Cooperating with or Avoiding Evil

[The Good Place spoilers] In the TV show The Good Place, four people fight to spend eternity in “The Good Place.” At one point, they recognize that they belong in “The Bad Place” because of their actions during their lifetimes, but as they try to learn to be better, they discover that no one in hundreds of years, even the best person they know, has earned a spot in “The Good Place.” Why? Cooperation with evil.

Cooperation with evil is exactly what it sounds like—helping evil be done. This can be formal (for example, giving a murderer a knife in order to help him murder) or remote (usually material, such as shopping at a knife store known to also donate knives to murderers). Recently, it has been in Catholic headlines regarding remote material cooperation with abortion: is it permissible to vote for a pro-choice candidate for their other policies, and is it permissible to accept a COVID vaccine that has used aborted fetal cells at any stage of research or development? (The Church says yes to both, given certain context, though plenty of talking heads are telling people no, thus creating the confusion.)

But there are lots and lots of other issues involving cooperation with evil other than abortion. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. Most purchases endorse poverty wages, exploitative labor, cooperate greed, and harm to the environment. Our taxes fund wars, torture, for-profit prisons, euthanasia, pollution, etc.. Once to start to seek purity, you realize how everything is tainted. Even if you tried to live, work, eat, travel, vote, and associate ethically, you would most likely fail in one or more areas, especially because it would take a certain amount of privilege to have the time and resources to research and disentangle yourself from all forms of cooperation of evil. We have to interact with people. We have to interact in the society in which we find ourselves. For many people, it is a choice of survival to take the easy, cheaper route. We are both collaborator and victim.

So where do we draw the line? At what point are we responsible for the systemic evil? At what point is our way of life a sin?

The Church recognizes that purity is impossible, and although we strive for that, we will fall short. The Good Place isn’t based in a Christian worldview. In reality, no one earns “The Good Place.” We are saved by Christ’s mercy when we fail perfection. But cooperation with evil is still a very real danger. I am guilty of being a white, middle class American consumer. I can try to do better, but I can't totally disassociate from every way that my way of life contributes to evil in the form of others' struggle or environmental impact. Must I give away every single thing and go forage in the desert? Thankfully, no. 

John the Baptist did not tell centurions and tax collectors to quit working for the Roman Empire. He did not tell people to stop paying their taxes (which funded war, torture, capital punishment, colonization, emperor worship, etc). Instead, John the Baptist told them to personally do no evil and to do their jobs honestly (Luke 3:12-14). They may be a small contributing part of a an evil institution, and their actions may materially cooperate with evil, but they are not responsible for the greater Empire's sins. Their cooperation is remote. They are responsible for their own sins and the choices they actually have power to make.

It’s a murky area determining how remote the cooperation is before it is a problem. Regarding recent vaccines: No child was killed in order to make vaccines; no child was killed in order to be used in scientific research. No fetal cells are directly used in research (only cell lines copied from a fetal cell). No fetal cells are in the vaccine. So is there a difference if research cells come from an aborted child or a miscarried child? Is there a difference if a donated organ comes from a murder victim or someone who died in a car accident?

And then comes “proportional reason.” Sometimes cooperation with evil depends not on the remoteness but also the outcome. We might conclude that we should avoid any scientific use of aborted fetal cells in order to protest elective abortion. But we also might conclude that COVID vaccines are the only way out of a global pandemic without millions more people dying. The weight of the pandemic outweighs the abortion protest; refusing the vaccine doesn’t save any babies, but accepting the vaccine can save thousands of our neighbors. Sometimes the reason is proportional. Other times it is not.

And people don’t like that. They don’t want the murky weighing of remoteness and proportionality and degrees of cooperation. They want black and white, do and don’t. They want the Church to be totally firm or totally lenient. But the best the Church can do is advise, because some of us have more power to be more discerning than other (choosing which vaccine to receive, choosing where to shop, having the time and freedom to protest). In the end, it is up to us to personally choose no evil, and to avoid it when we can. And when we can’t, we rely on Christ’s mercy. This is sometime a Bad Place, and we can’t completely avoid cooperation with evil until we are in the Good Place, and evil is no more.