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Sister Gabriela of the Incarnation OCD, herself a Where Peter Is contributor, emailed me earlier this year after reading my essay “Theology of Sexuality after Amoris and Fiducia,” pointing out that my analysis in that essay did not reach the subject of divine grace in the life of the Catholic believer. This was a major oversight on my part and an important critique on Sister Gabriela’s. I’ll attempt to address it in two parts, which will also draw some concepts from my essay “Poachers in the Kings’ Domain” dealing with environmental theology. The limitations of human conscience and human reason alone are intimately related to the situation, the ecology, in which we live. Divine grace animates and vivifies our situations as well as our own souls.

Saint Thomas More’s great Utopia, oddly for this type of book by a Catholic philosopher, depicts a society that allows things that Catholic moral theology emphatically does not, such as euthanasia. There are several different theories that More scholars have developed for why this is and what relationship it has to More’s own moral commitments. My preferred theory is that More, as a Renaissance humanist, is writing about the best society that he thinks is attainable by human reason alone—in other words, that he understands that divine grace, and divine revelation, make something even better possible, but Utopia is not about that “something even better.” I ask the reader to keep this in mind reading the points that I am about to make. I will be analyzing the limits and necessities of this-worldly human life on immensely controversial subjects with very high stakes. These are the situations that divine grace has to transform and the double-binds from which divine grace has to free us. To be crystal clear on this, any and all apparent deviations from orthodox belief in this essay are intended to set up refutations, clarifications, or harmonizations in the next essay.

The immorality of abortion as an act is a well-known facet of Catholic moral teaching and I am going to take it as a given.[1] However, moral opposition to abortion is not a unique characteristic of Christianity. I must admit to some frustration that this point even needs to be made; indeed, I think it needs to be made for mostly political reasons.[2] What we have to keep in mind here is that, this being the case, non-Christians who believe that abortion is morally wrong do not always arrive at what we would consider “pro-life” accounts of what to do about it socially, politically, or legally. (Nor, for that matter, do Christians who have that belief!)

Harvey’s Introduction to Buddhist Ethics shows that most exegetes of Buddhism’s first precept have arrived at moral opposition to, or suspicion of, abortion.[3] As put into practice in Buddhist or Buddhist-influenced Asian societies, this first precept-based nonviolence argument typically involves recognizing the pressures and attenuations of the will that I will be discussing.[4] There are also Jewish bioethicists who have taken anti-abortion stances, Immanuel Jakobovits and Leon Kass for instance, although there are others who insist that Jewish theology actually rules out a strong anti-abortion moral position.[5] I could also name irreligious moral opponents of abortion such as the late Nat Hentoff (notable in this context in part for having otherwise strongly libertarian views).

Other philosophers take stances that are difficult to categorize according to the usual polarized terms. Rosalind Hursthouse is a New Zealand philosopher in the virtue ethics tradition, in which agents’ overall personal characters rather than individual actions are the primary subject of moral scrutiny. Hursthouse is known for, among other things, her essay “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” which emphasizes the experience of abortion in the life of a particular agent (the pregnant woman).[6] This emphasis perforce diminishes the relative importance of the individual-rights approach that most people, be they “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” adopt when assessing abortion.

Plenty of theological traditions start and stop at the observation, or belief, that the death of a human conceptus falls legitimately under the sovereign demesne of God, the gods, or nature (and indeed very few people assess abortion and spontaneous miscarriage identically, at least not emotionally, regardless of their beliefs about each). For Hursthouse, however, this is not the only thing to consider. As she puts it:

I am not, in this article, trying to solve the problem of abortion; I am illustrating how virtue theory directs one to think about it. It might indeed be said that thinking about the problem in this way “solves” it by dissolving it, insofar as it leads one to the conclusion that there is no single right answer, but a variety of particular answers, and in what follows I am certainly trying to make that conclusion seem plausible.[7]

At first glance this seems difficult to distinguish from a conventionally pro-choice view on the morality of abortion. Very few pro-choice advocates would see all reasons for wishing to have an abortion as equally moving or sympathetic, but (by definition) none would see a less moving or less sympathetic reason as cause to seriously call into question the pregnant woman’s moral rights. The “rights” framing is the key difference; Hursthouse is interested in “what a virtuous agent would do in the circumstances,”[8] and in a footnote citing Judith Jarvis Thomson’s essay “A Defense of Abortion” she calls into question the idea that rights and justice are so closely linked that the virtue of justice is automatically satisfied by anything one has the right to do.[9] Most people do not actually make decisions based on what they do or not “have the right” to do, and so from a virtue-ethical standpoint the rights question is less important than things like motivation, incentive, and reasonably foreseeable consequence or outcome.[10]

