Lesson 14: The Moral Act

AGENDA

• Moral Acts and Fundamental Freedom
• Acts and Freedom in Veritatis Splendor
• Pope John Paul II on the Moral Act
• What is Pope John Paul II Responding to?
• The Problem of Fundamental Freedom
• Discuss Case #9: Self-Defense

MORAL ACTS AND FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOM

1. Each person has a conscience, the basis for their dignity, which is the place where the law of God and their freedom meet.
1. Although it can be damaged, and suffer from its invincible ignorance, it would seem it is always redeemable, or at least never completely corrupt or sinful.
2. So human dignity is grounded in the ability or capacity of the human being to love God in her or his particular choices, not in the one’s actual instances of loving God (otherwise one could argue, to quite violent effect, that those who sin lack human dignity).
3. Yet if the basis of human dignity is the capacity to direct oneself to love of God in one’s actions, there seems to be something in between the totality of one’s acts (one’s moral record, so to speak) and the totality of one’s being. We always have the capacity to make better choices in the future.
2. Basic Question: Is it possible to maintain a fundamental orientation toward God apart from all the particular acts that they perform? Or, is it rather that through every evil act, no matter how small, I am somehow or other directing myself away from God.
1. Put differently, in loving God, one is trying, through limited human means, to love something that is infinite. Are not all of our attempts to love God imperfect in some way, such that neither our best attempts, as well as our worst attempts, can ever finally orient us toward or away from God’s love?
3. Many moral theologians (with will consider Joseph Fuchs as an example of this), have suggested that even in every good thing that we do, there is inevitably something imperfect, something we do not do (a kind of sin of omission rather than commission). How are those sins of omission fundamentally different from my sins of commission, where all human actions are limited and imperfect? How do such omissions affect one's relationship with God?
1. As we mentioned last time, the tradition of Catholic moral theology addressed this same question by emphasizing the importance of keeping discussion about law closely linked to discussions about virtue.
2. This is the basic question about the connection between human freedom and moral acts that forms the substance of debate in John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Veritatis Splendor, which is the center (both literally and figuratively) of this course.

ACTS AND FREEDOM INVERITATIS SPLENDOR

1. His basic concern when he looks out on the world: freedom (a real good) has been divorced from the moral law of God (the standard by which one determines a responsible use of freedom)
1. Questions of “ethics” are basically questions about how to relate our freedom properly to the moral law.
2. The moral law is used in a couple of senses:
1. To refer to God’s law as revealed in the 10 commandments and the teachings of the patriarchs and prophets and in the teachings of Jesus (Divine law)
2. Eternal Law (God’s order and purpose for the world)
3. Natural law (Human participation in the eternal law through reason)
2. Two audiences for the letter:
1. Catholic moral theologians who have been teaching things contrary to the teaching of the bishops, especially with respect to the importance of individual acts and how acts relate to a person’s basic orientation toward or away from God (especially how this relates to the distinction between mortal and venial sin and the sacrament of reconciliation)
2. Others in society who think that it is okay to evil to achieve good (so those who follow a utilitarian or consequentialist form of moral reasoning)
3. Why begin with the story of the Rich Young Man (Mt. 19)
1. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” -- The question the rich young man poses to Jesus is, according to John Paul II, the question at the heart of every moral decision we make (par. 7)
2. In each moral decision we make, we are dealing not just with particular acts which may be either good or sinful but with “an appeal to the absolute Good which attracts and beckons us” (par. 7)
4. The great problem in modern society is the attempt to answer the question of the good of human beings apart from the question of God
1. “Only God can answer the question about what is good, because he is the Good itself.” (par. 9)
2. The moral life basically has the characteristic of responding to God’s love in a way that is proper for human persons (bodily creatures animated by a rational soul. (par. 10)
3. Acting for the good (acting in a moral way) is basically about relating freedom to the moral law in the proper way.
5. Jesus’ response to the rich young man: “keep the commandments”
1. “But God has already given an answer to the question (about the good): 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.” (the so called first principle of practical reason) [par. 12]
2. Recall this is what Benedict understands as the proper understanding of conscience (relating one’s freedom properly to the law of God written on the human heart, rather than accepting an external law [superego] or the dictates of one’s subjectively determined desires
3. Drawing on Romans 2:14-15—“When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them.”
4. John Paul II is arguing that, in each and every action we do, we reveal something about our basic orientation toward or away from God. This is why questions about how we relate our freedom to the moral law are so important, because it is only through our actions that we express our relation to God.
5. This also signals why the story of the rich young man is so important to this argument: “If you wish to enter into eternal life, keep the commandments. (Mt. 19:17) In this way, a close connection is made between eternal life and obedience to God’s commandments.” [par. 12]
6. “Perfection demands that maturity in self-giving to which human freedom is called… [Jesus’ words, ‘If you wish to be perfect…’] bear witness to the fundamental relationship between freedom and the divine law. Human freedom and God’s law are not in opposition; on the contrary, they appeal one to the other.” [par. 17]
6. The moral life fundamentally has the characteristic of a response: all of one’s freely chosen actions orient you to God in the form of response to (affirming or rejecting) the gift of God’s love.
1. We respond as whole persons, seeking to answer this fundamental question, and in each moral choice we communicate fundamentally who we are and what we love (an insight, you will recall, that comes from Augustine).
2. Obedience to the law and love of the good God are one and the same (the summary of Mt. 19)
3. God who is all good gives us the law, and it does not change just because we are unable to live up to it (and this is rooted in the fact that God is all good and that the law is his second chosen of communicating his goodness)

