Tainted vaccines: a reply to Copenhagan and Wolfe

It difficult to keep track of all the different hares being started in the debate about the liceity of the COVID-19 vaccines, and this is not an attempt to do so. It is a specific reply to two short treatments of the problem of vaccines developed, tested, or manufactured using cells taken from (or descended from those taken from) an infant who had been killed by abortion.

These treatments are those by Fr. Michael Copenhagen, here, and by Fr Phil Wolfe, here.

The agument

Both priests base their arguments on the duty of returning stolen property. The cells of the aborted infant are clearly not the lawful posession of the institutions or researchers making use of them. As noted here, the degree of use made of these cells in the manufacturing process varies, and these authors appear to be principally addressing the case in which they are used most comprehensively; for the sake of argument let that be the test case. Their claim, then, is that since it is wrong to acquire, use, or benefit from stolen property, then it is wrong to take the vaccine; the seriousness of the wrongdoing is compounded by the kind of theft at issue, one which involves the killing of the victim and a lack of respect for his mortuary remains.

Fr Copenhagan:

The recipient is an immediate participant in the commission of continuous theft of human remains obtained through deliberate killing, their desecration through exploitation and trafficking, as well as ultimate omission to respectfully bury them.

Fr Wolfe:

Human tissue obtained in such a manner is not an object of possession, and can never be an object of possession, irregardless if they are producing vaccines for every disease on Earth. The evil use of fetal tissue for someone’s good cannot justify the situation: it is a screaming violation of justice.

Response to the Argument

1. Is this principle of restitition really at issue? No.

The application of the duty of restitituion to this problem is a surprising one. One might think that, if abortion is morally tantamount to the murder of the innocent, the possession of the victim's mortal remains is the least of the problems one is faced with. It is cetainly true that these remains should be respectfully interred, but the question of restitution as such does not really arise, since it seems extremely unlikely that there are any identifiable near relations who would be willing to receive the stolen property. 

If, again, as I would prefer to say in accordance with the legal tradition of England and Wales, human tissue is never an 'object of possession', and cannot be bought or sold, then the question is not actually one of theft, but simply of the disrespectful taking and using of human issue. This is a moral issue, but if separated from the question of murder, it is not a very serious one. 

Suppose a thief entered my house and collected some living cells of mine from a bandage I had been using, or a hair follicle in my comb, or cheek cells on my toothbrush, and made off with them in order to develop a line of cells in which to breed viruses for research purposes. I should be entitled to complain, certainly, but as violations of my bodily integrity go, it is at the lower end of the scale.

2. Is the duty not to benefit from stolen property absolute? No.

Suppose we conceded to Copenhagan and Wolfe that the problem is one of stolen property, the question then is whether the duty not to benefit from stolen property is absolute. Especially in light of the fact that it is for practical purposes impossible to find anyone to whom restitution could be made in this case, does the fact that an item has been stolen at some time in the past mean that one is prohibited from making use of it today?

The answer is clearly 'no'. It is perfectly true that stolen goods, even when bought in good faith, must be restored to their rightful owner, but this principle is clearly not intended to apply beyond a certain practical limit. The owner of land who finds treasure buried by a highwayman two hundred years ago is not obliged to trace the descendents of the original owners and return it to them. (In another quirk of the law of England and Wales, it actually belongs to the Crown: though not because it had been stolen, just because it was buried with the intention of recovery.) 

The suggestion that, if it is clearly impossible to trace the original owners, then it would be morally impermissible for anyone to benefit from the treasure in any way, is, I'm sorry to say, ludicrous.

It so happens that I recently discovered that the house I have owned for more than a decade was built on land taken into private ownership under the UK Enclosures Act of 1773. I regard this Act, and even more the way it was applied, as thorougly unjust. Does that mean I should not live in it? What should I do to it? Burn it down? I think many Americans and Canadians have an even more pressing problem, occupying land once belonging to native peoples.

An aristocratic English lady who inherited property owned by a religious order until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, before becoming a Catholic, actually brought her problem to the Pope of the time, in a state of some distress. The property was not only stolen, after all, but stolen sacrilegiously and with all manner of circumstantial injustices. He (Leo XIII, I think) told her what anyone endowed with common sense would tell her: calm down! It was a long time ago. [I believe I read this anecdote in Faith and Fortune by Madeleine Beard but I can't lay my hands on my copy right now.]

The Problem with Tainted Vaccines

It was not my wish to minimise the seriousness of abortion in the forgoing remarks. On the contrary, I think that the problem with the argument made by Copenhagan and Wolfe is precisely that it distracts our attention from the real problem, the unspeakable crime of abortion, and focuses it instead on the comparitively minor issue of historic theft. 

It is very surprising that Copenhagan and Wolfe do not focus in the conventional way on the degree of cooperation the potential beneficiaries of the vaccines have with the abortion, the alternatives open to them, and the degree of inconvenience involved in refusing vaccines tainted in this way. I can only assume that their alternative approach is an attempt to circumvent the extremely well-trodden path taken by the Manualist tradition in dealing with such cases, and attempt to create a direct route to connect the end-user of the vaccine with something intrinsically evil.

Since this attempt, in my view, fails, we are forced back to the traditional way of analysing the problem. Clearly the conscientious end-user need not intend any statement of support for abortion by accepting the vaccine, and equally clearly the vaccination is only remotely connected with the original abortion. The question is not, then, a black and white matter of intrinsic evil, of actions which can never be done regardless of the consequences, but one in which the closeness of the connection, the seriousness of the original crime, and the 'inconvenience' (in the traditional terminology) of not using it. Remote material cooperation with evil can be licit if avoiding it is seriously difficult.

It is not out of softness or lack of zeal that our predecessors in the Faith accepted this conclusion. It is the only possible conclusion one can draw. Refusing to do intrinsically evil actions will occasionally require heroism, but it is always possible. Avoiding all cooperation with evil, even remote material cooperation, in simply impossible. I cannot vote, pay taxes, use the internet, open a bank account, or patronise a large shop, without remote material cooperation with evil: abortion, usury, unjust wars, pornography, slave labour, and so on. We must protest, of course, but even our protests can lose their force if we are protesting about everything.

