Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)
Dear Prudence
Translating Moral Principle into Public Policy
Created 10/10/2012 - 2:31pm
Daniel K. Finn
There has recently been much talk
about whether Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is faithful to the principles of
Catholic social thought—or is instead a libertarian rejection of the
church’s commitment to the poor. In response to the Ryan budget, the
chairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Justice, Peace, and Human Development,
Bishops Stephen Blaire and Richard Pates, have written that “the needs
of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should
come first.... Just solutions, however, must require shared sacrifice by
all, including raising adequate revenues, eliminating unnecessary
military and other spending, and fairly addressing the long-term costs
of health insurance and retirement programs.” In a later interview,
Blaire said, “The budget is not just a financial document; it is a moral
document: Are you cutting services to the poor and leaving the military
alone?”
Yet other bishops—for example,
Ryan’s former ordinary in Milwaukee, Cardinal Timothy Dolan—have praised
Ryan as a strong Catholic, and some have gone considerably further.
Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, one of the country’s most
thoughtful bishops, has raised questions about those who have challenged
Ryan’s claim that his budget is authentically Catholic. In a recent
interview Chaput said, “Jesus tells us very clearly that if we don’t
help the poor, we’re going to go to hell. Period. There’s just no doubt
about it. That has to be a foundational concern of Catholics and of all
Christians. But Jesus didn’t say the government has to take care of
them, or that we have to pay taxes to take care of them.”
Although that last sentence is
literally true, its use in this context is deeply misleading. Jesus also
didn’t tell his disciples to count on the government to respect
religious liberty, forbid abortion and same-sex marriage, or provide the
lion’s share of the budget of Catholic Charities across the United
States, but today these are all expectations of the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). A lot has changed since Jesus’
day, including the rise of democratic governments, which citizens
rightly expect to play an essential role in the achievement of the
common good, particularly in protecting the weakest among us, who are
threatened in a me-first culture. As Pope Benedict XVI has said,
economic life “needs just laws and forms of redistribution governed by
politics” (Caritas in veritate, 37).
We should not be shocked that a
bishop can make a mistake in explaining Catholic doctrine. As renowned
canon lawyer Ladislas Orsy, SJ, argued in The Church Learning and Teaching,
each bishop receives at his episcopal ordination a charism ensuring the
help of the Holy Spirit in witnessing to the Word of God, but this
doesn’t guarantee that he will make no mistakes in exercising his
charism. And because in our tradition the bishops in communion with one
another are the final arbiters of doctrine, it is all the more important
that they be theologically well informed.
It’s always possible for bishops,
like anyone else, to be misquoted in the press, but a pattern of public
statements by several high-profile bishops seems to point to
misunderstandings of two basic elements of Catholic moral theology. This
becomes clearer if we continue with the next sentences in Archbishop
Chaput’s discussion of Ryan’s budget:
Those
are prudential judgments. Anybody who would condemn someone because of
their position on taxes is making a leap that I can’t make as a
Catholic.... You can’t say that somebody’s not Christian because they
want to limit taxation. Again, I’m speaking only for myself, but I think
that’s a legitimate position. It may not be the correct one, but it’s
certainly a legitimate Catholic position; and to say that it’s somehow
intrinsically evil like abortion doesn’t make any sense at all.
Intrinsic evil and prudence are
the key notions here. Fifty years ago, the quite technical concept of
intrinsic evil was mostly confined to the writings of professional moral
theologians. Today it appears in just about every episcopal statement
on public policy in the United States. An action is intrinsically evil
if it is always and everywhere morally wrong. (Recall that most evil
actions are not always evil and depend on context: taking a life is
acceptable in defense of one’s own life; stealing a car is acceptable if
it’s the only way to get a dying person to the hospital.) The problem
is that the standard of intrinsic evil seems to have become a litmus
test for what is essential Catholic moral teaching. Perhaps I
misunderstand him, but in the passage I’ve quoted the archbishop seems
to be arguing that because neither reducing taxes nor cutting government
assistance to the needy is an intrinsic evil, neither can be described
as contrary to Catholic teaching.
The problem here is that, while
some actions are both intrinsically evil and extremely important
(abortion being one obvious example), other actions—for example,
masturbation—have traditionally been considered intrinsically evil but
are far less important. And while torture is both extremely important
and intrinsically evil according to church teaching, few bishops are
calling for stricter legal standards against torture, even after the
excesses of Abu Ghraib.
It is therefore a serious mistake
in Catholic moral theology to conclude that the category of intrinsic
evil creates a bright line between matters of greater and lesser moral
importance. Pope John Paul II cautioned against this very error in Veritatis splendor
(53): “The fact that only the negative commandments oblige always and
under all circumstances does not mean that in the moral life
prohibitions are more important than the obligation to do good indicated
by the positive commandments.” Somehow many of our bishops seem to have
become convinced of the contrary: that if something isn’t intrinsically
evil, it’s necessarily less important, and we may not even be sure that
the tradition holds it to be wrong.
What has led so many bishops to
this position? Although every bishop I’ve ever asked says he doesn’t
allow such things to influence his thinking, my own guess is that the
nasty reports to Rome of episcopal “error” by a small number of militant
Catholics have pressed many bishops to retreat from the plains of moral
ambiguity where everyday life occurs into the canyon of unassailable
moral certainty. And in this process, theologically challenged lay
Catholics hold their bishops to a standard of doctrinal purity that Pope
Benedict himself has rejected. Recall that Benedict made twice-divorced
French President Nikolas Sarkozy an honorary canon of the pope’s
cathedral, St. John Lateran, in spite of Sarkozy’s public support of
prochoice policies. In the United States, meanwhile, many bishops won’t
even allow prochoice politicians to speak at Catholic colleges in their
dioceses—not even to speak about, say, environmental policy.
This brings us to another point:
prudence, which led Pope Benedict to honor Sarkozy in spite of their
doctrinal differences. Prudence is regularly overused in addressing
economic justice and underappreciated in discussing life issues. Thomas
Aquinas taught that prudence is the virtue that allows us to take
concrete action as we live out our moral principles. At its best,
prudence allows us to foresee what will occur and judiciously decide how
best to put our principles into practice. Laws distinguishing between
first-, second-, and third-degree murder arise out of prudence in
applying the principle “thou shalt not kill.” Similarly, it took
prudence for the bishops to move from the principle that all abortions
are morally wrong to their support for a health-care reform bill that
would have incorporated the Hyde Amendment, which allows the federal
government to pay for abortions in the case of rape or incest. And yet
the leadership of the USCCB later claimed that it was only principle,
not prudence, that led them to reject the Obama health-care law on the
grounds that it would fund abortions.
While prudence is nearly
invisible in the bishops’ teaching about life issues, it is too often
used to trump all doctrinal concerns in discussions about economics. In
the interview quoted above, Archbishop Chaput seems to be suggesting
that because it requires prudence to determine how much tax revenue to
raise in order to help those in need, there can be no Catholic criticism
of Paul Ryan’s circular argument for lower taxes. When the discussion
is about spending, Ryan argues that the government can no longer afford
to help the needy as much we do now. Yet when the discussion is about
the tax policies that determine what we can afford, Ryan insists that we should never raise taxes, no matter how low they are already. This is the content of Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge,
signed by Ryan and 95 percent of the Republicans in Congress. Federal
income-tax receipts as a percent of GDP have been lower the past couple
of years than they’ve been since the 1950s. We “can’t afford” to help
the poor only because we’ve decided to lower income taxes instead. And,
as Bishop Blaire reminds us, even without raising taxes, more money
could be spent on programs for the needy and less on the military if our
priorities were what they ought to be.
What about Ryan’s concern for the
size of the national debt? Isn’t this a good reason to cut government
expenditures? We’ve all heard it argued that the national debt will
swamp our grandchildren. But if debt were Ryan’s real concern, why would
his plan spend the savings from budget cuts on further reductions in
income taxes? Even Fox News admits that the Ryan budget would add $3
trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Then there’s the claim that lower
taxes for the rich will result in more jobs, which will end up helping
the poor. Jobs are indeed the long-term solution for the able-bodied
poor, but during the economic slump the wealthy have moved much of their
money into safe, non-job-producing investments. For example, the
monetary value of the world’s (largely unchanging) supply of gold has
doubled from $4 to $8 trillion since the financial crisis began. The
wealthy undertake job-creating investments only when they judge it will
make them wealthier—not simply because Congress gives them a windfall
tax break unrelated to job creation. Today firms and investors are
holding back, sitting on the sidelines with trillions in cash. They
don’t want to start making refrigerators that will only sit in a
warehouse until economic activity heats up later. Giving the wealthy
more wealth by means of tax breaks will not create more jobs in the
current economic climate.
Ryan has also claimed that
reducing government help to the poor is actually good for them, because
it reduces dependency. In fact, far fewer of the poor are dependent than
right-wing rhetoric suggests—most of the able-bodied poor are eager to
find a regular job—but dependency is indeed a danger in helping others,
and we must be savvy about it. Still, how does the dependency argument
justify the dramatic cuts Ryan proposes in assistance to those too old,
too young, or too sick to work? Or cuts in retraining programs that help
the able-bodied poor qualify for a job so that they can support
themselves and their families?
Finally, there is the claim that
government should leave care for the poor to the churches and the
private sector. Of course we should not depend on the government to do
it all. But it is a right-wing illusion that private donations will take
up the slack if the government reduces assistance to the poor and
vulnerable. Across the nation, 62 percent of Catholic Charities’ budgets
and a similar proportion of Lutheran Social Services’ budgets come from
state and national governments, not from private contributions. Cut
government aid significantly and these agencies will have much less to
work with.
Thus we find that the five
arguments most often made in support of Ryan’s economic plans—budgetary
constraints, the national debt, job creation, welfare dependency, and a
shift to private charity—don’t really explain his policy priorities.
Something else must be going on.
From the Catholic perspective,
society, market, and government each have an essential role to play in
securing the common good. Paul Ryan’s budget arises from his underlying
political philosophy, tersely formulated in the assertion that
“government is the problem.” Notwithstanding recent attempts to revise
his personal history, he made clear in a 2005 speech to the Atlas Society
what originally motivated his interest in politics: “The reason I got
involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one
thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here,
make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus
collectivism.” As the theologian Vincent Miller has argued, Ryan’s
political philosophy is completely at odds with the principles of
Catholic social thought, which rejects both individualism and
collectivism as deeply inadequate accounts of authentic human
flourishing.
One final clarification is
needed. Describing a handful of moral issues as “non-negotiables”
furthers our misunderstanding of Catholic moral theology because it
reinforces the two errors identified above. First, it implies that for
these few issues both the underlying moral principle and a particular
plan for the political implementation of that principle are morally
binding on all Catholics. Second, mistaking certainty for importance, it
implies that Catholics can demote other similarly fundamental moral
commitments that all the modern popes have insisted on—for example, the
role of government in protecting the poor and ensuring the right of
workers to organize.
Intrinsic evil and prudence are
both fundamental realities in the moral life. But it is a serious
mistake from the perspective of Catholic moral theology to use intrinsic
evil as the litmus test for what’s truly important, or to use prudence
as a cover for public policies that distribute benefits to the
prosperous at the expense of those who can’t meet their own needs.
Source URL: http://commonwealmagazine.org/dear-prudence
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