The Joy of the Truth » Conscience

Join the Crusade Against . . . Water

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:19:23 +0000

I know that Pen & Teller have been critical of Catholicism, but in this video they make a good point. They take on environmental extremism (or perhaps any extremism) and force the question, “Do people support causes out of knowledgeable concern, or out of blind, ignorant emotionalism?” In our politicized word, it’s an important question to ask. Even in causes as reasonable as pro-life, we can fall into emotionalism and make ignorant arguments. However, I am always impressed with the leaders of the pro-life movement in Catholic circles – Fr. Frank Pavone, Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, Peggy Hamill, Bobby Schindler, etc. They all ground their discussion of abortion and other life issues in the natural moral law and create reasoned arguments that show why abortion is morally evil.

In other sectors of the public square, we are often so used to hearing propaganda and sloganizing that we stop questioning if the claims to truth are true. Our politicized culture even makes science into a propaganda tool instead of an investigation into objective truth. Does anyone really know if “global warming” is real or not? “Science” seems to support both sides of the argument because science has been used as a weapon rather than as an honest search for the truth. This video calls us to task on accepting such a culture.

It’s also really, really funny.

Some are called to extraordinary restitution

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:11:42 +0000

I just had the pleasure of speaking to youth at a family event in our neighboring diocese. The theme of the conference was God’s plan for our sexuality and family. When my talk on “True Sex” was finished, I sat in on the end of the adult track. I missed the actual speaker, but I did catch the testimony of a couple who through a deeper conversion to Christ became convicted about the wife’s sterilization.

The wife had been nearly bullied into getting a sterilization as a young woman. She was told that there was severe medical need for the sterilization due to the dangers posed by pregnancy complications. She was told, “If you get pregnant again, you will die.” At the time she had only a vague sense that sterilization was wrong. She was hit especially by the permanence of the procedure. She had serious doubts, but in the end she trusted her doctors, family and friends who were all telling her to have the tubal ligation.

Years later, her heart was moved closer to Christ and she was convicted that she had committed a serious sin^T. Eventually her husband joined her conviction and together they sought out a way to right the wrong by getting the sterilization reversed. Of course, they met with serious opposition from doctors who said, “Why would you want to do this? You have two kids. You don’t have to worry about getting pregnant. Why go back?” But they persisted and eventually found help through One More Soul. The operation was successful.

It was a beautiful story of conversion and restitution. The couple went through quite a trial (not to mention major surgery) to undo their sin. Their suffering and struggle was part of their restitution. Restitution is part of the conversion process, which usually runs the path of:

Compunction: conviction of sin
Confession & reconciliation: usually both personal and sacramental
Penance: making some act that turns the heart more completely toward sorrow for sin and connects us to the forgiveness of Christ on the Cross.
Restitution: putting right the wrong done by the sin

The only problem that I had with this beautiful testimony is that it left the impression that sterilization was a necessary step in being forgiven for the sin. I think the wife even told the priest that she could not accept Christ’s forgiveness until she got the tubal ligation reversed. The fact is that sterilization reversal is major surgery, and like all major surgery carries a very large risk. The risk of life outweighs the evil of the sin enough to make sterilization reversal extraordinary restitution. Extraordinary restitution is not required for forgiveness. Let me say that again. Those who have been sterilized do not need to go through major surgery to have their sterilizations reversed before they can be forgiven by Christ.

That is to take nothing away from the experience and personal convictions of this couple. In the privacy of a couple’s own conscience, the Holy Spirit may lead a couple to undergo heroic measures of restitution. This is especially the case when further conversion is necessary. Some are indeed called to extraordinary restitution.

As the husband continued the story, he shared that while his wife struggled with the choice to have her fallopian tubes tied, he internally rejoiced in his wife’s sterilization. Furthermore, while his wife became convicted that sterilization was wrong, he was enjoying the sex without consequences and the higher standard of living he was able to have with only two children. Obviously, God had more work to do on his heart. I believe that the Holy Spirit did indeed call this couple to extraordinary restitution to complete the husband’s conversion from selfishness to generous love.

In the end, God did bless their conversion toward life with new life. They had another child and have learned to accept the risks of pregnancy and the rigors and joys of parenthood in truly selfless love.

On the other hand, I know a couple in the same situation who underwent a similar conversion who decided that they were not called to sterilization reversal. Their conversion and dedication to life is no less complete. The Holy Spirit did not call this couple to extraordinary restitution because their conversion to life was complete without it.

Sterilization reversal is extraordinary restitution. When extraordinary restitution is necessary to complete one’s conversion, the Holy Spirit will call us to it. If he does not call us to it, we are not required to make extraordinary restitution. We need to discern the call of the Holy Spirit in our own hearts. However, we must be careful not to be misled by scrupulosity on one hand or by selfishness and a desire for the easy way out on the other hand. The Christian life is one of balance and careful discernment. But it is always a life led by love.

