or dislike of some particular individual politician or political party; disagreements about particular moral issues or matters of political philosophy (of the kind that always inevitably arise in political debate, journals of opinion, the classroom, etc.); disagreements about particular matters of empirical fact, concerning current events, history, science, etc.; and so on.

These sorts of disagreements, even when heated, are a normal part of social and political life and in no way intrinsically at odds with the good of individuals or societies. And even when erroneous opinions about such matters result from outright deception or intellectual dishonesty, they rarely strike at the very roots of the social order. Moreover, it is in any case simply unrealistic to suppose that government can, in general, effectively separate such lies out from the honest mistakes and exaggerations human beings are commonly prone to. Hence these are matters where government should not interfere with speech, but rather let error be corrected via the give and take of free debate.

2. It should clearly be motivated by service to the common good, rather than the narrow interests of some particular party or leader.

The point here is that it is not good enough for a policy of censorship actually to have sound reasons in its favor. It must be motivated by those reasons, and be widely perceived as having such a motivation. Even the best policy is likely to backfire if it is widely perceived to be motivated instead by corruption or a personal grudge on the part of some leader, or by an attempt by one party or ideology to silence reasonable dissent.

This does not mean that every single citizen has to think the policy has a good motivation. That would, of course, be an unrealistically stringent standard. But a critical mass of the population has to be able to see it that way. Think of the way that, in wartime, the bulk of the population often gives the government the benefit of the doubt where certain censorship is concerned, because it knows that certain matters have to be kept secret for the sake of national security. Certainly this was true in the days of World War II, for example.

Of course, things are different now, and distrust of governmental authority is much higher. But that makes it even more important (not less) for a critical mass of the population to be able to believe that a censorship policy is at least intended to serve the common good rather than some narrow personal or partisan interest. From the point of view of natural law, the whole point of suppressing certain kinds of expression is to preserve the social order and the common good. Hence a policy that will, in practice, tend only further to divide an already highly polarized society can hardly be justified on natural law grounds.

For these reasons, even when a policy of censorship has good arguments in its favor, it should in general not be pursued except by leaders known for the utmost probity and statesmanship. Otherwise it is likely to do more harm than good.

3. It should be calmly and carefully thought out, not impulsive.

Censorship, like war, is so grave in its consequences that even when it is justifiable, it should never be resorted to lightly. Hence, a policy of censorship should never be implemented except after careful and dispassionate study. Major events that trigger strong emotions (such as the rapid spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 and the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk) often lead to calls for censorship. But censorship policies proposed under such circumstances are the least likely to be justifiable, because they result more from emotion than reason.

4. It should as far as possible be implemented in general rules, rather than in ad hoc directives or other exercises of discretionary power.

This condition is a corollary of the second and third conditions. Where some individual or agency has arbitrary power to censor speech, it is far more likely that such censorship will result from the passions of the moment than careful and dispassionate analysis, and that it will reflect personal or partisan interests rather than be directed to the common good. There is also the consideration that social order requires predictability, and thus the rule of law rather than governance by whim.

In light of these criteria, what should we think of recent Trump administration policies that have been characterized as exercises in censorship? The answer is that it depends on which policies we are talking about. In the case of eliminating federal funding for DEI programs, rooting “woke” ideologies out of the military academies, and the like, I would say that these measures are all justifiable. One might quibble over details of implementation, but the basic policies are sound, because these ideas are poisonous and divisive and should have no influence on, or support from, government.

But things are very different with some of what has been said and done over the last couple of weeks, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Attorney General Pam Bondi has spoken of “going after” those who engage in vaguely defined “hate speech,” and of prosecuting printing businesses that refuse to print Charlie Kirk posters. While ABC was in my view correct to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for an unjust and inflammatory remark, it did so in part under threat from FCC chairman Brendan Carr, whose action has been compared by Republican Senator Ted Cruz to that of a mafia boss. President Trump has suggested that because the negative press coverage he has received is in his view excessive, it is “no longer free speech” and “illegal.”

These remarks and actions are foolish and irresponsible. They are bad in themselves, because they clearly do not meet the criteria set out in 1- 4 above. They also threaten to discredit the good things the Trump administration is doing, because they give its enemies ammunition by lending plausibility in the public mind to the tiresome charge of “fascism.”

Defenders of the administration will point out that left-wingers who promoted “cancel culture,” cheered Trump’s being kicked off of social media, suppressed speech during the pandemic, etc. have little standing to complain. That is correct. But it is also irrelevant. It’s a cliché to say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but it is also true. Statesmanship requires doing whatever possible to repair social divisions, not exacerbating them further in the interests of getting revenge on those who first caused them.

Thucydides’ times and ours

2025-09-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

All of my readers will no doubt have been following the horrific and heartbreaking news of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and its aftermath. As those who follow me on Twitter/X know, I have had a lot to say about the matter there. One of Twitter’s advantages over traditional blogging is that it is more conducive to running commentary on unfolding events. But because some readers of this blog are not on Twitter, it seems appropriate to comment here as well.

When major and shocking events occur, there is, of course, a tendency for people to respond more emotionally than rationally, and to overinterpret their significance. But it seems to me that two general points can safely be made about the current situation.

The first is that Kirk’s murder has vividly illustrated how dangerous and destructive of social order are the ideologies that have in recent decades come to have such a pervasive influence in academia and the culture more generally. This is evident not only from the so-called “anti-fascist” motivations of the shooter, but the approval of this murder shown by a disturbing number of people on the left side of the political spectrum (the same people, it seems, who also lionized the murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson).

In an article at Postliberal Order last year, I argued that “woke” ideologies are, in spirit, essentially revivals of the toxic and antisocial Manichean heresy which, in various guises, occasionally spread like a pestilence through medieval Europe. Much of the political violence we have seen in recent years, such as the riots of the summer of 2020 and the assassinations of Thompson and Kirk, illustrate just how dangerous these ideologies are. Their influence within academia and the broader culture must be thoroughly extirpated, root and branch.

By no means do I deny that there are also serious problems on the right end of the political spectrum. On the contrary, I have argued that Manichean tendencies can also be seen on the right, in, for example, the QAnon movement. Some of the recent political violence has also come from the right, as in the case of the January 6 riot and the assassinations this June of Democratic Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband. Right-wingers have also sometimes been guilty of ugly responses to violence against left-wingers, as in the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi. In no way does this entail positing some “moral equivalence.” Let the blame be parceled out in whatever unequal way you like – 60/40 or 70/30, say, instead of 50/50 – the fact is that there is bad behavior on both sides.

All the same, I would argue that the problem is more fundamentally on the left than on the right, because the cultural left more thoroughly dominates major institutions – academia, journalism, pop culture, and so forth. This is why the moral and cultural center of gravity has in recent decades moved steadily leftward (as the decline of religious belief, traditional sexual morality, and the like illustrate). The right has in some ways reacted badly to this, but precisely because it has been in a position of greater weakness and thus greater desperation. Nor, in my view, does recent GOP electoral success show otherwise. I would argue that that mainly reflects dissatisfaction with Democratic excess and incompetence rather than any revival of cultural conservatism. Indeed, it occurred precisely as the GOP itself moved leftward on moral and cultural issues.

But this brings me to my second point, which is that as bad as things are for moral and religious conservatives, they are nevertheless not as bad as too many on the right pretend. In the days since Charlie Kirk was murdered, many hotheads on social media have suggested that we are now essentially in a state of civil war and ought to respond accordingly. This is foolish and dangerous talk, and not true to the facts. In reality, despite the evil things too many “rank and file” left-wingers have been saying about Kirk’s assassination, most of the leading voices on the left have strongly denounced it, often in ways that show real human solidarity with their rivals on the right (some examples I’ve called attention to on Twitter being Bernie Sanders, Cenk Uygur, and Tim Robbins).

