Chapter 5: How Christians Make Difficult Decisions Part 2

Chapter 5: How Christians Make Difficult Decisions

Part 2

Four Ways of Thinking, and What Each Is Good For

Four major frameworks dominate ethical reasoning. Christians should understand all four, because each captures something real and each fails somewhere, and because the arguments you will meet in public life are almost always one of them.

Consequentialism

The claim: the rightness of an act is determined entirely by its outcomes. In its best-known form, utilitarianism, the right act is the one producing the greatest good for the greatest number.

What it gets right. Consequences matter enormously, and Scripture says so. Any ethic that ignores who is helped and harmed is not Christian but Pharisaical. Utilitarianism also insists that everyone's welfare counts equally, which is a genuine moral achievement and has driven real reforms.

Where it fails. Nothing is excluded in principle. If the numbers are large enough, any act becomes permissible — including the deliberate killing, framing, or torture of an innocent person. Defenders offer sophisticated replies, and the objection persists, because on this view the innocent person has no protection except an arithmetic that may not go their way. It also demands predictions nobody can make, and it has no room for the special obligations that structure actual moral life: a parent owes their own child something they do not owe every child.

Sameh's version of it: sixty-one jobs against a risk that may not be real.

Deontology

The claim: some acts are right or wrong in themselves, by virtue of duties that hold regardless of outcome. Kant's formulations: act only on a principle you could will to be universal; treat humanity, in yourself and others, always as an end and never merely as a means.

What it gets right. It protects the individual absolutely, which consequentialism cannot. Kant's second formulation is remarkably close to the Christian doctrine of the person, and the intuition it captures — that there are things you may not do to a human being no matter what follows — is the intuition of the martyrs.

Where it fails. It handles conflicts of duty badly, and Kant's own insistence that one may not lie even to a murderer at the door has struck most readers, including most Christians, as a reductio of his system. It also underdetermines content: the formal test tells you less than its admirers claim about what your duties actually are.

Virtue ethics

The claim: the primary question is not what should I do but what kind of person should I be, and right action is what a person of good character would do in the circumstances.

What it gets right. Everything in Chapter 4. Perception is a large part of ethics, and only a formed person perceives accurately.

Where it fails. Its action-guidance is thin in a crisis. "Do what a virtuous person would do" is not much help at two in the morning if you are not one, and the honest answer is often that you do not know what such a person would do. It works best as a supplement rather than as a stand-alone method.

Natural law

The claim: moral truths are grounded in the nature of things and are discoverable by reason. Human beings have a nature with ends proper to it, and acts that frustrate those ends are wrong.

What it gets right. It grounds morality in something real and public, accessible to people who do not share your faith, which makes it the natural language for arguing in a pluralist society. It explains the cross-cultural convergence noted in Chapter 1.

Where it fails. Reading moral conclusions off nature is contested at every step. There is real disagreement about which features of human nature are morally significant, and natural-law arguments have historically been used to defend positions later abandoned as mistaken. Critics also press the objection that a description of how things are does not by itself establish how they ought to be.

The Christian use of all four

Christian ethics does not select one. Scripture uses all four registers, and each theory functions best as a lens rather than as a machine:

• Natural law and Scripture establish the boundaries: what may not be done.
• Consequentialist reasoning does the work inside the boundaries, where several options are permissible and one is better.
• Virtue determines whether you can see the situation accurately and whether you will actually carry out what you decide.
• Deontology supplies the reminder that some doors are closed regardless of what stands behind them.

Applied to Sameh: the boundary question is whether concealing a danger to ninety families is among the things that may not be done. If it is, the sixty-one jobs are not a counterweight, because they are on the wrong side of a line. If the situation is genuinely uncertain, then consequences, timing, and method are legitimately in play.

Moral Absolutes

Are there acts that may never be done, whatever the circumstances or the consequences?

The Christian tradition says yes, and it is important to be clear about the size of the list. It is short. Most moral questions are matters of judgement, and treating everything as an absolute is a serious error that discredits the real ones.

