What Is a "Prudential Judgment"?
Thursday September 25, 2008
During the ongoing debate over the war in Iraq, many American Catholics who consider themselves faithful to the teaching of the Church have had to confront the fact that the papacy's response to the war in Iraq, under both Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, has been to oppose it. Some who have supported the war have tried to minimize the importance of this opposition by describing the decision to go to war as a "prudential judgment," left up to politicians.
The effect of this is to rob prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues, of any moral importance and to make it merely a practical matter. The popes' thoughts on the war in Iraq may be "interesting," but they're not "authoritative," like, say, their teaching on abortion or embryonic stem-cell research.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of prudence, which is, at heart, the virtue by which we recognize what is good and what is evil in any practical matter. To learn more about the virtue of prudence and to understand why a "prudential judgment" is a moral, and not simply a practical, one, see "Prudence: A Cardinal Virtue."
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I have always been conflicted about the war. I ask myself if it is a JUST war. We went in because we believed we would need to protect ourselves from one in the ‘axis of evil’ regime. It looks like it morphed into stopping the Iraq government from continuing their rapes, tortures and mass murders and at least attempt to live in a democracy. What defines a just war? I know genocide, but isn’t mass murder/rape and steal a form of genocide? I also know that war should always be avoided. Could we have avoided this war and still prevented more of the same that was perpetrated by their own government? What is our Church’s definition?