JOHN PAUL II ON THE MORAL ACT

1. Why is he taking this approach, explaining the meaning of freedom as a way to understand how to analyze acts as moral or immoral?
1. He is responding to certain tendencies among contemporary theologians to talk about the fundamental orientation of the human toward or away from God as somehow separate from or above that person’s acts.
2. The reasons that such theologians against whom the pope is arguing raised the possibility that human beings might maintain their fundamental orientation toward God despite the imperfect nature of their acts and their sinful acts are threefold:
1. First, it seems difficult to describe how a finite creature (the human) can relate to an infinite horizon (the ground of all being).
2. Second, there seems to be some evidence (Paul, the rich young man story itself) that suggests God still loves sinners and relates to them despite their sin.
3. Third, every act merely by the nature of human temporality and embodiedness seems imperfect because we are always excluding some good when we are pursuing some other good. (Think about how we give ourselves to causes, or how even in our best actions some good in the world is left undone.)
2. What specific misleading theological position does he think he is correcting?
1. What he thinks he is responding to teleological/consequentialist/proportionalist theories that (he thinks) say that moral rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by weighing the premoral goods and evils of the consequences.
1. example: artificial birth control
2. “the criteria for evaluating the moral rightness of an action are drawn from the weighing of the non-moral or pre-moral goods to be gained and the corresponding non-moral or pre-moral values to be respected.” (par. 74)
3. He thinks that these folks analyze moral situations by dividing (1) moral values (love of God and neighbor, justice, etc.) from (2) premoral values (health, physical integrity, material goods)
4. And he thinks that they judge moral goodness based on intention and moral rightness based on proportionate values or disvalues implied in the consequences of any action.
5. Examples: artificial birth control, war, economy
3. So then what does determine whether a particular action is moral or immoral?
1. Traditionally there have been three options:
1. Intention?
2. Circumstances (in particular the consequences)?
3. Object of the will?
2. Why are circumstances not sufficient to determine the morality of an act?
1. Because “The weighing of the goods and evils foreseeable as the consequence of an action is not an adequate method for determining whether the choice of that concrete kind of behavior is ‘according to its species’ or ‘in itself’ morally good or bad, licit or illicit. The foreseeable consequences are part of those circumstances of the act, which, while capable of lessening the gravity of an evil act, nonetheless cannot alter its moral species.” [In other words, although it can mitigate guilt, in cannot change the goodness or evil of a certain kind of behavior.]
2. So circumstances might mitigate culpability (that is, reduce the gravity of the sin) even if circumstances cannot make an evil action into a good action.
3. To say that circumstances (or consequences—that is, the circumstances that will be brought about in the future by an action) could determine the morality of an act would think any and all means justified to bring about a good result (even gravely evil ones).
4. It would also suggest that in carrying out a particular action, we could determine with certainly that our evil choices would relate to one and only one particular result, when in fact an evil choice or a good choice often have consequences we cannot foresee. In other words, it is very difficult to act so that only one consequence will result.
3. Why is intention not sufficient?
1. Because action in its full sense means not just intending but also willing an object in conformity with a person’s good. (par 78), committing oneself to it fully and realizing it unless blocked by some external obstacle.
2. Because we cannot intend some outcome without at the same time also intending the immediate factors that would bring about that outcome. Put differently, we cannot intend the final end of an action without also intending the intermediate affairs that bring it about.
3. “According to Aquinas, every action intended by the will is a…’good understood and ordered by reason.” (Rhonheimer, p. 163)
4. The object is always an act of will expressed as “a freely chosen kind of behavior” [object rationally chosen by the deliberate will]
