A Horror of the Absolute
Once, when I was a graduate student, a fellow student asked me a question. I forget what it was or what I said in reply, but I did give her an answer. When she heard it, she said, "Oh, you have a philosophy all worked out," and walked away. I've been wondering ever since just what she expected from me.
I recalled that very brief conversation from a now-distant past when I read Maria McFadden's and Anne Conlon's "A Conversation with Naomi Wolf in the Summer 1996 Human Life Review [HLR]. Ms. Wolf had created a sensation with her article, "Our Bodies, Our Souls," in The New Republic, in which she urged her fellow pro-choicers to admit that abortion is an evil because it ends human lives (though it is sometimes a necessary one) and to stop pretending that abortion is something other than it is. In a "Firing Line" TV program she discussed the article with Mrs. Helen Alvare, the principal spokesman on abortion for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. A transcript of the program was printed in the Spring 1996 HLR. "A Conversation" was an interview with Ms. Wolf based on that transcript.
The interviewers for the HLR began by asking if there was anything Ms. Wolf would like to add to it. She replied: "Not add, but contextualize. One thing that comes out very clearly in reading the transcript is how coherent [Helen Alvare's] prose is, and how chaotic my prose becomes in trying to convey the position I'm taking."
The late John Courtney Murray, S.J., once remarked that modern man has a horror of the absolute. It would be easy to ridicule him, or in this case her, as a mixed-up kid who regards coherence as an intellectual defect. There are indeed a lot of confused kids out there who do just that, for two reasons, one of them bad, the other at least not without some merit. The bad reason is that, as Woody Allen famously said, the heart wants what the heart wants, and will take it despite any arguments against it. But if all arguments can be dismissed as nothing more than efforts to impose other people's will on my will, then no one can say me nay. The appeal of this moral skepticism to adolescents of all ages is obvious, and accounts in large part for the enthusiasm with which they attack coherent thought.
On the other hand—and this is the partially-good reason—logical coherence can be deceptive in being too pat and presenting apparently conclusive arguments that in fact leave out aspects of the complex reality with which they purport to deal. The mind of the ideological terrible simplificateur specializes in this kind of thinking and treats moral, political, and legal reasoning as if it were an exercise in geometry, where the conclusions follow necessarily from the premises. That, I take it, is what Ms. Wolf meant when she said that there is "a wealth of human truth that stands between the sometimes too simplistic slogans of the pro-choice movement and the sometimes—fairly often, certainly often so far as I am concerned— far too simplistic solutions of the pro-life movement."
Personally, I would reserve the words "far too simplistic" for the opinions of former Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court, which achieved classic status in that department. But otherwise Ms. Wolf's point is well taken, even though only up to a point. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught that there is a universal natural law. But, he said, moral reasoning differs from geometrical reasoning in which the conclusions enjoy the same necessity and universality as the basic premises. This is not so in moral reasoning:
It is universally right and true to act according to reason. And from this principle it follows as a proper conclusion that debts must be repaid. This conclusion holds in most cases. But it could happen in some particular case that it would be injurious, and therefore irrational, to repay a debt, if for instance, the money repaid would be used to make war against one's own country. Such exceptions are all the more likely to occur the more we get down to particular cases: take, for instance, the question of repaying a debt together with a certain security, or in some specific way. The more specialized the conditions applied, the greater is the possibility of an exception arising which will make it right to make restitution or not (Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 94, a. 4, c.).
Reason, and therefore justice, require that goods that belong to another be returned to their owner, but justice also requires that this should not be done in some circumstances. We are also obliged to worship God, but not all the time or in all places, to the neglect of other good actions. Similarly, it follows from human nature that we must honor our parents, but not if they are violent criminals. These exceptions do not repeal the natural norm, which remains valid, but recognize that its applications are less than universal.
Are there, then, any absolute moral norms, or as some moralists today call them, exceptionless norms? This is a basic issue in contemporary moral philosophy and theology. One answer is that there are such norms, but they are negative ones, norms that forbid rather than command certain actions. That is to say, a norm that commands certain good actions to be done will admit of exceptions for sufficiently good reasons. But at least some negative norms are universal and admit of no exceptions. As the late Professor Arnold Brecht said from a Kantian point of view, the human mind cannot conceive that it could be just to convict a man of a crime that we know he did not commit.
