Tag: double effect

Is ownership more culpable than trade?

I am planning to write a post soon responding to a very interesting debate between Jacob Imam and Trent Horn, but here’s a teaser.

In Trent Horn’s defense of 401Ks, he asks, “If we can use YouTube, why can’t we buy stock in Google?” In other words, what is morally different about cooperating with Google in the sense of doing business with them through the use of their service, and cooperating with them in the sense of purchasing ownership in the company itself?

It’s a great question, and my answer will hearken back to the Thomistic doctrine of double effect, which I discuss in previous posts, namely, that it is permissible to do an act that one foresees as having both good and evil consequences, if the good consequences outweigh the evil, and are caused with the same immediacy, as a separate byproduct, not as a result of the evil itself.

This principle explains the problem we feel with the logic of most movie villains (at least of those who offer an explanation for their insanity). They always want to correct some wrong in the world (like starvation due to overpopulation) by some wrong means (like killing half of the people in the universe). Why do we hate them? Because they are violating the fundamental moral principle that—even in the most desperate of situations—it’s always wrong to “do good that evil may come,” as St. Paul condemns in Romans 3:8. Why is it always wrong? Because we cause an end less directly than we cause the means to it. By doing evil that good may result, we lose faith in God to provide the means for us to wholly obey him. It’s failing the test of the Sacrifice of Isaac.

The difference between being a user of Google services and being an owner of Google is that the good that one achieves by being an owner is achieved by means of being an owner, as a further result of the ownership (and all the shared responsibility that entails), whereas in the case of being a user of Google services, one causes the good that they intend simultaneously and in causal parallel with the evil that they permit Google to do.

Ownership in Google is a means to that monetary end. (I am assuming one owns stock in Google because they want to make money.) I tolerate that I am an owner of Google and Google is thereby using my capital to do evil things, because by means of Google getting money, I may achieve whatever good I intend to do with my share. No matter how proportionately great the reason—providing for my kids and my elderly relatives, or what have you—the evil is still causally prior.

But when I use a Google service in such a way that Google gets money (from me or from advertisers by my passive complicity), I do not achieve whatever good I intend by means of Google getting money; if anything, I achieve it in spite of Google getting money, as is evidenced by the fact that I could achieve my purposes just as well, or even better, if I gave Google no money at all for their service: then I could browse more efficiently, or listen to music without those contemptible interruptions. Indeed, I would much prefer if their services were entirely free, of both fees and advertisements!

Double Effect and equal causality

The Doctrine of Double Effect articulates when it is justified to perform an action that one foresees as having both good and evil effects. This doctrine was first credited to St. Thomas Aquinas, who used it to justify self-defense killing. The doctrine holds that an action that has both a good and a bad effect is justified if and only if the following four conditions are met:

  1. The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
  2. The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
  3. The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
  4. The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect. (Catholic Encyclopedia, qtd. McIntyre, 2014)

The first condition rules out actions that are intrinsically evil, such as fornication, regardless of their side effects, and the second condition rules out formal cooperation in evil–if you do evil because you want to do it, then it is illicit regardless of its good side effects. That leaves us with material cooperation: doing evil that you don’t want or intend to do, per se, but feel compelled to do for some reason, such as to avoid a greater evil. This is where it gets trickier.

To understand the third and fourth conditions, the distinction must be made between the degree of causality which a person has on the good and evil effects (third condition) and the magnitude of the good and evil effects themselves (fourth condition). While the fourth condition holds that the good and bad effects must be measured against each other, and the good effects themselves (or the evils avoided) must outweigh the bad, the third condition constrains this proportional consideration by stipulating that the degree of causality must also be weighed. The evil effect cannot be a means to the good effect; in other words, they must be caused by your action with equal directness. This rules out immediate (direct) material cooperation, such as assisting in an abortion operation by providing nursing care before or after the operation, but leaves remote (mediate) material cooperation as permissible under certain conditions. Since immediate/direct material cooperation and mediate/remote material cooperation are relative terms, this principle means we must take into account the relative directness with which we will cause the good and bad effect, and never act in such a way as to more directly cause the bad than we cause the good, that is, to use the bad as a means to the good.

The principle of equal causality, though few can articulate it, can be widely felt in people’s natural moral conscience. I offer the example of two ethical thought experiments that are often contrasted with each other.

In the basic version of the “Trolley Dilemma”, there is a runaway train barreling down a track toward five people who are lying helpless in its path. You are standing at a lever that can divert the train onto a second track to miss those people. However, on the second track there is one person lying similarly helplessly. Your hand is on the lever, and you must decide whether to pull the lever and permit the death of the one man, or do nothing and permit the death of the five. What would you do? Why?

Contrast this with a situation in which you are a doctor with four sick patients and one healthy patient, and you know that, unless those four patients receive organ transplants within the next hour, their death is immanent; furthermore, you know that the healthy patient, who is sleeping under anesthesia, has all the organs they need. You must decide whether to harvest his organs, killing him, in order to save them. What would you do then? Why?

The difference that most people can sense is a difference in the relative directness with which one achieves the good and bad effects. In the Trolley Dilemma, the directness of both effects is pretty much equal. In the doctor scenario, one effect is clearly more direct; in other words, it is involved as a means to the other effect. Such reflections confirm to us that it is not justifiable to make a choice based on the foreseen outcomes without consideration for the degree of causality or agency one has in the evil.

A consequentialist or utilitarian ethic is focused on the foreseen results as the ultimate basis of determining the morality of an action and believes that the end justifies the means. It does not limit this consideration of outcomes by one’s agency in the act. An honest utilitarian would say that the doctor should kill the healthy man to save the sick men, if he was sure that the others would die.

This kind of thinking is prevalent in our society today but is contrary to Christian ethical norms. Pope John Paul II rejected consequentialism and its cousin proportionalism in 1993. Even non-Catholic Christians should realize that a Christian view of man regards his foreknowledge as imperfect and recognizes that ignoring ourselves as subjects of our moral actions is to pretend to have God’s omniscience and his responsibility to direct all eventualities. The humble heart that acknowledges God’s sovereignty in all things remembers that there is a line he must not cross even when he foresees evil, because he trusts in God’s providence. Therefore, he acts according to the Natural and Divine law within his sphere of control, and trusts the Lawgiver to do the same within his own sphere, that is, the whole world.

While the Christian is prudent and shrewd in his dealings, nevertheless he looks to God and never “does evil that good may result.” The Doctrine of Double Effect, including its third condition, is not simply an obscure formulation or an optional stance, but an articulation of the moral law that binds the conscience of the Christian in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s restoration of his mind and reason.