Prudence and Proportionality

Taking off from Daniel Suhr's remarks concerning abortion, Iraq, and proportionality, I wanted to make one comment.  It's about the relation between prudence and proportionality in voting, something I've been thinking about ever since we had a conference on the role of prudence in the Catholic social tradition here at St. Thomas Law's Murphy Institute in April 2006.  Daniel wrote that

being wholeheartedly against the War in Iraq is not a proportionate reason for being pro-choice. As Archbishop Myers reminded us in the run up to the 2004 election, the Pope did not bind the conscience of Catholics to oppose the War in Iraq - he merely expressed his own prudential judgement on the question. Moreover, as the Archbishop points out, we must remember what we are balancing here - the lives of 1.3 million unborn children in America every year. Virtually no other modern policy issue - not taxes, welfare benefits, minimum wage, farm subsidies, the war - compares on that scale.

My focus here is not on the second point in that paragraph -- that no other issue can compare to the lives of 1.3 million unborn children.  That has been discussed before on the blog, and it is a powerful prima facie argument concerning proportionality (although one can question whether any policy that the pro-life community proposes will come close to saving 1.3 million lives, and also whether some policies widely opposed by Republicans -- such as access to contraception -- will prevent more of those abortions).

I want to focus on Daniel's (and Abp. Myers's) first point -- that abortion is matter of binding conscience for Catholics whereas Iraq is a matter of prudential judgment -- because I don't think that this argument logically shows disproportionality between the two issues.  An issue could be prudential, in the sense that the Church doesn't take a position on it, and yet be overwhelmingly important.  For example, suppose a voter is very knowledgeable on homeland security matters and, based on this knowledge, believes (i) that terrorists are very likely to try to smuggle nuclear bombs through a port, with a potential loss of millions of lives, and that (ii) the pro-choice candidate's plan for securing the ports is excellent and very likely to succeed while the pro-life candidate's plan is so inadequate as to create a huge risk.  The Church doesn't take a position on how to secure ports, so this is "merely" a prudential matter at the relevant level of decision, but that doesn't mean that the ports issue isn't a proportionate reason for voting for the pro-choice candidate (not, as all the analyses of this make clear, because the candidate is pro-choice, but because of the proportionate reason of a grave threat to millions of lives).

Now, the fact that the Church doesn't take a position on some issue could be evidence that the issue isn't important.  But it's pretty weak evidence once it's been acknowledged, as thoughtful people in both the magisterium and laity have done, that there are many issues on which the Church doesn't officially speak -- at least at the level of policy -- and instead leaves the matter to the better informed (and hopefully morally well-formed) judgment of lay people in their secular callings.  "Prudential" logically does not mean "unimportant."  The fact that an issue is prudential gives people discretion concerning it -- discretion, within reason, to disagree on its resolution -- instead of binding them to treat it as less important.

Again, this objection does not go to the "1.3 million unborn children" point, which I quite agree is logically about proportionality and would have to be answered, if at all, on other grounds.  But I expect that the argument "X can't be proportionate because it's only prudential" will appear in upcoming discussion about the 2008 elections.  So I offer this as a modest proposal for how to think about (not how to resolve) these issues.

Tom