Benedict XVI and proportionalism

Aboard his recent flight en route to Sydney, Pope Benedict XV1 commented to journalists on five subjects. One of these comments was made in response to a question about the issue of sexual abuse by Australian clergy and in his response, the Pope referred to three dimensions of the issue, one of which concerned a failure in the education of clergy. Here he singled out a particular ethical theory entitled Proportionalism.

This theory, in the Pope's words “held that no thing is bad in itself, but only in proportion to others; with Proportionalism it was possible to think for some subjects - one could also be pedophilia - that in some proportion they could be a good thing. Now, it must be stated clearly, this was never Catholic doctrine. There are things which are always bad, and pedophilia is always bad.”

It must be admitted that the early presentations of the theory of Proportionalism were by no means crystal clear and in consequence some in the Church failed to understand the theory and its implications for Christian life.

It may well be that a percentage of seminary teaching at the time led to misunderstanding on the part of some students and the conclusion that some actions, including child abuse, were not inherently wrong and could in some situations be justified. However, Proportionalism rightly understood does not lead to such a conclusion. The theory, it is true, was never officially taught by the magisterium, nor by the same token was it ever officially condemned.

What the theory said and did not say deserves to be clearly understood.

Proportionalism became popular in the 1960s and 1970s among Roman Catholic moral theologians, especially in Germany and the United States of America, where it underwent a process of development and refinement.

Reacting against an older, too rigid, moral theological theory, moral theologians such as Bruno Schuller, Josef Fuchs, Louis Jansenns in Europe, and Charles Curran, Timothy O'Connell and Richard McCormick in America, attempted to stress personal freedom and creative responsibility while trying to develop a more realistic approach to the place and meaning of moral rules in Christian ethics.

Their efforts provoked much useful discussion, as well as a good deal of opposition in theological circles. Although in McCormick's view the proportionalists had the better of the argument, many did not, and have not, agreed.

Proportionalism shifts the focus of moral judgment of right and wrong squarely onto consequences and other attendant circumstances of an action. Effects or consequences have always been considered important in moral judgment, but in this theory they enter more intimately into the constitution of the moral act. I will summarise some commonly agreed principles among those who propound the system.

1. First, an abstract consideration of the morality of human actions is not sufficient. Traditionally, Catholic moral theologians have referred to acts that are categorised as “intrinsically evil”. By this it is meant that physical actions that are judged to be wrong because of their object: that is, because of the sort of acts they are, independently of any other considerations.

Proportionalists take exception to this view. For them there are no intrinsically evil acts: if by acts it is meant physical actions considered in the abstract, for example, contraception or masturbation. The reason for this is that the context enters in the very object or meaning of the act. The act of masturbation, for example, in the context of sperm testing is an act that is different from self-pleasuring, much as we say that killing in self-defence differs from killing during a robbery.

As Richard McCormick put it (“Killing the Patient”, The Tablet, October 16, 1993), “those who reject these differences have attributed a full independent moral character to the material event of self-stimulation that they do not attribute to the merely material event of ‘speaking falsehood’ or ‘taking another's property’.”

2. Acts are not good or bad in themselves, according to proportionalists. The other side of the coin is that, in order to act rightly, it is necessary to weigh up the good that will be achieved and the evil that may result.

While one may not intend to do evil to human beings as such, if the amount of good for persons outweighs the evil, one has a proportionate reason for acting. Then the evil resulting (for instance, death, wounding, dishonour) remains outside the realm of morality (this is called by proportionalists “premoral” evil to distinguish it from moral evil in the strict sense).

If however, the evil done outweighs the good, then there is no proportionate reason for acting and the evil becomes moral evil and therefore wrong.

An example commonly given is the taking of his own life by a spy caught by the enemy in wartime. According to the proportionalist theory, this would not be wrong if there were no other way to protect secret information whose betrayal would jeopardise many lives. There would be a proportionate reason for taking his life in this case.

It is because of the central importance of proportionate reason in this theory that it is referred to as Proportionalism, and hence its protagonists are called proportionalists.

In weighing up the preponderance of good over evil, account must be taken not only of the action itself, for instance killing or lying, but also of the motive for which it is done and the circumstances in which it occurs.

This means that we cannot do our calculations in the abstract by attempting to put a moral label on classes of actions while prescinding from actual circumstances. Each act must be judged in its actual context and in terms of the existence of a proportionate reason. For proportionalists, a good intention certainly does not justify a morally wrong action. For them it is necessary to look at all the morally relevant circumstances before one can know exactly what the action is and therefore whether it is to be judged as morally wrong.

3. Clearly, in this way of thinking concrete moral rules are not absolute, that is, admitting of no exceptions. At most, they are general rules that will apply perhaps in the majority of cases, but that cannot be expected to exclude every possible exception. Killing an innocent person will generally be wrong but may be justified in some particular circumstances, for example, in a situation where one has certitude that this is the only way a far greater number of innocent persons may be saved.

A similar judgment could be made about lying, stealing, sterilisation, and so on in exceptional circumstances. However, it is admitted that some moral rules may be “virtual” absolutes, in the sense that it is hard to envisage the possibility of there ever being a proportionate reason for going against them.

The prohibition of rape, forcing another to violate his or her conscience, dropping a nuclear bomb that would kill a million people, and pedophilia, would for them, be in this category of “virtual” absolutes. Proportionalists come then to the same conclusion about pedophilia as Pope Benedict XVI in his comment, but on different moral grounds.

Proportionalism, it must be admitted, has done a great deal towards stimulating thought about moral issues and promoting a much-needed revision of Christian ethics. It has not however fully satisfied all its critics.

Whatever about the claim, which many proportionalists make, that the indispensable place of the individual person is implied in the evaluation of consequences it remains an indispensable truth that the dignity of the human person and the place of human rights needs to be enshrined as the centrepiece of moral decision making.