Communism, as anti-religious totalitarianism, threatens the catholic church in ways facism and other barbaric states don't. If the nazis ruled the world, there would still be a pope.
The catholic church has a genocide problem. It has repeatedly failed to intervene in genocides in countries with large catholic populations.
Here is an NPR report on the catholic church and Rowanda. One priest killed hundreds who sought sanctuary at his church. He was working as a priest in Rome when they caught him. The cardinal of rowanda refuses to admit any wrong doing by catholic priests even though some catholic priests were found guilty by courts.
The catholic church prefers to fudge rather than face difficult truths.
I thought Jeanne got that just right. Of course what Ratzsinger did by joining the Hitler Youth, and later serving in a unit guarding slave laborers from Dachau is forgivable -- he was very young, he would heve been in great danger had he publicly resisted, it is unreasonable to hold his actions at that age and under those circumstances against him. Certainly that's true, but to say something is forgiveable is to say that it has to be forgiven. He had a choice, he could have resisted, and he didn't.
It's okay that he didn't resist, but it is unacceptable for him now not to recognize and admit that he should have resisted -- that resisting was the only moral choice for him to make, and that his failure to resist was, in fact, a genuine moral failure.
Is it really a genuine moral failure, though? Bear with me here -- saying it's a genuine moral failure not to have resisted means that, in Catholic terms, it was a sin to be drafted and not to desert (or conscientiously object, or something).
That seems like an overly strong statement; morally praiseworthy, certainly, to refuse as a child to join the HJ, and the sort of thing that should be encouraged... but as a moral obligation? I'm just not as sure; martyrdom isn't usually a moral obligation, and Christianity has been able to reconcile itself well with, say, the existence of professional soldiers.
I think it would be fair for Benedict to say 'I wish I had been morally strong enough to resist'; but by saying as Pope, 'I was morally obligated to resist', well, it seems like he would be putting a really unfair burden on all child soldiers, a class we usually treat with sympathy.
Well, I can't speak authoritatively in Catholic terms, given that I'm not Catholic nor any other sort of Christian -- to the extent that 'moral obligation' and 'moral failure' are tightly defined terms, I'm not using them as such because I don't know the definitions.
That said, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that one's moral obligations can, if one is unlucky, include the obligation to be heroic, and most of the population of Germany found themselves in that position in the thirties and forties and did not meet their obligations. (I do not mean by this to in any way give the impression that I successfully live up to my own moral standards, or that I think I would have done any better than the average Nazi-era German in their place.) That was what struck me as the core of the Schindler's List story: that Schindler didn't do anything that any decent, ordinary person in his place shouldn't have felt obliged to do, he just found himself in a place where the obligation of a decent, ordinary person was to be a hero.
Ratzinger wasn't a hero. Most of us aren't, and so it's perfectly forgivable that he wasn't. I still don't approve of his failure to recognize and admit that he should have been.
LizardBreath is right. Sometimes moral obligations can require people to do things they don't have the capacity to do.
Really? That seems.... unsportsmanlike, joe o. Any examples -- I've heard lines like this advanced before, but it's a fairly commonplace notion that if you can't do something, you aren't morally liable for doing something -- ?
My own intuitions here lead me to think that there's just not a bare duty to perform a heroic action.
Any examples -- I've heard lines like this advanced before, but it's a fairly commonplace notion that if you can't do something, you aren't morally liable for doing something -- ?
From my point of view, you've got an equivocal sense of "can't" in this sentence.
There are things that you can't do because they simply aren't possible -- those, you are not morally obligated to do. I don't have a moral obligation to have prevented the civilian deaths caused by the war in Iraq, because there isn't anything I could have done that would have prevented those deaths. (I may have a moral obligation to have done more than I did to help prevent them, but I don't have a moral obligation to have successfully prevented them -- success was not within my power to command.)
There are also things you 'can't' do because you aren't strong enough or brave enough to choose to do them, despite the fact that the choice is physically possible. You're still morally on the hook for those -- your failure may be understandable and easy to forgive, but if the right choice was possible and you did not make it out of weakness or cowardice, it is still a failure that needs forgiveness.
Most people don't have the capacity to stand up to peer pressure and do the right thing in a situation like Nazi Germany. They still have a moral obligation.
I am pretty conformist. That's ok when society isn't evil. But when you live in an evil society being conformist is wrong.
I think a good way to think about the two versions of 'can' at issue here is by thinking of irresistible temptation. If you find something irresistibly tempting that may mean that in some sense you can't help doing it. But most of us wouldn't think that that eliminates your moral responsibility for it, if it's morally wrong. (Perhaps it mitigates the moral responsibility somewhat, but it doesn't completely eliminate it.)
I think Jeanne (and LB) is mostly right here too. When you succumb to temptation, or are unable to resist pressures of a certain sort, it's important to acknowledge that what you did was wrong.
Many states have experimented with the "irresistible impulse" volitional prong for the insantiy defense. This primarily took place prior to the anti-insanity defense backlash which followed Hinckley. It's my impression that most states have done away with it in their current law, though our reading didn't include any real survey on that. Neither New York nor California allow it.
This is, of course, a note on criminal rather than moral responsibility. And: Hooray, I'm learning things in law school.