So what does Hursthouse actually think about abortion, in practice? She thinks that, to use a platitude (and platitudes often do express truths), it just depends. “I have claimed,” she concludes, “that some abortions, done for certain reasons, would be callous or light-minded; that others might indicate an appropriate modesty or humility; that others would reflect a greedy and foolish attitude to what one could expect out of life.”[11] And indeed this is not only what a “folk” morality would tend to suggest about abortion but what it would suggest about most activities; absolutely denominating certain actions as right or wrong is a venerable tradition in moral philosophy, and one in which we as orthodox Catholics engage, but it is not how most people actually think about their or others’ lives. How to reconcile this? We don’t have the radical freedom of God, the gods, or a wild animal or natural force; once again we are poachers here. Quite the contrary; I believe that from Hursthouse’s essay we should proceed to question of what forces at home or in the world constrain people from performing moral actions and avoiding immoral ones.

Tanaka Mitsu, who was born in 1943 and died just last month, was a Japanese feminist thinker who did the bulk of her theoretical and activist work in the early-to-mid-1970s, when she was in her late twenties and early thirties.[12] Her ideas bear a clear family resemblance to those of radical feminists in the West in the same time period, fundamentally being a class analysis with women as the subjected class and women’s reproductive and sexual capacities as the basis for the subjection. However, there were ways in which she departed from Western radical feminism both practically—she was pointedly heterosexual; she deliberately took demimondaine jobs as a way of proving points that Western radical feminists would not have condoned proving that way—and philosophically. Her ideas on abortion were one such philosophical point.

The Japanese philosopher Morioka Masahiro, quoting Tanaka, has her incredulously asking “[w]hat on earth does the woman actually conceive in her belly [if not a human life]?” “At first glance,” Morioka continues, “Tanaka’s words look like those of pro-life activists, yet, her intention is completely different.”[13] Tanaka believed that abortion was, or was tantamount to, homicide, yet looking at the fact that this is a form of homicide that enormous numbers of women commit every day, concluded that the problem was that Japanese society was and is set up in a way that makes homicide socioeconomically necessary. In other words, while Hursthouse concedes a right to abortion but says that exercising this right might still be a cruel or cowardly act, Tanaka insisted that it does not say anything particularly bad about someone to have had an abortion, even though she did not believe that there is a right to do so.

Morioka, who has an obvious fondness (which I share) for Tanaka, seems to believe that her approach is, at least to an extent, representative of Japanese feminist thought at the time. Norgren presents Tanaka this way as well in Abortion before Birth Control.[14] Other retrospective sources on Tanaka, however, seem more skeptical of the idea that her thought was representative. These sources often point out that she had a habit of actively arrogating authority within the Japanese feminist movement and eventually left frontline activism and temporarily relocated to Mexico when other Japanese feminists lost patience with this.[15] Even so, Tanaka’s views reflected those of at least some other Japanese feminists at the time. A political cartoon that she published in her feminist magazine but did not draw herself depicts a Vishnu-armed woman holding a dead baby (complete with a projecting tongue and an “X” where the eyes should be) while operating devices like a saucepan, a teacup, and a typewriter. “Having aborted as usual,” reads the caption in English, “we go to our company as usual; we’ve been supporting our country which holds second place in GNP but still remains in the 27th place in GNI…”[16]

Tanaka’s position is not expressly Buddhist, but I think it is Buddhist-derived in the sense that similar concessions to necessity exist in Buddhist ethics, both in general and pertaining to abortion in particular. The practice of mizuko kuyō (水子供養, “water child memorial service”) as a means to appease the souls of aborted or miscarried children is a dramatic case in point, albeit one that has developed quite recently.[17] Roy Perrett characterizes this as a “middle way” between the “neo-Shinto” pro-life position and the “liberationist” pro-choice position,[18] but this would seem to presuppose Anglophone political categories. My interpretation would be that this is a case in which Buddhist ethics uphold nonviolence without being especially interested in questions about what a particular agent is and isn’t allowed to do. Once one has sidestepped or bracketed out agency and legitimacy, and is no longer distinguishing between “to hunt” and “to poach,” one is left only with oneself, the world, and whatever deeds one can or cannot live with having done. Tanaka referred to the resulting emotional state as something that Morioka translates “the swaying of the confused self,”[19] but I think Morioka undersells the intensity of what Tanaka is describing; I would translate torimidashi as “blowing one’s cool.” Tanaka’s policy stance—she cut her teeth on opposing the Japanese government’s attempts to remove socioeconomic indicators for legal abortion and replace them with fetal disability—was based not on rights or virtues, but on being allowed to live with oneself.

