3
The Search for a Universal Ethic
In 2009, the International Theological Commission, with the approval of the President of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William J. Levada, published The Search for Universal Ethics: a New Look at Natural Law.
Amongst other matters, the document discusses the exchange on the level of reason about what is common to all men endowed with reason, and the requirements for establishing a just society.
In Western society, we are witnessing the growth of a secularism that has not only discarded Christianity, but also the balance between God, man and nature that, is at the heart of our tradition, and with it, the teleology that gives meaning and purpose to human activity. In its place is an individualism that in this post-modern era rejects principled conduct in favour of life lived as an individual narrative, judged only for its autonomy.
The Commission’s paper has much to offer those of us who must resolve the very practical matter of how to conduct oneself as a Catholic bioethicist, philosopher or theologian in the public forum in which much of Bioethics is conducted. The Commission cautions us to “be modest and prudent when invoking the evidentness of the precepts of the natural law”, but nonetheless calls on us to engage in a dialogue with a view to a universal ethic.33
The Commission refers to the convergence of philosophy and religion in the natural law34 and goes on to say that the doctrine of natural law possesses coherence and validity on the philosophical plane of reason common to everyone, but acquires its full sense within the history of salvation: in fact Jesus Christ, sent by the Father, is, with his Spirit, the fullness of every law.
The Commission also explains the dependence of the natural law on grace:
Grace does not destroy nature but heals it, strengthens it, and leads it to its full realization. For this reason, even if the natural law is an expression of reason common to all men and can be presented in a coherent and true manner on the philosophical level, it is not external to the order of grace. Its claims are present and operating in the different theological states through which our one humanity has passed in the history of salvation.35
However, the society that we confront insists on a rigid separation between religious belief and the formation of public policy. In response, many Catholic bioethicists seek to engage in public debate as though natural law can be developed as a matter of pure reason as a discussion about humanity alone, and on such grounds seek to win support for a natural law approach without expecting an audience to listen to claims made from a faith perspective.
It seems to me that, as a matter of recent history, that approach is a failure. The UK probably provides the clearest example of a concerted effort by Catholic intellectuals to take that approach, and the UK probably leads the way in the Western world in terms of adopting evil public policies that are aggressively bigoted in the active exclusion of religious views and of natural law concepts, particularly the rejection of the Pauline principle and moral absolutes that are at the core of natural law explanations. UK public policy also rejects any notion of sexual ethics other than that there be consent.
Such an approach to secular discussion sells us short by leaving out important elements, such as the theological virtues, and what we know of human and divine love and the communion of persons revealed in the person of Christ and in the Blessed Trinity. St Thomas taught that the theological virtues are not derived from reason but from revelation. To proceed in these debates without those Christian presuppositions robs us of much that is important to understanding our moral tradition, including, I argue, an understanding of moral absolutes and the Pauline principle.
From a Catholic perspective, what we have to offer is an alternative approach to philosophical analysis that constructively builds upon shared understanding, mutually seeking the transcendent. In that, we can accept the different cultures within our pluralistic society as raw data and can work to identify goodness as a common ground and knowable. That then permits us, in a culturally inclusive way, to transcend differences between religions and cultures while still founded upon those differences. That approach is especially open to the Christian notion of love, asking simply that it be considered as an alternative and asking the very practical question whether a civilisation based on a notion of love as gift of self is a better civilisation than the alternatives.
Basically I am claiming that Christian philosophy has much to contribute to Bioethics from a tradition of exploration of human nature and identifying doctrines that are good for mankind and justified in human terms. As a Christian philosopher I am formed by faith but willing to test its propositions, knowing that God loves us and wants what is good for us. The propositions of the natural law are testable for validity and consistency even if the rich content is to a significant extent dependant on faith and grace.
In 2009, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also released the document Dignitas Personae, which identified three major issues involved in reproductive technology:
a)the right to life and to physical integrity of every human being from conception to natural death;
b)the unity of marriage, which means reciprocal respect for the right within marriage to become a father or mother only together with the other spouse;
c)the specifically human values of sexuality which require “that the procreation of a human person be brought about as the fruit of the conjugal act specific to the love between spouses.”
