This was a fascinating article, as I have come to expect from De Civitate. It is very timely, as I am likely to find my ballot in my mailbox when I next check it. However, I have to say, I often found myself deeply confused by the conclusions you came to in the course of your arguments.
It’s possible this is because there is a substantial gulf in our moral frameworks. Though I am not a San Francisco-style rationalist utilitarian, I am almost certainly have moral intuitions that allow for more cooperation with evil than you do. I was uncertain of how to go about trying to find out more, whether I could formulate a clarifying question (or several) that would help me at least figure out if I am disagreeing with you or just failing to understand the argument.
On consideration, I think focusing on Sophie’s Choice is the most productive path. Despite following along, and almost entirely agreeing with, your section explaining the foundations of the Catholic view of cooperation with evil, I don’t see how Sophie counts as providing any material cooperation.
What is it that Sophie is helping the Nazi do? Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall anywhere in the article where you actually state this directly (and, believe it or not, in addition to reading your whole article, I went back to re-read the relevant sections looking for this). What follows is my attempts to go through all the possible ways I could imagine Sophie being charged with material aid to the Nazi and why I think they don’t apply. In the end, I think Sophie makes a heroic sacrifice rather than a regretful compromise with evil.
First, Sophie did not physically deliver her child to the Nazi – the children were both forcefully taken.
Argument: I have not read the novel, and only watched the clip. It looks to me like both children have been ripped from her at the point that she makes the choice. It doesn’t look to me like she is passing her daughter over. Even if that is what is happening in the clip, does the whole case really hang on this? In a hypothetical Sophie’s Choice where my interpretation of the scene happened, does your whole position on the issue switch?
Second, Sophie does not operate, even under duress, any of the physical mechanisms by which her daughter gets killed. The Nazis do not ask her to shoot her daughter to save her son, or even so much as press a button.
Argument: I think this is just straightforwardly indisputable, except by an overly-literal and expansive sense of “physical mechanism” by which we conceive of the effect of her voice’s soundwaves hitting their ears and making chemical changes in their brain and so on. You know what I mean here – I’m talking triggers and buttons, not making a full account of a physicalist model of the mind.
Third, and the closest I can come to imagining, is that Sophie somehow helps the Nazi make a choice between which of her children to kill. An analogy here, to use your other primary example, is the roommate who helps the rapist decide which girl at the party to victimize.
Argument: This strikes me as also not very plausible. The Nazi has already decided to kill both her children. Her words are “take my daughter” but they have the same intention and effect as “let me keep my son.” As you say in the first section, “Sophie has saved her son at the cost of her daughter… She did not gas her child; she made a choice in order to save one of her children.”
Later on, you go further, saying that her choice was purely illusory all along. “Sophie never actually had a choice. The S.S. guard gave her the illusion of choice. He held 100% of the power. If Sophie had refused to pick a child, he might very well have followed through on his threat to kill them both. Then again, he might have spared one, or both. Likewise, once Sophie did choose one of her children, he might have killed both anyway, or killed the one Sophie didn’t choose. The power was always, entirely, in his hands.”
Given this, how is Sophie making a material contribution to the Nazi’s actions? We admit that her words did not empower or encourage the Nazi. The most they could have done is please the Nazi. To quote you again: “The only reason the S.S. guard gave Sophie the illusion of choice was to trick Sophie into immediate material cooperation with the murder of her own daughter. In the book, it is especially clear that the guard hates Sophie for her belief in Christ, and wants to strike at her by coaxing her into the greatest blasphemy of all.”
Are we truly going to say that denying the Nazi the satisfaction of this cruelty against a mother is worth her son’s life? That’s the moral? Let no evil-doer be amused, even if it means the death of your children?
Conclusion: I don’t see it. Perhaps it is so blindingly obvious that it need not be stated explicitly. Is simply the act of choosing to save one over the other (or choosing to save one instead of neither) sufficient to count as providing material cooperation? That’s all that I am left with, but I can’t imagine how that can be right.
Allow me an analogy:
Sophie and her two children are fleeing the Nazis, into the arms of the advancing Red Army, who will save them. However, the Nazis, determined to kill as many as possible before they are defeated, send 2 soldiers off to catch them. Each Nazi soldier is able to wrestle away one of her children and run off with them. Luckily, she spots a pistol on the ground, dropped by a different Nazi during their retreat. Sophie grabs the gun, knowing her only chance of saving her children is to kill or injure the fleeing Nazis carrying them off, she is too slow and weak to catch them. She picks up the weapon, but to her dismay, there is only one round remaining. She can’t kill both Nazis with one shot, so she has to choose – save one child, leaving the other to be taken, or do nothing and allow both Nazis to escape with both her children. She shoots the one carrying her son.
Does Sophie act wrongly here? What’s the moral difference with this situation vs. the one in Sophie’s Choice? To make the point more starkly, how is shooting the bullet to kill the Nazi carrying her son to his death different from shooting her words to kill the Nazi’s intention to carry her son to his death?
I have other objections to arguments in the article, but I think this is really at the core of our disagreement. I cannot understand how you can judge Sophie’s actions as material cooperation with evil, even granting your entire framework as laid out in the sections on Cooperation With Evil.
I agree with this take but perhaps on slightly different grounds: I don't accept that the Nazi had 100% of the power in this situation. I think Sophie had the power to influence him to kill only one of her children instead of both, by giving him the satisfaction of forcing her to choose between them. I think she knew that, and that's why she made her choice. If you don't think the power to influence others is real then I guess you think that all the ruthless capitalists who spend trillions of dollars on sales and marketing are fools.
She absolutely made the right decision (not that she would have been culpable at all for making the wrong decision under unimaginable duress). She doesn't deserve a guilt trip over it, she deserves therapy to process her trauma so that she can accept that she made the right choice and move on with her life.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Sophie has real power here, that would make her *more* complicit in the death of the child she chooses to have killed, not less (thus *more* guilty), so I'm not clear how taking the argument in this direction leads to the conclusion that she made the right decision.
It seems the only way you can reach that conclusion is by saying that it is right to do evil so that good may come of it (at least in extremis). That works if you are a utilitarian! I'm not really sure how it can work otherwise. But perhaps you have an unstated argument somewhere between "Sophie had power" and "Sophie made the right choice" that I'm not grokking.
I do agree that nobody needs to guilt trip Sophie, because she is guilt tripping herself plenty hard already. She *does* need help processing that guilt. But *really* processing it, not rejecting it. Help that insists she did nothing wrong isn't going to work. She'll know better, and (I think) that end in the same place: cyanide.
The key factor for me is that at least one of her children is going to die. So, it's not the trolley problem, because she's not putting a different person in harm's way instead of her children. In that case you could argue that she committed murder to save her kids.
She is not putting anyone *in* harm's way, she's being forced to choose whom she will take *out* of harm's way. That's not evil.
But how does she "choose whom she will take out of harm's way"?
She says to the guard: Kill this one. She may be doing it with the intention of saving the other one, but it is still formal cooperation: I choose this act, with this object (the killing of this child). The further end of the act is to take the other child out of harm's way, but that consequence goes *through* the act of consigning her other child to death.
The obvious objection (which you raised last night in person): what if she said instead, "Don't take my little boy"? Wouldn't saying it that way explicitly save one of her children without explicitly condemning the other, and therefore evade the problem of formal cooperation in the death of one of your children? So is this whole thing just a word game?
I don't think the objection stands up. As the article says, formal cooperation can be explicit or implicit. Within the context of the choice given by the SS man, saying the words, "Don't take my little boy" unmistakably implies her participation in the choice and her consent to the Nazis taking her little girl. It's still formal cooperation.
I repeat that the amount of personal guilt or culpability we should assign to Sophie is either zero, or so close to zero as makes no odds. My claim is only that, even if she is not culpable, her participation in the choice is formal cooperation, which is extremely damaging to her personally.
(I also continue to think that, even if we concede that Sophie has some kind of power here, it is *grossly* overconfident to say that "at least one of her children is going to die." I don't know how relevant that is, though.)
To be clear, you say formal cooperation here. In the article, you say immediate material cooperation. Is formal cooperation what you mean?
Whichever way, if we agree with you in her case, that it is wrong to make a choice when that would entail formal cooperation, or even immediate material cooperation, it is not at all obvious to me that that would carry over to less proximate forms of cooperation. Are there reasons to think so?
(For honesty's sake: I'm protestant, and would require more care than you've presented here to be convinced that your schema is correct, but I'm trying to work within it above.)
I'm not convinced that it would be wrong for her to choose one. Would it be wrong in the similar case, where she's choosing between herself and the child, to suggest that her child should be saved? My general sense is that few would say so, and yet, that seems the same in the details you present as relevant? (Unless perhaps consent/self-ownership is meaningful in whether people can be put to death, but that's an unusual take for anyone who (including me) is against euthanasia.)
Yeah, James, what about scenarios in which mortal peril is no one's fault, like a medical triage situation in which multiple patients could be saved with intervention but it's not possible to simultaneously intervene to save all of them? Are you saying the right choice in that scenario is to not make a choice?
Sophie is in a similar situation, it seems to me, and could make her choice based on a snap judgment of which child is most likely to survive the concentration camp.
> To be clear, you say formal cooperation here. In the article, you say immediate material cooperation. Is formal cooperation what you mean?
I promise I didn't do this to be cheeky, but literally at the moment you were writing this comment, I was editing the article to say "formal."
In another comment thread on this article a couple days ago (it was in response to Matt Mortarello), I agreed that the article erred in identifying Sophie's cooperation as immediate material, and I stated that I would edit the article as soon as I'd reviewed it for any downstream problems the edit might expose. It just took me a day and a half to get that done, which is why the edit came in mere seconds before or after you posted this comment.
Her cooperation was formal, and the article was in error.
> Whichever way, if we agree with you in her case, that it is wrong to make a choice when that would entail formal cooperation, or even immediate material cooperation, it is not at all obvious to me that that would carry over to less proximate forms of cooperation. Are there reasons to think so?
I think there are intuitive reasons to think that material cooperation with evil -- even more or less remote cooperation with evil -- is morally problematic.
Suppose you own a gun store (let's say it's in Somalia, where there are no gun laws). A man walks in and asks to buy a gun. He asks what kind of gun and bullet will definitely kill an adult human being at close range. You tell him, and then you ask why he would want to know that. The customer admits that he is buying a gun to kill his wife, and that he's going to do it as soon as he gets home. He is very convincing. You become certain you are talking to a psychopath.
Are there any moral problems whatsoever with selling him the gun? He doesn't put you under duress, he doesn't threaten violence, he simply offers you cash in exchange for a murder weapon. Is there any reason why that might not be okay?
If yes, then there are moral problems with somewhat-remote cooperation with evil, and you need to develop a moral framework for figuring out exactly how that works at different degrees of cooperation. I think the framework inevitably ends up looking something like the Catholic one. (If you're Protestant, I'll note that the Catholic framework has its ultimate roots in the Church Fathers, especially Augustine.)
And I tend to think that everyone will answer "yes."
I agree, this's a fascinating and thought-provoking article even though, on reflection, I still disagree with the bottom-line reasoning. And, after reflecting on your comment, I agree that we should dig in more to "Sophie's Choice."
Let me offer two other hypothetical analogies (your hypothetical being numbered (1)):
(2): Sophie thinks "My daughter is a good Christian and ready to face death. My son isn't ready yet." Her external level of cooperation is the same, but her inward reasoning is on a different level.
(3): Sophie somehow knows that this specific camp's head (was once friends with her daughter) / (is ideologically opposed to killing girls) / (something else), so she says "take my daughter" in reasonable hope that her daughter won't actually be killed. It's a very contrived scenario with the Nazis, but less so when we're stretching out the analogy to political choices in general.