So between Hursthouse and Tanaka we have two competing, even diametrically opposed, accounts of how to assess abortion philosophically, even though they both end up in roughly similar case-by-case practical moralities.[20] Neither is interested in divine grace or the divine will. Hursthouse perhaps more closely approaches being interested in critiques like Sister Gabriela’s of my earlier essay, since she does discuss particular agents whereas Tanaka is largely concerned with broad social forces. I agree with Tanaka more from a nonviolence perspective, even in a Utopia-esque reasoning style that brackets out my specifically religious beliefs. Whatever else a conceptus is, it is clearly a life form of some sort, and so abortion would call for at least the same level of moral scrutiny that modern moral philosophers apply to hunting or animal agriculture.[21]

We can, on some of these points, also think of war, and of the perceived necessity for going to war. Much of the nonviolence analysis of abortion in which exegetes like those of Buddhism’s first precept engage can be extended a fortiori to war, probably the most violent activity imaginable. Most of history’s greatest atrocities have occurred in wartime, even those that were not directly military in nature; the most famous example of this is probably the Holocaust, an opportunistic targeting of warzone civilians that, in the Nazi mind, came to eclipse the war itself. Expanding the scope of a study of military history outside the Western world and outside the modern age reveals even more horrors, especially in East Asian warfare with its massive death tolls going back many centuries.

This being the case, it makes sense that the recent trend in Catholic moral thought is towards ruling out war as morally admissible, if not “right off the bat” then fairly early in the going as morals are applied to particular situations. In non-Catholic philosophy, some concepts of just war are obviously deficient and easy to refute. The “will to power” justification somewhat unfairly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche is one such concept, as is the consequentialist justification regrettably advocated by Miguel de Unamuno, who I believe should have known better. Writes Unamuno in Tragic Sense of Life:

In the world of living beings the struggle for life establishes an association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten, between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each other.[22]

This is, to a limited extent, descriptively true. The vicissitudes of wartime can indeed bring about positive social change. I will confess to a fondness for World War II history inspired in large part by my knowledge of the changes that the war wrought within Allied societies. Yet this does not constitute a moral justification for war per se, not because it is a weak argument (although it is) but because it is not really a moral argument at all. “War can bring about positive social change” contains a moral valuation of the social change, but it does not make a moral argument about war, because numerous things can bring about positive social change, and a war happening to have done so does not mean that the war was the only or the morally best avenue. As a statement about war it is merely descriptive—factual. Pointing out that something leads, or can lead, to a good outcome is useful in moral argumentation when someone has directly claimed otherwise, but only in that circumstance. One needs to take some position on the relationship of moral statements to descriptive statements if one is going to develop it beyond that into an argument that something is itself morally acceptable; the Buddhist metaphysicians are in the right who accept that suffering and brutality are the way of the world but do not accept that that perforce makes it moral for us to take part in them.

More sophisticated is the traditional “just war theory” of Christianity, which accepts that war would seem to be self-evidently morally wrong due to the amount of violence it involves and, further, accepts that post facto justifications like Unamuno’s invocation of “progress” say more bad things about progress than they do good things about war. “Just” is an important watchword here because justice, while virtuous, is in traditional Christian thought ultimately subordinate to the even greater virtuous act of mercy. A war that is “just” is thus morally acceptable but still not morally ideal, because, to make an argument that Hursthouse would readily recognize, a morally ideal set of practices and behaviors would not have deteriorated to the brink of war to begin with. Just war theory is deeply concerned with legitimacy in the specifically political sense. A just war is launched by a legitimate political authority in response to a specific threat.