Not only as a matter of justice and charity, but also for the good of the country and of one’s own soul, it is crucial not to fall into the trap of pretending that all people whose political views are contrary to one’s own are monsters, or that they otherwise basically all think alike. Real life is more complicated than that. It is crucial to acknowledge this reality, and to work with all men of good will to bring down the political temperature while this is still possible. For as bad as things are now, an actual civil war, or any level of political violence approximating it, would be incalculably worse.

In recent months, the bitterness of current U.S. politics – and especially the stubborn insistence of too many on fighting ideology with counter-ideology, lawfare with counter-lawfare, and so on – has often brought to my mind Thucydides’ account of the civil war in Corcyra, in his History of the Peloponnesian War. We have, thank God, not descended to the level of violence he describes. But the mentality he describes, which led to that violence, is all too disturbingly evident. I’ll end this post with some relevant passages, a warning from antiquity that we ignore at our peril:

Civil war ran through the cities… And they reversed the usual way of using words to evaluate what they did. Ill-considered boldness was counted as loyal manliness; prudent hesitation was held to be cowardice in disguise, and moderation merely the cloak of an unmanly nature. A mind that could grasp the good of the whole was considered wholly lazy. Sudden fury was accepted as part of manly valor… A man who expressed anger was always to be trusted, while one who opposed him was under suspicion... In brief, a man was praised if he could commit some evil action before anyone else did, or if he could urge on another person who had never meant to do such a thing.

Family ties were not so close as those of the political parties, because party members would readily dare to do anything on the slightest pretext… To take revenge was of higher value than never to have received injury...

Those who led their parties in the cities promoted their policies under decent-sounding names: “equality for the mass of citizens” on one side, and “moderate aristocracy” on the other. And although they pretended to serve the public in their speeches, they actually treated it as the prize for their competition; and striving by whatever means to win, both sides ventured the most horrible outrages and exacted even greater revenge, without any regard for justice or the public good… The citizens who remained in the middle were destroyed by both parties, partly because they would not side with them, and partly for envy that they might escape in this way.

Thus was every kind of wickedness afoot throughout all Greece by the occasion of civil wars... People were sharply divided into opposing camps, and, without trust, their minds were in strong opposition. No speech was so powerful, no oath so terrible, as to overcome this mutual hostility... For the most part, those of weaker intelligence had the greatest success, since a sense of their own inferiority and the subtlety of their opponents put them into great fear that they would be overcome in debate or by schemes due to their enemies’ intelligence…

Those who attacked… primarily out of zeal for equality… were the most carried away by their undisciplined passion to commit savage and pitiless attacks… Human nature, having become accustomed to violate justice and laws, now came to dominate law altogether, and showed itself with delight to be the slave of passion, the victor over justice, and the enemy of anyone superior. Without the destructive voice of envy, you see, people would not value revenge over reverence, or profits over justice. When they want revenge on others, people are determined first to destroy without a trace the laws that commonly govern such matters, though it is only because of these that anyone in trouble can hope to be saved. (Book 3, Paul Woodruff translation, at pp. 139-43)

Is mandatory vaccination intrinsically wrong?

2025-09-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

Florida governor Ron DeSantis and state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo have announced that they will be ending all mandatory vaccination in the state. President Trump has criticized them for this, saying that “some vaccines… should be used otherwise some people are going to catch [diseases] and they endanger other people.” I have long supported DeSantis and have been critical of Trump, but on this issue Trump is right and DeSantis is wrong.

That is by no means to say that all mandatory vaccinations are defensible. As I have argued, the Covid shot should never have been mandatory. But it goes way too far to claim, as Ladapo does, that all mandatory vaccination as such is “immoral” and amounts to “slavery.” The truth lies in the middle ground position that while there is a moral presumption against a mandate, in some cases that presumption can be overridden and it can be licit for governments to require vaccination. Sweeping statements of either extreme kind are wrong, and we need to go case by case.

The relevant natural law principles are straightforward. Human beings are by nature social animals. The primary context in which we manifest our social nature is the family, but we do so also in larger social orders, and ultimately in the state, which, as Aristotle and Aquinas teach, is the only complete and self-sufficient social order. Now, the common good of the social order is higher than private goods. As Aquinas teaches, “the good of one man is not the last end, but is ordained to the common good” (Summa Theologiae I-II.90.3). Again, he writes: “The common good is the end of each individual member of a community, just as the good of the whole is the end of each part” (Summa Theologiae II-II.58.9), and “the common good transcends the individual good of one person” (Summa Theologiae II-II.58.12).

By no means does this entail an absorption of families and individuals into some collectivist blob. The natural law principle of subsidiarity requires as a matter of justice that central authorities do not interfere with lower level social orders (such as the family) when the latter are capable of providing for their own well-being. At the same time, subsidiarity also requires that central authorities do step in when a social order at some level cannot, on its own, secure its well-being. And such authorities can compel citizens to do what is necessary for the common good when there is no other way to achieve it.

For example, as the traditional Thomistic natural law theorist Thomas Higgins writes: “Note laws of compulsory military service. In time of war or grave danger of war they are gravely binding because they then express the Natural Law commanding citizens to preserve the State” (Man as Man: The Science and Art of Ethics, p. 520). This is so even though, as Higgins goes on to acknowledge, such laws can under some peacetime circumstances be contrary to the common good. He even argues that a citizen could in such a case licitly try to avoid being drafted, as long as he does not use immoral means to do so.

This example illustrates a point the importance of which cannot be overstated. To say that the state has a right under some circumstances to compel certain behavior simply does not entail giving it a blank check to do with citizens whatever it likes. That is a straw man to which too many are drawn today, because of the individualism and excessive hostility to authority that tends to characterize American politics on both the left and the right.

In any case, the general principle stated by Higgins has also been expressed by the magisterium of the Catholic Church. Of laws requiring military service during a national emergency, Pope Pius XII taught:

If, therefore, a body representative of the people and a government – both having been chosen by free elections – in a moment of extreme danger decides, by legitimate instruments of internal and external policy, on defensive precautions, and carries out the plans which they consider necessary, it does not act immorally. Therefore a Catholic citizen cannot invoke his own conscience in order to refuse to serve and fulfill those duties the law imposes. (Christmas message of December 23, 1956)

Now, if there can be circumstances wherein the state can licitly compel citizens to risk dying in battle for the sake of the common good, then it follows a fortiori that there can also be circumstances wherein the state can compel citizens to be vaccinated for the sake of the common good. In both cases the end is the same, namely to prevent the deaths of large numbers of one’s countrymen. And in the case of vaccination, the risk to the individual who is compelled is less serious than the risk imposed on those drafted into military service.

The Church herself has indicated that it can be licit for states to require vaccination. As Roberto de Mattei has noted, “on 20 June 1822, in the Papal States, the Cardinal Secretary of State, Ercole Consalvi, issued a decree which instituted a Central Vaccination Committee for inoculation throughout that territory” (On the Moral Liceity of the Vaccination, p. 55). In 2005, during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, the Pontifical Academy for Life said the following about the benefits of universal vaccination:

The severity of congenital rubella and the handicaps which it causes justify systematic vaccination against such a sickness. It is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to avoid the infection of a pregnant woman, even if the rubella infection of a person in contact with this woman is diagnosed from the first day of the eruption of the rash. Therefore, one tries to prevent transmission by suppressing the reservoir of infection among children who have not been vaccinated, by means of early immunization of all children (universal vaccination). Universal vaccination has resulted in a considerable fall in the incidence of congenital rubella.

The document goes on to note that when parents refrain from vaccinating children against German measles, there is

the danger of Congenital Rubella Syndrome. This could occur, causing grave congenital malformations in the foetus, when a pregnant woman enters into contact, even if it is brief, with children who have not been immunized and are carriers of the virus. In this case, the parents who did not accept the vaccination of their own children become responsible for the malformations in question.

