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How Saint Alphonsus’s Principle of Cooperation Morally Justifies Catholics Receiving the Covid-19 Vaccine
by Fr. Travis Stephens
If I buy this sweatshirt, am I supporting child labor? If I support this charity, am I supporting embryonic stem cell research? If I get the vaccine, am I supporting abortion?
These relevant ethical questions have troubled Catholic moral theologians for centuries. We ask questions like this because we know that our actions do not occur in a vacuum. Having good intentions is not always enough to justify our actions. Sometimes well-intending people unknowingly contribute to the immoral actions of others.
Although Saint Alphonsus Liguori was not the first theologian to reflect on the mingling of good and evil acts, he is the first to develop a systematic principle to explain how it is sometimes morally permissible for one person’s morally good action—the cooperator—to contribute to another’s immoral action—the principal agent. This is the Principle of Material Cooperation.
This principle begins by considering the intention of the cooperator and the principal agent. According to the Catholic moral tradition, there are two ways to understand intention. These correspond to two of the three sources of the morality of the act, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) identifies as: 1) the object chosen; 2) the end in view or the intention; and 3) the circumstances of the action (CCC, 1750). Broadly speaking, intention refers to the second criterion, the end. This is why one chooses a particular action. Narrowly speaking, intention constitutes the object of the act. Morally, this is what one chooses to do to achieve an end.
We’ve all heard the saying “the end does not always justify the means.” Here the means constitutes the object. For example, it is not ethical for parents to bribe a university to admit their child. The good end of getting into a good school, does not justify the evil means of bribing. For an action to be morally permissible, both the object and the end must be good.
Therefore, regarding cooperation, the first two criteria establish that the object and end of the cooperator’s action is morally good. This excludes formal cooperation, that is, intending the evil action of the principal agent. The classic example for cooperation is a servant helping his master meet up with a mistress. The question is: how much aid can the servant provide before his action becomes immoral? So long as the cooperating servant in no way intends the evil action of the master, he is not guilty of formal cooperation. Formal cooperation is never morally permissible.
Establishing good intention—object and end—in a cooperator is not enough to justify an action. We must also consider how materially connected the cooperator’s action is to the principal agent’s act. Ethically, the more that the principal agent depends on the immoral act of the cooperator, the stronger the reason must be to justify the cooperator’s action.
To determine how connected a cooperator’s act is to the principal agent’s, ethicist delineate between immediate and mediate material cooperation. Immediate means that the cooperator’s role is so invaluable that the action is almost indistinct from the principal agent’s. For example, a nurse who assists a surgeon in an immoral procedure commits immediate material cooperation. Mediate material cooperation occurs when the cooperator’s act prepares for the principal agent’s immoral act. For example, the nurse that does pre- or post-operative care for an immoral procedure. Although factors such as fear or coercion may mitigate the culpability of a cooperator, immediate material cooperation is always immoral.
Ethicists further delineate mediate material cooperation using proximate and remote. The more serious the immoral act of the principal agent, the stronger the need for a justification. The further removed the cooperator’s act is from materially supporting the immoral act of the principal agent, the less proportionate the justification needs to be. The receptionist who checks a patient into a clinic for an immoral procedure is further removed than the nurse who preps a patient. Moreover, the nurse who risks termination by objecting to prepping patients for immoral procedures, than the one who does not.
Regarding the Covid-19 no new abortions were committed to produce this vaccine. Second, although fetal cell lines attained from voluntarily aborted fetuses in the 1970s were used in the research for the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they are not used to produce the vaccine itself. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith argues for the moral permissibility of utilizing the Covid-19 vaccine, because of how far removed it is from the immoral act of abortion. At worst, taking the Covid-19 vaccine constitutes remote mediate material cooperation with abortion.
Although the Congregation permits one to abstain from receiving a vaccine on ethical grounds, it also encourages Catholics to consider the common good, which includes the health of the most vulnerable in society.
Click here to read a similar article from the USCCB.
