Category: Ethics

In his first program, Fr. Bryce has a lesson about concepts of human nature, natural law, and morality. Human freedom, a great good, exists within a context: the reality of human nature. Ignoring human nature leads to erroneous thinking about human action: that is, about morality.

I love when the NYT descends into self-parody. Here they seem to lament the fate of Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban ally and heroin distributor, who has apparently lost weight in the John Gotti Suite in the Manhattan Federal pen. And his guards don’t speak Pashto! Worst of all, he was lured to New York under false pretenses: he thought he was attending a “political meeting,” and the Feds had the nerve to arrest him instead for trying to sell $50 million in heroin to U.S. consumers!
Two unwittingly funny things about the article:
1. This dimwit Islamofascist is being represented by a lawyer named “Goldenberg.”
2. Mr. Goldenberg complains that his client “did not know that the [Bush] administration had publicized his name as a most-wanted drug dealer.” If he did, “it might have affected his travel plans.”
Here’s a serious ethical question, though: is it morally permissible to deceive a criminal? I think it is under limited circumstances, because a criminal doesn’t have a right to the truth, if revealing the truth means he will get away with his crimes, or commit other evils.
That is (roughly) Saint Thomas Aquinas’ teaching. Saint Augustine took the strict view that speaking an untruth was ipso facto sinful. Your thoughts?

I admit it: I’m impressed. Here’s Frances D’Emilio, an AP reporter covering the Pope’s illness and his recent statements on medical ethics, and doing a solid, accurate job of describing what the Catholic Church believes and teaches on these matters.

Later that day, the Vatican announced he had been fitted with a feeding tube in his nose to help boost his nutritional intake.
The use of the feeding tube illustrates a key point of Roman Catholic policy John Paul has proclaimed: It is morally necessary to give patients food and water, no matter their condition.
As Parkinson’s disease and other ailments have left him increasingly frail, the pope has been emphasizing that the chronically ill, “prisoners of their condition … retain their human dignity in all its fullness.”
The Vatican’s attitude to the chronically ill has been apparent in its bitter condemnation of a judge’s order two weeks ago to remove a feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged American woman who died Thursday.
Vatican Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, reacting to Schiavo’s death, denounced the removal of her feeding tube as “an attack against God.”
Although different, some see parallels in the two cases.
Under John Paul, Vatican teaching on the final stages of life includes a firm rejection of euthanasia, insistence on treatments that help people bear ailments with dignity and encouragement of research to enhance and prolong life.
A 1980 Vatican document makes the distinction between “proportionate” and “disproportionate” means of prolonging life. While it gives room for refusal of some forms of aggressive medical intervention for terminally ill patients, it insists that “normal care” must not be interrupted.
John Paul set down exactly what that meant in a speech last year to an international conference on treatments for patients in a so-called persistent vegetative state.
“I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory.”
John Paul’s 26-year papacy has been marked by its call to value the aged and to respect the sick, subjects the pope has turned to as he battles Parkinson’s disease and crippling knee and hip ailments.

I finally got around to opening my Fairfax County real estate tax assessment today. It was sitting in a stack of papers for a couple of weeks, and it has not improved with age.
They don’t actually come right out and saw how much you’re going to pay. No, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is coy about that subject, though they helpfully included a pamphlet explaining why assessments are completely justified and rational. Another shows the county budget that explains how they’re going to spend $3 billion (that’s right, with a “b”) in fiscal 2006.
But we peasants should rejoice! The good people on the Board are cutting our taxes, you see: to offset the obscene tax increase, they are lowering the tax rates, from $1.13 per $100 of value to $1.03. I did the math that they didn’t want to show us, and I see that what for us would have been a tax increase of $1,150 is “only” about $700.
In other words, I ought to shut up because my real estate taxes only went up 17% instead of 28%, and our county is such a wonderful place to live. But I can’t help but ask the question: if the county was wonderful when it was getting $4,000 last year from the Johnsons, why does it need the extra 700 bucks next year? Inflation, sure — that accounts for about $100. There aren’t 17% more students in the schools, and (thankfully) the cops don’t have 17% more criminals to catch. The firemen aren’t putting out 17% more fires. Et cetera.
To our family, the increase alone represents almost a month of groceries. Now I have to work for three weeks out of the year, just to pay my real estate taxes, mostly to support schools that my children do not attend. Those taxes are more than our phone, water, electrical, mobile phone, basic cable TV, and Internet connection bills combined.
It doesn’t stop with real estate. My federal taxes will probably be more than all of those things I just listed, plus all of our grocery expenditures. Aside from our rather substantial mortgage — itself a result of the Board keeping a lid on the county housing supply — our biggest expense is paying The Man in all his guises.
And you wonder why suburban parents vote for Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin?

