On Being in Good Faith*
It is a widespread belief, implicit among many non-Catholics and explicit among many Catholics, that a man is personally guiltless in doing what is in accord with his conscience. Think of such phrases as ‘he acted according to his lights’, ‘they sincerely believe that they ought to do as they do’, whose purpose is to exonerate. Catholics taught by the English Catechism** learn that it is impossible to sin mortally without full knowledge and full consent, and that it is right to act according to one’s conscience, and a sin to act against it, even though what one’s conscience requires of one is wrong; and, in general, that good faith exonerates. Many also familiarly use a distinction between ‘material’ and ‘formal’ sinfulness; a thing is ‘formally’ sinful (i.e. doing it is really a sin on the part of the agent) only when the agent believes that it is sinful or wrong.
We may note here, what has been noted before, that on this view sufficient thoughtlessness is a safeguard against committing mortal sin. Further, on this view it is difficult to see how it must be mortal sin to give up belief in Christ and the Catholic Church. For at least some cases of infidelity are occasioned by it strongly appearing to a man that Christian belief is untrue or unreasonable. And if when he is in this frame of mind he abandons faith, how can he be said fully to know that he is rejecting the truth revealed by God? In general, on that view, it is difficult to see how it is possible to commit grave sin with the intellect. Consider a rash and uncharitable judgement which led one to slander someone gravely. One does not - usually at least - say to oneself ‘Now I will judge rashly’ or ‘I am determined, rash as it is, to judge that so-and-so’ - one simply judges rashly. What does ‘in good faith’ mean? If it means that one has not got one’s tongue in one’s cheek, is not consciously lying or hypocritical, then good faith is not enough to exonerate. If it is enough to exonerate, then the slander uttered under the influence of a rash and passionate conviction is not a statement made in good faith. It is the same with the notion of sincerity. If I am sincere so long as I believe what I say, then sincerity does not exonerate me from the charge of calumny. Thus good faith or sincerity are either not much good as a defence, or not so easily assured as we might think at first. Or else we must take the line that it is not possible to sin gravely with one’s power of judgement. But if so, then abandonment of faith need not be a grave sin.
‘He ought to have realised...’, ‘He ought to have thought of...’, ‘He had no business to suppose that...’, ‘He ought to have found out...’, are phrases that bear witness to the fact that a man’s beliefs do not suffice to justify him so long as he acts accordingly. Someone realises he has sold petrol by mistake for paraffin, and thinks: ‘They’ll be sure to notice it is petrol’, and does nothing about it. ‘He had no business to think that’ would be the usual reaction. If he said it to someone else the question as to his sincerity would sound like a question whether he really thought it or was consciously saying something he did not think. If he said it to himself, we can still ask ‘Did he really think it?’ But in this use, the question ‘If he thought it, all the same did he sincerely think it?’ seems not to arise, for sincerity is being treated as a matter of thinking what you say; so ‘sincerely think’ contains a redundancy. But if we can ask ‘Did he sincerely think it?’ this suggests there is such a thing as insincerely thinking it - but insincerely thinking something will still be thinking it. Here then the question as to sincerity is not ‘Does he think the same as he says?’ but ‘Granted he thinks that, is it a sincere thought?’ That though he thought it, it was not a sincere thought, could mean a variety of things. It need not mean that some hesitancy or feeling of difficulty accompanied the thought. For it depends on the content of the thought whether a feeling of difficulty would be counted as showing that the man did not sincerely think it. In the paraffin-petrol case we should indeed say that the man who, with an uneasy feeling, thought ‘They’ll notice it’ was insincere precisely in suppressing the knowledge that made his thought doubtful. But notice that what counts here is that his thought would really be a most dubious one to have. In another kind of case, the uneasy feeling would not prove the insincerity of the thought, e.g. a man believes in the assurance of a friend that there are no steps to fall down in a dark passage, but has uneasy feelings as he walks the passage. That is to say, although at first sight the question as to the sincerity of a thought is a question purely about the inner state of the thinker, i.e. about something formally independent of external circumstances, on reflection we find, at least sometimes, that the circumstances and subject-matter would have to be considered. It may be said: in the petrol-paraffin case, only an idiot could sincerely think ... and so in other cases the question as to sincerity will be a question as to the inner state, not to be judged in the light of circumstances and subject-matter. But what sort of statement is it, that only an idiot could sincerely think ...? If sincerity is as it were an interior colour of one’s thoughts, then how can it be said that only an idiot could sincerely think ...? Is this proved by induction? If the question can ever be judged in the light of circumstances and subject-matter, that shows that sincerity is not as it were a secret colour of one’s thoughts.