As a faithful Catholic bioethicist, one is inclined to ask, how might these principles be proposed and explained to our contemporary culture as part of a universal ethic? The Congregation envisages that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive, but support each other and intersect, but it also claims that these norms are inscribed in nature and thus available. In defense of the first principle, the Congregation asserts:
The respect for the individual human being, which reason requires, is further enhanced and strengthened in the light of these truths of faith: thus, we see that there is no contradiction between the affirmation of the dignity and the affirmation of the sacredness of human life. ‘The different ways in which God, acting in history, cares for the world and for mankind are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they support each other and intersect. They have their origin and goal in the eternal, wise and loving counsel whereby God predestines men and women ‘to be conformed to the image of his Son’ (Rom 8:29).’36
By becoming one of us, the Son makes it possible for us to become “sons of God” (Jn 1:12), “sharers in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). This new dimension does not conflict with the dignity of the creature which everyone can recognize by the use of reason, but elevates it into a wider horizon of life which is proper to God, giving us the ability to reflect more profoundly on human life and on the acts by which it is brought into existence.37
In defence of the principles with respect to procreation, the Congregation asserts:
Natural law, which is at the root of the recognition of true equality between persons and peoples, deserves to be recognized as the source that inspires the relationship between the spouses in their responsibility for begetting new children. The transmission of life is inscribed in nature and its laws stand as an unwritten norm to which all must refer.38
Attempting to address topics such as those posed within reproductive technology about respect for human life and about procreation and even more widely on matters such as the recognition of homosexual relationships, we are at the same time confronted by a culture that wants to separate humanity from nature. The Commission expresses it as a rejection of the balance between God, man and nature that is at the heart of our tradition.
Gradually as laws are written to deal with the new technologies, the biological realities of human procreation are becoming ignored. In my own home state of Victoria in Australia, fatherhood has been removed from the law altogether. There are mothers identified as those who give birth, and then there are parents and a child may have any number of people who consent to being nominated as “parents” by the birth mother. In this way the law can cope with the myriad possibilities for family formation by removing altogether the significance of the biology of conception, and can adapt to the possibilities including that two men may parent a child by engaging a woman to carry the child for them (using gametes from any source), and then have her name them as the child’s parents.
How, in such a cultural context can one defend the balance between God, man and nature that is at the heart of our tradition? Is philosophy enough?
The present Pope, then Professor of Theology at the University of Regensburg, wrote a critique of the treatment of the relationship between philosophy and theology in the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes. He referred to there not being a radical enough rejection of a doctrine of man divided into philosophy and theology, and the tendency for a schematic representation of nature and the supernatural being merely juxtaposed.39
Presumably he had in mind teachings such as:
This Sacred Synod, therefore, recalling the teaching of the first Vatican Council, declares that there are “two orders of knowledge” which are distinct, namely faith and reason; and that the Church does not forbid that “the human arts and disciplines use their own principles and their proper method, each in its own domain;” therefore “acknowledging this just liberty,” this Sacred Synod affirms the legitimate autonomy of human culture and especially of the sciences.40
The approach in Gaudium et Spes to philosophy and theology that particularly seems to merely juxtapose faith and reason is also evident in the following passage (GS n. 62):
Although the Church has contributed much to the development of culture, experience shows that, for circumstantial reasons, it is sometimes difficult to harmonize culture with Christian teaching. These difficulties do not necessarily harm the life of faith, rather they can stimulate the mind to a deeper and more accurate understanding of the faith. The recent studies and findings of science, history and philosophy raise new questions which affect life and which demand new theological investigations. Furthermore, theologians, within the requirements and methods proper to theology, are invited to seek continually for more suitable ways of communicating doctrine to the men of their times; for the deposit of Faith or the truths are one thing and the manner in which they are enunciated, in the same meaning and understanding, is another.
Cardinal Ratzinger also described as a fictional starting point the claim that it is possible to construct a rational philosophical picture of man intelligible to all and on which all men of goodwill can agree, “the actual Christian doctrines being added to this as a sort of crowning conclusion.”41
In this he would seem to have challenged the presupposition of the Commission that there can be a universal ethic.
In the same article, Ratzinger was highly critical of the Thomists, saying that it can hardly be disputed that as a consequence of the division between philosophy and theology established by the Thomists, a juxtaposition has gradually been established which no longer appears adequate. “There is, and must be, a human reason in faith, yet conversely, every human reason is conditioned by historical standpoint so that reason pure and simple does not exist.”42 It should be noted that a debate rages among Thomists over whether a philosophical model or a more Augustinian Thomism properly represents St Thomas.43 There would seem to be Thomists on both sides of that debate. The debate has significance for the way in which we approach public policy formation. If all that needs to be said about public policy could be developed as a matter of pure reason, we would have no need to bring our faith into the issue of public policy but could debate the issues purely on the basis of reason. But is reason sufficient for that purpose? The International Theological Commission’s caution about being modest and prudent when invoking the evidentness of the precepts of the natural law would seem to be relevant.44 In my experience, many people do not find the precepts of the natural law to be self-evident. Our starting point needs to be somewhere else. Perhaps the least accepted precept of the natural law is the Pauline principle. Many people, it seems, are prepared to do the lesser evil to achieve better consequences.
