There are a number of causal claims being made quite flippantly. On the flip side, there are things being alleged not to be causal that indeed are causal.
It has been alleged that if you refuse to express a preference when one candidate has a clearly evil policy objective that you are not therefore choosing that evil. Facially this is ridiculous. If you see a small and incompetent child playing on the edge of a cliff, decide it isn’t your business, and that child falls to his death, you most assuredly bear some responsibility for that child’s death. Any situation where the obligation is manifest, your ability to act is unimpeded, and you fail to act is clearly a sinful act.
Now we can take that same situation above and adjust it. If the child is playing near the cliff in plain site of who you believe to be his parent, the obligation is no longer clear. Or to put it another way, the parent clearly has a more particular obligation, and prudence would allow you to assume the parent would be steadfast in observing it. Likewise, if we were to live under a military dictatorship, the obligation to improve the commonweal and offer counsel to those who would do so would be expressed differently than under our republican form of government.
With elections however, more often we are faced with ambiguity over what will be the ultimate manifestation of our vote if our chosen candidate indeed succeeds. Like experimental surgery, no one is obligated to do something when they believe the consequences of failure and attached likelihood will be as great as the consequences of success and attached likelihood. If on election day one arrives at the conclusion that the election of either candidate has the likelihood of advancing approximately similar evils, no one would surely fault that person for declining to express a preference. That some people want to assign that person the property of ‘wise’ or ‘thoughtful’ confounds me, but none the less I can’t fault them for the act arising from their premises.
Like then Cardinal Ratzinger has said and as he has reiterated as Pope Benedict, I agree that it is reasonable to infer a man’s intentions from his actions. Hence, those who consistently support laws supporting the right of abortion can rightly be said to support the product of that right: abortion. The reasonableness of such a proposition though is dependent upon prudence. If one were to make the construction that a person who always votes for Democrats therefore supports abortion, he should be mercilessly ridiculed. One can vote for Democrats for any number of reasons, and I dare say for many who do so, the Democratic Party position on abortion is not a significant consideration. One could quickly retort that abortion should be a top consideration, and such is not an unreasonable position and one our bishops agree upon. If however the outcome of such consideration is that the cause of reducing and eliminating abortion is not significantly furthered by choosing one candidate over the other, one can hardly fault that person for giving greater consideration to other grave evils where there is greater divergence in the projected outcomes. To construct a strawman, no one would quarrel with voting on the basis of tax policy in a mayoral race where one candidate supported raising taxes 50% and the other proposes lowering them 10%, with one candidate stating we should “nuke Mecca,” as repulsive as such a sentiment would be. As applied to the present election, people are rightly condemning McCain’s support of ESCR, and are rightly not seeing it as a cause to support Obama, since they both support this repulsive policy. And many people conclude that any gains on the abortion front with the election of McCain are outweighed by the costs of imperial ambition and the continued deterioration of our broader social policy.
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