Category: Ethics

Adultery in the Heart: Lustful Thoughts and Levels of Culpability

Matthew 5:27-28 is a powerful verse I learned as a boy and have never forgotten.  It struck me then and I continue to feel its impact.  It is probably the source of my long-held conviction that not only deeds, but also thoughts and words are morally evaluable.  Here is the verse:

27 You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 

I am not a theologian. What follows is an exercise in moral philosophy, not moral theology.

a) The first point I want to make is that the mere arisal of a lustful thought, whether or not accompanied by physical arousal in the form of an erection, say, is morally neutral.  Spontaneous unbidden  lustful thoughts, with or without physical manifestation, are natural occurrences in healthy human beings.  No moral culpability attaches to such occurrences. This is level 0 of moral culpability.

b) But after the occurrence of the thought, its  suppression is morally obligatory and its entertainment and elaboration morally impermissible.  Thus one ought to practice self-censorship and put the lustful thought out of one’s mind.  Why? Because thoughts and words are the seeds of deeds, and if lustful or otherwise evil, are likely to sprout into evil deeds.  This is level 1.0 of moral culpability.   Depending on the degree of the ‘hospitality’  of the entertainment one might want to distinguish levels 1.1, 1.2, and so on.

c) Thus taking pleasure in the lustful thought is morally impermissible even if no intention is formed to act on the thought either verbally, by saying something to the object of lust, or physically, by doing something to her by touching, fondling, groping, ‘making an advance,’ or something worse. Discharge of lustful thoughts and inclinations via masturbation leads to a separate but related topic which we can discuss later. We are still at level 1.0. This paragraph merely unpacks paragraph (b).

d) Morally worse than (c) is the deliberate decision to act on the lustful thought by forming the intention to commit adultery or rape.  But to decide to do X is not the same as doing X.  I might decide to tell a lie without telling a lie or decide to commit rape without committing rape.  ‘Adultery in the heart’ is not adultery in the flesh. Nevertheless, the decision to commit adultery is morally censurable. We are now at level 2.0.

e) Side issue: How are rape and adultery related? Rape, by definition, is in every case non-consensual, whereas adultery is in most case consensual. In most cases, but not in every case.  Three types of case:  (i) rape without adultery where an unmarried person rapes an unmarried person; (ii) adultery without rape; (iii) rape with adultery where a married person rapes an unmarried or married person or an unmarried person rapes a married person.   I should think that moral culpability is additive. So if an unmarried man rapes a married woman, that is worse than a rape by itself or an adulteration of her marriage by itself.

f) Now suppose I freely decide to commit adultery or freely decide to commit a rape, but ‘come to my senses’ and decide not to do either.  The ‘adultery in the heart’ is and remains morally wrong, and the same goes for the ‘rape in the heart,’ but morally worse would be to follow through on either initial decision.   It seems we are still at level 2.0. Or do I get moral credit for rescinding my decision?

g) A different case is one in which one does not ‘come to one’s senses,’ i.e., freely rescind one’s decision to do an evil deed, but is prevented by external forces or agents from raping or committing adultery or engaging in sex acts with underaged girls. Suppose the “Lolita Express” on which you are riding to Sin Central crashes killing all on board.  Does the NT verse imply that the free decision to commit illicit sex acts will  get one sent to hell as surely as the commission of the deeds would?

In this case one could plausibly claim that the ‘adultery in the heart’ is just as egregious, just as morally culpable, as the ‘adultery in the flesh.’ For although the free decision to commit adultery is not the same as the physical  act of adultery, the physical deed would have followed from the decision were it not for the external prevention. But it is not entirely clear.

There is a distinction between the physical deed, adultery say, and its moral wrongfulness.  Where does the wrongfulness reside? Is it present already in the prior free decision to do the deed whether or not the deed is done?  I say it isn’t. Ed Farrell seems to be saying that it is.  Can I argue my case? Well, the wrongfulness cannot hang in the air. If it is present in the deed, then the deed must exist, i.e., must have occurred.  If. on the other hand, the wrongfulness is already present in the free decision, whether or not the deed is done, then the question is begged.

h) Level 3.0 is reached when on does the evil deed that one intended to do.

 

 

Bad and Good Self-Censorship

'Censorship' and 'self-censorship' are not dirty words.  There are good and bad forms of each.

Bad self-censorship

The spreading virus of wokeness has transformed not only publishing but the entire information economy. At every level of it from school lectures to movies to Substack blogs, participants are vulnerable to having their careers ruined by a woke criticism. Everyone I know in publishing is aware of this danger and must reckon on the consequences. As a result, we now have self-censorship. It is far worse than the McCarthyism of the 1950’s because its enforcers among the woke have the ability to create instant twitters storms for which there are few effective defenses. (Edward Jay Epstein)

 Good self-censorship

Self-censorship and self-regulation of words, thoughts, desires, and emotions are essential to the moral life. 