Thomas Aquinas, responding to objections to the idea that war can ever be morally acceptable, explains thus:

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war, because he can seek for redress of his rights from the tribunal of his superior. Moreover it is not the business of a private individual to summon together the people, which has to be done in wartime. And as the care of the common weal is committed to those who are in authority, it is their business to watch over the common weal of the city, kingdom or province subject to them.[23]

I believe that war is a good case study for the idea that being “allowed” to do something means that one is “justified” in doing it, in the same way that abortion is a good case study for the tempting but incorrect view that agents who act wrongly are always making a free moral choice to do so. Just as a high view of human freedom may be deficient as a way to look at an action into which someone finds herself hemmed by circumstance, it may also be deficient as a way to look at an action that someone is undertaking for obviously cruel or otherwise immoral reasons, even if her position as President or Prime Minister or Dear Leader technically permits her to do so. Moreover, sometimes in war a non-state actor, which lacks political legitimacy by definition, seems to most observers to have the better cause. The American Patriots were illegitimate, non-state actors—until they gained international recognition. At that time, through the strange alchemy of statecraft, the American Revolution became legitimate (and, thus, arguably, a just war) after the fact.

I suspect that Aquinas, and the just war theological tradition itself, might improperly conflate “moral” and “descriptive” senses of authority. For Aquinas, human agents can, at least for purposes of assessing armed conflict, be classified as either “a private individual” or “the tribunal of [that individual’s] superior.” This reflects the feudal political structure in which Aquinas lived. It is possible that, if such political structures still existed today, Aquinas’s point would still have some merit within the societies that had them, especially when combined with other points from his thought such as his justification for tyrannicide.[24] Today, however, it cannot be assumed that any party to a conflict will always be either a state authority or a private citizen going around killing people. Thus the traditional just war criterion for legitimacy does not comport with current realities; how does an opposition movement that resorts to terrorist and guerrilla tactics against a violently oppressive state authority lack something moral that the state authority has?

I think that this deals just war theory a severe blow, but not necessarily a fatal one. Other just war criteria still make sense in the absence of the traditional analysis of authority, but those criteria could hypothetically be met by almost anyone, even Aquinas’s random private vigilante. It hardly seems that any war begun by Batman and Batman alone could be just. If it isn’t necessarily a state that is empowered to determine what is, say, a just cause, a proportionate response, or a reasonable likelihood of success, then what is it? It’s not only counterfactuals involving Batman that come to mind here; extremist paramilitaries and violent nationalists the world over believe in the justice of their causes, if anything, more than well-established states tend to. So we come to people like Pope Francis concluding that just war theory is impracticable, even though on paper it has some merit, and we are left to conclude that the violence of war cannot simply be “kicked upstairs” to any especially wise decisionmaker.

None of this changes the fact that there is, occasionally, a particular war not fighting which is, or seems, unconscionable. Imagine, for example, that you are a Ukrainian farmer, or metalworker, or driver, or student, or housewife (if, indeed, you are not actually one of those things, as some readers might be). Understand that you cannot know exactly how such a person would feel, but consider the effect that different approaches to right and wrong might have on her and how she might feel about those. She starts—you start—the 2010s apolitical or even mildly pro-Russian. Your parents grew up in the Soviet Union and while it was terrible in many ways there were moments, sometimes even far more than moments, of joy. Perhaps they vacationed in the Russian SFSR, or even moved to Ukraine from Russia to begin with. You think of Russians as a friendly and closely related people, but between 2014 and 2022 are gradually disabused of the idea that they think of you the same way. Then in February 2022 the Russian military launches a massive air, land, and sea assault on your country. You hate war and violence, like all virtuous people, but, not seeing what else to do, you join the military to defend your home.

A few months of fighting later, convalescing in a field hospital after barely surviving Mariupol or Kharkiv or some such place, you go on the English-language internet for a lark and see oldsters from some hippie performing-arts troupe in Vermont insisting that “NATO aggression” is why all this is happening. Does the pretended neutrality there strike you as in any meaningful sense “nonviolent”? If not, why not?

One answer might be that refusing to take a side is not actually necessarily nonviolent, nor is favoring a nonviolent approach necessarily a refusal to take a side. We do not even need to resort to moral no-brainers to illustrate this point. The story of Francis of Assisi’s attempted rapprochement with the Muslim world during the Crusades provides a good example involving a conflict that will seems less morally clear-cut to most of us moderns. Francis was not neutral in the Crusades. Like any good churchman of that time period, he sided firmly with “Christendom.” Yet he nevertheless attempted a path of nonviolence and dialogue.[25] Nonviolence is thus not the same thing as neutrality. Nor is neutrality always nonviolent; as has been pointed out for centuries, in a conflict where there is a sharp power disparity between the parties, neutrality amounts to taking the side of the more powerful party. The fox will not appreciate “neutrality” in his conflict with the hunting dogs, but he may appreciate (serious) proposals of ways to escape or vanquish the hunting dogs that are not “kill or be killed.”