Orthodox Catholic moral theologians have thus defended the liceity of requiring vaccination, when this is necessary for the common good. In their book Life Issues, Medical Choices: Questions and Answers for Catholics, Janet Smith and Christopher Kaczor note that “vaccines have virtually eradicated some childhood diseases common in decades past, such as polio, measles, tetanus, smallpox, whooping cough, and diphtheria” (p. 154). And they observe that when parents have refused these vaccines for their children, the result has sometimes been a recurrence of such diseases. They acknowledge that vaccines carry some risk, and that there can be cases where exemptions are reasonable. But nevertheless, they argue:

Rather than risk the outbreak of a disease that could kill or seriously harm many, individuals are reasonably expected to undergo some personal risk. In order to reduce risks for the whole community – especially those who are particularly susceptible to harm, such as children too young to be vaccinated and those who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons – it is reasonable and just for otherwise healthy members of the community to submit themselves to the small risks of vaccines… The Church teaches that we are all members of the body of Christ and that we are brothers and sisters in the Lord. Thus, we all have a serious obligation to seek the common good and sometimes to put ourselves and our children at some reasonable risk for the well-being of others. (pp. 153-54)

In recent days, some on Twitter/X have nevertheless claimed that the Church teaches that vaccination cannot ever be mandatory. One argument along these lines appeals to the following statement made by Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii:

Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason.

But this does not entail that vaccination can never be mandatory. For one thing, Pius was not addressing the question of vaccination in this passage, but rather the topic of forced sterilization and other bodily mutilations. Vaccination does not involve mutilation of the body, so inferring from his remark that mandatory vaccination is illicit is simply a non sequitur. For another thing, the argument would prove too much. You might as well say that Pius XI’s remark absolutely rules out ever forcing citizens to serve in the military. But that would contradict the teaching of his successor Pius XII, which I cited above.

Another argument appeals to the 2020 statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on Covid-19 vaccination, which says that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.” But there are two problems with this argument. First, it ignores the fact that this document is not addressing the morality of vaccination in general, but only the morality of Covid-19 vaccination in particular. The reason is that many Catholics were concerned that the Covid vaccines were linked to fetal tissue research in a way that made them morally problematic. The point of the document was to inform Catholics who were inclined to take the vaccine that they could do so in good conscience, while at the same time making it clear to those who were uncomfortable with doing so that they were not obligated to do so. All of this is clear from the larger immediate context of the line quoted above:

Both pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.

At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable. (Emphasis in the original)

Note the references to “the epidemic,” “vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses,” and the encouragement of pharmaceutical companies and governments to produce alternatives “that do not create problems of conscience.” What the document is addressing is whether the vaccines that were developed in order to deal with Covid-19, specifically, ought to be mandatory.

Moreover, the CDF statement does not actually say even that Covid-19 vaccination absolutely must in every case be voluntary. What it says is that “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.” The claim is that as a rule (in other words, in general) it is not an obligation. But that leaves it open that there could nevertheless be particular cases where it would be a moral obligation (for example, for hospital workers, perhaps). And it leaves it open that in those particular cases vaccination should be mandatory rather than voluntary. But again, the CDF document is in any case addressing the Covid-19 situation in particular rather than vaccination in general. So it is not inconsistent with the point I’ve been making.

I hasten to emphasize that that point is a very narrow one. I am arguing here only that the extreme claim that mandatory vaccination is always and intrinsically wrong cannot be justified on grounds of natural law theory and Catholic moral theology. That does not by itself show that any particular vaccine mandate is a good idea, all things considered. One has to go case by case and make a prudential judgment based on the relevant empirical evidence. But appeal to simplistic slogans like “My body, my choice” can provide no short cut.

Maimonides on negative theology

2025-08-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

Negative theology (also known as apophatic theology) is the approach to understanding the divine nature that emphasizes that what we know about God is what he is not rather than what he is. One might take the strong view that all of our knowledge of God’s nature is negative in this way, or the weaker position that much (but not all) such knowledge is negative. The medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) is among the most famous of negative theologians. He takes the stronger position. More precisely, his view is that when we predicate something of God, we are describing either his effects in the world of our experience, or the divine nature itself, and in the latter case we must understand our predications in a purely negative way.

For example, suppose we say that God is merciful toward the righteous and takes vengeance on the wicked. For Maimonides, the right way to understand this is as saying that God causes the righteous to be rewarded and the wicked to be punished. It is a statement about the effects of God’s actions, not about the divine nature itself. Or suppose we say that God is omnipotent. For Maimonides, this should be understood as a statement to the effect that there are in God no limitations of the kind that constrain the power of created things. It is a statement about the divine nature, but only about what is not true of it, rather than a positive attribution.

In his famous The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides defends Aristotelian arguments for the existence of a divine first cause. He also defends the doctrine of divine simplicity, according to which God is in no way composed of parts. It is in light of this fact about the divine nature, says Maimonides, that we can see that our knowledge of it can only be negative. He argues as follows:

It has been proved that God exists by necessity and that He is non-composite… and we can apprehend only that He is, not what He is. It is therefore meaningless that He should have any positive attribute, since the fact that He is is not something outside of what He is, so that the attribute might indicate one of these two. Much less can what He is be of a composite character, so that the attribute could indicate one of the parts. Even less can He be substrate to accidents, so that the attribute could indicate these. Thus there is no scope for any positive attributes in any way whatsoever. (Book I, Chapter LVIII, at p. 80 of the abridged Rabin translation)

Let’s unpack this. In this passage, it seems, Maimonides tries to show that divine simplicity all by itself entails an exclusively apophatic theology. How so? Start with the point he makes in the middle of the paragraph, concerning the proposal that to speak of a divine positive attribute “could indicate one of the parts” of God. Obviously this would be ruled out by divine simplicity, which denies that God has any parts. Nor, as he says at the end of the passage, could a positive attribute be an accident inhering in the divine substrate, because divine simplicity also rules out any distinction in God between substrate and accidents.

The third option Maimonides considers and rules out is the proposal that a divine positive attribute might be identifiable with either “the fact that He is” or “what He is” – that is to say, with either God’s existence or his essence. The idea here seems to be that someone who thinks we can predicate positive attributes of God might suppose that God’s existence is a positive attribute distinct from his essence, which we can predicate of that essence; or that God’s essence is a positive attribute distinct from his existence, which we can predicate of that existence. And the trouble with this proposal, Maimonides says, is that given divine simplicity, there is no distinction between God’s essence and his existence. They are one and the same thing.

The argument, then, seems to be that these three proposals would be the only ways to make sense of positive divine attributes, but all three are ruled out by divine simplicity; therefore, as he concludes at the end of the passage, “there is no scope for any positive attributes in any way whatsoever.”

The reader might wonder, though, exactly why we should regard these three as the only options. Some remarks Maimonides makes earlier in Book I of the Guide indicate the answer. In Chapter LI, he writes:

It is thus evident that an attribute must be one of two things. Either it is the essence of the thing to which it is attributed, and thus an explanation of a term… Or the attribute is different from the thing to which it is attributed, and thus an idea added to that thing. Consequently that attribute is an accident of that essence. (p. 67)

It is not hard to see why Maimonides would deny that God has attributes in the second sense, for that would be ruled out by the thesis that there is, given divine simplicity, no distinction in God between substrate and accidents. But what about attributes in the first sense, that is to say, an attribute understood as “the essence of the thing to which it is attributed, and thus an explanation of a term”? And what exactly does Maimonides mean by this?

He illustrates the idea with the example of asserting that “Man is a reasoning animal.” When we predicate of man the attribute of being a reasoning animal, we are really just picking out the essence of man, and thereby giving an “explanation of [the] term” (i.e. the term “man”). The attribute in this case is nothing different from the essence or nature of the thing to which we are ascribing the attribute. To predicate of God a positive attribute in this sense, then, would be to explain the meaning of “God” by stating the divine essence. Yet Maimonides says that even here, “this kind of attribute we reject with reference to God” (p. 67). Why?