It is the purity of one’s intentions in thinking these thoughts. By the purity of intention I mean not the ultimate purpose but the immediate purpose in thinking. The thought is thought, or there is an inclination to think it, because it appears to be the relevant truth on the matter in hand; as opposed to its appearing to be the relevant truth on the matter in hand because it is a convenient or otherwise tempting thought, i.e. because there is an inclination to think it.
When it is said that full knowledge and consent are necessary conditions of mortal sin, the statement is ambiguous. I believe that it is sometimes - even often - take to mean that unless the agent fully understands that what he does is wrong, then what he does is not mortal sin. But the statement need not mean this; it may well mean only that the agent must have full knowledge that what he is doing is such-and-such, when such-and-such is in fact gravely wrong, in order to commit mortal sin. For example, if I do not know, in giving my child, say, a drink, that it is a deadly poison, then I am not guilty of murder in so causing his death. But if I do know it, and give the drink fully intending that it shall kill him, then on one construction of the condition ‘full knowledge and full consent’, I commit mortal sin, and the fact that I perhaps believe it right to kill him is no impairment of the conditions for mortal sin. Now this, I should think, is the meaning of the doctrine: for it has obvious connections with the ethical tradition of Aristotelianism, according to which ignorance of circumstances can prevent an act from being voluntary - and only what is voluntary can be sin. But ignorance of principle is not a cause of involuntariness, but of scoundrelism, according to Aristotle and those who have followed him. This, then, will be the meaning of the condition ‘full knowledge’: given that to do X is gravely wrong, then a man is guilty of wrongdoing in doing what is in fact doing X, only if he knows that he is doing X. He may be doing what is in fact doing X without knowing it. To take a classical example, he may shoot his father by mistake for a stag. Then what he materially does is to shoot his father, but this was not his formal object - his formal object was to shoot a stag, and so he is not guilty of the sin of parricide. The distinction between material and formal is so made, in this case, by St. Thomas; and possibly we have here the historical origin of the expression ‘material and formal sin’; but we must notice that as he uses the distinction of material and formal, there is no room for these as adjectives of sin. What the man actually does (what happens with him as agent) is the material action; what he supposes himself to be doing is the formal action, and it is the rightness of what he - reasonably - supposes himself to be doing that determines his innocence; not the rightness that he supposes to attach to what he does or thinks he does. If, then, in teaching that full knowledge is necessary before a person can commit mortal sin, we give the impression that a person can only commit mortal sin if he conceives himself to be committing mortal sin, i.e., that if he does not believe himself to be doing wrong, he cannot be committing mortal sin, then it seems that we are teaching something different from any meaning of the formula ‘without full knowledge, it is not possible to commit mortal sin’ in which it can be reconciled with traditional teaching.
It is clear that, for any deed X, you cannot have intentionally done X unless you know you are doing X, except in a psychoanalytical sense in which there can be unconscious intentions, but I leave that aside, since unconscious intentions are not e.g. suitable matter for confession. If, then, you are to be charged with a certain intentional act, it is an adequate defence that you did not know you were doing that. And in many cases, this is an adequate defence against a charge of having done X guiltily. This, then, is the truth in the condition of ‘full knowledge’ for mortal sin: where the mortal sin is a specific act in a kind of case which requires intention on the part of the accused, then the act of mortal sin was not committed by an agent who did not have full knowledge. We can often say that an action was either intentional or involuntary.