End Note

^TThere is no doubt that sterilization is morally wrong. However, the woman who gave the testimony may have fallen victim to a misunderstanding of what constitutes a sin. It seems to me through her story that the pressures to get herself sterilized were great. The greatest influence was perhaps the voice of the professional as her doctor told her that sterilization was necessary to save her life. A person is only culpable for sin to the degree that she knows that it is evil and freely chooses it anyway. Her story indicated that she did not have true knowledge of the evil, and that she was practically coerced into the decision. Therefore, while the procedure is still gravely evil, she was probably not guilty of actual sin. Once she gained the knowledge, she chose against the sterilization in the form of remorse for her action. That choice was true contrition. I got the sense that this woman carried with her some unnecessary guilt. On the other hand, God used her guilt to bring her healing, not only of her body but also of her heart.

Thinking and Intelligence aren’t the Same as Wisdom

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:14:57 +0000

I was talking to my mom about politics yesterday. We were sharing our frustration with all of the negative ads that seem to be hitting a crescendo in the last week before the election. We were also sharing our incredulity at the number of Catholics and non-Catholic Christians who seem to be defending their vote for the pro-choice Barak Obama, even though he has promised to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act” into law as his first act as president. I shared with my mother one example of my frustration.

A recent editorial in our local newspaper made the following claim:

It really makes me sad and I can’t see how anyone with a Christian conscience can vote McCain-Palin ticket. Vote for McCain, vote for the alcohol industry. Oh, they are against abortion but apparently not against liquor and they neglect to mention that the McCains are making a killing, in more ways than one, on the alcohol industry. I guess you aren’t as dead when you have been killed by a drunken driver. Try telling that to the family of the mother and 10-year-old daughter who were killed by a former surgeon after his third drunken driving offense.

I don’t want to see anyone killed but I think it would be poetic justice if it was your family and not mine killed or maimed by alcohol which is the industry McCains make a living from. How can you be this blind.

Apparently McCain has family members who are high up in the management of some major businesses in the alcohol industry. Therefore, a vote for McCain is a vote in favor of drunk driving and alcoholism. Therefore, the writer of this letter concludes that a vote for McCain is just as pro-death as a vote for Obama. Q.E.D.

If I need to explain to you how ridiculous this argument is, I’ll buy you a pizza and a beer some time and we can talk.

My expression of frustration was, “People just don’t think.”

My mom replied, “Oh, people are thinking. That doesn’t mean they’re thinking right.”

Ah, the wisdom of my mother. That must be where I get it from, eh?

My mom’s statement hit me because I had just been reading about the supernatural virtue of temperance in the book Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann. This is the book on which I have been meditating during Eucharistic adoration each week. What struck me was a small paragraph on intellectual intemperance.

Fr. Vann said that there are two kinds of intemperance of the mind

to use the truth simply as a means of profit & pleasure
to twist the truth and pervert it

Both of these errors sacrifice reverence for the truth, which is an expression of Truth Himself.

It occurred to me that the problem with American culture is not that we don’t think at all (which might be considered the sin of intellectual insensibility), but that we use our intelligence to rationalize evil. Rationalizing evil actually commits both aspects of intellectual intemperance. When we rationalize, we use parts of the truth to explain away an evil for our own profit and pleasure, and we have to twist and pervert the truth in order to make it fit our desires.

The American culture has become very good at rationalizing evil. Moreover, doing so has become a firmly entrenched habit. The problem is not that America is less intellectual than it should be, or that people do not think. The problem is that American does not know how to correctly handle truth. We think, and we are proud of our “enlightened thinking,” but we do not think rightly.

Way to go, Mom. You put your finger right on it.

The Divine Pity by Fr. Gerald Vann.

family

Private Conscience Makes Morality Off Limits in Public Discourse

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:27:34 +0000

Are decisions of conscience private moral choices upon which nobody else should tread? Our culture seems to think so. However, the moral conscience always develops in the context of community as we seek objective moral truth together. The fact that our local newspaper editors won’t comment on moral choices, but will endorse a presidential candidate, shows that they do not understand the true nature of conscience.

The editors of our local newspaper made some interesting comments about morality in a recent editorial. They were mainly commenting on an incident in which a local gas station accidentally keyed a price of 34.9 cents per gallon instead of $3.499 into its gas tanks. Since customers were paying at the pump, the gas station attendant did not catch the error right away. Cars lined up down the street to take advantage of the mistake. The editors comment on one woman, who

. . . told reporters it normally costs her $100 to fill her SUV. She proudly showed off a receipt for $8.85 after pumping her tank full last Monday.