So it would not be as morally suspect—would not be the same kind of vice masquerading as virtue—if Western pacifists would recommend nonviolent resistance strategies to the people of Ukraine, rather than making vague noises about NATO expansion and the unipolar world order so as to wash their hands of the matter. This advice might still be very bad; the great nonviolence theorist Mohandas Gandhi gave notoriously awful advice along these lines to Jews during World War II and the Holocaust.[26] Other leading lights of Gandhi’s time made this point, sometimes to Gandhi himself. Martin Buber warned Gandhi that “[a] diabolical universal steamroller cannot thus be withstood.” Judah Leon Magnes “also responded skeptically.”[27] George Orwell, writing a year after Gandhi’s assassination, was particularly incisive, devoting his essay “Reflections on Gandhi” partly to arguing against the idea that Gandhian pacifism can work in a society in which civil liberties do not exist.[28]

Even so, while Orwell is a sound critic of Gandhi’s wildly unhelpful position on World War II (as are Buber and Magnes), there is probably no “one neat trick” for establishing when military action might be the least bad course to take. The American Civil War happens to have ended slavery in the United States violently rather than nonviolently. What if, say, a French Revolutionary-style abolitionist government had been invading other countries that still had slavery in order to abolish it there? Would that be harder to justify or excuse? If so, why and according to what moral authority? The history of human conflict and of release from human bondage simply does not provide us with clear pragmatic guidelines here. Nazism fell violently despite Gandhi’s position, Stalinism relatively nonviolently despite Orwell’s. The United States abolished slavery over six hundred thousand dead bodies, the British Empire by a series of controversial but nonviolent Acts of Parliament, Haiti by a revolutionary war on the part of the slaves themselves. Gandhi dislodged the British from India while keeping violence to a minimum, which does not seem likely with dislodging the Russians from Ukraine. We, human beings, grasping at scraps of justification and agency and mutual understanding as we do, live in a stupefying universe and have a history that sometimes seems to obfuscate as many moral lessons as it teaches.

Sometimes there is a temptation to sidestep the dilemma by making the goal being pursued seem less morally imperative than it actually is. Oftentimes, for example, people will attempt to make the Civil War seem less morally clear-cut by pointing out that racism was widespread in the North as well, and even among abolitionists. Thomas DiLorenzo is one example of a historian who has made this almost his entire stock in trade, releasing several poorly-reviewed books attempting to argue that Abraham Lincoln was actually more racist than the Confederate leadership.

This is wrong, and it would be silly even if it were not wrong. As Ken Masugi, a reviewer in Harry V. Jaffa’s natural-law tradition of Civil War historiography, correctly pointed out, this “confus[es] the issue of race with the much more fundamental one, which was slavery.”[29] Chattel slavery was not morally evil because the people enslaving others held racist views; rather, it is morally evil to hold racist views in part because they are a legitimizing ideology for evil practices like chattel slavery. Relatively non-racist people were united with, yes, some of the most racist people in the world at the time in their desire to put an end to this evil practice. They held this desire for principled reasons or to protect the wages of white laborers or to prevent black people (enslaved ones) from being imported into their states or for more or less any other reason one might imagine. A similar point holds good when applied to World War II. Everyone from the feminist idealists of the WAC and WAAF and WAVES to the gang rapists of the late-period Red Army was fighting against the side of the war whose core war aim was to perpetrate multiple genocides, and all moral analysis of who was on “the right side” once the war was underway needs to start from that fact. None of this, however, says very much one way or another about whether and under what conditions inaugurating or joining either war was morally acceptable to begin with.

