Pushkin. On February eighteenth, two thousand and eight, on the first day of spring training, a Major League Baseball player named Andy Pettitt held a press conference. He was a pitcher who, over the course of a long and brilliant career, played for the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros. A straight arrow, a beloved teammate, one of the good guys. But now an investigation by Major League Baseball had found that Pettit had, on several occasions used performance enhancing drugs. I want to apologize to the New York Yankees and to the Houston Astros organizations, and to their fans, and to all my team mates and to all of baseball fans for the embarrassment I have called them. He reads from notes, his head bowed and shame. I also want to tell anyone that is an Andy Pettit fan, I am sorry. Pettit wanted to come clean, sort of. I'm not that much of a baseball fan, but I have to say I've always been obsessed with his case. Obsessed to the point where if you sat next to me in an airplane, I would bring it up without warning and bend your ear for a good half hour. First off, what sort of bizarre apology is this? I want to apologize for the embarrassment I caused others others I thought this was about Andy Pettit and what Andy Pettit did wrong. I never took this to get an edge on anyone. I did this to try to get off to DL and to do my job, and again for that, I am sorry for the mistakes I've made. Pettit says I was injured. I took performance enhancing drugs to get healthy, not to get ahead. Does that distinction matter? Then he segues into this long thing about his dad, who he somehow dragged into the whole mess and now wished to drag out of it. He goes on and on about his dad's heart problems. It's all very emotional, But what does his dad's heart condition have to do with the fact he cheated? At the time, everyone waited on Anti Pettitt's public statement, including my favorite, a professor named Hollyweeks, who in the pages of the Harvard Business Review called it a self protective string of explaining back padding and minimizing with a small wan apology tucked in ouch. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This episode is the first of a three part series about how to make sense of novel problems. Because what happened to Andy Pettitt was a novel problem. And if a problem is novel, if we've never seen that kind of problem before, how do we know how to think about it. I think we're really bad at figuring out novel problems. I think we need some help. I have a suggestion. Is good Rome to the Church of the Jesus. In the seniority the Church of the Jesu, built in fifteen sixty eight, the spiritual home but perhaps the most storied of the many separate divisions of the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits. It is impossible to describe the interior. It's breathtaking color ornamentation. Take one of those standard issue Renaissance cathedrals that you can find all over the world, caffeinated heavily. That's the Church of the Jesuit. And you can see on one side you can see Saint Ignacious being presented to God by Saint Peter. Saint Peter was the first spoke and Ignatius was the first superior general of the Jesuits. Saint Ignatius is buried there. Huh. While Saint ROSSI Savior his only his right arm, as you can see on the older this is right now. You choose to baptize so many people so that only his right arm is everywhere where is arrested in India. The Jesuit order was founded in the sixteenth century by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish nobleman. They're famous as the educators of the Roman Catholic Church. There may well be a Loyola High School or university in your town, or a school named after Saint Francis of Xavier. Another legendary Jesuit, Georgetown University, is a Jesuit school, so as Boston College. The Jesuits are intellectual, austere, and five hundred years ago, the Jesuits pioneered a specific approach to solving problems that were new to the world. It's called casuistry. I have to admit that I've fallen in love with casuistry. In this episode and the two that follow, I want to explain the beauty and the power of the Casuistic method. It can help with life and death issues, help us resolve some of our most divisive controversies, but also smaller things as well. From the Church of the Jesuit, my guide took me next door to the rooms where and Ignatious lived. His shoes are still in the bedroom from five hundred years ago, all battered and worn. And then I walked a few minutes north to Via del Seminario, to the graduate school of the Jesuit Order, a magnificent building with an enormous sunlit courtyard and a staircase so wide a carriage could drive up it, but not ornate, spare simple. I sat in a small room off the main entrance, where I imagine Jesuit theologians had been receiving visiting journalists since the late sixteenth century. I would like my listeners to learn how to think like a Jesuit. So here I am, so here I am now. Casuis Street comes from the word causes in Latin something happened. So you give a case, which is a narrative, you say, something happened. That's the theologian I went to see in Rome, James Keenan. Father Keenan is in his sixties, short reddish hair, a gracious manner. He was wearing a pair of old sneakers, which for some reason struck me as odd. But then I remembered Saint Ignatius's battered shoes, and I thought, that's fairy. Jesuit Keenan says the Jesuit way of approaching problems is a function of what they were asked to do for the church. The sixteenth century, when the Jesuits get their start, is the age of colonial expansion. The West is being explored, the East is opening up Columbus, Magellan, Cortez. And it's the Jesuits who go out with these expeditions. The Pope asked them to be his emissaries to the world, diplomats, businessman. And if you're out on the road thousands of miles from Rome, encountering new people and new things, you start to think differently. How could you not You're not sitting behind the walls of a monastery in splendid isolation. You have to be practical, pragmatic. In Augustine, one of the greatest of early Christian thinkers, thought that the biblical commandment thou shalt not lie was absolute. You should never lie, ever, but that's not very helpful to a Jesuit in the sixteenth century in a place like say England. Now, say you're in England and Queen Elizabeth is the queen, and she's not recognized as the sovereign by the Catholics, and you've just arise as a priest, and if you tell the soldier that you're a priest, you're going to be dead. So is it moral to lie if you're being asked if you're a Catholic When answering truthfully means that you're dead. That kind of question is just the beginning. There's never been international law because everybody had their own countries. Now they're finding out that there are not only new lands that have never been explored, but there are people in those lands. What jurisdictions are there, What questions of sovereignty, what questions of prerogatives are there? And a whole host of questions arise that are political, goal and governmental, and that's going to raise well, how do you make a decision about this? In response, the Jesuits reach a really important conclusion, which is that when it comes to new problems, you can't start by appealing to a principle principles don't help because principles are the product of past experience, and they're only helpful so long as you're still living in the world. Those past experiences help create When you're confronted with a situation you haven't encountered before, then you're in uncharted territory. In those situations, the Jesuits argue you have to proceed on a case by case basis. Now what does that mean? Well, to give just one example, there was a huge controversy over maritime shipping in the sixteenth century. Keenan has studied it extensively. The Catholic Church in those days had an absolute prohibition against usury. It was immoral to charge any interest on a loan. When that prohibition was enacted centuries before it made sense. Many loans were from wealthy people lending to desperately poor farmers, and the farmers were being exploited. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as the world opened up, merchants started shipping valuable cargoes overseas t furs from the New World, sugar rum and they wanted to buy insurance on their cargo. But was the premium that someone might pay an insurance carrier usury. It was a huge issue within the Church at the time. Many said it was usury, but the Jesuits replied, no, insurance is a novel problem, and you can't solve novel problems with old principles. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century wrote that a general rule applies generally, and the more you descend into the particulars, the more it's no longer a general rule. Descend into the particulars, understand what is distinctive about the case under consideration. That's what the Jesuits started to do. How First they would find a standard case. That is, a case that's in the same general territory where we've already reached agreement. So usury looks like an insurance premium, and everyone agrees that usury is wrong. That's a standard case, The Jesuits say, though, there's another relevant standard case. Think of the captain of the ship. He's also a kind of insurance. People pay him something like a premium to make sure the ship travels safely from point A to point B, and everyone agrees the captain is a good idea. Next, the Jesuits create what they call a taxonomy. They ask how close does the case in question come to the standard cases. So is the premium paid for maritime insurance more like something you would pay a loan shark, or more like the money you would pay for a good captain. So they keep looking for all sorts of similarities, and then they look for where's the breaking point, where is it no longer legitimate? And in the case of maritime insurance, the Jesuits say, insurance doesn't look that much like usury. It looks like the captain. The captain is there to make sure the ship gets from A to B safely. Insurance is there to make sure the value of the cargo gets from A to B safely. Do you see how brilliant that is? Everyone was going in circles around this question, and principles weren't helping. One side shouting Pope Gregory the Ninth ruled on this in twelve eighty seven, the other side accusing the Church of being stuck in the past. There are pirates out there, round and round and round. Jesuits just say stop, let's break it down step by step. Maritime insurance is just another kind of captain, and we're all in favor of captain's right. I was not raised as a Catholic. This was all new to me. It so next, let's go jesuit on the case of Andy patted. For more than a decade, there has been widespread illegal use of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances by players in Major League baseball. In January of two thousand and seven, George Mitchell, former Senate Majority leader, former key negotiator in the Northern Ireland Peace process, testified before Congress on the results of his twenty month investigation into the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The evidence we uncovered indicates that this has not been an isolated problem involving just a few players or a few clubs. The Mitchell report was four hundred and nine pages long. It named countless baseball players as illegal drug users, including on page two hundred and twenty four, Andy Pettit. The allegation came from one of Pettitt's closest friends, his trainer, Brian McNamee. Quote. From April twenty first to June fourteenth, two thousand and two, Pettit was on the disabled list with elbow tendonitis. Mactimye traveled to Tampa at Pettit's request and spent about ten days assisting Pettit with his rehabilitation. Mactimy recalled that he injected Pettit with human growth hormone on two to four occasions. The year before, the same allegation about Pettit had surfaced in a news report. Pettit had denied everything, but now baseball was in turmoil over performance enhancing drugs. Names were being named. Pettit was forced to come clean. I want to apologize to the New York Yankees and the Houston Astro's organizations and to their fans, and to all my team mates and to all of baseball fans for the embarrassment I have caused them. But then the apology isn't good enough. People get upset at him. He gets defensive, round and round. You deny, you get caught, you apologize. The apology doesn't work, the same circus that happens with all these cases. Okay, but what would the Jesuits say? They would say, wait, this is a novel problem. Baseball players using genetically engineered hormones to heal injuries. Isn't something that's happened before our set of existing principles do not help us. This is a time for casuistry. So are there standard cases out there, something reasonably analogous that we all agree on to help us make sense of this novel problem. It turns out there are standard case number one, A picture named Tommy John. Perhaps you've heard of him. Tommy John was very good, as good as Pettit. He played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Yankees. A big, friendly guy from the Midwest, also raised Catholic, as was Andy Pettitt. Not that it matters, but if you're gonna go jesuit and matters at baseball, maybe it's more appropriate to stay into family. July seventeenth, nineteen seventy four. I'm pitching against the Montreal expos I get right to the point where you're going to throw, and I felt this pain in my elbow like I've never had in my life. That's Tommy John in an ESPN documentary looking back on the injury that made him famous. When I shake my arm, get the ball back, and I throw again in the same pain and a ball goes home played. He's clearly told the story a million times, for he has it down the grimace, the aborted throwing motion. I go time, I walk off the mound. Wald Austin's coming this way, and I said, Walter, I've hurt my arm. Get somebody in. Tommy. John tore the ulner collateral ligament in his elbow, which is a tendon that basically holds your arm together. Baseball pitchers are always tearing their ulnar collateral ligament because throwing a baseball at ninety five miles per hour is an extraordinarily unnatural act. And in that era, the early nineteen seventies, if you did that to your elbow, your career was over. You'd never pitch again. But John had a very resourceful orthopedic surgeon named Frank Job, and Job had a brilliant idea. He'd take a very similarly sized tendon from the forearm, a tendant that isn't much used, and grafted onto John's damaged ligament. John got his brand new elbow at the age of thirty one, and he ended up pitching in the major leagues until he was forty six years old, which is bananas. Other players look at how John saved his career and they start asking for the same surgery. It becomes epidemic. Close to five hundred major league pitchers have thus far had what's now called Tommy John surgery, not to mention thousands of teenagers in minor league pitchers. Baseball players get Tommy John surgery the way the rest of us floss our teeth. Okay, let's look at another standard case. The pictures are on the right field. Forget about it. This one has hitted for no jersey. How about the baseball player Barry Bonds, who's widely believed to have used performance enhancing drugs at the end of his career. Bonds used to be slender and fast. He became huge when Bonds was thirty seven, at an age when most baseball players are retired. To Arizona, he had one of the greatest seasons for a baseball player