Abstract

In responding to an unjust legal situation involving human rights abuses, one approach is to seek a selective ban on some abuses if a more comprehensive ban is not feasible politically. While such an approach to embryo research or abortion, for example, can reasonably be applied, much harder to defend is regulation—that is, giving permission or instructions for others to do or prepare to do what we believe is morally wrong. Regulation necessarily involves us in wrongly intending that others choose wrongly, that is, in formal cooperation with evil. We should choose other means of making a bad situation better: selective banning or discouragement by, for example, withholding funding, and the mandating of acts that are good or potentially good in the context in which they are mandated.