OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
I think I disagree with EA on their premises because I think we can't really help someone unless we have a relationship with them and understand them. There is a balance between impact and knowledge. One side of the scale is something small that has low stakes but involves something you know well - like helping a neighbor pay for a much needed car repair. The other side of the scale has high stakes but involves situations where people don't have any idea what the ripple effects would be because they are too removed from the people they are trying to help - like the Mosquito Nets.
My principle would be that a problem should be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority that includes people directly impacted by the problem. Or in practice, this:
A wealthy woman once visited the twentieth century activist Dorothy Day and pulled a large diamond ring off her finger. She handed it to Dorothy and asked her to use it for good. Dorothy dropped it into her pocket.
Later that day, a homeless woman knocked on the door at Dorothy’s Catholic Worker house, begging for money. Dorothy calmly reached into her pocket and gave her the diamond ring.
Dorothy’s friends were appalled. Later, while alone, they asked Dorothy if it would not have been better to sell the ring and use the money to rent a room for the beggar woman. Or perhaps they should have invested the money in a bank for her.
Dorothy replied, “She can do that with the ring if she wants to. She can see it and go on vacation if she wants, or she can just wear it on her finger and enjoy it if that’s what she wants. Do you think God created diamonds only for the rich?”
Dorothy’s response exhibits not just one, but two key principles of Catholic social teaching. Not only did she lavishly take an option for the poor by gifting the diamond ring, she also embraced the principle of subsidiarity, which says that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible. In this case, the lady receiving the ring should decide how to use it - not Dorothy, not her friends, and not the state.
-Brandon Vogt (Saints and Social Justice: A Guide to Changing the World, page 91)
You might think this kind of altruism is reckless, I think giving malaria nets to people whose problems we don't know is reckless. All charity is risky and reckless because it requires involving yourself and your material goods in the well-being of another who may terribly misuse it - making you their accomplice.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
My son got his 15 month well-child check today. At the appointment everyone was really trying to upsell me the COVID Vaccine. I had a conversation that went:
Dr: "Are you sure, just the regular 15 month vaccines?"
Me: "And the flu shot."
Dr: "The regular 15 month vaccines, COVID, and the flu shot?"
Me: 'Ye-no, no COVID. Just the flu shot if that's possible."
Dr: "Yes, it's possible."
Then with the nurse administering the vaccines:
Nurse: "I noticed on the paper it said just the 15 month vaccines, would you like the flu shot as well?"
Me: "Yes, the flu shot."
Nurse: "COVID, too?"
Me: "No COVID."
Nurse administers 3 shots. I get the paper home with my son's weight, height, and shots administered. They list COVID as administered, no flu shot. My husband called them, he was put on hold then disconnected.
I'm sure the pediatrician thinks I'm crazy, but I don't think a boy less than 2 years of age gets a huge benefit from a Covid vaccine, he's already on an aggressive vaccine schedule, getting multiple vaccines every three months, and I really wanted him to have that flu shot.
There also needs to be a clearer way to consent to medications/procedures than a verbal conversation that apparently two separate people misunderstood. I'm still hoping he got the flu shot but the paper was marked wrong.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Anyone here concerned about bird flu passing to cattle? Anyone avoiding dairy, beef, or chicken?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
I'm going to give you advice from a woman's perspective and from the perspective who's been paying attention to the latest in nutrition.
Diet will have more affect on weight gain than exercise, especially as you both age. To stop gaining weight, decrease mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fat. Dairy, coconut, palm kernal oil, and tallow are good fats. Everything else is on thin ground.
To lose weight, cut protein down to around 50g/day. This is a temporary measure, but it will rev up the metabolism quite nicely.
One thing to check before all else - is your wife pregnant? Have you really ruled it out? Are you sure? Ok then, read on!
How to get your wife to join in: Tell her you are interested in contributing to Science! (TM) You are getting really interested in SMTM's Potato studies, and you would like to help provide more data on what the effect would be on someone in the healthy weight range. This would involve eating only butter and potatoes for a month straight, but most people who try it like it.