ever. Largely because of Bonds and a dozen or so other stars from baseball's so called steroid era, the league banned all use of peds. Barry Bonds is the case that most of us agree is unethical. So in one corner we have Tommy John, and in the other corner we have Barry Bonds. In our taxonomy, who is Andy Pettick closest to Tommy John, Barry bonds to help me figure things out. I called up two of the most learned baseball experts I could think of. Hi, my name is Jonah Carry. I am a writer for the Athletic and for Sportsnet. Jonah Carry, who was one of those people I suspect tried rocket science as a kid, found it too easy and took up baseball analytics instead. I interviewed doctor Frank job back in two thousand and two, I believe, and he said that the big risk of this surgery was that if you did it, the person hand would become a claw, which is terrifying. That you put a new tendon in and essentially it messes with the arm so much that you don't even have any tactile ability whatsoever. That was the risk. That was the risk that Tommy John took. Carrie points out that creating a new ulner collateral tendon doesn't make you a better pitcher. It just means that you can pitch the way you pitched before. It's restorative. The tendon is there as a stabilizer that it essentially allows you to use the force that you have and the mechanics that you have in the physical strength that you have to throw as hard as possible without risk of anything happening. It keeps the arm in place. There's not a huge amount of difference between Tommy John's stats before his surgery and Tommy John's stats after his surgery. The surgery turned him back into the Tommy John we have always known. That's not the same as bonds. Bonds use drugs. That turned him into something new. A man who typically hit between thirty and four, he home runs a year suddenly and unexpectedly hits seventy three. Seventy three, there's all the all time. Next, I called up. This is George Will, political commentator, baseball fanatic, and, most crucially for our purposes, the son of Professor Frederick Will, philosopher an epistemologist. Are we now recording? Should I proceed? Yes, yes, we're recorded. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking a time. Okay, well, it's good fun. I always take time to talk baseball. Okay. If you think it sounds like I was calling George Will from my car, you are entirely correct. He's a busy man. I had to take whatever time with him I could get. Let's look at the universe of cases that we've had over the last thirty years or so, and sort can we draw a line between the ones? Can we sort of put them on a continuum from I have a real problem too, I have less of a problem. So his Bonds at the far end. Sure. Sure, When Barry Bonds goes to a spring training one year and he used to wear a size forty two jersey and now he wears a size fifty two jersey and his half size has gone from seven on eighth to seven on a quarter, that is fundamental structure of his body has changed. Then you have to say, to compete with Barry Bonds, other people have to be willing to put their bodies through this strange transformation. And that's not fair somehow, so our casuistry tells us that we're fine with restorative interventions, but were dubious of transformative interventions. So who is Andy pettitck closest to Barry Bonds or Tommy John So Pettit, we understand you know the story fight better than me. We understand it. Andy Pettit, who is a superb pitcher right. Yes, At one point he admits that he took human growth hormone in order to help recovery from an injury so that he could pitch longer. Is that in any way different from what Tommy John did? Kerry said he couldn't see a difference between the two. Pettitt had an elbow injury, just like Tommy John. Pettit used cutting edge medical science to recover from an elbow injury. Just like Tommy John. Tommy John didn't have multiple surgeries to replace each of his body parts with a bionic upgrade. He did at once to recover from injury. Pettit didn't use human growth hormone on multiple occasions. He used it to treat a specific elbow injury two to four shots over a single seven week period when he was on the disabled list. And if you look at Andy Pettitt's performance after he got himself injected with human growth hormone, it looks almost identical to his performance before or he injected himself with human growth hormone. He briefly used performance enhancing drugs to become himself again. Andy Pettitt is Tommy John same case. Did you have an opinion on Andy Pettitt only again, as you say, taking him at his word that it was only for recovery from exertion and b that if anyone else wanted to match them, they would not be putting their health in jeopardy. That seemed to me to be benign. So why are we so mad at Andy Pettitt for doing the same thing as Tommy John? Why are we scrutinizing his apology for being insincere? His apology was insincere because he had nothing to apologize for, and that little bit of hair splitting that got him in so much trouble. I never took this to get an edge on anyone. I did this to try to get off to DL and to do my job. That's not hair splitting. That's exactly the point. He didn't do it to get an edge, And that's why it's okay. Why is it okay if someone operates on my elbow but not ok if someone injects my elbow with a syringe. Is there a philosophical distinction between a scalpel and a syringe that I somehow missed. We're going to turn now to that Barry Bonds verdict. The baseball star's trial over steroid use ended yesterday and he's been found guilty of at least And what about Barry Bonds. This little bit of casuistry tells us that our problem with Bonds isn't one of principle. Bonds isn't wrong because he used performance enhancing drugs, and using performance enhancing drugs is always wrong. No, the issue is how he used drugs. Barry Bonds would have been okay if he had just dialed it back done what Tommy John and Andy Pettit did, which is to use medical science to smooth out the bumps at the end of their careers. Barry, next time, don't hit seventy three homers. If there were a way to ramp this up gradually, where okay, hit twenty seven home runs in at thirty thirty five, whatever, If there was some general progression going on, I could kind of see it. Jonah Carry was clear on this right. If at thirty seven he turns himself into a bulkier power player without the speed you know, who walks a lot and is hitting thirty homers a year, He's not only just in the hall in an instant, he's one of the greatest players of all time. Right without a knee. We're all celebrating Barry Bonds. If that happens before my conversation with Jonah Carry, I'd never thought about bonds that way. That's what casuistry does. It reframes the problem, and it says that there is a way to make sense of difficult problems without retreating into the trenches of principle. Will and Carry reminded me of a story the philosopher Stephen Tullman once told. Tullman was a casuist. He was once in a National Ethics Commission, one of those Blue Ribbon all star groups that consider weighty topics like euthanasia. The group was drawn from every walk of life, but he convinced them to work case by case the Jesuit way, and lo and behold, they all agreed. It was only at the end of their deliberations when everyone was asked to explain the principles that underlay their decisions, when they all disagreed. Suddenly they were all shouting at each other, which made Tullman wonder, if all principles do is divide us, why do we bother talking about them at all. Oh, and while we're on the subject of Stephen Tullman, let me share with you this little bit from an interview he did years ago that I stumbled across on YouTube. I mean, quite often when I'm teaching, I take my dogs into class and they sit