That last one in particular seems like enough of a reach that I wonder whether we wouldn't be better off simply talking about political choices. I'm just having a hard time visualizing it. Does the head of the camp inspect every person who goes into the chamber to make sure she isn't an old friend / girl / other?
FWIW, though, I had to concede that OP is right that I misclassified Sophie's cooperation. Shoulda stated it was formal.
Thanks for reading and thinking it through, at any rate! I don't know where exactly you're coming from, ethically speaking, and I don't know what other objections you have, so all I can do is answer your question about Sophie's cooperation.
As of last night, when I posted this, my thinking was that Sophie's *consent* was the material element of her cooperation.
However, the very first thing I woke up to this morning was an email from a reader (who is smarter than me & has published in this area), which pointed out that consent cannot possibly be material cooperation, because consent is the *essence* of formal cooperation. Here is that email, in its entirety:
> I haven't gotten past the section entitled Sophie's Error yet, but there is a mistake here. Sophie's choice is not material cooperation at all. She has absolutely no material with which to cooperate. She is not making it possible, or easier, for the guard to kill the other one. Her action is pure formal cooperation. She says to the guard: Kill this one. She may be doing it with the intention of saving the other one, but it is still formal cooperation: I choose this act, with this object. (The object of the act, as opposed to the circumstances, further end, and consequences of the act, is another important piece of the moral puzzle.)
I think this email is correct. I was wrong to classify this as immediate material cooperation. Sophie's cooperation was formal. I'm going to have to publish a revision to that section tonight, but first I need to reread everything after that point to identify any downstream effects on my argument, so that my correction does not introduce more errors. (Then I will fret for a few hours about the impact on you lovely *readers* of my making such a stupid error.)
So my answer to your first several objections is: yes, you are correct, this is not material cooperation at all. It is formal cooperation.
With this correction, the difference in your fleeing-to-the-Red-Army hypothetical then, I suspect, becomes much clearer: in that hypothetical, Sophie does not consent to the killing of either of her children, she does not direct it, she does not participate in it -- however you want to put it, she doesn't do *that*. She can even continue attempting to chase down the other Nazi even though she is confident that she will not succeed! (Indeed, she should!)
As I said, I have no idea where that leads you to next, but I thank you for the thoughtful (and correct) correction!
I think it’s also a mistake to call what Sophie does consent or formal cooperation too. Let’s go back to the frat rape example. I think we agree that Sophie is a victim in any case, even if she ends up engaging in formal cooperation. So, I’m going to take the rape case from the perspective of the victim and build the analogy to Sophie from there.
For the sake of clarity, I’ll call the rape victim Cathie. She gets captured by several rapists and brought to an isolated room. She is pleading for her safe return. The leader of the group, having her at his mercy and being pure evil, decides it would be especially brutal for Cathie to feel somehow responsible for all this. So, rather than the whole group raping her in turn as was initially planned, he says, “I’ll give you a break – choose which of us will rape you and the rest will just hold you down.” Cathie replies it’s too awful to choose and begs again to be released to safety. The leader says, “if you don’t choose, it’s all of us.” And he turns to the others in his group who all start getting ready. Just as they are pushing her down onto the bed, she cries out “[guy 1] can do it!” with the hope that it will save her from being raped by the rest of them.
Is the claim that Cathie consents in some sense to being raped by guy 1? Or in some sense formally cooperates in this action? This seems really obviously false to me. If Cathie doesn’t consent in this situation, what’s the disanalogy to Sophie’s situation?
FWIW, I'm focusing on Sophie's Choice since you say about its connection to the broader argument: "If it seems wrong to you, perhaps my argument isn’t going to connect with you and you can skip the rest of this article." And I don't want to get too far ahead since this is a clear crux. I suppose I should wait on the revision, but it sounds to me like the change to a formal cooperation analysis might break the analogy to Sophie's Choice, while the existing material cooperation argument survives, in which case you might really just be saying that if the basic analysis of the moral considerations involved in material cooperation is a necessary point of agreement.
I like the Cathie example! Two observations about Cathie:
First, as you say, the gang rapists do this deliberately, in order to be especially cruel. They offer Cathie, essentially, an exchange: a significant reduction of immediate physical suffering in exchange for her verbal consent to one rape. I certainly agree that this is extremely cruel. The way I see it, the gang is (through extreme duress) pushing Cathie toward formal cooperation, and they believe (with good reason) that this formal cooperation will hurt Cathie *worse* than *multiple* additional physical rapes.
What isn't clear to me is why *you* see this choice as extremely cruel. If I understand your position (and I frankly suspect I do not), you believe that Cathie's verbal agreement to be raped by one of them is not formal cooperation, does not harm her, and therefore is not wrong. But if this verbal agreement doesn't harm her, then why is it cruel of the gang to put this choice to her in the first place? They're offering a reduction of physical suffering in exchange for (if I understand your position correctly) a harmless verbal token that means nothing and has no effect on Cathie.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Maybe not, but perhaps my second observation will shed more light:
Versions of Cathie's situation seem to happen in real life fairly commonly. Under extreme duress, rape victims are often coerced into telling their rapist to proceed with the rape. This might take the form of an estranged partner "asking" for sex after making a clear threat of violence if the answer is anything but "yes," or an assailant demanding that the victim ask for more. Victims in this situation, fearing for their lives, very often give some form of verbal consent.
And, empirically, that seems to really mess them up quite badly! Rape victims who have been forced to consent to their own rape seem to struggle with deeper problems than those who do not. They tend to have a harder time recognizing what has happened to them as rape, making bizarre judgments even when the facts are as plain as day. It seems they tend to have a harder time recovering from the trauma, as well, even having come to grips with it, compared to those who were not coerced into this.
Let me make another analogy: suppose someone ("Stephie") is kidnapped by terrorists and is forced (at gunpoint) to pluck out her eyes for, I don't know, terrorist propaganda. Is she to blame for this act? Extremely minimally or not at all. Is she nevertheless wounded by this act? Yes! And did she perform this act? Yes. Her ultimate intention was to save her own life (a very good thing!), but the direct object of her action was to blind herself. Stephie's good intentions don't restore her sightedness.
So I suppose my basic position is that consent to an evil act is inherently damaging to one's interior, similar to how plucking out an eye is inherently damaging to one's exterior. Coercion or duress (or some other factor) might very well reduce (or even eliminate) the moral guilt one incurs for formal cooperation, but the damage occurs nevertheless. If that is true, then I think it is uncontroversial to say that it is morally obligatory to avoid voluntarily inflicting that damage under ordinary circumstances.
The Catholic position goes further than this basic position. The Catholic claim is that it is *always* morally obligatory to avoid voluntarily inflicting that damage. As I said in one of the footnotes, this is one area where Catholic thought breaks from the mainstream, and I won't bother trying to defend it.
On the other hand, how about a more modest claim? It is almost always morally *praiseworthy* to avoid coerced formal cooperation with evil, even if it is not morally obligatory. By that I mean only this: if the gang gave Cathie the choice of choosing one rapist, and Cathie's response were to spit in the gang leader's eye, and she then suffered the full wrath of the gang, I think we would all call this decision heroic, courageous, and a number of other very good things. Does that sound correct?
(I did not drive at this in the article, or even spell it out to myself beforehand, because I thought the Sophie-related material was an easy layup where nearly everyone's moral intuitions would line up with mine. Obviously I was completely wrong about this! Oh well! I'm glad the conversation is happening anyway!)
This is really interesting, and I appreciate you continuing the thread! I have to say I am surprised that this is your position, even though it seemed to follow from your previous claims. My tollens has been ponensed. We do seem to have very opposite intuitions here.
Just to answer some of your questions, which perhaps will clarify my view:
1. I think in the Cathie case, presenting the choice is cruel because its intent is to inflict further harm. I think whether it inflicts further harm is a matter of contingent psychology, however, not any moral failing. Ordinary human psychology is not perfectly attuned to the right and the good IMO. In other words, you can psychologically suffer and feel guilt for things that are not at all morally blameworthy and that a detached observer would say is not a thing to feel guilty about. This is often the perspective that a good psychological counselor is meant to bring.
2. As far as the morality of making the choice, in Cathie's case, I think she is free to choose either option, from the point of view of morality. (Ok, in my stricter moments I might say that she is obligated to choose the option she predicts will result in less harm to herself, the additional rapes or the psychological consequences of feeling like she in some way consented given her existing psychology. Duties to self are a part of morality that I don't have very confident views on.) In Sophie's case, my considered judgment at the moment is that she is morally required to choose one child, though I would not have heaps of blame to put on her for failing in this duty (she's under great duress).
3. As I suggest above, I think it is not morally praiseworthy to refuse to choose in these situations. Indeed, I think Sophie's actions in the original work are heroic and praiseworthy precisely because she saves her son's life even at the cost of her own future anguish over the choice. I put it in the same category as pushing someone out of the way of an oncoming bus: risking your own safety for the sake of someone else's. In Cathie's case where she spits in the eye of the gang leader, I'd be tempted to call that rash or reckless, rather than courageous. It's one thing to steel oneself against evil being visited on you, and another to aggravate the risk to yourself with no hope for any gain. But I think since Cathie's own welfare is the only thing at stake, I wouldn't have especially strong views on what the all-things-considered right thing to do is.
As a slight aside, I was talking with my wife about this, and her reaction was to consider the case of King Solomon splitting the baby (I assume you're sufficiently familiar to not need the story rehearsed). Does the true mother formally cooperate with evil by consenting to the lying imposter being granted custody of her baby? Is she therefore wrong to insist on this when King Solomon offers the split as a compromise? Suppose Solomon credibly warned that he would follow through on the compromise if an alternate agreement could not be reached between the parties -- should she continue to only insist on the justness of her custody, come what may? We're not sure if this is analogous, but perhaps it gets at the point that when presented with nothing but bad options, obstinate rejection of the options can be reckless (and even wrong) rather than praiseworthy.
I will preface this by saying that I have never had the pleasure of voting for a winning candidate or ballot measure in my adult life, and that my current plan is to write in Governor Abbot because he has been the most competent Republican politician of my lifetime.
I think you should edit the section where to advise people not to vote at all. I say this because votes for the House, Senate, and local government is even more important as our Federal Executive grows more and more deranged. Don't cast a vote for President, but please do vote for those you can with good conscience.
I hate to add more complexity to an already long article, but I wonder if it matters that I fully believe that Trump will be legally prevented from taking office should he be elected, and therefore a vote for Trump is a vote for Vance (and chaos!) It would be more like telling a rapist where the girl is, knowing that there is a police officer already there on the lookout for said rapist. Your prior work has fairly convinced me that Trump is guilty of insurrection, and constitutionally this means that he cannot take office, even if voted in.
I wholeheartedly agree that people shouldn't decline to vote. That's both for the reasons you give, and because I think that it's important to show that you are willing to bother to vote but rather declining to support any candidate. It'll have the same impact on the results in this election, but it'll show up very differently in the aggregate statistics - which is the same practical impact a third-party vote is likely to have.
Personally, I've written in my friends many times for local offices, and one time I missed the deadline to request an absentee ballot, but I've never declined to vote.
I just kind of took it as read that everyone knew I meant don't vote for president (but still vote downballot in the races you can vote in), but, hey, fair point. I think an earlier draft had more explicit language saying something to that effect, so I'll see what I can dig up when I go in to make a revision tonight. Thanks for the note!
(Some of my downballot races are ALSO a nightmare where I will have to politely decline to cast a vote, but that's a my-state problem not an everyone-else problem. And even I have a few races where I can vote major-party with a clear conscience. I'll lose, but I'll have voted.)
