The shuttle Atlantis took off yesterday. Two more flights and she'll be retired.

Been finishing up Issue 3 of TCR. Should be out in a day or two or three. Will announce here, of course.

Meanwhile, check out Lydia-the-horse-lover's post at W4 and the accompanying video.

Bernadette sends me this link to a Golfweek story noting the death of a girl Bern used to play with in the Florida Junior Golf Association. Her name is Mallory Code, and she was afflicted all her life with cystic fibrosis. She was cared for in the bosom of a strongly Christian family, her stout heart admired by all who knew her, and only 25 when she passed away. Unexpectedly, I should add. God bless her.

I always thought it was supposed to be safe, legal and rare. That's what Bill Clinton told me, but I should have known better than to trust The Great Prevaricator. Well, it's not rare and, of course, it's never safe for the baby. But 'safe' for the woman surely meant that the murder would take place in a sterile atmosphere, such as a hospital or clinic surgery, with a fully qualified and state-licensed killer doctor on hand. An accomplished accomplice nurse might come in handy too. But enterprising American human beings are always on the lookout for a way to save a buck. And even though this particular kind of murder is legal, most women who avail themselves of it seem to want to hide the fact from everyone else. So, with both these goals in mind, a 7 months pregnant 17 year old Utah girl hired a thug to beat her up, the primary target being her belly. The cost of hiring a pregnant belly-beater: $150. She later "entered a no contest plea in May 2009 on charges of second-degree felony criminal solicitation of murder." This was subsequently vacated by a judge who ruled that her actions "fit the state's definition for an abortion and, therefore, she 'cannot be held criminally liable for'" them. So she walked. The guy who beat her pled "guilty to second-degree felony attempted murder."

The irony? The baby survived and is currently in foster care. His mother is trying to get custody.

Well, no, says one of my students. She wrote a story about losing her father last year. That means he died. She was real close to him, and has come to a denial of the wisdom she'd grown up with (imparted in the title to this post): there was no good reason why her father should have died. Death separated him from those who loved him and depended upon him. Plus, he was a nice guy. Everybody liked him. He did a lot of good and had more to do, etc.

Which led me to wonder: if he died for no reason, was he also born for no reason? Or are those different questions?

...of The Two Sleepy Mommies needs your prayers. You can read why over there. I can't bring myself to describe the situation.

And a question, which I'll get to in a moment. A passage came to mind from a book I read a long time ago (don't ask why; things just come to mind, okay?). It's a long passage, so I'll try to summarize a lot.

There was this fellow, middle-aged or thereabouts I'm guessing, afflicted with bronchial asthma and emphysema, who got into a coughing fit and ruptured a disc which left him in agonizing pain. He was eventually referred to a neurosurgeon who put him in the hospital and into traction. He needed surgery, so a lung specialist was called in to help strengthen the patient. The anesthesiologist didn't want to put him under, but finally consented. The operation was scheduled for Friday. On the previous Monday

I went to sleep and had a restful sleep until sometime early Tuesday morning, when I woke up in severe pain. I turned over and tried to get in a more comfortable position, but just at that moment a light appeared in the corner of the room, just below the ceiling. It was just a ball of light, almost like a globe, and it was not very large, I would say no more than twelve to fifteen inches in diameter, and as this light appeared, a feeling came over me. I can't say that it was an eerie feeling, because it was not. It was a feeling of complete peace and relaxation. I could see a hand reach down for me from the light, and the light said, "Come with me. I want to show you something." So immediately without any hesitation whatsoever, I reached up with my hand and grabbed onto the hand I saw. As I did, I had the feeling of being drawn up and of leaving my body, and I looked back and saw it lying there on the bed while I was going up towards the ceiling of the room."

As he left his body, he felt that he had taken on the same 'form' as that of the light. He experienced it as mostly circular in shape, of the substance of "a wisp of smoke or a vapor...like the clouds of cigarette smoke...illuminated as they drift around a lamp." And yet he knew that the form had certain attributes, for he had taken the light's hand with his own. After this, he and the light begin traveling - through walls and down corridors - with a sensation of motion but not speed. Instantaneously, it seemed, they arrived at the hospital's recovery room, the location of which the patient had not known. Below them, doctors and nurses in green uniforms went about their chores.

This being then told me, "That's where you're going to be. When they bring you off the operating table they're going to put you in that bed, but you will never awaken from that position. You'll know nothing after you go to the operating room until I come back to get you sometime after this."

The light's voice, by the way, was not an audible one. But the patient insists that it was "vivid" in form and unmistakable in content. Then the light revealed the reason for this little trip: that he didn't want our patient to experience any fear when the time came, because "he", the light, would not be there at once, though he "would be overshadowing everything that happened and would be there for me at the end."

They returned to the patient's room and he to his body. He knew now that he was going to die, but was "not in the least afraid," and entertained no questions, such as "What can I do to keep this from happening?" When shaving before the mirror, he "noticed that my hand didn't shake like it had been doing for six or eight weeks before then." On the day before the operation, he began writing letters to his wife and adopted son, a nephew, with whom they were "having some trouble." While writing he began to weep, uncontrollably, and again felt the presence. No light this time, but it asked him, "Jack, why are you crying? I thought you would be pleased to be with me." And Jack said that he very much wanted to go with 'him,' but that he was worried his wife wouldn't "know how to raise" their nephew, and thought that his own presence might have done the boy some good. The presence replied that "Since you are asking for someone else, and thinking of others, not Jack, I will grant what you want. You will live until you see your nephew become a man." And then he was gone.

