“The defense of the lesser evil quickly turns into ethical relativism”

2022-02-10 15:48:18

Men of the Church are not expected to engage in politics. They are even asked not to do so. It is happy, even if it may itch their hearts loving justice, peace, love and truth. Isn’t the political domain “the broadest field of charity”in the words of Pope Pius XI?

→ READ. Assisted suicide, the Vatican’s strategic turn on bioethics

Experience shows that everyone must remain in their role. Enlightening conscience about what is good and evil is necessary and sufficient. Pope Francis has done it againduring his general audience, condemning any form of suicide: “There is no right to die. » For the Church, no desperate person should be excluded from suicide prevention. Promoting palliative care, the pope said: “We must, however, be careful not to confuse this aid with unacceptable abuses that lead to killing”while recalling that “therapeutic obstinacy is immoral”.

He also took care to indicate that “life is a right, not death, which must be welcomed, not administered” and “this ethical principle concerns everyone, not just Christians or believers”. Recalling that “priority must always be given to the right to care for all, so that the weakest, especially the elderly and the sick, are never excluded”the Pope finally denounced as “inhumane” the fact of“accelerate the death of the elderly” by depriving them of necessary treatment.

Politician tactics

Useful clarifications given the confusion which is rising following the article by an Italian priest, presented as a friend of the Pope, published by a magazine close to the Vatican. Not because the article in question validated suicide – assisted or not – but because it proposes to participate in a specifically Italian political-legal imbroglio on this subject, from a political tactic angle.

→ ANALYSIS. Assisted suicide: Italy relaunches the debate

Father Carlo Casalone essentially explains that, to counter a law validating euthanasia which seems inevitable, it would be legitimate to support a law validating certain assisted suicides, while giving it as little scope as possible. His option seems dictated by urgency and fear: the threat of something worse, predictable although still uncertain. In short, we would have to agree to legalize acts of death – sacrificing certain lives – to avoid many other deaths… A warlord could develop such reasoning. But the Church is neither an army nor a political party. In “calculating”it would go beyond its area of ​​competence and weaken its message.

It’s about life and death

In a context where the people – including the Catholic faithful – struggle to differentiate between law and morality, ecclesial support for an immoral law would be scandalous for many. Relativistic interpretations of Father Casalone’s posture are already emerging. Another confusion, the Italian bill that he suggests supporting (even if it means improving it by restricting its scope) conflates the cessation of useless or disproportionate treatments (therapeutic relentlessness), the refusal of treatments which keep people alive (which can be legitimate), and suicide (assisted), always unacceptable. Such confusion arose in France when we counted among the so-called “clandestine euthanasias” the cessation of treatment in intensive care, at the risk of further trivializing the false idea that the administration of death is common.

→ REREAD. Euthanasia and therapeutic relentlessness: the Vatican refines its doctrine

The Church always goes astray when it speaks to the political world in the way it functions: in the mode of the balance of power or calculation. The art of compromise, sometimes considered a political necessity, quickly leads to compromise. Doesn’t History judge harshly the naivety of those who believed they could stop an evil through “compromises”? The latter often turn out to be “rotten”, according to the expression of the philosopher Avishai Margalit. Let us remember that in bioethical matters, it is a question of life and death and that from instrumentalized borderline cases, opponents of prohibitions insist on forcing the door. To support this strategy, to stop the slide, is to risk bearing part of the responsibility for the shift.

“Those who choose the lesser evil forget that they chose evil”

The quest for a “lesser evil” is legitimate when it comes to limiting an evil that is already present. Article 73 of “The Gospel of Life” thus affirms that a parliamentarian does his duty by voting for a new law which, without repealing an iniquitous law already voted, at least attenuates its scope. But applying this “lesser evil” reasoning to a (bad) bill that we consider preferable to another not yet votedis to demonstrate “consequentialism”, as if the end justified the means.

Would we advocate a racist law for fear of another that would be more racist? The defense of the lesser evil quickly turns into ethical relativism. Hannah Arendt noted: “Politically, the weakness of the lesser evil argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil very quickly forget that they chose evil. »

May the Church guard against worldly strategies! His purity of intention is manipulated, leading those who listen to him into confusion and error. Is it not better that she should cry in the desert, where one can hear from afar? In the long term, the impotence, even defeat, induced by uncompromising postures, proves more fruitful than we think… While the past compromises of the ecclesial institution weigh on our collective conscience, its firmness in the choice of life illuminates the future.