P.S. I am very grateful to hear that my discussion of the insurrection has been convincing! My fear, and actually my expectation, is that it doesn't matter how convincing the case against Trump is: if We The People attempt to put Trump in office unconstitutionally, the Republicans in Congress and the justices of the Supreme Court will ensure that he stays there, exercising powers to which he is not entitled, regardless of what the Constitution says. The rule of law, unfortunately, is a choice, and it is one that we are (so far) actively declining to make. If he wins, though, mark my words, I'm going to try to find someone to bring a quo warranto action!
While my state of Ohio is Trumpy and non-battleground, it is most defintely a battleground state for control of the Senate. Both the abortion-friendly Democratic incumbent and the Trumpy GOP challenger are abhorrent, but the real issue is this: will the next President be opposed by a hostile Senate? That's what i want. How I feel the Presidential race is likely to go, will determine which party's candidate I vote for.
Choosing not to choose in Sophie's case is absurd. It's just as bad as choosing one child over the other if not worse. The only choice to not be complicit would be to fight in anyway possible. Passivity isn't absolution. When you know bad is going to happen and you fail to act you are then an accomplice... There isn't such a thing as complete powerlessness. I agree that the proximate is relational to the amount of power, but it is never zero.
I am very open to the claim that Sophie has some moral duty to engage in active resistance, even at the cost of her life. In Footnote 6, I set that question aside, but I could buy it.
On the other hand, I find it extremely implausible to say what you seem to be saying: Sophie *refusing* to consent to the execution of her own child is "just as bad if not worse" than *consenting* to the execution of her own child, as she did. I don't see how you get there.
That is to say: I'm definitely willing to consider the possibility that resistance is morally obligatory, passivity is a moral failure, and participating in the Nazi's game is a larger moral failure. But what you seem to be saying is that resistance is best, picking one of your kids to die is second-best, and passivity is worse, which seems... well, as you say, absurd.
But maybe one or both of us is misunderstanding the other, because I know you aren't prone to absurdity!
Fair enough. Let me attempt to unpack my thoughts... Might even lead me to change my mind:
First question for me is can we trust the Nazi to keep his word about his future actions. Some stories present this type of dilemma by having an antagonist prompt the protagonist to "put down the gun or I shoot the girl"... In most of those cases I wouldn't trust the bad guy to keep his word since his whole safety is predicated on the hostage being alive and once I don't have a way to retaliate I am as good as dead and the bad guy has no reason to comply. I told my kids recently, discussing the foundation of power, that it comes from you having something the other person wants (tabling for a moment that this works in your arguments favor, since once a choice is made Sophie would lose her power). Once you relinquish the thing the other person wants you lose most of your power. In this case though, the only power given to Sophie is the choice. I trust the Nazi at his word that someone will die. Maybe all. The likely case in this scenario is that the sadistic bastard (sorry for the language, but I think it is tame for what I would like to use and warranted to boot) wants to leave someone alive. If he wanted death, it was his to deal out. In this case, he wants suffering. He wants to show the frailty of human morality and faith. So I think we are safe to assume that he will leave someone alive, even if he might have removed their desire to live. It seems likely he will do just as he says, because it supports his desire. It compliments his character, which might be the nicest sounding insult I have ever written... (Continuing in another post because I am writing this on a phone...)
Next question seems to me what to do with the now clearer (still room for human absurdism/randomness) with the clear, presented options. Likely we should enumerate them:
1. Do nothing, both kids die.
2. Choose a kid, the other dies.
But let's back up and recognize the power Sophie does have and doesn't have and let's see if their are options that aren't presented.
First, Let's state some obvious areas where Sophie was close to powerless. She didn't seem to have the option to avoid participating in the Nazi's trolley dilemma (I am going to come back to this I think). She had very little physical power. She had no support on the Earth around her or at least one of a physical nature, meaning she might have been surrounded by the Trinity itself at that moment but nothing evident in the world around her.
What power did she have then? Did she have any? She did have some evidentially because she had something the Nazi wanted and in this power is granted. So we should explore that. She has power over the Nazi's paradigm meaning he wanted to justify his morals. "I dispose you because you are disposable. You are weak and worse yet you think yourself superior to me in your faith," my might be an adequate summary of his thoughts. He wants to support this. He wants to proclaim it, as all zealots want to when they have doubts in their hearts. When part of them knows they aren't on solid ground. So Sophie has power, and although it isn't physical it is substantial. The only power the Nazi has is actually quite frail when compared to the Christian faith and creed. The have worldly, physical power but we as Christians know, and this should be taught very young, that this world is not our home. That we don't live to live. We live for Christ. If we die, we are healed and saved and are no longer chained by fear, pain and death. Our actions don't save us (this might be something you bulk at given your Catholicism, but you may not too) in any way. They are only evidence of our faith and weak evidence at that. "Lord I believe, but help me with my unbelief."
So we come back around to options. We presented the superficial options presented. After reviewing the real power dynamic though we recognize there are other less evident options. They may seem similar options but the spirit of them are vastly different and they are based on the fact that the Nazi is powerless compared to God. So we lost them and the spirit of them. I think they all would benefit by speaking the Truth. That no matter what the Nazi does, Christ will greet whomever dies as long as they look to him for true saving. If I was Sophie I would prophesy this in the snake's face before acting. After, I would let go of my fear of death and then act as The Spirit willed me. If I felt it on me to fight in all ways I could think of I would do so until I was dead. If I was called to choose I would but stating that I was setting the child free and that we would see them in eternity, sooner or later (for me it would be sooner).
What I would not do is give the Nazi what they desired. I would not remove myself from the place of power my faith would, as it does now, give me. Freedom. True freedom from a love of this world that causes me to suffer unduly. Sophie's true failure was giving up her power thinking death is something ultimate. Letting the Nazi justify his paradigm.
Passivity enacted because of a fear of moral failure is the worst form of this since it not only reinforces the Nazi's view that Sophie should be looked down on, but also because it elevated death. It makes death more meaningful than it should be. Our Earthly lives are valuable things only if they serve God but we should not cling to them. I hate abortion, but not because the baby is destroyed. I don't believe they are destroyed ultimately. I believe I will see my child that was miscarried (what a fricked up phrase... My wife didn't fail to carry them... She didn't fail in any way... I know it doesn't mean this but I dispose even the thought). I hate abortion because of what it says about the heart of the one who chooses death of others over the helpless. The one who chooses their own possibilities through murder.
So I believe that the best option is to truly not play the Nazi's game by stating that his threat means nothing. And then showing fearlessness to prove it.
Hopefully that is clear enough... Again, I am preaching through my thumbs here. There are a couple of lingering thoughts but I am going to save them since they would only be MY footnotes and aren't necessary for you to at least get a gist of where I am coming from. One would be to discuss the kid's POV... But that would be long to thumb out and would roughly be the same argument as above with the added thought of no one goes to Hell be ause they didn't get enough chances to believe. I will elaborate on anything you wish though if you ask me to. Let me just be at a keyboard...
"So I believe that the best option is to truly not play the Nazi's game by stating that his threat means nothing. And then showing fearlessness to prove it."
I'm satisfied with this. "Prophesy, wield the Cross, and tell him Jesus died to free him from the sin he is committing" does seem like a better answer than "stand there and do nothing."
I am all for listening to the Spirit in the moment. I am convinced that, at that moment, the Spirit would not prompt you to choose a child. So, if this ever happens, and you hear a prompting to choose a child, employ big time discernment of spirits, because I'm pretty sure that's the devil.
I mention this because... have you ever read Silence, by Shusaku Endo? It's a tragic book about the comprehensive destruction of a priest under similar circumstances. (The ending is sometimes misunderstood as a happy ending.) There is a moment where the priest faces a similarly horrible choice, and he hears a voice in his head, pretending to be the Lord, advising him to do the bad thing for the greater good. He does, which destroys the faith of hundreds and his own.
But, yeah, on the whole, your approach strikes me as sound.
Jacob and Isaac. The Father and Jesus... I am not so sure there isn't presidence but I understand where you are coming from.
One thing I will say, that I avoided saying before, is that I don't think this is a great analogy for this election even if I do think it is an interesting moral dilemma.
Also, true faith in the redemption through The Christ can't be destroyed by any act...
Romans 8:38-39
So there was a bigger issue than the actions of the priest (will read) or even Sophie... It seems like a true misunderstanding of the Gospel.
I ruminated on this and I should have clarified that the misunderstanding of the Gospel is on the part of those losing faith, not you... I wasn't trying to be insulting. If you took it that way I apologize.
I agree that *true* Faith in Christ can't be destroyed by any act... but that's partly because true Faith in Christ *rules out* lots of acts, because those acts oppose Christ and the true faithful would never oppose Christ. For example, the devil *believes* in the redemption of believers through Christ, but he doesn't have true faith in it because he *opposes* that redemption!
I agree, though, that the priest in Silence did, in the end, misunderstand the Gospel, and probably in just about the way you think. He entered Japan too eager to be a martyr and, when the moment came, he lost that faith that was keeping him on the right path. (The Japanese persecution, incidentally, was the scariest persecution in the history of the world, at least to me.)
I join the opinion of Heaney, J, and I write separately to add that this US Presidential election and the last two US Presidential elections have been like the Battle of Wits scene in the 1980s classic movie The Princess Bride, where the correct answer is both cups have been poisoned by iocane powder and you’re a dead man if you choose either of them.
I cast my ballot for the American Solidarity Party nominees for President and Vice President in the last 2 presidential elections, and I did so again earlier this month via absentee ballot for the upcoming US Presidential Election. Peter Sonski and Lauren Onak are the Presidential and VP nominees in this year’s election, and you can go to http://www.petersonski.com/ to learn more about them and find out if they are on the ballot or, like in MN, have registered write-in candidate status (where if you write them in, the vote is actually tabulated, counted, and included in the official canvassing report for your state).
Simcha Fisher also has an excellent post on this topic as well. I don’t always see eye to eye with her, but I agree with what she says in this excerpt, regarding voting for major party candidates who do not align with her morals:
“And every time I vote this way, I stray a little further from even understanding clearly what I believe, or from feeling like it’s important, because my standards keep shifting out of sheer self-preservation. You have to change your standards if you don’t want to go insane. You have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, right?
But we have noses for a reason. They’re a gift from God to deter us from consuming things that will hurt us. Plug your nose long enough, you forget what noses are for. “
You and I have arrived at the same conclusion of what options are actually available, however our understanding of the facts which lead us to that position are different.
When I initially read your posts about what Trump did regarding the 2020 election and J6, I said that that seemed plausible and made sense. I also said that it presented as facts, things I was becoming aware of for the first time. Due to some circumstances outside of my control, my only source of national news during that timeframe in 2020 was bits and pieces of conservative talk radio. However, you were not an impartial voice on the matter in your posts. Thus, I said I would await SCOTUS to tell me whether or not Trump could be voted for. To the best of my knowledge, when they had the chance to say yea or nay, they said nothing meaningful. Perhaps it is cowardly of me, but I decided to outsource my judgement on the issue to SCOTUS (as long as the decision was not an obvious political hit-job, but that caveat did not come to pass, thankfully) about the time that the case was brought before them (as I said to James then). With SCOTUS unwilling to give a definitive answer, I conclude that Trump should not be removed from the list of acceptable candidates on that issue.
However, I come to the conclusion that we are still unable to vote for Team Trump, because I think that Trump, like Harris, is pro-abortion. Trump less so than Harris or Walz (which is a depressingly low bar to clear), but still to a sufficient extent that I cannot vote for him in clear conscience. The fact that Vance, an ostensibly Pro-Life Catholic from my new home state of Ohio, has been shedding all signs of being Pro-Life since joining the ticket is extremely disheartening.
Normally, I vote on election day because I think that that ought to be the only day on which ballots should be taken in. This year, I am also doing so because of some hope for some miraculous event which will change the options in front of me...