The operation went flawlessly, and Jack woke up in the same bed that the presence had pointed out. The anesthesiologist was there when he regained consciousness, with all kinds of fancy equipment on hand, but was amazed that he didn't have to use any of it. Jack had recovered like a man with normal lungs.

It was three years after the event that he gave this testimony. Up to that point, he had told only his wife, brother and minister of his encounter with the presence. He felt no need to proselytize, or to convince others. He claimed that the encounter was as real as any waking experience in his life, even more so, though he could not explain why. And further, "I don't have any doubts anymore. I know there is life after death."
---------------------

Taken from Raymond Moody's well-known book, Life After Life, 1975.

My question is: Is this sort of thing possible?

...without whose talents The Christendom Review and my own book would probably not be available, has won the "Photo of the Month" at this site. Congratulations to him.

...in Salon of all places, gotten via Chris Lugardo (but off his Facebook page), who is doing the same thing to his kids. Homeschooling, that is. I think.

Not being one myself (a homeschooler, that is, except for some religious stuff) I don't vouch for anything in it. Just find it interesting because the parents appear to be lefties, and it maybe exposes a little of the liberal hypocrisy: now that they've made the public schools safe for multiculturalism, religious indifference, and moral chaos, they want their own kids kept away from it.

Lydia asks the question at W4. I hope somebody can come up with the right answer.

Not mine. Lydia's told me about a little girl she knows, 4 years old, Catholic, and named Bernadette, who "has some kind of major blood clot in her abdomen that the doctors can't find. I guess she's had this since she was a preemie and something went wrong with an abdominal IV they had to give her. You can imagine that this causes a lot of trouble, including internal bleeding from time to time...She's going to have surgery...October 14th or thereabouts; I didn't write down the exact day. This surgeon says he's going to try to actually find the blood clot and remove it. I guess other surgeons haven't been able to do that..."

Bernadette has a twin sister (unafflicted), a two year old brother, and their Mom's expecting. Bernadette could use your prayers. When I hear the outcome, I'll let you know.

Bern's at one of those tonight, listening to this group.

I'll be gone for a while.

Upupdate: Haymes finished tied for 7th. When I find out where he's playing the first stage, I'll post it.
-----------------------------------
Update: after 3 rounds, Haymes is in 10th. That's fine. He hasn't shot a round over par yet. Today's the last day. If you scroll down the leaderboard, you'll see in 18th place Andrew Giuliani. Yup. Rudy's son.

After pre-qualifying come two more stages of qualifying (about 6 rounds per stage) followed by the final stage. In terms of mental stamina, it may be the most grueling experience in professional sports.
---------------------------------

I played golf this past Sunday at Disney's Magnolia Course with Bernadette and her partner from Big Break X, Michigan, Haymes Snedeker. Winning the Big Break qualified Haymes to play in Disney's November PGA tournament, The Children's Miracle Network or something like that, so he was out to get familiar with the course. Since I used to play that course on the mini-tours back in the 90's, they've lengthened it to keep up with technology. There are now four 500 yard par 4's, not to mention a few more in the 475 to 85 range. It's hard to relate. So I was worried about his length, but even with that funny swing, he seemed to me to be averaging between 290 to 300 yards per drive. So no problem there. And he can play all the other shots too. I only worry about how quickly he plays. (A refreshing change, actually, since I've gotten into the habit of taking a nap while waiting for Jim Furyk to line up a shot.)

This particular round of golf, and even the Disney tournament itself, was not all that important compared to where he was going after the round was over: to Dade City to play in a PGA Tour pre-qualifying tournament. Yep, he's going to Q-School. So wish him luck. Yesterday was the first day of competition, during which he shot 67, putting him in third place. The top 43 after four days of golf will move on to the next stage.

I should add that, though we've corresponded, this is the first time I've met him, and he's just what he appeared to be on TV: a gentleman with an impish sense of humor. The baby his wife delivered during the filming of the Big Break is now 14 months old.

Here's a Facebook video golf tip featuring Bernadette and Haymes.

Below is some wildlife seen on the golf course. Sorry I forgot to get the wild turkeys. I'll shoot one next time. The Disney tournament's just before Thanksgiving.

Be sure to click on the image to enlarge.

...it's victims, that is, in your own way, but do remember. Many have chosen silence and prayer, and that's good too. Poor at silence while bereft of insight, I can only offer this thing from three years ago. Three years, for God's sake. I often wonder if a day goes by that memory of that day does not cross my mind. I don't think so.

A few others who have put something up: Susan at Lilac Rose, Dylan of Dark Speech...(with a Dylan Thomas poem two posts above that which seems appropos); Elena, who reminds us of Project 2,996, offering her own contribution from 3 years ago; and Paul Cella at W4.

BTW, I saw this show last night. Don't know if they'll be replaying it any time soon. If not, the DVD is worth the money. The History Channel did good work yesterday.

has begun. First week now under the belt. Beyond that I don't really have anything to say, nor time if I did. Oh. Reading mss. for TCR.

Lydia tells me, and posts about it, that Terri Schiavo's dad has passed away. She got it from Wesley Smith.

I can't say I'm surprised. How long would your heart hold out after watching the legal organs of the country you love - the very organs you count on to keep you and yours safe from harm, and to seek redress on your behalf should they not - murder your child? "Judicial homicide," he called it. He gets the last word. Now he can hold his daughter again.

