The Dubious Guidance of the New Natural Law Theorists on "Formal Cooperation"
Saturday, September 22, 2012 Steven A. Long Christopher Tollefsen argues as follows regarding the issue of formal cooperation:
As Sherif Girgis and Robert P. George have explained, formal cooperation involves acts that assist another in wrongdoing, in which the intention of the one providing assistance is precisely to further the wrongful aims of the primary agent. If I provide you with contraceptives in order to enable you to contracept, then I am formally cooperating with you. Formal cooperation is not guaranteed by inevitability: I might know to a certainty that you will misuse some resource or aid I give you. But unless I provide the aid for the sake of so enabling you, then I do not share in your bad intention.
Where the HHS mandate is concerned, there should be little doubt that formal cooperation is not at issue. If the president of a Catholic college is compelled to offer the coverage and complies, it will not be done for the sake of enabling his employers to contracept, but for the sake of complying with a legally authoritative, even if unjust, policy. Accordingly, the form of cooperation at stake is material, not formal.
Alas, this is an aperçu that wasn’t, because the definition of formal cooperation is incorrect. The definition provided implies that only if the cooperator “intends” to bring about the evil involved is the cooperation formal. But “intent” is being used in a peculiar fashion, to denote only what makes the act desirable to the agent and to positively exclude the integral nature and per se effects of that which is chosen. Note how easy this makes avoiding formal cooperation: one may do anything whatsoever provided that one wishes one weren’t doing it. But the integral nature and per se effects of action are always included in the moral object, contrary to those for whom the object of moral action is merely what makes that action appetible to the agent. This is because we choose actions and not merely the formal aspect under which the action is desirable to us—not merely the ratio of the appetibility of an action—but also the action itself. The one who murders “wishing” he were not, but nonetheless choosing to do so, has a conflicted conscience, but is a murderer. The one who offers to provide mass support for the pursuit of sinful actions, while wishing he were not aiding sinful actions, is still “directly” providing such support: “directness” is not a function merely of how one describes one’s proposal for action, but includes the action itself, its integral nature, and per se effects. So, perhaps the reason why someone performs formal cooperation with evil is not because he wishes the evil to be done, but for some other reason: but it is wrong to do. It is wrong to provide mass access to things that one knows are principally sought after for gravely immoral purpose, and the wrongness is formal because providing such access is in essential part defined by its causal implication in depravity and the agent is choosing this causal implication irrespective what he “wishes”. The case is similar with respect to the performance of action generally. For instance, perhaps someone crushes an infant’s skull to remove it from the birth canal and save the mother, and not because one wishes to hurt the child: but this is wrongful homicide and not a medical act, because the act terminates in the child—in such a way as to hurt and kill the child—and not in the putative patient, the mother. Irrespective that the agent “only wishes to help the mother” what the agent is doing is murdering a child. Roman Catholics who wish serious guidance about these matters should reflect that the George/Gigris account is deriving from a theory that countenances the crushing of infant skulls in craniotomy, and that is deeply implicated in the recent abortion (as witness the Lysaught brief defending the hospital) for which the former St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital has rightly lost its Catholic status. It is wonderful that gifted men of affairs and lawyers are willing to defend the rights of Catholic believers in the public forum. But inasmuch as some of these persons are wedded to a theory in critical contradiction with important elements of the actual moral tradition of the Church—a tradition centrally related to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas—the long-term benefit is dubious. This begins to be seen in the misportrayal of the Church’s teaching regarding material and formal cooperation, which the NNLT—wedded to a purely logicist insistence on the content of a proposal for action rather than a realist account such as is found in the teaching of Aquinas—cannot help but get wrong, having gotten wrong the analysis of human action in general. The chickens of the NNLT are beginning to come home to roost: NNLT chicken roosting is an emerging bull market.
Reader Comments (8)
Steve,
Good post. What kind of participation obtains in the case of individuals who purchase insurance policies that comply with the HHS mandate?
Thanks,
Mike
The definition provided implies that only if the cooperator “intends” to bring about the evil involved is the cooperation formal.
That is exactly right: formal cooperation means to subjectively intend another person's action.
But “intent” is being used in a peculiar fashion, to denote only what makes the act desirable to the agent and to positively exclude the integral nature and per se effects of that which is chosen.
What you refer to here - integral nature and per se effects - appears to be the object (chosen behaviour) of a human act; and if the action involved is something done by someone else, it can't be the object of your act.
Mind you I think the NNL theorists pretty much just ignore the object (the objective behaviour chosen by the acting subject), and base their entire theory on intentions. Because of that their theory is a fundamental option theory of just the sort condemned by Veritatis Splendour.
But I also think it is a mistake to try to incorporate the actions of other people into the object of an act, which is how I am (probably incorrectly) interpreting the proposal here.
I more fully explain my understanding here:
http://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/thespians-and-the-hhs-mandate/
Steve:
I would like to know the answer to Mike's question.
Even more, what kind of participation obtains in the case of individuals who purchase any insurance policies through an employer who voluntarily chooses to cover immoral services as part of the company package?
