A person is capable of distinguishing good actions from bad ones because he possesses reason and a conscience, which enable him to make clear judgments.
The following guidelines make it easier to distinguish good actions from bad ones:
(1) What I do must be good; a good intention alone is not enough. Bank robbery is always bad, even if I commit that crime with the good intention of giving the money to poor people.
(2) Even when what I do is truly good, if I perform the good action with a bad intention, it makes the whole action bad. If I walk an elderly woman home and help her around the house, that is good. But if I do it while planning a later break-in, that makes the whole action something bad.
(3) The circumstances in which someone acts can diminish his responsibility, but they cannot change at all the good or bad character of an action. Hitting one’s mother is always bad, even if the mother has previously shown little love to the child.
May we do something bad so that good can result from it?
No, we may never deliberately do something evil or tolerate an evil so that good can result from it. Sometimes there is no other course of action but to tolerate a lesser evil in order to prevent a greater evil.
The end does not justify the means. It cannot be right to commit infidelity so as to stabilize one’s marriage. It is just as wrong to use embryos for stem cell research, even if one could thereby make medical breakthroughs. It is wrong to try to “help” a rape victim by aborting her child.
Dig Deeper: Catholic Catechism section (1749-1761) and other references @ http://www.catholiccrossreference.com/catechism/#!/search/1749-1761
My Source: I got this in a daily email I get about Catholic teachings. Okay, not the cat. That I added myself. 🙂
polination.blog 
What a timely post. I’m in a group called “Catechism & Coffee.” We meet in a public coffee shop, about a dozen of us, every Wednesday morning at 7, and we’re plowing through the Catechism. We just went through this section two weeks ago. It sparked a rather intense discussion, and I would love for you to weigh in on it. Lila Rose and her group, Live Action Films, goes into Planned Parenthood clinics under false pretenses to expose the evil and the lies taking place in those clinics. Their investigative reporting is doing much good, but they use deception to do it. Are their actions moral? Do the ends justify the means?
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I’ve heard some Catholics say that it’s wrong for Live Action to use deception to accomplish their goals because such tactics violate Catholic teaching. I’m not Catholic, and not qualified to say what the church teaches on the subject; but it seems to me that if one is going to condemn the use of deception as practiced by Live Action, then logically speaking one must also condemn the practice of spying, which also involves deception. As a practical matter, wars cannot be won without the use of deception, so forswearing the use of deception is tantamount to unilateral disarmament, and unilateral disarmament is pretty much the same thing as unconditional surrender. Christians are not the ones who declared war on the unborn, but like it or not, we’re in that war, and if we’re going to win, we can’t fight with one hand tied behind our backs.
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Great point, Bob. I don’t know how Chrissy or quiner will respond, but I agree with you, and it seems to me that when it comes to action, all Christians struggle to come up with definitive answers about the “goodness” or “badness” of their actions. Personally, I believe that intellectual arguments about morality are fraught with pitfalls, mainly because moral truth is not an intellectual thing. Truth is “seen” or “judged;” it is not arrived at by reason. It can only be clarified or explained by rational arguments. All actions must be judged for moral content, and ultimately that judgement can only come from the Almighty. It is, in my view, difficult and perilous to issue rules or edicts about an action beforehand, or in general. Very few actions, like abortion, can be prejudged in general.
My point is that questions about things like deception or warfare, which are extremely subtle, must be dealt with cautiously and with razor sharp distinctions. Normally, intent is everything. For example, there’s a world of difference between withholding information from an enemy and engaging in “deception with intent to do harm.” In my view, God Himself purposely, with good intent, withholds vast amounts of information from those he loves dearly. Why would we assume that such a thing is evil for us while in His service? That is not to say that taqiyya, when used to do harm to others is not evil. It is. But that is not the same thing. In fact, I would argue that being over-scrupulous in the way one defines the dangers of certain actions is, itself, an insidiously evil thing, because it has the unintended but detrimental effect of suppressing all actions of good people for fear of doing wrong.
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And just to be clear about who I’m pointing fingers at, those Catholics you mention who condemn LiveAction are probably not fully knowledgable about the Catholic teachings they use as a hammer to hit LiveAction with. At the very least, they are not being cautious enough, considering the subtlety of the subject. It’s also no secret that the Catholic Church itself gets into trouble over some of these issues, so they rarely come out to openly condemn wrong-doing unless it is fairly obvious. But they have made many miss-steps in the past that caused lively internal debate, such as statements about “just war,” capital punishment and disarmament.
But I’m NOT criticizing Chrissy’s guidelines. On the contrary, I think most of them wisely address the problem of over-intellectualizing morality. A person who thinks they can do a bad act in order to accomplish a greater good has fallen into an intellectual trap. As Chrissy points out, the end does NOT justify the means, and to believe that, you have to rely on your conscience more than your intellect.
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Wow … that is a good question. Ditto the messy issues involved in my kids’ military work, which has involved lying and killing.
As I understand it, the stuff I posted above is about simple good vs. bad. These other questions get into the murky gray areas where one is forced to choose among only bad options. I was taught by my parish priest that where all the choices (including “do nothing”) are BAD, the most moral choice is the one that is least bad.
In Sophie’s Choice, her only options were to either pick one of her kids to be killed or refuse to pick one, in which case they would both be killed. Telling her captors, “Kill that one,” was objectively evil; refusing to choose was worse, so she picked the girl, because she felt the boy had a better chance of surviving the war. She made the most moral choice, knowing it was a bad act.
My kids are devout Catholics who work or have worked in war zones and interrogation centers where these decisions are not the stuff of movies or esoteric what ifs, but boots on the ground realities with life, death and where will they spend eternity consequences.
Take the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”, which Lefties throw into soldiers’ faces. Did you know it is mis-translated? In the original, it actually says “Thou shalt not murder.” I don’t get why so many don’t understand this when even our law makes a great distinction between first and second degree murder and a greater one between murder and manslaughter.
Our soldiers are actually trained in this stuff. They spend as much or more time learning when NOT to shoot as when and how to shoot. Ditto the stuff interrogators do, which include lying and keeping detainees awake for long periods of time in uncomfortable circumstances (bright lights, loud music, too hot or cold).
[None of these are torture; our soldiers are forbidden to torture and they KNOW what the difference is. In fact, they were forbidden all along. When BHO signed his “we won’t torture any more” order in January 2009, it SAID that from now on, every interrogation will follow the rules in the ARMY INTERROGATION RULE BOOK.]
As to your original example, yes, on the face of it, using deception to spy on people is as objectively wrong as lying to a terrorist to get him to give up information. Will it help stop a greater evil? Will it save lives? Will doing nothing allow something worse? These are critical questions for a moral person to ask and answer.
It’s why we need to steep ourselves in God’s word and live in prayer 24-7, as Paul said, “pray always.” Sometimes we’re faced with really crap choices which, in our human-ness, we can’t know what is best. And we don’t always get the luxury of TIME to look at all the options, ask for advice, etc. Sometimes, it’s a split second pull or not pull that trigger.
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Good info, Chrissy. Thanks.
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