This is an article I feel I have so many comments on... that it would take too long to say all of them (some are in agreement, some are in disagreement). Perhaps later I will say more of them, but in the interests of time for now I'll try very much to constrain myself for now and just bring up two things: The first a comment, the second a question.
In regards to the comment, I think the repeated references to Sophie's Choice hurts the article. It's just not something you mention at the start and then bring up again towards the end, it's something you bring up a lot throughout the article. That distracts from the actual argument of the article on the election--or even on the general issues of cooperation with evil--because it makes the reader fixate on and want to debate that specific example rather than the broader issues, distracting from the more important parts of the article.
And this brings me to the question, one I was curious about. Suppose that between now and voting day, Donald Trump dies somehow. While he's still technically on the ballot, this effectively turns J.D. Vance into the Republican presidential candidate. How would that affect things for you? Similarly, what if this happens with Harris and Walz?
In hindsight, you are obviously correct that I should not have relied so much on Sophie. I did so because I assumed the entire reading audience would intuitively agree with me, and I could use that as bedrock to build toward further points. As it turns out, the reading audience does *not* share my intuition, and so this bedrock turned into sand.
Walz is fairly straightforward: everything I said against Harris can be said of Walz, and, in some ways, Walz has done even worse things. He is my governor, I have seen him up close, and I despise him. (In both debates, the Republican candidates were "fact-checked" by dishonest moderators about the circumstances of infants born alive after abortions in Minnesota. Those fact-checks were lies. I have been thinking about publishing something on this topic for De Civ, but I am not sure whether I can keep my temper sufficiently in check.) So if Harris died and Walz took the nomination, he would be an even easier "hell no."
Vance is a little more interesting.
I dislike Vance. I don't have as strong an opinion of him (I've had relatively little exposure), but my general impression is that he is somewhat more dishonest than your average Washington politician, and that's already extremely dishonest. I earlier linked an Edward Feser article which argued that a Trump victory could be bad for the pro-life movement, and many of his arguments apply equally to Vance. On the other hand, it's an open question whether Vance, as a dishonest man, would change his positions if he ascended to the top of the ticket.
Vance has not personally tried to overthrow the United States government, so that *is* a pretty big point in his favor, from where I'm sitting. He wasn't in the Senate at the time, so didn't cast any votes on impeachment or certification. Another point in his favor.
On the other hand, he is running on the ticket of a man legally not qualified to be POTUS, he's embraced Trump throughout despite the insurrection, he won't admit that Trump lost the election (but won't deny it, either, which is a small point in his favor), and he has said that he would have voted against certification. That's less bad from an insurrection standpoint but still extremely bad (I wrote about anti-certification votes pre-insurrection: https://www.jamesjheaney.com/2021/01/02/special-comment-on-the-cruz-electoral-college-objection/). He's still obviously *way too close* to Trump's lawlessness, maybe too close to justify voting for him under any circumstances.
But I haven't looked into him all that closely, and I will reserve judgment until Vance does actually end up on top of the ticket.
(One thing I'm very interested in seeing: after 2024, especially if Trump loses, how quickly and how clearly does Vance reverse position on this for the sake of setting up in 2028 run?)
Wow, James, that's impressive. I'm highly tempted to call that masterful tutorial in and analysis of Catholic moral theology, a classic exercise of Catholic moral overthinking, even if I largely agree with your eventual conclusion. I will say the "Sophie's choice" scenario, given the extreme duress involved, is not that helpful as far as the election is concerned, even if it helpe your background discussion of moral theology.
I generally agree with your description of Trump and Harris. However, we disagree somewhat on your analysis on the choice.
Contrary to your footnote, Kamala Harris has a conventional respect for the rule of law (if likely a risk to executive order overreach, a tendency started by Barack Obama and continued by Joe Biden). However, Kamala harris can't "codify Roe" without Congress passing a bill she could sign. Her executive leeway to promote abortion is therefore limited. All of this to say Kamala Harris cannot substantially commit the grave evil of expanding abortion by herself, making more remote the material cooperation with that evil of anyone voting for her. (If Harris were a Hitler with absolute power to carry out her plans, that would be different).
By contrast, Donald Trump is more than capable of attacking the rule of law all by himself with limited Congressional ability to block him. He will have a list of MAGA faithful to appoint in the executive branch, ready to do whatever he tells them to, placed using acting appointments, which he abused during his first term. he has made clear his desire to weaponize the Justice Department to harrass his "enemies". And then there's the Insurrection Act, which allows the President to call out the military for a broad list of domestic issues mostly at his description -- ripe for abuse. All that increases the material cooperation of any Trump voter, with the evil of attacking the rule of law -- the Constitution.
And that is even before analyzing the evil of attacking the rule of law versus the evil of abortion. I would argue the breakdown of civil order resulting from attacking the rule of law is more dangerous and a greater evil than widespread abortion, even of Roe is "codified". Ancient Rome, for all the evils of slavery and infanticide effectively promoted civil order, allowing the rapid spread of the gospel.
For those reasons, I believe a vote for Kamala Harris can be justified as the lesser evil -- that is, for a voter in a battleground state likely to influence the outcome. (I admit, it's a close call).
But like you, I live in a non-battleground state (Ohio) and I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party. I have no desire to compromise my integrity, or risk my soul, by casting a vote for Harris if I don't absolutely have to. (Hooray for the Electoral College!).
One other comment. You linked to comments by Edward Feser and Steven Greydamus. One the one hand, I was appalled by Feser's acknowledging Trump's attempt to overturn the election, only to dismiss it). OTOH, Greydamus's approach is much closer to mine. A well-formed conscience, prayer and common sense, rather than a detailed moral analysis, suffices for most situations, including voting, which is almost always very remote material cooperation with whatever evil a candidate wants to do.
Since -- as you probably realize -- I wrote this article partly in a desperate hope of persuading you, specifically, I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear that. Hooray for the electoral college indeed! It saved me from any responsibility in 2020 (though, alas, not 2024, at least not so far). This is a very good reason to refrain from a morally questionable vote.
These points are therefore purely academic, but I'll ask them anyway:
1. You write that "voting is almost always very remote material cooperation with whatever evil a candidate wants to do." In this article, I argued that voting is almost always very proximate (and absolutely necessary) material cooperation with the evils a candidate runs on doing. What led you to reject my thinking.
2. You write that a vote for Harris is less proximate than a vote for Trump because she is less likely to accomplish the evil she vows. In the article, I argued that it doesn't matter a whole lot if one candidate is more likely to enact his evil than the other candidate, if both candidates are running on evil. It doesn't increase your proximity from the evil at all, and it doesn't decrease your responsibility for it as much as you would like (not least because the future is so unpredictable). A vote for a candidate who intends evil is still unavoidably a vote for that intent, and for the degraded moral character that is capable of harboring that intention. What led you to a different conclusion? You don't really explain in this comment.
3. Lastly, I pointed out several Catholic texts that make it clear that the right to life is more fundamental than the rule of law. Indeed, if you don't have a universal right to life, Catholic teaching generally holds that you *do not have* a rule of law, properly speaking; you have an ordered tyranny of some sort. (Aquinas's treatise on law is fairly scathing about this sort of thing.) Yet you write that you see the rule of law as more fundamental than the right to life. I can see the argument for it, but it seems foreclosed, at least for Catholics, by existing teachings. What leads you to think that the Catechism, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Francis are all mistaken about the right to life being the more fundamental right?
(The Catechism and the popes could be mistaken; they sometimes are! But it's a nerve-wracking experience to disagree with them.)
How much of this article remains if I'm not convinced that Trump is an insurrectionist?
I'm inclined to think that he was deluded into thinking that he won, and acted accordingly, and that January 6th was not intended to be an insurrection. I think his speech should be read as it literally reads, not some esoteric reading based on things random trump followers said online. (That he wants his followers to go to the capitol, and, cheer on (or the contrary, depending), to peacefully voice their opinion, in order to give "pride and boldness" to the reluctant republicans. Notably, looking at the end here, he doesn't think the democrats will vote with him. That doesn't look like a coup!) That removes section 3 from relevance as one votes, I would think. Of course, January 6th was still horrible.
You ask for an at length addressing of the facts. But I have not read things all that deeply, and I don't have the time at the moment. (It is currently past 1, and I have church in the morning.)
> How much of this article remains if I'm not convinced that Trump is an insurrectionist?
Not much. If you remove the insurrection part, I think there are still several cases to be made against Trump, but they (1) are not as strong, and (2) on my rubric, they tend to fall under ordinary antipolitics rather than extraordinary antipolitics, which is the problem.
EDIT: also (3) I didn't make them in this article!
> You ask for an at length addressing of the facts. But I have not read things all that deeply, and I don't have the time at the moment. (It is currently past 1, and I have church in the morning.)
That's what they all say! Or some variation of it. "I think you're wrong but I'm not getting into the details."
(However, ditto. After 1, Mass in the morning, so I'm offline in 15 minutes.)
((Look at it this way, though: I don't really care too much if you reply here in a timely fashion. I care that you take enough time between now and election day to become significantly more acquainted with the facts about that day. From that point of view, you have nearly a month! Obviously, I commend my own writing on this above all else, but you could alternatively consider the J6 Committee Report, or at least its executive summary. They were obviously biased, but the lack of relevant response from Team Trump, even two years later, is deafening.))
In terms of the original Sophie's choice question, I mostly agree with you: Sophie was being pressured to play a rigged game, and choosing not to play is (probably) the best choice available to her. A runner-up choice might have been informing the officer that if he cared so much, he could flip a coin himself.
However, an interesting variant occurs to me:
Let's say you wake up on the peak of a two-way greased ramp: one greased slope to your right, one greased slope to your left, and a small ridge you can balance on in the center.
The moment you wake up, all the handholds and resting platforms retract. you can only stay balanced on the ridge summit as long as you're awake and have strength in your limbs.
there are two giant buttons, at the bottom of either ramp. If your body falls on one button, family member A dies, if your body falls on the other button, family member B dies.
There is no escape, no food, no water, no explanation for who placed you in this situation or why. Just clearly marked signs and your two family members trapped in soundproofed glass deathtrap cages, rigged to the buttons.
Now, in that situation, the obviously correct answer is to stay awake for as long as you possibly can, balanced on the ridge between the two chutes for as long as you possibly can. And pray for rescue.
But.... you know that unless rescue arrives, you're going to collapse from hunger, dehydration, or sleep deprivation eventually, and that when you do, your body is going to slide down one or the other of the chutes, basically at random, and then trigger one of the death-buttons.
In that situation.... is it completely unthinkable to 'bias' which SIDE of the ridge the majority of your body weight is resting on ahead of time, so that when you finally do collapse, you have a pretty good guess which family member will die?
I'm inclined to say that doing so is sometimes understandable.... Say, if it's a choice between sacrificing an 18-yr-old son vs an 18-month-old-daughter, the son has a clear duty to sacrifice himself for the daughter, and both of you KNOW that, and know that the other one knows that, so 'resting' your body so that it's 'more' leaning in the direction of the son for when your grip eventually fails is understandable... not ideal, but understandable.
Because it's either that or call the trap-designer's bluff, and try to break your way out of the trap early, by deliberately getting close to one of the buttons while you're still awake and full of energy attempting to hack it, and risking the fact that you'll probably still trigger that button... which is also an understandable choice to make, but risks an earlier death of one family member.
I'm not certain how this applies to a political dilemma, unless maybe you were picking which state to pre-cache your survival supplies in, in case of total governmental downfall? But it's a fun thought experiment.
This was a fascinating article, as I have come to expect from De Civitate. It is very timely, as I am likely to find my ballot in my mailbox when I next check it. However, I have to say, I often found myself deeply confused by the conclusions you came to in the course of your arguments.
