The LA Times Tackles Complex Moral Reasoning…

      And gets it all wrong.  C+ for effort, though, since the editorial “A Blessing in Disguise?” (April 27, 2006) brought up the subject of the Catholic moral principle called “double effect,” a principle probably unknown to most journalists.  But misunderstood – or misconstrued? – by the writer of this editorial, this principle becomes a handy weapon against the Church’s perennial teaching, based on natural law, that one can never do evil in order to attain to a perceived good.  This is one of the most basic of moral principles and one that is not too difficult to understand… unless a newspaper editor is desperately trying to muscle the Church into compliance with secular norms.  If that’s the case, the “wise” thing to do is begin with something much more complicated; thus, the waters can be muddied a good bit so as to provide a suitable atmosphere in which to launch one’s conclusion.

      Here’s muddying of the waters:   

There is a precedent in Catholic teaching for allowing the use of condoms to prevent disease. A doctrine known in moral theology as the "double effect" says that an individual may engage in an act that has both good and bad effects if the good effect compensates for the bad effect and the act itself is "morally good or at least indifferent."  
 
The use of condoms to contain the spread of AIDS seems to fit squarely into that doctrine. If birth control is an evil (a proposition that even many Catholics question), it is certainly a lesser one than contributing to the scourge of AIDS.   

It’s hard to know where to begin in order to untangle this mess.  But first, it should be noted that the writer is not arguing for the acceptance of limited condom use per se, but rather is claiming more particularly that such use can be acceptable to Catholic moral teaching.  In the argument above, the writer first inaccurately defines double effect, thus providing the foundation for the argument’s conclusion:  he equates or identifies the act itself as one of the effects – that is, the act (condom use in certain situations, something the Church views as immoral in and of itself) “becomes” the tolerated effect (the sanctioning of an immoral act because it is a “lesser” evil than the alternative).  What we have here is simply the unethical claim – again, in this case, given the Church’s condemnation of condom use – that the ends justifies the means, or put more classically, one can indeed do evil so that a good can be attained.

      This is not how the principle of double effect works.  The name of the principle itself – “double effect” – should be clear enough; and it refers to the effects of an already morally acceptable act, the effects of which are mixed.  The usual, and very good, illustration of this is the case of the pregnant woman with a cancerous uterus, a cancer that is killing her.  The act that follows, with the woman’s consent, is the removal of the uterus, the effects of which are the preservation of her life and the unfortunate, and unintended death of the fetus.  The object of the act is the removal of that which is killing the woman; the intention of the act is the preservation of the woman’s life; and the effects of the act is that a good is achieved, even if at the expense of the tragic loss of life, a good achieved that outweighs the unintended loss.  This is starkly different from the “case” set forth by the LA Times editorial. 

      We could wonder about the writer’s intentions in so muddled an argument, but, then, we’ll leave that judgment to God.  The only real alternative to explaining this article is that the writer is ignorant of that about which he writes, and such writers, such debaters, should not deem themselves worthy to proclaim on subjects they do not understand.  But that’s seldom been a check on the modern media in America.   
 

The Long Lent of 2002

      Yes, that infamous year of so many priest scandals coming to light (though the great majority of allegations hark back to the 1960s and 70s).  The publisher of Our Sunday Visitor, Greg Erlandson, begins one of his recent articles (quoted in the latest issue of First Things, May 2006, Number 163, pp. 68, 69) with, “‘Any priest who is found guilty of such abuse in an objective investigation or in an appropriate court should be dealt with according to the laws of the state and the Church.’  Then he changes pace:  ‘But we are so far past this point’.”  Erlandson then gives us some details that most people are unaware of:  “Catholics are being robbed by a collection of activists, judges, legislators, and lawyers in a shrewdly manipulated hysteria that shows no sign of abating.  It has resulted in an estimated one billion dollars in payments.  Now parish properties and services are at risk…. No other institution has undergone this kind of scrutiny – or taken similar steps to remedy the problems.  It is estimated that the number of abuse cases in one year in the nation’s public schools is larger than the total number of alleged cases in the Church in the past 50 years.”   Then the editor of First Things gives us the particular facts, something that is not trumpeted by the media:  “… in 1998 the U.S. Department of Justice listed 103,600 reported cases of sexual abuse in public schools, while in the 53 years from 1950 to 2003 there were 10,667 reported cases of clergy sexual abuse nationwide.  That’s ten times as many in a single year as instances of clerical abuse in more than half a century.”  Where’s the public outcry about this, the newspaper cartoons, the “survivor networks,” and, of course, the lawyers? FT explains:  “Public schools are protected by government immunities from large claims for damages, and abusing teachers are routinely moved from classroom to classroom.”