Marie, a commenter to the previous post, has a blog, TwoWaysofRenouncingtheDevil. Dot Wordpress. Dot com. You should read her about page. She's also written a couple of books and some poetry. My favorite line from a recent post about her C-section experience in a Catholic hospital: "I started to wonder if there was something about me or my other two kids that made them think I’d better not procreate ever again."

In other female links (or is it links to females?), Micki beats up on the sickaholics who denounce women with lotsalittluns as bumpaholics. Favorite line: "some truly messed-up women have children for all the wrong reasons. i've met some of them. and "wanting something to love" tops the list of really rotten and self-indulgent ideas -- and it isn't just immature and misguided teens who are saying this -- but educated, professional, single women facing mid-life all alone. thank you, betty friedan."

Peony rants rationally on health care. Favorite line: "If the choice to kill my child in the womb is a matter between me and my doctor, why isn't the choice to undergo a tonsillectomy a matter between me and my doctor?"

I have a question, which I'll offer after giving, briefly, the appropriate background.

In a recent Hastings Center Report (you may have to register to get the complete article), a Rebecca Stangl puts up a thing entitled "Plan B and the Doctrine of Double Effect." Plan B is an "emergency contraceptive" that sometimes has an abortifacient effect, preventing implantation of an embryo in its mother's womb. It may also prevent pregnancy by inhibiting ovulation or fertilization. (How it does this is not well understood.) Assuming that intentionally procuring an abortion is always wrong, the first of these three mechanisms is the one that concerns us. She asks: "Suppose that emergency contraception works exactly as its opponents claim. Would it follow that taking emergency contraception is morally equivalent to intentionally procuring an abortion?"

She answers: "Perhaps surprisingly" [actually, Rebecca, it doesn't surprise me at all], "I shall argue that it would not. If one accepts the doctrine of double effect, there would be circumstances in which the former is permissible even if the latter is never permissible."

She defines double effect as follows:

The doctrine makes a crucial distinction between harm that a person merely foresees will be the result of her action, and harm that she intends either as a means or as an end. According to the doctrine of double effect, it may be morally justifiable to perform an action that one foresees will result in some harm even if it would be unacceptable to aim at that very same harm, either as an end or as a means. Whether this is so in any particular case depends on whether the good to be achieved is proportional to the harm that is foreseen. I will argue that taking hormonal contraception can be justified by the doctrine of double effect even if it is true both that it can have an abortifacient effect, and that one may never intentionally obtain an abortion.

She attempts to "prove" her thesis as follows:

Someone who obtains a first trimester surgical abortion directly intends to secure the death of the fetus, either as an end or as a means to some other end. But someone who uses emergency contraception need not intend the death of any particular fetus...She may believe that, under exceptional circumstances, the contraception will fail to prevent the conception of a fetus. And in a proportion of these cases, the changes in her body brought about by the use of emergency contraception may mean that the fetus will not be able to implant itself in the womb. But she need not intend for that to happen...Not every effect of a person’s action need be intended.

She employs an analogy:

An example from another area of bioethics may help here. Opponents of euthanasia generally concede that we may give dying patients high doses of morphine even if we know that such treatment may hasten death. What we may not do, they claim, is directly intend the death of the patient and administer the morphine as a means to that end. So the same action—administering morphine—has a different moral status depending on the structure of our intentions. Because this one action has two different effects, it is possible to directly intend one of the effects and merely to foresee the other. If we take the morally good end (the relief of suffering) as the object of our intention, the action may be permissible. But if we take the morally bad end (the death of the patient) as the object of our intention, the action will be impermissible...if this distinction works in the end-of-life case, it seems to me that it must also work in the case of emergency contraception...We can then agree that directly intending the death of any particular fetus, either as a means or as an end, is impermissible, while allowing that if our intention is merely the morally good end—the prevention of a pregnancy—then the action may be permissible...Indeed, it seems to me that opponents of emergency contraception must accept something like the intend/foresee distinction.

She employs another analogy:

It appears, for example, that breastfeeding causes changes in the endometrium that are similar to the changes brought about by the use of emergency contraception. If such changes can have an abortifacient effect in the former case, then there is no reason to think they cannot also have an abortifacient effect in the latter. But no one takes this to be a reason not to breastfeed...A breastfeeding woman does not intend the death of any particular fetus by breastfeeding. Even if there is an extremely rare risk of this occurring, it will occur only as a wholly unwanted side effect of her action...

She then deals, in conclusion, with the problem of proportionality:

One might object that such a good [preventing pregnancy], while important, could never be proportional to the foreseeable possibility of the harm of the possible abortifacient effect. If the embryo really is a person with moral rights, perhaps only the risk of the mother’s death would be proportional to the foreseeable possibility of the death of the embryo. But this doesn’t seem right. Even on the interpretation of the empirical facts most favorable to opponents of emergency contraception, the chance that it will result in the death of an embryo, in any particular case, is very small.

In essence, "I claim that women who use emergency contraception need only intend the contraceptive effect of the medication, and not any possible abortifacient effect it may have."

My question is: what's wrong with her argument?

is now employed by this Chicago company, called NoMi LaMad. I forget how the name came about, but can find out. More contemporary than classical, but still plenty of pointe work, I've been led to believe. And yes, that's her (excuse me, 'she') on the front page.