Just to focus on the world of medicine, the case is often raised of benefitting from Nazi experimnents. Much closer to home, however, and more perhaps grist to the Copenhagan and Wolfe mill, we might ask about the work of the 'resurrection men' who for several centuries supplied medical students with subjects for dissention from freshly dug gaves, especially if the hangman ever slackened in his work. The whole of modern medicine is based on the knowledge built up on the basis of the study of these unfortunates. The very pervasiveness of the problem, however, brings its own, unfortunate, solution. Not benefitting from this work is impossible, and we are not obliged to do the impossible.

The degree of cooperation with abortion involved in using tainted vaccines is greater, and the original crime more serious, than the degree of cooperation with grave-robbing involved in using doctors educated in a body of knowledge based on that crime. Furthermore, avoiding this cooperation is not so comprehensively impossible. This is true and I urge readers to take the issue seriously. Nevertheless, it is clearly not the case that taking the vaccine is intrinsically evil, and its licitness will vary according to the circumstances of the end-user.

On tainted vaccines

Since it may be useful to others, I am publishing her a long email reply to a question I received on this question in the context of the COVID vaccine (with very minor tweaks).

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The use of cell-lines from aborted babies in the development of vaccines is sadly of long standing, so the question has been asked, and answered, before. It is as you say a form of cooperation in evil, but it is ‘material’ rather than ‘formal’, and ‘remote’ rather than ‘proximate’.

 
The first distinction is about whether you intend the evil. If you contribute to an abortion by, saying, driving a woman to the clinic, because you want her to have an abortion, that is formal cooperation, and as serious an any kind of involvement. If you fill the car with fuel, knowing what it is for, but just because it’s you job to fill up cars with fuel, it’s ‘material’ cooperation. That can still be serious, but it is a different category.

Even material cooperation can be ‘proximate’, that is ‘close’: selling a gun to a known murderer just for the money is close cooperation, it brings you very close to the evil. Paying taxes knowing that some of the money will be used for bad purposes, or buying things in a shop whose owners make donations for bad things, is remote cooperation.

We should avoid all cooperation with evil if we can easily do so. We can’t say: we should never cooperate in the smallest way with evil, because that would be impossible. So we make another distinction, about how easy it is to avoid cooperation: between ‘grave’ and ‘slight’ ‘inconvenience’. Grave inconvenience is when, say, your job, and perhaps the welfare of family members, is put in jeopardy.

Regardless of the level of inconvenience, formal cooperation in mortal sin is always wrong, because it is itself mortal sin. By intending the sin, we make it our own.

With material cooperation, the closeness tells us the level of inconvenience one should be prepared to suffer. One can’t be exact here, but remote material cooperation does not require us to suffer grave inconvenience. Instead one should balance the good to be gained against the evil of the cooperation.

You’d find all this in any textbook of moral theology from the old days, and indeed orthodox ones from today.

It’s for you to decide how much ‘inconvenience’ changing your job would be, but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has in the past said that the level of cooperation in evil represented by being vaccinated with a vaccine developed from this cell-line is sufficiently remote to allow people to take it in order to secure the good of immunity from a serious disease, but they urged people to protest. It’s not nothing. The Bishops I think have in fact protested.

It is a question for each individual how important the good of immunity is in itself. Your question though is also about administering the programme of giving the vaccine, so the question is about the good, to you and others, of this particular job.

The old text books used an example of a Catholic type-setter who found himself being asked to set type for a pornographic book. If his family depended on his income, he should look for another job before leaving the present one. In other words, he can put up with this level of cooperation in evil at least in the short term. Whether it is possible to escape even in the longer term depends on other things. Are there any jobs where we will not be asked to cooperate in this kind of thing, that we can actually get? Certainly, there are fewer than there used to be.

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The major magisterial document on the issue is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's Instruction Dignitatis Personae (2008).

Some useful information was included in an article in the Irish Catholic by Dr Helen Watt (she comes to very much the same conclusion as I do):

It needs to be said at the outset that foetal cell-lines are not the same as actual foetal parts or tissue. Such tissue was itself sourced from historical abortions: a horrifying practice involving close complicity with those performing the abortion. The tissue was then used many years ago to make various cell-lines that circulate in labs today and are used in developing some vaccines. Although in the case of the HEK 293 cell-line there is some possibility that it may have come from a miscarriage, I will assume that this cell-line too originated, as seems all too likely, from a deliberate abortion.
Foetal cell-lines are developed from the original cells or tissue: they do not include any cells of the unborn child. It is also worth noting that where they are used for vaccines, these cell-lines are used not as intended ingredients (even if some fragments of cells remain) but to prepare the vaccine in or e.g. to test it on.
The Covid-19 vaccine candidates range from those that did not involve foetal cells at any stage (for example, CureVac), to those that used foetal cells at every stage: design, testing and production (for example, Astra-Zeneca). Other vaccines again (for example, Pfizer) do not use a foetal cell-line in ongoing production, but did use one in confirmatory tests.

Talk on consent and sex education

Response to George Weigel in The Tablet

I wrote this in early November 2012 as a guest post on The Tablet's blog. It is no longer available there so I re-post it here.

Weigal had written an article for The Tablet replying to an earlier one by John Haldane. I discuss these articles here.

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George Weigal balances his critique of Catholic ‘progressives’ with hard words aimed at Catholic ‘traditionalists’: between us, he says, we represent ‘the tired alternatives of the past 40-plus years [which] have clearly run their course’. Weigal should look in the mirror: his aggressive neo-conservatism (a conservativism without continuity with the past), which he embraced with all the zeal of a convert after his earlier career as a liberal firebrand, has been just as much a fixture of the post-conciliar debate as liberalism and traditionalism. Perhaps neo-conservatism has run its course as well.

Traditionalism has always been the underdog in this debate, and Weigal’s characterisation of ‘nostalgic traditionalism’ in terms of ‘maniples, lace, and Latin liturgies’, wanting to ‘tighten the constraints’ of ‘Counter-Reformation Catholicism’, demonstrates near-perfect ignorance of the movement as well as a lack of charity, both personal and intellectual.

It is not clear what Weigal means by saying that Liberalism and Traditionalism are ‘caught’ in a moment of history, but his own neo-conservatism rejects the conservative voices of the recent past—Ottaviani, Gerrigou-Langrange, Pope Pius XI—just as must as the progressive voices of the present, and is trapped in a narrow range of time as well as of opinion. Pope Benedict XVI’s condemnation of ‘the hermeneutic of rupture’ was as much a body-blow to them as to progressives. Such is the distaste for the past in this movement that Thomas Aquinas College, described by Weigal as ‘one of the jewels in the crown of higher education in the United States,’[1] actually excludes history from its curriculum. Readers should pause and let that astonishing fact sink in a little.