Dealing with war we have to be in some ways even more downbeat and pessimistic in our understanding of what’s humanly feasible than we do when dealing with abortion. As Orwell, again, points out,[30] the general logic of interpersonal moral decisions begins to break down when applied to so-called “great matters” of politics and statecraft. Yet we can only let the waters get so muddy before we are effectively abdicating out responsibility to think morally at all. We must, therefore, somehow or other arrive at certain tentative principles, or ideas about principles. Self-defense comes to mind, but defensive arguments, strong pacifists will correctly note, can be abused to justify almost any war. Any military cause imaginable is or can be presented as an attempt to defend something, whether oneself or someone else or one’s economic interests or more abstract things like a certain culture or conception of the world. The current regime in Russia sells the war in Ukraine, for example, as a defense of Eastern European culture and morals against Western values.[31] The Confederate cause in the American Civil War was a defense of a cultural practice (slavery), the Nazi cause in World War II ultimately a defense against a perceived worldwide conspiracy against Germany (“international Jewry”). When it comes to assessment of one’s own interests, it is not at all clear where to draw the line between reasonable, even if somewhat abstract, self-defense and cases that should be obviously absurd. All of this being the case, I think that defense of others presents a stronger case than self-defense when it comes to escalating to military conflict.

Refusing to defend others, unlike refusing to defend oneself, looks an awful lot like complicity in what is being done to them. In at least some such cases I believe that necessity considerations apply. A straightforward reading of much moral theology, both Christian and Buddhist, would indicate that it is, if not morally unacceptable to take another’s life to defend one’s own, at least not morally ideal either; one does not necessarily have the right to choose oneself over somebody else. Self-defense might simply not be the moral option; certainly a straightforward reading of Jesus’ teachings would suggest that it is not, despite the existence of Christian allegorical traditions that diminish the literal significance of many of Jesus’ moral pronouncements.[32] Bystanders, however, are inevitably, in practice, choosing between two or more other people, whether by commission or by omission.

And yet the fact of violence remains—as does the fact that many, perhaps most, “humanitarian interventions” go very badly. So we come again to the limits of human capability.

If we follow Tanaka’s argument, or some of what’s implicit in Orwell’s, then society being so pervasively based and predicated on widespread murder—to the point that few if any of us escape indirect culpability for it—probably renders all abortions and most military actions venial sins. They become features of the way the world simply is rather than moral acts in the sense of attempts on anyone’s part in particular to make the world better or worse. I do not fully subscribe to this framework, because I think that ultimately it zeroes out human agency in a way that harms our understanding of other subjects, including our relationship with God. If we can gain a wild animal’s “inability to do differently” in these cases, why not in others, when it comes to things that many more people consider it obvious should be prohibited or strongly discouraged? There does not seem to be any clear, actionable dividing line here. What is true, however, is that even if all sins are not venial sins, all sins call for a “there but for the grace of God” humility among those who do not commit them. Any moral systems or rhetorical devices that overemphasize the role of individual will in acting morally should be taken as suspect, despite their current popularity. A virtuous person can be fenced into non-virtuous actions, even violent ones; socioeconomic circumstances are not easily separable from individual preferences. Whether an act is a sin is just not quite the same moral question as are the status, dignity, and moral rectitude of any particular person who performs that act.

I have spilled a great deal of metaphorical ink in building up the idea that, in looking at the relationship between conscience and grace, we need to seriously recognize the fact that we constantly engage in actions or inactions that in any objective analysis are obviously immoral. Despite serious problems with Peter Singer’s work on issues like disability, I believe that his work on global poverty and development patterns provides an excellent case in point. There really is not any good reason why people in the developed world should not donate much, much more of our disposable income to poverty alleviation in less-developed countries than we currently do, no matter what we tell ourselves and one another about “treating ourselves” or “thinking globally and acting locally.” Yet it would be difficult if not impossible to argue convincingly that anybody who does not donate all or almost all of her excess income to Doctors without Borders is a non-virtuous person or is dedicated to making the world worse. Action-based and agent-based analyses of the same activities can yield completely different conclusions in practical morals—and we do need God to square, so to speak, the resulting circle. A world of pure human action without divine grace animating it is not a world of radical freedom, but of constant confusion, compromise, and constraint.

[1] During the Irish abortion referendum of 2018 it emerged that various medieval Irish hagiographies have accounts of saints miraculously ending pregnancies. However, we can derive from the discussion of the Books of Genesis and of Job in “Poachers in the King’s Domain” a refutation of the idea that this provides useful guidance within the structures of Catholic theology for actions that are not miracles.

[2] As of this writing, the recent reversal of a series of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States that had found a right to abortion in the US Constitution is one of the main political issues in my country. The view that opposition to abortion is inherently Christian and thus antithetical to the American government system’s religious neutrality is a prominent piece of pro-choice rhetoric.

