There were about 150 people gathered in the parish hall. At times voices were raised, challenging questions proffered, and a few harsh words were exchanged. It was a kind of town hall in West Philly with representatives from the city including our city councilmember. The topic was street safety and how to slow traffic on our streets. At the end, a friend of mine leaned over to me and wondered to me why people were so heated about it. “It is just a matter of traffic, not some major moral issue,” he said.
But all human acts are moral in character; we act rightly or wrongly while pursuing good or bad ends. How we drive and how we manage our roads is a shared practice which shapes a large amount of our lives. The decisions we make on the road—or about our roads—structure our neighborhoods and our broader polity. Most importantly, life and limb are implicated in our driving actions, decisions, and policies. Too many of us think of too many matters as morality free zones, areas of human life that lack the ethical import which would require self-examination, shared deliberation, and direct concerns for others. This is perhaps worst exemplified with issues around road safety. To drive, or consider matters of road safety and efficiency, directly impacts life and limb.
To be indifferent to that is to be indifferent to the dignity of life. For Catholics in particular, we need to seriously consider our moral obligations when it comes to driving and legislating regarding our roads. These practices need to be shaped by moral theology especially considering principles of love, the fostering of a culture of life, and natural law.
Ordering Our Transportation Loves
Speed limits and traffic laws show up in, of all places, Gaudium et Spes: “Others think little of certain norms of social life, for example . . . laws establishing speed limits. They do not even avert to the fact that by such indifference they imperil their own life and that of others.” I used to find these words vaguely embarrassing. It seemed so specific and unimportant in the context of the Christocentric anthropology and deep communitarian vision of Gaudium et Spes. It seemed so out of place and so insufficiently a matter of church teaching. But it is not. Gaudium et Spes is about the meaning and value of human life and the nature of community. Our indifference—this treating driving as an amoral matter—risks lives and is a direct failing of our moral life which undermines the human community.
The context in which this passage is written is important. It is in a section of Gaudium et Spes on the human community. It is in the context of rapid technological and social changes that cannot be addressed by a “merely individualistic morality.” Driving is an area of life that we tend to treat in an individualist way. It is always me that needs to get somewhere. But the Church teaches that I am always communally related with others, and thus “the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good . . . promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life.” Gifted to be I am always in the context of giving to others. It is never just about me.
This means our considerations of driving need to be shaped by a personal and social ethos. This is the case to the extent that each person ought to “consider it his sacred obligation to esteem and observe social necessities as belonging to the primary duties of modern man.” In this, the Council Fathers were considering many issues, including public health, but they directly mention speed limits. Again, this may seem all so mundane. But God the Father sent his Son to incarnate in the mundane and his spirit to renew the face of the mundane. We do not just image God, live out the incarnation, and participate in the Holy Spirit when we are at Mass. We do it—or fail to do it—behind the wheel or at the townhall about road safety.
The sacred obligation that Gaudium et Spes speaks to is the truth that “every human person possesses an infinite dignity,” and this includes those in the car next to me. The American tendency to think little of these matters leads to a persistent acceptance of death. This acceptance has worsened in recent years. For a variety of reasons, the number of people dying on our roads has increased. We are the only country in the world to see this increasing death toll. This is no small matter. These deaths affect people of all ages, striking down children, young adults, and sometimes whole families. When I speed, my indifference imperils life. If I think this is of little import, that is largely because I, in some real way, am not taking life seriously.
Driving and the Ordering of Our Loves
For Augustine, the heart of our moral lives is the ordering of our loves. Too often, we love some things more than we should and others less than we should. Ordering our loves includes placing God before all, the changeless before the changing, virtue before earthly success, love of the needy before love of self. But it also includes the myriad decisions we make about our roads. When I speed, pull up into a crosswalk so people cannot get by, or accelerate for a yellow, I make a small choice to put my desire to get somewhere faster ahead of the safety of others. In this, I place my private good (getting somewhere) against the common good, which for Augustine is a definition of sin.
A virtuous society orders its loves as well. A community is, as Augustine puts it, an assembly of persons “united by the shared objects of our loves.” When we, as a society, prioritize in our road design the speed of car movement over safety, we share a disordered social love. When we accept that cars are designed to be able to violate the law—in that even a minivan can greatly exceed peek speed limits—we disorder our social loves. When we promote ever larger cars with ever larger screens in them, we do not prioritize the safety of the child crossing the street but the comfort of a big car with fancy gadgets.
Beyond road safety, how we structure our streets also shapes our lived experience of sociality. Do we foster a world that lends itself to personal encounters and community life? If we design everything for the convenience of automobiles so that I move from parking lot to parking lot, from drive-thru to driveway, I design a world in which humans never cross paths. Instead, they merely encounter each other in two-ton pods of insularity. Forming zoning laws such that they prioritize parking spots over living space makes it harder to build housing. This is no small matter. It is hard to raise a family or make the decision to bring life into this world with soaring housing costs. Increasingly dangerous roads make it harder for children to cross the street. This leaves them in the increasingly narrow world of looking at their social media feed in their bedrooms because exploring outdoors is too dangerous with SUVs hurtling down streets while the driver looks at his social media feed.
Road Safety and a Culture of Life
John Paul II introduced a key social distinction that has shaped the Pro-Life movement. We can live in a Culture of Life or of Death. Part of the value of this term is that we can understand the issue of abortion within a broader context in which socio-cultural forms either express our love for existence or devalue the good of living. A culture of death is one in which we have disordered our social loves in such a way that the discarding of a child is allowed or celebrated.