The editors post the question, “Was filling up at 34.9 cents stealing, or did those who lined up just take advantage of an opportunity offered them?”

They then quote one possible response from an online respondent,

“The oil companies have been ripping us off for years,” a reader who uses the screen name jstib1 wrote on our Web site. “She paid the price the pump said to pay. It’s not like she filled up and drove off without paying for what she bought.”

They then quoted another reader who thought that customers taking advantage of the mistake were dishonest. The comment of the editors was then, “It’s a fascinating debate, isn’t it?”

The editors then present a list of similar moral decisions that they consider not always clear:

Do you tell the store clerk when he or she gives you too much change?
What if it’s a substantial mistake, say $20, and the clerk is the daughter of a friend?
What if it’s only $1 and you don’t discover the error until you get home. Do you spend $5 in gas to return the $1?

“Now let’s up the ante”

You happen upon an item in a garage sale being sold for $2.50 that you know is worth $30,000. Do you tell the seller, or take advantage of a great deal?
Your neighbor has wireless Internet access and you can receive the signal in your home. Do you save yourself $50 a month by using his signal?

Their conclusion?

Truth is, these questions can only be answered as you consult your own conscience or perhaps your higher power.

We’re not going to tell you what is right and what is wrong.

But those people in Rapids who filled up for one-tenth of what gasoline should have cost?

They’re all crooks.

Here’s the irony. The day after telling us that they won’t tell us what is right or wrong, they write an editorial justifying their right to endorse a specific political candidate.

Now, if a newspaper wants to use its editorial opinion page to endorse a specific candidate, I have no problem with that. However, what makes them think that moral choices are out of the realm of reasoned public discourse? We are free to agree or disagree with their pick of a presidential candidate. Are we any less free to agree or disagree with their moral reasoning?

Their comment on morality is very telling. “Truth is, these questions can only be answered as you consult your own conscience or perhaps your higher power.” According to these editors, decisions of conscience are even more private than political decisions and are therefore not fair game for public discourse.

Yet, moral decisions are based on objective truth, and therefore subject to the kind of reasoned judgment that should happen in public debate. In fact, the “dilemmas” that the editors present are actually fairly clear-cut to anyone who accepts the existence of objective moral reality.

Let’s give it a try, shall we?

Do you tell the store clerk when he or she gives you too much change?

If the clerk gives you too much change by mistake and you do not tell him or her, you have not paid the asking price for the items you purchased. This is a sin against (commutative) justice.

What if it’s a substantial mistake, say $20, and the clerk is the daughter of a friend?

A greater amount of extra change can make the sin against justice more grave.

What if it’s only $1 and you don’t discover the error until you get home. Do you spend $5 in gas to return the $1?

The small amount of change makes the sin less grave, but it does not justify knowingly keeping the extra money. While spending $5 on gas to return $1 of extra change seems disproportionate, justice would demand at least a phone call to the store. You could also return the dollar on your next trip into town.

“Now let’s up the ante”

You happen upon an item in a garage sale being sold for $2.50 that you know is worth $30,000. Do you tell the seller, or take advantage of a great deal?

These scenarios are perhaps a little more complex. In this case, special knowledge of the worth of an item may give you the right to sell it for more than you pay for it. However, if the value is this disproportionate, justice would demand that you at least offer the seller a fair amount based on your ability to assess the true value of the item and to get the higher price. What percentage of the true value would be fair? That may be a prudential judgment to be made in dialogue with the seller.

Your neighbor has wireless Internet access and you can receive the signal in your home. Do you save yourself $50 a month by using his signal?

This one is only difficult because there are no physical goods being stolen, and the act of piracy is so easy. However, if by social contract it is understood that you need to pay for a service to use it, using it without paying is stealing. There is probably a difference between using free-floating WiFi waves in a particular instance (especially given the fact that so many public places offer free WiFi access) and permanently hijacking the signal. If you want Internet access, you should pay for it.

Finally, let’s take one more look at the gas station situation. Remember this quote?

“The oil companies have been ripping us off for years,” a reader who uses the screen name jstib1 wrote on our Web site. “She paid the price the pump said to pay. It’s not like she filled up and drove off without paying for what she bought.”

First of all, this statement is purely illogical. The error did not hurt the oil company. It hurt the gas station, who had already paid for the gasoline and is reselling it. If this was a local gas station, the consequences are quite immediate. If it is a chain gas station, the consequences might be more easily absorbed, but are still felt by real people trying to run an honest business. Secondly, the sentiment that oil companies have been ripping us off for years does not in turn justify ripping them off. If we believe oil companies are ripping us off, we need to use recourse to legislation, legal action or economic forces (however, the truth still remains that American gas prices are among the lowest in the world – perhaps we’re just spoiled). Finally, customers who drove off with a full tank of gas for a tenth of the cost were not paying for what they bought. They knew that the lower prices was the result of an error, not of a promotion by the gas station. They were taking advantage, and they were unjust.