The subsequent chapter of the Guide, Chapter LII, indicates the reason. Suppose we try to define God, in something like the way we define man as a reasoning animal. This, Maimonides says, would imply that God has “pre-existing causes,” which as first cause he cannot have (p. 68). How so? Maimonides’ meaning here seems to be this. When we define man as a reasoning animal, we are identifying him as belonging to a certain genus (namely, animal) and as set apart from other things in that genus by a differentia (namely, reasoning). Now, in a sense, animality and rationality are thus prior to man, and thus they are causes, of a sort, of his being. Since God is uncaused, then, he cannot be defined in terms of a genus and a differentia. (Again, this seems to me to be what Maimonides is getting at, though he doesn’t spell it out in the relevant passage in Chapter LII.)

Maimonides then says that another thing we might be doing when predicating an attribute of something in the sense of defining it is describing it in terms of part of its essence. We do this, for example, when we say that man is an animal. But this too cannot be what we’re doing in the case of God, because given divine simplicity, there are no parts to God’s essence.

Thus does Maimonides claim to show that we can say nothing positive about the divine nature. But some readers may think he would still need to say more in order to make the case. And they would be right. For consider Aquinas’s alternative position. Like Maimonides, he strongly affirms divine simplicity, holds that we cannot strictly define the divine essence, and takes much of our knowledge of God’s nature to be negative. But he rejects the extreme claim that we can say nothing positive about him.

Aquinas argues that Maimonides’ position does not adequately account for talk about God’s goodness, wisdom, and the like. He notes that the view that attributing goodness to God is really just a way of saying that God is the cause of good things cannot explain why we say that God is good but not that God is a physical object – for, after all, God is the cause of physical objects too. Aquinas continues:

When we say, “God is good,” the meaning is not, “God is the cause of goodness,” or “God is not evil”; but the meaning is, “Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God,” and in a more excellent and higher way. Hence it does not follow that God is good, because He causes goodness; but rather, on the contrary, He causes goodness in things because He is good. (Summa Theologiae I.13.2)

To be sure, this is not because there is some common genus to which God and other good things belong. Nor does Aquinas think we have a clear idea of the nature of God’s goodness. Nor, given divine simplicity, does he think that God’s goodness is distinct from his wisdom or his power or any of his other attributes. Still, when we say that God is good, we are in Aquinas’s view saying something positive about him, and something literally true.

How can this be? The answer has to do with Aquinas’s famous view that not all literal language is either univocal or equivocal, but that some is analogical, and that this is the case with predications of the divine attributes. When we say that God is good, we are not saying that he is good in exactly the same sense in which we are good (which would be to use “good” in a univocal way), nor are we saying that he is good in some completely unrelated sense (which would be to use “good” in an equivocal way). We are saying that there is something in God that is analogous to what we call “goodness” in us, even if it is not exactly the same thing.

Maimonides would disagree. For him, when we apply to God’s nature the same terms we use to describe created things, we speak equivocally. This is true even when we say that God exists, for God “shares no common trait with anything outside Him at all, for the term ‘existence’ is only applied to Him as well as to creatures by way of homonymy and in no other way” (The Guide of the Perplexed, Book I, Chapter LII, at p. 70).

This is not a dispute I will explore here. Suffice it for present purposes to note that while Maimonides writes as if the controversy over whether God has positive attributes hinges on whether or not one accepts divine simplicity, that is not in fact the case. Rather, it hinges on whether or not one accepts that we can truly speak of God in analogical terms.

Dharmakīrti and Maimonides on divine action

Tugwell on St. Albert on negative theology

McCabe on the divine nature

Lao Tzu’s negative theology

Diabolical modernity

2025-08-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Satan tempted Christ to avoid the cross, and offer us instead the satisfaction of our appetites, marvels or wonders, and political salvation – exactly what modern market economies, science, and liberal democracy promise us. In my latest essay at Postliberal Order, I discuss Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s analysis of the diabolical, and the light it sheds on the character of the modern world.

Hanson on observation

2025-08-12T20:12:00.000-07:00

According to the conception of scientific method traditionally associated with Francis Bacon, science ought to begin with the accumulation of observations unbiased by any theoretical preconceptions. The idea is that only such theory-neutral evidence could provide an objective basis on which to choose between theories. It became a commonplace of twentieth-century philosophy of science that this ideal of theory-neutral observation is illusory, and that in reality all observation is inescapably theory-laden (to use the standard jargon). That is to say, even to describe what it is we observe, we cannot avoid making use of theoretical assumptions about its nature, circumstances, and so on.

Norwood Russell Hanson’s 1958 book Patterns of Discovery is commonly cited as a classic expression of this view. And one way Hanson repays study is that his treatment makes it clear that theory-ladenness does not by itself have relativistic implications, contrary to what one might suppose from simplistic accounts of contemporary philosophy of science.

To be sure, it can at first glance seem otherwise. As Hanson emphasizes, there is a sense in which different observers operating with different background assumptions can be said to see different things. One microbiologist looking through a microscope at what’s on a certain slide might see a cell organ, while another sees a bit of foreign matter that resulted from the staining process. One seventeenth-century astronomer looking at the sun at dawn sees it move through the sky, while another sees the earth moving relative to the sun. And so on.

Many would reply that in reality, they do see the same thing, but simply draw different inferences from it. The assumption here is that there are two things going on, a visual experience on the one hand, and a separate act of interpretation of that experience on the other. But this, as Hanson influentially argued, is an illusion. One way this illusory assumption is sometimes spelled out is by taking two perceivers to have the same sort of retinal image, or the same physiological state, but then imposing different interpretations on it. The problem here, as Hanson notes, is that a visual experience is simply not the same thing as the having of a retinal image or other physiological state:

Astronomers cannot be referring to these when they say they see the sun. If they are hypnotized, drugged, drunk or distracted they may not see the sun, even though their retinas register its image in exactly the same way as usual. Seeing is an experience. A retinal reaction is only a physical state – a photochemical excitation. Physiologists have not always appreciated the differences between experiences and physical states. People, not their eyes, see. Cameras, and eye-balls, are blind. Attempts to locate within the organs of sight (or within the neurological reticulum behind the eyes) some nameable called ‘seeing’ may be dismissed… there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball. (pp. 6-7)

Another way the mistaken assumption in question is often spelled out is in terms of “sense-data.” The idea here is that the two observers have similar sense-data – describable, say, as their being “both aware of a brilliant yellow-white disc in a blue expanse over a green one” (p. 7) – and that they then assign different interpretations to these sense-data. But this is simply not a correct description of how visual experience goes in the normal case. Consider the famous Necker cube example (Fig. 1 in the image above). If shown such an image and asked what he sees, a perceiver might simply say “That’s an ice cube,” or “That’s an aquarium,” or “That’s a wire frame,” or any number of other things. Context will likely play a large role in determining his answer. For example, if the cube is part of a larger image that looks like a Scotch glass, he’s obviously more likely to describe it as an ice cube than as an aquarium. The point though, is that there are clearly cases in which the way he’d describe his experience is as “seeing an ice cube” – as opposed, say, to “seeing a set of lines, and then going on to interpret it as an ice cube.”

Of course, there can be cases in which the perceiver says the latter rather than the former. In those cases there are two things going on, the experience and then a separate interpretation of it. But there are not two things going in the ordinary case. There’s just the one thing going on, seeing an ice cube. Similarly, in the case of the two astronomers, one of them might describe his perceptual experience as “seeing the sun move” and the other as “seeing the earth move,” and with each of them there is just the one thing going on rather than an experience together with a separate act of interpreting it.