There are those who would maintain that convicting him could be justified by the necessity of saving the entire people from a savage and victorious enemy who demanded that the innocent man be sacrificed. Others would contend that anyone who could accept that argument has not grasped the elementary idea of justice. Edmund Burke, who certainly held a view of the role of prudence in morals and politics similar to that of Aquinas, once remarked that there are some things a good man would not do even to save the commonwealth. Aquinas himself, to cite but one example of an exceptionless norm in his writings, teaches that suicide is always wrong: "Killing oneself is totally impermissible" (Summa Theologica, 11-11, q. 64, a. 5, c.).
One can dismiss these citations, and a host of others that could be adduced, as proving only that certain Dead White Males have held that there are some moral absolutes. But it seems clear to me, at any rate, that if there are no absolutes, reasoning collapses into incoherence and yields no conclusions. For doubt implies knowledge (how can we doubt if we do not know what knowledge is?), and similarly probability implies certainty, contingency implies necessity, and the relative implies the absolute. Knowledge, certainty, necessity, and the absolute are the standards against which we measure doubt, probability, contingency, and the relative. If reason has no access to the absolute, etc., then even doubt, etc., must collapse into incoherence.
For this reason all moral judgments, even relative and conditioned ones, depend upon there being some moral absolutes. Without them, our moral reasoning becomes a proportionalism in which we balance one good against another, or one evil against another, with no final standard by which to measure them.
Aristotle says somewhere in his writings that the ability to think consists largely in the ability to make distinctions. Then, in another part of his writings he says that most people are not very good at making distinctions. Naomi Wolf, for instance, denies the difference between killing and letting die. In this she is not alone; the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York has struck down as unconstitutional a New York State law forbidding assisted suicide. The court argued that since State law allows a person to refuse treatment of a disease of which he will die, it must allow him to employ a doctor's assistance in putting an end to his life. He is just as dead in either case, and that is what matters, not the means by which he dies.
I recall being on an informal committee organized by the Family Life Bureau of the Archdiocese of New York in the early '60s to discuss Planned Parenthood's effort to have the city's public hospitals provide contraceptives to poor patients. After we had finished our discussions, I remarked to one of the priests present that the next issue that would arise would be abortion. "Yes," he said, "and we'll lose that one, too." I then began to realize that eventually euthanasia would become a public issue. When that happened, as it now has, the American people would be largely incapable of distinguishing between killing and letting die. Steeped in a flexible utilitarian and pragmatic ethic as we are, we judge by results, and the result in either case is that the person is dead. The unwillingness of juries in Michigan to convict Dr. Jack Kevorkian demonstrates how deeply result-oriented utilitarianism lies in our national psyche.
Consider this exchange in "A Conversation with Naomi Wolf" concerning a stranger who dies because you won't give him some of your bone marrow:
HLR: A person dying is not the same thing as killing a person.
Ms. Wolf: Actually you are killing him.
HLR: . . . I think there is a significant difference between a person being deprived of a medical procedure dying, and killing a human being.
Ms. Wolf: But the person who is going to die because you aren't going to give him your bone marrow feels like you're killing him, and you are.
HLR: But that's not a really fair analogy.
Ms. Wolf: Well, I think it's a perfect analogy; I think I have yet to hear you tell me why it's not a fair analogy.
So let me suggest that a fair analogy would be, not a person dying for lack of bone marrow, which a donor could supply him with, but a person needing a heart transplant to save his life. You, sir, have a healthy, functioning heart; therefore you are obliged to literally give him your heart so that he may live. But, you protest, if I do that, I die. True, but that is the analogy with abortion. Great though a mother's need of an abortion may be—and sometimes it is felt as intensely as Ms. Wolf says it is—it kills the child in her womb to meet the mother's need. In the lexicon of choice, the abortion that does not produce a dead baby is a botched abortion.
This gets us into an argument about the relative importance of the mother and the child. On that I will only remark that to make that the point at issue leads us to relativize the moral wrongness of directly and intentionally taking innocent human life. What is the standard by which we judge the proportion between the mother's need and the child's life?
We can try to wiggle out of that question by denying that a fetus is a person, and therefore not the subject of a moral or legal right to live. That assumes, in typically American fashion, that moral and legal issues can be reduced to questions about rights, and that the question of the worth of human life does not arise until a person is present in the womb. Then we face the question of the criteria by which to establish that a person is there: is it the appearance of the "primitive stripe," or the formation of a brain, or the capability of experiencing pain, or the ability to survive outside the womb?