The Pauline principle is explicable within the context of understanding what it is to act in a way that is incapable of being oriented towards God. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus makes a distinction between his account of the Decalogue and his account of the Beatitudes. The first captures the gravity of the law. The second explains the lesser importance but nevertheless significance of what is demanded by love. In his encounter with the rich young man, Jesus makes a similar distinction between keeping the law in order to be good, but if one is to be perfect then the Beatitudes apply. In doing evil by acting in breach of the law, we sever the relationship with God, and no achievement of good consequences can balance that. The problem in a secular context is how to explain the gravity of doing evil without reference to our relationship to God.
Sitting on government committees drafting ethical guidelines, I discovered that there was a natural desire to distinguish between the words “must” and “should.” In drafting guidelines, the committees wanted to describe some guidelines as exceptionless, whereas other principles were not held to be so, although it was difficult to provide a coherent reasoned explanation of the basis for this distinction.
Trying to explain moral norms without recourse to faith is often difficult and in some circumstances may not be possible for a contemporary audience. Cardinal Ratzinger’s view in that respect would also seem to be reflected in Dignitas Personae (n.7) which, quoting John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (n. 45) states:
The respect for the individual human being, which reason requires, is further enhanced and strengthened in the light of these truths of faith: thus, we see that there is no contradiction between the affirmation of the dignity and the affirmation of the sacredness of human life. “The different ways in which God, acting in history, cares for the world and for mankind are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they support each other and intersect. They have their origin and goal in the eternal, wise and loving counsel whereby God predestines men and women “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8:29).45
The issue of the role of reason as distinct from faith with respect to the natural law is reflected in the debate over what is sometimes disparagingly called the “Hellenization of the early tradition,”46 which may also be attributed to the influence of St Paul, with his background and philosophical education as a Roman citizen, and the Hellenic influences on Roman culture. In relation to natural law, the scriptural text most often quoted is St Paul’s letter to the Romans:
When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do instinctively things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, to which their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.47
St Paul’s attitude to philosophy is confusing. He is negative about philosophy but evidently used the language of philosophy of the period and locality in which the Stoics had much influence. He would have been familiar with Aristotle, of whose works the Stoics made free use. His reasoning reflects Aristotle, of an earlier period, and Stoics of the day – Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Cicero.
Historically St Paul would have had a Greek philosophical training as a Roman citizen and clearly used Stoic arguments. He clearly believed that knowledge can be attained through reason and that ethics is constituted by knowledge. That is to say, he was a cognitivist. In relation to the Stoic naturalist ethics of the period, it is worth mentioning that the Stoics adopted the cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice, courage and temperance) and believed in the inherent goodness and purposefulness of human nature, and that the end of human beings was in community. St Paul would not have shared their belief that all people are manifestations of the one universal spirit (pantheism), but he clearly had adopted the view that the Stoics share with Christ that we should live in brotherly love and readily help one another.48
In his interesting account of the influence of Stoic philosophy on St Paul, Troels Engber-Perdersen suggests that St Paul adopts the same logic and simply substitutes Christ for Reason in explaining righteousness in terms of love and communio.49
Comparing St Paul to the Stoics, they both claim that goodness is knowable. For the Stoics that is through reason, but for St Paul it is through Christ (Gal 1:16, 2Cor 4:6). In Corinthians he makes the revealing comment: “Jews demand signs, Greeks desire wisdom but we proclaim Christ crucified” (1Cor 1:22-25). Also in the same letter he seems to embrace communitarianism using language of the Stoics (1 Cor 1:10-11) and elsewhere he shares the dominance of will and reason over pain and suffering (Gal 5:24) and concludes that joy is the proper response to suffering (Phil 2:17, 1:17-18), both Stoic claims.50
St Paul had of course been a Pharisee and trained under the major Jewish scholar Gamaliel (Acts 22:3) but his teaching in relation to Pharisaic Law seems to differ depending on the audience. He addresses Gentiles, Jews and Greeks differently. The dominant motif in his teaching is, of course, not reason, natural law or Pharisaic Law, but the Christ event. This is most evident in Galatians, and he claims authority on the basis of his “meeting” with Christ on the Road to Damascus.
