Over at What's Wrong with the World, I pointed out that under the right circumstances, the Just War Theory criteria used to condemn Scott Roeder could actually justify violence against providers of partial birth abortions. Part of the discussion comes down to whether or not you take a Roman Catholic or Reformed view of the intersection between human law and sin, and one's level of obedience to human law, but these are some of the criteria that rightly used to condemn Roeder's act as vigilantism:
If Roeder had then, in this alternate scenario, approached Tiller with a gun and threatened to harm him if he didn't cease, but did not immediately harm him, then he would have met the second criterion. Roeder's next act would have to involve shooting to wound Tiller, rather than harming him in order to meet the final criterion which is the minimal use of force necessary to stop a violent act on an innocent life.
The two critical points that were made against this were that the chance for successfully saving the unborn child's life is low given the mother's complicit role in the act, and that it is illegal to enter an abortion clinic armed with the intent of stopping the act. I would counter that in this scenario, the intervening party need not give the mother any more regard than the doctor. In fact, it would, according to the Just War Theory arguments used against the act, be ironic since the mother is the actual unjust aggressor, and the doctor is nothing more than a mercenary in her employment. The second issue is where I said that the divide between traditional Protestants and Catholics becomes apparent, with the former regarding disobedience to a law used to hide violent crimes as no vice, and the latter having some sympathy for the need to obey it.
The reason I use this scenario to illustrate what I think Martin Luther meant when he said that "reason is the devil's whore" is that reason is deterministic only with respect to the data and parameters given to it. I just logically justified a scenario in which killing Tiller could have been morally licit according to Christian theology. Another might disagree, and arrive at equally valid conclusions by taking the same underlying logic and supplying different parameters based on their own perspective. For example, even the relationship between obedience to human law, sin and salvation can skew this entire discussion wildly.
Now, consider the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to assassinate Hitler. Reason alone does not provide a deterministic path to ascertaining the morality of assassinating Hitler. The logic that is used to determine this is dependent on the initial assumptions. For the sake of brevity, I'll compare two of the major ones: utilitarian and traditional Christian theology of most conservative Catholics and Protestants. The utilitarian side provides a safety valve in situations like this by making the good that which provides the most pleasure and prevents the most pain for the most people, "within the limits of reason." The traditional Christian theology holds that all moral truths are immutable and unconcerned with the utilitarian calculus of how they affect one's neighbor's happiness and level of pain, "within the limits of reason" (using Jesus' example of breaking the Sabbath to save a neighbor from harm, and that example also be applied to certain things like using deception to stop a violent criminal).
Under the utilitarian assumption, the logical path leads inexorably to the assassination of Hitler because his death would cause an undeniable good for the majority of Germans and political prisoners since it would have provided a chance to end a war that Germany was losing and to free the prisoners. Law and order considerations, and even Hitler's life, would be expendable since the potential good was so overwhelmingly higher than the potential bad, that it would have been a very clear decision. The objection, within the utilitarian context, would have been to raise awareness of new information which would have shifted the potential good to a position equal to, or inferior to, the potential harm, done by the act.
If one now assumes the traditional Christian theological approach, it is a strictly immoral act to kill Hitler even to save millions of lives because the Christian theological path assumes that the ends do not justify the means (it is true that this is an assumption, but then the point is that people make philosophical and logical assumptions before they apply logic). Dietrich Bonhoeffer summarized the position of the moral quandary that the traditional Christian finds themselves in in such a situation:
The conundrum that exists here between the utilitarian and the traditional Christian is that according to the logical path most consistent with both, at the time of the plot on Hitler's life, the actions were justified. For the utilitarian, Hitler's death was justified. For the traditional Christian, allowing Hitler to live was equally justified, and killing him, highly problematic. Now obviously, both of them would have preferred to be free of a murderous tyrant, but one cannot confuse the desirability of an outcome with the morality of the means to acquiring the outcome. Morality is a matter of "what should I do," not "how should I achieve this desirable outcome."
Secular moral reasoning tends to make the disastrous mistake of finding a desirable outcome, finding an an efficient path to it, and then assuming that logic and reason naturally dictate that that is the natural course of logical thinking. Another mistake that secular moral reasoning often makes is not accounting for the fact that the "desirable outcome" is often deeply rooted in emotional and subconscious desires which have little to do with pure logic. For example, there are people for whom liberty is the sine qua non of life, and there are those who for whom peace and order are the sine quibus non of life. Both of those desires are rooted in emotional, pre-rational human behavior. Logic does not dictate either of them.
