Just Thomism

A doctor amputates the wrong leg. Did he use his medical skill?

Qua performing an amputation, yes, qua amputating the wrong leg, then no. This is the distinction between the secundum quid and simpliciter, where the answer is simpliciter no and yes secundum quid. Understood another way it is the distinction between per se and per accidens, where the answer is per se no and per accidens yes.

The example generalizes to any mistake: I solved the algebra problem for 1=0; you drove into a tree, She  baked the pizza crust with plaster of Paris as opposed to flour, etc. If you ignore the modifier (i.e. “into a tree’/ “for 1=0” or “with plaster of Paris…”) then yes you used some skill of solving or driving or baking, but insofar as you include the modifier, you did not.

The example generalizes to moral mistakes if you put the good you were seeking separate from the modifier making the specific difference constituting a sin. In other words, don’t say “I murdered” but, more precisely, e.g. “I sought to preserve my honor by shooting the man at the bar for scuffing my shoes.” Insofar as you were seeking to preserve your honor, there is a real skill and the actualization of some potency, but insofar as you acted in the manner you did, you did not even preserve your honor, but lost your dignity as a rational agent. Again, considered merely as an act of preserving honor, you did a good that even the person you killed could not reasonably keep from you, even though you are entirely condemned for seeking honor in the way you did.

Accounting for mistakes therefore requires distinguishing effects from defects, where an effect is correlative to a cause or actuality while a defect is the absence of that cause or actuality precisely where it belongs. As an effect, the action traces back to pure actuality and divine operation; as a defect, it cannot.

The most interesting defect is the culpable mistake, which demands making the mistake when you know that you’re making it.

That I sin requires two things:

1.) God continues to will the existence of my nature, which is ordered to ultimate end E.

2.) That I seek something incompatible with, or injurious to, attaining E.

Self evidently, sin is against God’s will in sense (1.)

-Form : thing with form :: the meter : a meter.

-Equal numbers of stones are in many ways not equal stones (any comparison between them reveals  differences in weight, volume, shape, etc.) but in no way unequal numbers.

-If by the equality of the stones you mean whatever it is that makes them stone, this is one just as the number is. Just as a meter is what it is by the meter, a stone is what it is by the stone, though “the stone” would be a new coinage, not meaning what it would normally mean.

-The forms of material things have this pure unity and equality only as intelligible or only as actual intelligence.

–The intelligible is actual intelligence. 

-All form is like God in that its being is its act, but forms of things beneath intelligence are forms not simply, but in matter, or at least with material conditions.

-Essence is most simply something with being. Sensation grasps, by contrast, only what has being with qualification, that is, accidents.

-Sensation is limited to grasping accidents of exterior things because it knows by organs, because it needs an accident belonging to exterior object and an organ.

Chesterton explains the collapse of civilization into eroticism by a principle he says has

 [T]he same staleness everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense.

Everlasting Man, c. 8

Developing the point further, he says:

Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.

The claim is there is a common principle for widespread obscenity, use of hallucinogens, and the sort of atheism that denies all ultimate meaning. There is first of all the will to power that breaks through boundaries or taboos. When order becomes insipid and boring, it only makes us feel alive again through the shock we receive from breaking it.

To leave it at this doesn’t suffice. Any sin is transgressive, but sexual liberation, psychedelics, and atheism transgress the limits of physical and spiritual appetite in a basic and fundamental way. In sexual liberation we break out of the limits of procreative responsibility, social shame, and interpersonal obligation; in psychedelics we break beyond stale reason and the conventions of respectable religious mysticism that waits on God and trusts in faith; in atheism the self “reverses the assumption of meaning and direction in the world.”

We call them Zeno’s paradoxes, but to him they were refutations of the existence of motion.

Take Achilles and the tortoise. The point is not to prove that Achilles will never reach the tortoise. We will obviously see him do so. That’s given. The point where he gets to the tortoise is where he has no further distance to close, and so….

1.) Motion can have a point where it has no further distance to close.

The problem is that it is also true that

2.) Motion cannot have a point where it has no further distance to close.

Since the moving Achilles is, say, halfway to the tortoise, then half that distance again, ad infinitum. 

The second horn of the contradiction is the harder one to see, and so it often gets presented as the whole argument. It is NOT the whole argument. The whole argument is a reductio ad absurdum against the reality of motion. By way of comparison, read this Euclid proposition:

If two circles cut one another, then they do not have the same center.

Let the circles ABC and CDG cut one another at the points B and C.

I say that they do not have the same center.

For if they have the same center, assume it is E. Join EC, and draw EFG through at random.

Then, since the point E is the center of the circle ABC, EC = EF.

Also,  since the point E is the center of the circle CDG, EC = EG.

Therefore EF = EG, that is, the part of a magnitude equals the whole, which is impossible.

Therefore if two circles cut one another, then they do not have the same center.

Notice that this is not called “Euclid’s paradox,” where he proves that line EF is “paradoxically” both less than EG and equal to it. We are not supposed to draw the edgy or paradoxical conclusion that some parts equal their wholes. It’s simply an impossibility. Analogously, Zeno claims to find contradictions in motion.

To give another example, take “the arrow.” You shoot an arrow at 25 meters per second that flies for 3 seconds. Therefore:

1.) The arrow is changing place.

But then it is also true that at, say, exactly 2 seconds…

2.) The arrow is in a place exactly 50 meters away.

And this is true of every place the arrow is in for every moment of its flight. So at every moment the arrow is in a place and changing place. This is also a contradiction.

