Divorce and moral considerations

In the divorce debate so far, a lot has been said about whether raising moral considerations is legitimate. But some of the complexity and nuance involved has yet to emerge in answer to the main questions raised.

Is it illegal to say that voting for divorce legislation is a sin?

Whether it is actually illegal is ultimately for the courts to decide. However, if it were, the consequences would be absurd.

It would mean that the Church would be able to pronounce itself on the sinfulness of, say, euthanasia, but not – if the issue came to a vote – that it would be a sin to vote for it.

Since the key issue concerns the threat to impose spiritual sanctions on religious followers it would imply that spiritual leaders without any followers would be able to speak of sin.

For example, given the composition of Parliament, an Anglican vicar and a Muslim imam would be able to condemn euthanasia as a sin if Parliament were considering a Bill to introduce it, since there are no Anglican or Muslim MPs. But the Catholic Church would be prohibited from doing so; an interesting case of preventing someone from speaking on grounds that people might pay attention.

In the last two examples, the underlying rationale for the permission to speak would be: You may speak only if you or the subject (or both) are at this time politically irrelevant.

Can we have a debate about divorce that excludes moral considerations?

Declaring something a sin simply means it is considered by the Church to cut one off from the true source of authentic life – what the Church calls “God”. While there are many people who want to keep theology out of the divorce debate, the pro-divorce side is actually teeming with people who see the issue as fundamentally about living authentically.

Every time a pro-divorce argument accuses the Church of sanctioning hypocrisy, or wanting to keep people chained to dead marriages, or preventing others from “beginning afresh” (not too far from saying being “born again”), or just being “cut off from reality”, the underlying meaning is that divorce would enable those obtaining it a better chance of living an authentic life – richer in what makes a human life worthwhile.

And that is an ethical – or moral – argument. Just as it is a moral argument to say that prohibiting divorce is an injustice or that the Church is lacking compassion on this issue.

This is not to say such arguments ought therefore to be ruled out of bounds. On the contrary, it shows how difficult it is to discuss an issue like divorce while excluding moral considerations. As the moral philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, we cannot discuss marriage, or anything that touches the common good, without discussing the conditions that make the institution or human life itself worth treasuring. We may pretend to ourselves that we are not discussing ethics but we would be, in fact, discussing the elements of what makes life good.

Recognising the centrality of moral considerations does not mean, of course, recognising the Church authorities as the ultimate arbiters of the discussion. The moral terrain will be inevitably contested. This will be so even among co-religionists who share the same moral principles but different assessments of what would be for the common good.

Is there unequivocal evidence that the introduction of divorce in other countries has been worse for the common good?

Mgr Anton Gouder, among others, has stated that research shows that the introduction of divorce in “other countries” has been detrimental to the common good. He may think it does but the great bulk of the researchers whose work has been cited or circulated by people close to ProġettImpenn (of which Mgr Gouder is a leading figure) do not in fact reach such a conclusion.

They do reach conclusions that burst some pro-divorce myths; they do show how some liberal reforms had pernicious unintended consequences. But they generally do not argue that introducing divorce per se had done more harm than good.

And the reasons are not hard to find. In several cases, including for the US and the UK (favourite exemplars for the anti-divorce lobby), divorce was introduced, as such, hundreds of years ago. Deciding whether the introduction then was for better or for worse is difficult.

Furthermore, the anti-divorce lobby underestimates both the impact of the many variables that shape family life – apart from marriage legislation – as well as how unstable family life was in practice in the past. The leading historian of divorce in England, Lawrence Stone, concluded his history by saying that it was difficult to decide if the various reforms in marriage law had, by the late 1980s, actually improved the lives of ordinary people over what things had been like 100 years before. But he did not say they had clearly made things worse.

Is the common good something that is discovered or constructed?

The biggest complication of all, perhaps, is that the common good is not simply something that is discovered “out there”. It is also something that we construct together. To discuss divorce – pro or contra – in fatalistic terms, without honestly examining legal and policy features that can mitigate its introduction (or non-introduction), is arguably itself immoral because it limits our tapping of two of the most important sources of human authenticity: thought and cooperation.

ranierfsadni@europe.com