A knowledge of history, of course, is incompatible with the Ultramontanism, of mid-19th Century vintage, which is a central plank of this neo-conservatism. The rejection of Ultramontanism is something which liberal and traditionalist Catholics can agree upon, and although we may jokingly call it ‘the Spirit of Vatican I’, that Council was a disappointment to the more extreme ultramontanists, today as in 1870, who tend to gloss over the important range of authority attributable to papal pronouncements made ex cathedra, in the exercise of their teaching office, on prudential matters, as private doctors, and over breakfast to their friends.

Bl. John XXIII, Weigal tells us, wanted to establish a ‘new way of being Catholic’. If, as Weigal implies, this included a rejection of the Latin liturgy, he needs to explain away good Pope John’s emphatic insistence on it in his Apostolic Constitution ‘Veterum Sapientia’, promulgated the very year the Second Vatican Council met, 1962. In light of Pope John’s condemnation of those anyone who ‘writes against the use of Latin’ in the liturgy, Weigal’s views might have earned him a spell in the papal dungeon.

Weigal’s phrase ‘evangelical Catholicism’ could be an apt description of what Bl. Pope John XXIII had in mind, but it was not an evangelism in discontinuity with the past. The liturgical concerns of traditionlists are in fact echoed persistently by the post-Conciliar popes. Most obviously, there is the problem that if you condemn the past, including the liturgical past, you implicitly condemn yourself: as Pope Benedict wrote, before his election, by such a policy the Church is ‘calling its very being into question’.

Secondly, the ancient liturgy has positive evangelical value. In 1964 Pope Paul VI warned religious superiors that if they abandoned the sung Latin Office, they would lose vocations,[2] a warning whose prescience is now evident. Why this might be so was explained by Bl. John Paul II, who praised the liturgical continuity preserved in the Eastern churches: ‘Today we often feel ourselves prisoners of the present. It is as though man had lost his perception of belonging to a history which precedes and follows him.’[3] Even more important, the liturgy of the East, like that of the Western past, is something whose appeal goes beyond just the intellect. Bl. John Paul II went on: ‘The lengthy duration of the celebrations, the repeated invocations, everything expresses gradual identification with the mystery celebrated with one’s whole person.’[4]

This point is taken up and applied to liturgy in general by the Instruction Liturgiam authenticam. Words are not enough, particularly today: indeed, as Pope Paul noted, ‘Modern man is sated by talk’[5]

The power of the ancient liturgy to move hearts, as well as minds, is increasingly acknowledged by liberal thinkers, as well as traditionalists, as the recent lecture of Prof. Tina Beattie made clear: she wrote

‘Today, the theology and liturgy of the Catholic Church is less ‘cluttered,’ less mystical, and less comprehensive in its spiritual scope. Its tight, clear focus is far more ‘rational’ but far less whole.’

This is not, in fact, an isolated case. Members of what we might call the ‘Pickstock school’ has combined a recognition of the value of the ancient liturgy with a number of positions more at home in theological liberalism than traditionalism. We can argue about those other positions, naturally: the point here is simply that the traditional liturgy has come back into the debate as a live option.

Again, the division between traditionalists and conservatives, once neuralgic, is being broken down by a new generation of scholars and seminarians who are willing to consider the question of the liturgy, and the associated theological issues, on their merits, particularly in the light of Pope Benedict’s writings. It is George Weigal, in fact, who appears to be stuck in the past, a past in which an attack on traditionalism was a compulsory element in any conservative argument, to avoid accusations of ‘disobedience to Vatican II’.

If Weigal wants to know how far, in fact, we have moved on, he should spend a little time with the seminarians, not only of the Traditional Orders, but of the secular seminaries of England and Wales, and America, and ask them what they think of the Extraordinary Form. He will perhaps be shocked to discover how many are planning to say it themselves when they are ordained. This is the future, Professor Weigal: wake up and smell the coffee.

[1] Address to Thomas Aquinas College, 2006
[2] Apostolic Letter, ‘Sacrificium Laudis’, 1964.
[3] Apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen (1995) 8
[4] Orientale Lumen 11
[5] Evangelii Nuntiandi 42

Worries about Chesterton

This is a 'book review' I wrote in 2011 for the now-defunct 'Faith in the Home'. Chesterton's influence in the Church continues and I thought it would be good to put this out there somewhere.

‘Orthodoxy’ by G.K. Chesterton (first published 1908; Baronius Press edition, 2006) pp181 

Review by Joseph Shaw

It’s not often I review a book which has been published for more than a century, but at this time of rising Chestertonian revivalism, with Chesterton studies, Chesterton institutes, and reprints and references constantly appearing, it is as well to take stock of what is going on on planet ‘GCK’. Contrary to my own expectations, I am not very enthusiastic about what I see. Rather than trying to give a balanced assessment of GKC’s overall work, which would be a monumental task, let me list some of my misgivings, based on this one work.

Swinburne on sexual morality

The extraordinary and unprofessional reaction to Prof Richard Swinburne's paper at the SCP Midwest conference just over a week ago stimulates me to want to do what a lot of people appear to think should not be done: to engage with the issues Swinburne raises, and the arguments of his paper, philosophically. In a rather brief form, I'm going to do that here.

Swinburne divides moral principles into different categories, which we can call the precepts of Natural Law, and precepts of Divine Law. The latter are only binding because God has commanded them; the former are part of the nature of things, necessary moral truths as they apply to the circumstances of the world we live in. This distinction is common to Aquinas and Scotus, but Scotus puts more of the familiar moral principles of the Decalogue into the category of Divine Law, saying that (a) God had good reason to command what he did, but also that (b) God could have commanded differently, even without changing physical creation. Thus, whereas a Thomist might think that the obligation to honour our parents might work rather differently if human nature was such that we never knew who our parents are (and were born like turtles, out of eggs buried on the beach), a Thomst does not think that God could have told us to ignore our parents given how humans actually grow up. A Scotist thinks that all the precepts of the 'Second Tablet of the Law', from 4th to 10th Commandments (on the Latin/Catholic numbering), could have been different if God had so willed, even given human nature as it is.

