Moral Theology 101, How a christian can vote for Obama
The Bishops have been speaking as loudly as I can remember about this election, and there is a good reason for it. Bishop Paprocki has been the loudest and clearest I have heard. Bishop Sheridan has gone so far as to say that Vice President Joe Biden is not to receive communion in the Diocese of Colorado Springs. Archbishop Chaput has been very vocal about voting as usual. They're giving sound bites, which is all I can do in a facebook post, but here is a reasoned explanation of WHY they're saying what they're saying.
In order to understand the Bishops, I have to first define a few terms.
• Cooperation is operation with or helping.
• Intrinsic evil is something that is wrong just because of what it is.
• Gravely evil is something that isn't just bad, it is seriously bad.
So, there are two kinds of cooperation, formal and material. Formal cooperation is cooperating with desire and material cooperation is cooperating with action. For example, formal cooperation is helping someone because you want the same thing as they do. I got to help my buddy Gabe pour concrete for his new patio. He wanted a new patio, and I wanted him to have a new patio too. An example of material cooperation is the labor and sweat (not much sweat actually) that I put into helping him actually pour it. I actually did stuff to help make it happen.
In the political sphere, a vote is always material cooperation and can also be formal cooperation. That said, a vote for Obama is material cooperation with a grave intrinsic evil, namely abortion. If you're voting for Obama because he is pro-abortion, then it crosses the line into formal cooperation with a grave intrinsic evil, which is to say, you're voting him in to help women kill their babies. I don't know a single Catholic who would be guilty of formally cooperating that way.
So if there is wiggle room, why are the Bishops speaking so strongly?
Well, that was what they said in 2008, and people didn't get it. Well, material cooperation with an intrinsic evil is sometimes allowed. That is to say, I can sometimes do things that help other people do evil stuff. If I were a satellite guidance software developer, someone might use that software to crash a satellite into a populated area, which would make it so that I helped them do it, but I didn't want to help them do it. I'm not going to stop writing guidance software because some nut job might abuse it, but the principle of double effect applies. The principle of double effect states that it is permissible to do something that has a known evil effect given a few criteria.
• The action is morally positive or neutral: So, you have to be voting for Obama because you actually believe Obama has better social policies. This is a matter of debate, but you have to believe it. (nature-of-the-act condition)
• You can only be hoping for the good stuff to happen, namely the country moving forward (right-intention condition)
• You have to believe that Obama's social policies don't require that a quarter of the population be aborted for their fiscal solvency (means-end condition)
• You have to believe that the good of the country moving forward is more important than a quarter of our unborn babies being killed (proportionality condition) The first two are quite possible, the third is potentially debatable, but I don't think that proportionality is satisfied.
So, can a Christian vote for Obama?
The answer is yes, if you really believe that Obama is going to be a better president, you only want him to do good things, you don't think that he is depending on abortions to reduce the number of welfare recipients and that Obama's execution of domestic and foreign policy is going to sufficiently better than any pro-life candidate to make up for the death of 1.2 million babies per year.
The Bishops have decided to take the next step from 2008 and say that the proportionality condition for the principle of double effect is not met, which is why they have been more vocal. The attacks on religious freedom from the department of health and human services as enabled by the affordable care act might have something to do with it to.
One last thing, the Bishops haven't mandated that Catholics vote for Romney, just that it would be seriously bad vote for Obama.
Update: A friend of mine pointed out that there is a distinction between pro-choice and pro-abortion, and that I have used pro-abortion when I should have used pro-choice. A lot of anti-abortion people like to say that there are only two camps - the one they live in is people who oppose all abortions no matter what and that the other camp believes that everyone who isn't conceived with a million dollar trust ready to go should be aborted.
To that I respond, in 2008, then senator Obama had a voting record of more abstentions than anyone else, which made his record totally unclear about anything - except abortion. He tried to pass laws that would reintroduce partial birth abortion and tried to get laws repealed that would protect babies born alive after an attempted abortion. I understand that it is a spectrum of belief, and that the dividing lines aren't totally clear, but I think Obama's record puts him squarely in the pro-abortion section of it. President Clinton said that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Under Obama, the party platform has now omitted rare, which says something about the one(s) who sets the platform.
Secondly, my friend mentioned ectopic pregnancies, where the life of the mother is in danger. To that, let us apply the principle of double effect to the action of removing the section of fallopian tube that has the baby in it. The intention is to save the live of the mother, and the result is the death of the baby. The action itself is morally positive, as it saves the life of the mother. The action is only hoping for good things, as the intended goal is to save the life of the mother. The means-end condition is met because the death of the baby isn't what saves the mother's life. Finally, the proportionality is met because the life of a mother who has responsibilities to her partner and other children is more important than the life of an unborn child whose only responsibility is to grow.