For you Chicago people, there's a performance in mid-September at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, which appears to be a part of the Harold Washington Library on State Street.

but it looks like I'm going to weaken, veer off into the Atlantic, and not hurt anybody. Anybody remember 2004? I do. Don't want no more of it.

I haven't heard an answer I'd call definitive. Here's a brief video on the issue. You tell me.

Lydia's put up an important post. At least it seems so to people like me who have trouble figuring out this proposed federal health care fix. It's (Lydia's post, not Obie's televised explanations) clearly written and solidly researched. Its focus: will you be able to keep your current health insurance if the federal thing goes through? Obie says yes. I heard him on TV. Lydia says, "Probably not." Guess whom I'm inclined to trust.

Timothy ones is making available in stages the progress of a new painting, "China, Brass & Peaches". Start here and work your way up. Tim's work was featured in the last issue of The Christendom Review.

Update: Better yet, go to the front page, scroll down 4 posts and start there. He's gotten another stage done since yesterday.

2nd Update: It's finished, here. Magnificent.

I caught the end of some TV show about sleep disorders. I had meant to watch the whole thing but, as often happens, got distracted by something else (probably another show), and remembered only when the hour was almost up that I was supposed to be watching that other thing. So I flipped back real quick and saw a young boy tucking himself into bed while the narrator said that he (the boy) would lose 10-15 years off his life every time he went to sleep. That can't be right. I must have heard wrong, or else the narrator's guilty of bad grammar, or sleep deprivation. I have heard that a condition called sleep apnea can take 10-15 years off your life all told. That's if it doesn't kill you first for not breathing. Anyway, the two second snippet I saw put me in mind of the Blessed Virgin, but it wasn't my fault. I rummaged around in the old cerebral suitcase for a while before it finally came to me. I did some more rummaging through one of our bookcases and finally found it too (the book, I mean). Then I had to rummage around in the book to find the passage. (All the rummaging took over an hour.) It was in a letter from Flannery O'Connor to one of her friends. Apparently the friend (who at the time was religiously curious, later converted to Catholicism under O'Connor's influence, before finally de-converting, to O'Connor's grief) had mentioned in her own letter something about broken sleep, to which Flannery responded:

The business of the broken sleep is interesting, but the business of sleep generally is interesting. I once did without it almost all the time for several weeks. I had high fever and was taking cortisone in big doses, which prevents your sleeping. I was starving to go to sleep. Since then I have come to think of sleep as metaphorically connected with the mother of God. Hopkins said she was the air we breathe, but I have come to realize her most in the gift of going to sleep. Life without her would be equivalent to me to life without sleep, and as she contained Christ for a time, she seems to contain our life in sleep for a time so that we are able to wake up in peace.

The reason it rung the bell for me is that when I have trouble sleeping, I head for the rosary. Well, more accurately, I start saying Hail Mary's. Holding the beads doesn't help. I'm usually too tired to keep track of which bead I'm on in which decade, so I just jump in with "Hail Mary, etc." and keep going. (I've more than once realized that I've said several Hail Mary's while still holding on to the same bead, so I have to start over.) I do try to think of a few intentions beforehand so that I'll feel like I'm doing something more important than counting Mary's in lieu of sheep. I'll just have to trust that the Lady doesn't mind. After all, she gave the idea for the rosary to some saint way back when, it's repetitious by nature, so she can't complain if people use it as a sleep-aid. It was her idea. Plus, the only reason it ever occurred to me to use it that way is that she once rocked baby Jesus to sleep, so I figure she can do the same for me. Rocking is repetitious, but so are the good habits that end in virtue. (So they tell me, not having gotten that far.)

The only other technique that works nearly as well is stuffing the King James Bible under my pillow. I don't know why it works, but it does. Just trust me.

I won't have that problem tonight, though. I did a lot of yardwork and inhaled enough beer to keep me yawning through this post. Probably best not to tempt fate. The night might come when I can't sleep and she won't let the Hail Mary's work. Fine. I have a backup plan. It's called the Miraculous Medal. No beads to count. Just hang on and say the words. Over and over.

Although he's called it a "teachable moment," I haven't quite figured out what his role is supposed to be. To lend a commiserating ear to the complaints of both men? It's probably over by now, but I was just wondering what it is that's being taught by the beer summit, and who it is that's being instructed. And what's in it for the white guy. If I were that latter fellow, I wouldn't go. Attending implies that there's a reason to attend. I'd go if Obama had said beforehand, "I'd like you to come to the White House so that I can apologize to you for having acted stupidly." It would be even more enticing if he'd added, "And so that I can advise that race-leech Henry Gates to apologize as well, and to crawl back into whatever academically protected pc fever swamp he crawled out of."

But what it's going to look like is that we have two men possessed by grievances of equal legitimacy, who will behave better toward each other next time around once Obie the Post-Racial Mediator has shown them a better way. Why is Officer Crowley sharing a beer with a man who thinks he's a racist? Does Crowley have something to apologize for? Is there something he can learn from Mr. Gates, the man who wrote on his Yale application, "As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself," and whose resentment of whitey seems to have ripened with the years, along with his collection of academic honors and his general prosperity? "This isn't about me," he said on a morning talk show while contemplating a possible lawsuit. That's what people always say when they want to universalize their personal nuttiness. But no, he's just speaking for black people everywhere.