Review of Francis Kamm, The Moral Target, in the Philosophical Quarterly

In this review I give a brief critique of Frances Kamm's reliance on ethical intuitions in her discussions.

It concludes:

The untangling of such confusions and distortions is not the work of sociologists, but of philosophers. It means that, rather than take for granted each intuition in a train of argument, we must take up the task of analysing, explaining, clarifying and systematizing our moral thinking, and setting our intuitions into some historical context. Given the audience of a piece of work, it can be perfectly reasonable to take certain assumptions for granted. On the other hand, ‘this seems right’ is seldom a sufficient reason to prefer one option to another, when anything important is at stake.
The whole review can be read here.

In response to the Beattie petition on the Polish Abortion Law

Introduction

An ‘Open Letter’ or petition has been publicised calling on the Catholic Bishops of Poland to withdraw their support for a legislative initiative to criminalise all abortion. The signatures are arranged in alphabetical order, but the second name, Tina Beattie, Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton, is one of the very few which will be widely recognised, and it will be convenient to refer to the document as ‘the Beattie Petition’. The text, purporting to come from signatories who ‘respect the Church’s moral stance against abortion’, is a disgraceful, but wholly unsuccessful, attempt to justify a failure to protect the unborn. It’s central contention, that abortion is not always an act of injustice towards innocent life deserving of legal protection, cannot overcome, and only ignore, Pope St John Paul II’s powerful declaration the Church’s infallible teaching on abortion, in his 1995 Encyclical Evanglium vitae §57:

Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.

Nuns in the Congo: non-authoritative, but true

The Pope referred to the famous case of the 'Nuns in the Congo' in the latest aeroplane interview. The case is about nuns who, fearing rape, take some kind of contraceptive pill. Pope Francis' exact purpose in making the reference was unclear, but not nearly unclear enough for the Vatican spokesman Fr Lombardi, who relived his triumphs in obscuring the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI on the dangers of condoms for people with AIDS, and in throwing sand into the eyes of everyone trying to make sense of Pope Benedict's remarks about male prostitutes using condoms.

In the meantime, Sandro Magister seems to have uncovered the history of the 'Nuns in the Congo' discussion, which wasn't what pretty well everyone had assumed up to now, claiming that Pope Paul VI said nothing on the subject. Rather, it had simply been discussed by some theologians under Pope John XXIII.

Being a moral philosopher rather than a historian or, for that matter, a mind-reader, I think the contribution I can best make here is to explain why the Nuns in the Congo case is important, regardless of whether Pope Paul VI or any other pope authorised any ruling about it.

The narrative of victimhood: transsexuality

Fallon Fox, born a man, competes against women in
Mixed Martial Arts, and does pretty well...

I've just noted on my other blog that living as a transsexual has been categorised by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as incompatible with the Faith. This is about the argument in favour of tolerating or promoting this lifestyle.

The transsexual phenomenon is not entirely new, but it is taking on a new form and become a cause celebre with astonishing speed. From a common-sense point of view it seems sheer lunacy: people can now simply claim to be the sex opposite to that indicated by their biology, and have this assertion officially recognised, with or without any medical diagnosis or intervention (not that either would make any real difference).

Conference on Human Nature

Conference on Saturday 3rd May

Human Nature: Biology, Ethics and Theology

With Rev Prof Nicanor Austriaco OP
Associate Professor, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Providence College
Visiting Research Fellow, Anscombe Bioethics Centre

Fr Austriaco will present two papers on recovering natural inclinations and disinclinations in biological and ethical discourse, looking at how biological dis/inclinations relate to the Virtues, Natural Law and Original Sin.

Respondents
Dr Joost Banneke (Clinical Psychology) 
Rev Dr Robert Gay OP (Biology, Bioethics)
Dr Simon Kolstoe (Biomedical Chemistry, Research Ethics)
Rev Dr Richard Conrad OP (Chemistry, Dogmatic Theology)

10.30-4pm, at Blackfriars Hall OX1 3LY

Please register online HERE.
Or via admin@bioethics.org.uk / 01865 610212

Registration is £10 (includes lunch)

A paradox of Utilitarian thinking: the uselessness of terror bombing

Update: another book on this subject, looking at a wider range of bombing campaigns, comes to the same conclusion: Bombing to Win by by Robert A. Pape

It is a fact that, in principle, Utilitarianism cannot be self-defeating. Since it does not specify a particular strategy or set of means to achieve its goal (the greatest possible good), any strategy or set of means which failed would be rejected.

In practice, Utilitarian agents are self-defeating with depressing regularity. The most powerful and ruthless people who seek some good regardless of the constraints of common-sense morality seem almost always to end up creating far more harm than good - even in their own terms. No one could be more calculating and unimpeded in pursuit of a goal than the great dictators of the last couple of centuries, but, despite the oceans of blood they spilt, their imperial or ideological projects came, in the end, to nothing. In some cases they had thoroughly misguided goals; in others, their disregard for conventional morality created a reaction which eventually defeated them. Both show the dangers of Utilitarianism in practice: it encourages the idea they you can dream up your own vision of the good and then promote it with complete disregard for the collateral damage - having worked out first, to your own satisfaction, that this damage will be less than the good you will bring about. Such calculations are invitations to self-delusion, not to say megalomania.

One enduring debate among historians is the value, or lack of it, of one of the greatest crimes committed by the Allies in the 2nd World War, of conventional area bombing. I was interested to see a new book on the subject, which concludes that the huge resources devoted to this would have been better used elsewhere, from the point of view of winning the war as quickly as possible: that is to say, even leaving aside the horrendous carnage it created of non-combatants.

The case of the nuclear bombing of Japan is even more controversial as to its effectiveness, though even more straightforwardly criminal in its targeting of civilians.

Here are some quotations from the Economist's review.

The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945. By Richard Overy. Allen Lane; 852 pages; £30.

The failure of Germany’s first big bombing campaign against Britain, following the allies’ unexpectedly sudden collapse in France in 1940, was in some ways typical of what came later in confused ends and inadequate means. Two things above all ensured that all the early attempts at strategic bombing (whether by the Germans, the British or the hopelessly ill-equipped Italians) were far less effective than anyone had expected.