It’s possible this is because there is a substantial gulf in our moral frameworks. Though I am not a San Francisco-style rationalist utilitarian, I am almost certainly have moral intuitions that allow for more cooperation with evil than you do. I was uncertain of how to go about trying to find out more, whether I could formulate a clarifying question (or several) that would help me at least figure out if I am disagreeing with you or just failing to understand the argument.
On consideration, I think focusing on Sophie’s Choice is the most productive path. Despite following along, and almost entirely agreeing with, your section explaining the foundations of the Catholic view of cooperation with evil, I don’t see how Sophie counts as providing any material cooperation.
What is it that Sophie is helping the Nazi do? Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall anywhere in the article where you actually state this directly (and, believe it or not, in addition to reading your whole article, I went back to re-read the relevant sections looking for this). What follows is my attempts to go through all the possible ways I could imagine Sophie being charged with material aid to the Nazi and why I think they don’t apply. In the end, I think Sophie makes a heroic sacrifice rather than a regretful compromise with evil.
First, Sophie did not physically deliver her child to the Nazi – the children were both forcefully taken.
Argument: I have not read the novel, and only watched the clip. It looks to me like both children have been ripped from her at the point that she makes the choice. It doesn’t look to me like she is passing her daughter over. Even if that is what is happening in the clip, does the whole case really hang on this? In a hypothetical Sophie’s Choice where my interpretation of the scene happened, does your whole position on the issue switch?
Second, Sophie does not operate, even under duress, any of the physical mechanisms by which her daughter gets killed. The Nazis do not ask her to shoot her daughter to save her son, or even so much as press a button.
Argument: I think this is just straightforwardly indisputable, except by an overly-literal and expansive sense of “physical mechanism” by which we conceive of the effect of her voice’s soundwaves hitting their ears and making chemical changes in their brain and so on. You know what I mean here – I’m talking triggers and buttons, not making a full account of a physicalist model of the mind.
Third, and the closest I can come to imagining, is that Sophie somehow helps the Nazi make a choice between which of her children to kill. An analogy here, to use your other primary example, is the roommate who helps the rapist decide which girl at the party to victimize.
Argument: This strikes me as also not very plausible. The Nazi has already decided to kill both her children. Her words are “take my daughter” but they have the same intention and effect as “let me keep my son.” As you say in the first section, “Sophie has saved her son at the cost of her daughter… She did not gas her child; she made a choice in order to save one of her children.”
Later on, you go further, saying that her choice was purely illusory all along. “Sophie never actually had a choice. The S.S. guard gave her the illusion of choice. He held 100% of the power. If Sophie had refused to pick a child, he might very well have followed through on his threat to kill them both. Then again, he might have spared one, or both. Likewise, once Sophie did choose one of her children, he might have killed both anyway, or killed the one Sophie didn’t choose. The power was always, entirely, in his hands.”
Given this, how is Sophie making a material contribution to the Nazi’s actions? We admit that her words did not empower or encourage the Nazi. The most they could have done is please the Nazi. To quote you again: “The only reason the S.S. guard gave Sophie the illusion of choice was to trick Sophie into immediate material cooperation with the murder of her own daughter. In the book, it is especially clear that the guard hates Sophie for her belief in Christ, and wants to strike at her by coaxing her into the greatest blasphemy of all.”
Are we truly going to say that denying the Nazi the satisfaction of this cruelty against a mother is worth her son’s life? That’s the moral? Let no evil-doer be amused, even if it means the death of your children?
Conclusion: I don’t see it. Perhaps it is so blindingly obvious that it need not be stated explicitly. Is simply the act of choosing to save one over the other (or choosing to save one instead of neither) sufficient to count as providing material cooperation? That’s all that I am left with, but I can’t imagine how that can be right.
Allow me an analogy:
Sophie and her two children are fleeing the Nazis, into the arms of the advancing Red Army, who will save them. However, the Nazis, determined to kill as many as possible before they are defeated, send 2 soldiers off to catch them. Each Nazi soldier is able to wrestle away one of her children and run off with them. Luckily, she spots a pistol on the ground, dropped by a different Nazi during their retreat. Sophie grabs the gun, knowing her only chance of saving her children is to kill or injure the fleeing Nazis carrying them off, she is too slow and weak to catch them. She picks up the weapon, but to her dismay, there is only one round remaining. She can’t kill both Nazis with one shot, so she has to choose – save one child, leaving the other to be taken, or do nothing and allow both Nazis to escape with both her children. She shoots the one carrying her son.
Does Sophie act wrongly here? What’s the moral difference with this situation vs. the one in Sophie’s Choice? To make the point more starkly, how is shooting the bullet to kill the Nazi carrying her son to his death different from shooting her words to kill the Nazi’s intention to carry her son to his death?
I have other objections to arguments in the article, but I think this is really at the core of our disagreement. I cannot understand how you can judge Sophie’s actions as material cooperation with evil, even granting your entire framework as laid out in the sections on Cooperation With Evil.
I agree with this take but perhaps on slightly different grounds: I don't accept that the Nazi had 100% of the power in this situation. I think Sophie had the power to influence him to kill only one of her children instead of both, by giving him the satisfaction of forcing her to choose between them. I think she knew that, and that's why she made her choice. If you don't think the power to influence others is real then I guess you think that all the ruthless capitalists who spend trillions of dollars on sales and marketing are fools.
She absolutely made the right decision (not that she would have been culpable at all for making the wrong decision under unimaginable duress). She doesn't deserve a guilt trip over it, she deserves therapy to process her trauma so that she can accept that she made the right choice and move on with her life.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Sophie has real power here, that would make her *more* complicit in the death of the child she chooses to have killed, not less (thus *more* guilty), so I'm not clear how taking the argument in this direction leads to the conclusion that she made the right decision.
It seems the only way you can reach that conclusion is by saying that it is right to do evil so that good may come of it (at least in extremis). That works if you are a utilitarian! I'm not really sure how it can work otherwise. But perhaps you have an unstated argument somewhere between "Sophie had power" and "Sophie made the right choice" that I'm not grokking.
I do agree that nobody needs to guilt trip Sophie, because she is guilt tripping herself plenty hard already. She *does* need help processing that guilt. But *really* processing it, not rejecting it. Help that insists she did nothing wrong isn't going to work. She'll know better, and (I think) that end in the same place: cyanide.
The key factor for me is that at least one of her children is going to die. So, it's not the trolley problem, because she's not putting a different person in harm's way instead of her children. In that case you could argue that she committed murder to save her kids.
She is not putting anyone *in* harm's way, she's being forced to choose whom she will take *out* of harm's way. That's not evil.
But how does she "choose whom she will take out of harm's way"?
She says to the guard: Kill this one. She may be doing it with the intention of saving the other one, but it is still formal cooperation: I choose this act, with this object (the killing of this child). The further end of the act is to take the other child out of harm's way, but that consequence goes *through* the act of consigning her other child to death.
The obvious objection (which you raised last night in person): what if she said instead, "Don't take my little boy"? Wouldn't saying it that way explicitly save one of her children without explicitly condemning the other, and therefore evade the problem of formal cooperation in the death of one of your children? So is this whole thing just a word game?
I don't think the objection stands up. As the article says, formal cooperation can be explicit or implicit. Within the context of the choice given by the SS man, saying the words, "Don't take my little boy" unmistakably implies her participation in the choice and her consent to the Nazis taking her little girl. It's still formal cooperation.
I repeat that the amount of personal guilt or culpability we should assign to Sophie is either zero, or so close to zero as makes no odds. My claim is only that, even if she is not culpable, her participation in the choice is formal cooperation, which is extremely damaging to her personally.
(I also continue to think that, even if we concede that Sophie has some kind of power here, it is *grossly* overconfident to say that "at least one of her children is going to die." I don't know how relevant that is, though.)
To be clear, you say formal cooperation here. In the article, you say immediate material cooperation. Is formal cooperation what you mean?
Whichever way, if we agree with you in her case, that it is wrong to make a choice when that would entail formal cooperation, or even immediate material cooperation, it is not at all obvious to me that that would carry over to less proximate forms of cooperation. Are there reasons to think so?
(For honesty's sake: I'm protestant, and would require more care than you've presented here to be convinced that your schema is correct, but I'm trying to work within it above.)
I'm not convinced that it would be wrong for her to choose one. Would it be wrong in the similar case, where she's choosing between herself and the child, to suggest that her child should be saved? My general sense is that few would say so, and yet, that seems the same in the details you present as relevant? (Unless perhaps consent/self-ownership is meaningful in whether people can be put to death, but that's an unusual take for anyone who (including me) is against euthanasia.)
Yeah, James, what about scenarios in which mortal peril is no one's fault, like a medical triage situation in which multiple patients could be saved with intervention but it's not possible to simultaneously intervene to save all of them? Are you saying the right choice in that scenario is to not make a choice?
Sophie is in a similar situation, it seems to me, and could make her choice based on a snap judgment of which child is most likely to survive the concentration camp.
> To be clear, you say formal cooperation here. In the article, you say immediate material cooperation. Is formal cooperation what you mean?
I promise I didn't do this to be cheeky, but literally at the moment you were writing this comment, I was editing the article to say "formal."
In another comment thread on this article a couple days ago (it was in response to Matt Mortarello), I agreed that the article erred in identifying Sophie's cooperation as immediate material, and I stated that I would edit the article as soon as I'd reviewed it for any downstream problems the edit might expose. It just took me a day and a half to get that done, which is why the edit came in mere seconds before or after you posted this comment.
Her cooperation was formal, and the article was in error.
> Whichever way, if we agree with you in her case, that it is wrong to make a choice when that would entail formal cooperation, or even immediate material cooperation, it is not at all obvious to me that that would carry over to less proximate forms of cooperation. Are there reasons to think so?
I think there are intuitive reasons to think that material cooperation with evil -- even more or less remote cooperation with evil -- is morally problematic.
Suppose you own a gun store (let's say it's in Somalia, where there are no gun laws). A man walks in and asks to buy a gun. He asks what kind of gun and bullet will definitely kill an adult human being at close range. You tell him, and then you ask why he would want to know that. The customer admits that he is buying a gun to kill his wife, and that he's going to do it as soon as he gets home. He is very convincing. You become certain you are talking to a psychopath.
Are there any moral problems whatsoever with selling him the gun? He doesn't put you under duress, he doesn't threaten violence, he simply offers you cash in exchange for a murder weapon. Is there any reason why that might not be okay?
If yes, then there are moral problems with somewhat-remote cooperation with evil, and you need to develop a moral framework for figuring out exactly how that works at different degrees of cooperation. I think the framework inevitably ends up looking something like the Catholic one. (If you're Protestant, I'll note that the Catholic framework has its ultimate roots in the Church Fathers, especially Augustine.)
And I tend to think that everyone will answer "yes."
I agree, this's a fascinating and thought-provoking article even though, on reflection, I still disagree with the bottom-line reasoning. And, after reflecting on your comment, I agree that we should dig in more to "Sophie's Choice."
Let me offer two other hypothetical analogies (your hypothetical being numbered (1)):
(2): Sophie thinks "My daughter is a good Christian and ready to face death. My son isn't ready yet." Her external level of cooperation is the same, but her inward reasoning is on a different level.
(3): Sophie somehow knows that this specific camp's head (was once friends with her daughter) / (is ideologically opposed to killing girls) / (something else), so she says "take my daughter" in reasonable hope that her daughter won't actually be killed. It's a very contrived scenario with the Nazis, but less so when we're stretching out the analogy to political choices in general.
That last one in particular seems like enough of a reach that I wonder whether we wouldn't be better off simply talking about political choices. I'm just having a hard time visualizing it. Does the head of the camp inspect every person who goes into the chamber to make sure she isn't an old friend / girl / other?
FWIW, though, I had to concede that OP is right that I misclassified Sophie's cooperation. Shoulda stated it was formal.