Decent Man, Manly Man, Otherworldly Man

No morally decent man wants ever to have to take a human life. But no manly man will be unprepared to defend against a lethal attack using lethal force, or hesitate to do so if and when circumstances require it.*  

The first proposition cannot be reasonably disputed; the second can. 

How might one dispute the second proposition?

I had a conversation with a hermit monk at a remote Benedictine monastery. I pointed out that the monastery was wide open to jihadis or any group bent on invasion and slaughter. He told me that if someone came to kill him, he would let himself be slaughtered. 

That attitude makes sense if Christianity is true. For on Christianity traditionally understood this world is a vanishing quantity of no ultimate consequence. (I used that very phrase, 'vanishing quantity,' in my conversation with the monk and he nodded in agreement.) Compared to eternity, this life in time is of no consequence. It is not nothing, but it is comparatively nothing, next-to-nothing.  Not nothing, because created by God out of nothing and redeemed by his Son.  But nonetheless of no ultimate value or consequence  compared to the eternal reality of the Unseen Order.

Socrates: "Better to suffer evil than to do evil." Christ: "Resist not the evildoer." Admittedly, "those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked 'to do as much evil as they please' " — to quote from Hannah Arendt quoting Machiavelli. But again, why would this ultimately matter if the temporal is nothing as compared to the eternal?

But is Christianity true? We do not know one way or the other. Belief, even reasonable belief, is not knowledge.

If Christianity (or some similar otherworldly religion) isn't true, then he who allows himself to be slaughtered gives up his only life for an illusion. But not only that. By failing to resist the evildoer, the one who permits evil promotes evil, making it more likely that others will be violated in the only world there is.

What do I say? More important than what I say is how I live.  What people believe is best shown by how they live.  Talk is cheap and that includes avowals of belief. Belief itself, however, is demonstrated by action, and often exacts a cost.

Well then, how do I live? Monkish as I am, I do not spend all of my time in prayer, meditation, study, and writing. I also prepare for this-worldly evils that may or may not occur. I shoot my guns not just because I like doing so; my ultimate aim is to be prepared to kill malefactors should it prove necessary to do so to defend self, others, and civilization itself. That being said, I pray that I may die a virgin when it comes to taking a human life, even the life of an MS-13 savage or a Hamas terrorist. **

Now what kind of mixed attitude is that? Am I trying to have it both ways? If I really believe in the Unseen Order would I not allow myself to be slaughtered like the monk I mentioned?  To focus the question, suppose that my wife has died and that I have no commitments to anyone else. My situation would then be relevantly similar to the monk's.

If, in the hypothetical situation, I look to my worldly preservation, to the extent that I would use lethal force against  someone bent on killing me, does that not show that I don't really believe that this world is a vanishing  quantity, that the temporal order is of no consequence as compared to eternity? To repeat, real belief is evidenced by action and typically comes with a price.

I do believe, as my monkish way of life attests, that this world is vain and vanishing and of no ultimate concern to anyone who is spiritually awake, but I don't know that there is anything beyond it, and I would suspect anyone who said that he did know of engaging in metaphysical bluster. Which is better known or more reasonably believed: that this transient world despite its vanity is as real as it gets, or that the Unseen Order is real?  There are good arguments on both sides, but none settle the matter.  I say that the competing propositions are equally reasonably believed.  I believe, but do not know that God and the soul are real and so I believe but do not know that this passing scene is of no ultimate consequence (except insofar as our behavior here below affects our eternal destiny).  I also believe that I am morally justified in meeting a deadly attack with deadly force, a belief that is behaviorally attested by my prepping.

Both beliefs are justified, but only one is true. But I don't know which.  The belief-contents  cannot both be true, but the believings are both justified. And so it seems to me, at the present stage of reflection, that by distinguishing between belief-state and belief-content, a distinction we need to make in any case, I solve my problem.

But best to sidestep the practical dilemma by invocation of my maxim:

Avoid the near occasion of violent confrontation!

This will prove difficult in coming days as we slide into the abyss. But it ain't over 'til it's over. The slide is not inevitable.  If you know what's good for you, you will support Donald J. Trump for president.

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*When I counter a lethal attack with lethal force, my intention is not to kill the assailant; my intention is merely to stop his deadly attack. But to do so I must use such force as is necessary to stop him, force that I know has a high likelihood of killing him.  If my intention is to kill him, then I am in violation of both the moral and the positive law.

**Compare George Orwell, a volunteer for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War: "Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him."

Derek Parfit on the History of Ethics

David Edmonds, in his superb biography, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (Princeton UP, 2023, p. 160) reports,

Parfit once summed up the history of ethics in four neat steps:

1) Forbidden by God.

2)Forbidden by God, therefore wrong.

3)Wrong, therefore forbidden by God.

4) Wrong.

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

Weakness is No Justification: The Converse Callicles Principle

It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014.

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Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?