quietly while I lecture. But I don't like to take them in when I'm lecturing on Dickcart because I'm compelled to say that Descartes thought the dogs who are merely machines, and this is an insult I'm not prepared to expose them to in my presence. I mean, I think, and the one thing I'm quite sure is that Descarte never owned a dog. Descartes was a man of abstract principles. I think therefore, I am Tullman was a casuist who brought his dogs to his philosophy lectures and assumed they were following along. I mean, whose side are you want? This is a sat question. The Jesuits are of the Catholic Church, as X is to Why is it like the Marine Corps is to the military. Yeah, but they yeah, they calls the Pope's Marines. James Martin, Jesuit priest, writer, editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America. But the other the other line is you probably are this. If you've met one Jesuit, you've met one jesuit. Yeah, Martin is very twenty first century Jesuit. He looks like he runs marathons, very energetic. He's two hundred and forty six thousand Twitter followers. I asked him to talk to me about casuistry because it's obviously been applied to much more troubling situations than ethics in professional baseball. And he told me a story. It was about the aftermath of that terrible shooting a few years ago at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Across America tonight an emotional response and here in Orlando, hundreds of people lining up all day long to donate their own blood after so much bloodshed. Martin heard about it like all of us did, and was devastated. And I didn't quite get at the beginning that it was a gay night club, and you know, it was at the time the largest mass shooting in US history, forty nine people, and so it was, you know, a pauled as everybody else was. And truly I waited for responses the USCCB, the US Bishop's Conference, because I knew that in every other instance before that and since that, the Bishop's Conference and the local bishops come out immediately with his statement, you know, we stand with our brothers and sisters wherever in Texas, and this Methodist Church and this stopping mall wherever, we are with you. Nothing radio silence. I really, I really couldn't believe it, and I thought they can't even rouse themselves to say they're sorry. Do you think it was deliberate like that or was it? No? You know, one of my professors of moral theology at Boston College who I think you'd really like in terms of his writing, Jim Keenan, I met perfect person to talk to. He points out that for Jesus in the Gospels, sin is usually not where people are weak but trying, you know, people are really struggling, but where people are strong and not bothering. So, for example, the Good Samaritan, the priest, and the Levite simply they don't bother. They just don't bother. They could help the guy, but they don't bother. And so Jim Keenan said, for Jesus, sin is a failure to bother to love. And so after Orlando, the bishops just didn't bother. They didn't bother, and I thought that was sinful, and I was really angry. About it. Now, James Martin is angry. He thinks that some of his religious superiors have acted sinfully. So what does he do? He descends into the particulars. The specific case in front of us is about the Catholic Church's moral response to gay people. Are there gay people within the Catholic Church? Yes, there are. Who are they exactly? Well, they are people with a certain sexual orientation, but they're more than that. I mean. The thing that most people misunderstand about LGBT Catholics and LGBT Christians is that for them, it's it's not often about their sexual wi. It's about Jesus. It's about prayer. It's about God and the relationship to the church and the sack ements and helping the poor and their friends, and so their sexual lives are just a part of it. So it would be like saying that a straight person came to me, what would you say to about sex? Well, that might be one thing we talk about, but that's not the whole thing we talk about. What's the most important particular about gay people within the Catholic Church that they're Catholics. I always like to say to people, you know, it's not a question of making them Catholic. They're already Catholic, they're baptized. It's their church just as much as the pope or the bishop or me. Now Martin does some taxonomy. We have a group within our church who, in one respect behave in a way that's contrary to church teaching. What other cases are like that? Well, he says, there are actually lots of people, quite happily welcomed within the Catholic Church who in some part of their life also violate church teaching. You see with LGBT people being fired. You know, even these days, you're not following this rule? What about the other rules? And we say to people, are firing people who practice birth control or in vitro fertilization, No, we're not. Do you fire people who aren't generous to the poor? Oh, we would never do that. Why not? That's a pretty important rule from Jesus. Oh, well, that's that's different. The casuist asks, why is that different? How is the biblical directive to give to the poor, a teaching that has been at the center of Christian practice for two thousand years, somehow less essential than being straight. If you fire people for one sort of rule violation, why aren't you firing them? For another? After his initial response to the Pulse shooting, Martin wrote an article on the church in the gay community and then a book. And what's strange about reading both is you keep waiting for the other shooter drop. So here's my question, though from an outsider, so one responsive annonswer might be, if you're that disappointed in your church, why don't you leave the church? Because this is on the First of all, it's only one part of what the church is doing. Yeah, right. Second of all, you could just say that about your country or your family. I mean, you know, like you know, the current presidential administration. Why aren't you leaving? People say, well, I'm an American. Well, I'm a Catholic too, and truly, you know, given that I'm not challenging any church teaching and really talking more about the Gospels, there's no reason to leave. I've also, you know, to be clear, I've also made several promises. I took a vow as a Jesuit that i'd stay. I made a promise as a priest at my ordination that i'd stay. So I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, that to me is not even a question. Now again, consider what he says here. I'm not challenging any church teaching. He's not tackling this issue at the level of theological doctrine. I have to admit that this puzzled me at first. Martin is an intellectual, a scholar, a serious person like most of us. I assume that to be an intellectual and a serious person is to engage first and foremost with principles. But Martin isn't interested in bouncing on some point of church doctrine. He's a Jesuit thousands of miles from the Vatican, trying to live his faith in the real world. Saint Ignatius famously told his followers that their first obligation on their travels was to console those who were suffering or marginalized. That's why you descend into the particulars, because if you do not immerse yourself in the specifics of someone's life and circumstance, then all you can offer is platitudes or outrage. You cannot truly offer consolation. And so I'm trying to sort of encourage my brothers, says are Catholics, to do with their LGBT brothers and sisters. You encounter the person as they are and the accompany them, which is what Jesus does. So you know that's jesuetical. So be it, Yeah, so be it. Revisionist History is produced by Meil LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carli Migliore, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladoe.

