Michael Dummett on the Morality of Contraception more

* Forthcoming in the Heythrop Journal. Michael Dummett on the Morality of Contraception John Schwenkler Department of Philosophy, Mount St. Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, Maryland, US schwenkler@msmary.edu In his recent writings, Sir Michael Dummett has reflected twice on the Catholic position on the morality of contraception, focusing his attention especially on Humanae Vitae’s prohibition of the contraceptive use of the birth control pill.1 On examination, Dummett finds this prohibition ‘incoherent’, arguing that its promulgation ‘greatly damaged the respect of the faithful for the Catholic Church’s moral teaching in general’, as well as ‘the integrity of Catholic moral theology’ (Nature and Future, pp. 49-50). Given Dummett’s earlier defense of Paul VI’s reaffirmation of the Church’s traditional position on contraception in Humanae Vitae,2 as well as his forceful criticisms of certain liberalizing tendencies among Catholic theologians and biblical scholars,3 these arguments deserve to be taken seriously, and regarded as coming from a spirit of serious philosophical reflection rather than casual dissent. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that they are based on a misapprehension of what is really behind the position Dummett means to be criticizing, and that when the essentials of that position are clarified the rationale behind it is safe from his objections. We will proceed as follows. In Section I Dummett’s argument is presented. Section II considers in some detail the position on the use of the contraceptive pill put forward in Humanae Vitae, emphasizing how it differs from Dummett’s construal of it, and how this difference undoes the force of his objections. Finally, Section III quickly summarizes the Thomistic case for moral parity between deliberately contraceptive intercourse and other forms of sexual deviancy, suggesting that Dummett’s way of interpreting the traditional teaching on contraception disallows him from acknowledging this parallel. I Professor Dummett’s dissent from the magisterial position on birth control rests on his account of the nature of human acts. For Dummett, the immorality of an act must arise from one of two sources: either the act is one that is intrinsically wrong no matter what motivates it (like giving an innocent man a fatal dose of poison, or dropping an atom bomb on a civilian population); or it is one that is not intrinsically immoral, but is ‘done for an evil purpose’, such as when one gives someone a piece of information in order to humiliate him or prompt him to do something shameful (Nature and Future, p. 51). In this he essentially follows the lead of St. Thomas, who distinguishes the intrinsic nature and intended purpose of an act as its most important characteristics, arguing that ‘the most important of all circumstances is that which effects the act as to its end, namely the why; secondarily, that which affects the substance of the act, that is, what is done’.4 Thus for use of the contraceptive pill to be reasonably proscribed, such use must be shown to be illicit in one of these two respects. Yet Dummett argues that there is no reason to think this could be so: No one supposes that it is intrinsically wrong for a woman to take the Pill, for example for its original purpose of regularizing irregular periods. … Equally, the intention, on the part of a married couple, of reducing the frequency or number of the wife’s pregnancies is, as already noted, recognized by the Church as legitimate and, in appropriate circumstances, praiseworthy. In the ruling of Humanae Vitae, we have therefore a condemnation as morally wrong of an act not intrinsically wrong but held to become wrong when it is done for a particular end, even though that end is likewise not in itself wrong. It is incomprehensible how this could be so; it is impossible to think of a parallel—at least, I have not been able to think of one. Whatever may be thought about the maintenance in the encyclical of the traditional teaching on other methods of contraception, the prohibition on the use of the Pill is indefensible on the basis of moral theology as it has always been previously understood, and throws the moral teaching of the Church into confusion. (Nature and Future, pp. 51-52) It is important to see that Dummett means this objection to apply only to the attempted extension of the Catholic teaching on the older forms of contraception to what he regards as the special case of the contraceptive pill: on his analysis it is because taking the pill cannot reasonably be regarded as an intrinsic wrong in the same way as, say, the use of a ‘barrier’ method of contraception in intercourse that using the pill to contracept should not have been declared wrong even when done with a morally permissible end in view. Thus Dummett’s case against the teaching of Humanae Vitae has the form of a dilemma for its proponents: either use of the contraceptive pill is wrong intrinsically, or it is wrong on certain occasions because of an illicit end; and if neither of these, then it cannot be wrong after all. But the contraceptive pill differs from more traditional forms of contraception in that it is not intrinsically wrong to use it, and clearly it is not always wrong to intend not to have children, so it must not always be wrong to take the pill, even with contraceptive intent. II All this is reasonable so far as it goes, and indeed there is a possible reading of the text of Humanae Vitae that leaves it susceptible to Dummett’s objection. The relevant passages are the second paragraph of §14, which designates as immoral ‘any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means’; and also the final paragraph of §16, where the condemnation is applied to ‘the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious’.5 If it is the preventative action (i.e., in this case the swallowing of the contraceptive pill) taken in itself that Catholic teaching supposes to be immoral, then Dummett seems right to regard that teaching as philosophically problematic, as neither the swallowing of the pill nor the aim of having sex without children – neither the what is done, nor the why – is essentially immoral. But this is not the only way to read the teaching of Humanae Vitae. A sentence past the bit quoted above from §14, in discussing the relationship of means to ends, the text designates (emphasis mine) ‘sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive’ as ‘something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order’ no matter the status of the intention behind it; and then this formulation is repeated at the end of the paragraph, which concludes that ‘it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong’. The implication here seems to be that it is since ‘deliberately contraceptive’ sex is illicit that it is wrong to take the contraceptive pill: that is, what makes it wrong to do something ‘specifically intended to prevent procreation’ is that doing so means engaging in sexual intercourse whose ‘procreative significance’ has been divided off from its ‘unitive’ one (see ibid., §12). Similarly, §16 continues by noting that a couple’s deliberate efforts to prevent fertility ‘obstruct the natural development of the generative process’ (again, my emphasis): and of course there is no ‘generative process’ at all unless sexual intercourse is in the picture. On this reading, the prohibition of artificial contraception depends not on the idea that acts intended to, say, render a woman infertile are immoral in and of themselves, nor on the idea that there is anything essentially wrong with intending not to have children, but rather that deliberately contraceptive acts can make for the sinfulness of sexual ones, by interfering with their properly procreative character. And in that case, Dummett’s objection will not apply.6 It is important to recognize that this sort of ‘making for’ can operate in a temporally backwards direction, too, and when we see this then it is possible to understand how, contra Dummett, the act of taking a contraceptive pill can properly be seen as immoral in its own right. Consider for example the case of a soccer player who shortly before the half scores a goal that later turns out to be decisive: what he did, we say, is score the game-winning goal, yet the nature of his action was not determined until more than an hour later. The events of the second half are partly determinative of what kind of action the man’s first-half action is: what happens later can make for a significant characteristic of something that is happening right now. Or again, suppose a man eats breakfast at 8:00, and then heads to Mass immediately thereafter, where he takes Communion. If we take seriously the requirement to fast for an hour before receiving the Eucharist, we will regard him as having done something immoral, and may express this by saying that, whether or not he explicitly intended to break the pre-Communion fast, the man should not have eaten when he did. (Of course, we might equally put it by saying that he should not have taken Communion, but in fact this is precisely the point.) But where does the immorality lie? Not, surely, in the eating alone; nor in the man’s intention to enjoy a good meal, or provide his body with necessary nourishment. Rather, the man is wrong to eat when he does because in doing so he renders his body unfit to receive the Sacrament, which is something he goes ahead and does anyway. In the context of his taking Communion, his eating is wrong; and in the context of his having eaten, his taking Communion is. And it is in the same sort of way that the act of swallowing a pill with the intent to render oneself infertile ultimately ‘contradicts the full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love’ (Evangelium Vitae, §137): choosing to take the pill affects the character of a couple’s sexual acts, making them so that the generative nature which is supposed to be inherent to them has been thwarted in precisely the same way as it is when more traditional forms of contraception are used. The fact that it occurs in the context of an active sexual life makes it the case that taking the pill, no less than using a condom or other sort of physical barrier to conception, can be a deliberately contraceptive interference with the properly generative nature the human sexual act.8 III This last point about the moral parity between deliberately contraceptive use of the contraceptive pill and of more traditional forms of contraception deserves further emphasis, since as we have noted it is precisely his claim that Humanae Vitae ‘did not merely reaffirm a long-standing tradition’, but also ‘dealt with something quite new’ (Nature and Future, p. 50), that permits Dummett to leave open the possibility of adhering to what he regards as the traditional teaching even as he dissents from the Church on this particular point. For on Dummett’s analysis, the traditional prohibition against the use of barrier methods could be based ‘only on a claim that an act involving such a device was intrinsically wrong’, likely ‘on the ground that it violated the integrity of the marriage act’ (ibid.); and as we have seen he finds it impossible to extend this judgment to the use of the contraceptive pill. But in the traditional cases, exactly what is supposed to constitute this violation? For Aquinas, at least, whose account of sexual ethics was evidently the chief influence on the natural law arguments of Humanae Vitae, it is precisely in the fact that a contraceptive sexual act is one in which the generative character of human sexual intercourse has deliberately been interfered with: … it is clear that every emission of the semen is contrary to the good of man, which takes place in a way whereby generation is impossible; and if this is done on purpose, it must be a sin. I mean a way in which generation is impossible in itself, as is the case in every emission of the semen without the natural union of male and female: wherefore such sins are called ‘sins against nature.’ But if it is by accident that generation cannot follow from the emission of the semen, the act is not against nature on that account, nor is it sinful; the case of the woman being barren would be a case in point.9 If we endorse this framework, then there appears to be no way for our respective moral verdicts on the newer and older forms of contraception to come out differently: if sexual intercourse is licit despite one’s deliberately having made generation impossible by swallowing a contraceptive pill, then it will be similarly licit despite one’s deliberately having made generation impossible by putting on a condom. And then, of course, the familiar worries about a slippery slope set in; for if we suppose it acceptable to have deliberately non-generative10 intercourse of these sorts, it becomes difficult to see what, aside from arbitrary divine decree, could make it unacceptable to use one’s sexual organs in a host of other ways that have nothing at all to do with procreation. Certainly there are those who will not recognize such an appeal as a successful reductio of the contraceptive position, but it seems safe to assume that present company is not of that kind. 1 See pp. 897-98 of Dummett, ‘Reply to Andrew Beards’, in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis E. Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 2007), pp. 889-99; and chapter 7 of Dummett, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2 See ‘The Documents of the Papal Commission on Birth Control’, New Blackfriars 50 (1969), pp. 241-50, where Dummett makes a qualified defense of the appeals to authority in the so-called ‘minority report’ issued to Paul VI by the Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family and Births, arguing also that ‘only a really radical revision of the basis of the Christian teaching on sex could result in a coherent position in which contraception was allowed as sometimes lawful but on the other kinds of act traditionally condemned were still condemned’ (pp. 249-50). But for a somewhat more skeptical analysis of such appeals see Dummett, ‘Enforcing the Encyclical’, New Blackfriars 51 (1970), pp. 229-34. 3 See the yearlong exchange in New Blackfriars that began in October 1987 with Dummett’s ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, vol. 68 (1987), pp. 424-31, and concluded in December 1988 with his ‘What Chance for Ecumenism?’, vol. 69 (1988), pp. 530-45. Of course the teaching on contraception is nowhere near as central to the self-conception of Catholicism as are those on the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, etc., which are the central subjects of this exchange: on this issue see the essays cited in note 2, above. 4 Summa Theologica IaIIae, q. 7 a. 4 resp. In Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness, trans. John A. Oesterle (Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 86. 5 Quoting from the translation at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_pvi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html. 6 We find an almost identical suggestion at pp. 193-94 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s essay ‘On Humanae Vitae’, which is concerned to address a supposed dilemma very similar to Dummett’s: of a couple that uses contraceptives in contradistinction to one that relies on periods of abstinence to achieve the goal of avoiding conception, Anscombe writes that ‘the act of the contraceptive pair has a different character from the act of the other pair. For one of the descriptions true of their act is: that it is an act of sexual intercourse deliberately rendered infertile (if it should by chance be fertile otherwise). And this is the immediate significant difference between them and the other pair.’ Clearly Anscombe is pointing to a supposed difference in the couples’ respective sexual acts. Reprinted in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (eds.), Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 192-98. 7 Quoting from the translation at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae_en.html. 8 Perhaps significantly, this analysis applies equally to the case of post-coital methods of contraception, such as the ‘morning after pill’: on the present account, they will be immoral because they deliberately render a past act of sexual intercourse non-generative. It seems that Dummett, on the other hand, must be committed to regarding such practices in the same way as he regards the use of the contraceptive pill, unless perhaps they are abortifacient. 9 Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, Chapter 122. In Aquinas, Of God and His Creatures, trans. Joseph Rickaby, S.J. (Westminster, Maryland: The Carroll Press, 1950), p. 283. Some italics removed. 10 By this I mean ‘deliberately non-generative’ in the teleological sense in which an act can be of the generative kind even if no new life results from it. See pp. 84-88 of G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘You Can Have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer’, in The Collected Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Volume III: Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 82-96.