Acts the Christian tradition has regarded as excluded by their very object include: the direct and intentional killing of an innocent human being; adultery; rape; the sexual abuse of a child; torture; the deliberate condemnation of someone known to be innocent; and the denial of Christ. Different Christian bodies would extend or phrase the list differently, and the core is stable.

The mark of an absolute is that no intention and no circumstance changes the description of the act. You cannot rape someone kindly. You cannot torture a child for a good cause. When people find themselves constructing elaborate scenarios in which such acts become permissible, the scenarios are doing the work, and the scenarios are almost always fictional — which is a good reason to be suspicious of ethics conducted entirely through thought experiments.

St Paul's rejection of the principle that we may do evil so that good may result (Romans 3:8) is the tradition's charter here. It is also the hardest thing in Christian ethics to hold when the good result is genuinely large and genuinely certain, and no honest writer should pretend otherwise.

The Principle of Double Effect

Many acts have two effects, one good and intended, one bad and foreseen. Christian tradition has developed a careful analysis for these, usually stated as four conditions, all of which must be met:

1. The act itself must be good or morally neutral. Not an act wrong by its object.
2. The bad effect must not be the means by which the good effect is achieved. You may not do harm as your instrument.
3. The bad effect must be foreseen and permitted, not intended. If you would be disappointed to discover the bad effect had not occurred, you intended it.
4. There must be a proportionately serious reason for permitting the bad effect.

The standard medical case. A dying patient is in severe pain. The dose of analgesia required to control the pain may, as a side effect, shorten life. Administering it is permissible: the act is pain relief, the death is not the means of relieving pain, the death is not intended, and relief of severe suffering in a dying person is a proportionate reason. Deliberately giving a dose calculated to kill in order to end the suffering fails conditions two and three and is a different act entirely. Chapter 12 examines this, including the evidence about how often properly managed palliative medication actually does shorten life, which is less often than commonly assumed.

The obstetric case. In an ectopic pregnancy, the embryo has implanted where it cannot survive and where continuation threatens the mother's life. Treatment of the damaged tube is analysed by most of the tradition as an act directed at a pathological condition, with the death of the embryo as a foreseen and unintended consequence. Chapter 7 works through this properly, including where Christians disagree about it.

The military case. Foreseen civilian deaths from an attack on a legitimate military target. This is the most abused application in the whole field, because "we did not intend it" can be made to cover nearly anything, and because the proportionality condition does the heavy lifting and is exactly the condition most easily fudged. Chapters 34 and 35 handle it.

The abuse of the principle. Double effect is a tool for genuine cases and it functions, in practice, as a laundering device more often than it functions as analysis. There is a good test of good faith. Ask whether you would take the good effect if you could have it without the bad one. If the answer is an immediate yes, the reasoning is probably honest. If some part of you wants the bad effect — if the death, the harm, the ruin is quietly part of what you are after — then you are intending it, and the four conditions are decoration.

Conflicts of Duty and the Lesser Evil

Duties conflict. What then?

First, test whether the conflict is real. Many dissolve on inspection, usually because the options were framed too narrowly or the facts were wrong. Sameh's binary — report now or wait six months — is probably false. He might commission an urgent independent inspection himself. He might report to the regulator rather than the police. He might tell the building's managing agent. He might set a deadline of one week rather than six months. He might consult a solicitor about whistleblower protection, which exists in law in many countries, including his own. Generating options is the most underrated moral skill there is.

Second, where the conflict is real, rank the duties. The tradition holds that the graver obligation takes precedence, and offers rough guidance: preserving life outranks preserving property; the duty not to do harm is generally weightier than the duty to do good; obligations to the vulnerable outrank obligations to the powerful; and duties of justice outrank duties of loyalty. Sameh's duty to his cousin is real. It is not of the same order as ninety people's safety, and the fact that the loyalty is emotionally vivid while the ninety families are statistical is a fact about his psychology rather than about the weights.