Of course, the first astronomer would (as we now know) in this case be mistaken about what he sees. But that is irrelevant to the point, which is that the content of his experience is correctly captured in the description “seeing the sun move,” rather than the description “seeing a yellow-white disc in a blue expanse” etc. Here too we can certainly imagine eccentric cases in which what a perceiver sees could accurately be described in that odd way – for example, if the perceiver had no idea of what the sun is. But obviously that is not what is going on with a normal adult, let alone an astronomer. And if some astronomer did “react to his visual environment with purely sense-datum responses – as does the infant or the idiot – we would think him out of his mind. We would think him not to be seeing what is around him” (p. 22).

Then there is the fact that, even when we are dealing with oddball cases like this, they still involve the application of concepts within the perceptual experience itself rather than in some separate act of interpretation. We characterize the experience in terms of “a yellow-white disc” rather than “the sun,” but the characterization is internal to the experience rather than tacked on to it. As Hanson writes:

The knowledge is there in the seeing and not an adjunct of it. (The pattern of threads is there in the cloth and not tacked on to it by ancillary operations.) We rarely catch ourselves tacking knowledge on to what meets the eye. (p. 22)

Moreover, if perceptual experiences did not incorporate such knowledge, we would not be able to do with them the things we do in fact do, and which science and common sense alike require us to be able to do with them – namely, draw inferences from them and otherwise relate them to our larger body of background knowledge, including the scientific theories we test by way of perceptual experience. To quote Hanson again:

Significance, relevance – these notions depend on what we already know. Objects, events, pictures, are not intrinsically significant or relevant. If seeing were just an optical-chemical process, then nothing we saw would ever be relevant to what we know, and nothing known could have significance for what we see. Visual life would be unintelligible; intellectual life would lack a visual aspect. Man would be a blind computer harnessed to a brainless photoplate. (p. 26)

This sort of observation is, of course, a longstanding part of modern critiques of naïve empiricism, from Kant’s dictum that “percepts without concepts are blind” to Wilfrid Sellars’ attack on “the myth of the given.” And again, at first glance it might seem to entail a kind of relativism. If what we perceive always reflects what we know (or take ourselves to know, anyway), but different perceivers have different bodies of knowledge (or of what they take to be knowledge), how can they ever perceive the same things?

But Hanson also makes it clear why such a relativistic conclusion does not follow. To say that there is a sense in which different observers may see different things – as in the examples involving the object under the microscope, the sun at dawn, or the Necker cube – does not entail that there is not also a sense in which they see the same thing. Suppose two people are looking at the cube and one says “That’s an ice cube!” whereas the other says “That’s an aquarium!” It’s not as if there is nothing about which they agree. We can imagine the conversation continuing: “Do you at least agree that there are lines there?” “Of course!” Here too what they take themselves to know is intrinsic to the experience rather than being tacked on in a separate act of interpretation. But in this case it is shared knowledge.

As Hanson writes, “if seeing different things involves having different knowledge and theories about x, then perhaps the sense in which they see the same thing involves their sharing knowledge and theories about x” (p. 18). Disagreement takes place against a deeper level of agreement. Indeed, unless there were some level of agreement (at least concerning what exactly the dispute is about) there couldn’t be a disagreement in the first place. As Donald Davidson would later argue, even to make sense of what another person is saying as language (whatever he is saying in that language), we need to be able to tie his utterances to aspects of a shared environment, which entails shared beliefs about that environment. Anticipating such arguments, Hanson notes that error is the exception rather than the rule: “We may be wrong, but not always – not even usually. Besides, deceptions proceed in terms of what is normal, ordinary. Because the world is not a cluster of conjurer’s tricks, conjurers can exist” (p. 21).

The theory-ladenness of perception thus by no means entails relativism or skepticism. For it doesn’t entail that disagreement between observers need be total or even massive, or that all or most of our perceptual judgments might be in error. Indeed (and to go beyond what Hanson himself says), it is consistent with holding that there is some level of theory, some very general way of carving up the basic structure of the world, that is common to all observers and which we cannot coherently deny to be a reflection of reality.

Another key insight from Hanson is that the role language plays in the theory-ladenness of observation:

There is a ‘linguistic’ factor in seeing, although there is nothing linguistic about what forms in the eye, or in the mind’s eye. Unless there were this linguistic element, nothing we ever observed could have relevance for our knowledge… For what is it for things to make sense other than for descriptions of them to be composed of meaningful sentences? (p. 25)

Part of this has to do with the general and essential connection in human beings between thought and language, a topic I examine in some detail at pp. 91-103 and 245-56 of my book Immortal Souls. Our being rational animals – that is to say, animals capable of grasping concepts, putting them together into propositions, and reasoning logically from one proposition to another – goes hand-in-hand with our having a language with the semantic properties and combinatorial structure human languages have.

Hanson’s point also has to do in part with the thesis that certain specific ways of conceptualizing the world are impossible unless certain specific forms of linguistic representation are first in place. The examples he emphasizes have to do with how the formation of certain concepts in physics was possible only after certain mathematical techniques had been developed. (I had occasion to discuss in a post from a few years ago the way the invention of novel systems of symbols makes possible new ways of conceptualizing things.)

In any event, it is crucial to emphasize that here too we are not talking about something entirely separable from and tacked on to perceptual experience. Rather, having a linguistically expressible content is something inherent to distinctively human perceptual experience, at least in a mature and normal human being. In human experience, conceptual and sensory content are fused, two aspects of one thing rather than an aggregate of a purely intellectual state (as in an angel) and a purely sentient state (as in a non-human animal).

It may illuminate things to consider the Thomistic view that as a rational animal, a human being has a single soul that grounds both his intellectual and sensory powers, rather than distinct rational and sensory souls. As Aquinas says in Disputed Questions on the Soul, “the sentient soul in man is nobler than that in other animals, because in man it is not only sentient but also rational” and again, “the sentient soul in man is not a non-rational soul but is at once a sentient and rational soul” (Article XI, at p. 147 of the Rowan translation). If this were not so, then (the Thomist argues) a human being would not be a single substance, but a mash-up of two substances (as human beings are on Descartes’ account).

It is one organism, the human being as a whole, who sees something as an ice cube (thereby conceptualizing in the act of seeing) or sees that the earth is moving (thereby having an experience with a propositional content expressible in a sentence). And it is in one act that these “seeings” are accomplished, rather than in two coordinated acts. That is perfectly consistent with the obvious fact that we can distinguish between the conceptual and sensory aspects of the one act. As Hanson writes:

‘Seeing as’ and ‘seeing that’ are not components of seeing, as rods and bearings are parts of motors: seeing is not composite. Still, one can ask logical questions. What must have occurred, for instance, for us to describe a man as having found a collar stud, or as having seen a bacillus? Unless he had had a visual sensation and knew what a bacillus was (and looked like) we would not say that he had seen a bacillus, except in the sense in which an infant could see a bacillus. ‘Seeing as’ and ‘seeing that’, then, are not psychological components of seeing. They are logically distinguishable elements in seeing-talk, in our concept of seeing. (p. 21)

As the Thomist would argue, we can distinguish between a man’s animality and his rationality, but it doesn’t follow that his animality and rationality are grounded in two distinct substances only contingently united. Similarly, we can distinguish between the sensory and conceptual content of a man’s seeing an ice cube or of his seeing that the earth moves. But it doesn’t follow that there are two acts here, an act of seeing and a distinct, additional act of conceptualizing or interpreting what he is seeing.

Newman on capital punishment

2025-08-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

It was announced last week that Pope Leo XIV will be declaring St. John Henry Newman to be a Doctor of the Church. As the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, the Church proclaims someone to be a Doctor on account of “eminent learning” and “a high degree of sanctity.” This combination makes a Doctor an exemplary guide to matters of faith and morals. To be sure, the Doctors are not infallible. Their authority is not as great as that of scripture, the consensus of the Church Fathers, or the definitive statements of the Church’s magisterium. All the same, their authority is considerable. As Aquinas notes, appeal to the authority of the Doctors of the Church is “one that may properly be used” in addressing doctrinal questions, even if such an appeal by itself yields “probable” conclusions rather than incontrovertible ones (Summa Theologiae I.1.8).