At their most fundamental, the rules of logic, and by extension, human reason, are just algorithms. Like most algorithms, the result is dependent on the inputs. The inputs need not just be data, but rather can also include entire rule sets, whether done so consciously or subconsciously (usually the case). For these reasons, and more, it is important for people to realize the limits of logic and reason as the exclusive basis for moral philosophy.
The Enlightenment model of reason as the basis of morality and guiding light for humanity is fundamentally flawed in that it assumes that humans are essentially rational by nature, rather than emotional and rationalizing. A significant percentage of the body of economics and political ideas rests on this dangerous foundation because it assumes that man is a rational being who acts in his rational self-interest in relating to the world. Likewise, much of modern philosophy outright ignores the overriding influence that emotion and animal instinct have on the way that human beings utilize reason.
- The lack of temporal proximity to the act of taking an innocent life.
- There was no attempt on Roeder's part to seek a non-violent resolution.
- Roeder used the maximum level of force necessary to stop Tiller, not the minimal level of force needed.
If Roeder had then, in this alternate scenario, approached Tiller with a gun and threatened to harm him if he didn't cease, but did not immediately harm him, then he would have met the second criterion. Roeder's next act would have to involve shooting to wound Tiller, rather than harming him in order to meet the final criterion which is the minimal use of force necessary to stop a violent act on an innocent life.
The two critical points that were made against this were that the chance for successfully saving the unborn child's life is low given the mother's complicit role in the act, and that it is illegal to enter an abortion clinic armed with the intent of stopping the act. I would counter that in this scenario, the intervening party need not give the mother any more regard than the doctor. In fact, it would, according to the Just War Theory arguments used against the act, be ironic since the mother is the actual unjust aggressor, and the doctor is nothing more than a mercenary in her employment. The second issue is where I said that the divide between traditional Protestants and Catholics becomes apparent, with the former regarding disobedience to a law used to hide violent crimes as no vice, and the latter having some sympathy for the need to obey it.
The reason I use this scenario to illustrate what I think Martin Luther meant when he said that "reason is the devil's whore" is that reason is deterministic only with respect to the data and parameters given to it. I just logically justified a scenario in which killing Tiller could have been morally licit according to Christian theology. Another might disagree, and arrive at equally valid conclusions by taking the same underlying logic and supplying different parameters based on their own perspective. For example, even the relationship between obedience to human law, sin and salvation can skew this entire discussion wildly.
Now, consider the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to assassinate Hitler. Reason alone does not provide a deterministic path to ascertaining the morality of assassinating Hitler. The logic that is used to determine this is dependent on the initial assumptions. For the sake of brevity, I'll compare two of the major ones: utilitarian and traditional Christian theology of most conservative Catholics and Protestants. The utilitarian side provides a safety valve in situations like this by making the good that which provides the most pleasure and prevents the most pain for the most people, "within the limits of reason." The traditional Christian theology holds that all moral truths are immutable and unconcerned with the utilitarian calculus of how they affect one's neighbor's happiness and level of pain, "within the limits of reason" (using Jesus' example of breaking the Sabbath to save a neighbor from harm, and that example also be applied to certain things like using deception to stop a violent criminal).
Under the utilitarian assumption, the logical path leads inexorably to the assassination of Hitler because his death would cause an undeniable good for the majority of Germans and political prisoners since it would have provided a chance to end a war that Germany was losing and to free the prisoners. Law and order considerations, and even Hitler's life, would be expendable since the potential good was so overwhelmingly higher than the potential bad, that it would have been a very clear decision. The objection, within the utilitarian context, would have been to raise awareness of new information which would have shifted the potential good to a position equal to, or inferior to, the potential harm, done by the act.