It must have been a slow news day for the Washington Post to use this article as its Military Outrage Story du jure:

Imaad said they were startled by a loud banging at the door. He went quickly to open it. When he did, Imaad said, there were about a dozen U.S. soldiers standing with their guns pointed at his head.
Imaad and his mother said the soldiers rushed in, ordering them to sit together while they searched the house. “You look poor,” Imaad recalled one of the soldiers saying. “Why?”
Imaad answered in English: “I have not been able to find a job, although I’m a graduate of the College of Arts.” His heart was pounding, Imaad said. His mother, a chatty widow who adores her son, sat next to him, shaking.
The soldiers went to search his bedroom. He heard laughing, and then they called for him, he said. Imaad went to his room and saw that the soldiers had found several magazines he kept hidden from his mother. They had pictures of girls in swimsuits and erotic poses. Imaad said the soldiers spread the magazines on his bed and put his Koran in the middle.
“This is a good match,” Imaad said one of the soldiers told him.
“It was a nightmare,” he said. “I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines.”
Within 20 minutes, the soldiers left without arresting him or his mother. While the soldiers went next door to search his neighbor’s house, Imaad began to slap his mother, he said. “The American people are devils,” Um Imaad recalled her son repeating.

I dunno about this. In high school, when Mom discovered the cigars in my suitcase when I was about to leave on a beach trip, my first instinct wasn’t to give her the back of my hand. (Instead, I launched on an impassioned, adolescent rant about her invading my privacy, as if minor children have privacy rights.) Has any major liberal news outlet ever so blithely reported on physical abuse of women, without so much as a single word to condemn it?
More than that, the only sources for this story are a mother-smacking jobless homebody, and the target of his violence. No one else corroborated any details of the story, other than there were U.S. troops in the neighborhood that night.
It’s also curious that the Post — which ran article after article repeating condemnations of “The Passion of the Christ” as anti-Semitic — would also repeat laughably anti-Jewish statements without comment.

Um Imaad brought Imaad pills from the doctor to try to calm him. He looked at the yellow ones, then the red ones and refused to take them. “All these belong to Jewish people,” he said, pushing one set aside. “And these others are from bad or foreign people.”

This guy sounds like Pat Buchanan at the pharmacy!
More seriously, there are a few things to know about Arab communication if you have not dealt with Arabs before. WARNING: the following paragraphs contain generalizations, which are sometimes mischaracterized as “stereotyping.” However, just about anyone who has communicated with Arabs for a significant llength of time will agree with these generalizations.
1. Arabs exaggerate. Most people can embellish, but Arabs have a knack for inventing or magnifying details. Case in point: why would 12 men all point their weapons at one guy in a doorway? Why would they bunch up, unless they wanted to present an appealing target for a bad guy with an AK-47 or hand grenade? Most likely, there were two or three guys at the door, and others providing perimeter security.
2. In part because they exaggerate, Arabs do not expect their words to be taken at face value. You, the listener, are expected to read between the lines. If you don’t, it’s your fault, not the speaker’s.
3. Arabs will make up events in order to save their personal honor. Thus, it is very unlikely that the soldiers would have arranged the naughty pictures around a Koran; it’s more likely that Imaad made that up. You see, looking at provocative photos of sluttish infidels is bad, but juxtaposing them with the words of Allah as dictated to the Prophet? Incomparably worse! So the real crime wasn’t Imaad’s lack of chastity, it was the blasphemy of the Crusaders!
That’s why Imaad says later in the article, “I asked God to forgive me…because I could not prevent American sins” (emphasis mine). Not forgiveness for his sins, but other people’s.
(Thanks to Australian blogger Tim Blair for the original link to the article. Read his take, which is a lot funnier than mine.)