Freedom, Sin and Conscience

(This information on this page is also available on a pdf handout.)

Freedom

1. Freedom of Choice: In order to be considered a moral (that is, distinctly human) act, it must proceed from free choice; to some degree our choices determine our character and our fundamental orientation toward or away from God.
2. Basic Freedom: However, while it is true that morality and mortal sin do affect one's orientation toward or away from God (and therefore one's salvation--the possibility of ultimate union with God [John Paul II's invocation of Mt 19]), the question is to what degree?
1. Basis of Moral Priorities?
2. Imperfect/Tragic Actions?
3. Structural Sin?
3. Nature of Moral Action (for JPII, VS, par78)
1. Unity of body and spirit in each act
2. Subject/object structure for analyzing moral acts (value resides in the subject, nature of the act resides in the object)
3. Specifying the morality/immorality of an act involves analyzing
1. Intention (mitigates culpability)
2. Circumstances/consequences (affects the description of the object and can mitigate culpability)
3. Object of the will (Only the object of the will, understood as a freely chosen kind of behavior, specifies the morality of the act)

Sin

1. Old Model:
1. Act-centered (isolated beings relating to each other)
2. sins best understood as inability to overcome the temptations of flesh ("sinning from weakness")
3. adequate to terminal moral problems only (think of acts of violence or sexual promiscuity)
4. important to distinguish what one directly intends from what one tolerates or allows to happen (recall Paul VI, HV, par 14)
5. Importance of the principle of double effect (which pertains to the question of whether it is morally permissible to perform an action which one can foresee will bring about both good and evil effects).
2. New Model:
1. Centers on the relationship of acts to inter-personal relationships and social structures
2. new ways of understanding sin: "sinning from strength" "failure to bother to love [or to see from another point of view"
3. Necessary to make sense of cumulative moral problems (think of questions like economic injustice, environmental degradation, racism, and the HIV/AIDS crisis)
4. Relates new ways of practicing the sacrament of penance (focusing on relationships and values, not just acts)
3. Marciano Vidal on Structural Dimensions of Sin:
1. Trying to figure out how to account for the influence of social structures and one's position in a network of responsibilities without renouncing the importance of personal responsibility.
2. Still holds the traditional understanding of moral sin to be important (grave matter, knowledge, full consent of the will), but consider that complicity in sinful structures may also indicate one's contempt for/orientation away from God.
3. Typology (still acknowledging subjective culpability and objective good and evil):
1. Social Repercussions of Every Individual Sin: People's actions can become negative models for others, and can influence the way others view the world (think of how your actions influence young people).
2. Collective Sin: when people act together for a common evil; the "convergence of forces and wills towards a common disvalue" (think of the power of legislation to influence public morality)
3. Inter-individual Sin: when sin is expressed through disordered relationships, such that it challenges the ability of the two parties to the relationship to see and bring about the good in the future (think of marriages broken by betrayal or abuse)
4. Social Sin: closely related to the former, but based on networks of disordered relationships based on past sinful models of behavior (think of the effect of hazing on the expectations for community life.
5. Structural Sin: "the combination of institutions and practical devices," official group policies that present a social context to others that either constrain freedom or only present only bad choices (think of ND or other cloistered neighborhoods)

Conscience

1. Benedict XVI:
1. Recall that for Benedict, conscience must be distinguished from superego, but is also a way of understanding experience as a source of moral knowledge.
2. Experience always tends towards self-justification, so it is important that one's experience be put in dialogue with tradition (this is the meaning of the primacy of the informed or educated conscience).
2. Pope John Paul II:
1. Natural Law: "But God has already given an answer to this question: he did so by creating man and ordering him with wisdom and love to his final end, through the law which is inscribed in his heart (Rom 2: 15), the "natural law." ;The latter is "nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided. God gave this light and this law to man at creation." (par 12) [Also Par 54]
2. Witness: some personal inner voice that testifies to us about ourselves (par 57); conscience functions sort of like an inner bishop, testifying to the truth of the moral law by forcing us to recall how it has been lived in tradition
3. Inner dialogue: between the human person and God (par 58)
4. Practical moral judgment: ;determining whether or not the action being considered conforms to the moral law established by God (par 59)
3. Richard Gula:

1. Conscience is the whole person's commitment to the value and judgment one makes in light of that commitment of who one ought to be and what one ought to do or not do." (p. 114)

2. Differentiations (as does Benedict) between conscience (which testifies about the truth of oneself and one's relation to ;God) and superego (which is the internalization of external authority)
3. Three senses of conscience:
1. capacity
2. process
3. judgment