Just one problem - There's no way you'd be able to do this if you have someone eating normal meals in the house. The fridge space of preparing two meals, the mental effort to avoid eating other food, it's too much. Would she be able to try it with you? It doesn't have to be for the whole time, just long enough to get in the groove. Would she like to weigh herself with you every day so she can be a trial participant as well?
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient. How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
There were many hundreds of African societies pre-Colonization with their own codes of conduct and methods for enforcing it. Genetic descendants from these societies may have a harder time conforming to English Common Law, but that doesn't mean that crime and poverty follow necessarily from a lower average IQ score.
I don't view it as a racial thing. Take race out of it and we can have more productive conversations with people outside the Very Online Right. Everyone knows that some people are smarter than others (even if someone believes everyone is smart in their own way, they have to admit that the child with Down Syndrome has less than most.)
How do we as a society accommodate this? How do we provide everyone with a role that challenges and interests them, while providing for their needs? How do we include everyone in the social contract, so that breaking the law becomes offensive to everyone? How do we ensure that top talent goes into the positions that need it, and these positions are rewarded enough to encourage the smartest people to do their best? How do we do this without screwing everyone else?
I'm not talking about changing laws, but first societal attitudes. We first have to agree that these are good things. Right now, the conversation shys away from acknowledging differences and puts everyone into the same grind together.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Let's say a child was missed in screening and was born alive with Trisomy 18. Is it ok to kill the child then and there?
If the argument jeroboam is making is that after the first trimester the child is old enough to resemble what we value in a human, and therefore should have a basic right to life, then why would the presence of a disease change that?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2mo ago
there would be a bunch of boring guys getting degrees in it by now, explaining how it all works.
It's called parapsychology, and they have a Journal and various research groups in various Universities including the University of Virginia and UC Santa Barabara.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
“No one has given any reason to think that the First Cause is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc.” is not a serious objection to the argument.
People who make this claim – like, again, Dawkins in The God Delusion – show thereby that they haven’t actually read the writers they are criticizing. They are typically relying on what other uninformed people have said about the argument, or at most relying on excerpts ripped from context and stuck into some anthology (as Aquinas’s Five Ways so often are). Aquinas in fact devotes hundreds of pages across various works to showing that a First Cause of things would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and so on and so forth. Other Scholastic writers and modern writers like Leibniz and Samuel Clarke also devote detailed argumentation to establishing that the First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes.
Of course, an atheist might try to rebut these various arguments. But to pretend that they don’t exist – that is to say, to pretend, as so many do, that defenders of the cosmological argument typically make an undefended leap from “There is a First Cause” to “There is a cause of the world that is all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.” – is, once again, simply to show that one doesn’t know what one is talking about.
To give these arguments takes pages and pages, here is a very hasty version missing all the background for the purpose of fitting into a comment. Chapter 6 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a much more detailed argument.
Several attributes seem to follow immediately and obviously from God’s being Pure Act. Since to change is to be reduced from potency to act, that which is Pure Act, devoid of all potency, must be immutable or incapable of change (ST I.9.1). Since material things are of their nature compounds of act and potency, that which is Pure Act must be immaterial and thus incorporeal or without any sort of body (ST I.3.1–2). Since such a being is immutable and time (as Aquinas argues) cannot exist apart from change, that which is Pure Act must also be eternal, outside time altogether, without beginning or end (ST I.10.1–2).
As the cause of the world, God obviously has power, for “all operation proceeds from power” (QDP 1.1; cf. ST I.25.1). Moreover, “the more actual a thing is the more it abounds in active power,” so that as Pure Act, God must be infinite in power (QDP 1.2; cf. ST I.25.2). In line with the mainstream classical theistic tradition, Aquinas holds that since there is no sense to be made of doing what is intrinsically impossible (e.g. making a round square or something else involving a self-contradiction), to say that God is omnipotent does not entail that he can do such things, but only that he can do whatever is intrinsically possible (ST I.25.3).