I know some black people for whom "being black in America" is awful. I know some white people like that too. But Henry Gates is not one of those for whom it is awful. Being black and Henry Gates in America is comparatively wonderful, especially if he can keep his mouth shut.

So what we have at the summit (which I think would have been more revealing if they'd thrown the bar open to other repasts, like vodka and whiskey and various foreign-grade wines) is one tenured, racial crank whose alternate reality will be found worth exploring, one liberalism-on-steroids politician whose mediocrity is revealed in his preference for stereotypes over facts, and one cop who did his job. No, I don't see anything in this for the white guy at all.

Except beer. It's free, so he should drink a lot of it, claiming as excuse that this is not about him, but about upholding the reputation of hard-drinking Irish cops everywhere. Anybody know how many Obama had?

...from Beth, of Inscapes, who writes:

Our older daughter, Davina, had a couple of bad seizures this afternoon and is in the hospital. She will be kept until they can get her records from a few years ago to compare -- she has an aneurysm or something like it in her brain, but has had no problems from it for the past several years...I will so appreciate it if you will please pray for her.

Update: In addition to her remarks in comments, Beth sends along this link, where you can read about the condition of which her daughter is a victim.

There are those whose intellects get tied up in Chinese puzzles when confronting the question: "is torture ever justified?" If the answer is 'no', but you're not quite sure they mean it, try a follow-up: "Is waterboarding torture?"

Should the answer be a furrowed brow accompanied by a solemn, "Wow. That's a tough one. Let me think about it," you'll know that the answer is not 'no'. "Tough" can only imply that, upon first consideration, your moral intuition cannot know the truth of the matter, that what you see is not what you get, as when you see a father disciplining his eight year old son with a fist to the mouth, and feel pretty sure you know what you're looking at.

Well, that's what my moral intuition tells me about waterboarding, and as a consequence I suspect that people who find that conclusion 'tough' to arrive at, and who wish to experience a self-induced migraine before pronouncing one way or the other, are probably looking for a way to justify it, or at least leave it in a state of such delicious irresolution that the activity continues uncondemned.

I had hoped never to discuss the subject again, before, that is, stumbling across an article by Gilbert Meilaender in a recent Weekly Standard. It's called "Stem Cells and Torture," and he uses rationales for the former by way of analogy to the latter. It's a fairly extended discussion, and a mostly very fine one, and I simply don't have time to do justice to all its parts. I need, as best I can, to cut to the chase.

I say 'mostly' because Mr. Meilaender is one of the more reliably staunch apologists for traditional Christian morality, yet in this article I sense an ambivalence, or perhaps a hesitancy, at just that place where I'd expect him to give an answer firm and to take a stand forthright. (I want to be fair, so if any see it another way, I'll certainly entertain the correction.) It caught my attention because it seems atypical of his writing, which is always (and is this time as well) characterized by its accessibility to the layman; a mildly elegant, yet unadorned, prose style suitable to clarity; perfect honesty; and a fearlessness in argument touched by humility. One never gets the sense that this humility leads him to avoid or finesse some possible objection; neither does it (in my experience) lead him to shy away from a necessary conclusion, as though he were left wringing his hands at how 'intractable' it all is.

As I said, he leads us to torture by way of stem cells, presenting the usual rationales for embryo-destructive research and the usual objections to them. He eventually moves from the usual to the extraordinary by asking (and calling to his aid the Jewish thinker Hans Jonas):

But what if the issue is not improving but, more starkly, preserving society? Jonas was prepared to acknowledge that there are "examples of what, in sober truth, society cannot afford." It cannot afford to let an epidemic "rage unchecked." Some epidemics are acute--as, for example, the Black Death was. Others are public calamities of a more chronic kind--as, for example, "the life-sapping ravages of endemic malaria" may be. Of these possibilities Jonas wrote: "A society as a whole can truly not 'afford' such situations, and they may call for extraordinary remedies, including, perhaps, the invasion of private sacrosanctities." Jonas did not think of this as a matter of numbers alone, since, as he noted, there is also a sense in which society cannot afford a single injustice or violation of rights. Still, there might be cases "critically affecting the whole condition, present and future, of the community" that could constitute something like a state of emergency in which disaster could be averted only through "extraordinary means" of experimentation--means otherwise forbidden...It is not silly to think of terrorist activity--which intends, after all, to undermine all settled social life by returning us to something rather like Hobbes's state of nature--as a political parallel.

Readers will recognize this as the bio-ethical version of the much beloved and belabored ticking time bomb scenario. Having gotten us there, his description of torture is as follows:

In torture we seek to overcome another person's conscientious resistance to our will. We aim to "break the conscience which is commanding him to keep silence." This differs from what Thielicke calls "temptation by desire," which seeks to work "by way of the man's own decisions." Nor can torture be equated with coercion, with an attempt to force a decision out of the person. Torture seeks to inflict pain severe enough to eliminate the ego, to bypass "the sphere of decision altogether." It seeks, we might say, to turn the person--a subject--into an object, a thing...His [Thielicke's] fundamental category is not torture but dehumanization. Temptation and coercion attack--but without bypassing or subverting--the person, and they may sometimes be permitted or, even, required. Torture and truth serum bypass--we might say, "thingify"--the person, taking away "the personal right to decision." But if the human person is a representation of transcendence, it is the transcendent that has then become our target.

The central objection to both torture and ESCR is, using Helmut Thielicke's phrasing, that they require a

"direct confrontation with transcendance." This happens when the personhood of another human being, "the bearer of an alien dignity" and "the direct representation of transcendence," is at stake.