The first was the near impossibility, given the technology then available, of landing a meaningful concentration of bombs near any target other than a large city; in 1941 only one in ten Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers got within five miles of their targets in the Ruhr valley. The second was the unforeseen resilience of well-organised societies to withstand bombing without suffering either moral or economic collapse. Shelter was found for people who had lost their homes, repairs to infrastructure were quickly made and industrial production temporarily shifted if necessary. Although more than 40,000 people died during the eight months of the Blitz and in London about 1m homes were damaged or destroyed, there were no riots and war production increased steadily. People suffered, but the majority got used to it.

Despite this experience, Britain’s Bomber Command under the brutally single- minded Arthur Harris, never doubted that “area bombing”, a euphemism for attacking cities indiscriminately. And he never lost his belief that if you killed enough German workers you would win the war. Yet even when the RAF in 1942, closely followed by the US Army Air Force, began to put together the famous “thousand bomber” raids that were supposed to “knock Germany out of the war”, German war production continued to ramp up and the Nazi regime never came remotely close to losing political control.

...

Mr Overy’s final verdict, however, is damning. He argues that “strategic bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principle assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations.” Nor has it left any real legacy. It was rapidly rendered redundant by the overwhelming but (since 1945 at least) unusable destructive power of nuclear weapons. More recently, bombing has come full circle. Precision-guided munitions now allow Western air forces to hit military targets while leaving even nearby civilians often largely unscathed—the precise opposite of what prevailed during the second world war.

Carts and Horses in John Haldane

The Philosophical Quarterly has just published my review of John Haldane's Reasonable Faith; they kindly inform me that I can make it available to all on-line if I pay them £3,000. Thanks, but no thanks.

Here, nevertheless, is a teaser quote.

Haldane notes the description of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, as suggesting that we should look again at notions of personal identity and post-mortem survival which allow temporal gaps in existence (p7). Haldane goes on to explore these issues in Chapter 11 (pp145-159). What is puzzling is the suggestion that we take as a starting point in philosophy a datum—if it is a datum—of Revelation. The standard Thomist approach is that philosophy deals with matters of Natural Reason, leaving Revelation to Theology: Philosophy is by definition the exercise of reason without the explicit aid of Revelation, and its role is to establish the conceptual ‘Nature’ which is perfected by Grace. Christian Philosophers have the task of showing the coherence of Christian beliefs without appeal to their supernatural origins, for the benefit of critics who do not accept those origins, and in areas such as Metaphysics and Mind it engages at ground level with non-Christian thought. Thomists might add further that the correct understanding of Scripture requires a complete theological education and the supernatural virtue of Faith. From this perspective, the argument that, since in contemporary philosophy more or less anything can spark a philosophically fruitful debate, we might as well raid the pages of the Christian Scriptures, is not altogether flattering, and may be imprudent. For those who take the Christian contribution to Philosophy seriously, Scripture is not just one more possible source of interesting ideas, along with Dostoyevsky or the study of the neurology of autism.

"Reasonable Faith. By JOHN HALDANE. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Ppx + 197. Price £25.99.)"
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 63, Issue 253, start page 830 

Infanticide: coming to a hospital near you

The Bones has a good post about the way the eugenicists float 'shocking' ideas, wait for the fuss to die down, and then impose the reality. They get people used to the idea of contraception, abortion, screening for the disabled, euthanasia, by endless debate, and their chums in the media are always on hand to keep the defenders of the status quo on the back foot. The matter is never settled until they get their way; when that happens, suddenly it is very settled indeed, one might think it was handed down from the Almighty, the fuss they make about 'attacks on abortion rights' and so on.

This procedure is aided enormously if the response of Catholics is not to oppose the evil with arguments from Natural Law, but to beg to be allowed to shelter Catholic institutions and Catholic medics from having anything to do with it. The progressives are always willing to make this concession to win the main issue, after which they can remove our precious protections at their leisure. This has happened so often now it would be tedious to list the cases, but it started with Cardinal Heenan reining in opponents of abortion in exchange for a 'conscience clause' which in the long term has proved totally worthless.

There is another aspect of the progressive strategy which is worth highlighting. The Catholic Medical Quarterly has just published a short paper of mine, which the editor commissioned, on the widely used medical textbook by Beauchamp & Childress. This was first published in 1979, and is now in its fifth edition. It is a truly appalling book, a disgrace to academia, deriving not from serious moral philosophers but a self-regarding group of 'applied ethics' people who find it very easy to get grants and sell books without actually thinking anything through clearly.

The Catholic Medical Quarterly very decently lets people download pds of articles, and you can read mine here. One very striking thing about the Beauchamp and Childress approach is that they encourage medics to view every decision as a matter of balancing considerations. Not, as you might imagine, medical pros and cons to a proposed treatment, or anything as sensible as that, but 'on the one hand, Kantian ethics would suggest option (a); on the other, the patient wants (b); and then again my feeling is that we should go for (c).' This describes what may indeed be the reasoning of a medic with absolutely no ethical formation; Beauchamp and Childress want to keep medics that way, even after they've done a course in 'medical ethics'. Instead of making a decision on the basis of a coherent account of ethics which is itself subject to rigorous debate, they want medics to balance innumerable such accounts against each other and against inchoate feelings and even social pressure.

The genius of this account is that it can disguise the victory of materialism and utilitarianism indefinitely. One of the most powerful arguments against these theories is that they have extreme implications which are completely implausible. Murder five innocent people to save six? Cause great pain to one to save a large number from pin pricks? Give extra food to an indolent epicure while ignoring the needs of contented paupers? Instead of confronting these cases and concluding that Utilitarianism is simply wrong, Beauchamp and Childress say: keep it in the background, just balance it against your intuitions. So as time goes on, and healthy moral intuitions are undermined by relentless Utilitarian propaganda, not least in medical ethics courses, it can continue its relentless advance. The unthinkability of contraception, abortion, IVF, screening, euthanasia, and infanticide disappear one after the other because it hasn't been made sufficiently clear that the only reason to ignore these traditional moral prohibitions is a moral theory, Utilitarianism, which no sane  person would actually adopt, without massive and arbitrary conditions, in real life.

Non-Directive Counselling: what I have learnt

Last evening I presented one of two papers on NDC at a seminar on the subject organised by the Anscombe Centre, and took part in the discussion. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account of proceedings, or reveal the identities of anyone (I don't know if they'd mind or not), but I will sumarise what I think I learnt from a very interesting evening.

