Miller: Well-Ordered Means and Ends Revisited

Eduardo Moisés Peñalver, who teaches at Cornell, argues in Commonweal that the genuinely Catholic vote this fall should go to the Democratic party. In fact, for Peñalver, it’s not even a close call, for he thinks that the Bush administration knowingly led the United States into war in Iraq on false pretenses, tortures prisoners to extract confessions and satisfy its hatreds, intentionally seeks to favor the rich at the expense of the poor, and consciously enflames racial hatred for political advantage. He thus proves, sadly, that some people are determined to believe the worst about those who disagree with them on complex political issues. I would let it go at that, but Peñalver also talks about Catholic moral doctrine on abortion, getting some aspects of that doctrine quite wrong. In particular, he says that, if opposition to abortion were the moral imperative that Catholics like Robert George and Gerald Bradley say it is , then "George W. Bush’s failure to take extraordinary steps during his six years in office to put an immediate end to the slaughter makes him nearly as culpable as prochoice politicians. If mass murder is going on every day in this country, shouldn’t President Bush halt all other government business in order to force through a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion?" In other words, if abortion is really as bad as some Catholics say, then they ought demand that their politicians take steps to end abortion immediately, and if these politicians don’t do so, then there’s no moral difference between such politicians and pro-choice politicians. Peñalver is here falling into the same confusion I remarked on a few weeks ago , a confusion regarding two different kinds of moral norms recognized in Catholic moral theology. One the one hand, we have norms that prohibit actions that, by their nature, are incapable of being ordered to the final end of human nature, just as embezzling funds is an action incapable of being ordered to the end of running a bank. Such actions are always and everywhere wrong, and so we may never, under any circumstances whatsoever, engage in such actions or even cooperate in them. Abortion, being the intentional killing of an innocent human being, is such an action. On the other hand, we have norms that require us to act to help others, including by preventing aggressors from killing them, whether in abortion or otherwise. Norms requiring positive action, however, are not absolute but are always qualified as to circumstances. The reason is that an action is positively required only if, in the circumstances, it is uniquely well-ordered to the final end, i.e., there is no action available to the agent better ordered to that end than the action in question. Hence, the question as to whether there is an obligation to act¯and if so, what that obligation is an obligation to do¯always depends on the circumstances, for only by examining the circumstances can we determine which actions are available and how well-ordered to the final end various actions are. Hence, when Peñalver says that pro-life politicians ought do anything and everything to prevent abortions, I think he is confusing the norm against killing the innocent with the norm in favor of rescuing the innocent from unjust aggressors. The former requires that we do anything whatsoever to avoid violating it, going to our deaths as martyrs if need be. Senator Kerry rather grossly violated this norm, incidentally, when he advocated in favor of a moral right to abortion , telling attendees at a NARAL function, "The right to choose [an abortion] is a fundamental right. Neither the government nor any person has a right to infringe upon that freedom." The norm about rescuing the innocent from a violent death, however, is different. Pro-life politicians, and indeed Catholic voters, are required to do what they can to prevent the deaths of innocents, whether in abortion or otherwise, given existing circumstances, which circumstances include political realities and our independent moral obligation to respect the rule of law. What’s possible in the circumstances, of course, is an empirical question about which reasonable people may disagree; in some cases, a person might even reasonably conclude that so little can be done that a politician’s position on abortion is irrelevant. It’s clear, however, that Peñalver’s idea¯that President Bush should shut down the government to work for a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion¯is entirely unrealistic; there is no reasonable basis to think it would succeed in present circumstances. Hence, such an action is not uniquely well-ordered to the final end; indeed, given its patent futility, it is probably not ordered to that end at all. There is thus no obligation to do such a thing. A final example will make this quite clear. Peñalver and I agree, I’m sure, that when terrorists, inspired by religious hatred, murder innocent human beings, what they do is gravely wrong. Peñalver and I tend to disagree, I suspect, about how aggressive the United States ought be in acting to prevent such wrongdoing. By Peñalver’s logic, the government ought do anything and everything to prevent such killings, and if our politicians fail to exert themselves to the utmost, then they¯and presumably those who vote for them on the basis of their policies¯are no better the terrorists themselves. In this way, Peñalver might be committed to saying that he himself is the moral equivalent of a terrorist. I, for my part, know that he is much better than that.

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