The Fifth Way, if successful, establishes by itself that God has intellect. Furthermore, intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent ones in that the latter, but not the former, possess only their own forms. For an “intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower” (ST I.14.1). That is to say, to understand some thing is for that thing’s essence to exist in some sense in one’s own intellect. Now the reason non-intelligent things lack this ability to have the form of another thing is that they are wholly material, and material things can only possess one form at a time, as it were. Hence immaterial beings can possess the forms of other things precisely because they are immaterial; and the further a thing is from materiality, the more powerful its intellect is bound to be. Thus human beings, which, though they have immaterial intellects are also embodied, are less intelligent than angels, which are incorporeal. “Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality … it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge” (ST I.14.1). This argument presupposes a number of theses in the philosophy of mind and cannot be evaluated, or even properly understood, unless those theses are first understood. We will explore these theses in chapter 4.
We can also conclude, in Aquinas’s view, that “there is will in God, as there is intellect: since will follows upon intellect” (ST I.19.1). Why do will and intellect necessarily go together? For Aquinas, things naturally are inclined or tend towards their natural forms, and will not of themselves rest, as it were, until that form is perfectly realized; hence the acorn, for example, has a built-in tendency towards realizing the form of an oak, and will naturally realize that form unless somehow prevented by something outside it. What we are describing in this example is of course the goal-directedness of the acorn as something having a final cause. But other sorts of thing have final causes too. In sentient beings, namely animals, this inclination towards the perfection of their forms is what we call appetite. And in beings with intellect it is what we call will. Thus anything having an intellect must have will. (We will return to this topic in the next chapter.) Of course, since God does not have the limitations we have, he does not have any ends he needs to fulfill, any more than he needs to acquire any knowledge. Thus, as with our attribution of power, intellect, and other attributes to God, our attribution of will to him is intended in an analogous rather than a univocal sense.
Since something is perfect to the degree it is in act or actual, God as Pure Act must be perfect (ST I.4.1). Given the convertibility of being and goodness, God as Pure Act and Being Itself must also be good, indeed the highest good (ST I.6).
Feser, Edward. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides) (pp. 95-96).
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7mo ago
Pope Francis already answered a Dubia in a more standard way in 2021:
TO THE QUESTION PROPOSED: Does the Church have the power to give the blessing to unions of persons of the same sex?
RESPONSE: Negative.
Today's response to the Dubia says:
c) For this reason, the Church avoids any type of rite or sacramental that might contradict this conviction and suggest that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.
Today's Dubia Response is a total nothingburger, but everyone is reading into it what they want to read.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
My husband started up Baldur's Gate 3 with my five year old on the chair next to him, and now no one in my house has slept in 48 hours. She keeps running in and out of our bedroom screaming about monsters and worms going into eyes. The baby wakes up and starts crying. I can't safely have both her and the baby in the bed at the same time. I hate this game with a burning fire and I haven't even played it yet.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
Re: transmen - I think our culture sees male as the default, and women as a defective male who needs special accommodations because of this defect. Things like birth control, abortion, and protected maternity leave seek to even the playing field between men and women, a necessity because the game we are all playing assumes a male player. Gender by Ivan Illich spells out the argument that this is a necessity in an industrialized society.
Transmen are a manifestation of this expectation that male is the default. They feel like a defective man, therefore they take steps to reduce the defect.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
Part of the rules is that the more controversial the statement, the more supporting thought needs to go into defending it. "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
Having a username state a partisan and inflammatory statement is the opposite of proactively providing evidence for it. It's just a username, it's not a complete argument that people can respond to and tear apart. It's a way to shit post.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
One of the new blue checkmarks might be an indication someone is not a Bot. It shows an investment in the community. Right now it's mostly used to troll people who think that a blue checkmark is a sign of authenticity, accuracy, and truthiness. But over time it could develop into something useful.
Or Musk is trying to bankrupt Twitter, has no idea what he's doing, or any of the above.
