Notes: Tuesday, September 27-Tuesday, October 4, 2011 (part 2 of 2)

7. On the death penalty

7.1 "Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, in his famous speech on the “Consistent Ethic of Life” at Fordham in 1983, stated his concurrence with the “classical position” that the State has the right to inflict capital punishment"; "[a]lthough Cardinal Bernardin advocated what he called a “consistent ethic of life,” he made it clear that capital punishment should not be equated with the crimes of abortion, euthanasia, and suicide."

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/08/catholicism-amp-capital-punishment-21

(That came to my attention via this post by Fr. Zuhlsdorf.)

Labels: death penalty, Joseph Bernardin

7.2 Prof. Feser on the death penalty

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/09/4033

That article, which came to my attention via this blog post by Prof. Feser, is well worth reading in full (and it isn't too long), but I want to highlight these parts, at least:

Most critics of capital punishment pay little attention to the question of “punishment,” focusing almost exclusively on their argument with “capital.” This is a fatal mistake, for as it happens, anyone who agrees that punishment as such is legitimate cannot fail also to agree, if he thinks carefully about the matter, that capital punishment can be legitimate, at least in principle. ...

[...] If wrongdoers do deserve punishment, and if punishment ought to be scaled to the gravity of the crime (harsher punishments for graver crimes), then it would be absurd to deny that there is a level of criminality for which capital punishment is appropriate, at least in principle. ...

[... Against the argument that the death penalty is offensive to 'human dignity':] ... On the contrary, to regard a person as deserving of punishment is implicitly to affirm his dignity as a human being, for it is to acknowledge that he has free will and moral responsibility, unlike a robot or a mere animal. If inflicting lesser punishments is not incompatible with human dignity and even implicitly affirms it, then given the principle of proportionality, capital punishment also can be compatible with (and indeed an affirmation of) human dignity.
[italics in the original, my ellipses and square-bracketed interpolations]

Labels: death penalty, human dignity, justice, morality

7.3 Two blog comments by Prof. Feser on New Natural Law theory and the death penalty

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/in-defense-of-capital-punishment.html?showComment=1317504347621#c79084043059913225

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/in-defense-of-capital-punishment.html?showComment=1317504714308#c3938891609449872006

Labels: death penalty, justice, morality, New Natural Law

7.4 Prof. Long on the death penalty

http://thomistica.net/news/2011/9/18/goods-without-normative-order-to-the-good-life-happiness-or.html

That's quite a technical article, but I recommend that you read at least the paragraph (beginning with the words "Still, Tollefsen is consistent") on the Church's teaching on the death penalty. (Most usefully for me, it mentions a pronouncement by Pius XII. on the matter; in item 4 of this edition of Notes I linked to this web-page of the (Italian) text of that pronouncement, and now I see that it is also available, again in Italian, on pages seventy-two to eighty-five of AAS 47 (1955) here.)

Labels: death penalty, justice, Magisterium, morality, Pius XII. Pacelli

8. "No to legal marriages if Church forced to marry gays: archbishop"

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=28476

Labels: Barry Hickey, funerals, G.L.B.T., marriage

9. The Catholica Forum welcomes a new participant

http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=84919

Labels: Aragon, Catholica Australia

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Confessor, A.D. 2011

The clock is ticking: the rush to end the latest ‘injustice’

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/judges-urge-coalition-to-pass-samesex-bill/2008/09/13/1220857873114.html

I see that

[s]enior judiciary members have urged the Coalition not to block or delay Government legislation that will give same-sex couples the same financial rights as heterosexual de facto couples

And the impetus for this? The imminent retirement of the Hon. Mr. Justice Michael Kirby A.C. C.M.G.:

Justice Kirby has become the public face of the proposed legislation. As the law stands, his partner of almost 40 years, Johan van Vloten, would be ineligible to receive part of his pension should he die first. If Justice Kirby was female, Mr van Vloten would receive the part pension.

This discrimination exists in more than 100 areas of Commonwealth law, which Labor has sought to end with two bills.

The question is: is this discrimination unjust? I say: no, it is not, since even a lawful spouse is not ‘owed’, in justice, a part-pension or other entitlements. One could make a tenuous argument, I suppose, that since a wife makes sacrifices for her husband, she should enjoy some of the benefits that he reaps from these. But this would ignore the fact that these sacrifices are part of a mother’s vocation. Also, the law has an educative function, and any discouragement of homosexual activity is a good thing. And the notion that a sinner should be rewarded for the longevity of his state of sin is quite repugnant.

But since the question of human rights and discrimination has come up again, I might make a few more remarks on the topic. We know, or should know, that a right is implied by and dependent on a duty. Now a Christian can point to the Ten Commandments as the source of his or her rights, since they lay down the corresponding duties. For instance, a duty not to kill implies a right to life, a duty not to steal implies a right to private property, and a duty to worship God implies a right to hear Mass offered according to the rubrics. Christians don’t (or shouldn’t) claim too many rights that have no basis in God’s ordinances.

Or, to look at the matter from another angle: each of us has an indestructible ontological dignity, an orientation towards a transcendent goal. We have certain rights in order that we can pursue this goal.

So it is perplexing when one hears secularists like Ms Elizabeth Broderick asserting that “[t]here is no question that legislated paid maternity leave is a basic human right” or the Sodomites League’s calls for same-sex ‘marriage’. What are the new-found duties that evoke these absurd demands?

Or even when a Catholic like Rev. Fr. John T. Zuhlsdorf refers to a right to vote as though it were “written into our being”. How can this be, when no-one contests the State’s denial of voting rights to the insane and to convicts, whose ontological dignity is no less than anyone else’s?

But at least with Catholics we know what ‘human dignity’ means. What do the secularists mean, though, when, unable to show the duty from which their asserted rights were inferred, they make some vague appeal to human dignity? If any secularists are visiting here (or anyone who understands the secularist world-view), please let me know!

In Iota Unum, Professor Romano Amerio links such claims to abstract rights without corresponding duties to the conflation of human nature and the human person. But then there are secularists like Professor Peter Singer, who explicitly separate out the two in their scheme of ‘human non-persons’ and ‘non-human persons’. And then one hears the likes of Mr. Paul Keating calling for a society based on the innate dignity of man according to a vague humanist conception. But when man has no goal beyond this world, ‘human dignity’ becomes a very shaky foundation indeed.

Reginaldvs Cantvar