As the seminar was attended by a number of people from counselling organisations (or organisations which do counselling inter alia), as well as a number of moral philosophers, we were able to try in a sustained way to get to grips with each others' angles on the subject. The counsellors (as I might call them for convenience) were naturally not used to the kinds of questions we raised; nor were the philosophers especially well-informed about counselling. The first thing which emerged was that, as far as I could see, the existence of moral problems of the type we were raising had not occurred to the counsellors as a group before (or: before the thing blew up in the Catholic press a few months ago). Handling a counselling session to minimise cooperation with evil, or consent by silence to evil, was not part of their training. As Catholics they naturally had some instincts on these matters, but these things had never been formalised, and although they went into counselling with considerable professional training, ethics from a Catholic point of view did not form part of that. In this, of course, they are in the same boat as doctors, though one might have hoped for something better from organisations with strong links to the Church.

They were able to clarify for us some of the protocols they use and how these relate to the kinds of moral problem which I outlined. The answers to the question 'Can an NDC counsellor volunteer information?' and the question 'Can an NDC counsellor answer a question about his own moral view?' were both a clear 'no': nor would any of the counsellors present allow themselves to break the rules of NDC in an emergency situation.

On the other hand, some of them did say that they would aim to steer the conversation in particular directions, that they looked out for 'pro-life clues' and so on. If some kind of information would make a difference, in the counsellor's judgement, he would steer the client into asking for it.

This might look as though the rules of NDC were being kept in letter but not in spirit, but it also emerged that other organisations, including pro-abortion organisations, would regard the provision of information as not infringing NDC at all. Their approach would be to make sure that the client had a full set of options to consider. The pro-life counsellors would not set out options unasked: one reason for this which was discussed is that if you give pro-life options, it would seem that you had to give options involving abortion as well. Something a bit like a Socratic questioning method, of getting the client to see for herself, and to ask for herself the necessary questions, is used instead.

In addition to this, one counsellor pointed out that it would be impossible for a counsellor not to convey a certain amount about his own preferences by tone of voice, body language and so on. (Thinking about this afterwards, it occurred to me that this was much less the case with counselling over the phone.)

My argument in my paper was to the effect: NDC may well work in some cases, and indeed be the best approach in some cases, or for some of the time in a case, but a counsellor must be ready either to switch into a more interventionist mode of operating, or refer the client on to a more interventionist type of counselling, if the counsellor judges that a good outcome depends upon it. I pointed out in my paper that such a procedure was perfectly normal in ordinary counselling. However, the counsellors present were very resistant to this suggestion, and it is clearly not a way of doing things they are used to.

They used two arguments against it. One was that becoming more interventionist would undermine the rapport with the client. If this were true then it would never bring about a better outcome; but equally if it were true then other counselling organisations, who tell their counsellors to switch into a more interventionist mode when the client is suicidal, would have noticed. And indeed if being interventionist never worked then all the other kinds of therapy, other than NDC, would never work, and that seems rather an extravagant claim.

The other is that any deviation from NDC would be found out and referrals from GPs and the like would dry up. In the case of one counselling group represented at the meeting at least, the organisation's business model depends on strict adherence to the rules for this reason. Against this it should be pointed out that there are other business models: you can advertise and get your clients that way, and non-NDC pro-life counselling groups do just that. More fundamentally, this argument does not look to me like a justification for close material cooperation in a grave evil.

My preliminary conclusion from the discussion is this. One the one hand, despite saying they would never break the NDC rules, and their reluctance to move the client on to other forms of counselling, pro-life NDC counsellors can find ways of getting the client to ask for necessary information, can steer the conversation in a pro-life direction, and so on: so there are more resources for ensuring a good outcome (and avoiding cooperation in evil) than might appear at first.

On the other hand, when push comes to shove, and in the admittedly unlikely case when a word in season would make all the difference, pro-life NDC counsellors will stick to a strict interpretation of the rules and remain silent. I have yet to see a sufficient moral justification for that, but no doubt the debate will continue.

Why I was wrong about Triple Effect

Frances Kamm has proposed something called 'Triple Effect', in which an agent can bring about a desired effect, which is essential for his overall plan, without intending it. She says this shows we can use something as a means which we do not intend. I agreed with her analysis, though I said it should not be called a means of the agent.

Kamm's examples. The party: I will only throw a party if I don't expect there to be a lot of clearing up. I think my guests will do the clearing up for me, so I throw the party on that basis. But I don't intend that they clear up.

Looping Trolley: I can direct a trolley away from one set of people tied to the track only the basis that lives will be saved overall. In fact there are even more people tied to the alternative track. But luckily (?) there is a very fat man tied to the track as well, who will stop the trolley before it gets to these latter people. I can direct the trolley in that direction without intending the squashing of the fat man.

These have some plausibility, particularly the party example (or so it seemed to me), but I have realised that this approach is subject to powerful counterexamples, like this one.

The wicked uncle. My uncle is very rich and very wicked; a whole community is suffering under his exploitative sway. I fancy scratching my finger on the trigger of a loaded gun I am pointing at him, which will obviously go off and kill him. Normally such finger-scratching would be wrong, because the unintended effect of killing an innocent (non-aggressor) would outweigh the good of relieving my itch in this way. But in this case the good consequences of his death far outweigh the badness of the death in itself. So the balance of non-intended consequences is actually positive.

Now this seems absurd, and if we allow this then any action with overall good consequences which violates a deontic constraint (a common-sense moral prohibition like 'don't kill the innocent) could be done with a little morally irrelevant posturing. So the moral structure of deontic constraints would effectively collapse into Consequentialism.

The case is indeed absurd because when I say that the good consequences of the action make it morally possible to do, I am taking cognizance of them in a way which implies that I intend them. One intends things which motivate one to act as one does. The good consequences of the death are motivating me, in part, and I would nit act without them; thus I must be intending the death of the uncle as well, as a means to my intended end.

What I failed to see was that on Kamm's examples the agent must be intending the good foreseen results because they are essential to his plan. If he did not expect them then he'd have to call it off, and he'd better make sure they happen, by adapting the plan if necessary. They are indeed his means, but by the same token they are intended.

