An incident recently occured in which someone took a communion wafer from a Catholic Mass. (See news story link below.)Suppose that the Catholics are mistaken and that the wafer in question is not of spiritual significance. Even under these conditions, I think that it was most likely a serious moral wrong to take the wafer. The wafer was initially the property of the church and I doubt that those receiving communion gained the right to take the wafer (in an uneaten state) from the church. Furthermore, since the item taken was of great importance to the owner, the wrong was a serious one.
 

Apparently the rules of the church require that the communion wafer be eaten immediately. I doubt that (in this context) the priest’s act of handing the wafer to the recipient transfers unconditional property rights to the recipient. Given the context, the priest is probably only granting the recipient the right to own the wafer given that he follows church rules concerning its use.
 

[Suppose it is well known that A doesn’t want his car to be driven on unpaved roads and would never knowingly consent to his car being driven on an unpaved road. When B asks to borrow A’s car and A agrees, it doesn’t seem that A has consented to B’s driving his car no matter what, rather, A has only agreed to B’s driving it on paved roads.]
 

Even if you think that the priest is consenting to giving the recipient full ownership of the wafer. It seems plausible to hold that the priest’s consent was invalid. Consent is invalid in cases where one party has insufficient knowledge of the nature of the agreement, and I doubt the priest believed he was consenting to the wafer being used in a manner which violated the church’s rules. Furthermore, the recipient’s going up to accept communion probably led the priest to believe that he would immediately consume the wafer. This type of behavior could invalidate consent.
 

Normally if someone takes a wafer which belongs to someone else we would say that it is at most a trivial wrong. However, this is because wafers are generally of little importance to their owners. When an owner cares quite a bit about an object (even when it has no objective value) it is seriously wrong to steal it.
 

[Imagine that A owns a painting that is quite terrible but is thought by A (and a few of his friends) to be an impressive work of art. As a result A places a great deal of importance on the painting and is much happier because he owns it. In this case it would be seriously wrong for B to steal and destroy the painting even though it might not have been seriously wrong if A had not cared at all about the painting.]
So it looks like taking a cracker can be a serious moral wrong
News article here: http://www.wftv.com/news/16806050/detail.html 

I first read about this on Leiter’s site. His post is here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/biologist-myers.html

 

In a recent column, Ellen Goodman writes about the increasingly common practice of hymenoplasty—a medical procedure to replace the hymens of women who are no longer virgins.  The justification for the procedure is that it potentially protects women living in cultures that consider bridal virginity to be mandatory for the sake of honor and decency from the sort of consequences that these women would suffer if their would-be grooms and families ever discovered that they hadn’t waited until marriage to have sex.

In this post I’m particularly interested in a comment that Ms. Goodman includes in her column from a representative of the French gynecological association (France being a country where these procedures are becoming increasingly common).  Even if we take for granted that the zealous insistence on female (but usually not male) virginity at the time of marriage is an outdated and wrongheaded view, it’s still not clear to me that the doctors who perform hymenoplasty operations are doing anything wrong. (more…)