One of my maxims of morality is, “If we got the easy moral decisions right, we could more easily forgiven for struggling with the difficult ones.” The editors of our local newspaper don’t even want to try to get the easy moral decisions right. Conscience is not a private decision. It is a reasoned decision-making process made in the context of a community engaged in reasoned discourse with the goal of arriving at objective moral truth.

End Note

“Would you fill up with 35-cent gas?” Marshfield News Herald. 20 October 2008. Gannet News Service. 6A.
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Cheaters Never Prosper

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:37:00 +0000

Ok, “cheaters never prosper” is a cliche. But so is “every law was meant to be broken,” yet we hear this saying much more often – in word or idea. Our country is currently suffering from the greedy cheating of people associated with the Annie Mae and Freddie Mac companies. In 2002 we heard about a number of scholars who had plagiarized or otherwise misrepresented themselves and their scholarly work. At that time, U.S. News and World Report carried the article, “Our Cheating Hearts.”

The article begins:

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once claimed that “mutual cheating is the foundation of society.” For as long as there have been rules, it seems, there have been cheaters.

I would like to know the context of Pascal’s statement. He was, after all, a Catholic scholar and I find it difficult to believe that he was so defeatist. This statement, like “every law was meant to be broken,” indicates (with a wink and a smirk) that cheating is natural to human beings.

When we are faced with human depravity, we tend to defend our sensibilities in two ways. First, we try to shrug it off by convincing ourselves that it is inevitable or normal or inevitable. Second, we try to find a psychological explanation.

What’s going on here? Doesn’t anyone play by the rules? On Wall Street, the one-two punch of greed and competition is to blame, says journalist James Stewart. His coverage of the 1987 stock crash and insider-trading scandals earned him a Pulitzer and became the foundation of his bestseller Den of Thieves. All that money sloshing around, he says, “can drive people into a frenzy. . . . You’re thrown in that competitive situation at a very early age and exhorted to win at all costs.” And that win-at-all-costs ethic, critics say, is the foundation of the cheating culture.

In Hollywood, “you can get away with your embezzlements and your lies, and your murders, but you can never get away with failing,” according to Dominick Dunne, celebrated chronicler of the powerful and notorious. The pressure to succeed–and the fear of failure–Dunne says, is the perfect prescription for cheating. It may also be the root of widespread cheating among students. Consider: Seventy-four percent of high school students admitted to “serious test cheating” last year. That’s more than double the number who admitted this in 1969.

Certainly an overemphasis on success leads to cheating. I see this in high school students and their parents, or example. Sometimes we even get parents defending or even abetting the cheating by their children and offering the excuse, “Well, she has to get into college and she can’t do that without a good grade in this class.”

Obsession with success and the willingness to sacrifice integrity show a degradation of priorities and a false sense of happiness – a willingness to sacrifice transcendent goods such as honesty, truth and integrity for the sake of temporal, imperfect, and insecure goods such as money and success. Obsession with success brings constant dissatisfaction and cheating does nothing to alleviate the unhappiness caused by a disordered life.

Of course, there are other reasons for cheating as well:

But pressure to succeed isn’t a complete explanation. Undeniably, there is an almost romantic appeal to “beating the system”–particularly if the system, whether it’s the speed limit or the stock market, is perceived as rigged or unfair. Take the tax code, for instance. Nearly everyone thinks he or she pays too much or that others don’t pay enough. So Americans cheat to the tune of $195 billion a year, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That amounts to a whopping $1,600 per taxpayer.

While the first cause of cheating is a false sense of true happiness, the second is a false idea of the purpose of authority. “Sticking it to the man” has been in vogue since the 1960′s. Actually, it has been part of the American culture since the American Revolution when True Whigs held a philosophy that held all authority suspect. Americans hold that individuals need to grab all they can for themselves while authority attempts to keep them from it.

However, the truth is that authority is intended to lead us to authentic goodness, especially when our own weaknesses or ignorance would make attaining that goodness more difficult if not impossible. Often our attempt to “stick it to the man” or to “beat the system” are like my two-and-a-half-year-old’s stubborn refusal to wear pants.

And think about the reasons people give for cheating. We steal cable because “the prices are a rip-off.” We fudge insurance claims because “the rates are sky high.” We pocket office supplies because “the company can afford it.” All these rationalizations suggest people are perversely cheating to restore fairness. Is this tolerable?