This admission also effect another example I came up with: the railway enthusiast. He is so keen on railways that he wants to build one really as an end in itself. Someone points out that railways are dangerous things and people are bound to be killed in accidents in the years after it is built. This seems to rule out the project. Then someone else points out that railways are safer than roads and by shifting traffic away from roads it will have an overall positive effect on the number of accidental deaths. I DID say that the enthusiast can proceed with the building with no intentions about accidental deaths, happy in the knowledge that the balance of unintended consequences is positive. I NOW say that since the improved overall safety is essential to the moral viability of the project he must intend it, if only as a means to the end of building a railway.

Changing my position in this way brings underlines the principle found in many discussions of the Principle of Double Effect, that the good consequences of an action must not flow causally from the bad foreseen side effects. At least, if the bad side effects are such that it would be wrong to intend them, one cannot justify the action on the basis of further, good, effects which flow from them, for to do this is to bring them, and the bad cause of them into one's intentions.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The ethical problems of non-directive counselling

Update: for the latest episode in the story, see here.

There has been a flurry of interest in this topic on the Catholic blogs, since LIFE, the pro-life charity, has got accreditation for its counsellors as conforming to the 'non-directive' style favoured by the secular counselling industry. The hope of the organisation that using non-directive counselling (NDC) will win the organisation acceptance by, and influence in, government, and even funding, is not entirely without foundation. But non-directive counselling is very controversial in Catholic ethics, and I have seen no serious defence of LIFE's stance.

What are the problems?

Practical. 1. It is claimed that non-directive counselling works. The claim is very hard to substantiate since the counsellor normally does not know what the ultimate outcomes are. We can't hold this against the method, but the claim that its effectivness is a knock-down argument in favour of it won't wash either.

2. The suggestion that the alternative to LIFE's NDC is to say to clients what you want them to conclude at the end of the counselling, at the beginning. This is the reverse of the truth. People going to LIFE counsellors know that they are going to a pro-life group - the name rather gives it away. They then get no guidance at all from the counsellor. The alternative is to use a more neutral name, start the counselling very softly-softly, and then introduce some important facts into the discussion: notably what abortion is, what the alternatives are. This is the approach taken by other pro-life groups, and they are just as adamant as LIFE that this approach works.

Psychological. NDC is a horse from the 'values clarification' stable established by Carl Rogers and others. Rogers found that he could get 1950s university students to pull themselves together simply by repeating back to them their own statements. This obviously worked because the students for the most part had very clear, and fairly old-fashioned, values from their upbringing. It has a very different effect on people today who come from a pretty values-free background in the first place. Indeed, it is favoured today as part of a package with the idea that all decisions are equally valid, there are no objective moral principles, and so on, and it is really hard to see why anyone who is not a moral subjectivist would give NDC a second glance.

Funding. James Preece raises the question of why Catholics are being asked to fund LIFE's counselling. This is a good question because NDC counsellors are not supposed to allow their own values to influence their counselling. It follows that pro-life NDC counsellors will be no different, and no better from the point of view of outcomes, than pro-abortion NDC counsellors. Why, then, does LIFE think it is important to expand its band of counsellors? Why not let non-aligned or even pro-abortion groups pay for it? Just let people ring the Samaritans.

Or is LIFE and its supporters hinting that their counsellors are more likely to get pro-life outcomes than others? If that is true, their accreditation for NDC should be taken away.

Moral. It is a principle of moral and civil law that silence implies consent. Silence is one of the 'Nine ways of being an accessory to another's sin' in many examinations of conscience. To speak more formally, it is evidently a way of cooperating materially in evil. Material cooperation can be justified in some cases, but this cooperation is close, not remote, and the evil is extremely grave. The justification would have to take the form of an overwhelming good that would be attained, or evil avoided, by the silence, in relation to the chance of non-silence doing any good.

So this would be justified: stifling one's protest about the brutality of the concentration-camp guard would clearly save many people from serious suffering; voicing it would anyway do no good; and no-one is going to imagine that you approve of the brutality anyway (there is no chance of scandal). At first glance, LIFE's supporters have a mountain to climb to show that LIFE counsellors are in that kind of situation.

So can we have an argument, please?

Another Prussic problem

Alexander Pruss has put forward some very troubling counter-examples to the solution Frances Kamm gives to the 'Loop' case. Since I follow Kamm, at least in outline, these are problem cases for me too.

Rather than summarise all that here readers can see Pruss for themselves. Here is a response - though not, at the moment, a solution.

Case 1. Jim the railway enthusiast is keen to build a railway between two large cities. His motivation is simply that he loves railways. A safety expert tells him, however, that over 50 years there are likely to be 50 deaths on this railway, if built. Jim is sad because this appears to show that it would be wrong to build it: 50 deaths is a high price to pay for his dream of a gleaming new railway. However, the expert quickly adds that the railway will divert traffic from the roads, and since railways are generally safer than roads the number of lives saved will be, say, 55.

Jim is happy again: it seems that these two unintended side-effects of his project don't just cancel each other out, but leaves him with a modest credit balance.

Case 2. Benny the blackmailer tells Jill that unless she kills one person (Charlie) he, Benny, will kill two other people (all these victims are innocent with nothing much to distinguish them). Jill knows it would be wrong to intend the death of an innocent even to save two lives. Instead, she points her gun directly at Charlie's head, and, with the intention of giving her trigger finger some much-needed exercise, pulls the trigger. She knows, of course, that Charlie will be killed as a result of this, but whereas this would normally be an act of terrible recklessness, she knows that the unintended side-effect of Charlie's death will be more than off-set by the saving of the two other innocents.

What we need to bear in mind with Pruss's cases, which are like my Case 2, is that while it seems that in these cases something is going horribly wrong, the plausibility of the reasoning in Case 1 and others like it is perfectly ok. Not just ok, in fact, but it is essential that we are able to off-set side-effects if we are to engage in any large-scale action: government policies on transport, education, health and so on will invariably generate 'winners and losers' and we balance these out to see if the policy is permissible. If we are to stop Jill's line of reasoning we must show that it is different from that of Jim. Case 1 shows that Kamm's original insight ('triple effect') remains correct.

So how are they different?

1. Jim could intend the good results if he wishes; Jill could not, because if she did she would have to intend the evil means to them. Put another way, the good results come from the evil results for Jill, but not for Jim.