Thanks for reading and thinking it through, at any rate! I don't know where exactly you're coming from, ethically speaking, and I don't know what other objections you have, so all I can do is answer your question about Sophie's cooperation.
As of last night, when I posted this, my thinking was that Sophie's *consent* was the material element of her cooperation.
However, the very first thing I woke up to this morning was an email from a reader (who is smarter than me & has published in this area), which pointed out that consent cannot possibly be material cooperation, because consent is the *essence* of formal cooperation. Here is that email, in its entirety:
> I haven't gotten past the section entitled Sophie's Error yet, but there is a mistake here. Sophie's choice is not material cooperation at all. She has absolutely no material with which to cooperate. She is not making it possible, or easier, for the guard to kill the other one. Her action is pure formal cooperation. She says to the guard: Kill this one. She may be doing it with the intention of saving the other one, but it is still formal cooperation: I choose this act, with this object. (The object of the act, as opposed to the circumstances, further end, and consequences of the act, is another important piece of the moral puzzle.)
I think this email is correct. I was wrong to classify this as immediate material cooperation. Sophie's cooperation was formal. I'm going to have to publish a revision to that section tonight, but first I need to reread everything after that point to identify any downstream effects on my argument, so that my correction does not introduce more errors. (Then I will fret for a few hours about the impact on you lovely *readers* of my making such a stupid error.)
So my answer to your first several objections is: yes, you are correct, this is not material cooperation at all. It is formal cooperation.
With this correction, the difference in your fleeing-to-the-Red-Army hypothetical then, I suspect, becomes much clearer: in that hypothetical, Sophie does not consent to the killing of either of her children, she does not direct it, she does not participate in it -- however you want to put it, she doesn't do *that*. She can even continue attempting to chase down the other Nazi even though she is confident that she will not succeed! (Indeed, she should!)
As I said, I have no idea where that leads you to next, but I thank you for the thoughtful (and correct) correction!
I think it’s also a mistake to call what Sophie does consent or formal cooperation too. Let’s go back to the frat rape example. I think we agree that Sophie is a victim in any case, even if she ends up engaging in formal cooperation. So, I’m going to take the rape case from the perspective of the victim and build the analogy to Sophie from there.
For the sake of clarity, I’ll call the rape victim Cathie. She gets captured by several rapists and brought to an isolated room. She is pleading for her safe return. The leader of the group, having her at his mercy and being pure evil, decides it would be especially brutal for Cathie to feel somehow responsible for all this. So, rather than the whole group raping her in turn as was initially planned, he says, “I’ll give you a break – choose which of us will rape you and the rest will just hold you down.” Cathie replies it’s too awful to choose and begs again to be released to safety. The leader says, “if you don’t choose, it’s all of us.” And he turns to the others in his group who all start getting ready. Just as they are pushing her down onto the bed, she cries out “[guy 1] can do it!” with the hope that it will save her from being raped by the rest of them.
Is the claim that Cathie consents in some sense to being raped by guy 1? Or in some sense formally cooperates in this action? This seems really obviously false to me. If Cathie doesn’t consent in this situation, what’s the disanalogy to Sophie’s situation?
FWIW, I'm focusing on Sophie's Choice since you say about its connection to the broader argument: "If it seems wrong to you, perhaps my argument isn’t going to connect with you and you can skip the rest of this article." And I don't want to get too far ahead since this is a clear crux. I suppose I should wait on the revision, but it sounds to me like the change to a formal cooperation analysis might break the analogy to Sophie's Choice, while the existing material cooperation argument survives, in which case you might really just be saying that if the basic analysis of the moral considerations involved in material cooperation is a necessary point of agreement.
I like the Cathie example! Two observations about Cathie:
First, as you say, the gang rapists do this deliberately, in order to be especially cruel. They offer Cathie, essentially, an exchange: a significant reduction of immediate physical suffering in exchange for her verbal consent to one rape. I certainly agree that this is extremely cruel. The way I see it, the gang is (through extreme duress) pushing Cathie toward formal cooperation, and they believe (with good reason) that this formal cooperation will hurt Cathie *worse* than *multiple* additional physical rapes.
What isn't clear to me is why *you* see this choice as extremely cruel. If I understand your position (and I frankly suspect I do not), you believe that Cathie's verbal agreement to be raped by one of them is not formal cooperation, does not harm her, and therefore is not wrong. But if this verbal agreement doesn't harm her, then why is it cruel of the gang to put this choice to her in the first place? They're offering a reduction of physical suffering in exchange for (if I understand your position correctly) a harmless verbal token that means nothing and has no effect on Cathie.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
Maybe not, but perhaps my second observation will shed more light:
Versions of Cathie's situation seem to happen in real life fairly commonly. Under extreme duress, rape victims are often coerced into telling their rapist to proceed with the rape. This might take the form of an estranged partner "asking" for sex after making a clear threat of violence if the answer is anything but "yes," or an assailant demanding that the victim ask for more. Victims in this situation, fearing for their lives, very often give some form of verbal consent.
And, empirically, that seems to really mess them up quite badly! Rape victims who have been forced to consent to their own rape seem to struggle with deeper problems than those who do not. They tend to have a harder time recognizing what has happened to them as rape, making bizarre judgments even when the facts are as plain as day. It seems they tend to have a harder time recovering from the trauma, as well, even having come to grips with it, compared to those who were not coerced into this.
Let me make another analogy: suppose someone ("Stephie") is kidnapped by terrorists and is forced (at gunpoint) to pluck out her eyes for, I don't know, terrorist propaganda. Is she to blame for this act? Extremely minimally or not at all. Is she nevertheless wounded by this act? Yes! And did she perform this act? Yes. Her ultimate intention was to save her own life (a very good thing!), but the direct object of her action was to blind herself. Stephie's good intentions don't restore her sightedness.
So I suppose my basic position is that consent to an evil act is inherently damaging to one's interior, similar to how plucking out an eye is inherently damaging to one's exterior. Coercion or duress (or some other factor) might very well reduce (or even eliminate) the moral guilt one incurs for formal cooperation, but the damage occurs nevertheless. If that is true, then I think it is uncontroversial to say that it is morally obligatory to avoid voluntarily inflicting that damage under ordinary circumstances.
The Catholic position goes further than this basic position. The Catholic claim is that it is *always* morally obligatory to avoid voluntarily inflicting that damage. As I said in one of the footnotes, this is one area where Catholic thought breaks from the mainstream, and I won't bother trying to defend it.
On the other hand, how about a more modest claim? It is almost always morally *praiseworthy* to avoid coerced formal cooperation with evil, even if it is not morally obligatory. By that I mean only this: if the gang gave Cathie the choice of choosing one rapist, and Cathie's response were to spit in the gang leader's eye, and she then suffered the full wrath of the gang, I think we would all call this decision heroic, courageous, and a number of other very good things. Does that sound correct?
(I did not drive at this in the article, or even spell it out to myself beforehand, because I thought the Sophie-related material was an easy layup where nearly everyone's moral intuitions would line up with mine. Obviously I was completely wrong about this! Oh well! I'm glad the conversation is happening anyway!)
This is really interesting, and I appreciate you continuing the thread! I have to say I am surprised that this is your position, even though it seemed to follow from your previous claims. My tollens has been ponensed. We do seem to have very opposite intuitions here.
Just to answer some of your questions, which perhaps will clarify my view:
1. I think in the Cathie case, presenting the choice is cruel because its intent is to inflict further harm. I think whether it inflicts further harm is a matter of contingent psychology, however, not any moral failing. Ordinary human psychology is not perfectly attuned to the right and the good IMO. In other words, you can psychologically suffer and feel guilt for things that are not at all morally blameworthy and that a detached observer would say is not a thing to feel guilty about. This is often the perspective that a good psychological counselor is meant to bring.
2. As far as the morality of making the choice, in Cathie's case, I think she is free to choose either option, from the point of view of morality. (Ok, in my stricter moments I might say that she is obligated to choose the option she predicts will result in less harm to herself, the additional rapes or the psychological consequences of feeling like she in some way consented given her existing psychology. Duties to self are a part of morality that I don't have very confident views on.) In Sophie's case, my considered judgment at the moment is that she is morally required to choose one child, though I would not have heaps of blame to put on her for failing in this duty (she's under great duress).
3. As I suggest above, I think it is not morally praiseworthy to refuse to choose in these situations. Indeed, I think Sophie's actions in the original work are heroic and praiseworthy precisely because she saves her son's life even at the cost of her own future anguish over the choice. I put it in the same category as pushing someone out of the way of an oncoming bus: risking your own safety for the sake of someone else's. In Cathie's case where she spits in the eye of the gang leader, I'd be tempted to call that rash or reckless, rather than courageous. It's one thing to steel oneself against evil being visited on you, and another to aggravate the risk to yourself with no hope for any gain. But I think since Cathie's own welfare is the only thing at stake, I wouldn't have especially strong views on what the all-things-considered right thing to do is.
As a slight aside, I was talking with my wife about this, and her reaction was to consider the case of King Solomon splitting the baby (I assume you're sufficiently familiar to not need the story rehearsed). Does the true mother formally cooperate with evil by consenting to the lying imposter being granted custody of her baby? Is she therefore wrong to insist on this when King Solomon offers the split as a compromise? Suppose Solomon credibly warned that he would follow through on the compromise if an alternate agreement could not be reached between the parties -- should she continue to only insist on the justness of her custody, come what may? We're not sure if this is analogous, but perhaps it gets at the point that when presented with nothing but bad options, obstinate rejection of the options can be reckless (and even wrong) rather than praiseworthy.
Just beginning my journey now but absolutely love that the article begins with introducing intermission breaks
Classic James!
I will preface this by saying that I have never had the pleasure of voting for a winning candidate or ballot measure in my adult life, and that my current plan is to write in Governor Abbot because he has been the most competent Republican politician of my lifetime.
I think you should edit the section where to advise people not to vote at all. I say this because votes for the House, Senate, and local government is even more important as our Federal Executive grows more and more deranged. Don't cast a vote for President, but please do vote for those you can with good conscience.
I hate to add more complexity to an already long article, but I wonder if it matters that I fully believe that Trump will be legally prevented from taking office should he be elected, and therefore a vote for Trump is a vote for Vance (and chaos!) It would be more like telling a rapist where the girl is, knowing that there is a police officer already there on the lookout for said rapist. Your prior work has fairly convinced me that Trump is guilty of insurrection, and constitutionally this means that he cannot take office, even if voted in.
I wholeheartedly agree that people shouldn't decline to vote. That's both for the reasons you give, and because I think that it's important to show that you are willing to bother to vote but rather declining to support any candidate. It'll have the same impact on the results in this election, but it'll show up very differently in the aggregate statistics - which is the same practical impact a third-party vote is likely to have.
Personally, I've written in my friends many times for local offices, and one time I missed the deadline to request an absentee ballot, but I've never declined to vote.
I just kind of took it as read that everyone knew I meant don't vote for president (but still vote downballot in the races you can vote in), but, hey, fair point. I think an earlier draft had more explicit language saying something to that effect, so I'll see what I can dig up when I go in to make a revision tonight. Thanks for the note!
(Some of my downballot races are ALSO a nightmare where I will have to politely decline to cast a vote, but that's a my-state problem not an everyone-else problem. And even I have a few races where I can vote major-party with a clear conscience. I'll lose, but I'll have voted.)
P.S. I am very grateful to hear that my discussion of the insurrection has been convincing! My fear, and actually my expectation, is that it doesn't matter how convincing the case against Trump is: if We The People attempt to put Trump in office unconstitutionally, the Republicans in Congress and the justices of the Supreme Court will ensure that he stays there, exercising powers to which he is not entitled, regardless of what the Constitution says. The rule of law, unfortunately, is a choice, and it is one that we are (so far) actively declining to make. If he wins, though, mark my words, I'm going to try to find someone to bring a quo warranto action!
