Cooperation with Evil, Causality, and Dependence

A Foray into Philosophy

Some recent thoughts on what political responsibility might mean for U.S. Catholics led me to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the concept of cooperation with evil, a staple of Catholic moral theology. These reflections, in turn, led me to revisit Julie Hanlon Rubio’s work on the relationship between the older notion of cooperation with evil, typically differentiated into formal and material cooperation, and the more recent concept of social sin. Last week, I summarized one of her most important articles on the topic, placing it into dialogue with more recent attempts to make sense of the notion of social sin.

In the 2017 article I analyzed, “Cooperation with Evil Reconsidered: The Moral Duty of Resistance,” as well as in an earlier article, “Moral Cooperation with Evil and Social Ethics,” Rubio extensively engages with the early 20th-century manualists, moral theologians who wrote manuals of moral theology for use primarily by priests hearing confessions. One of the things I value about Rubio’s treatment of the issue is that she takes the manualists seriously as interlocutors. Although by no means seeking to rehabilitate or revive the manualist tradition, neither does she dismiss the manualists out of hand as completely superseded by more recent moral theology. Rather, she seeks to understand what they were up to as theologians, recognizing the strengths of their approach even as she identifies the significant weaknesses.

As I argued several months ago, the renewal of Catholic theology in the twentieth century by the likes of Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, and others, as salutary and necessary as it was, nevertheless had the negative effect of propagating a narrative in which theology after Aquinas entered a long period of decline. This had the ironic effect of leaving this vast historical period under-studied by later generations of theologians, creating gaps in our understanding of how the theological tradition had developed at precisely the moment when theology was being revolutionized by historical consciousness and a greater awareness of historical development. Rubio’s work, then, helps us better understand the evolution of the tradition of moral theology and its continued relevance for theologians today.

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In the same vein, I want to continue my own reflections on the notion of cooperation with evil by looking backwards in time to the original development of the idea. The difficulty here is that, unlike the principle of double effect, for example, which has clear origins in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the concept of cooperation with evil has no clearcut pedigree. It is most associated with the 18th-century Redemptorist moralist Alphonsus Liguori, but he did not originate the concept. In his recent book on the topic, Cooperation with Evil: Thomistic Tools of Analysis, Kevin Flannery, S.J. argues that the concept originates with the German Jesuit moralist Hermann Busenbaum, who lived a century before Liguori but whose work was a major influence on the latter. I will take Flannery’s word for it.

What interests me is less the specific origins of the concept of cooperation with evil (although that is interesting!) and more the fact that its origins are non-Thomistic. Indeed, Flannery admits this, and one purpose of his book is to reconstruct the aspects of the concept he finds most valuable from a more explicitly Thomistic framework. I am more interested why non-Thomist sources were helpful for moralists like Busenbaum and Liguori in articulating their moral reasoning. From my perspective, one central problem is that Thomas Aquinas is wedded to an Aristotelian conception of causality, in which there are basically four types of causes:

• Material Cause: Sometimes a thing behaves a certain way because of the material out of which it is composed;

• Efficient Cause: When a thing is changed or moved because of the action of another thing;

• Formal Cause: Sometimes a thing behaves a certain way because of the arrangement of its parts or attributes into a whole, or its form or essence;

• Final Cause: Change or movement can be brought about as a thing acts for the sake of its end or purpose.

Aquinas’s account of action inhabits a world defined by these four types of causes. He focuses on the factors that might move a person to act, the person’s intentions or ends in acting, the effects caused by the person’s action, whether those effects were intended or not, etc. While that is all very important, a world in which the concept of cooperation with evil makes sense is more complicated: it includes consideration of accomplices, the conditions necessary for actions to take place, and the tenuous connections that exist between people who never directly interact with each other. How does this more complex account of actions and the causal relationships they create enter the Catholic moral tradition?