1. “By the object of a given moral act, then, one cannot mean
   a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on the basis of its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the outside world. Rather the object is the proximate end of deliberate decision which determines the act of will on the part of the acting person.” [78]
2. The judgment of its morality is whether “that object is capable or not of being ordered to God, the one who alone is good and therefore brings about the perfection of the person? [par. 78-9]
3. What does this ordering to God involve? Loving God and others from an act of will that unties body and spirit.
4. Per Rhonheimer, we must be able to distinguish (as VS does) between object of the will and ulterior intentions (those we do proximately in order to bring about final intentions).
5. Otherwise, we will be in the position (of the proportionalists or consequentialists) that it is impossible to speak about the object of the act except by expanding it to include further intentions and consequences in order to describe the act properly.
6. Objects of will are freely chosen kinds of behaviors, but what is meant by this is to explore what it is like to experience making a choice (to be “in the perspective of the acting person”). One can only do this (VS and its supporters think) if one distinguishes what it is like to make a choice of a kind of behavior that wills a something immediately as a rationally determined good behavior from what it is like to analyze an action from the outside where things outside of the immediate structure of choice seem to matter.
7. MR, “Intentional Actions and the Meaning of Object”—“Do not look at human actions ‘from the outside’; do not focus only on what happens, what is the case, and on the state of affairs brought about by a behavioral performance; but rather put yourself in the perspective of the acting subject, for whom ‘actions’ or ‘behaviors’ are objects of choice, informed by reason, as immediate goals of the will.” (243)
5. Examples of actions incapable of being ordered to the good [intrinsically evil acts]: [par 80]
1. (1) whatever is hostile to life such as homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide
2. (2) whatever violates the integrity of the human person such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, and attempts to coerce the spirit;
3. (3) whatever is offensive to human dignity such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children, degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit and not as free responsible persons.”
6. Examples for discussion:
1. Self Defense—what am I willing when I decide to bear arms against someone who invades my home with the thought of harming my family?
2. Contraception—what am I willing if I decide to use artificial means in order to regulate the births of my children?
3. Abortion—what exactly am I willing if I decide to abort the child conceived in me as a result of rape?
4. Giving gifts to one's children—what am I willing when I decide to purchase an additional toy for my child at Christmas time, realizing that he has many toys and that the money might be better spent on someone who does not even have enough food to eat?

4. Key question: what theological reason can there be for this kind of difference: one group of theologians wanting to describe the object from the perspective of the acting person, and others who want to include in the notion of an object further intentions and circumstances? This is perhaps the central disagreement in Catholic moral theology today between those who want to support the teaching of the Church that there are intrinsically evil acts and those who do not.

1. One theological reason has to do with relative stress on human finitude or trust in the Gospel. Note that both are to be found within the narratives of Jesus. The question is which you will rely on when trying to interpret what the object of the will.
2. Another reason has to do with a perceived tendency of those who want to expand the object to rely on behaviorist and therefore non-theological modes of analysis.
3. Another reason has to do with how one reads Jesus’ call to perfection. Are there finally instances, situations of real moral tragedy, where one cannot act willing some good without also directly or at least significantly willing some evil?
4. Is it a matter of theological rhetoric, whereby introducing a distinction between objective morality and subjective culpability is really a way of saying the same thing that those who want to rely on intentions are trying to do?

WHAT IS JOHN PAUL II RESPONDING TO?

1. What he thinks he is responding to teleological/consequentialist/proportionalist theories that (he thinks) say that moral rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by weighing the premoral goods and evils of the consequences (he has specifically in mind the examples of defenses of artificial contraception)
1. “the criteria for evaluating the moral rightness of an action are drawn from the weighing of the non-moral or pre-moral goods to be gained and the corresponding non-moral or pre-moral values to be respected.” (par. 74)
2. He thinks that these theorists analyze moral situations by dividing (1) moral values (love of God and neighbor, justice, etc.) from (2) premoral values (health, physical integrity, material goods)
3. And he thinks that they judge moral goodness based on intention and moral rightness based on proportionate values or disvalues implied in the consequences of any action.
4. Examples: artificial birth control, war, economy
2. The response to John Paul II by those he criticizes has been that he misunderstands what they are doing, because they disagree on (1) how we should understand the difference between freedom of our particular choices and our fundamental freedom and (2) how exactly the object of the will ought to be understood (especially how proximate and ultimate intentions have the capacity to change the description of the object).
   

THE PROBLEM OF FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOM

1. It seems that it is not possible to understand actions as totally determine human goodness because we are always ordered to freedom prior to and beyond our particular acts.
1. Josef Fuchs: “The reason why basic freedom or transcendental freedom is so called will not be clear. The free self-commitment of ourselves as persons is more than any particular action or actions and more than the sum of them. It underlies them, permeates them, and goes beyond them, without ever being one of them. A man’s free choice and basic self-commitment consisting ultimately of the gift or refusal of the self in love to God, should not be equated with any particular moral act. The act of basic freedom is the realization of the person as a whole.” (188
2. The problem here seems to be what it means to act and how much of who one is fundamentally is realized (or “at risk”) in each act.
1. Can a person maintain a fundamental orientation to God in the course of doing an action contrary to the law of God
2. Different than saying whether a person is basically good or evil—this has to do with capacity for action over a lifetime, not in the particular
3. Is the basic orientation (exercise of basic freedom) unknowable or knowable, to what extent, and under what conditions?
3. Fuchs and others would respond that it is true that specific acts of free choice are related to our basic orientation toward or away from God but that they do not exhaust our relation with and orientation to God.
1. We are never able to make choices for the absolute good because we live in a world infected by evil (i.e. even in our best choices) and so we can never make a free choice in this world which is entirely free from disvalues.
2. Only a freedom of the whole person prior to and beyond all choices can be oriented to an absolute good because it is the ultimate value of a person free from the tragedy/conflict of particular goods, and this happens in our values and our orientations related to but beyond our particular conduct.
4. John Paul II thinks that there is not domain of freedom that is unaffected by our particular choices
1. The moral good is choosing the absolute good in each of our particular choices, because we choose not an end (the good) but the kind of agent person we want to become.
2. For John Paul II, the point of using the rich young man story is (in part) because it shows Jesus calling the rich young man (and therefore, possibly us) to a choice of perfection.
3. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, the example of Christ on the cross demonstrates that it is in the power of human beings, through God’s grace, to choose the absolute good in their particular choices. The cross admits of not final moral tragedy or conflict.
4. This appears to be a basic point of disagreement about whether we must view the Gospel as giving a possible description of the world or must we give a description apart from it.
5. Are premoral goods inevitably in conflict in human life, and do we see it as impossible to bring about to choose a perfect good?
6. Examples (of scenarios depicting a possible conflict among goods)
1. Unintended pregnancy (the young unwed mother)
2. War (Do you fight to defend your country? Do you fight to bring freedom to people in other countries?)
3. Voting (Do you exercise your right to vote even if there is no candidate whose views coincide with your own in all respects)
4. The rich young man scenario (give up your money to be with the poor or accumulate it to help the poor indirectly)
5. The martyr’s call

Discuss Case #9: Self-Defense