Kavanaugh and McCabe

Summary:

1. Many Americans believe that torture is necessary, to the extent that the benefits outweigh the costs.
2. Reducing people to mere numbers in order that the greatest good for the greatest number is achieved is not acceptable, not matter what the number of people being tortured is, and that this utilitarian approach will only spill over into how we view “the birth of mildly handicapped infants, the treatment of Alzheimer’s patients and the execution of people on death row.”
3. Love must be defined by those things which are NOT love, which are defined as moral absolutes, or love is a completely vague term.
4. The concept of love, if open as to what it DOES mean, must be able to change and evolve due to circumstances which we have not yet encountered, and in doing so, we must look back at how we have defined love and be willing to rewrite what the concept of love means in light of these new circumstances.

Why must we define love by those things which it is not, instead of by those things which it is?

McCabe holds to the idea that it is not “absolutely clear what relationship love is suppose to have to behavior” (14). In this, he is explaining that there are behaviors which, in and of themselves, do not lend themselves to being seen as either good or bad. Without knowing the intentions behind such behaviors, we cannot ever really know if the behavior is good or not. Due to this fact, we may be surprised to find a person who participates in a behavior that many people may view, in and of itself, as a bad behavior. However, if the person actually partaking of the behavior is doing so out of love, then it is not possible to judge that specific instance of the behavior as bad. In this way, we may be surprised to witness certain expressions of love. However, this leaves open the possibility of everything being an expression of love, in which case, the concept of love inevitably becomes vague. To avoid this vagueness, we must state those behaviors which are not loving, leaving the other end of the spectrum, those things which are loving, wide open. Fr. John Kavanaugh draws on Charles Krauthammer’s definition of torture as a “’monstrous evil’” when he explains that if we don’t draw the line saying that all torture is evil, then we will, sooner or later, come to discussions about degrees of evil in situations concerning the sanctity and care of human life itself. He goes on to ask “is there any evil we would not do, to be victorious over evil?” and comments that if we are not able to find one “monstrous evil” which we are not willing to partake of, under any circumstances, then those who we currently find to be evil will undoubtedly succeed “in conquering, not our lands, but our souls.” McCabe draws on many examples of society, and how a society can change, to some extent within itself, without redefining itself, but that any significant changes within the society must cause the society’s structure to change as well. Combining these two points of view, we can see that if we fail at defending ourselves from those who we currently view as evil, our society, through each and every soul in it, will be taken over by them. This can only be seen after the change has taken place, however.

Is there a way for us, as a society, to define what we will deem to be NOT LOVING behaviors? If these behaviors are defined, and our society was to follow through on behaving in a LOVING way, would it be possible to overtake those who do not behave as such without torture? What kind of world would we come to know; one which is still infiltrated with evil or one more utopian than that which we currently know?