Third, distinguish two things both called "the lesser evil."

Choosing the lesser physical evil is entirely legitimate and is what most decisions consist of. Amputating a leg to save a life. Telling someone a devastating truth. Closing a department to save a company. These are bad outcomes accepted to avoid worse ones, and choosing them is not sin but responsibility.

Committing a lesser moral evil to prevent a greater one is a different matter, and the mainstream tradition refuses it. You may not do something intrinsically wrong on the grounds that worse will follow otherwise. This is the point of Romans 3:8, and it is where the tradition takes its heaviest fire.

Fourth, can there be genuine moral dilemmas — situations where every available option is sinful?

Christians disagree, and this is one of the places where it should be admitted plainly rather than papered over.

The Catholic tradition and much of Orthodoxy hold that God does not place people in situations where sin is unavoidable, and that in any genuine dilemma there is a permissible course, even if it is costly and even if it is not obvious. On this view, the appearance of a dilemma reflects our limited vision.

Some Protestant theologians, notably in the twentieth century and often shaped by the experience of living under tyranny, have argued that genuine tragic conflicts do occur, and that the Christian must sometimes act, accept guilt, and throw himself on God's mercy rather than pretend the act was clean. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's position, written while he was involved in a conspiracy against Hitler, moves in this direction.

I hold the first view, with a heavy qualification: it is a claim about the objective moral order and not a description of what decision-making feels like. Chapter 45 is devoted to the situations where no choice feels acceptable, because whatever the theory says, people live through those situations and need something better than a syllogism.

Cooperation With Wrongdoing

Sameh's real question, and one of the most practically important tools in this book. Almost nobody in a modern economy escapes it: we are all connected to wrongdoing by supply chains, employment, taxation, and shared institutions.

The tradition distinguishes:

Formal cooperation — sharing the wrongdoer's intention. You want the wrong thing done. This is always wrong, regardless of how small your contribution.

Material cooperation — contributing to the act without sharing the intention. This is assessed by degree.

• Immediate material cooperation: participating directly in the wrongful act itself. Almost always impermissible.
• Mediate material cooperation: contributing something the wrongdoer uses. Assessed by:
  • Proximity — how close is your contribution to the act itself? Handing over the instrument differs from paying the tax that funded the building where it was stored.
  • Gravity — how serious is the wrong? More remoteness is required as gravity rises.
  • Necessity — is your contribution essential, or would it happen identically without you? Replaceability reduces but does not eliminate responsibility, and "someone else would have done it" is a genuine factor and a notoriously abused one.
  • Duress — what would refusal cost you? Real duress reduces culpability, as Chapter 3 set out. Losing your livelihood is serious duress. It is not unlimited licence.
  • Alternatives — is there another job, supplier, or route? The question is whether a real alternative exists, not a theoretical one.
  • Scandal — a technical term meaning leading others into sin by your example, rather than causing gossip. If your participation will teach others that the thing is acceptable, that is a separate and additional harm.

Worked examples. A citizen paying taxes that fund things they believe gravely wrong: remote, unavoidable, and permissible; the obligation is to work for change. A nurse asked to assist directly at a procedure she believes is the killing of a patient: proximate material cooperation at minimum, and legitimate grounds for conscientious objection, addressed in Chapter 14. An engineer building a surveillance system for a regime that will use it to find dissidents: proximity high, gravity high, and the "someone else would build it" defence weak, since it is available to everyone simultaneously. An accountant asked to sign accounts he knows to be false: this is not cooperation but participation; the false statement is his own act.

Sameh's case. If the certification is fraudulent and he now knows it, then staying silent for six months is not remote cooperation. He would be an active participant in concealment, with knowledge, in a matter concerning the lives of ninety people. His duress is real and it does not reach the threshold. If, on the other hand, the documents genuinely are a clerical mess, there is no wrong to cooperate with — which is exactly why establishing the facts comes first.