The answer to that question depends very much on who wants to do the killing and why. It is a question to which, as the U.S. Supreme Court astutely pointed out in Roe v. Wade, there is (and will be) no universally agreed answer. Therefore, the Court argued, we have no way of upholding the constitutionality (i.e., the public morality) of laws that forbid abortion. We do know, of course, that at conception a living being of the human species has come into existence, but making the answer depend on a definition of personhood enables us to dodge the issue of the objective worth of human life as such.
Ms. Wolf says, "In my view it is more wrong to impose childbearing on women against their will" than it is to abort children (i.e., to kill them). But she also refers, in her New Republic article, to abortion as a "necessary evil," and maintains nonetheless that "sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die." In saying this, she again denies the difference between killing and letting die. Consciously or not, she also denies the classical double-effect distinction between doing evil and permitting it, and subscribes to the proportionalist principle that we may do evil in order to achieve good. Which is tantamount to saying that no action is morally forbidden in itself but only in proportion to the good or evil that results from it.
But this is moral incoherence. If moral good and evil can be judged in isolation from the object toward which a human act is directed by its very nature, there are no fixed premises from which we can reason to firm conclusions about the proportion between good and evil in any concrete action. In a system of pure proportionalism, good and evil come to be simply names that we attach to what we want or do not want.
If we accept the proportionalist principle that the immorality of an act does not lie in the act itself but in its proportion to its good or evil consequences, then we must face the question of Why Not? This appears most starkly in the cases where the disproportion between the evil done and the good achieved is most clear. If sacrificing an innocent man will save the country, why should we not do the evil deed with a pained but good conscience? Why not sell a daughter into child prostitution in order to save the family from starvation, as is done in certain parts of Southeast Asia? Why not give false testimony under oath in a murder trial, if the drug cartel threatens to wipe out a village if you tell the truth?
The Supreme Court indulges in a similar proportionalism with its test of constitutionality where it balances personal autonomy against "a compelling state interest." Since the Court is the author and the ultimate judge of the meaning of both terms, it has made itself the conscience of the nation, using apparently no standards other than its personal convictions or feelings. In this the Court reflects the value system of a cultural elite, whose power depends on the acquiescence of a population that to a large extent is confused and uncertain about its own moral beliefs.
At the bottom of this confusion lies a horror of the absolute that is the result of a loss, not only of faith in divine revelation, but of confidence in reason itself. This in turn is not only the consequence of several centuries of epistemological criticism that have left us doubtful of our ability to know reality. More importantly, it is the consequence of our growing unwillingness to acknowledge norms that are superior to our wills and independent of our choice. It is not for nothing that the "right to choose" has become the card that trumps the claims of an objectively valid and commonly-held morality. The distrust of coherent thought in moral issues that is now widespread among us derives not only from our awareness of the complexity of moral issues but from our dread of having any moral standards that we ourselves have not chosen "imposed" upon us. In the crunch, we prefer incoherence to a certainty that might interfere with our freedom to choose our own lifestyles.
It is also typical of liberal-minded Americans to erect suffering into a supreme evil and compassion for the suffering person into a supreme virtue. We may not ever be sure about what is good, but we know what hurts. Thus Ms. Wolf quotes with approval the Buddhist saying, "You have to go where the least suffering is." This sentiment is admirable in its way, but it reduces the fundamental premises of moral judgment to pleasure and pain, and that is the essence of utilitarianism, as Jeremy Bentham explained. It leaves us with a free-floating morality in which there is no action that in principle we may not perform if it will reduce the net amount of suffering in the world.
Thus equipped we are asked to face the issues, not only of abortion but the rising ones of assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, indeed the nature of marriage of any sort, the structure of the family, and very broad questions about the content of education and the purpose of politics. Ms. Wolf, who is neither hardhearted nor stupid, draws her philosophical and moral principles from a cultural milieu infected by a horror of the absolute. That unfortunately makes it difficult for her to escape incoherence or to trust coherent thought. But it may be some consolation to her that a distaste for coherent thought is not considered a handicap in intellectual circles today.
Endnote
Francis Canavan, S.J., is professor emeritus of political science at Fordham University, and a prolific writer who has contributed to a wide variety of American and foreign publications; he was for many years an editor-at-large of this journal. His latest book is The Pluralist Game (Rowman & Littlefield).
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