I do not think that the condition ought to be more generously stated than that. For the limits of the voluntary are far wider than the limits of the intentional; but sin essentially requires, not intention but voluntariness. A man may be not guilty of murder of malice-prepense - i.e. of having intended the death of someone he did kill and had no right to seek to kill - but yet guilty of homicide, in circumstances where, if he did not know what he was doing, he ought to have known it. If he drives a car at 90mph through a city street and kills one or two people in doing so, perhaps it did not occur to him that this was likely to happen. So he did not intend their deaths; but he ought to have realised what was likely, and his not realising it does not excuse him. And it seems ludicrous to suggest that unjustified homicide, in circumstances where a man could have realised if he had thought, is not a mortal sin, is not gravely wrong. I am not supposing him mad or drunk, but only thoughtless; and the case is not an imaginary one. - You may say: he committed with full knowledge the mortal sin of driving at breakneck speed through a city street. But the reason why it is a sin to do this is that it is dangerous. There could be little objection to it otherwise. - Perhaps we should say: a man who does this does know the danger even if he does not think of it. Then there can be knowledge without realisation. ‘I did not think of that’ or ‘I did not think of it like that’ do not disprove knowledge. At least the condition ‘knowledge and consent’, if it is really quite generally requisite, does not mean that the matter must present itself to the man as such-and-such - the condition which holds in the narrower sense, in which e.g. a man cannot be accused of deliberate murder unless he conceived himself to be engaged in killing someone.
In the sense in which there can be knowledge without realisation, then I know what I am doing in forming a rash judgement. But I do not conceive it as forming a rash judgement; and is it not a misuse of words to say I know what I am doing in such a case? Rashness, carelessness, omission to think or to act, negligence: it is not reasonable to say that these are never morally sinful, but the sense in which, so far as they are guilty, they are accompanied by knowledge is an extended sense of ‘knowledge’. Perhaps the car-driver knew what he did not think of; hence here we might easily say ‘You knew perfectly well’; in other cases we say rather ‘You would have known if you had thought’.
Abelard was condemned for the opinion that those who crucified Our Lord were not guilty of mortal sin because by Our Lord’s own testimony they did not know what they were doing.
The question arises: ‘You would have known, if you had thought when?’ The answer need not be: at the moment of action, when you acted ignorantly. In the time between the arise of the situation and the action you have to take in it, you may easily be in a state of invincible ignorance - i.e., you may be in a state of ignorance that cannot be overcome in that space of time. It might then be argued that you are always in this sense in a state of invincible ignorance at the time of action, if you are in a state of ignorance at all - at least in cases where to act and to abstain from acting are equally critical or you think they are; e.g., you think you ought to perform an abortion in certain circumstances and they arise; or anything else that you think you ought to do, when in fact you ought not to do it.
Here I have changed the ignorance from ignorance of circumstances to ignorance of law. If we revert to ignorance of circumstances, we shall see that the argument is preposterous, for it would exonerate you if you thought (rightly) that you ought to do such-and-such in certain circumstances, and thought (rashly and wrongly) that those circumstances held; the action being such as is wrong in the circumstances that actually held; e.g. you think (rightly) that you ought to dismiss an employee who is selling information where it will do harm, before certain information becomes available to him; and you judge (rashly and wrongly) that this employee is selling information where it will do harm. You had plenty of time in which to make a reasonable investigation, but you formed your judgement without reasonable investigation; now, at the time when you ought to dismiss him if your judgement is right, it would take time which you have not got, to undo your rash judgement. This sort of invincible ignorance would hardly exonerate you.
Thus the answer to our question: ‘You would have known, if you had thought when?’ is: if you had thought when you ought to have thought.