[3] Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 313-326. I would recommend that the interested reader do her own research on Harvey’s own sources, due to the inherent problems with relying on a single authority, even one as erudite as Harvey, on a controversial subject. Shoyo Taniguchi’s A Study of Biomedical Ethics from a Buddhist Perspective is especially interesting for containing Buddhist theological arguments against “edge cases” such as abortion in cases of rape or fetal disability. Berkeley, CA: Graduate Theological Union/Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1987.

[4] See, inter alia, Pinit Ratanakul, “Socio-Medical Aspects of Abortion in Thailand,” in Buddhism and Abortion, ed. Damien Keown (London: Macmillan, 1998)” 53-66; Bardwell Smith, Buddhism and Abortion in Contemporary Japan: Mizuko Kuyo and the Confrontation with Death (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992); op. cit., Thich, “Dharma Talk, July 20, 1998”; Suzuki Yuriko, “Mizuko kuyō ni miru taijikan no hensen” (“Changing Perspectives on the Conceptus Seen through Fetal Memorial Services”), Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan Kenkyū Hōkoku (Research Reports of the National Museum of Japanese History), vol. 205 (March 2017), 157-209. In Japanese. Taniguchi, mentioned in the previous footnote, is unusually absolutist in her prudential approaches on this subject.

[5] Danya Ruttenberg is a currently prominent exponent of this view in the United States. Other Jewish ethicists who historically advocated (to varying degrees) a lenient treatment of abortion include Rashi, Joshua Falk, Jacob Emden, and Eliezer Waldenberg.

[6] Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 223-246.

[7] Ibid., 233.

[8] Ibid., 225.

[9] Ibid., 236. Thomson’s essay is well-known for the “violinist” thought experiment in which abortion is analogized to being involuntarily hooked up on a life support machine that is sustaining a famous classical musician (the choice of occupation is never explained in the essay). A range of refutations is available, from distinguishing parent-child duties from duties to a stranger all the way to not doing so and biting the bullet on one’s obligation to keep the violinist alive, but the essay’s fame and staying power are one example of a way in which the security of person suite of arguments for abortion rights is more potent and compelling than abortion opponents tend to assume. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 47-66.

[10] Readers may note that the presence of outcome in this list of considerations means that Hursthouse’s treatment of the issue has some affinities with the broad consequentialist tradition, although she is not a utilitarian. Hursthouse distinguishes her view from a utilitarian one in Op. cit., Hursthouse, 225-226.

[11] Ibid., 244.

[12] While Hursthouse is an academic philosopher from a genteel background who is most comfortable writing discursive papers, Tanaka, at least as a young woman, was the sickly daughter of a fishmonger with a high school education whose preferred mode was the foul-mouthed tirade. On of the best-known photographs of the young Tanaka provides some insight into her psychology. Holding a cigarette upside her head, she glares exhaustedly in a direction kitty-corner to the camera. Her eyes are baggy, her lips pursed, her hair lank and unflatteringly cut. The overall effect reminds one of a wrestler or boxer, forced against the ropes but refusing to give up or give in.

[13] Morioka Masahiro, “Feminism, Disability, and Brain Death: Alternative Voices from Japanese Bioethics,” Journal of Philosophy of Life vol. 5, no. 1 (July 2015), 22. Quoting, in part, Tanaka Mitsu.

[14] Tiana Norgren, Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 67.

[15] Intermittent discussions of this throughout the book can be found in Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

[16] The cartoon appears in “Women’s Lib in Japan,” femjapan, last edited March 31, 2006, http://femjapan.pbworks.com/w/page/8848023/Women%27s%20Lib%20in%20Japan. GNI should probably be “Gini” as in the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality rather than of the overall size of a nation’s economy.

[17] The related veneration of the bodhisattva Jizō as a psychopomp for deceased children (including deceased conceptuses and neonates), however, goes back centuries. It is deeply implicated in and intertwined with other Japanese Buddhist folk beliefs and practices.

[18] Roy W. Perrett, “Buddhism, Abortion and the Middle Way,” Asian Philosophy vol. 10, no. 2 (July 2000), 109.

[19] Op. cit., Morioka, “Feminism, Disability, and Brain Death,” 23.