If one now assumes the traditional Christian theological approach, it is a strictly immoral act to kill Hitler even to save millions of lives because the Christian theological path assumes that the ends do not justify the means (it is true that this is an assumption, but then the point is that people make philosophical and logical assumptions before they apply logic). Dietrich Bonhoeffer summarized the position of the moral quandary that the traditional Christian finds themselves in in such a situation:
"the ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live." He did not justify his action but accepted that he was taking guilt upon himself as he wrote "when a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace."From the traditional Christian view, the act itself is still logically a criminal act because the ends do not justify the means. Whatever Hitler is doing does not justify a preemptive use of force to stop him, and from this perspective, Bonhoeffer had to make a personal choice: accept the logical conclusion that killing Hitler would be murder from his philosophical-logical path and stand aside, or do what his philosophical-logical path told him was murder, and accept whatever consequences came with it.
The conundrum that exists here between the utilitarian and the traditional Christian is that according to the logical path most consistent with both, at the time of the plot on Hitler's life, the actions were justified. For the utilitarian, Hitler's death was justified. For the traditional Christian, allowing Hitler to live was equally justified, and killing him, highly problematic. Now obviously, both of them would have preferred to be free of a murderous tyrant, but one cannot confuse the desirability of an outcome with the morality of the means to acquiring the outcome. Morality is a matter of "what should I do," not "how should I achieve this desirable outcome."
Secular moral reasoning tends to make the disastrous mistake of finding a desirable outcome, finding an an efficient path to it, and then assuming that logic and reason naturally dictate that that is the natural course of logical thinking. Another mistake that secular moral reasoning often makes is not accounting for the fact that the "desirable outcome" is often deeply rooted in emotional and subconscious desires which have little to do with pure logic. For example, there are people for whom liberty is the sine qua non of life, and there are those who for whom peace and order are the sine quibus non of life. Both of those desires are rooted in emotional, pre-rational human behavior. Logic does not dictate either of them.
At their most fundamental, the rules of logic, and by extension, human reason, are just algorithms. Like most algorithms, the result is dependent on the inputs. The inputs need not just be data, but rather can also include entire rule sets, whether done so consciously or subconsciously (usually the case). For these reasons, and more, it is important for people to realize the limits of logic and reason as the exclusive basis for moral philosophy.
The Enlightenment model of reason as the basis of morality and guiding light for humanity is fundamentally flawed in that it assumes that humans are essentially rational by nature, rather than emotional and rationalizing. A significant percentage of the body of economics and political ideas rests on this dangerous foundation because it assumes that man is a rational being who acts in his rational self-interest in relating to the world. Likewise, much of modern philosophy outright ignores the overriding influence that emotion and animal instinct have on the way that human beings utilize reason.
(Now, I fully expect a number of people to miss the point of this post. There are a lot of reading comprehension-challenged people out there. There are also a lot of people who are borderline hysterical in the way that they deal with any opposition to their cherished beliefs or worldview. So I shall simply say once again that I am not justifying the act of vigilantism against Tiller, but rather utilizing his situation to show how with slight variations on the situation, some of the logic that condemned the killing could actually justify the killing. Hence my observation that "reason is the devil's whore." Like a gun in the hands of a criminal, reason in the mind of an unbalanced or evil person is a dangerous weapon. It is just a tool that people use, not an all-encompassing characteristic waiting to be unleashed in humanity to bring about a set, specific view of how to behave. For that reason, logic and reason alone cannot be the only basis on which humanity seeks the answers to moral questions.)
I would posit that the theological viewpoint you've used here is not, in fact, Biblical.
Read through the laws established in the Old Testament. Anyone found guilty of murder was to be put to death. Anyone found guilty of manslaughter was required to remain in a city of refuge until the death of the high priest that judged their case. If the 'blood avenger' found the person that had commited manslaughter outside the city of refuge before then, the blood avenger was allowed to kill the manslaughterer and would not be guilty of murder.
By these laws, Tiller had commited murder, not manslaughter. Multiple murders, at that. It did not matter when or where he was dispatched, by Old Testmanent law his killing was an execution, not a murder.
By Biblical standards, killing Hitler -after- he was responsible for the murder of innocent people would also not have been murder, but simply an execution.
I don't think the avenger of blood applies well here for the following reasons:
The reason that I cited Bonhoeffer's quote is that it is an excellent example of how situations like this work. Bonhoeffer was well aware of the complex moral issues surrounding his act, and said that humanity would forgive him as it was out of desperation to save lives, and his own conscious would be satisfied. However, at no point did he think that God would automatically call his actions to kill Hitler righteous. That part is key. He was well aware of the fact that taking Hitler's life was still murder because he was not a lawful authority acting under divine permission to execute justice on evildoers. That is why he said that when he stood before God, he'd have to throw himself on God's grace.
