Proportionalism:

...It is precisely these ambiguities that account for much of the controversy's protractedness and inconclusiveness...

...It began with some articles in European journals dealing with the moral assessment of actions in which good and evil seem perplexingly combined...

...What the author sets out to do is to chronicle, and in some respects to evaluate a series of positions in Catholic moral theology that has constituted a running controversy for more than twenty years...

...All of this makes for a controversial style that is at once ponderous and nervous, and extremely redundant: pretty awful stuff to read...

...At the same time, it would not be difficult to imagine circumstances so extreme and intimidating, that even a mother who drove her child into prostitution would be judged, not ethically right but, in view of her plight, morally blameless...

...Unfortunately, a persistent confusion has burdened this controversy from the start...

...The whole dispute is further complicated by actual and potential interventions by ecclesiastical authorities, and by the Catholic theological foible of cushioning the shock of innovation by swathing it in traditional terminology, diplomatically redefined...

...It has no comparable place in the working vocabulary of moral philosophers, or even of Christian ethicists generally...

...Apart from sheer historical information, perhaps the main value of reviewing the Roman Catholic "proportionalism" controversy, and therefore of reading Hoose's book, is to be reminded of the importance of distinguishing clearly among three orders of good and evil, one belonging to the realm of harm and benefit, one to the normative ethics of right-ness and wrongness, and one to the subjective morality of guilt and innocence...

...No such luck...

...James Gaffney "Proportionalism" is a modern addi-tion to the jargon of Roman Catho-ie moral theology, in whose recent literature it appears frequently and often confusingly...

...And indeed, the arguments Roman Catholic moral theologians conduct under this heading seem to a great extent oblivious of highly pertinent discussions about closely related questions pursued by others learned in religious and ethical matters...

...While on the left, advocates of proportionalism sometimes confuse proportionality with the quite different criteria of indirectness or unin-tendedness...

...I accordingly opened Bernard Hoose's book with hopes of finding the Catholic debate presented in terms sufficiently exoteric to foster constructive relations with relevant aspects of a broader culture...

...Convinced as I am that Catholic moral thought is retarded by habits of discussing matters of long-standing public interest in terms adhering to a very private cultural history, I was disappointed by this characteristic of Hoose's book...

...ve a quick answer...

...It is a book whose idiom, purview, and allusions make it so hardly accessible to "outsiders," however enlightened about the underlying issues, that having done a stint of moral theology in a Catholic seminary seems almost indispensable for reading it with interest or ready comprehension...

...It is reflected in the rhetorical question Paul attributed to defamers of his Christian community, "Why not do evil that good may come...

...Any reader whose interest in it is' real but not heroic must be grateful to Hoose for getting the gist of it into one small paperback, and showing in the process that the controversy has dealt with important questions and generated useful ideas...

...And the perplexity is intensified as one begins to unwrap the ambiguities of "good and evil'' in such a statement of the problem...

...Here a kind of pro-portionalism is normally taken for granted insofar as a reasonable excess of benefit over harm is frequently a basis for moral approval-as in accepting an amputation to arrest the spread of infection, or a tax to enhance public welfare...

...The crucial underlying assumption is that there are some kinds of behavior that remain morally reprehensible irrespective of how much good results from them...

...In the past it was widely held that behavior giving rise to bad effects as well as good ones might be ethically.acceptable if the bad effects were '' indirect'' or "unintended...

...The basic issue that makes pro-portionalism controversial is old and familiar...

...On the right, opponents of proportionalism sometimes stretch the meaning of "indirect" and "unintended" far beyond the limits imposed by honest usage...

...One who keeps them in mind, if asked whether or not he or she is "a proportionalist," will not find it possible, I think, to give a quick answer...

...Despite its European origins, the controversy has thrived especially in the linked States where, in recent years,' 'pro-portionalism," as'a term of opprobrium applied by more conservative to more liberal moral theologians, has elicited from the latter a great number of explanatory and defensive statements, few of which appear to satisfy their critics...

...Both proportionalists and their critics have often generated misunderstanding by confusing these orders, or by ignoring some of their combinations...

...or the one later raised by critics of Jesuit casuistry, "Does the end justify the means?'' From one point of view these may seem naive questions...

...Thus for a destitute mother to provide for dependent children by working so hard and long that she ruins her health, or for her to do so by constraining one of the children to offer services as a prostitute, would not normally be perceived as ethically parallel cases...

...If doing "evil that good may come" means merely doing or occasioning some harm that makes certain benefits possible for whoever willingly incurs the harm, the main moral question does seem to hinge on whether or not the benefits are worth it...

...For in the latter case the cost of the benefit is understood to entail not simply harm, damage, physical evil, but wickedness, sin, moral evil...

...And although most people seem to make such comparisons fairly confidently, even though lacking a methodical standard, some thinkers regard an incommensurability of values belonging to harms and benefits as fatal to the rationality of even quite ordinary proportionalism...

...No doubt there is a problem about measuring the proportion of harm to benefit when they belong to very different orders of value...

...A more significant controversy arises when proportionalism seems to involve the acceptance not simply of doing some harm to bring about greater good, but of doing something antecedently recognized to be wicked...

...This led to two opposite modes of sophistry...