Reason Amid the Ruins

By Michael Pakaluk Let's get it out of the way at the start. It is permissible for Catholics to choose the lesser of evils. When they do so, their choice gets accounted for as avoiding the greater evil, not favoring the evil that is lesser. You are driving a runaway trolley. Five men are working on the track ahead; one man only is on the track to the left. You pull the lever to change tracks. In doing so, the effect of your action is that one man perishes. This you could foresee, but you did not wish it. The evil is imputable to the circumstances, not to you. Catholics call this sort of reasoning "double effect." An application: If one candidate favors abortion through all nine months, while the other opposes only late-term abortions, so far it would be praiseworthy to favor the latter, on the grounds of avoiding the former. You would be "rejecting legal abortion through all nine months," not "favoring legal abortion in first months." I simplify to be clear. But I should add a condition of double-effect not often attended to, which proves highly relevant to politics. In the trolley example above, Catholics hold that you are gravely bound to take no delight in the killing of the one. It is foreseeable. You have no choice. To change tracks is praiseworthy. Still, you must continue to hold up the death of that man as an evil. We can imagine cases where that would be difficult. Suppose he is your enemy. You know he has been plotting to kill you. It would be expedient if he were to die. With relief, you realize you can kill him under cover of double effect! If your intention changes in this way, your action becomes corrupt. If, when you return to town, you get congratulated by friends for having so dispatched with an enemy, you must distance yourself from them and make it clear that his death was no part of your intention. In politics what we "delight in" is sometimes shown by what we favor in acting upon, and sometimes in what we say, or fail to say. Recently the Republican National Committee changed, or was imposed upon to change, its historic assertion, in the tradition of Lincoln, that the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment as interpreted in light of that Declaration imply that abortion must be illegal - in all states and jurisdictions. Abortion law can no more be a patchwork than slavery law. A house divided against itself cannot stand: the only stable realization consistent with the "proposition" on which our nation is founded is that abortion be uniformly illegal. There are changes that are so radical that they unravel everything, although they seemed slight at the start. A married man or woman commits adultery. Maybe it looked like a small slip-up then. But it becomes clear over time that, from that moment, a split became inevitable - but for the intervention of grace. Some say - I say - that in removing this plank, the Republican Party dissolved itself, and that that fact will become clear over time. The so-called "realignment of the Right" will prove to be a replacement of the Right. Someone might say: "Yet there is such a thing as 'the inopportune.' Newman for example accepted papal infallibility but he believed the defining of it in the First Vatican Council was not opportune. In American politics today, from the point of view of electability, it is not opportune to assert the universality of the right to life. To refrain to assert something is not the same as asserting its opposite." But Newman had written a book defending the historic character of papal infallibility (Development of Christian Doctrine). Politics in a free society must be transparent. Where can one look for what a party believes, except its platform? Moreover, other things have dropped out of the platform. National debt is no longer mentioned as a serious problem. Social Security reform is no longer advocated - even though the best estimates say the system will be bankrupt in fifteen years. The Supreme Court's redefinition of marriag...