Month: November 2021

I’m a Patreon support of Pints With Aquinas and the other day, Matt Fradd asked for objections to the assertion that “NO Christian should have a Smart Phone”. Here’s how I replied:

My two objections are as follows…

(A) Smart Phones are not intrinsically evil – abusus non tollis usum. Therefore you are encouraging people to forsake the goods of a smart phone unnecessarily.

(B) On a more personal level, I have several people in my life who are all-or-nothing types. No new hobby lasts long before it’s added to the long list of things from which they must abstain because they’t do it moderation. From the outside it seems like they rarely develop much of the crucial virtue of temperance.

Also, the angelic living rarely lasts forever and often results in bing-purge cycles.

David Bates, Patreon Supporter

At the end of a recent episode on this subject, a response was given to these objections:

Honestly, I was rather disappointed. I was expecting a better-prepared response, particularly from folks trained in philosophy, to what I considered to be some fairly obvious objections.

He saw that it was good

Simply adopting an Augustinian conception of evil doesn’t avoid my objections. Yes, everything is ultimately “good” because it was made by God – Marc spent most of his time emphasizing this almost to the point of caricature and straw-manning, as though one must first adopt Gnosticism in order to describe something as “intrinsically evil”. Marc said:

“I’m trying to imagine what this would be like, if Christian morality somehow involved getting rid of the things that are evil in themselves… what would that be? What would I get rid of?”

Marc Barnes

However, it’s not a term foreign to Catholic thought:

“hostile to life itself . . . whatever violates the integrity of the human person . . . whatever is offensive to human dignity,”

Pope St. John Paul “The Great”, Veritatis Splendor quoting Gaudium et Spes

Matt Fradd pointed out that there are even “goods” involved in sin, giving pornography as an example. Okay, but pornography is a distortion of the sex act. Sex has a licit context. Therefore, to answer Marc’s question, we’d get rid of the distortion, not the elements which are being distorted. As I said in my initial comment, just because something can be abused, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its legitimate use (abusus non tollis usum).

While conceding that Smart Phones have many goods, Marc seems to be suggesting that there is no such licit context for a Smart Phone. This is what we would expect if we made the moral claim that “NO Christian should have a Smart Phone”. If something cannot possibly be used in any context, isn’t it fair to call it intrinsically evil?

Conceding the debate?

Marc said several times that it “doesn’t follow” to say that smashing your iPhone deprives you of the goods it would otherwise offer, but without any real explanation. If I smash my phone, I don’t get to use Hallow any more! Is he saying that the world would be better without it? Interestingly, Marc then went on to pretty much concedes that people can in fact receive this goods in a licit fashion from their phones! It all seemed rather muddled.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a way of treating the phone for some people , in some situations, that isn’t for them a near occasion of sin. I concede it as possible – I don’t think it’s usual

Marc Barnes

Afterwards, Matt said that people have to decide for themselves whether or not the pro’s of ownership outweigh the con’s, which also seems to deny the assertion that “NO Christian should have a Smart Phone”.

“I can resist anything but temptation” – Wilde

I think Matt’s comment about temperance is legitimate. The Smart Phone isn’t the only place whereby one can develop temperance. I’d also concede that if someone truly knows that they can’t handle a Smart Phone, then the temperate thing to do is indeed to get rid of it.

My point was rather that I’ve noticed a pattern that of my friends who give up their Smart Phones they seem to constantly be giving stuff up. Every new hobby is embraced for a few weeks before they find that they can’t moderate it and so it is added to the ever-increasing list of things which they must eschew entirely. In my experience, these are the sorts of people who say things like “NO Christian should have a Smart Phone”…