Pushkin. On February eighteenth, two thousand and eight, on the first day of spring training, a Major League Baseball player named Andy Pettitt held a press conference. He was a pitcher who, over the course of a long and brilliant career, played for the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros. A straight arrow, a beloved teammate, one of the good guys. But now an investigation by Major League Baseball had found that Pettit had, on several occasions used performance enhancing drugs. I want to apologize to the New York Yankees and to the Houston Astros organizations, and to their fans, and to all my team mates and to all of baseball fans for the embarrassment I have called them. He reads from notes, his head bowed and shame. I also want to tell anyone that is an Andy Pettit fan, I am sorry. Pettit wanted to come clean, sort of. I'm not that much of a baseball fan, but I have to say I've always been obsessed with his case. Obsessed to the point where if you sat next to me in an airplane, I would bring it up without warning and bend your ear for a good half hour. First off, what sort of bizarre apology is this? I want to apologize for the embarrassment I caused others others I thought this was about Andy Pettit and what Andy Pettit did wrong. I never took this to get an edge on anyone. I did this to try to get off to DL and to do my job, and again for that, I am sorry for the mistakes I've made. Pettit says I was injured. I took performance enhancing drugs to get healthy, not to get ahead. Does that distinction matter? Then he segues into this long thing about his dad, who he somehow dragged into the whole mess and now wished to drag out of it. He goes on and on about his dad's heart problems. It's all very emotional, But what does his dad's heart condition have to do with the fact he cheated? At the time, everyone waited on Anti Pettitt's public statement, including my favorite, a professor named Hollyweeks, who in the pages of the Harvard Business Review called it a self protective string of explaining back padding and minimizing with a small wan apology tucked in ouch. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This episode is the first of a three part series about how to make sense of novel problems. Because what happened to Andy Pettitt was a novel problem. And if a problem is novel, if we've never seen that kind of problem before, how do we know how to think about it. I think we're really bad at figuring out novel problems. I think we need some help. I have a suggestion. Is good Rome to the Church of the Jesus. In the seniority the Church of the Jesu, built in fifteen sixty eight, the spiritual home but perhaps the most storied of the many separate divisions of the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits. It is impossible to describe the interior. It's breathtaking color ornamentation. Take one of those standard issue Renaissance cathedrals that you can find all over the world, caffeinated heavily. That's the Church of the Jesuit. And you can see on one side you can see Saint Ignacious being presented to God by Saint Peter. Saint Peter was the first spoke and Ignatius was the first superior general of the Jesuits. Saint Ignatius is buried there. Huh. While Saint ROSSI Savior his only his right arm, as you can see on the older this is right now. You choose to baptize so many people so that only his right arm is everywhere where is arrested in India. The Jesuit order was founded in the sixteenth century by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish nobleman. They're famous as the educators of the Roman Catholic Church. There may well be a Loyola High School or university in your town, or a school named after Saint Francis of Xavier. Another legendary Jesuit, Georgetown University, is a Jesuit school, so as Boston College. The Jesuits are intellectual, austere, and five hundred years ago, the Jesuits pioneered a specific approach to solving problems that were new to the world. It's called casuistry. I have to admit that I've fallen in love with casuistry. In this episode and the two that follow, I want to explain the beauty and the power of the Casuistic method. It can help with life and death issues, help us resolve some of our most divisive controversies, but also smaller things as well. From the Church of the Jesuit, my guide took me next door to the rooms where and Ignatious lived. His shoes are still in the bedroom from five hundred years ago, all battered and worn. And then I walked a few minutes north to Via del Seminario, to the graduate school of the Jesuit Order, a magnificent building with an enormous sunlit courtyard and a staircase so wide a carriage could drive up it, but not ornate, spare simple. I sat in a small room off the main entrance, where I imagine Jesuit theologians had been receiving visiting journalists since the late sixteenth century. I would like my listeners to learn how to think like a Jesuit. So here I am, so here I am now. Casuis Street comes from the word causes in Latin something happened. So you give a case, which is a narrative, you say, something happened. That's the theologian I went to see in Rome, James Keenan. Father Keenan is in his sixties, short reddish hair, a gracious manner. He was wearing a pair of old sneakers, which for some reason struck me as odd. But then I remembered Saint Ignatius's battered shoes, and I thought, that's fairy. Jesuit Keenan says the Jesuit way of approaching problems is a function of what they were asked to do for the church. The sixteenth century, when the Jesuits get their start, is the age of colonial expansion. The West is being explored, the East is opening up Columbus, Magellan, Cortez. And it's the Jesuits who go out with these expeditions. The Pope asked them to be his emissaries to the world, diplomats, businessman. And if you're out on the road thousands of miles from Rome, encountering new people and new things, you start to think differently. How could you not You're not sitting behind the walls of a monastery in splendid isolation. You have to be practical, pragmatic. In Augustine, one of the greatest of early Christian thinkers, thought that the biblical commandment thou shalt not lie was absolute. You should never lie, ever, but that's not very helpful to a Jesuit in the sixteenth century in a place like say England. Now, say you're in England and Queen Elizabeth is the queen, and she's not recognized as the sovereign by the Catholics, and you've just arise as a priest, and if you tell the soldier that you're a priest, you're going to be dead. So is it moral to lie if you're being asked if you're a Catholic When answering truthfully means that you're dead. That kind of question is just the beginning. There's never been international law because everybody had their own countries. Now they're finding out that there are not only new lands that have never been explored, but there are people in those lands. What jurisdictions are there, What questions of sovereignty, what questions of prerogatives are there? And a whole host of questions arise that are political, goal and governmental, and that's going to raise well, how do you make a decision about this? In response, the Jesuits reach a really important conclusion, which is that when it comes to new problems, you can't start by appealing to a principle principles don't help because principles are the product of past experience, and they're only helpful so long as you're still living in the world. Those past experiences help create When you're confronted with a situation you haven't encountered before, then you're in uncharted territory. In those situations, the Jesuits argue you have to proceed on a case by case basis. Now what does that mean? Well, to give just one example, there was a huge controversy over maritime shipping in the sixteenth century. Keenan has studied it extensively. The Catholic Church in those days had an absolute prohibition against usury. It was immoral to charge any interest on a loan. When that prohibition was enacted centuries before it made sense. Many loans were from wealthy people lending to desperately poor farmers, and the farmers were being exploited. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as the world opened up, merchants started shipping valuable cargoes overseas t furs from the New World, sugar rum and they wanted to buy insurance on their cargo. But was the premium that someone might pay an insurance carrier usury. It was a huge issue within the Church at the time. Many said it was usury, but the Jesuits replied, no, insurance is a novel problem, and you can't solve novel problems with old principles. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century wrote that a general rule applies generally, and the more you descend into the particulars, the more it's no longer a general rule. Descend into the particulars, understand what is distinctive about the case under consideration. That's what the Jesuits started to do. How First they would find a standard case. That is, a case that's in the same general territory where we've already reached agreement. So usury looks like an insurance premium, and everyone agrees that usury is wrong. That's a standard case, The Jesuits say, though, there's another relevant standard case. Think of the captain of the ship. He's also a kind of insurance. People pay him something like a premium to make sure the ship travels safely from point A to point B, and everyone agrees the captain is a good idea. Next, the Jesuits create what they call a taxonomy. They ask how close does the case in question come to the standard cases. So is the premium paid for maritime insurance more like something you would pay a loan shark, or more like the money you would pay for a good captain. So they keep looking for all sorts of similarities, and then they look for where's the breaking point, where is it no longer legitimate? And in the case of maritime insurance, the Jesuits say, insurance doesn't look that much like usury. It looks like the captain. The captain is there to make sure the ship gets from A to B safely. Insurance is there to make sure the value of the cargo gets from A to B safely. Do you see how brilliant that is? Everyone was going in circles around this question, and principles weren't helping. One side shouting Pope Gregory the Ninth ruled on this in twelve eighty seven, the other side accusing the Church of being stuck in the past. There are pirates out there, round and round and round. Jesuits just say stop, let's break it down step by step. Maritime insurance is just another kind of captain, and we're all in favor of captain's right. I was not raised as a Catholic. This was all new to me. It so next, let's go jesuit on the case of Andy patted. For more than a decade, there has been widespread illegal use of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances by players in Major League baseball. In January of two thousand and seven, George Mitchell, former Senate Majority leader, former key negotiator in the Northern Ireland Peace process, testified before Congress on the results of his twenty month investigation into the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The evidence we uncovered indicates that this has not been an isolated problem involving just a few players or a few clubs. The Mitchell report was four hundred and nine pages long. It named countless baseball players as illegal drug users, including on page two hundred and twenty four, Andy Pettit. The allegation came from one of Pettitt's closest friends, his trainer, Brian McNamee. Quote. From April twenty first to June fourteenth, two thousand and two, Pettit was on the disabled list with elbow tendonitis. Mactimye traveled to Tampa at Pettit's request and spent about ten days assisting Pettit with his rehabilitation. Mactimy recalled that he injected Pettit with human growth hormone on two to four occasions. The year before, the same allegation about Pettit had surfaced in a news report. Pettit had denied everything, but now baseball was in turmoil over performance enhancing drugs. Names were being named. Pettit was forced to come clean. I want to apologize to the New York Yankees and the Houston Astro's organizations and to their fans, and to all my team mates and to all of baseball fans for the embarrassment I have caused them. But then the apology isn't good enough. People get upset at him. He gets defensive, round and round. You deny, you get caught, you apologize. The apology doesn't work, the same circus that happens with all these cases. Okay, but what would the Jesuits say? They would say, wait, this is a novel problem. Baseball players using genetically engineered hormones to heal injuries. Isn't something that's happened before our set of existing principles do not help us. This is a time for casuistry. So are there standard cases out there, something reasonably analogous that we all agree on to help us make sense of this novel problem. It turns out there are standard case number one, A picture named Tommy John. Perhaps you've heard of him. Tommy John was very good, as good as Pettit. He played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Yankees. A big, friendly guy from the Midwest, also raised Catholic, as was Andy Pettitt. Not that it matters, but if you're gonna go jesuit and matters at baseball, maybe it's more appropriate to stay into family. July seventeenth, nineteen seventy four. I'm pitching against the Montreal expos I get right to the point where you're going to throw, and I felt this pain in my elbow like I've never had in my life. That's Tommy John in an ESPN documentary looking back on the injury that made him famous. When I shake my arm, get the ball back, and I throw again in the same pain and a ball goes home played. He's clearly told the story a million times, for he has it down the grimace, the aborted throwing motion. I go time, I walk off the mound. Wald Austin's coming this way, and I said, Walter, I've hurt my arm. Get somebody in. Tommy. John tore the ulner collateral ligament in his elbow, which is a tendon that basically holds your arm together. Baseball pitchers are always tearing their ulnar collateral ligament because throwing a baseball at ninety five miles per hour is an extraordinarily unnatural act. And in that era, the early nineteen seventies, if you did that to your elbow, your career was over. You'd never pitch again. But John had a very resourceful orthopedic surgeon named Frank Job, and Job had a brilliant idea. He'd take a very similarly sized tendon from the forearm, a tendant that isn't much used, and grafted onto John's damaged ligament. John got his brand new elbow at the age of thirty one, and he ended up pitching in the major leagues until he was forty six years old, which is bananas. Other players look at how John saved his career and they start asking for the same surgery. It becomes epidemic. Close to five hundred major league pitchers have thus far had what's now called Tommy John surgery, not to mention thousands of teenagers in minor league pitchers. Baseball players get Tommy John surgery the way the rest of us floss our teeth. Okay, let's look at another standard case. The pictures are on the right field. Forget about it. This one has hitted for no jersey. How about the baseball player Barry Bonds, who's widely believed to have used performance enhancing drugs at the end of his career. Bonds used to be slender and fast. He became huge when Bonds was thirty seven, at an age when most baseball players are retired. To Arizona, he had one of the greatest seasons for a baseball player