Cooperation with Evil and Social Sin

A Brief Survey of Some Recent Theological Work

Earlier this week, I briefly discussed the role the concepts of formal and material cooperation play in the process by which Catholics discern which candidate to vote for in elections. To quickly summarize, formal cooperation means lending one’s “moral support” to another’s evil action, while material cooperation refers to a situation in which one person’s actions in some way enable or facilitate someone else’s evil action. Formal cooperation is always wrong, while our culpability for material cooperation depends on a number of circumstantial factors. When it comes to voting, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ voting guide Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship states that, while one can never vote for a candidate who supports an “intrinsically evil” position precisely because of that position (i.e., formal cooperation), one can vote for the candidate in spite of that position (i.e., material cooperation), but only for grave reasons.

That discussion reminded me of theologian Julie Hanlon Rubio’s 2017 article “Cooperation with Evil Reconsidered: The Moral Duty of Resistance,” published in Theological Studies, in which she brings the traditional notion of cooperation (and in particular material cooperation) into dialogue with the more recent theological concept of social sin. Rubio situates the concept of cooperation in the manualist tradition (roughly equivalent to what I had called the casuistical tradition), the work of so-called “manualists” who composed manuals of moral theology to train priests in the art of hearing confession, including guidance on how to deal with difficult cases of conscience. It was in this context that the concept of cooperation was most fully developed and applied to a number of types of cases.

As Rubio goes on to explain, however, the manualist tradition, including its use of the concept of cooperation, came under assault beginning in the middle of the twentieth century (Rubio is particularly reliant on James F. Keenan’s A History of Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century: From Confessing Sins to Liberating Consciences, but cites several other critics, as well). One of the most important criticisms of the manualists is that they did not pay sufficient attention to the social dimension of sin, including what would later come to be referred to as “social sin.” This criticism implicates the manualists’ use of the concept of cooperation in at least two ways:

1. When it comes to the types of evil with which we potentially materially cooperate, they tend to ignore our participation in what Pope John Paul II, in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, called “structures of sin,” the vast institutional and social webs that link us to injustices, both locally and worldwide (e.g., exploited labor, the global climate crisis, etc.), instead focusing on relatively immediate ways people can cooperate with others’ sin, such as situations involving sex or situations at the workplace.

2. When the manualists do consider our participation in these structures, they tend to minimize our responsibility for doing anything about them, pointing to the fact that one individual’s choices will probably have little impact on the broader problem. Rubio cites the example of Heribert Jone, who argued that, while a person may have an obligation to assist the poor he or she personally encounters, he or she bear no culpability for failing to assist the poor in faraway countries because “even should he give all he has, such a general evil would not be remedied.”

As that last example illustrates, the manualist tradition was plagued by a certain kind of individualism, focusing on our interpersonal relationships rather than our embeddedness in broader social institutions and networks, and failing to consider the way individual actions, considered collectively, can in fact remedy a “general evil.”