St. Thomas has an article in the Summa theologiae: Whether a will that departs from an erroneous conscience is bad?[1] e.g. if a man thinks he ought to fornicate, but chooses not to, is his will bad? St. Thomas’s answer to this question, which as he says is the question whether an erroneous conscience binds, is that it does bind: such a will is bad. The reason is that for the will to be bad, it is enough if what a man does is done qua bad, i.e., under the conception of evil; so that if he thinks he commits some kind of wrongdoing in doing a certain thing, then formally he does commit it. This point of doctrine is well known and fits in well with the position I sketched at the beginning.
St. Thomas’ next article is less well known, and does not fit in with that position at all. For in it he raises the question whether a will that accords with an erroneous conscience is good[2]; and this, as he says, is the same as the question whether an erroneous conscience excuses. His answer is that such a will is bad unless the error, or ignorance, is the kind of ignorance that makes an act involuntary. Further he appears to think that the only kind of ignorance that does make an act involuntary is ignorance, without any negligence, as to some circumstance of a man’s action. E.g., to commit adultery one must have intercourse with someone else’s spouse; if a man did this knowingly, believing that one ought to, then his will is bad, because the prohibition of adultery is part of the law of God, which a man is obliged to know. But if he thought the woman was his wife - as might happen through his ignorance of, say, a previous valid marriage on her part - then his ignorance, as causing his action to be involuntary, would excuse him. We may note that to make the matter quite clear we could say: the ignorance makes his action involuntary under the description ‘intercourse with someone else’s wife’. However he would be unwilling to say that the appropriate ignorance made the action involuntary under the description ‘infringing the law of God’, or ‘a wicked action’, and his reason is clearly that such ignorance is blameworthy, because anyone ought to know that it is against the law, or is wicked, to commit adultery. He appears to adopt the general principle that ignorance of the law does not excuse. Now later theologians, most notably St. Alphonsus, have successfully taught that not all ignorance of the law (i.e. natural law) is blameworthy;*** the question whether it is is not, as far as I know, discussed by St. Thomas. St. Alphonsus certainly followed St. Thomas in holding that ignorance of the wrongness of adultery - and even fornication - could not but be blameworthy; what was not necessarily blameworthy in his view was ignorance of recondite parts of the law of nature; decisions about right and wrong involving remote and unobvious conclusions from the main outlines of the law - the ‘main outlines’ being perhaps such as are adumbrated in the ten commandments. St. Thomas at any rate distinguishes between the ten commandments (apart from the ceremonial character of the particular specification of the law demanding that time be set aside for divine things, i.e. the law concerning the sabbaths) and other matters of morals, on the score that the ten commandments are what is most obvious and primary of such laws as come after principles like ‘Do good and avoid evil’: i.e. as we should say, as have particular content.
For it is surely nothing special about moral laws as opposed to matters of fact that brings about the condemnation of ignorance of them, even if some people have thought so. To see that a type of practice (like St. Monica’s cakes) has the malice of superstition or idolatry about it, for example, may need knowledge and judgment above the ordinary; to know concerning negroes or Tierra del Fuegians in dealing with them that they are humans needs no such thing. The one is a matter of law, the other of fact: but it is the matter of fact that a man should be reproached with not realising, and not the matter of law. As is often remarked, recognition of a situation or a proceeding here and now as falling under such-and-such a description is essential to the application in practice of any general law; thus if there is no such thing as an obligation to judge situations right, there can be no such thing as an obligation to act thus and so in such-and-such a situation, but every obligation must be, as many are, conditional on the agent’s realisation. This may seem to be so, since if for example someone does not realise the situation because he is drugged or unconscious, we do not think he has any obligations in it: indeed, whatever his body did we should hardly ascribe to him, but should deny him the character of a moral agent altogether. However this does not show that a man must realise the situation in order to have obligations in it but only that he must be able to take care, and by taking care to realise the situation.