ever. Largely because of Bonds and a dozen or so other stars from baseball's so called steroid era, the league banned all use of peds. Barry Bonds is the case that most of us agree is unethical. So in one corner we have Tommy John, and in the other corner we have Barry Bonds. In our taxonomy, who is Andy Pettick closest to Tommy John, Barry bonds to help me figure things out. I called up two of the most learned baseball experts I could think of. Hi, my name is Jonah Carry. I am a writer for the Athletic and for Sportsnet. Jonah Carry, who was one of those people I suspect tried rocket science as a kid, found it too easy and took up baseball analytics instead. I interviewed doctor Frank job back in two thousand and two, I believe, and he said that the big risk of this surgery was that if you did it, the person hand would become a claw, which is terrifying. That you put a new tendon in and essentially it messes with the arm so much that you don't even have any tactile ability whatsoever. That was the risk. That was the risk that Tommy John took. Carrie points out that creating a new ulner collateral tendon doesn't make you a better pitcher. It just means that you can pitch the way you pitched before. It's restorative. The tendon is there as a stabilizer that it essentially allows you to use the force that you have and the mechanics that you have in the physical strength that you have to throw as hard as possible without risk of anything happening. It keeps the arm in place. There's not a huge amount of difference between Tommy John's stats before his surgery and Tommy John's stats after his surgery. The surgery turned him back into the Tommy John we have always known. That's not the same as bonds. Bonds use drugs. That turned him into something new. A man who typically hit between thirty and four, he home runs a year suddenly and unexpectedly hits seventy three. Seventy three, there's all the all time. Next, I called up. This is George Will, political commentator, baseball fanatic, and, most crucially for our purposes, the son of Professor Frederick Will, philosopher an epistemologist. Are we now recording? Should I proceed? Yes, yes, we're recorded. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking a time. Okay, well, it's good fun. I always take time to talk baseball. Okay. If you think it sounds like I was calling George Will from my car, you are entirely correct. He's a busy man. I had to take whatever time with him I could get. Let's look at the universe of cases that we've had over the last thirty years or so, and sort can we draw a line between the ones? Can we sort of put them on a continuum from I have a real problem too, I have less of a problem. So his Bonds at the far end. Sure. Sure, When Barry Bonds goes to a spring training one year and he used to wear a size forty two jersey and now he wears a size fifty two jersey and his half size has gone from seven on eighth to seven on a quarter, that is fundamental structure of his body has changed. Then you have to say, to compete with Barry Bonds, other people have to be willing to put their bodies through this strange transformation. And that's not fair somehow, so our casuistry tells us that we're fine with restorative interventions, but were dubious of transformative interventions. So who is Andy pettitck closest to Barry Bonds or Tommy John So Pettit, we understand you know the story fight better than me. We understand it. Andy Pettit, who is a superb pitcher right. Yes, At one point he admits that he took human growth hormone in order to help recovery from an injury so that he could pitch longer. Is that in any way different from what Tommy John did? Kerry said he couldn't see a difference between the two. Pettitt had an elbow injury, just like Tommy John. Pettit used cutting edge medical science to recover from an elbow injury. Just like Tommy John. Tommy John didn't have multiple surgeries to replace each of his body parts with a bionic upgrade. He did at once to recover from injury. Pettit didn't use human growth hormone on multiple occasions. He used it to treat a specific elbow injury two to four shots over a single seven week period when he was on the disabled list. And if you look at Andy Pettitt's performance after he got himself injected with human growth hormone, it looks almost identical to his performance before or he injected himself with human growth hormone. He briefly used performance enhancing drugs to become himself again. Andy Pettitt is Tommy John same case. Did you have an opinion on Andy Pettitt only again, as you say, taking him at his word that it was only for recovery from exertion and b that if anyone else wanted to match them, they would not be putting their health in jeopardy. That seemed to me to be benign. So why are we so mad at Andy Pettitt for doing the same thing as Tommy John? Why are we scrutinizing his apology for being insincere? His apology was insincere because he had nothing to apologize for, and that little bit of hair splitting that got him in so much trouble. I never took this to get an edge on anyone. I did this to try to get off to DL and to do my job. That's not hair splitting. That's exactly the point. He didn't do it to get an edge, And that's why it's okay. Why is it okay if someone operates on my elbow but not ok if someone injects my elbow with a syringe. Is there a philosophical distinction between a scalpel and a syringe that I somehow missed. We're going to turn now to that Barry Bonds verdict. The baseball star's trial over steroid use ended yesterday and he's been found guilty of at least And what about Barry Bonds. This little bit of casuistry tells us that our problem with Bonds isn't one of principle. Bonds isn't wrong because he used performance enhancing drugs, and using performance enhancing drugs is always wrong. No, the issue is how he used drugs. Barry Bonds would have been okay if he had just dialed it back done what Tommy John and Andy Pettit did, which is to use medical science to smooth out the bumps at the end of their careers. Barry, next time, don't hit seventy three homers. If there were a way to ramp this up gradually, where okay, hit twenty seven home runs in at thirty thirty five, whatever, If there was some general progression going on, I could kind of see it. Jonah Carry was clear on this right. If at thirty seven he turns himself into a bulkier power player without the speed you know, who walks a lot and is hitting thirty homers a year, He's not only just in the hall in an instant, he's one of the greatest players of all time. Right without a knee. We're all celebrating Barry Bonds. If that happens before my conversation with Jonah Carry, I'd never thought about bonds that way. That's what casuistry does. It reframes the problem, and it says that there is a way to make sense of difficult problems without retreating into the trenches of principle. Will and Carry reminded me of a story the philosopher Stephen Tullman once told. Tullman was a casuist. He was once in a National Ethics Commission, one of those Blue Ribbon all star groups that consider weighty topics like euthanasia. The group was drawn from every walk of life, but he convinced them to work case by case the Jesuit way, and lo and behold, they all agreed. It was only at the end of their deliberations when everyone was asked to explain the principles that underlay their decisions, when they all disagreed. Suddenly they were all shouting at each other, which made Tullman wonder, if all principles do is divide us, why do we bother talking about them at all. Oh, and while we're on the subject of Stephen Tullman, let me share with you this little bit from an interview he did years ago that I stumbled across on YouTube. I mean, quite often when I'm teaching, I take my dogs into class and they sit