As a note, Tumblr is now selling not one, but two blue checkmarks for $7.99. They also stack, so there are some people running around with 28 checkmarks. Everyone on Tumbr thinks this is a grand idea, regardless of what utility they might get out of it. Why purchase a blue checkmark? Because it's amusing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity
Is masturbating to pornography not sexual activity any more? And showing porn to kids is something "for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense?"
To your wider point that the Right has begun using the word grooming in wider and wider contexts, they are not the first to consider the similarities between grooming and political radicalization. Grooming itself is a broader word with multiple meanings - grooming a young politician for a higher office for example. It is not weird or purely waging a conflict for the word grooming to be used to describe persuasion, enticement, or cohesion to ingrain in children sexual politics their parents would not approve of (which is what schools are accused of.)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2mo ago
Dragon Naturally Speaking has worked in medical environments for a while, and I was able to find a pirated copy at some point.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
I am very disheartened to hear that you have deemed the Cosmological argument 'trounced... for decades." I have seen atheists like Dawkins completely misunderstand the Cosmological argument and refute caricatures of it. I have seen some philosophers provide interesting propositions that make supporters of the Cosmological argument need to add details and rebuttals. This is not a stagnant field, and no side has won (though there are several theist arguments that have no good rebuttals yet.)
In your link, rebuttal 1 shows that the author does not understand what is meant by "Cause," because radioactive decay absolutely has a cause. I don't like Craig's argument because the premise "The Universe Had a Beginning" is harder to defend than other premises, and I will not defend WLC's Cosmological argument. A flaw with Rebuttal 2 is that not every event needs to be separated from its cause in time, there are many causes that occur concurrently with the event it causes, like all Essentially Ordered Causes. My ire for Rebuttal 3 increases every time I see it. Just going to quote Feser on this one:
“What caused God?” is not a serious objection to the argument.
Part of the reason this is not a serious objection is that it usually rests on the assumption that the cosmological argument is committed to the premise that “Everything has a cause,” and as I’ve just said, this is simply not the case. But there is another and perhaps deeper reason.
The cosmological argument in its historically most influential versions is not concerned to show that there is a cause of things which just happens not to have a cause. It is not interested in “brute facts” – if it were, then yes, positing the world as the ultimate brute fact might arguably be as defensible as taking God to be. On the contrary, the cosmological argument – again, at least as its most prominent defenders (Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al.) present it – is concerned with trying to show that not everything can be a “brute fact.” What it seeks to show is that if there is to be an ultimate explanation of things, then there must be a cause of everything else which not only happens to exist, but which could not even in principle have failed to exist. And that is why it is said to be uncaused – not because it is an arbitrary exception to a general rule, not because it merely happens to be uncaused, but rather because it is not the sort of thing that can even in principle be said to have had a cause, precisely because it could not even in principle have failed to exist in the first place. And the argument doesn’t merely assume or stipulate that the first cause is like this; on the contrary, the whole point of the argument is to try to show that there must be something like this.
It is not special pleading, it's basic logic. The Causal Principle is defined as "whatever begins to exist has a cause." This is a good defense of the Causal Principle. If someone can give a very good argument that A)There exists a series of causes and effects and changes, B) It is not the case that the series has an infinite regress, and C) It is not the case that its members are joined together like a closed loop, then they have given a very good argument that D) Therefore, the series has a First Cause and a first change. And many people have indeed made very good arguments on this, here is one of the latest
If there is a first, uncaused-Cause, and whatever begins to exist has a cause, then the first uncaused-Cause did not begin to exist. If the First Cause did not begin to exist it is not some sort of special pleading to say that it has no cause.
If you then go on to say, "The Universe didn't begin to exist, therefore it does not need a cause," the universe is a set of things that change, and this provides a good defense of "It is not the case that the series has an infinite regress."
Actually I have a puzzle if you're interested.
3 year old female presents to the ER with the following symptoms:
- Fever. High of 104.5, has not gone below 101.3 in five days despite parents alternating Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen every three hours.
