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Christopher Hitchens.

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I don’t hear many people claim that pro-lifers in general hate women. I much more frequently hear the claim that male Republican politicians want to restrict women’s rights. It seems at least somewhat more plausible that a small subset of anti-abortion individuals would oppose abortion simply for misogynistic reasons.

I think some of the counter-arguments you raise can be applied here: given that so many male Republican politicians grew up in traditionalist Christian communities, we would expect them to oppose abortion for this reason alone. Still, I know a fair number of women who believe that the majority of male Republicans are incurably sexist, and this reasoning seems too weak to persuade them.

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But, to follow an inferential chain that far, we have to be careful about our definitions. More careful than the definition given here was (with no offense meant to Michael Vassar, since it probably requires one to be more careful than is usually the case for a blog comment). Specifically, I think the idea of “preventing any harm or creating any benefit to any party other than the benefit to the actor of the actor’s values being fulfilled” is not rigorous enough under the circumstances.

If I have your reasoning correct, I think you have a good point in that the idea of “preventing any harm or creating any benefit to any party other than the benefit to the actor of the actor’s values being fulfilled” is basically incoherent on a high enough level of abstraction. But I think that’s a result of that precise formulation being made at a low-level of abstraction, and in an informal context.

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Also, unless you believe in some kind of dignity not related to abilities, this would seem like a very noncentral case of human preferences. A human in lots of pain doesn’t have much more abstract thought than a dog in lots of pain.

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So let me talk vague generalities some more.

The first pole of your continuum was “the philosophy that no one ever sins mortally”. This could technically be stretched to be barely compatible with Catholic teaching but basically no. The critical point here is that it’s clearly dogmatic that we do have the freedom to sin mortally and die in that state. Unless it is backed by special revelation in an individual case, the claim to be certain of one’s own salvation is clearly heretical. (In case you wonder, the reason that was dogmatized was because some Protestants claim saving faith includes such certainty.) In therms of your Hansonian Optimism post that would mean the King is clearly able of doing evil himself. The loophole here is that something possible might still not happen, so we could hope that at the final judgment it turns out nobody actually died in mortal sin. Catholic liturgy occasionally does pray for that result, but it is at best a possibility the other possibility also must be
kept in mind . So universal reconciliation is kinda like the friendly singularity of Catholicism, something we can hope for but not something we can count on. Nobody ever sinning mortally in the first place would go beyond that and I actually haven’t seen a lot of arguments for that position, but technically someone could argue there still is a chance. I’d say that’s too much of a stretch to take serious, but at that point we would be talking practical rationality and a failure in practical rationality is something different from heresy.

The other pole you mentioned would be that mortal sin “excludes, for example, someone who accidentally committed murder by shooting what they thought was a deer but turned out to be a human, but in which everyone else knows, in some little corner of their head, that what they’re doing is wrong”. There is some truth in that, because there are things everyone does know in a little corner of their head to be wrong. And I would be very skeptical of someone claiming never to have done something they somehow knew to be wrong. On the other hand, the ignorance Catholic teaching is talking about is clearly ignorance of the moral law, not of some kind of consequence. Theoretically someone could say contraception being bad is one of the things everyone knows intuitively and that claim wouldn’t be heretical. But it’s actually so dumb I’ve never heard anyone saying it. The closest I’ve seen in real life is that everyone know Catholicism doesn’t like contraception, so dissenting Catholics must somehow be aware of their
double-think. I know this is not true from my experience of once having been a much more liberal Catholic than I am now. But yes, this is something an orthodox Catholic could believe.

So basically the two poles you talked about are out, but there is a large continuum between them that magisterial teaching hasn’t settled. OK, so much for the spectrum that is compatible with Catholicism, now on to what is reasonable.

The whole question hinges on how honest people are about their reported beliefs. So this is the Catholic flavor of the range of essentially identical arguments your post starts out condemning by example. And then I think that rationalization and honestly mistakes both obviously happen and are hard to tell apart in individual cases.

So let me get to your example of threatening atheists with hell. Now it’s a really common trope for atheists to claim that they would convert if the evidence turned out that way. The question whether that is true is pretty much equivalent to the question whether their atheism damns them, because (assuming there actually is a God) this is the difference between invincible and vincible ignorance. I’m pretty sure there are people who are honest about this, even to themselves. For example, most converts don’t report they somehow knew all along but just deceived themselves before their conversion. Plus empirically hell threats don’t seem all that effective. On the other hand, I’m also quite sure that many people on both sides of basically every issue are a lot less open-minded than they fancy themselves to be. So even if there is no sure way to tell the difference in individual cases, it’s clear what the difference is.

To get a little cute here, atheists who actually feel threatened by hell maybe should, because at that point Christianity is enough of a live option for them that they should be investigating it very carefully. Of course it’s not a reliable heuristic, because fear isn’t all rational. Still, atheist complaining about Catholic hell threats seems a bit odd to me, because it seems to signal doubt not only about their beliefs (which is good) but also about the honesty of their own presentation.

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http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/02/abortion-and-premarital-sex.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/09/abortion-when-it-really-is-about-controlling-women.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/10/how-i-lost-faith-in-the-pro-life-movement.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/11/a-response-to-objections-on-my-pro-life-movement-post.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/11/the-battle-over-contraception-in-the-pro-life-movement.html

Also, I really need to write another post on consequentialism.

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Shouldn’t you believe them, if they’re actually smarter than you? This seems to assume they’re wrong, which is kind of cheating, isn’t it?

I mean, when someone tells their child they can’t have all the sweeties, we don’t compare it to a passing Hindu slapping your burger out of your hand.

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