And which imposes upon us what ought to be obvious to any Christian, that there are "limits which cannot be transgressed."

But what about that emergency situation?

To return to the stem cell analogy for a moment, suppose that what was needed was not an entire industry devoted to the use and destruction of embryos in an on-going program of research, but, instead, just three specific embryos. Produce and destroy them, and we position ourselves for continual progress in the war against degenerative diseases. Draw back, and we forgo all such good results. It's a hypothetical with no purchase on reality, of course, but I have often wondered what my answer to it would be.

And he never does answer it, although he seems to know that he should:

In theory, my answer ought to be clear. If human beings were simply members of our species, it might sometimes make sense to sacrifice one or another of them for the sake of the species as a whole. But human beings are not just members of the species or parts of a whole. Each human being is a "someone" who belongs to no earthly community to the whole extent of his being. That is why we are not interchangeable. The "value" of one thousand people may be more than that of one, but the thousand are not more than one in personal dignity...

and concluding a few paragraphs later that "wrong, but very little harm, has been done."

Likewise, he asks of torture:

Would I authorize that the captured terrorist be slapped around? Yes. Deprived of sleep for a time and disoriented? Yes. Water-boarded once? Now I begin to suspect that it is corrupting to try to answer that question in advance, as if there were a policy we could formulate to protect ourselves in a moral no-man's land.

And again he does not answer, preferring theory instead: "But the answer must, I think, turn on whether doing it once would be more like an attempt at coercion, which is still a test of strength, or whether from the start it would aim to thingify the captured terrorist, trying to bypass altogether his capacity to decide." And does it not do this? My moral intuition tells me, without hesitation, that not only does it do this, but that this is precisely what it was designed to do.

And yet again a few paragraphs later:

Waterboard that captured terrorist once? Well, I'm not sure we have a rule to cover the question. Water-board him fifty or a hundred times? Surely not. That is no longer a test of strength, but of will.

Which, at first reading, prompted me to scribble in the margin, "It wasn't the first time either," which I will explain in a moment. So yet again he fails to answer. My overall impression is that Meilaender is headed in the right direction, wants to get to his destination, but can't quite summon the resolve to cross the finish line. He seems to want to make allowance for transgressions in acute emergencies, as opposed to the normal run of things:

What if we face not an acute but a chronic epidemic? My own sense is that this is quite a different matter...It is one thing--perhaps never to be done and perhaps always wrong--to step into a moral no-man's land in the face of an acute emergency. But if the crisis continues indefinitely, it ceases to be an emergency and becomes everyday life. Not three embryos destroyed just once, but an ongoing industry of embryo-destructive research, with which we make our peace on the ground that we do this in the face of the ongoing crisis of human suffering. We should reject the notion of a "war" against disease; it will turn out to justify transgressing most moral boundaries that present themselves.

He finishes with this reminder:

Life, and our shared way of life, are always fragile and insecure. That is not a crisis; it is human history. And during our share of that history it will always be true that how, rather than how long, we live should be our central concern.

Which seems most morally salubrious except for that word "crisis," with which (again) he seems to leave room, in the extraordinary situation, for letting "how long" take priority over "how."

And so (assuming I'm reading him correctly) I'd like to try to nudge Mr. Meilaender over the finish line by first providing a gentle reminder of my own: St. Paul's prohibition against doing evil that good may come is what Anscombe called "bedrock." It applies to any evil whatsoever, intrinsic or otherwise, and makes no provision for exigent circumstances - "emergencies," in other words. I'm sure Meilaender knows better than I that to surrender it is to justify precisely what he most dreads, "transgressing most moral boundaries that present themselves." A presumption to the contrary would have to contend that our nation will ultimately keep its sanity, that we will not institutionalize in our ordinary affairs what we resort to in the exceptional.

The problem is that we already live in that nation, the one in which the disabled and the unborn are routinely murdered, by permission of law, and in which each individual is allowed to ratify his (or her) situation as being in itself a paradigm of acute necessity. The acute is already chronic. Meilaender himself sets side by side the words of two thinkers from different traditions. One is Helmut Thielicke, who says of the Christian that he

owes to the world...the public confession that he is one who is committed, "bound," and hence not "capable of [just] anything." If we make ourselves fundamentally unpredictable, i.e., if as Christians we think that torture is at least conceivable--perhaps under the exigencies of an extreme situation--we thereby reduce man to the worth of a convertible means, divest him of the imago Dei, and so deny the first commandment. This denial can never be a possible alternative.

The other is an oft-quoted passage from Cardinal Newman with the same essential import:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

Meilaender's conclusion? He's not sure he wants

to agree with either Newman or Thielicke...It is, however, to say the very least, instructive to find Thielicke, whose brand of Lutheranism always flirts with antinomianism, insisting that, at least in this instance, what we do counts for more than what we accomplish, and insisting upon it in a way as relentlessly demanding as Newman's.

And I find it instructive to note that Newman's words amount to no more than a re-assertion of Paul's prohibition, ornately rendered.