In relation to claims about the Hellenization of Christianity through St Paul, it is worth noting that Pope John Paul II says something that reinforces this view in his analysis of two difficult passages.
In the very familiar submission and headship passage of 1 Corinthians (11:2-16), St Paul asserts that Christ is the head of every man, man is head of woman, and also that man is image of God’s glory but woman is a reflection of man’s glory, as woman came from him. He says also that man is not created for the sake of woman, but woman is created for the sake of man. In his analysis of this passage and the related passage in Ephesians, Pope John Paul II asserts:
The motif of “head” and of “body” is not of biblical derivation, but is probably Hellenistic [Stoic?]. In Ephesians this theme is utilized in the context of marriage (while in First Corinthians the theme of the “body” serves to demonstrate the order which reigns in society). From the biblical point of view the introduction of this motif is an absolute novelty.51
Developing the submission and headship theme in Ephesians 5: 22-33, St Paul writes that husband and wife should defer to one another in obedience to Christ, and that wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord: Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is husband head of his wife. Just as the Church submits to Christ, wives submit to their husbands. Husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her.
On this passage Pope John Paul II writes in Mulieres Dignitatem (n. 24) that St Paul was rooted in the customs of the time. Adapting the teaching, the Pope writes that there should be mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ, and that the husband is “head” in order to give himself up for his wife. The Pope asserts that “subjection” is not one-sided but mutual. I mentioned these treatments of St Paul by Pope John Paul II to a Pauline Conference52 recently and was greeted by what can only be regarded as a seething response by a recent convert from Lutheranism.
What is clear about St Paul’s treatment of Pharisaic Law is that he adapts to particular audiences but always asserts supremacy of the Christ event, and in relation to righteousness he says several seemingly inconsistent things:
•He requires following the Law, but asserts that Christ is the fulfilment of the Law (Gal 2:15-21, 3:15-24, 4:1-3, Rom 9-11).
•He requires following Christ, but is neutral about the Law (Philippians 3:4-9).
•He requires following Christ but not the Law (Philippians 3:49).
•He attributes Law to Christ (Gal 3:7-11, 2:19-20).
•He asserts that Christ (grace) is necessary to follow the law (Romans 7:7-25, 2:12-25).53
In Galatians, he testifies to his own personal encounter with Christ, from whom he learned the Gospel rather than through encounter with the Apostles (1:11-18). He disparages conformity with the Law: circumcision counts for nothing with Christ (5:2); and he asserts that the whole of the law is summed up in commandment to love one another (5:15) – Christ the new creation: active faith through love (6).
In relation to the natural law, the Church usually refers to the Romans (2:14-16) passage. However it is not clear in the tradition that natural law is a matter of reason alone, rather it is seen as having a divine authorship. Pope Leo XIII, quoting St Thomas, appealed to the “higher reason” of the divine Lawgiver:
But this prescription of human reason could not have the force of law unless it were the voice and the interpreter of some higher reason to which our spirit and our freedom must be subject. 54
Indeed, the force of law consists in its authority to impose duties, to confer rights and to sanction certain behaviour: “Now all of this, clearly, could not exist in man if, as his own supreme legislator, he gave himself the rule of his own actions.”55 And, Pope Leo concluded:
It follows that the natural law is itself the eternal law, implanted in beings endowed with reason, and inclining them towards their right action and end; it is none other than the eternal reason of the Creator and Ruler of the universe. (St Thomas Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 91, a.2).56
Pope John Paul II also connected natural law directly to divine revelation when he wrote:
Man is able to recognize good and evil thanks to that discernment of good from evil which he himself carries out by his reason, in particular by his reason enlightened by Divine Revelation and by faith, through the law which God gave to the Chosen People, beginning with the commandments on Sinai. Israel was called to accept and to live out God’s law as a particular gift and sign of its election and of the divine Covenant, and also as a pledge of God’s blessing. Thus Moses could address the children of Israel and ask them: “What great nation is that that has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and ordinances so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day?” (Dt 4:7-8).57
Then we have the then Cardinal Ratzinger declaring that “Reason has a wax nose” and “Reason will not be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will not be human.”58
On the other side of the coin, Pope John Paul II asserted:
Every people has its own native and seminal wisdom which, as a true cultural treasure, tends to find voice and develop in forms which are genuinely philosophical. One example of this is the basic form of philosophical knowledge which is evident to this day in the postulates which inspire national and international legal systems in regulating the life of society.59
3.3 A Practical Partnership between Faith and Reason
In our own time, an example of that seminal wisdom is surely to be found in the International Human Rights Instruments, which:
•assert that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
•recognise that “these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.”60
