[Grem] SPAM(11.7) A. Esolen: How can you discuss the morality of acts when the person you're speaking with is a moral relativist?

2025. Okt. 15., Sze, 18:41:00 CEST

Eating Toadstools

How can you discuss the morality of acts when the person you're speaking
with is a moral relativist?

   -
   Anthony Esolen <https://crisismagazine.com/author/esolen>

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/eating-toadstools?utm_source=Crisis+Magazine&utm_campaign=bd0469961e-Crisis_DAILYRSS_EMAIL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a5a13625fd-bd0469961e-27989997&mc_cid=bd0469961e&mc_eid=b9d3f7c6f0*In
the United States *last year, 25 people were executed by law. The shortest
time between conviction and execution was nine years; the average was 25
years. All were men. This was the racial breakdown: 13 white, nine black,
two Hispanic, one Native American. That was in accord with the ratios of
murderers in those categories; if anything, whites were slightly
overrepresented.

The youngest person to receive the death sentence was 18 when he committed
the crime. He had already been convicted of kidnapping and rape and was
serving two life sentences when a jury found him guilty of a previous and
unrelated crime of rape followed by murder. Another man, 19 when he
murdered a convenience store clerk in a robbery, tortured and killed a
fellow prisoner—who was serving 90 days for a traffic offense —between his
conviction and his sentencing two days later. A third man, also 19, was
embroiled in gang wars and murdered two people at two separate places in
one day while he was on the run from a previous murder. Those are the three
men who were under 20 when they committed their capital crimes.

The cases are miserable: murder for hire, double murders, rape and murder,
murder by someone on parole while serving a sentence for a previous murder,
murder *followed *by rape and mutilation of the corpse, murder followed by
the rape of a little girl, and so on. To enter the area of these murders is
to lift up a tattered curtain that separates the nicer part of a foul room
from its dank and rat-ridden corner. It is *our *world, festering.

Again and again in the stories of these malefactors—and often of their
victims too—we find sexual confusion, irresponsibility, and treachery:
children growing up in chaos; no father in the home; “blended” (read
“mangled”) families; seething jealousy and vindictiveness; sexual abuse;
pornography. And all these are merely *accepted *as the foul air above a
garbage dump is accepted. After a while, you no longer notice the stench.
But the sick miasma is under no compulsion to become salutary because it is
no longer sensed as sick. You can pretend that a toadstool is a
chanterelle. The toadstool demurs.

I bring up these capital cases not to argue for the death penalty but to
note a curious inconsistency among—I use the word for want of a
better—“liberal” Catholics. Last year, about a million children in the
United States were snuffed out in the womb. The ratio of murdered unborn
children to executed murderers was not 4-to-1, not even 40-to-1, but
*40,000-to-1*. For each executed inmate, a whole city the size of
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was obliterated.

Now, if it is morally wrong to execute a man guilty of kidnapping along
with two counts of rape and murders committed in two completely separate
incidents, or of a hired assassin who slashed a middle-aged woman to death
slowly and torturously, or the enraged killer of six people at once with
guns and an ax, or a murderer who raped and mutilated the corpse of a
female hitchhiker whom he and his buddies tortured to death—if it is
morally wrong to execute these men who, by their actions, declared war on
all society and all law, then it is *immeasurably more vicious and foul *to
sentence an innocent unborn child to death—one whose very existence, unless
you were raped, is owing to your own voluntary action and who rightly
claims from you the special protection that a child claims from his mother
and father. Yet where is the outrage now?

But forget about outrage. Where is the moral analysis? I am not arguing
that we *should *sentence people guilty of aggravated murder to death. The
death penalty, so long delayed and so rarely enforced, has no value as a
deterrent. I can be persuaded that we should exercise mercy even in these
terrible cases—and even at some risk to the lives of wardens, doctors,
nurses, guards, repairmen, janitors, cooks, other prisoners, and people
outside of prison whom the capital offenders may murder by proxy. I cannot
be persuaded, though, that to administer condign punishment is *evil*—because
reason itself perceives the balance, the equity, the fit application of the
death sentence to the deadly. Scripture itself prescribes the penalty,
which, as I say, I can be persuaded to set aside, for mercy.

The problem lies not in a supposed inconsistency in Catholics who use the
case of capital punishment as the ace of trumps against their anti-abortion
fellows in the pews but in their *consistent nominalism *in moral matters
regarding sex. That is, they believe that in one area of the moral life,
what traditional Catholics see as a crucial area with all kinds of social
evils that flow from getting things wrong, *there is no such thing as
objective good and evil *so long as no compulsion is involved; in which
case it is not the act itself but the coercion that is wrong, the violation
not of the nature of the body but of the individual will. They can claim no
precedent for such nominalism, whether they hold it philosophically or,
more likely, with a loose negligence. And Catholic authors most concerned
with the social good are against them: Leo XIII, Charles Péguy, Léon Bloy,
Jacques Maritain, G.K. Chesterton, François Mauriac, Dorothy Day, Pius XI,
Paul VI, Malcolm Muggeridge, and John Paul II, among many others.

Now, nobody is a nominalist when it comes to eating mushrooms. We know that
the death cap can kill. So can the destroying angel, the false morel, and
other poisonous fungi that attack the liver and the kidneys. Traditional
Catholics believe something analogous about moral evil. When they argue
against “liberal” Catholics, they assume that their opponents believe that
good and evil are objective facts in the moral order, that they can be
known by reason, that they have inevitable consequences, and that, in the
case of grave sin, the consequences are dire in this life and may be
eternal in the life to come. But if the opponents do not believe those
things, where is the common ground from which to discuss things?

When it comes to the most contested issues, how can you appeal to reason as
applied to Scripture and to past and consistent teachings of the Church
when your opponents believe that history is a burden to be shucked off or a
chain to be broken, that the teachings are as changeable as is the platform
of a political party and thus that no logical consistency is required, and
that Scripture is not the word of God in its specifics but only in the
generality? And in the generality, too, only as it is presumed to be
tending in historical progress toward some undefined end, one conformable
to the current beliefs of political progressives.

*If someone eats* the ivory funnel mushroom, we can expect the horrible
symptoms of nerve poisoning to ensue shortly. The person may well die. But
it is not like that with the moral life. The consequences are not so
immediately visible and traceable.