But a culture of life is not only one in which abortion is unthinkable. It is a culture in which the good of life is loved in all aspects of our existence. It expresses itself in a culture that avoids war, does not deploy death as a punishment, supports the formation of families through marriage, takes seriously the evil of gun violence, and celebrates artistic practices that depict that it is good to be.
A culture of life is one in which the goodness of being saturates our sense of reality. This is not to make everything a “pro-life” issue in a way that decenters abortion as preeminent issue. But it is to foreground the need for a life-loving culture in a comprehensive sense.
If it is good to be, then how we think about road design, traffic laws, and personal driving decision should express this. Road safety is a culture of life issue. In this America is failing. In 2023, 43,000 people died due to cars, including 7,3oo pedestrians. This does not count the many injured and the many who turn inward into their cars and homes to avoid the threat of the roads. A culture in which over 100 people die every day, and many more are badly injured, is a culture that is indifferent to life.
We Have Got to Go Somewhere
None of this is to say we must forgo cars and driving. The movement of people and materials is a good, something that we rightly have as a shared love. Here we might draw on another aspect of Catholic Social Thought, the preferential option for the poor. This term expresses that in all social political questions, we should give preference to the poor. This still means balancing and factoring various goods, but it means doing so with a preference for those in need. In a similar way, we ought to have a preferential option for life. When we act or legislate, we should consider if the policy imperils life or supports it. We do so while considering other goods while recalling these other goods can only be had if one is living.
Thus, when we think about road design, traffic laws, and personal driving practices we should be preferring life. This means thinking of both the safety of human lives and the quality of human lives. Ensuring the safety of persons, a culture-enriching layout of roads, and the efficient movement of persons and goods is the basic order for which we should aim. Effectiveness of transport, speed of movement, and minimized obstruction to movement are important too but not more than living.
On a personal level, we should seriously examine our consciences about how we drive. Are we driving too fast, too often, and too erratically? Do we take seriously moving two-ton machines or are we on our phones? Likewise, car manufacturers and regulators need to seriously ask themselves why we need such large vehicles that can accelerate so quickly and drive so rapidly? Are we placing speed, size, and entertainment ahead of the safety of the child crossing the street, the person driving near us, or ourselves? What are we loving when we drive? If we are not loving others, and loving life, then we should repent, confess, and reform.
On a broader political level, we need to take seriously the work of reforming our roads. For Thomas Aquinas, “whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natural law.” This should be expressed in human law in a way attuned to the circumstances of a time and place. Human laws should be derived, directly or indirectly, from natural law and thus should express human goods. Dangerous driving practices are obstacles to the preservation of life; thus human laws that slow traffic, promote law abidance, and make pedestrian crossing easier fulfill the natural law. When we examine our consciences, we should take seriously that if laws “framed by man” are just then “they have the power of binding in conscience.” To violate such laws, especially when we risk lives, is a sin.
But we also must ask if our human laws sufficiently enact the natural law’s orientation towards life and towards the sociality of human existence. This is the good of the Vision Zero initiative, which would deepen the derived correspondence of civil laws governing traffic and the natural law. The aim of Vision Zero is to develop a street system in which there are zero fatalities. The difficulty of the goal should be counterbalanced by the good it seeks. To aim at less is to accept death and the often anti-social nature of a lot of our shared driving practices.
Major progress towards Vision Zero is possible, which we can know by past periods of progress and current progress in Europe. First, a series of safety measures, many required by law, lowered traffic fatalities until the early 2000s. Developments of safety belts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, and directional signals have all made driving safer. To return to this trend, we will need to focus on stopping the arms-race of car sizes. We will also need to interrogate the safety of large touchscreens in cars. Shiny and new in this case appears to be dangerous and unnecessary.
Our peer nations in Europe and Asia have all dramatically lowered traffic fatalities by changing road laws. Practices like lowered speed limits, speed cushions, narrower driving lanes, camera enforcement at intersections, speed limiters on cars, and promotion of public transport are all effective ways to make driving (and walking) safter. Most of these practices make the movement of vehicles more efficient, especially by reducing traffic-snarling accidents. They also make our neighborhoods and roads more livable with fewer cars loudly speeding and thus children more safely able to cross the street. The bigger change that this requires is reordering our transportation system towards safer public transport options with their myriad benefits. It will mean shifting urban centers such that they prioritize walking and a human, rather than auto, shaped landscape.
What this requires is a deepened sense of the moral ordering of all fields of human action. In the parish hall, the people arguing for and against various traffic measures recognized the ethical importance of the discussion. Without downplaying other major moral issues, Catholics can still play a key role towards safer roads by driving ethically and partaking in important local discussions of road safety. Speaking to traffic police in Italy, Pope Francis spoke about the importance of such an issue: “Aware of this decisive challenge, it would be foolish to give in to evil or even just try to remain neutral.” Beyond a neutrality of indifference, “everyone is asked to take charge of his share of responsibility, putting into the field all his energy to counter selfishness, injustice, and indifference.” A culture of life includes our road design, our cars, and our driving decisions. It is a culture we should in no way be indifferent to. Driving safely is a virtuous and shared practice of living out the culture of life against indifference to life. Our personal and political practices should enact this so that we will not just be driving safely but also driving ethically.