Secondly, I'd like to take a closer look at Dr. Meilaender's sense of what waterboarding is, of what category of acts it belongs to. When he says, "Waterboard that captured terrorist once? Well, I'm not sure we have a rule to cover the question. Waterboard him fifty or a hundred times? Surely not," he appears to assume that it might be treated as akin to other kinds of acts of which we know that "If no rule can quite tell us when we have transgressed a line that should not be crossed, that does not mean there is no such line." If it were possible, I'd like to persuade Dr. Meilaender that waterboarding is not that kind of act, but rather belongs to a class of others Meilander has already set apart as not being subject to line-drawing - such acts as forced nudity, being compelled to sit or sleep in one's own urine and feces - because they lack the quality of "parts", the capacity to be parceled out in careful measure. They do not acquire their "fullness of being", so to speak, with frequency or duration of use, but are what they are from the beginning. And because the intent to dehumanize is so manifest in their very nature.

"Well, I'm not sure we have a rule to cover the question." But we do. All intrinsic evils are forbidden in a very familiar form: Thou shalt not... So the question must be whether one instance of waterboarding is that kind of evil, or only becomes so if done to excess. (What's "to excess?" I don't know. Draw a line.) Is it more like a slap in the face, or forced nudity? Or does it matter? Is a slap in the face (which Meilaender would allow), whether dealt in anger or intimidation, not evil? I ask because Paul's prohibition covers any evil, not just those judged to be intrinsic. But if that slap in the face is the first in a sequence which you have determined ahead of time will not cease until the information has been divulged, is it not intrinsic from the get-go?

What I'm getting at is that certain kinds of acts, in their very conception, are incapable of "tipping over" into another kind. All good acts can be corrupted by circumstances or intentions, while no evil act can ever be made good. But among these latter we must make distinctions. Circumstantially evil acts, such as slapping your terrorist prisoner in anger or frustration (or hatred), can be forgiven. You regain your composure and self-discipline, confess to your superior officer, resolve to do it no more, and likely that's the end of it. But should you be aware of the fear that the slap has struck into the prisoner, and then resolve by repetition to use it as a likely means to your end, what began as circumstantial evil is now intrinsic, as the intention behind it has changed utterly.

Likewise with depriving your terrorist of sleep, which in its inception I should think is no evil at all. Keeping a man up a few hours past his bedtime, perhaps withholding food and drink, appears to fall within the bounds of lawful coercion. We know, however, that this tactic, aggressively pursued, with no strictly determined limits in mind at the outset, can cause great physical and possibly mental harm. If a line has not been drawn beforehand, a line which you know you will not cross, then what began as lawful coercion has tipped over into what it is absolutely forbidden. A good act has been corrupted.

But this line-drawing, this tipping point, will not apply to an act like waterboarding. You do not set out to waterboard a man in a fit of anger, or even as purposeful but carefully limited intimidation, even though much planning is involved, very meticulously detailed planning, if we are to be sufficiently scrupulous in our concern that no permanent harm (meaning brain damage or death) come to the prisoner. (He is, of course, unaware of our concern.) Your reason for employing the tactic will be as follows: "I am waterboarding this terrorist scum only that innocent lives might be saved." So if innocent lives were not at stake you wouldn't do it? And if not, why not? Or does the prohibition against doing evil only apply when the anticipated outcome is inconsequential? If your prisoner were a common criminal in possession of life-saving information regarding a kidnapped child, would you allow our police to indulge this tactic?

So the justification given has as its end a very noble thing - to save lives - and it is offered virtually always in just that form, which I hope any honest reader will recognize as just another way of saying that the end justifies the means, and of rejecting St. Paul's dictum. Most claim to love it as long as we don't take it too seriously. Its beauty seems to lie in its malleability. It's a very noble principle in theory, until the consequences of obeying it become more than I can bear, which renders it not a principle at all but a quaint sentiment, another of those lofty biblical counsels people love to wrap their lips around with no intention of swallowing. Mine eye offends me most every day, but it's still in my head.

So when a man says that we must do this particular thing to save innocent lives, we should at once notice that he has leapfrogged over his real intention to give us a false one disguised as an unarguably good end. And what is that real intention? It is, in the case of waterboarding, to terrorize a man into believing he is going to drown so that he will divulge information that will enable me to save lives. Before holding up that wonderful end for universal admiration, I ought at least to acknowledge what comes before it, the chosen means to my end, which is my unequivocal (and not merely coincidental) intention to terrorize a man into giving me what I want, to (using Meilaender's language) "thingify" him, to bypass his freedom of will, literally to de-soul him since his soul is of no account to me other than as it is convenient to my end. Unlike sleep deprivation, waterboarding does not start out as lawful coercion and then only later slide over into iniquity. It is evil from the outset. My motive in doing it the 100th time is no different than it was the first. I intended the first time to instill a mortal fear of dying, and I intended it the last.

The same would apply to such means as extracting the prisoner's fingernails one-by-one with a pair of pliers. Or touching an electric cattle prod to various parts of his body. From the prisoner's perspective the loss of his 10th nail may seem a more cumulative horror than his loss of the first, but as an individual act, the 10th extraction is identical in content, in motive and object, and is thus no worse in itself than the first; just as, at the sight of ten murdered people, we should not cry out in horror at the pile of bodies, but at the fact that there is even one among them, for the crime against the 10th was of precisely the same gravity as against the first.