- Lethargy. Does not respond to parents saying name, wakes up when IV line is placed but goes back to sleep, fell asleep standing upright.
- Lack of appetite. Not drinking fluids, no urination in 24 hours.
- 40-50 breaths per minute, heart rate is 40-50 bpm (not a typo, and yes she is 3 years old.) O2 is 90-94%
Nasal swab comes back indicating RSV and Parainfluenza. Chest X-Ray is clear, chest sounds clear on stethoscope. No change to vitals after receiving fluids. No post-nasal drip or other symptoms.
She was born at 40+2 (not a premie) and has had no prior medical history.
The patient is admitted to the hospital. The reason given on the admission paperwork is "Dehydration." An EKG reveals nothing unusual. There is no change to her heart rate or temperature even under hospital care. She still sleeps most of the day.
After eight days of admission, her care team runs another test,
She is discharged to home on day 11.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6mo ago
Why is Eisenhower asking a Catholic woman? Eh, weirder things happen in wartime.
There are a few criteria for waging a just war according to Catholic doctrine:
- The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.
- All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
- There must be serious prospects of success.
- The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
I think your scenario takes for granted #1 and #2. The historical record bears out #3, but it could be an interesting exercise to determine if this could have been known at the time. Your question is getting to the heart of #4.
Then I look at the doctrine of Double Effect. When an action produces both a negative and a positive effect, it is permitted if:
- The good effect outweighs the bad effect.
- The action is undertaken with the intention of producing the good effect, not the bad effect.
- The bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect.
Given this, the most simple answer to "How many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?" is one less than the number of lives saved by the success of Operation Overload, as long as the rules of Double Effect are applied. Of course, we don't live in a counterfactual world where we know for certain how many people would have died had we not acted. We should be careful and allow for our knowledge being imprecise.
There would be some actions that could not be tolerated - we could not attack civilians directly in the hope that it would redirect medical supplies from the military and therefore weaken the military. This would violate the "bad effect is not the direct cause of the good effect" clause. But overall, as long as we are attacking legitimate military targets for the sake of attacking legitimate military targets, and we are reasonably certain that each attack will save more lives than cause civilian deaths, it is morally permissible.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6mo ago
I didn't do it for skin problems, but a few things really helped my Rosacea:
- High carb, low fat (less than 20g fat), low protein (less than 50g protein). Think Kempner Rice diet,
- Supplement Stearoylethanolamide
- Supplement Glycine.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
Have you spoken with a dermatologist in person? Could you have rosacea?
The changless thing is allowed to casually affect things, in fact, that is it's nature entirely. The changeless thing's nature is entirely, wholly, and simply to act, to bring into existence. You would need to present a really good argument for why this would imply the universe is part of God. It is contingent on God, and is possibly inevitable based on God's nature, but has a different nature.
Edit: One classical theist described God as an "omnipotence trope," if that helps conceptualize what theists are talking about.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9mo ago
That there are real relationships within the universe itself, without which it would be something substantively different, indicates that this is not the answer. Classical Theism requires that God be "divinely simple," composed of no parts that could even be conceptually taken away.
But I will admit we are coming up to the edge of which arguments I remember comfortably. There are lots of distinctions made between types of relationships, causal, change, etc and I have forgotten more here than I remember.
Needless to say, if presented with the box described in the OP, I would open it in a heart beat! I have spent a decent percentage of my life trying to answer the question with the tools I have, and will undoubtedly spend a lot of time in the future on the matter (I have Gaven Kerr's "De Ente et Essentia" on my desk and am trying to psyche myself up for what some have called the best proof for God's existence yet.)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
I don't think Catholics would have a problem with anti-aging technology. They don't have a problem with binoculars, even if they give people the ability to see further than normal healthy human eyes could. Rather it's more tied to the concept of human flourishing, things that provide a force multiplier to human nature are fine. See The Metaphysics of Bionic Implants.