An analysis of the texts of the covenants shows that “dignity” in this context implies the inestimable worth of each member of the human family and “rights” presume to identify what is needed for human beings to flourish. The International Instruments therefore presume that human goodness is knowable and can be specified.61
Pope John Paul II encouraged philosophers, but again sought to connect their endeavours to Scripture:
They should be open to the impelling questions which arise from the word of God and they should be strong enough to shape their thought and discussion in response to that challenge. Let them always strive for truth, alert to the good which truth contains. Then they will be able to formulate the genuine ethics which humanity needs so urgently at this particular time. The Church follows the work of philosophers with interest and appreciation; and they should rest assured of her respect for the rightful autonomy of their discipline. I would want especially to encourage believers working in the philosophical field to illumine the range of human activity by the exercise of a reason which grows more penetrating and assured because of the support it receives from faith.62
The teaching of these three Popes at least, Leo XIII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, would seem to suggest that there is to be no dichotomy between faith and reason. Rather the teaching would suggest that as philosophers we would be foolish to ignore Scripture and that our discipline should properly consider the nature of the Creator and the relationship between created and Creator, and seek to test theological propositions against reason, seeking justification rather than accepting them simply as a matter of faith. From a protestant perspective, our humanity may be too “fallen” to be able to do that, but from a Catholic perspective, we have trusted in the role of reason as an important contributor to our tradition, but not in isolation from faith and the Scriptures.
That suggests that as bioethicists, we should participate in public debate openly as Christians rather than try to engage in an exercise of pure reason. I would suggest that we should be open about our faith because subterfuge is beneath dignity and in any case, would only breed suspicion. In a pluralist society we can approach this by insisting on being willing to listen to others, willing to encourage their contribution from their own cultural beliefs, and willing to test our own Christian concepts, and in that way seek common ground by seeking to identify human goodness and the virtues. That provides a mutually respectful pathway towards seeking human transcendence together in recognition of our differences but also our commonalities.
In this respect I have been greatly encouraged by finding links between Alasdair MacIntyre and Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI in MacIntyre’s emphasis on culture and tradition and the historical development of ideas, and his rebuttal of the notion of pure reason building a morality from the ground up without the benefit of culture;63 in John Paul II’s recognition of native and seminal wisdom and his encouragement to philosophers to consider questions from the Word of God; and finally, in Benedict XVI’s insistence on the connectedness of philosophy and theology.
A Catholic philosopher has much to contribute to Bioethics from our traditional exploration of human nature, identifying doctrines that are good for mankind and justified in human terms, and from our acceptance that we are formed by faith but willing to test propositions from revelation, knowing that God loves us and wants what is good for us.
However, I do think that a response is needed to Cardinal Ratzinger’s “wax nose” concept. I would conclude that reason may not be saved without faith, but goodness is a property that is recognisable even by those who are unfamiliar with the Gospels, and that in a pluralist society we can mutually seek to identify a common understanding of human goodness.
It is relevant that in making a distinction between cardinal and theological virtues, St Thomas Aquinas claimed that all virtues other than the theological are in us by nature, according to aptitude and inchoation, but not according to perfection, and the theological virtues are from without:
Sic ergo patet quod virtutes in nobis sunt a natura secundum aptitudinem et inchoationem, non autem secundum perfectionem: prater virtutes theologicas, quae sunt totaliter ab extrinseco.64
By “from without” I understand Aquinas to mean that the theological virtues are revealed to us by God rather than the product of our own reasoning.
That does raise questions about many of the issues that have been developed in Dignitas Personae in relation to the emphasis placed on trinitarian love:
By taking the interrelationship of these two dimensions, the human and the divine, as the starting point, one understands better why it is that man has unassailable value: he possesses an eternal vocation and is called to share in the trinitarian love of the living God.(n. 8)
And:
These two dimensions of life, the natural and the supernatural, allow us to understand better the sense in which the acts that permit a new human being to come into existence, in which a man and a woman give themselves to each other, are a reflection of trinitarian love. “God, who is love and life, has inscribed in man and woman the vocation to share in a special way in his mystery of personal communion and in his work as Creator and Father” (n.9)
These passages raise something of a challenge to a natural law approach because the Trinitarian mystery is only known through Divine Revelation and these passages suggest that we should understand human love in marriage as being an imitation of the love between the divine persons and hence that the truth of that communion of persons informs our human relationships because the imago dei is not of single person but of a Trinity. That then suggests that we should understand human nature relationally, through the relationship of the Divine Persons, and the nuptial mystery and communio can only be fully understood through divine revelation.