Suppose, however, that someone leaves a baby on a doorstep in the winter. If I take care - i.e., if being in the house I look outside the door - I shall realise the situation and so become obliged to rescue the baby from the cold. Further, I am able to take care. In the view I have suggested, does this mean that I am obliged to rescue the baby, and am guilty if I do not take the care that would result in my realising that it was there? This would be an absurdity; this is precisely the sort of situation in which my obligation is conditional on my realising the situation. When then am I to blame for not taking care? Clearly it is wrong to say: when I can take care and don’t. The answer must be something like: when it is my job to take care in the kind of way that would in fact lead to realisation.
Yet even that is not enough. Suppose I ought to look out of that door periodically to look at a thermometer there. Then it is my job to take care in a way that would lead to discovery of the baby; yet if I neglect my job, my guilt in respect to the baby’s getting frozen, if I have any, is not at all the same as any guilt in respect of ill following upon the gap in the record of thermometer readings. It looks as if (a) one ought to be alert to one’s immediate surroundings insofar as it is not reasonable to take it for granted that they don’t need attention; (b) one ought to be alert to facts and true consideration concerning what one is doing.
There is a story of a schoolboy who said that pins saved millions of lives every year by not getting swallowed. Someone who tries to explain what is absurd about this may say that a negation cannot be called a cause of anything. However, do not cooks spoil potatoes by not putting salt in the water? and do not signalmen cause accidents by not giving signals?
There are, then, two different ways in which one thing is said to come of another. Firstly, directly, when the other acts, so as to produce it - e.g., something gets hot by being heated by some other hot thing. Second, indirectly, from the mere fact that the other thing does not act. For example, we say a ship sank because of the pilot, if he stopped navigating it. All the same, what follows on a failure to act is not always assigned to the agent - qua not acting - as a cause, but only when the agent can act and ought to do so. For example, we should hardly say, at least imputing responsibility, that the pilot lost the ship by failure to navigate, if he had died. But if the pilot committed suicide, the statement again becomes reasonable. Again, we should hardly say that a cook gave me a good night’s rest by not putting Benzedrine in my dinner, even though it was perfectly in his power to do so, because in any case he ought not to have been putting Benzedrine into his dishes.
We must ask what ‘can and ought’ mean here. For example, it might be said that a rope saved someone’s life by breaking at a critical moment; and perhaps this is so because in some sense the rope could have and ought to have held; could have, at least in the sense that we could not have told that it must break just then; and ought to have, because ropes are meant to hold. In this sense, however, the pilot who dies at the critical moment could after all be said to have lost the ship: in this sense only to a pilot who was not supposed to be navigating the ship or who was not able to navigate because his instruments had broken down, could the loss of the ship for lack of navigation not be ascribed. (Of course, here we are not speaking of moral responsibility.)
Now suppose that for the pilot of a ship we substitute the will of a man. To ascribe to the will and to call voluntary are the same. Then if the man could have and ought to have done such-and-such a voluntary action, the failure to do it will also be voluntary; even though the failure is not because he chose not to do it; but simply that it was a voluntary action that he did not do when he could have and ought to have done it. Only if some necessary condition of his doing it is lacking and the lack itself is not voluntary, will his failure be non-voluntary, like the failure of the pilot when the machinery was out of order. Now an essential condition of acting is that you have an idea of doing such-and-such, and an essential condition of acting with a further intention is that you have an idea of such-and-such as your objective. Suppose then that you do not have the idea of doing the thing that you otherwise could do and ought to do, or that you do not have the idea of the thing you ought to be aiming at, what will follow about your guilt or innocence in failing to do what you ought to do?
