When the present contests the past: the death penalty

David Bentley Hart has an attack on Feser & Bessette’s defense of the death penalty.  His main argument is that the death penalty is un-Christian because, basically, Jesus has already taken the sins of the world upon Himself.  I remember making the same argument as a teenager.  The problem, of course, is that this isn’t an argument against the death penalty; it’s an argument against punishment of any kind.  Catholic orthodoxy, once again, has chosen to endorse common sense rather than the cleanest theological argument.

Hart has a history of this, by the way.  I remember in his Beauty of the Infinite, he goes on (please excuse my going from memory) about Christianity overthrowing the pagan worldview that the city must use violence to protect its island of order from foreign enemies and internal miscreants.  I remember thinking to myself, “I hope not, because the pagan view is obviously true.”  I wrote it off at the time, because it was a book addressing post-modernist critiques of Christianity on their own terms.  Hart was speaking Po-Mo, which is an absolutely terrible language for philosophy or moral reasoning, much worse than the common man’s unadorned English.  Po-Mo doesn’t do nuance.  Po-Mo doesn’t do clarity.  So of course whatever Hart was thinking was bound to come out sounding crazy.  But no, it turns out Hart actually thinks in Po-Mo.

I can’t comment on Hart’s treatment of the Church Fathers, since he is much better qualified to speak on them than I.  I was bothered by this

And, anyway, if Newman was right—and believing Catholics had better hope he was, for the sake of the intelligibility of their faith—it is not only doctrine but also the church’s understanding of its teachings that is clarified over time by the Spirit. There may be slight missteps, of course, but the general view of development tacitly taken by the magisterium is that there are no violent retreats from clearly stated new discoveries; there is only a relentless narrowing and intensification of focus. This suggests, among other things, that the teachings of the magisterium under the current pontificate are probably more trustworthy than those under the pontificate of, say, Leo X.

Does development of doctrine really mean that newer = better?  Is Pope Francis necessarily a better guide to the Faith than all his predecessors (and inferior to all his successors)?  Most people don’t put it like this, but it does seem to be the implication of many invocations of Newman’s name.

A very important thing to keep in mind, as pointed out by Michael Pakuluk, is that development of doctrine is not itself a doctrine.  No one is obliged to accept any version of it.  If one is going to accept some development theory, newer=better is probably the worst one.  Nobody knows what future popes will say, so we could never be sure of anything.  The whole point of such a theory is to have certainty about doctrine in spite of superficial dissimilarities in its formulation over time.  For this, older=better would serve us much better.  All one has to do is look to the first pronouncement on a given topic.  Future popes may contradict this, but that would just make them heretics, which is future Catholics’ problem, not ours.  Hart’s own description of development suggests a theory that is better still:  clearer=better.  Preferring one direction on the time axis to the other is arbitrary and irrational, but the case for preferring clear pronouncements to vague ones is obvious.  For the most part, this supports the standard view of favoring more recent formulations of the Faith, simply because they are more precise.  Their formulators were cognizant of a finer-grained set of distinctions.  However, papal and conciliar clarity has certainly not been in the ascendant for some time.  (Popes learned to speak Po-Mo.  One thing we should not be thankful to JPII for.)  Thus, the most “developed” doctrine now lies in the past.

This leads to to a broader complaint, the general sense that “we know better now”.  Knowledge has advanced.  Science has advanced.  Morality has advanced.  Our willingness to trust Reason has advanced.  But their is no Knowledge, no Science, no Morality, no Reason–not with capital “K”, “S”, “M”, “R”.  Making them proper nouns like that implies that they are unitary things that can bring the plenitude of their authority to bear on any particular issue.  So, for example, it would be wrong to say “Science tells us that gravity can bend light.”  No, particular observations of gravitational lensing show that.  If a person had reason to doubt those observations or their interpretation, it wouldn’t count against him one bit that scientists have gathered fantastically reliable measurements on completely different subjects.  There is no capital-S “Science.”  Likewise, it is never enough to say “we know better” in general.  One must say what in particular we know now that our ancestors didn’t that leads us to think differently.  Our ancestors thought the Earth was the center of the solar system, but we know particular things now (the phases of Venus, the parallax motion of the stars,…) that lead us to think differently.  What in particular do we know now about the death penalty that Thomas Aquinas or Pope Pius IX didn’t know?

Perhaps we are simply more spiritually mature than previous generations, that we see things they don’t?  This will hardly seem plausible to the traditionalist, not because we grant some special authority to the past, but because we don’t grant any special authority to the present.

That is the traditionalist argument for the death penalty.  If we’re the only generation to see a problem with it, probably we’re the ones that are wrong.  On the other hand, I do appreciate why the new natural lawyers and Pope John Paul II were against the death penalty, and it had nothing to do with trying to appease liberals.  In fact, it was born of the fight against them.  In the ethical debates of late-20th century Catholicism, to be conservative-orthodox meant to be anti-consequentialist.  That there are intrinsically evil acts, acts wrong by their object that cannot be made right by any consideration of intent or circumstances, was where we planted our flag.  So we needed a list of such acts.  Killing seems like the most obvious one.  But tradition grants states the right to execute.  This could be accommodated by making the intrinsically evil act more specific:  it’s wrong to kill as a private person; it’s wrong to kill a person not judged guilty of capital offense by the state.  But the more qualifiers one can stuff into the specification of the object of an act, the less useful anti-consequentialism becomes.  Ideally, we’d want the barest “atom” of will, the minimal specification to make an action intelligible.  Presumably the solution is to say that it’s not the number of qualifiers but their type that keeps our anti-consequentialism pure and usable.  (Innocent vs. guilty and public vs. private do not invoke intent or consequences, nor do they require such considerations to explain their relevance.)

Still, I understand the discomfort, and I share it.  We hold that the rule against killing has exceptions, while the rule against rape has none, even though killing is worse than rape, even though a state could conceivably authorize rape, even though someone might do something so bad that they’d deserve it (hence the public’s sadistic complacency about prison rape).  I can’t shake off the worry that the reason we make exceptions to the rule against killing and not the rules against sexual evils is that rape, fornication, and the like are ultimately not sufficiently useful, and we are not really anti-consequentialists after all.

I can’t make up my mind about the death penalty.