This does however seem to be consistent with St Thomas’s view that the theological virtues are understood only through Divine revelation.
For Catholic bioethicists, one of the most difficult aspects to argue in a pluralist context, particularly a bigoted secularist context, is the Pauline principle65 that underlies our morality and the related claim that there are absolute moral norms.
We generally take the Pauline Principle from the passage in Romans (3:8):
Why not say – as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say – “Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is deserved.
From which we draw the conclusion that one must not do evil in order that good may come.
In Veritatis Splendor Pope John Paul II gave expression to this principle in his analysis of the moral act in terms identifying that the object of the act needs to be capable of being orientated towards God:
Activity is morally good when it attests to and expresses the voluntary ordering of the person to his ultimate end and the conformity of a concrete action with the human good as it is acknowledged in its truth by reason. If the object of the concrete action is not in harmony with the true good of the person, the choice of that action make our will and ourselves morally evil, thus putting us in conflict with our ultimate end, the supreme good, God himself. (n.72)
… the moral life …consists in the deliberate ordering of human acts to God, the supreme good and ultimate end (telos) of man. … But this ordering to one’s ultimate end is not something subjective, dependent solely upon one’s intention. It presupposes that such acts are in themselves capable of being ordered to this end, in so far as they are in conformity with the authentic moral good of man, safeguarded by the commandments. (n.73)
The morality of the human act depends primarily and fundamentally on the ‘object’ rationally chosen by the deliberate will …(n. 78)
In order to be able to grasp the object of an act which specifies that act morally, it is therefore necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the acting person. The object of the act of willing is in fact a freely chosen kind of behaviour. (n.78)
By the object of a given moral act, then, one cannot mean a process or 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 that object is the proximate end of a deliberate decision which determines the act of willing on the part of the acting person. (n.78)
Expressed in these terms of a teleology that involves the Creator, it is difficult to understand the Pauline principle expressed in terms of the object of the act unless one invokes the relationship to the Creator and, in so doing, that set of beliefs about the Creator that we can only know through Divine Revelation.
I would suggest that the Pauline principle can be understood in terms of loving relationship as a desire to preserve authenticity of love. When one discusses the nature of the moral act, the notion of an absolute does emerge in the context of understanding moral acts as expressive of human love of another. Doing evil then contradicts that loving relationship but especially so when we understand love in the sense that Christ’s gift of self on the Cross gave to the meaning of love.
There does seem to be a gap in natural law accounts based on reason alone when it comes to explaining absolute moral norms and the Pauline principle. This is, of course, the central issue in relation to proportionalism, situation ethics and the fundamental option (discussed later). What they lack is an adequate account of authentic human love. However it would seem that we cannot achieve an adequate account of authentic human love from reason alone. As St Thomas expresses it, the theological virtues come from without.
Basically because the moral act is to be understood in terms of communion with God, it would seem difficult to posit communion with God as our natural ultimate end, as a matter of pure reason, unless reason predicates existence of a creator who creates us for love of us (agape) and wants our love (eros) in return.66 This notion of God seems to be peculiar to the Christian faith. It is also the case that the theological virtues (faith, hope and love), depend on both the agapeic and erotic notion of the Creator’s love, and in our understanding of that love we rely on the grace of God in revealing Divine Nature to us, and we rely on Christ and his sacrifice on the Cross for our understanding of the authenticity of love as complete gift.
I am sympathetic to the task of new natural law which seeks to engage the secular world in argument based on pure reason and without assistance from revelation. It would be wonderful if with reason alone we could lead others to a position that did not contradict the moral truths of our faith. However, when it comes to the true nature of love and hence the existence of moral absolutes and the Pauline principle, I doubt that it is achievable.
From my experience in chairing government committees, I am convinced that there is a better way in which we may encourage people to seek ideal solutions to ethical problems, based on their own personal and cultural beliefs. In that respect I do not see two distinct projects in being both Christian and a philosopher. Rather, I am a Christian who is willing both to listen to others and subject my beliefs to philosophical scrutiny alongside theirs, and to ask the question, whether living according to these beliefs is a more coherent, consistent, happier and more fulfilling way to be. By this, I mean living according to the aim to give of myself to others and thus to strive to be like my Lord and Saviour.