quietly while I lecture. But I don't like to take them in when I'm lecturing on Dickcart because I'm compelled to say that Descartes thought the dogs who are merely machines, and this is an insult I'm not prepared to expose them to in my presence. I mean, I think, and the one thing I'm quite sure is that Descarte never owned a dog. Descartes was a man of abstract principles. I think therefore, I am Tullman was a casuist who brought his dogs to his philosophy lectures and assumed they were following along. I mean, whose side are you want? This is a sat question. The Jesuits are of the Catholic Church, as X is to Why is it like the Marine Corps is to the military. Yeah, but they yeah, they calls the Pope's Marines. James Martin, Jesuit priest, writer, editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America. But the other the other line is you probably are this. If you've met one Jesuit, you've met one jesuit. Yeah, Martin is very twenty first century Jesuit. He looks like he runs marathons, very energetic. He's two hundred and forty six thousand Twitter followers. I asked him to talk to me about casuistry because it's obviously been applied to much more troubling situations than ethics in professional baseball. And he told me a story. It was about the aftermath of that terrible shooting a few years ago at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Across America tonight an emotional response and here in Orlando, hundreds of people lining up all day long to donate their own blood after so much bloodshed. Martin heard about it like all of us did, and was devastated. And I didn't quite get at the beginning that it was a gay night club, and you know, it was at the time the largest mass shooting in US history, forty nine people, and so it was, you know, a pauled as everybody else was. And truly I waited for responses the USCCB, the US Bishop's Conference, because I knew that in every other instance before that and since that, the Bishop's Conference and the local bishops come out immediately with his statement, you know, we stand with our brothers and sisters wherever in Texas, and this Methodist Church and this stopping mall wherever, we are with you. Nothing radio silence. I really, I really couldn't believe it, and I thought they can't even rouse themselves to say they're sorry. Do you think it was deliberate like that or was it? No? You know, one of my professors of moral theology at Boston College who I think you'd really like in terms of his writing, Jim Keenan, I met perfect person to talk to. He points out that for Jesus in the Gospels, sin is usually not where people are weak but trying, you know, people are really struggling, but where people are strong and not bothering. So, for example, the Good Samaritan, the priest, and the Levite simply they don't bother. They just don't bother. They could help the guy, but they don't bother. And so Jim Keenan said, for Jesus, sin is a failure to bother to love. And so after Orlando, the bishops just didn't bother. They didn't bother, and I thought that was sinful, and I was really angry. About it. Now, James Martin is angry. He thinks that some of his religious superiors have acted sinfully. So what does he do? He descends into the particulars. The specific case in front of us is about the Catholic Church's moral response to gay people. Are there gay people within the Catholic Church? Yes, there are. Who are they exactly? Well, they are people with a certain sexual orientation, but they're more than that. I mean. The thing that most people misunderstand about LGBT Catholics and LGBT Christians is that for them, it's it's not often about their sexual wi. It's about Jesus. It's about prayer. It's about God and the relationship to the church and the sack ements and helping the poor and their friends, and so their sexual lives are just a part of it. So it would be like saying that a straight person came to me, what would you say to about sex? Well, that might be one thing we talk about, but that's not the whole thing we talk about. What's the most important particular about gay people within the Catholic Church that they're Catholics. I always like to say to people, you know, it's not a question of making them Catholic. They're already Catholic, they're baptized. It's their church just as much as the pope or the bishop or me. Now Martin does some taxonomy. We have a group within our church who, in one respect behave in a way that's contrary to church teaching. What other cases are like that? Well, he says, there are actually lots of people, quite happily welcomed within the Catholic Church who in some part of their life also violate church teaching. You see with LGBT people being fired. You know, even these days, you're not following this rule? What about the other rules? And we say to people, are firing people who practice birth control or in vitro fertilization, No, we're not. Do you fire people who aren't generous to the poor? Oh, we would never do that. Why not? That's a pretty important rule from Jesus. Oh, well, that's that's different. The casuist asks, why is that different? How is the biblical directive to give to the poor, a teaching that has been at the center of Christian practice for two thousand years, somehow less essential than being straight. If you fire people for one sort of rule violation, why aren't you firing them? For another? After his initial response to the Pulse shooting, Martin wrote an article on the church in the gay community and then a book. And what's strange about reading both is you keep waiting for the other shooter drop. So here's my question, though from an outsider, so one responsive annonswer might be, if you're that disappointed in your church, why don't you leave the church? Because this is on the First of all, it's only one part of what the church is doing. Yeah, right. Second of all, you could just say that about your country or your family. I mean, you know, like you know, the current presidential administration. Why aren't you leaving? People say, well, I'm an American. Well, I'm a Catholic too, and truly, you know, given that I'm not challenging any church teaching and really talking more about the Gospels, there's no reason to leave. I've also, you know, to be clear, I've also made several promises. I took a vow as a Jesuit that i'd stay. I made a promise as a priest at my ordination that i'd stay. So I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, that to me is not even a question. Now again, consider what he says here. I'm not challenging any church teaching. He's not tackling this issue at the level of theological doctrine. I have to admit that this puzzled me at first. Martin is an intellectual, a scholar, a serious person like most of us. I assume that to be an intellectual and a serious person is to engage first and foremost with principles. But Martin isn't interested in bouncing on some point of church doctrine. He's a Jesuit thousands of miles from the Vatican, trying to live his faith in the real world. Saint Ignatius famously told his followers that their first obligation on their travels was to console those who were suffering or marginalized. That's why you descend into the particulars, because if you do not immerse yourself in the specifics of someone's life and circumstance, then all you can offer is platitudes or outrage. You cannot truly offer consolation. And so I'm trying to sort of encourage my brothers, says are Catholics, to do with their LGBT brothers and sisters. You encounter the person as they are and the accompany them, which is what Jesus does. So you know that's jesuetical. So be it, Yeah, so be it. Revisionist History is produced by Meil LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carli Migliore, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladoe.