As media reports have made widely known, in November 2009, the ethics committee of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus in order to save the life of its mother. This woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove fatal for both her and her previable child. The ethics committee believed abortion to be permitted in this case under the so-called principle of double effect, but Thomas J. Olmsted, the (...) bishop of Phoenix, disagreed with the committee and pronounced its chair, Sister Margaret McBride, excommunicated latae sententiae, “by the very commission of the act.” In this article, I take the much discussed Phoenix case as an occasion to subject the principle of double effect to another round of philosophical scrutiny. In particular, I examine the third condition of the principle in its textbook formulation, namely, that the evil effect in question may not be the means to the good effect. My argument, in brief, is that the textbook formulation of the principle does not withstand philosophical scrutiny. Nevertheless, in the end, I do not claim that we should then “do away” with the principle altogether. Instead, we do well to understand it within the context of casuistry, the tradition of moral reasoning from which it issued. (shrink)

This essay considers how the JRE has engaged Catholic ethics in the last 50 years and how the concerns of Catholic ethics during this period of exceptional change are reflected and developed in the JRE. It discusses the transformation of Catholic ethics by focusing on the transitions: (i) from classical to historical consciousness; (ii) from an essentialist concept of human nature to a dynamic concept of the moral subject; (iii) from abstract to contextual moral reason; and (iv) from a discourse (...) that ignored the politics of power to one that reckons with it, analyzing the distinct ways in which the JRE engaged with these transformations. It concludes by looking to the future and suggests that a deeper engagement with the breadth of Catholic ethics internationally may help advance the Journal's mission and that a fuller interaction with the comparative and humanistic dimensions of the JRE's mission will enhance Catholic ethics. (shrink)