[20] A case-by-case practical approach is also what Thich Nhat Hanh advocated in a fascinating dharma talk from 1998, although his starting point was more conventionally “pro-life.” Thich Nhat Hanh, “Dharma Talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh on July 20, 1998  in Plum Village, France,” https://www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/G%20-%20TNH/TNH/Questions%20and%20Answers%20July%2020th%201998/Dharma%20Talk%20given%20by%20Thich%20Nhat%20Hanh%20on%20July%2020.htm. Accessed September 10, 2024. We will have occasion to return to this talk in my second essay on this topic.

[21] “Potential human life” is an obscurantist formulation because it could apply to anything from (synchronically) ova and spermatozoa still securely within the parents’ gonads to (diachronically) the primordial ooze that would evolve into humanity in the fullness of the geological eons. A conceptus is an actual human life in the sense that it is a distinct organism of the human species—again, whatever else it is. Cogent arguments that this should not matter overmuch can be made, many of which famously coalesce around the fact that the conceptus is actually inside another person’s body and as such is impinging on that person’s own rights in a much more dramatic way than in otherwise analogous situations.

[22] Miguel de Unamuno, trans. Anthony Kerrigan, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 124.

[23] Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, The Summa Theologiæ of St. Thomas Aquinas, Second and Revised Edition (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1920), II.II.40.1.

[24] Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, trans. J.G. Dawson (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1959), 44.2.

[25] “Follow St. Francis’s example: Don’t be a pain in the neck to the Muslims,” my own priest, a Franciscan himself, preached in a Transitus homily in October 2022. At a discussion of Muslim theology per se held in March 2023, the same priest was pointedly critical of the religion—yet he began the discussion by asking the (uniformly Catholic) participants to recount positive personal experiences with Muslims in our lives.

[26] Both Gandhi’s earliest and his latest major statements on the subject have a history of alienating and infuriating Jewish people attempting to assess his legacy. In 1938—the year of the Anschluss, the Munich Agreement, and Kristallnacht—Gandhi wrote that “My sympathies are all with the Jews….If there ever could be a justifiable war, in the name of and for humanity, war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war.” (Aron Heller, “Unearthed Gandhi WWII letter wishes Jews ‘era of peace,’” AP News, September 24, 2019, https://apnews.com/general-news-f40d8c2c7d8d4ffeadd576ded89acc0c. Accessed September 10, 2024. Quoting Mohandas Gandhi.) In 1946—the year in which the Nuremberg trials ended and the Tokyo Trial began—Gandhi told his biographer Louis Fischer that “Hitler killed five (sic) million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs….It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.” Louis Fischer, Gandhi and Stalin: Two Signs at the World’s Crossroads (New York: Harper, 1947), 43. The historical research establishing the now-familiar death toll of six million rather than five had not yet been done in the first years after the war.

[27] David Cortright, Gandhi and Beyond: Nonviolence for an Age of Terrorism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 113. Quoting, in part, Martin Buber.

[28] George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” Partisan Review vol. 16 no. 1 (January 1949), 90.

[29] Ken Masugi, “The Unreal Lincoln,” Claremont Institute, October 11, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20131203053713/http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.226/pub_detail.asp. Archived December 3, 2013; accessed September 10, 2024.

[30] “Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?” Op. cit, Orwell, 91.

[31] This even though plenty of the characteristic moral problems of liquid modernity, such as very high rates of abortion and divorce, are even more prevalent in Russia than in the West. I am a signatory of an open letter condemning as heretical the underlying ideas in the political theology of the Russian Orthodox Church.  “A Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ (Russkii mir) Teaching,” Public Orthodoxy, March 13, 2022, https://publicorthodoxy.org/2022/03/13/a-declaration-on-the-russian-world-russkii-mir-teaching/. Accessed September 10, 2024.

[32] To take the famed parable of the good Samaritan as an example, Augustine, Origen, and Aquinas all have commentaries on Luke’s Gospel that treat the parable solely as an allegory of God and the soul, even though the immediate context in Luke 10 is a question that Jesus has been asked about interpersonal morality. Modern theologians, following John Calvin, have generally been unimpressed with this allegorized reading, although Aquinas, to his credit, does list moral edification as one of the (three) purposes of the text. A late-twentieth-century commentator writes, from a low-church Protestant perspective, that “[m]ost modern readers would agree with [the Welsh theologian C.H.] Dodd that this farrago bears no relationship to the real meaning of the parable.” George Bradford Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980), 165.

Image of “Conscience and Law,” a sculpture on a courthouse in Bamberg, Germany. From Wikimedia Commons.


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Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution. He works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.

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