Yes, sometimes the explanation of why we cheat is just that we’re selfish and whiny. We tend to think we are never getting enough because we are never satisfied with what we have.

So, whether we are revealing our messed-up priorities, our hubris, or our selfishness, we sacrifice much when we cheat. Cheaters destroy their personal integrity – the virtue of being who you were created to be. What’s more, since human beings are created to receive Truth, cheaters do great harm to justice between them and others, therefore isolating them from the bond of trust that creates a society. And what do we gain? A stapler? A few hundred dollars that we’ll spend foolishly anyway? A good grade that won’t even be remembered ten years from now? Even those people who rise to positions of power and prestige by cheating live with the constant fear that they will be found the fraud.

Furthermore, all sin does harm to society

No wonder many are now asking if there’s been a major shift in cultural standards–whether cheating and deceit have become accepted tools of the trade in the never-ending quest for success.

We have an innate sense that cheating is evil. U.S. News & World Report, the consummate supporter of bad science, explains:

Yet there is tension here as well. As great as the urge to cheat may be, we also have an almost hard-wired hatred of cheaters and a deep-seated urge to punish them. In fact, studies have shown people will go to great lengths to ferret out and punish cheaters, even when doing so is costly and offers no material gain. According to sociologists, this instinct to punish rule-breakers may date to hunter-gatherer societies, which were highly egalitarian–there were no hierarchical leaders. So when it came to sharing food, for instance, these minisocieties had to work as a group to punish any freeloaders.

It amazes me that everything can be traced back to the “hunter-gatherer” era of human history, as if this era (inexplicably) forever defined human nature. Truth be told, every time the “hunter-gatherer” era is used as an explanation for modern human behavior, the connection is based on a total guess. There is no evidence. This pseudo-scientific explanation is a “socially acceptable” alternative to the acceptance of natural law. We know that cheating is bad because human beings were created for Truth.

As Catholics, we know through Divine Revelation that human beings once knew the perfect life, but that Original Sin damaged our intellect and our will. Therefore we are tempted toward sin and deceit, yet we still hold goodness as our ideal. Cheaters never prosper – not because they are never successful but because they sacrifice the reality of who they are meant to be for the myth of what they wish they had.

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Medical Ethics Conference

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:18:26 +0000

I just returned from the medical ethics conference. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. The first half of the conference was a rather good dialogue about ethics counseling. It was an eye-opener about how difficult health care decisions can be, especially when the health care provider and the family have different medical goals for an incapacitated loved one. While the principle of ordinary and extraordinary means of treatment were not mentioned (except almost dismissively in one of the case study scenarios as “traditional Church teaching”), it was strongly applied by the presenter and the participants. My only qualm about this part of the day was a brief discussion about “quality of life values.”

The afternoon presentation by John Hardt was on conscience. He began with a scenario in which a doctor refuses to give Viagra to a patient because the patient was not married. Despite the doctor’s compassionate, gentle manner of explaining his position, the conference participants were outraged at the doctor’s apparent “judgmental” attitude. Dr. Hardt led us through views of conscience and then argued in favor of the Catholic tradition of defining conscience as a moral reasoning process. He defined a valid judgment of conscience as one that can be reasoned, explained and debated. Not bad.

Mr. Hardt did a nice job, both presenting and being true to Catholic tradition. There was one rather glaring omission in his presentation, however. He did not connect the conscience to objective moral truth. As a result, his definition of conscience came across much closer to consensus morality (something is right or wrong because we have argued and discussed and come to a reasonable consensus that it is right or wrong).

What was more bothersome was the blatant and widespread modernism among the participants. Mr. Hardt seemed like an obsessed conservative in comparison to these “judge not” medical professionals. When you consider that modernism is usually practiced as the intolerance of tolerance, it becomes very scary to consider that it has become the dominant philosophy within the medical community. Many were even arguing that the patient had a right to freedom of conscience, but the medical professional did not. For example, a nurse in Oregon who opposed euthanasia had no right to excuse herself from the moment of death by assisted suicide of his or her patient, even though the nurse’s absence would in no way affect the patient’s ability to be killed.

Dr. Hardt tried to conquer the dominant trend by using the purpose and goals of medical care as the guiding principle of what a medical professional should be required to provide and what should be optional. If a requested treatment heals, it should be required (so a doctor may not refuse to treat an AIDS patient just because that patient is homosexual or a criminal). If a requested treatment is recreational, convenient, or cosmetic (abortion, birth control, plastic surgery) it should be optional for a professional to deny based on his or her judgment of conscience. This is a valid line of natural law thinking. It was also the point most strenuously opposed by the conference participants. Dr. Hardt was getting at something I strongly believe. The medical profession is becoming a market economy rather than a professional service.