Remember, no matter how evil someone else is, their evil never excuses your actions. If you came home to find someone murdered your entire family, it would not justify hunting them down and murdering them. The only time you could shed their blood is if there were no government to act as God's agent of justice.
To clarify: by "found guilty" I do not mean found guilty by a court of law; guilt was determined by having at least two witnesses come forward and say that yes, so-and-so was responsible. Tiller's late-term abortions were a well established fact, there was no doubt that he was indeed guilty of killing those babies, regardless of having never been convicted of murder in a court of law.
If one now assumes the traditional Christian theological approach, it is a strictly immoral act to kill Hitler even to save millions of lives because the Christian theological path assumes that the ends do not justify the means
I guess I'm not terribly traditional, because I look at the ten commandments and see 'thou shalt not murder' as just that. Says nothing to me about the killing of the admittedly guilty, the one that flagrantly took pride in being murderous himself.
So while killing an unrepented abortionist isn't a righteous act per se, I see no difference between that act and the death penalty for any other murderer, or stoning an adulterer to death or whatever.
Romans 13 gives us no leeway to believe that we are qualified to take the law into our own hands when there is a duly constituted authority because the government is God's authority on Earth to exact justice.
I'm unconvinced on this. Romans 13 applies insofar as the authorities themselves don't run afoul of the Law. When the authorities fail to enforce the law, then it seems to me that there is justification for the People themselves enforcing it.
But there is danger here, because another lesson that I draw from Romans 13 is that we should be very careful about taking the civil law in our own hands because the absence of government is usually worse than a bad government.
Are you prepared to give license to every vindictive person to stone to death someone who slept with their significant other? The modern equivalent of sleeping with a betrothed woman is having sex with a woman who is an exclusive dating relationship headed toward marriage. Are you prepared to give the aggrieved significant other and their family permission to stone to death the guilty party? How about if a man rapes your daughter before she gets in a serious relationship? Are you prepared to take 50 shekels as your main restitution?
The significant difference is that when there is a lawful authority, you have to obey its statutes on murder and adultery. A duly constituted government would have every right before God to execute you for stoning to death an adulterer if it declared that adultery was not offense which it would punish. If think that renders it an illegitimate state, then your recourse is to follow the founding fathers who declared independence in a manner in nearly perfect keeping with Just War Theory.
So what happens if the people don't like the manner in which it was enforced? Suppose they decide that it's not enough that a drug dealer gets 5 years in prison and decide to "do it right" by killing him?
The real elephant in the room with private enforcement is that mobs and vigilantes almost never do the job as well as the government does. More often than not, they are either wildly out of control in how they punish or they get the wrong person.
The fact is, a person wronged by a mob or vigilante has a true right to seek vengeance on all of them. For me, this issue is a bit sensitive because as a southerner, I've seen from our history how vigilante "justice" never works out the way it is supposed to. I would rather see the cops liquidate every member of a vigilante mob on the spot than tolerate them.
Not only that, but it tends to create much more injustice. Vigilantes often get the wrong person, and when they do, they don't get to wash their hands of their culpability. Nothing, and I mean nothing, warrants mercy for them when they target an innocent person. No level of deception, anguish, etc. excuses their actions or warrants leniency. Anyone who would take God's law into their hands damn well better be prepared to face the full wrath of the Law's judgment if they don't execute it perfectly.
I understand where you are coming from, but one of the things I have realized in this is that we have to remain blameless. It may satisfy your desire to see justice come to Tiller and others like him, but is it even justice when you had to break God's law in order to do it? Do not lose sight of the fact that the Old Testament law was the civil law of a particular state, not a universal set of laws that applies to all people in all places. You cannot use the Mosaic Law to justify breaking an equivalent statute in a gentile legal system.
I must admit, I tend to be emotional in regards to abortion. Admittedly, I am anti-abortion. When I started to read your post, I almost turned away, fearing that at any moment a book would drop. However, the post is quite interesting, so I swallowed and read on.
I found that you did an excellent job of examining my subconscious thinking. And more, you helped me see how others think, those in the anti-abortion arena who tend to disagree with my stance on the events. I had an inkling about what was going on back there in my mind, and an idea of where they were coming from, but seeing it written so neutrally and logically allowed me to process it all a good deal better.