Thus, if I were compelled to define torture, it would run along these lines: it is an act, belonging to a category of such acts, which, in its inception, is incapable of "tipping over" into another kind of act. It is not made worse (from the perspective of the torturer's intention) by repetition, nor better by reduction in the frequency of its use. It is not subject to our scruple for line-drawing because, as a tool, each instance of it is a self-contained, fully discrete packet of torment inflicted with the same intention and object as in every other instance. Every instance of waterboarding begins with the object of overpowering, by means of suffering, the very thing that makes a man human. In its attempt to destroy his soul's dominion over the power to choose between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, it is a form of figurative murder, temporary murder, we might say, and which cannot be said of other forms of lawful (meaning moral) coercion, as when a parent spanks his child in corrective punishment, or a prisoner is sentenced to ten lashes with a bullwhip for assaulting a guard. (I should say that Meilaender doesn't distinguish among punishment, coercion and torture - only between the latter two - though I think it's of the essence.)

I assume that most parents inflict pain on a child as the price to be paid for this particular transgression, and only to the degree that he is left free to choose whether to do it again, and that none among you would take it to such a level that he would never think of doing it again - not because he has freely chosen the good, or because he loves his parents' friendship more than his selfish pleasure - but because his terror of you is so profound. His soul is no longer his own, but belongs to you. He is less your child than your slave. If you had good warrant to believe that your teenage son was in possession of the names of fellow students planning a copycat version of the Columbine massacre, but whose names he refused to divulge for whatever reason, to what lengths of force would you allow the police to go in extracting that information from him? Would it include waterboarding?

Now it is certain that pain can be licitly administered as corrective punishment, becoming illicit only as its measure exceeds the gravity of the offense. That is, by means of a humane prudence, we try to insure that the punishment given is retribution for a known crime (its first purpose), as deterrence to future bad behavior (its second), which we hope will redound to the prisoner's own benefit (otherwise known as rehabilitation, its third), and to the peace and security of society (its fourth).

Is an act of waterboarding ever described by any of the above aims of punishment? No: because, first and foremost, it is not being delivered as punishment. Retributive punishment, as an attempt to approximate justice, is described in our moral tradition as an act "good in its kind." Punishment, by definition, takes cognizance of the humanity of its recipient, and is apportioned accordingly. An act of torture is never licitly engaged as punishment for a past transgression, but is taken in hand for the sole purpose of pre-empting some future (and entirely hypothetical) transgression, bypassing all those other aims except the last, society's peace and security. In its attempt to render null and void the soul's autonomy, it cares nothing for its victim's humanity, nor for any profit to which we might aspire on that humanity's behalf, but only for the end to which the torment is directed; and therefore, by definition, can never be proportionate to a known offense since, from its inception, it is not directed to that offense. In short, it is the sort of act that is not at all concerned with justice, but with results. (In Meilaender's formulation, with what we accomplish, not what we do.)

If it is indeed possible that, e.g., waterboarding is a licit coercive technique, why is it not more widely practiced? It is by some reports delightfully, and demonstrably, effective, which should recommend it to our use. If it is indeed an act "good in its kind," then it must be good for serious cases other than ticking time bomb scenarios. Police often have before them suspects of whose guilt they have little doubt. Why should they be denied use of the waterboard to confirm their suspicions about a serial rapist?

And yet there is no agitation among the branches of the military to modify the code of justice to which they are sworn, or among the police of this country to have access to these techniques, and I suspect the reason is that they know in their guts that if they had such access, they would no longer be just policemen upholding the law, but something else. They would leave work every day with the stench of criminality clinging to their own character. At the risk of seeming overly sanguine, I don't believe that most of our policemen or our military knights of the realm want to be anything like the criminals they strive to bring to justice or the enemy they engage in battle. Moral intuitions do serve a real purpose and are capable of apprehending what is true, what these police and military men already know: that their very integrity and self-respect would be at stake.

I'm perfectly aware that most people don't give a whit for the soul of a Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In light of the plans he had for us, and for the one successfully carried out on 9-11, he had coming whatever he got. Such people are free to remind us of that seminal event, and to amuse themselves concocting ticking time bomb scenarios to drive the point home, as long as they're also willing to admit that ttbs's are just a long-winded way of rejecting the biblical prohibition against doing evil that good may come; that such scenarios are constructed with no other purpose than to evade that prohibition. They should say it out loud, slowly and carefully enunciated: I reject the principle that I may not do evil that good may come.

In his article, Meilaender cites a "paradox" noted by law professor Zachary Calo, who wonders somewhat aghast at a principled morality requiring "that the community perish so that its laws might be upheld." The obverse requirement is that the laws be ignored so that the community might survive. We could probably get along quite well if the laws against jaywalking fell into disuse, but of those undergirded by a divine command, their loss would no doubt extract a steeper price, something akin to the community selling its soul for Wales. And, as I mentioned previously, we're well on our way. I also wonder what kind of community that would be, and whether in the long run any of us would really want to live in it once its true nature became manifest.

Just overworked and underpaid at the moment. I ain't complaining, though.

Bern made me and another fellow a 4th of July dinner consisting of standing rib roast, corn on the cob, fresh steamed asparagus, and sweet potato casserole. The child can cook. Of course, since I mowed and edged her lawn for her, it was the least she could do. And day before yesterday she let me hit balls with her on the driving range. It's beautiful to watch. Her swing I mean. She's decided to slowly get back in shape for the LPGA's Bell-Micro (or Micro-Bell? No, that can't be right) Classic in April 2010 which, according to her, is right around the corner. She earned entry by winning Big Break X Michigan. Anyway, we're going out to the range again today, which interferes with time that could be spent blogging. Guess which I'd rather do.