Christ has called us to teach the truth in love. This command embraces the objective truth of morality, the free exercise of conscience, and the use of compassion when dealing with patients who make bad choices of conscience. If Dr. Hardt would have included in his definition of conscience that it is rooted in objective moral truth, this conference would have beautifully encompassed the entirety of Catholic truth. However, perhaps the presenters at this conference gave their audience all the truth they could handle.

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Veritatis SplendorThe flagship document of fromtheabbey.com, this document lays out the renewal of moral theology recommended by the Second Vatican Council. Pope John Paul II exposes errors in moral thought and guides us toward the path of authentic moral living by participating in God’s plan for our lives. $6.64

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ACOG’s Definition of Conscience and Good Medical Practice

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:20:00 +0000

We have been examining the definition of conscience forwarded by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) Ethics Committee and the consequences of taking this definition to its logical conclusion. If one may forgive a medical ethics committee for not being moral theologians, the consequences their statement has on medical practice is perhaps less forgivable. Even the committee’s view of the medical profession is a dangerous paradigm shift rooted in an anemic materialistic philosophy. Not only does this philosophy endanger individual rights of conscience it also endangers the quality of health care for all of us.

Traditionally, professionals were highly educated, specifically trained and highly paid to be experts in their field. Their expertise gave them authority and was the foundation for the trust that we placed in them. Trust was strengthened through demonstrated competence and rapport built through a personal but professional relationship. Think back to the days of the private family practice, when the entire family went to the same doctor who knew every member, remembered their past conditions, and sometimes even came up with their own medicinal concoctions for specific ailments.

ACOG promotes a different view of the professional in support of its reformulation of the moral conscience. A professional is a merchant in a capitalist system whose purpose is to provide to the client (no longer called a patient) products and services in the health market. ACOG says, “A second important consideration in evaluating conscientious refusal is the impact such a refusal might have on well-being as the patient perceives it – in particular, the potential for harm” (3) (emphasis added).

This materialistic definition of the professional has a very important but subtle effect on the principle of patient autonomy. Under the traditional understanding of the medical professional, patient autonomy meant that the patient had the power to make final decisions about whether or not to accept extraordinary means of treatment (treatment with little chance of success or with burdens that outweighed their benefits). Such decisions were always to be made after full consultation with medical professionals so the patient could be fully informed of the choices available. However, patient autonomy did not extend to the refusal of ordinary means of treatment, and certainly did not mean that the patient could request any treatment he or she wanted. However, ACOG’s understanding of the professional changes its understanding of patient autonomy. “One of the guiding principles in the practice of medicine is respect for patient autonomy, a principle that holds that persons should be free to choose and act without controlling constraints imposed by others” (3). Theoretically, a client could walk into a doctor’s office and request an amputation – and the doctor would be obligated to perform the operation as long as the patient was convinced it was necessary. I’m sure that no member of ACOG would extend their principle to this ridiculous extent. However, the very fact that they cannot follow the principle to its logical conclusion shows the error of the principle. ACOG’s redefinition of the professional and of patient autonomy strips the professional of his expertise. The doctor has little more authority than the store clerk.

According to ACOG, a patient requesting contraception or even sterilization has the right to receive the desired treatment just because she wants it. The doctor’s role is only to provide the desired service. If contraception and sterilization are against a doctor’s conscience, the doctor must ignore his or her conscience. Many doctors who oppose contraception and sterilization do so because they judge these “treatments” to be medically bad for patients in addition to being morally evil. However, these doctors do not have the right to deny these treatments even on medical grounds. Why? Because social values, the patient’s opinion, and “accepted medical practice” (which is often directed by political and social tides rather than by science) all outweigh professional judgment. Medical judgments are being made by everyone except those who are most qualified (and best paid) to make apply medical knowledge to specific conditions of the patient.

ACOG’s redefinitions of conscience and of the medical professional are dangerous. They give the power to define medical care to capricious social and political influences rather than to the trained professionals. They thus redefine even the ethical standards that traditionally guided the use of the power that medical professionals have over our bodies. “By virtue of entering the profession of medicine, physicians accept a set of moral values – and duties – that are central to medical practice” (3). Traditionally, these “moral values” and duties were expressed through the Hippocratic Oath, derived from a reasoned understanding of the human person and the nature of the healing arts. The Hippocratic Oath bound doctors to protect all human life and dignity, to not take advantage of the intimacy or authority of the patient-doctor relationship, and to do no harm. This oath is rarely taken in medical schools anymore. Today, these “moral values” and duties are defined by ambiguous and shifting social and political influences. Thus, proper medical care includes contraception, sterilization and abortion because these things are socially and politically favored, even though these treatments violate the basic principle of totality and integrity – the principle that states that the goal of medicine is to make sure the body is kept whole and that it is treated as part of the whole person rather than as a machine or an object. Forcing a woman to accept an “unplanned pregnancy” by refusing contraception, sterilization or abortion is now considered doing harm to the patient. Killing a child in the womb is not considered doing harm because “the moral status of the fetus and the obligations that status confers differs widely.” So, if the moral status of blacks or of women were to differed widely in public opinion, the doctor would be morally justified or even obligated to kill blacks or women? Taken to its logical conclusion, ACOG’s logic would say yes.

