The Ethics of Procreation and the Defense of Human Life by Martin Rhonheimer

Author:Martin Rhonheimer [Rhonheimer, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-02T07:25:29+00:00

A Note on the Proportionalist Solution

The resolution of this question cannot, therefore, consist in asking the question whether the behavior in question, judged in principle to be objectively dishonest, could nevertheless be later "justified" in a specific case. It would rather be necessary to examine whether that which the Church condemns as "contraception," on the one hand, and the preventative use of contraceptive means in the case of the threat of rape, on the other, are not in reality two objectively different types of human acts, which are therefore subject to different moral norms. Responding to this question, one would also clarify what is meant by "the object of a human act," in the way that this term seems to be used by the Church's magisterium.

Before proceeding, however, I want to insert a brief comment. For adherents of the proportionalist or consequentialist theories (it is not necessary to distinguish between these here), the case would be resolved, more or less, in the following manner. Having as a point of departure the type of argument just presented (in Fr. Perico's article), they would say that the solution given is neither coherent nor sincere. The proportionalist, in fact, would say that it makes no sense to speak of an act that is evil based on its object, and then, by means of rather complicated reasoning, attempting to justify an exception. The proportionalist would simply begin with the idea that the contraceptive act "as such"—that is, in the second sense of a procedure considered at the technical-physiological level—cannot yet be qualified morally. It would be necessary, he would claim, to also take into consideration the circumstances and the intentions of the agent, referring to the realization of other goods or to the prevention of other evils. Only with reference to all of these elements could one arrive, in each specific case, at the object of the act. This methodology, it seems, is in essence similar to the one just presented, with one significant difference: it universalizes the method, and in this sense it is more coherent.

On the basis of this methodology, however, it would no longer be possible to formulate a universal norm prohibiting the choice of a concrete behavior, given that—according to the requirements of the methodology—all of the possible circumstances could not be taken into consideration at the moment of the formulation of the norm. The norm could only contain a more-or-less formal prohibition: "Never have recourse to contraception without a proportional reason." Such a norm obviously does not conform to the Church's teaching.

To clarify our problem it will therefore be indispensable at first to show, in detail, precisely that in which consists the "contraceptive choice" rejected by the Church, and why such a choice and the associated behavior are to be considered morally disordered. To this end, the encyclical Humanae Vitae provides a formulation of the norm prohibiting contraception, a formulation that will allow us to respond to this question in a clear and technically unambiguous way.

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