2. Jill is acting much more immediately than Jim, on persons she can identify. She is more closely involved in the evil of innocent deaths.

3. The trivial goods Jill and others like her are intending could be achieved in other ways, which do not bring about such drastic harms. We might ask: what is Jills' intention in doing it this way? The answer would be: to take advantage of the favourable balance of unintended side effects available in this exact situation.

I'm not happy with any of these three differences, as the basis for allowing Jim's reasoning and ruling out Jill's.

On 1: Jim could intend the good results, but as stipulated he doesn't. This will often be the case with the leaders of large-scale projects. Again, consider the 'butterfly effect': by turning over in bed, we may cause a hurricane in New Zealand. We don't need to worry, however, because we are just as likely to be preventing a hurricane in New Zealand. We don't need to go to the trouble of intending the good possible results of our careless actions in order to take advantage of their neutral overall effects; we just note (in response to objections) that we aren't making things any worse.

2. It has been noted before that having identifiable victims can have an effect on our intuitions. It surely can't have an effect on the truth of the matter. The identifiable victims in the Jill case partially explains our distaste for her reasoning, but I'm not ready to bite the bullet and say that, therefore, what she does is ok.

3. We might we say: Jill's intention in exercising her trigger finger with a loaded gun pointed at Charlie with the safety catch off is to capture the positive balance of side-effects, which would not be captured in any other way. Similarly, we always adapt our plans in order to avoid disastrous side-effects. If someone tells you that simply by travelling from A to B via C you may spread a deadly disease from C to B, then you don't go via C, you go via D instead. So Jill can exercise her finger with the gun pointed another way, unloaded etc. etc. but if she does that a disastrous result arises: two innocents are killed by Benny. Instead, she gains her trivial good in a way which won't have this disastrous result, but a less disastrous one, that of Charlie dying.

My feeling right now is that there is a moral difference between the cases, but I can't identify a principled explanation for it.

Intending harms: some thoughts

Following the Double Effect conference organised by the Anscombe Centre, I've been thinking about what it means to intend harms. Here are some preliminary thoughts.

There are a range of ways of understanding what constitutes intending a harm, which corresponds to different ways of understanding intention as a whole. A preliminary characterisation of harm would include pain, loss of function, and loss of opportunities for good.

1. An agent intends any harm he knowingly brings about.

2. If an agent intends a physical effect which is a harm to the patient, then he intends the harm which is constituted by that physical effect.

3. If an agent intends a loss of function (etc.) to the patient, then he intends the harm constituted by the loss of function.

4. If an agents intends that the patient by harmfully effected by something, then he intends that harmful effect.

To illustrate:

A. Spraying mosquitoes: Adam sprays an area from an aeroplane to kill disease-carrying mosquitoes, in the knowledge that a small number of people will suffer a painful allergic reaction to the spray.

He intends harm under (1) but under none of the others.

B. Beatrice uses the body of Duncan to cushion the fall of Edith from a ladder. Beatrice intends Duncan to absorb the impact of Edith’s fall, a physical event which is harmful to Duncan.

Beatrice intends harm to Duncan under (1) and (2) but not (3) and (4).

C. Freddie tapes up Georgina’s mouth and nose to prevent her using up oxygen on a stricken submarine.

Freddie intends to harm Georgina under (1), (2) and (3), but not (4)

D. Henry the government official is impervious to requests for help for those suffering from an epidemic. Irene infects him with the disease, in the hope that his own suffering will prompt him to change his policy.

Irene intends to harm Henry under all the definitions.

Counterexamples.

It is easy to show that definition 1 is too wide.

Justin knows he will suffer some pain and stiff limbs after his exercise routine, but he is not motivated by bringing about these harms, he is motivated by the desire to get fit.

Contrary to definition (1), Justin does not intend the harm, since intention is tied to reasons for action and motivation. Which is to say, intending something which brings about a harm is not the same as intending a harm.

It is harder to show if any of the other definitions are too narrow, since here the question is of whether it should be said that what the agents bring about is a harm, or (like Justin’s exercise) that it merely bring a harm about.

Craniotomy: is reducing the size of the baby’s head ipso facto harming the baby, or does it merely bring about harm to the baby?

Fat Man: is using the Fat Man to stop the trolley (to soak up the trolly’s kinetic energy) ipso facto harming him, or does it merely bring a harm about?

In the exercise case, the causation of harm by the agent is direct and inevitable; it is clear that it is not intended, however, since it is clearly besides the point of Justin’s practical reasoning (though it is accepted as a side-effect of what he does): it is neither an end nor a means. In Craniotomy the death of the baby is beside the point in the same way, but the physical modification of the head is not beside the point: it is intended.

I am inclined to say: This bodily modification is not merely a cause of a harm, it is something which is undesirable in the same way that a loss of function is undesireable, that is, in and of itself. I am harmed if my limbs or organs are radically pushed out of shape; it not merely the case that having them radically pushed out of shape will cause me a harm, rather it is a harm to me. If this is right, then definitions 3 and 4 are too narrow.

This is supported by intuitions such as this. If we were to define theft in terms of intentions, then it might be ‘to intend of another the loss of property rightfully his’. The intention of something which will probably lead to a loss of property is not theft: such as taking on a weaker opponent in a game of skill, with a wager. On the other hand the harmful nature of the loss of property does not have to intended: the thief need not intend the victim to suffer grief or want, for example. All the thief needs to intend, to intend a theft, is an objective transfer of goods from the victim to himself. One way of explaining why this is wrong is to say that although the thief may not intend that the victim be harmed in terms of grief or want, taking someone’s goods harms him ipso facto. The thief intends something which is a harm, even if he does not intend the victim’s harm as a separable objective.

Again, we are harmed when cheated, betrayed, or libelled, because those things are bad things when they happen to us. Agents who intend those bad things to happen to others are intending harms to happen to their victims. They may not, in fact, care about the victims’ well being; that may be indifferent to them, whereas they have some other end in view for which cheating and so on is a useful means. Nevertheless, they intend to harm insofar as they intend these bad things to happen to their victims, since these bad things are harms.

Looking at it in this way suggests that a wide definition of harm is needed: harms include not only loss of function, but the compromise of physical or material wellbeing. Causing the loss of wellbeing in this wide sense is not necessarily wrong, but it will normally be wrong if it is intended as an end or a means.