If it becomes the norm, ACOG’s reasoning will do serious harm to the medical profession and to the care we receive. Making medical care into a commodity market, removing prudential decision making power from trained professionals, allowing patients and society to decide what is or is not acceptable treatment are sure ways to erode our standard of care. Destroying the solid ethical principles that provide checks and balances to the incredible power that doctors hold over life and death and the intimate nature of the patient-doctor relationship is a sure road to abuse. What was ACOG thinking?

Examining the Consequences of ACOG’s Definition of Conscience

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Sat, 03 May 2008 20:51:00 +0000

In the last blog post we examined the definition of conscience promoted by the Committee of Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. When we compare their description to the definition taught by the Catholic Church, we notice that they have many similar points, but one major difference. The definition of conscience proposed by ACOG does not even mention an objective moral law as a norm for conscience. The next logical (and common) question is, so what? This blog article will examine the consequences of understanding conscience according to ACOG’s definition, using the very opinion statement published by that committee. We’ll first explore the committee’s examination of what makes a judgment of conscience valid. We’ll then look at the importance of their implication that the judgment of conscience is not inviolable. Finally we’ll see that their definition of conscience opens the door for tyranny.

Click here to read the first blog article in this series

Click here to read about the Catholic Church’s teaching on conscience at the Abbey

According to ACOG’s definition of conscience, a judgment of conscience is only valid to the extent that

the underlying values “constitute a core component of” one’s identity

the a person has deeply reflected on the issue at hand

the person is likely to feel guilt, shame or loss of self-respect by performing the act in question (2).

Notice once again that all of these conditions for an authentic judgment of conscience are subjective. None of them appeal to an objective norm of right and wrong. The committee on ethics goes on to say that a claim to conscience is not genuine if it is a mask for personal distastes, based on discriminatory attitudes, based on self-interested motives, and influenced by social pressures.

On one hand, these statements seem reasonable. We need to deeply reflect on matters of conscience, make sure our decisions are not being unreasonably influenced by social pressures, biases or distaste and be careful that we are not being selfish. However, the list of qualifications offered by ACOG begs the question, “on what is an authentic judgment of conscience based?” ACOG does not satisfactorily answer this question. They seem to offer these possibilities:

Social considerations

Patient desire

“Professional standards”

Scientific integrity (at least this one appeals to something objective)

Their first basis for a legitimate judgment of conscience seems to contradict their own qualification that an authentic judgment of conscience should not be influenced by social pressure: “In some circumstances respect for conscience must be weighted against respect for particular social values.” The second basis seems to contradict good medical practice – if the moral conscience of the practitioner cannot contradict the wishes of the patient why is thre need for a medical consultant? Medical care simply becomes another consumer-provider market relationship. We’ll talk about the other conditions in a future blog article. However, the first condition is a major concern for this article.

What is the consequence of ACOG’s qualifications for an authentic judgment of conscience? For ACOG, the judgment of one’s conscience is not inviolable. If the moral conscience is not inviolable, neither is our right to form our own character and moral destiny. By ACOG’s own logic, personal integrity must sometimes be sacrificed for social standards. In fact, if conscience is a personal feeling and if a medical professional’s conscience opposes social “moral norms,” “professional standards” or a patient’s desire, it would actually be selfish for a medical professional to follow her conscience! Specificallly, ACOG’s statement says, “Although respect for conscience is a value, it is only a prima facie value, which means it can and should be overridden in the interest of other moral obligations that outweigh it in a given circumstance” (2). In one statement, ACOG has relegated judgments of conscience to just one value among many, and must be subverted by moral norms imposed – not by objective truth but by social and “professional” norms created by those in power!

The imposition of a moral choice on an individual conscience (not to be confused with the attempt to rationally convince someone of the rightness of a moral decision) is called tyranny. If ACOG’s definition is widely accepted, the individual right to form is own character and determine his own destiny will be usurped by those in social and political power. If conscience must be weighed against social values, then society controls the individual. ACOG itself proposes certain moral assumptions that they claim must be accepted (based on what?). The most egregious include their assumption that because the life of an unborn baby is “debated,” it can not be a professional consideration and that the life of the mother must always be placed above the life of the fetus (as if one life should be valued over another).