Sincerely,
Kirk
It seems to me that the case with an individual would vary greatly depending on the facts of the case. If one is referring to a father and mother obliged to provide for the healthcare needs of a family, and who refuse to use any of the false "services," and who also have no other way to provide the care for their children, then their cooperation is limited to providing care for their family while being extorted to be part of a policy of which they do not approve. That looks like remote material cooperation. This is different from an institution administrating access to moral evils for all its employees. The individual is not cooperating in "building into" the policy the evil that federal regulation has placed there, and is only either seeking or choosing genuine health care, and paying for it in part with a policy which has been artificially forced by the state to cover things that the mother or father know to be evil and oppose. If there were a way to avoid using such a policy at all and to devise another path, that would be preferable--and indeed it ought to be sought--but not at the cost of denying genuine health services to those in one's care. So, for the purely individual case, much hinges on the impossibility of securing adequate health care otherwise. Imagine that the path to a hospital is surrounded by brigands, who insist one pay them extortion before entering, and who make clear that they plan to spend their money in evil ways. A sick or dying child would be taken into the hospital, and were there no other way, paying the brigands would not constitute formal cooperation with either their present or future intended evil. If the brigands, however, are part of hospital policy, or if the evil use of the monies paid the hospital is part of hospital policy, or if the hospital deliberately administers evil pseudo "services" then that is not merely material cooperation... Coercion is not the whole story (one thinks of Catholics who have endured torture rather than perform sacrilege). One cannot do certain things rightly even under coercion, one such being to administer access to moral evil for a multitude--which objectively constitutes formal cooperation with the moral evil since administering it is chosen as essentially coordinate to it and for it even if with abhorrence & opposition & with a wish one were not doing so.
Regarding the comment that formal cooperation simply "means to subjectively intend another person's action" the simple answer is "no it doesn't". It includes (or may include) this case, but it is not limited to it, as my estimable colleague Dr. Michael Pakaluk has incisively observed <http://philosophy.avemaria.edu/post/32216014189/a-formal-and-material-fallacy>. The nature of the *cooperation* is what is at stake, not simply the nature of the preferences of the one cooperating. Not only the finis operantis--the end sought by the agent--but the finis operis--the effect of the act chosen or "end of the act"--is involved. A man feeding the ammo into a machine gun is cooperating formally with the firing of the weapon even though he not be pulling the trigger. That, by the way, is why pacifists are not constrained to do such things (not that I harbor sympathy for pacifism as an absolute moral posture). Similarly, someone who arranges appointments of clients with prostitutes for a living, is formally cooperating with prostitution--the activity is indeed defined by this "working together for a common aim" and not merely by a person's wishes (perhaps the pimp wishes he were not a pimp, is revolted by prostitution and wishes that the prostitute and client would not engage in vicious activity, and seeks to stop being a pimp by earning enough money pimping to do something else: nonetheless the individual in question remains a purveyor of vice formally implicated in it by cooperatively sustaining it). Someone who has simple volition of an evil performed by another but does nothing to determine and choose means to the end, is not in moral terms formally cooperating with the action of the other person because no action is chosen, although the person is sinning by willing the evil (which is not defined by what anyone else does, whereas "cooperation" refers to chosen coordination of action).
Excellent discussion, Dr. Long. Thank you for writing this.
Dr. Long,
I think you're on the money. I tried playing around with the example that Dr. Pakaluk proffers in order to help clarify the point. Here is my attempt: http://menlikewine.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-hhs-mandate-formal-cooperation.html Let me know if you think that using his example as an analogy works or not.
-Abram
Dr. Long,
Thank you for your wise words in your last comment. I am still trying to grasp their connection to the principles that you have laid out above and to the principles by which we can judge what is good and evil in these difficult cases. Here is my question for you:
What is the difference between the situation that the parents of the dying child find themselves in with the brigands who claim that they will use the money in evil ways and the brigands who are part of the hospital policy?
In the first case the money goes to the brigands for the sake of obtaining access to the hospital's services.
In the second case the money goes to the hospital's brigands for the sake of obtaining access to the hospital's services.
In the first case the brigands reveal their evil intentions.
In the second case the brigands reveal the evil intentions of their hospital.
In the first case the parents do not participate in the brigands' forecasted evils.
In the second case the parents do not participate in the hospital's forecasted evils, or so it seems, since they merely pay money for the life-saving services that the hospital can provide their daughter.
How is this second case, namely, paying money to the hospital for a specific service that saves life in spite of the fact that monies at that hospital go to pay for evil procedures, different than the first example that you gave regarding the Mandate and the purchase of an insurance policy that has evils attached to it and a family being extorted in the case of the "necessity" of health care?
It seems that you had said that the family in the Mandate example was materially cooperating with evil in purchasing some of the Obamacare health insurance on the condition that it was the only way for them to obtain health care, while in this last example with the hospital's brigands or the hospital's policies, whichever you like, you said that the parents were not "merely materially cooperating" with the evil in purchasing a health care service from the evil hospital.
What distinction am I missing between these two acts? How can we distinguish between choosing the means with the principal agent of the evil and not choosing the means with the principal agent in these difficult cases? How can we distinguish between my act and their act? My paying for a good and their extorting me vs. my participating in their financing of evil operations? What is the significance of the distinction between remote and proximate with regard to cooperation in the first place? With regard to good and evil? With regard to sin and culpability?
Your answer will help immensely. Thanks and God bless you all at Ave Maria for your labors for the Kingdom!
The nature of the *cooperation* is what is at stake, not simply the nature of the preferences of the one cooperating.
Absolutely. That is, the nature of the chosen action or behaviour of the cooperating person, which the Magisterium calls the object of the act (see Veritatis Splendour) is also morally pertinent in addition to his intentions. An act can be evil in virtue of an evil object or an evil intention (or because of circumstances, a case we are not considering here).
When the act is evil in virtue of its object we properly refer to it as intrinsically evil. When it is evil in virtue of the acting subject's intentions we properly refer to it as formal cooperation with evil. For example, here is the Pontifical Academy for Life on formal cooperation:
The first fundamental distinction to be made is that between formal and material cooperation. Formal cooperation is carried out when the moral agent cooperates with the immoral action of another person, sharing in the latter’s evil intention. On the other hand, when a moral agent cooperates with the immoral action of another person, without sharing his/her evil intention, it is a case of material cooperation.