Catholics reject surrogacy because they reject IVF and the commodification of human life. They see the relationship between a mother and a child as the clearest indicator that humans cannot be reduced to individuals forming contracts, but rather we are social creatures who work towards common goods. Making a child outside of an act of love between two married people is a farce and a sin against the child - but at least usually it's a sin of passion. Surrogacy is a dispassionate sin where the maternal relationship is broken with a contract - a dramatic inversion of the family being the last bulwark against a pure Lockean society.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
You're getting a lot of replies for the first point. For the second point, it seems comparable to a 12 year old making a decision to take cross-sex hormones after living as the opposite sex since they were 8. If the experience is the only factor, not the maturity, then that would be just as acceptable as giving cross sex hormones to 16 year olds who have been on puberty blockers since they were 12.
But I think the general public expects that 16 year olds are able to make more informed decisions in general than 12 year olds, and a large part of this depends on the difference in general maturity and problem solving ability - not just experience. For there to be proper informed consent, the kid needs to be able to understand life long choices. The kid needs to understand not just the words "increased risk of heart disease or stroke" but needs to have a conceptual understanding of risk and what it is like to go through a stroke, what happens after, etc. It's one thing to know the words that it will be harder to have sexual pleasure or start a family, it's another thing to be able to conceptualize what that would mean for them as an individual (I would say most 16 year olds would be unable to fully appreciate it, let alone 16 year olds who have brains that function like 12 year old brains.)
The experience of dressing in a certain way and cutting hair in a certain way is absolutely trivial and never entered my mind as a concern with regards to informed consent and making permanent medical decisions at 16.
A definitive list of Catholic Dogmas and their teaching weight has been made, yes. Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma by Ludwig Ott is the best at explaining the degrees of authority each teaching possesses. St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Moral Theology is likely the most thorough explication of Catholic Moral Theology. As Rev. Thomas Slater, S.J. put it, "Moral theology is still what St. Alphonsus left it."
Ott lists 6 grades of Theological Certainty, ranging from "immediately revealed truths... defined by a solemn judgement of faith (definition) of the Pope or a General Council" to "Tolerated Opinions." A solemn judgement of faith cannot be just what the Pope said last Tuesday, or even something put in an instructional document like the Catechism. (The current Catechism of the Catholic Church has many topics with various degrees of authoritativeness, and explicitly states that the degree of authority pertains to the documents outside of the Catechism in which they are defined. Addition to the Catechism does not increase magisterial authority.)
The Church has not U turned on capital punishment, which is infallibly considered not intrinsically immoral. The current Pope skirting heresy does not change the fact that capital punishment is good in a lot of situations. The Pope could even be a full blown heretic and that would still not pose a problem for the Church. What he cannot do is declare he's changing prior dogmatic teaching using his authority as the Pope.
In the case of capital punishment, Pope Francis is clearly making a prudential judgement, which is still binding on Catholics as my first comment shows. Prudentially, in most countries today, is is possible to protect society without killing murders. Much of the benefits to the murderer from killing them are gone as well - in a non-Catholic society it is unlikely that a murderer will repent, go to confession, face the hangman, and go on his way to Heaven. Instead, keeping the murderer alive for longer gives him the best chance at repentance. Prudentially, there is a good argument to not practice Capital Punishment. And as I said above, the Pope doesn't even need a good argument to make Catholics do something under obedience. He could outlaw the color pink arbitrarily.
"Do not murder" in the Bible has always been consistent with God commanding the Israelites to practice capital punishment one book over. There is no ambiguity or conflict there. If you are interested in a more thorough explication of Catholic teaching on Capital Punishment, I recommend, "By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment." (You should be able to pirate it, there's nothing about copyright in Alphonsus' Moral Theology, so it's totally morally fine.) (Also copyright would probably be considered unnatural, like usury, and therefore prohibitions on it are unjust.)
Honestly that reminds me. I owe a debt to Pope Francis for his ambiguous statements on Capital Punishment. It is much, much easier to talk about how Church teaching hasn't changed in regards to Capital Punishment than it is to talk about how Church Teaching hasn't changed in regards to Usury, which used to be the go-to zinger.
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