Let us consider the statement that you could have and ought to have had the idea of doing such-and-such and that your failure is therefore voluntary. There is at once a contrast between this and the statement concerning the exterior act, that a man could have and ought to have done such-and-such and so that his failure was voluntary. For there, there was available one possibility of showing that he could not have done the thing: namely that he did not have the idea of it. But even if it can sometimes be said that a man ought to have had a certain idea, here at any rate there is no such possibility. It cannot be necessary to have an idea of having an idea in order to have the latter idea. If then the voluntariness of anything necessarily involves having an idea of that act, then having an idea cannot be a voluntary thing. One can most easily see this when having the idea is having an explicit thought prior to acting. Then the command to act thus is obeyed by first thinking of such-and-such; e.g. - at least in my own case - the command to point North East, say, for I have to orientate myself by thinking of a certain place. But the command to think of such-and-such would not then have to be obeyed by first thinking of something else - or, if it were, the command to think of that something else would not have to be obeyed by first thinking of something else again.
Thus either thoughts are not voluntary or voluntariness does not necessarily involve a separate idea of the thing that is called voluntary. While, then, it may be argued: a man can’t do what he doesn’t think of, when the doing is some exterior action, it cannot similarly be argued: a man can’t do what he doesn’t think of, when the doing is itself some form of thinking. We must therefore either deny altogether that thoughts are voluntary or admit that if you could and ought to have had such-and-such an idea, this is not conditional on your having the idea of having the idea. ‘You ought to have done such-and-such...’ can be countered by ‘But I didn’t know’; ‘You ought to have known such-and-such’ or ‘You ought to have thought of such-and-such’ cannot in general be countered in the same way.
Let us return to the analogy of the pilot and the ship. I said that the loss of the ship was ascribable to the pilot if he could have and ought to have navigated the ship; but remember that in this analogy ‘could have’ relates not to the condition of the pilot but to the navigability of the ship. And similarly, ‘could have known’ relates not to the condition of the man, but to the knowability of the thing to someone in his position. By ‘in his position’ I mean, given what he already knows, supposing it is not already to be blameworthy in its limitations; for no one is subject to obligations until he already knows a lot; ordinarily, not until he has mastered a language. (I say ‘ordinarily’ because of deaf-mutes who don’t master a language but are not ‘idiotic’.)
‘Invincible ignorance’ is sometimes spoken of as if it were a psychological condition - not necessarily of mental defect or insanity. I am suggesting that it means ‘ignorance that the man himself could not overcome’; as appears from the standard example, that the man who has never heard of Christ is invincibly ignorant of Christianity. Here the impossibility is not an impossibility because of the bent of his mind; he simply has not the information available to attend to.
It will be clear that everything turns on the question whether our thoughts are voluntary: a very difficult question. To say that every thought is voluntary would lead us to say e.g. that a temptation, when this comes in the form of a thought like ‘I could pinch that’, is voluntary. To deny that thoughts are voluntary at all, except in so far as persisted in, would however seem equally absurd, since thoughts are essential to intentional action, and on this view intentional action will be in large measure non-voluntary. What exactly should be said about this I do not know. The truth about it would surely throw a great deal of light on voluntariness.
* Text of an undated and unpublished typescript of a paper given to the Philosophical Enquiry Group that met at the Dominican Conference Centre at Spode House in Staffordshire (see Preface), dating probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s.
** Anscombe was mistaken in claiming that A Catechism of Christian Doctrine (first published by the Catholic Truth Society, London, in 1889) taught that it was impossible to sin mortally without full knowledge and full consent. Review of all printings of the Catechism back to 1929 provided no evidence of such a teaching in it. However, similar teaching is certainly in A Catechism of Christian Doctrine Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (originally published in 1885): ‘To make a sin mortal three things are necessary: a grievous matter, sufficient reflection, and full consent of the will.’ (page 11 in the 1937 edition)
*** Saint Alphonsus Maria Liguori, Theologia Moralis, Tomus Primus editio nova, cura et studio P. Leonardi Gaudé (Romae Ex Typographia Vaticana, 1905): Liber Primus, Tractatus Secundus: De Legibus, Caput IV, Dubium 1: An ignorantia excusat, pp. 147ff.