In a mortifying follow-on to our discussion of why we mustn’t do evil in an attempt at good, here’s a case out of Australia that demonstrates the deadliness of bad ethical systems. Mother and father are expecting a baby. It’s a desired pregnancy, and mother is doing just fine. Then, in a routine ultrasound, an abnormality in the baby’s hand is discovered.
The mother, having been reared in a culture where any physical deformity is a source of both lifelong discrimination for the child and shame for the mother, grows despondent. The only solution, she thinks, is to kill the baby.
Now normally when people devolve into a serious depression, the best response is to treat the depression. We would look for any moral means to assist the mother: Counseling, social support, medical interventions to protect both the mother and her child.
All that changes once we reduce our ethical system to a cost-benefit analysis:
Ainsley Newson, a senior lecturer in bioethics at the University of Sydney, said late-term abortion was a fraught area of ethics and law.
“Distinguishing between serious and more minor conditions identified during pregnancy is difficult,” she said. “There is no clinical or ethical agreement, and different people will respond to a diagnosis in different ways.”
But she said advances in imaging and pregnancy screening was creating more difficulties as more and more problems could be identified, and medical advances that could save premature babies increased.
Once the direct killing of innocent humans is permitted for some reason, the question only becomes is this reason significant enough to justify the killing?
The article drips with angst: People instinctively know that possessing an unattractive hand shouldn’t be a capital offense. Lacking any moral system other than “Are my reasons good enough?” means that we are left pitting one set of justifications against another.
In the end, the doctors cave. They have no principle on which to stand. They freely choose to kill a baby that under any other circumstances they would have worked devotedly to protect and to heal.
Truth or Consequences?
This approach to ethics is called consequentialism. The consequences, the longterm outcome, is the sole measure by which decisions are made.
We often appeal to consequences when trying to talk someone out of a serious sin. We might advise the mother against abortion because of how bereft she will feel in the future. We might remind her she is depriving her family of the joy that this child would have brought. All that is true. Discussing consequences can be an effective way of helping someone see what the right thing to do is.
But we mustn’t therefore think that the sin is in the consequences. After all, this same couple might have carried the baby to term, only to be bereaved in a traffic accident on the way home from the hospital. The final outcome is not the measure of whether an action is right or wrong.
The moment we become consequentialists we have declared evil obsolete. Decisions are no longer “bad” or “wrong” in the moral sense. They are simply poor choices, the wrong fruit picked off the decision tree. Terrorists, serial killers, rapists? They’re all just making bad decisions. They’ve acted out of proportion, that’s all.
You hear people say things like this. I once knew a lady who explained that people were never bad, they were just sometimes very afraid and so they made bad decisions.
Sane people, and especially sane Catholic people, have no business thinking this way.
Image: Antoon Claeissens (circa 1536–1613) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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