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</p><h1 class="gmail-gb-headline gmail-gb-headline-ebb8a439 gmail-gb-headline-text">Eating Toadstools</h1>
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<p class="gmail-gb-headline gmail-gb-headline-66cb49cb gmail-gb-headline-text gmail-gb-headline-excerpt"><font size="4">How can you discuss the morality of acts when the person you're speaking with is a moral relativist? </font></p>
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<div class="gmail-pp-author-boxes-name gmail-multiple-authors-name"><a href="https://crisismagazine.com/author/esolen" rel="author" title="Anthony Esolen" class="gmail-author gmail-url gmail-fn">Anthony Esolen</a></div>
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</div></div><p><a href="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">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</a><font size="4"><strong>In the United States </strong>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.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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 <em>followed </em>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 <em>our </em>world, festering. </font></p><p>
</p><p><font size="4">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 <em>accepted </em>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.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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 <em>40,000-to-1</em>. For each executed inmate, a whole city the size of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was obliterated.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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 <em>immeasurably more vicious and foul </em>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?
</font></p><p><font size="4">But forget about outrage. Where is the moral analysis? I am not arguing that we <em>should </em>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 <em>evil</em>—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.</font></p><p><font size="4">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 <em>consistent nominalism </em>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, <em>there is no such thing as objective good and evil </em>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.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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?
</font></p><p><font size="4">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.
</font></p><p><font size="4"><strong>If someone eats</strong> 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.
</font></p>
<p><font size="4">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 <em>accepted </em>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.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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 <em>40,000-to-1</em>. For each executed inmate, a whole city the size of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was obliterated.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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 <em>immeasurably more vicious and foul </em>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?
</font></p><p><font size="4">But forget about outrage. Where is the moral analysis? I am not arguing that we <em>should </em>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 <em>evil</em>—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.
</font></p>
<p><font size="4">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 <em>consistent nominalism </em>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, <em>there is no such thing as objective good and evil </em>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.
</font></p><p><font size="4">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?
</font></p><p><font size="4">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.
</font></p><p><font size="4"><strong>If someone eats</strong> 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.
</font></p>
<div class="entry-content"><p><font size="4">When people do evil,
persuaded that it is good or at least permissible, the specific evil of
the action itself is not compounded with the further evil of contumacy
against God. Stupidity is in part a mitigating or attenuating factor.
Nor does the entirety of a man’s moral life depend wholly upon rightness
in one or another organ, so to speak. If you lose your kidneys, you
die. But adulterers walk among us and may yet be kind to dogs and old
ladies, honest in their business dealings, and dependable in the quality
of their work.
</font></p><p><font size="4">Even so, I would not want to count too much on those areas
remaining unaffected. The moral poison, settled into one area, leaches
into others. And in important ways, evil in the moral life is <em>more</em> disastrous
than eating bad mushrooms. Amanitin in Joe’s stomach does not leap to
Bob’s stomach. But moral evil poisons the society that accepts it; and
it does so, again, regardless of the opinions of the people involved.
The Hurons were <em>worse</em>—quite a great deal worse—as human beings
for the brutality of their tortures. The libertine atheists in the
salons of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France spilled their evil
abroad by example and by the falsehoods about God which they accepted
and promulgated, and blood flowed like wine in the streets.
</font></p><p><font size="4">We Americans are worse—quite a great deal worse—as human beings
for our casual dismissal of the moral law governing sex and marriage and
the begetting and raising of children. It is not just the broken
families I am talking about here but hardness of heart, extending so far
as to leave the sexes not <em>different from </em>one another, which they are by God’s natural ordaining, but <em>alienated</em>. We are a society starved for love songs.
</font></p><p><font size="4">I fear, then, that any insouciant treatment of the moral law
regarding capital punishment is meant not, primarily, to protect 25 men
who may die this year for their dreadful crimes. Instead, it is meant to
dismantle Catholic moral teaching generally as understood as reflecting
objective fact, with objective and predictable and miserable
consequences attendant upon its violation. If it were not so, we would
hear from the opponents of the death penalty the same kind of warning
that you would give to people regarding anything deadly—in this case, <em>deadly to them, </em>the people applying the penalty.
</font></p><p><font size="4">We would also, <em>a fortiori</em>, find opponents of the death penalty decrying abortion as immeasurably worse <em>for the people who perform or procure the abortions</em> because,
as I say, if you risk your own spiritual death by taking part in a
state’s execution of a kidnapper, rapist, torturer, and murderer, how is
it logically possible to believe anything other than that you risk at
least the same by snuffing out the life of your own unborn child?
</font></p><p><font size="4">Would you let your children play with darts dipped in curare?
Would you send them to schools where poison is common? Would you hire a
cook who raises bad mushrooms as a hobby, to feed them to mice? Of
course not. In morals as in mushrooms, the personal motives of the
opponents or proponents of a diet may reflect the condition of their
souls, a condition known only to God, but they <em>do not matter</em> as to fact.
</font></p><p><font size="4"><strong>That is what traditional</strong> Catholics believe and
what the Church teaches as regards what moral truth essentially is. Good
and evil do not shift with the tides, and development cannot ever mean
flat contradiction, no more than reason can be irrational, God can
contradict Himself, or the Holy Spirit tell lies. If you agree, we can
argue. If you do not, we might as well be shouting at each other in
mutually incomprehensible languages—and our problems lie far deeper
than, for example, that of a bishop playing footsie with a proponent of
mass murder of the unborn.
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<h2 class="gmail-widget-title gmail-box-header-title"><font size="4">Author</font></h2>
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<div class="gmail-pp-author-boxes-name gmail-multiple-authors-name"><a href="https://crisismagazine.com/author/esolen" rel="author" title="Anthony Esolen" class="gmail-author gmail-url gmail-fn">Anthony Esolen</a></div>
<p class="gmail-pp-author-boxes-description gmail-multiple-authors-description gmail-author-description-0">
Dr. Anthony Esolen is the author of 28 books on literature, culture,
and the Christian life, whose most recent work is <a href="https://angelicopress.org/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-anthony-esolen">In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John</a>. He and his wife Debra also produce a new web magazine, <a href="https://anthonyesolen.substack.com">Word and Song</a>,
devoted to reintroducing people to the good, the true, and the
beautiful. He is a Distinguished Professor at Thales College
<a class="gmail-ppma-author-user_url-profile-data gmail-ppma-author-field-meta gmail-ppma-author-field-type-url" aria-label="Website" href="https://anthonyesolen.substack.com/" target="_self"><span class="gmail-dashicons gmail-dashicons-admin-links"></span> </a>
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