Indeed, though the Doctors of the Church are not individually infallible, it would be absurd to suppose that they could all be wrong on some theological issue about which they are in agreement. For given their high degree of sanctity, how could all of them be wrong about some matter of Christian morality? Given their eminence in learning, how could all of them fall into error on some point of doctrine or scriptural interpretation? Given that they are formally recognized by the Church as exemplary guides to faith and morals, how could they all collectively lead the faithful into grave moral or theological error?

Consistency with the consensus of the Doctors has, accordingly, been regarded by the Church as a mark of orthodoxy in doctrine. For example, in 1312 the Council of Vienne defended a point of doctrine by appealing to “the common opinion of apostolic reflection of the Holy Fathers and the Doctors” (Denzinger section 480). Also relevant is Tuas Libenter, in which Pope Pius IX stated:

[T]hat subjection which is to be manifested by an act of divine faith… would not have to be limited to those matters which have been defined by express decrees of the ecumenical Councils, or of the Roman Pontiffs and of this See, but would have to be extended also to those matters which are handed down as divinely revealed by the ordinary teaching power of the whole Church spread throughout the world, and therefore, by universal and common consent are held by Catholic theologians to belong to faith…

[I]t is not sufficient for learned Catholics to accept and revere the aforesaid dogmas of the Church, but… it is also necessary to subject themselves… to those forms of doctrine which are held by the common and constant consent of Catholics as theological truths and conclusions, so certain that opinions opposed to these same forms of doctrine, although they cannot be called heretical, nevertheless deserve some theological censure. (Denzinger sections 1683-1684, emphasis added)

Here Pius IX held the consensus opinion of Catholic theologians to have such a high status that even if opposed views are not strictly heretical, they nevertheless “deserve some theological censure.” Now, the Doctors of the Church are the theologians on whom the Church has placed a special stamp of approval, putting them forward as models. It stands to reason that if there is a consensus among them on some thesis of faith or morals, that is powerful evidence that it must be correct.

Now, consider the topic of capital punishment. Even if we just confined ourselves to scripture, or to the consensus of the Fathers of the Church, or to the consistent teaching of the popes down to Benedict XVI, there can be no question whatsoever that the Church has taught irreformably that capital punishment can be licit in principle. That is not to deny that some of the Fathers and some of these popes have recommended against using it in practice, but the point is that even they acknowledged that it is not intrinsically wrong to inflict the death penalty. Joseph Bessette and I demonstrate this at length in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. I have also done so elsewhere, such as in my Catholic World Report article “Capital Punishment and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium.”

All the same, it is useful to consider what the Doctors of the Church have said on the matter, because they too are in agreement that the death penalty can in principle be a legitimate punishment. This would be a powerful argument for the liceity of capital punishment even if we didn’t already have scripture, the Fathers, and two millennia of papal teaching. Adding the Doctors to the witnesses on this matter puts icing on the cake, as it were, highlighting the futility of thinking that this is a teaching the Church could reverse. The Doctors who have addressed the topic of capital punishment include St. Ephraem, St. Hilary, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter Canisius, St. Robert Bellarmine, and St. Alphonsus Liguori. (The earliest of these thinkers are, of course, Fathers as well.) All of them agree that it can be morally legitimate in principle, even those among them who recommend against using it in practice. (See the book and article referred to above for the details.)

We can now add St. John Henry Newman to this consensus. The death penalty was not a topic Newman said a great deal about, but what he did say is important. For example, in Lecture 8 of Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, Newman cites the following example of the way a practice can be embodied in the tradition of a nation like England rather than in explicit law: “There is no explicit written law, for instance, simply declaring murder to be a capital offence, unless, indeed, we have recourse to the divine command in the ninth chapter of the book of Genesis.” (This statement is from a longer passage first written when Newman was a Protestant, which he quotes in order to comment on it. As he immediately goes on to say about the passage, “I see nothing to alter in these remarks, written many years before I became a Catholic.”)

Newman’s reference here is to Genesis 9:5-6, which states:

For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.

Newman understands this passage to be an “explicit written law… declaring murder to be a capital offence,” and one that holds of “divine command.” Note that this is diametrically opposed to modern attempts to reinterpret this passage as merely a divine prediction that murder would as a matter of fact lead to retaliation. For Newman, God is not merely predicting but indeed commanding that murderers should be slain, and as a matter of punishment. And here he is, of course, simply reiterating what the traditional understanding always said.

In a series of letters to his nephew, Newman addressed questions about whether the Church has behaved in an immoral way over the centuries. Among the points he makes are that one must distinguish between, on the one hand, the state’s having the power justly to punish offenders with death, and on the other hand, specific cases where this power was used in a cruel manner. He writes:

It is on the Inquisition that you mainly dwell; the question is whether such enormity of cruelty, as is commonly ascribed to it, is to be considered the act of the Church. As to Dr. Ward in the Dublin Review, his point (I think) was not the question of cruelty, but whether persecution, such as in Spain, was unjust; and with the capital punishment prescribed in the Mosaic law for idolatry, blasphemy, and witchcraft, and St. Paul's transferring the power of the sword to Christian magistrates, it seems difficult to call persecution (commonly so called) unjust. I suppose in like manner he would not deny, but condemn, the craft and cruelty, and the wholesale character of St. Bartholomew's Massacre; but still would argue in the abstract in defence of the magistrate's bearing the sword, and of the Church's sanctioning its use, in the aspect of justice, as Moses, Joshua, and Samuel might use it, against heretics, rebels, and cruel and crafty enemies.

Note first that Newman says that capital punishment is “prescribed” in the Mosaic law for various offenses, and that such killing is to be understood “in the aspect of justice.” This should, of course, be obvious enough to anyone who reads the first five books of the Old Testament, but occasionally people will suggest that the Old Testament merely permits the death penalty without actually commending it. Clearly, Newman would have no truck with such sophistry.

The second thing to note is Newman’s allusion here to Romans 13: 3-4, which says:

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.

This has traditionally been understood as sanctioning capital punishment, and Newman clearly has this interpretation in mind when he refers to “St. Paul's transferring the power of the sword” and “the magistrate's bearing the sword, and of the Church's sanctioning its use.” With this passage too, death penalty opponents sometimes propose strained reinterpretations, but Newman would not agree with them.

But there is more to be said. For note that Newman refers, specifically, to “St. Paul's transferring the power of the sword to Christian magistrates.” This too is part of the traditional understanding, and yet another thing that modern day abolitionists sometimes resist. For it is sometimes proposed that, even if the death penalty is licit as a matter of natural law, its use is not compatible with the higher demands of specifically Christian morality. Newman would clearly reject this claim as well. Again, he holds that St. Paul’s teaching authorizes the use of capital punishment for Christian rulers in particular, not merely for states governed only by natural law.

In short, we now have the testimony of yet another Doctor of the Church that the liceity of the death penalty is the teaching of Genesis 9 and Romans 13, and that this teaching is a matter of Christian morality no less than of natural law. This directly contradicts those who claim that the Church could teach that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, or that scripture merely tolerates rather than sanctions it, or that it is contrary to the higher demands of the Gospel even if it is consistent with natural law.

Now, Newman is best known for his theology of the development of doctrine. Could claims like the ones we’ve just seen him reject nevertheless be justified by Newman’s own criteria as “developments” of Church teaching on the death penalty? Clearly not, because Newman, like St. Vincent of Lerins (the other great theologian of doctrinal development), insists that a genuine development can never contradict past teaching. Newman writes:

A true development [of doctrine], then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption… A developed doctrine which reverses the course of development which has preceded it, is no true development but a corruption. (An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Chapter 5)

Suppose you say “All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man.” If I add “So, Socrates is mortal,” I have said something that can be said to be a development of what you said, because it follows logically from what you said. It adds something, insofar as it says something you did not yourself say. But nevertheless, what it adds was already implicitly there in what you said, and I have simply drawn it out.

