Consequentialism and Catholic ethics seem to be natural enemies.
The Catholic prohibition against intentionally killing the
innocent, lying, committing adultery, and so on contradicts the
very essence of consequentialism that no act may be assessed as
good or evil independently of its consequences. However in the
1960s within the Catholic tradition itself, there arose a method in
ethics called proportionalism which practically, if not
theoretically, affirmed that which consequentialists have long
affirmed and Catholic ethicists had so long denied, namely one may
do evil that good may come. According to proportionalists, so long
as the good effects are proportioned to the bad effects of the act,
the act is licit even if evil is used as a means to achieve the
good. In this book, Christopher Kaczor argues against the
plausibility of proportionalism and its first proponents, namely
Peter Knauer, Joseph Fuchs, Bruno Schuller, Louis Janssens, and
Richard McCormick. Examining the genealogy of the movement, he
disputes a received history that depicts proportionalism as a
recovery of Thomas Aquinas. Instead, contends Kaczor,
proportionalism is best seen as the organic successor to the moral
manuals of the pre-Vatican II era. Proportionalism arises not from
Thomas but rather extends many of the tendencies and
presuppositions of the manuals. In particular, it retains their
marginalizing of the account of human action as a knowing-willing
involving a number of stages not always consciously recognized yet
carefully described by Thomas in Summa theologiae, Prima Secundae,
6-17. Kaczor shows that a great deal of the plausibility of
proportionalism rests on a fragile foundation that is rapidly
eroding, an education in the moral manuals.
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