Do we proceed under the right method?

An important essay that examines the reasons given to accept vaccines (and any product) that uses aborted fetal cells, from Michael Pakaluk: 

Why I Signed “To Awaken Conscience”

In ethical questions, one has to follow the right method. Right method does not mean coming up with an argument that seems obvious to you, even if it implies that lots of thoughtful people are deluded. This is how the EPPC signatories proceed. It’s obvious to them that only the abortions in the past could be wrong; these are remotely distant. Therefore, only forward-looking effects can be ethically relevant now. And, so long as one limits oneself to using “immortalized cells,” there can be no such effects.  

So they say. I hold that every step of this reasoning is flawed. But more importantly, their method is flawed. If, on their view, past statements of the Pontifical Academy of Life, the CDF, the U.S. Bishops, and many other thoughtful “pro-life scholars,” such as those at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and the National Catholic Bioethics Center, end up being not simply mistaken but actually insanely deluded, then they’ve made a wrong turn. Their view cannot be correct, because it does not “save the appearances,” as Aristotle would say.  

We are somewhat hemmed in by the insistence on a certain approach of theologians who are bound and determined that we take the vaccines. But is their framework valid? Before we assent to the discussion, we have to decide if it's the discussion that offers answers:

First, we need to clear up some confusions involving Liguori’s distinction, from his Theologia Moralis, between “formal” and “material” cooperation. That distinction is useful only when cooperation is verified, and one wants to know what sort of cooperation it is. 

Michael thinks they have the wrong end of the stick: 

For Catholic ethicists to assure us solemnly, as some have done, that we can licitly take the “abortion tainted” vaccines, for the reason that our material cooperation with abortions in the past would be “very very remote,” is philosophical foolishness of the highest order.

Read the whole thing to find out why from a philosophical point of view.

I believe the theologians err by falling into the trap of legalism, which takes as given that the thing will be done, and merely seeks a path of reasoning that shows that it can licitly be done. Is this how we want to live? Or do we want to do good.