By contrast, if I added something like “So, all men are redheads,” I could not be said to have developed what you said, because my addition in no way follows from what you said, and indeed has nothing at all to do with what you said. Even more obviously, if I added either “Some men are immortal” or “Socrates is immortal,” I would not only not have “developed” what you said, but, on the contrary, I would have reversed and contradicted what you said. For the claim that “Some men are immortal” directly contradicts your statement that “All men are mortal.” And the statement “Socrates is immortal,” though it does not explicitly contradict what you said, does contradict what was implicit in your remarks.

Similarly, to say that the death penalty is intrinsically wrong, or that it is not sanctioned by scripture, or that it is never permitted by the higher standards of Christian morality, would contradict and reverse what scripture and tradition have consistently said. Hence to teach such things would, by Newman’s criteria, not count as a development of doctrine, but rather as what he calls a “corruption” of doctrine that attempts to “correct” rather than corroborate it, and which “obscures” rather than illuminates it.

Newman, then, gives no aid and comfort whatsoever to Catholics who would like a doctrinal reversal on this matter. On the contrary, his words clearly condemn them.

Suffering for the truth (Updated)

2025-07-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

As many readers will have heard by now, last week Detroit’s new archbishop Edward Weisenburger suddenly fired three well-known professors at Sacred Heart Major Seminary: theologians Ralph Martin and Eduardo Echeverria and canon lawyer Edward Peters. No official explanation has been given. Martin has said that he was told only and vaguely that it had to do with “concerns about [his] theological perspectives.” Echeverria has declined comment because of a non-disclosure agreement. Peters says that he has “retained counsel.”

I have been commenting on the matter at Twitter/X and, because of its importance, thought it appropriate to do so here as well. One thing all three of these professors are known for is their longstanding defense of the Magisterium and traditional teaching of the Church. They have in recent years also respectfully criticized Pope Francis, because of words and actions of the pope that generated controversy due to their apparent conflict with the Church’s traditional teaching (on matters such as Holy Communion for those in adulterous unions, the death penalty, non-Christian religions, and blessings for homosexual couples).

In doing so, they were perfectly within their rights as theologians and as Catholics. As I have documented elsewhere, the Church has always acknowledged that there can be cases where it is legitimate for the faithful with the relevant theological expertise respectfully to raise criticisms of problematic magisterial statements, even publicly. The Church addressed the matter in some detail during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, in the instruction Donum Veritatis. Martin, Echeverria, and Peters all have the relevant expertise and have presented their objections with respect to the person and office of the pope. They have no history as “rad trad” firebrands or the like but are men of proven learning and sobriety. A reasonable person might disagree with them, but could not accuse them of violating the theological and canonical norms governing theological discussion in the Church.

All the same, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they were fired because of their theological views. Again, Martin, at least, was explicitly told that his firing had to do with that. And that theological animus was the motive is made even more plausible by the fact that one of the first things Archbishop Weisenburger did upon taking office was to crack down on traditional Latin Mass communities in the archdiocese. The archbishop has not explained how his harsh dealings with Catholics of more traditional opinions can be reconciled with what he has said elsewhere about how the faithful should treat one another:

Pope Francis is calling us to be a truly listening church... It is perhaps helpful also to note what synodality is not. It is not a political process in which there are winners and losers. We must not think of synodality as a power game whereby those with differing theological visions of the church and its mission contend for control and dominance… Dialogue and communication are essential for bishops to exercise their servant-leadership role on behalf of God’s people.

Nor, despite his admiration for Pope Francis, has the archbishop explained how his actions can be squared with what DDF prefect Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández tells us was the late pope’s desire “instead of persecutions and condemnations, to create spaces for dialogue” and to avoid “all forms of authoritarianism that seek to impose an ideological register.”

Other admirers of Pope Francis well-known for their endless chatter about dialogue, inclusion, and mercy have reacted with merciless glee at the peremptory exclusion of Martin, Echeverria, and Peters – and in some cases thrown in gratuitous smears to boot. Austen Ivereigh matter-of-factly characterizes them as “notoriously... intemperate.” It is difficult to judge this to be anything but a brazen lie, which Ivereigh perhaps thinks he can get away with because few of his readers are likely to know much about the three professors. But whether or not he knows it to be false, the reality is precisely the opposite of what he says. Echeverria long defended Pope Francis before only reluctantly and cautiously changing his mind, Peters is well-known for lawyerly nuance, and Martin is about as mild-mannered as can be imagined.

Mike Lewis accuses the three professors of “heresy.” This is a preposterous calumny. As the Catechism defines it, “heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same” (2089). Never have any of the three professors expressed any denial or doubt about any such doctrine. Michael Sean Winters is especially shameless in his bad faith, applauding the firing of Martin, Echeverria, and Peters while in the same breath defending Fr. Charles Curran’s notorious dissent from the Church’s teaching on sexual morality.

It should be recalled that last week’s firings are not the first time prominent and loyal Catholic academics lost their positions because they criticized Pope Francis for failing to uphold traditional teaching. For example, in 2017, after criticizing the pope for sowing doctrinal confusion, Fr. Thomas Weinandy was removed from his position as consultant to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine. After signing a letter that accused Pope Francis of heresy in 2019, philosopher John Rist was banned from all pontifical universities, and theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols has had difficulty finding a stable academic position.

It is important to emphasize that, like the three professors fired last week, these are not mere media influencers, “rad trad” hotheads, or otherwise marginal figures. They are eminent academics long known for their deep learning, scholarly rigor and nuance, and fidelity to the teaching and Magisterium of the Church. Nor were they critical of Francis from the start, but only after his problematic statements and actions accumulated. One can disagree with some of the things they have said (for example, I think Rist and Nichols went too far, as I said at the time), while acknowledging that their arguments are serious, presented in good faith, and worthy of respectful engagement.

And it should be noted too that these men are only a handful from among a much larger body of eminent scholars known for their longtime loyalty to the Church and its Magisterium who were deeply troubled by aspects of Pope Francis’s pontificate – Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Josef Seifert, Msgr. Nicola Bux, Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Cardinal George Pell, and on and on and on. Even if we confined ourselves just to academics and other Catholic thinkers and churchmen who have been publicly respectfully critical of Pope Francis, the list would be very long. If we added those who have opted for various reasons to keep their concerns private, it would be extremely long.

The reason is not that these people, long known for their deep loyalty to the Church and to other recent popes, somehow magically all became heretics or dissenters under Francis. The reason is that Pope Francis was simply unlike any previous pope in history in the number of his theologically problematic statements and actions. None of the previous popes notorious for such words and actions – not Liberius, not Honorius, not John XXII – comes close. It is impossible for a theologically well-informed and intellectually honest person not to see the problem, and the gravity of the problem.

Yet for the most part, Pope Francis’s defenders have not seriously engaged with these thinkers’ arguments, and none of Francis’s defenders is remotely as notable for theological expertise and sobriety as the most eminent of the pope’s critics. Instead, for the most part Martin, Echeverria, and Peters, like Weinandy, Nichols, and Rist before them, have been subject to vulgar abuse and dismissiveness from their moral and intellectual inferiors – adding insult to the grave injury of having their livelihoods unjustly taken from them.

Again, Donum Veritatis taught that it is possible for there to be cases in which Catholics with the relevant theological expertise can legitimately raise criticisms of defective statements from the Church’s magisterial authorities. Indeed, the instruction even acknowledges that “such a situation can certainly prove a difficult trial. It can be a call to suffer for the truth, in silence and prayer, but with the certainty, that if the truth really is at stake, it will ultimately prevail.”

