The Only Evil
It has been said that the only thing modern society sees as objectively evil is suffering. If you can find a victim who is suffering from some policy or practice then you can convince people that it is wrong. If you can’t then you have to appeal to some deeper moral principle and you immediately run into the objection that not everyone agrees with that principle. Where society ends up is a place called sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is a morality that has the avoidance of pain and suffering as it’s central principle. So killing is not objectively wrong but only wrong because it causes suffering for the person being killed and their loved ones. But what if killing actually reduces suffering? Then it suddenly becomes OK.
There are huge problems. One is the problem of not being able to predict what actions will cause suffering. Sexual morality gets into this category a lot. You get a lot of “What could it hurt?” arguments. People do get hurt. But how they will get hurt is not clear. Acting against God’s design will go wrong at some point but you can’t pinpoint where and when that will happen. So for this to work you need to be able to predict the future. We can get it very wrong.
The truth is that pain is not evil. Pain is something we try to minimize as physical and emotional people. Extending that to other people introduces some social empathy which is good. But morality goes deeper than that. What really matters is our relationship with God. That can even get better when we are in pain and sometimes will get worse when we prosper. So focusing on pain and pleasure will give us the wrong answer a lot.
Jesus’ greatest act of good was being crucified. So His main focus was not to avoid suffering. What is more, He invites us to take up our cross and embrace self-sacrificing love. He taught two principles that contradict sentimentalism. First, that we should seek a deep spiritual peace and joy that is unaffected by the pains and pleasures of this world. Secondly, that our physical suffering can do spiritual good. That we can mitigate the temporal consequences of our sins and the sins of others. We can even break down spiritual barriers that can allow others to come to salvation.
These are important things to understand because one of the key question atheists ask is why there is suffering in the world. The short answer to that is because God is not a sentimentalist. He does not make the elimination of suffering His goal. He has higher goals than that.
This is why the pope thinks truth is such an important aspect of Catholic social action. We are motivated primarily by compassion and the desire to reduce the suffering of others. But there are higher principles we will not violate no matter how much suffering it might eliminate. There is a greater good. To give meaning to suffering. For that we must respect the dignity of the human person. Part of that dignity involves living some hard truths. Condoms and AIDS is one example. Abortion is another. We don’t compromise on truth because there are some hard situations. We cannot assume some people are simply unable to be moral. We need to believe in grace. We can’t make God into a sentimentalist.