Our experience of the last century has revealed the fickleness of social standards. Society bases its standards on political majority, media propaganda, and immediate self-interest. For this reason, philosophers from Plato to Saint Thomas Aquinas to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson have stressed the need for guidance of objective standards that transcend the whims of the people (Jefferson did not believe these standards should be enforced by the federal government, but he did believe they needed to be in place). According to ACOG’s arguemnt, the personal conscience of the abolitionist should have been sacrificed to the social standard that accepted slavery. The German dissenter during Hitler’s reign should have been silenced in the face of the social standard that accepted the values of the Third Reich.

By defining conscience only as a personal judgment without any reference to an objective moral law, ACOG robs the moral conscience of its importance and purpose. ACOG then subverts moral conscience even further by subordinating it to the whims of society and those in power who set medical professional standards.

An Examination of ACOG’s Definition of Conscience

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:29:00 +0000

In November, 2007, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Committee on Ethics wrote Committee Opinion Number 385, “The Limits of Conscientious Refusal in Reproductive Medicine.” In this opinion, the Committee on Ethics undertook to define conscience, and then to place limitations based on this definition on when a health care provider can refuse to provide “treatment” based on conscientious objection.

Their definition of conscience runs like this: Conscience has been defined as the private, constant, ethically attuned part of the human character. It operates as an internal sanction that comes into play through critical reflection about a certain action or inaction. The committee also says, “Ethical decision making in medicine often touches on individual’s deepest identity-conferring beliefs about the nature and meaning of creating and sustaining life.” They stress the relationship between conscience and personal integrity: “According to this definition, not to act in accordance with one’s conscience is to betray oneself – to risk personal wholeness or identity.”

There are some good points of this definition.

The Committee on Ethics seems to respect the conscience and to give it appropriate weight of importance, especially in its acknowledgement that following one’s conscience is a key part of “personal wholeness or identity.”
Conscience is a key part of the human character. The choices that we make define our character, and our conscience helps us make those decisions and is also formed by those decisions as part of our character.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says about conscience, “Moral conscience, present at the heart of the person, enjoins him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil. It also judges particular choices, approving those that are good and denouncing those that are evil” (CCC 1777). That sounds pretty close to the “intenral sanction” in the ACOG definition.
The Catechism also says, “Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (CCC 1778). That sounds close to “. . . that comes into play through critical reflection about a certain action or inaction.” In fact, this is part of the definition of conscience that many Catholics ignore today. Conscience is a critical reflection – an exercise of reason. It is not just a “little voice” that tells us what is right and wrong, although the Holy Spirit certainly speaks to our conscience, and part of our conscience is made up of synderesis, the natural moral law that is an inherent part of human nature and is therefore obvious to every human being. However, the primary function of conscience is moral reasoning.
Finally, the CCC says, “His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary” (1776). This aspect of conscience will actually compose the central argument of the ACOG statement on the limitations of conscience. It is true that the conscience is an intensely personal aspect of the human character. It resides in the heart, the center of our being, where it pulls together all of our human faculties and where our personality meets the Holy Spirit.

The ACOG Committee gets part of the definition of conscience correct, and that gives their statement a certain weight of authenticity. However, their definition omits a crucial aspect of conscience. One cannot speak of conscience as a process of moral reasoning without acknowledging objective truth. What is there to reason about if objective truth does not exist? The Catechism of the Catholic Church repeatedly stresses the relationship between moral conscience and the objective moral law:

“Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. . . . For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God” (CCC 1776)
“It bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to the supreme Good to which the human person is drawn, and it welcomes the commandments” (CCC 1777).
“It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law” (CCC 1778).
“Conscience is a law of the mind; yet [Christians] would not grant that it is nothing more” (CCC 1778).

The ACOG Committee on Ethics completely ignores the objective moral law in their definition of conscience. To them, the personal nature of conscience naturally means that conscience is private and subjective.

The consequences of this mistaken definition of conscience are striking, even in the conclusions the Committee on Ethics draws in this opinion.

The authenticity of conscience can be assessed through inquiry into 1) the extent to which the underlyling values asserted constitute a core component of a provider’s identity, 2) the depth of the provider’s reflection on the issue at hand, and 3) the likelihood that the provider will experience guilt, shame or loss of self-respect by performing the act in question. It is the genuine claim of conscience that is considered next, in the context of the values that guide ethical health care.

Notice that all three of these earmarks of “authentic claims to conscience” are completely subjective. By relegating the claims of conscience to personal and subjective decisions, the Committee on Ethics can summarily dismiss these claims – which is exactly what they do in the rest of the opinion, as we shall see in the next post.

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