Thanks for taking the time to patiently explain the notions. I truly hope no one finds you in contempt. I think you were quite fair to both sides and acted as a superior mediator. I hate being emotionally stuck on some issues. I suppose knowing one's weaknesses is a good thing though, if it doesn't always help.
Thanks :)
Keep in mind that Israel's civil laws were altered, shaped and in some cases, created wholecloth by Yawheh. He could easily have stated that someone guilty of manslaughter was not to be executed - instead, he explicitly stated that a manslaughter caught outside their city of refuge before their exile was complete could be executed and the executioner would not be guilty of murder.
I would actually find the end of Romans 12 to be of more use in your argument than Romans 13, where Paul councils his readers not to seek vengeance, but to leave it in the Lord's hands.
I actually quite agree with you on the subject of vigilante justice, especially the risk it poses to innocent people.
I should perhaps clarify that I am speaking of what is moral by God's standards versus what is legal by our government. I do not believe it is immoral to be the executioner of a murderer; I firmly believe that if the person killed via lethal injection, electric chair, firing squad or what-have you really was guilty, then the people administering the drug, pulling the switch or the trigger are not guilty of murder in God's eyes. I believe the commendation to obey the government and not take the law into our own hands was for our sake, and not a statement that a government's laws supersede God's own.
I wasn't implying that a government's laws supercede God's laws, but rather that that the two exist in parallel. If the government repealed all of the laws regarding murder, God's law would remain. However, that doesn't mean that Christians could go about enforcing God's law on murderers. Rather, the correct course of action would be for the Church to gather, analyze the situation according to Just War Theory. If the Church could marshal enough troops to have a reasonable chance, its course of action would be to first demand redress from the state, and if that doesn't get answered, wage an insurrection against the government. Revolution, not vigilantism, is the honorable option for the Church.
I'll also restate a point I made to EW: you cannot use God's law as an excuse to violate equivalent statutes. If a human government outlaws all forms of preemptive violence, you cannot use God's law to justify killing someone for manslaughter. Their violation of the law does not justify your violation of a reasonable human statute.
Let's say your older child kicked my older child, and your child fell onto the street and got run over. Under the Old Testament law, that would be capital murder as it was manslaughter. However, under the new covenant, if your family carries out the avenger of blood, the Virginia Commonwealth government is authorized as an agent of God's wrath to charge every member of your family involved with capital murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Their executions would be just and legitimate in God's eyes. While my older child might be a murderer, God also authorized the VA state government to execute those who shed blood in ways against its laws.
I should also point out that my opinions on this are not firmly fixed; but I will offer information or counterarguments that I believe are relevant to the conversation.
Having re-read your original post, I think I was one of the reading-comprehension challenged people that you mentioned. ;)
In mulling the matter over, I think that certain actions have to be viewed in a context that is not just moral vs immoral, but lawful vs unlawful.
For the Israelites, it was lawful and thus not immoral to execute someone for manslaughter. In modern day America, executing someone for manslaughter is unlawful, and would therefore be immoral BECAUSE it was unlawful to do so, not because executing someone for manslaughter is, in and of itself, inherently immoral the way murder, theft and adultery are inherently immoral.
So thus it is breaking the law, not the act which breaks the law, which is immoral.
Make any sense? Care to add some insight to this theory?
Let's use the manslaughter case I created above as an example.
1) You would be usurping the state's divinely invested authority to punish wrongdoers.
2) You would be breaking a just and legitimate law (1st degree murder) to carry out that action.
3) Jesus commanded His followers to not take vengeance on their enemies, and that is precisely what you would be doing there.
4) You would be showing no faith in God's justice by taking things into your own hands.
It is inherently immoral for you to carry out your own punishment of criminals when there is a duly constituted authority. In a stateless society, that would be one thing, but in modern America, there is a legal system that is at least somewhat competent at carrying out the law in these matters.
So, it is first and foremost about authority. We don't possess the requisite authority to carry out punishments for crimes. When you realize that, you then realize that when we kill the wrongdoer outside of the legal system, we are actually commiting murder. An execution is different because it is done under a lawful authority, and not to belabor the point, we lack that lawful authority.