While my state of Ohio is Trumpy and non-battleground, it is most defintely a battleground state for control of the Senate. Both the abortion-friendly Democratic incumbent and the Trumpy GOP challenger are abhorrent, but the real issue is this: will the next President be opposed by a hostile Senate? That's what i want. How I feel the Presidential race is likely to go, will determine which party's candidate I vote for.
Choosing not to choose in Sophie's case is absurd. It's just as bad as choosing one child over the other if not worse. The only choice to not be complicit would be to fight in anyway possible. Passivity isn't absolution. When you know bad is going to happen and you fail to act you are then an accomplice... There isn't such a thing as complete powerlessness. I agree that the proximate is relational to the amount of power, but it is never zero.
I am very open to the claim that Sophie has some moral duty to engage in active resistance, even at the cost of her life. In Footnote 6, I set that question aside, but I could buy it.
On the other hand, I find it extremely implausible to say what you seem to be saying: Sophie *refusing* to consent to the execution of her own child is "just as bad if not worse" than *consenting* to the execution of her own child, as she did. I don't see how you get there.
That is to say: I'm definitely willing to consider the possibility that resistance is morally obligatory, passivity is a moral failure, and participating in the Nazi's game is a larger moral failure. But what you seem to be saying is that resistance is best, picking one of your kids to die is second-best, and passivity is worse, which seems... well, as you say, absurd.
But maybe one or both of us is misunderstanding the other, because I know you aren't prone to absurdity!
Fair enough. Let me attempt to unpack my thoughts... Might even lead me to change my mind:
First question for me is can we trust the Nazi to keep his word about his future actions. Some stories present this type of dilemma by having an antagonist prompt the protagonist to "put down the gun or I shoot the girl"... In most of those cases I wouldn't trust the bad guy to keep his word since his whole safety is predicated on the hostage being alive and once I don't have a way to retaliate I am as good as dead and the bad guy has no reason to comply. I told my kids recently, discussing the foundation of power, that it comes from you having something the other person wants (tabling for a moment that this works in your arguments favor, since once a choice is made Sophie would lose her power). Once you relinquish the thing the other person wants you lose most of your power. In this case though, the only power given to Sophie is the choice. I trust the Nazi at his word that someone will die. Maybe all. The likely case in this scenario is that the sadistic bastard (sorry for the language, but I think it is tame for what I would like to use and warranted to boot) wants to leave someone alive. If he wanted death, it was his to deal out. In this case, he wants suffering. He wants to show the frailty of human morality and faith. So I think we are safe to assume that he will leave someone alive, even if he might have removed their desire to live. It seems likely he will do just as he says, because it supports his desire. It compliments his character, which might be the nicest sounding insult I have ever written... (Continuing in another post because I am writing this on a phone...)
Second que
So we trust the Nazi to be a Nazi.
Next question seems to me what to do with the now clearer (still room for human absurdism/randomness) with the clear, presented options. Likely we should enumerate them:
1. Do nothing, both kids die.
2. Choose a kid, the other dies.
But let's back up and recognize the power Sophie does have and doesn't have and let's see if their are options that aren't presented.
First, Let's state some obvious areas where Sophie was close to powerless. She didn't seem to have the option to avoid participating in the Nazi's trolley dilemma (I am going to come back to this I think). She had very little physical power. She had no support on the Earth around her or at least one of a physical nature, meaning she might have been surrounded by the Trinity itself at that moment but nothing evident in the world around her.
What power did she have then? Did she have any? She did have some evidentially because she had something the Nazi wanted and in this power is granted. So we should explore that. She has power over the Nazi's paradigm meaning he wanted to justify his morals. "I dispose you because you are disposable. You are weak and worse yet you think yourself superior to me in your faith," my might be an adequate summary of his thoughts. He wants to support this. He wants to proclaim it, as all zealots want to when they have doubts in their hearts. When part of them knows they aren't on solid ground. So Sophie has power, and although it isn't physical it is substantial. The only power the Nazi has is actually quite frail when compared to the Christian faith and creed. The have worldly, physical power but we as Christians know, and this should be taught very young, that this world is not our home. That we don't live to live. We live for Christ. If we die, we are healed and saved and are no longer chained by fear, pain and death. Our actions don't save us (this might be something you bulk at given your Catholicism, but you may not too) in any way. They are only evidence of our faith and weak evidence at that. "Lord I believe, but help me with my unbelief."
So we come back around to options. We presented the superficial options presented. After reviewing the real power dynamic though we recognize there are other less evident options. They may seem similar options but the spirit of them are vastly different and they are based on the fact that the Nazi is powerless compared to God. So we lost them and the spirit of them. I think they all would benefit by speaking the Truth. That no matter what the Nazi does, Christ will greet whomever dies as long as they look to him for true saving. If I was Sophie I would prophesy this in the snake's face before acting. After, I would let go of my fear of death and then act as The Spirit willed me. If I felt it on me to fight in all ways I could think of I would do so until I was dead. If I was called to choose I would but stating that I was setting the child free and that we would see them in eternity, sooner or later (for me it would be sooner).
What I would not do is give the Nazi what they desired. I would not remove myself from the place of power my faith would, as it does now, give me. Freedom. True freedom from a love of this world that causes me to suffer unduly. Sophie's true failure was giving up her power thinking death is something ultimate. Letting the Nazi justify his paradigm.
Passivity enacted because of a fear of moral failure is the worst form of this since it not only reinforces the Nazi's view that Sophie should be looked down on, but also because it elevated death. It makes death more meaningful than it should be. Our Earthly lives are valuable things only if they serve God but we should not cling to them. I hate abortion, but not because the baby is destroyed. I don't believe they are destroyed ultimately. I believe I will see my child that was miscarried (what a fricked up phrase... My wife didn't fail to carry them... She didn't fail in any way... I know it doesn't mean this but I dispose even the thought). I hate abortion because of what it says about the heart of the one who chooses death of others over the helpless. The one who chooses their own possibilities through murder.
So I believe that the best option is to truly not play the Nazi's game by stating that his threat means nothing. And then showing fearlessness to prove it.
Hopefully that is clear enough... Again, I am preaching through my thumbs here. There are a couple of lingering thoughts but I am going to save them since they would only be MY footnotes and aren't necessary for you to at least get a gist of where I am coming from. One would be to discuss the kid's POV... But that would be long to thumb out and would roughly be the same argument as above with the added thought of no one goes to Hell be ause they didn't get enough chances to believe. I will elaborate on anything you wish though if you ask me to. Let me just be at a keyboard...
Oh boy... I need to fix some typos but hopefully it doesn't detract too much. I will properly edit when I get home.
"So I believe that the best option is to truly not play the Nazi's game by stating that his threat means nothing. And then showing fearlessness to prove it."
I'm satisfied with this. "Prophesy, wield the Cross, and tell him Jesus died to free him from the sin he is committing" does seem like a better answer than "stand there and do nothing."
I am all for listening to the Spirit in the moment. I am convinced that, at that moment, the Spirit would not prompt you to choose a child. So, if this ever happens, and you hear a prompting to choose a child, employ big time discernment of spirits, because I'm pretty sure that's the devil.
I mention this because... have you ever read Silence, by Shusaku Endo? It's a tragic book about the comprehensive destruction of a priest under similar circumstances. (The ending is sometimes misunderstood as a happy ending.) There is a moment where the priest faces a similarly horrible choice, and he hears a voice in his head, pretending to be the Lord, advising him to do the bad thing for the greater good. He does, which destroys the faith of hundreds and his own.
But, yeah, on the whole, your approach strikes me as sound.
Jacob and Isaac. The Father and Jesus... I am not so sure there isn't presidence but I understand where you are coming from.
One thing I will say, that I avoided saying before, is that I don't think this is a great analogy for this election even if I do think it is an interesting moral dilemma.
Also, true faith in the redemption through The Christ can't be destroyed by any act...
Romans 8:38-39
So there was a bigger issue than the actions of the priest (will read) or even Sophie... It seems like a true misunderstanding of the Gospel.
Also, sorry for not editing... Been a bit crazy for me lately.
I ruminated on this and I should have clarified that the misunderstanding of the Gospel is on the part of those losing faith, not you... I wasn't trying to be insulting. If you took it that way I apologize.
None taken!
I agree that *true* Faith in Christ can't be destroyed by any act... but that's partly because true Faith in Christ *rules out* lots of acts, because those acts oppose Christ and the true faithful would never oppose Christ. For example, the devil *believes* in the redemption of believers through Christ, but he doesn't have true faith in it because he *opposes* that redemption!
I agree, though, that the priest in Silence did, in the end, misunderstand the Gospel, and probably in just about the way you think. He entered Japan too eager to be a martyr and, when the moment came, he lost that faith that was keeping him on the right path. (The Japanese persecution, incidentally, was the scariest persecution in the history of the world, at least to me.)
Blissenbach, M, concurring
I join the opinion of Heaney, J, and I write separately to add that this US Presidential election and the last two US Presidential elections have been like the Battle of Wits scene in the 1980s classic movie The Princess Bride, where the correct answer is both cups have been poisoned by iocane powder and you’re a dead man if you choose either of them.
I cast my ballot for the American Solidarity Party nominees for President and Vice President in the last 2 presidential elections, and I did so again earlier this month via absentee ballot for the upcoming US Presidential Election. Peter Sonski and Lauren Onak are the Presidential and VP nominees in this year’s election, and you can go to http://www.petersonski.com/ to learn more about them and find out if they are on the ballot or, like in MN, have registered write-in candidate status (where if you write them in, the vote is actually tabulated, counted, and included in the official canvassing report for your state).
Simcha Fisher also has an excellent post on this topic as well. I don’t always see eye to eye with her, but I agree with what she says in this excerpt, regarding voting for major party candidates who do not align with her morals:
“And every time I vote this way, I stray a little further from even understanding clearly what I believe, or from feeling like it’s important, because my standards keep shifting out of sheer self-preservation. You have to change your standards if you don’t want to go insane. You have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, right?
But we have noses for a reason. They’re a gift from God to deter us from consuming things that will hurt us. Plug your nose long enough, you forget what noses are for. “
https://www.simchafisher.com/2024/10/10/im-tired-of-throwing-my-vote-away-so-im-voting-asp/
All to say, well done, Mr. Heaney!
I respectfully concur and I join your opinion in full!
You and I have arrived at the same conclusion of what options are actually available, however our understanding of the facts which lead us to that position are different.
When I initially read your posts about what Trump did regarding the 2020 election and J6, I said that that seemed plausible and made sense. I also said that it presented as facts, things I was becoming aware of for the first time. Due to some circumstances outside of my control, my only source of national news during that timeframe in 2020 was bits and pieces of conservative talk radio. However, you were not an impartial voice on the matter in your posts. Thus, I said I would await SCOTUS to tell me whether or not Trump could be voted for. To the best of my knowledge, when they had the chance to say yea or nay, they said nothing meaningful. Perhaps it is cowardly of me, but I decided to outsource my judgement on the issue to SCOTUS (as long as the decision was not an obvious political hit-job, but that caveat did not come to pass, thankfully) about the time that the case was brought before them (as I said to James then). With SCOTUS unwilling to give a definitive answer, I conclude that Trump should not be removed from the list of acceptable candidates on that issue.
However, I come to the conclusion that we are still unable to vote for Team Trump, because I think that Trump, like Harris, is pro-abortion. Trump less so than Harris or Walz (which is a depressingly low bar to clear), but still to a sufficient extent that I cannot vote for him in clear conscience. The fact that Vance, an ostensibly Pro-Life Catholic from my new home state of Ohio, has been shedding all signs of being Pro-Life since joining the ticket is extremely disheartening.