The scholars who have lost their positions for criticizing Pope Francis’s errors are now indeed suffering for the truth. But the truth will ultimately prevail, as it did in the cases of Liberius, Honorius, and John XXII. We do not know how long this will take. In the case of John XXII, it happened very quickly; in the case of Honorius, it took decades. But we can have good hope that Pope Leo XIV, who seems to be a kind and generous man who appreciates theological learning and wants to unify the Church, will approach these controversies in a less divisive and draconian manner than did his predecessor.

UPDATE 8/2: The Pillar reports that Sacred Heart Major Seminary’s policy for terminating faculty requires “due process,” “specifying the grounds for dismissal,” and other conditions. If these and the other details about the case that have been reported are accurate, it would seem that the firings violated the seminary's own policy.

A postliberal middle ground on trade

2025-07-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

In my latest article at Postliberal Order, I defend a postliberal middle ground position between free trade dogmatism and rigid protectionism, and argue that sound trade policy depends more on circumstances and prudential judgment than appeal to abstract principle.

Heeding Anscombe on just war doctrine

2025-07-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Anscombe’s “War and Murder” is a magnificent essay, an intellectually rigorous and morally serious defense of traditional Christian and natural law teaching against pacifists on the one side and, on the other, those who attempt to rationalize the unjust killing of civilians. As she argues, both errors feed off of one another. The essay is perhaps even more relevant today than it was at the time she wrote it.

Here is a summary of her position. The pacifist holds that all killing is immoral, even when necessary to protect citizens against criminal evildoers within a nation, or foreign adversaries without. This position is contrary to the basic precondition of any social order, which is the right to protect itself against attempts to destroy it. It also has no warrant in the orthodox Christian tradition. A less extreme but related error is the thesis that violence can never justly be initiated, but at most can only ever be justified in response to those who have initiated it. In fact, Anscombe argues, what matters is not who strikes the first blow, but who is in the right. For example, it was in her judgment right for the British to initiate violence in order to suppress chattel slavery.

That is one set of errors. But another and opposite extreme error is to abuse the principle that war can sometimes be justifiable, in order to try to rationalize violence that is in fact unjust. Indeed, this opposite extreme is, in Anscombe’s view, the more common error. And it is more common in war than in police activity, because war affords more occasions for the evil of killing the innocent, and civilians in particular. The principle of double effect is too often misapplied in attempts to rationalize such killing.

Having given a general description of these two sorts of error, Anscombe then goes on to examine each in more detail. She suggests that in the early twentieth century, some were drawn to pacifism in part as an overreaction to universal conscription (which she regards as an evil). But her main focus is on the theme that pacifism derives from a distortion of Christianity. In part this has to do with a hostility to the ethos of the Old Testament, which she argues is widely misunderstood and widely and wrongly thought to be at odds with the New Testament. But the New Testament too has been badly misunderstood. For example, counsels to which only some are called (such as giving away one’s worldly goods) are sometimes misrepresented as precepts binding on all.

“The truth about Christianity,” Anscombe says, “is that it is a severe and practicable religion, not a beautifully ideal but impracticable one” (p. 48). But the distortions she describes have made Christianity seem to be an ideal but impracticable one. And the attraction some Christians have for pacifism is an example. Many Christians and non-Christians alike believe the falsehood that Christ calls us all to pacifism. And because no society could survive if it practiced pacifism, many thus conclude that Christian morality is simply not practical.

Here, as Anscombe argues, is where pacifism inadvertently paves the way for those who rationalize the murder of the innocent. Falsely supposing that all violence is evil and also noting that violence is necessary to preserve a society against evildoers, they take the short step to the conclusion that “committed to ‘compromise with evil,’ one must go the whole hog and wage war à outrance” (p. 48). In other words, once we are convinced that we’re going to have to do evil anyway in order to protect society, there’s no limit to the evil we will rationalize as necessary to achieve this good end. Unrealistic moralizing has as its sequel an amoral realpolitik, falsely presenting itself as the only alternative.

With Catholics, Anscombe says, this amorality masquerades as an application of the principle of double effect. True, this principle can indeed in some cases justify actions that foreseeably risk harm to civilians, when that harm is not intended and when it is not out of proportion to the good to be achieved. (For example, it can be justifiable to bomb an enemy military base even if one foresees, while not intending, that some civilians nearby could be killed as a result.)

The trouble, Anscombe says, is that people often play fast and loose with the notion of “intention” in order to abuse the principle of double effect. For example, it would be sheer sophistry for an employee to say that when he helped his boss embezzle from the company, his “intention” was not really to assist in embezzlement, but only to avoid getting fired, so that the action could be justified by double effect. Similarly, Anscombe argues, it is sophistry to pretend that the obliteration bombing of cities does not involve any intentional killing of civilians, but only the intention to end a war earlier. Another sophistry involves interpreting what counts as a “combatant” very broadly, so as to try to justify attacks on the civilian population in general. Anscombe also responds to various other attempts to rationalize violations of just war criteria.

That, again, is the argument in outline. Here are some ways it is relevant today. We have, on the one hand, some Catholics who appear at least to flirt with pacifism. Pope Francis said things that implied that war could never be just and that traditional teaching on this matter needed to be rethought, though he also said things that pointed in the other direction. As with other topics, his teaching on this matter was simply muddled rather than a clear departure from tradition. But it was muddled in a way that gives aid and comfort to the first, pacifistic erroneous extreme identified by Anscombe.

On the other hand, we also have many who go to the opposite extreme criticized by Anscombe, of trying to rationalize unjust harm to civilian populations by abuse of the principle of double effect and related sophistries. For example, this is the case with much of the commentary on Israel’s war in Gaza. Israel certainly had the right and indeed the duty to retaliate for the diabolical Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, which killed almost 1,200 people. But many seem to think that this gives Israel a blank check to do whatever it likes in Gaza, or at least whatever it likes short of deliberately targeting civilians.

That is not the case. Yes, traditional just war doctrine holds that it is always immoral deliberately to kill civilians. But that is by no means all that it says on the matter. It also holds that it is immoral deliberately to destroy civilian property and infrastructure, and thereby to make normal civilian life impossible. To be sure, it holds too that it can, by the principle of double effect, sometimes be permissible to carry out military actions that put civilian lives and property at risk, where such risk is not intended but simply foreseen. But it also holds that this harm must not be out of proportion to the good that one hopes to secure by way of such military action.

Throughout Gaza, however, civilian property and infrastructure have been largely destroyed, and ordinary life made impossible. The resulting humanitarian crisis has been steadily worsening. Casualty numbers in Gaza are hotly disputed, but they are undeniably high. According to a recent report:

Almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025 as a result of the Hamas-Israel war, estimates the first independent survey of deaths. More than half of the people killed were women aged 18-64, children or people over 65, reports the study.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the true number is half of that, or even just one third of that. That would still be extremely high. Such loss of life, destruction of basic infrastructure, and making of ordinary civilian life impossible are out of proportion to the evil Israel is retaliating against. And this is putting aside the awful conditions under which Gazans have been living for years, and the allegations of cases where civilians have been deliberately targeted during the current war. These too are hotly disputed matters, but the point is that even if we don’t factor them in, Israeli action in Gaza seems clearly disproportionate and thus not justifiable by the principle of double effect.

There is also the sophistry some commit of pretending that if a civilian sympathizes with Hamas, he is morally on a par with a combatant and may be treated as such. And then there is the proposal some have made to dispossess the Gazans altogether, which would only add a further, massive layer of injustice.

None of this can facilitate a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, but will inevitably greatly inflame further already high hostility against Israel. A commitment to preserving the basic preconditions of ordinary civilian life for Israelis and Palestinians alike is both morally required by just war criteria, and a precondition to any workable modus vivendi.

A second Honorius?

2025-07-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

Like his predecessor Honorius, Pope Francis failed clearly to uphold traditional teaching at a time the Church was sick from heresy. So I argue in my contribution to a symposium on Francis in the latest issue of The Lamp.