In this respect I disagree with the double life mentality proposed by Germain Grisez, whom I nevertheless much admire, when he wrote:
Similarly, I consider it the responsibility of the person who is both a Christian and a philosopher to remain faithful to both ways of life, to resist all demands from either side to choose between them, to deny nothing for the sake of lessening the tension, and thus to become a bridge between the gathering of those sons and daughters of the Church who believe and those men and women who philosophize.67
There should be no such division. On the other hand, I agree with Grisez when he says in the same article,
I do not think that philosophy can begin with universal doubt. In fact, philosophers who imagine that their thinking is altogether presuppositionless have not managed to set aside all presuppositions, the better to keep them unaware of their presuppositions, the better to keep them without subjecting them to critical scrutiny.68
In Western culture, the greatest divide between a Catholic understanding and secularism occurs in understanding conjugality. We do need a conceptual framework to build a bridge by achieving a philosophical analysis of affectivity and communion of persons and the radical oneness of human and divine love (agape, erotic and filial), but the content for that analysis will be from Revelation.
There are different models of philosophical analysis in Western culture. Firstly there is the dominant secular view that undertakes philosophical analysis as the splintering and deconstruction of reality. In that context we can assess a philosophical work by the number of distinctions made and defended! This popular philosophical approach reduces the role of reason to narrative only. There is no objective reality and goodness is not knowable.
From a Catholic perspective what we have to offer is an alternative approach to philosophical analysis that constructively builds upon shared understanding, mutually seeking the transcendent. In that we can accept our cultures as raw data and can work to identify goodness as a common ground and knowable. That then permits us, in a culturally inclusive way, to transcend differences between religions and cultures while still founded upon those differences. That approach is especially open to the Christian notion of love, asking simply that it be considered as an alternative and asking the very practical question whether a civilisation based on a notion of love as gift of self is a better civilisation than the alternatives.
In that way we can seek to lead public reason towards accepting the propositions of Dignitas Personae (n .9), such as:
Respect for that dignity is owed to every human being because each one carries in an indelible way his own dignity and value. The origin of human life has its authentic context in marriage and in the family, where it is generated through an act which expresses the reciprocal love between a man and a woman. Procreation which is truly responsible vis-à-vis the child to be born “must be the fruit of marriage.”69
And that Christian marriage is rooted:
in the natural complementarity that exists between man and woman, and is nurtured through the personal willingness of the spouses to share their entire life-project, what they have and what they are: for this reason such communion is the fruit and the sign of a profoundly human need. But in Christ the Lord, God takes up this human need, confirms it, purifies it and elevates it, leading it to perfection through the sacrament of matrimony: the Holy Spirit who is poured out in the sacramental celebration offers Christian couples the gift of a new communion of love that is the living and real image of that unique unity which makes of the Church the indivisible Mystical Body of the Lord Jesus. 70
Thus Christian Philosophy has much to contribute to Bioethics in its exploration of human nature and in identifying doctrines that are both good for mankind and justified in human terms.
Situation ethics is a view that gained some prominence in Catholic circles around the time of the Second Vatican Council and the discussion over the Papal Commission on Birth Control.
The phrase “situation ethics” is usually attributed to Joseph Fletcher, although it was used before this. Fletcher published a number of texts over a twenty-five year period.71
In 1952 he earned the distinction of his view being criticised by Pope Pius XII, who wrote:
The distinctive mark of this morality is that it is in fact no way based on universal moral laws, for instance, on the Ten Commandments, but on the real and concrete conditions or circumstances in which one must act, and according to which the individual conscience has to judge and choose.72
Fletcher, then an Episcopalian vicar, distinguished between the old morality, which consisted of abstract principles or rules and legalistic laws or norms issued by divine or church authority or claimed as a matter of nature or essence, with his new morality which was based on experience of the context or situation in which one exercises one’s conscience to give a loving response.
In his student days was Fletcher was a social activist – siding with the workers (particularly miners). He became a Christian because he saw the Church as a means of bringing social idealism to bear upon society. As he put it, “It was not Christianity which led me to my social ideals; … my social ideals led me to Christianity.”
Most of his writings and activities during the time of his ministry were to do with his social theology. He came to realise that he did not believe in doctrinaire solutions:
“At bottom I was still convinced by the case for pragmatism, in both the cognitive and ethical sense, which I had long since accepted as a convinced pupil of James and Dewey.”
