In particular, Stone is well known for his open and ready embrace of negative campaigning. “The same people who tell you they hate negative political TV commercials,” Stone wrote, “will also be able to tell you exactly what was in them.” The lesson Stone seems to have drawn from negative campaigning is that it works, so it may as well be embraced. Ethically, however, this reveals a fairly dubious form of reasoning that we should reject as Catholics.

The various figures who embrace negative campaigning, to which we all have been and will continue to be subjected during this year’s midterm elections, make two critical errors in their reasoning. First, they adopt the old adage “the end justifies the means.” If a campaign ad gets people to reject the opposing candidate, so the reasoning goes, then the commercial is justified because of its effectiveness. Philosophers will identify this kind of ethical reasoning as a form of utilitarianism, which holds that an act’s moral rightness or wrongness is determined entirely by its consequences. Perhaps even some faithful Catholics can be seduced into thinking a good intention justifies whatever choices we make, but the faith firmly rejects such moral reasoning. “The reason why a good intention is not itself sufficient, but a correct choice of actions is also needed,” St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Veritatis splendor, “is that the human act depends on its object, whether that object is capable or not of being ordered to God.” Negative campaigning is one of many examples wherein people may have a perfectly reasonable intention — to win a political race in this case — and yet choose a means of doing so that doesn’t order things towards God.

The faulty reasoning of utilitarianism at work in negative campaigns nicely leads us into seeing the second critical error at work among the political consultant class. Mobilizing negativity induces people to commit the sin of anger. Phrased another way, negative campaign ads are a scandal in that they lead others to sin and to begin to normalize sinful inclinations instead of to reject them. Political communications, whether in conversations between friends or in advertisements, must be carried out in a way that promotes virtue. As it nicely says in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every request for information or communication.” The interesting aspect of this particular teaching in the catechism is that it not only puts the burden for virtuous conduct on the one doing the communicating, but also on the one receiving the communication. As Catholic citizens in an age of negativity, one of the great steps we can take in cleaning up our politics is to reject and ignore negative campaign ads.