Your coffee cools off. At the beginning, there are two principles:

a.) The coffee.

b.) Heat.

But neither (a) nor (b) become something else. The coffee doesn’t become tea or jam, but remains coffee; and heat can’t become cold. One principle doesn’t change and another cannot, so nothing has  changed in reality. One can generalize the example to being as such.

(The Aristotelian answer is very radical too: he claims that words of the class of (b) are used to describe both full actuality and a proximate stage before it, like “burger” refers both to the cooked sandwich and the frozen patty. So words like “hot” and “cold” are likewise inherently ambiguous – indeed, being itself is ambiguous in this way, and this is clear even from the example, since our (a) term will stand to the (b) term in a way that demands this sort of ambiguity – (a) is in potency to (b.))

We permit evils to happen, e.g. the highway system demands accepting some amount of death. Could  God permit evils in this manner? Not if the permission results only from limitation of power, and this is how we see things. We only allow highway deaths because we are too technologically limited to keep them from happening, and as our power increases, we expect we do more and more to prevent death. We of course hit omnipotence at the limit of this increase of power, which would, out of love, permit no evils at all. Since evils exist, it seems omnipotence and love nowhere coalesce.

Thomas inverts this argument and claims our desire to eliminate human pain and death as far as possible arises from the limitation of our power:

The difference between one who has care of a particular thing, and one whose providence is universal, is that particular provider excludes all defects from what is subject to his care as far as he can; whereas, one who provides universally allows a defect to remain, so as not to hinder the good of the whole.

ST. 1. 22. 2 ad 2

Let it sink in: it is peculiar to the particular provider to exclude all defects from what is subject to his care as far as he can. Our sense that we must do whatever we can to help persons subject to our care is a sense arising from our finitude, or limitation of power to the particular domain of caring for humans. Technological increase of this power does not remove its human limitation, which in turn causes both our felt need and moral responsibility to eliminate evils from the things under our care as far as we can.

Perhaps every provider excludes as many evils as he can from the domain of his care, but for us, this domain begins with the humans nearest to us and falls away from there. Within this starts-with-humans domain, we do as much as we can to eliminate evils, so that any increase of human power is dedicated to eliminating more and more evils in this domain.

Of course, if Thomas is right we will still be stuck with an inveterate, gut-level conviction that an intelligent power must do whatever it can to eliminate evil from the human domain, and this gut-level conviction will remain even when we contemplate omnipotence. Even the angels couldn’t shake an analogous gut-level conviction, and for some of them it led to their fall. As Suarez puts it, the demons fell because they knew that they would provide for themselves as far as they could, but that God because of his universal provision was not under the same necessity. So Lucifer convinced himself it was better to trust in himself than to trust oneself to God. Translated into a human idiom, the conviction becomes it’s better to trust in science, reason and technology (i.e. man’s provision for himself) than in “religion” and “faith.”

What desires enjoys and feels its absence, but humans have two categorically different sorts of desire, one from sense and another from reason. This gives two different sorts of enjoyment and (to simplify things) let’s say Thomas calls the enjoyment of sense delectatio and the enjoyment of reason gaudium. 

Consider fasting or some other satisfactory act of offering one’s pain to God. That it is contrary to delectatio is essential, but what if it is done without gaudium? This means one judges the act repellent even in one’s higher faculties, which means he is strengthening his attachment to delectatio. To the extent that our fasts or penances lack gaudium they more have the character of anti-fasts. To be sure, when one is starting out, the penance will be done badly, but it helps to identify that the badness consists precisely in weak or undeveloped gaudium (what most translators render as joy) in an action  contrary to delectatio. 

1.) Alice has sufficient reasons for loving Bob unconditionally.

2.) Alice’s reasons are either

(a) Shared with persons other than Bob (e.g. she loves him for being handsome, but there are other handsome men.)

(b) Not shared with persons other than Bob

If (b) then her reasons are either

(c) reasons to cease loving Bob, were they otherwise (e.g. she loves him as a provider, but would cease doing so were he to lose his job.)

(d) not (e.g. she loves him as provider, but would love him if he weren’t)

3.) If (a) the reasons do not suffice to explain Alice’s love of Bob, as they would just as soon explain her love of someone else.

If (c) Alice’s love is conditional.

If (d) however, the reasons also do not suffice, since one is saying that Alice would still love Bob, even were this reason taken away.

4.) So the only sufficient reason for unconditional love is to love the person precisely as that person. In fact, this seems to be a sufficient reason as a formal cause, i.e. to love unconditionally just is to love the person as person, such that the desire for one is not different from the desire for other in reality, but only in ratio.

Sin and suffering are real encounters with the absence of divine causality. Nothing God wants, wills, or even permits suffices to explain their real presence. God permits sin and suffering for reasons, but the permission does not suffice to explain their reality, when real.

The temptation among Thomists is to see the permission of sin and suffering – the antecedent permissive decree –  as a removens prohibens, but this is simply indirect causality, and God does not cause sin even indirectly.

I include suffering where traditionally only sin was included insofar as I argue that suffering is formally the disorder of appetite, whether rational or irrational, when the appetite seeks the flourishing of the lower at the expense of the higher. I’m open to the idea that rats suffer when we exterminate them, or that persons suffer when treated in civil war hospitals, but I’d rather distinguish the obvious pain involved in both from the notion of suffering. In the case of the civil war hospital, for example, there is a disorder in the pain being inappropriate to the act of healing, i.e. there is a failure of the irrational desire of the body to subordinate itself to the rational goodness of the medical act.