I see you used a version of PDE that omitted any mention of remote and proximal objects. Your mistake.
1*. The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent*
The showing of graphic images of violence to young children is not the proximate object. It is the remote object.
Trying showing some good faith and use the complete PDE to which I have linked earlier.
I used the one from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that was listed as coming from the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Does your version differ from that?
You did not, that I could find, actually link anything. Perhaps you would be willing to link to your source so that we can look at that source’s definition of terms? You simply stated it. In looking for further defnition and clarification of the terms used, all the formulations of the principle of double effect that I can find reference it as follows:
The foreseen beneficial effects must not be achieved by the means of the foreseen harmful effects, and no other means of achieving those effects are available;
ascensionhealth.org/ethics/public/key_principles/double_effect.asp
Third, the evil effect must not function as the means by which the good effect is produced.
stjohns.edu/academics/centers/teach/forum/forum_2007_Rourke.stj
An indirect intention is a circumstantial intention that the agent would not consider as the immediately desired result of an action, but as
an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of choosing the means to the desired result. Thus, an indirectly intended bad consequence would be a foreseen and merely tolerated effect of the action but not the ultimate reason for performing the action. The undesirable effect is in a certain sense intended, since one still chooses the means, i.e., performs the action, but ***it is only indirectly intended since it would have been avoided if possible. ***This understanding of direct and indirect intent is an essential element of the principle of double effect.
ascensionhealth.org/ethics/public/issues/intention.asp#ind_int
The principle of double effect is directed at well-intentioned agents who ask whether they may cause a serious harm in order to bring about a good end of overriding moral importance
when it is impossible to bring about the good end without the harm. A third common misinterpretation of double effect is to assume that the principle assures agents that they may do this provided that their ultimate aim is a good one that is ordinarily worth pursuing, the proportionality condition is satisfied and the harm is minimized. That is not sufficient:
it must also be true that causing the harm is not so implicated as part of their means to this good end that it must count as something that is instrumentally intended to bring about the good end. Some discussions of double effect wrongly assume that it permits acts that cause certain kinds of harm because those harms were not the agent’s ultimate aim or were regretted rather than welcomed. The principle of double effect is much more specific than that.
Harms that were produced regretfully and only for the sake of producing a good end may be prohibited by double effect because they were brought about as part of the agent’s means to realizing the good end.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
There has yet to be any evidence put forward that shows that the organizations advocating the use of these images in situations in which they are knowingly exposing young children to them is something that they even give lip service to seeking to avoid or that such is indeed absolutely unavoidable if they are to achieve their desired result.
The action in question is not simply “showing graphic images of dismembered corpses of children.” It is “showing graphic images of dismembered corpses of children in venues in which children ages 2-7 are known to be likely to see them.”