Normally, I vote on election day because I think that that ought to be the only day on which ballots should be taken in. This year, I am also doing so because of some hope for some miraculous event which will change the options in front of me...
This is an article I feel I have so many comments on... that it would take too long to say all of them (some are in agreement, some are in disagreement). Perhaps later I will say more of them, but in the interests of time for now I'll try very much to constrain myself for now and just bring up two things: The first a comment, the second a question.
In regards to the comment, I think the repeated references to Sophie's Choice hurts the article. It's just not something you mention at the start and then bring up again towards the end, it's something you bring up a lot throughout the article. That distracts from the actual argument of the article on the election--or even on the general issues of cooperation with evil--because it makes the reader fixate on and want to debate that specific example rather than the broader issues, distracting from the more important parts of the article.
And this brings me to the question, one I was curious about. Suppose that between now and voting day, Donald Trump dies somehow. While he's still technically on the ballot, this effectively turns J.D. Vance into the Republican presidential candidate. How would that affect things for you? Similarly, what if this happens with Harris and Walz?
In hindsight, you are obviously correct that I should not have relied so much on Sophie. I did so because I assumed the entire reading audience would intuitively agree with me, and I could use that as bedrock to build toward further points. As it turns out, the reading audience does *not* share my intuition, and so this bedrock turned into sand.
Walz is fairly straightforward: everything I said against Harris can be said of Walz, and, in some ways, Walz has done even worse things. He is my governor, I have seen him up close, and I despise him. (In both debates, the Republican candidates were "fact-checked" by dishonest moderators about the circumstances of infants born alive after abortions in Minnesota. Those fact-checks were lies. I have been thinking about publishing something on this topic for De Civ, but I am not sure whether I can keep my temper sufficiently in check.) So if Harris died and Walz took the nomination, he would be an even easier "hell no."
Vance is a little more interesting.
I dislike Vance. I don't have as strong an opinion of him (I've had relatively little exposure), but my general impression is that he is somewhat more dishonest than your average Washington politician, and that's already extremely dishonest. I earlier linked an Edward Feser article which argued that a Trump victory could be bad for the pro-life movement, and many of his arguments apply equally to Vance. On the other hand, it's an open question whether Vance, as a dishonest man, would change his positions if he ascended to the top of the ticket.
Vance has not personally tried to overthrow the United States government, so that *is* a pretty big point in his favor, from where I'm sitting. He wasn't in the Senate at the time, so didn't cast any votes on impeachment or certification. Another point in his favor.
On the other hand, he is running on the ticket of a man legally not qualified to be POTUS, he's embraced Trump throughout despite the insurrection, he won't admit that Trump lost the election (but won't deny it, either, which is a small point in his favor), and he has said that he would have voted against certification. That's less bad from an insurrection standpoint but still extremely bad (I wrote about anti-certification votes pre-insurrection: https://www.jamesjheaney.com/2021/01/02/special-comment-on-the-cruz-electoral-college-objection/). He's still obviously *way too close* to Trump's lawlessness, maybe too close to justify voting for him under any circumstances.
But I haven't looked into him all that closely, and I will reserve judgment until Vance does actually end up on top of the ticket.
(One thing I'm very interested in seeing: after 2024, especially if Trump loses, how quickly and how clearly does Vance reverse position on this for the sake of setting up in 2028 run?)
Wow, James, that's impressive. I'm highly tempted to call that masterful tutorial in and analysis of Catholic moral theology, a classic exercise of Catholic moral overthinking, even if I largely agree with your eventual conclusion. I will say the "Sophie's choice" scenario, given the extreme duress involved, is not that helpful as far as the election is concerned, even if it helpe your background discussion of moral theology.
I generally agree with your description of Trump and Harris. However, we disagree somewhat on your analysis on the choice.
Contrary to your footnote, Kamala Harris has a conventional respect for the rule of law (if likely a risk to executive order overreach, a tendency started by Barack Obama and continued by Joe Biden). However, Kamala harris can't "codify Roe" without Congress passing a bill she could sign. Her executive leeway to promote abortion is therefore limited. All of this to say Kamala Harris cannot substantially commit the grave evil of expanding abortion by herself, making more remote the material cooperation with that evil of anyone voting for her. (If Harris were a Hitler with absolute power to carry out her plans, that would be different).
By contrast, Donald Trump is more than capable of attacking the rule of law all by himself with limited Congressional ability to block him. He will have a list of MAGA faithful to appoint in the executive branch, ready to do whatever he tells them to, placed using acting appointments, which he abused during his first term. he has made clear his desire to weaponize the Justice Department to harrass his "enemies". And then there's the Insurrection Act, which allows the President to call out the military for a broad list of domestic issues mostly at his description -- ripe for abuse. All that increases the material cooperation of any Trump voter, with the evil of attacking the rule of law -- the Constitution.
And that is even before analyzing the evil of attacking the rule of law versus the evil of abortion. I would argue the breakdown of civil order resulting from attacking the rule of law is more dangerous and a greater evil than widespread abortion, even of Roe is "codified". Ancient Rome, for all the evils of slavery and infanticide effectively promoted civil order, allowing the rapid spread of the gospel.
For those reasons, I believe a vote for Kamala Harris can be justified as the lesser evil -- that is, for a voter in a battleground state likely to influence the outcome. (I admit, it's a close call).
But like you, I live in a non-battleground state (Ohio) and I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party. I have no desire to compromise my integrity, or risk my soul, by casting a vote for Harris if I don't absolutely have to. (Hooray for the Electoral College!).
One other comment. You linked to comments by Edward Feser and Steven Greydamus. One the one hand, I was appalled by Feser's acknowledging Trump's attempt to overturn the election, only to dismiss it). OTOH, Greydamus's approach is much closer to mine. A well-formed conscience, prayer and common sense, rather than a detailed moral analysis, suffices for most situations, including voting, which is almost always very remote material cooperation with whatever evil a candidate wants to do.
Since -- as you probably realize -- I wrote this article partly in a desperate hope of persuading you, specifically, I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear that. Hooray for the electoral college indeed! It saved me from any responsibility in 2020 (though, alas, not 2024, at least not so far). This is a very good reason to refrain from a morally questionable vote.
These points are therefore purely academic, but I'll ask them anyway:
1. You write that "voting is almost always very remote material cooperation with whatever evil a candidate wants to do." In this article, I argued that voting is almost always very proximate (and absolutely necessary) material cooperation with the evils a candidate runs on doing. What led you to reject my thinking.
2. You write that a vote for Harris is less proximate than a vote for Trump because she is less likely to accomplish the evil she vows. In the article, I argued that it doesn't matter a whole lot if one candidate is more likely to enact his evil than the other candidate, if both candidates are running on evil. It doesn't increase your proximity from the evil at all, and it doesn't decrease your responsibility for it as much as you would like (not least because the future is so unpredictable). A vote for a candidate who intends evil is still unavoidably a vote for that intent, and for the degraded moral character that is capable of harboring that intention. What led you to a different conclusion? You don't really explain in this comment.
3. Lastly, I pointed out several Catholic texts that make it clear that the right to life is more fundamental than the rule of law. Indeed, if you don't have a universal right to life, Catholic teaching generally holds that you *do not have* a rule of law, properly speaking; you have an ordered tyranny of some sort. (Aquinas's treatise on law is fairly scathing about this sort of thing.) Yet you write that you see the rule of law as more fundamental than the right to life. I can see the argument for it, but it seems foreclosed, at least for Catholics, by existing teachings. What leads you to think that the Catechism, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Francis are all mistaken about the right to life being the more fundamental right?
(The Catechism and the popes could be mistaken; they sometimes are! But it's a nerve-wracking experience to disagree with them.)
How much of this article remains if I'm not convinced that Trump is an insurrectionist?
I'm inclined to think that he was deluded into thinking that he won, and acted accordingly, and that January 6th was not intended to be an insurrection. I think his speech should be read as it literally reads, not some esoteric reading based on things random trump followers said online. (That he wants his followers to go to the capitol, and, cheer on (or the contrary, depending), to peacefully voice their opinion, in order to give "pride and boldness" to the reluctant republicans. Notably, looking at the end here, he doesn't think the democrats will vote with him. That doesn't look like a coup!) That removes section 3 from relevance as one votes, I would think. Of course, January 6th was still horrible.
You ask for an at length addressing of the facts. But I have not read things all that deeply, and I don't have the time at the moment. (It is currently past 1, and I have church in the morning.)
> How much of this article remains if I'm not convinced that Trump is an insurrectionist?
Not much. If you remove the insurrection part, I think there are still several cases to be made against Trump, but they (1) are not as strong, and (2) on my rubric, they tend to fall under ordinary antipolitics rather than extraordinary antipolitics, which is the problem.
EDIT: also (3) I didn't make them in this article!
> You ask for an at length addressing of the facts. But I have not read things all that deeply, and I don't have the time at the moment. (It is currently past 1, and I have church in the morning.)
That's what they all say! Or some variation of it. "I think you're wrong but I'm not getting into the details."
(However, ditto. After 1, Mass in the morning, so I'm offline in 15 minutes.)
((Look at it this way, though: I don't really care too much if you reply here in a timely fashion. I care that you take enough time between now and election day to become significantly more acquainted with the facts about that day. From that point of view, you have nearly a month! Obviously, I commend my own writing on this above all else, but you could alternatively consider the J6 Committee Report, or at least its executive summary. They were obviously biased, but the lack of relevant response from Team Trump, even two years later, is deafening.))
In terms of the original Sophie's choice question, I mostly agree with you: Sophie was being pressured to play a rigged game, and choosing not to play is (probably) the best choice available to her. A runner-up choice might have been informing the officer that if he cared so much, he could flip a coin himself.
However, an interesting variant occurs to me:
Let's say you wake up on the peak of a two-way greased ramp: one greased slope to your right, one greased slope to your left, and a small ridge you can balance on in the center.
The moment you wake up, all the handholds and resting platforms retract. you can only stay balanced on the ridge summit as long as you're awake and have strength in your limbs.
there are two giant buttons, at the bottom of either ramp. If your body falls on one button, family member A dies, if your body falls on the other button, family member B dies.
There is no escape, no food, no water, no explanation for who placed you in this situation or why. Just clearly marked signs and your two family members trapped in soundproofed glass deathtrap cages, rigged to the buttons.
Now, in that situation, the obviously correct answer is to stay awake for as long as you possibly can, balanced on the ridge between the two chutes for as long as you possibly can. And pray for rescue.
But.... you know that unless rescue arrives, you're going to collapse from hunger, dehydration, or sleep deprivation eventually, and that when you do, your body is going to slide down one or the other of the chutes, basically at random, and then trigger one of the death-buttons.
In that situation.... is it completely unthinkable to 'bias' which SIDE of the ridge the majority of your body weight is resting on ahead of time, so that when you finally do collapse, you have a pretty good guess which family member will die?
I'm inclined to say that doing so is sometimes understandable.... Say, if it's a choice between sacrificing an 18-yr-old son vs an 18-month-old-daughter, the son has a clear duty to sacrifice himself for the daughter, and both of you KNOW that, and know that the other one knows that, so 'resting' your body so that it's 'more' leaning in the direction of the son for when your grip eventually fails is understandable... not ideal, but understandable.
Because it's either that or call the trap-designer's bluff, and try to break your way out of the trap early, by deliberately getting close to one of the buttons while you're still awake and full of energy attempting to hack it, and risking the fact that you'll probably still trigger that button... which is also an understandable choice to make, but risks an earlier death of one family member.
I'm not certain how this applies to a political dilemma, unless maybe you were picking which state to pre-cache your survival supplies in, in case of total governmental downfall? But it's a fun thought experiment.