His rejection of the doctrinaire and the dogmatic bore its fruit in his best-seller, Situation Ethics. As he explains, its thesis was set within the context of Christian rhetoric, but situation ethics as a theory of moral action is utterly independent of Christian presuppositions or beliefs.73
By 1970 Fletcher had settled firmly for the consequentialist position that the right thing to do in any case is whatever will maximize human benefit, regardless of supposedly relevant but abstract moral rules. He thus rejects a systematic Christian ethics. The context or situation is all important and cannot be anticipated completely in any systematic ethics. He thus described systematic orthodoxy as legalism. At the same time, Fletcher declared himself against antinomianism – holding no principles at all. Instead, situationism confronts a situation “armed” with principles/maxims from one’s community, but ready to compromise “if love seems better served by doing so.”74
He argued that the person and his or her situation is unique and the only categorical commandment is to love. Some of his sayings were:
•Love Only is Always Good.
•Love is the only Norm.
•Love and Justice are the same.
•Love is not Liking.
•Love justifies the Means.
•Love Decides There and Then.
•“Love” is not sentimental love, but an act of the will – willing the well-being of the other(s).
•Value is relative to persons and persons are relative to society.
•Conscience is a verb not a noun.
•The ultimate criterion is “agapeic love.75
In answer to the question, “How do we know the loving thing to do?” Fletcher suggested that “Our situation ethics frankly joins forces with Mill … We choose what is most ‘useful’ for the most people.”76 He argued that the rule of thumb for loving is “seek the best welfare and deepest happiness of the most people in the situation.”77
In response to the question, “What is distinctive about ‘Christian’ ethics?” Fletcher argued that the Christ Factor and his complete gift of himself on the Cross makes our understanding of love different. Later however he abandoned this and declared himself a humanist: “Whatever helps people is good, whatever hurts them is evil.” He contrasted this with theism: “Whatever does the will of God is good, what ignores or flouts God is evil.” Fletcher thought that there is a possible way out for theism if it acknowledges that God wills man’s good, but he asserts that most Christians condemn this kind of ethics.78
There are a number of problems with Situation Ethics. First, it sets up a false description of Christianity in criticising the latter. Consideration of the context has always been part of the tradition, which is not solely rule-based. The principle of double effect, in particular, allows an assessment to be made of the consequences, and the intended and foreseen consequence should be assessed as part of determining the rightness or otherwise of an individual act in order to understand the act involved and the possible “sinfulness” of an individual in performing it. Casuistry has also been part of the tradition in which we are to treat like cases alike. The major difference is that Situation Ethics regards each case as unique, so that general principles do not hold.
In Fletcher’s account of Situation Ethics, the notion of love seems devoid of content. The predicted consequences are not the only factor to be considered in relation to whether an act is an act of love. As any spouse can attest, the meaning given to an act by the parties to it is crucial. Fletcher attaches no weight to what I referred to earlier as the intransitive effects of an act. My acts express who I am and when I do evil that determines who I am. Finally, because he embraces utilitarianism, Fletcher’s account is open to all the criticisms against utilitarianism provided earlier, including the difficulty of aggregating people for the purpose of evaluating consequences and accepting the resultant injustices.
3.5 Proportionalism and Double-Effect Reasoning
Double-effect reasoning, particularly as it appears in St. Thomas Aquinas,79 is usually given as the source of the perspective of moral theology known as “proportionalism.” A key proponent of proportionalism has been Joseph Fuchs,80 who argued that there are objective norms, but they are culturally and historically conditioned, not universal. Further, he argued that all moral norms must admit of exceptions, and he adopted the term “pre-moral” evil to describe evil defined by a moral norm prior to assessing the overall good and evil aspects of an act. On this view, it is only when that balance has been achieved that one can determine whether an act is reasonable or not. He wrote:
What must be determined is the significance of the action as value or non-value for the individual, for interpersonal relations and for human society, in connection … with the total reality of man and his society and in view of his whole culture. Furthermore the priority and urgency of different values implied must be weighed.
This view differs from Situation Ethics81 in that it takes into account the meaning of an act and thus accepts that there may be intrinsic evil in an act. It differs also, however, from a traditional Christian or biblical view, which holds that some acts, such as direct killing of the innocent, are always wrong. In Fuchs’ view, such evil is “premoral” and is to be balanced with the good and evil consequences in a given situation.
A number of theologians have taken a similar view, including Jack Mahoney SJ, Charles Curran and Richard McCormick.
McCormick has made a significant contribution to discussion of Bioethics. I met him at his home in Washington in 1984 at the time that in vitro fertilization had recently been widely accepted as a remedy for infertility and the morality of the procedure was under intense discussion. I suggested that the technology involved enormous loss of nascent human life including deliberate destruction of embryos selected for unwanted characteristics or because growth appeared too slow or too fast to be normal. I also suggested that inherently the technology involved a relationship of domination between the technologist and the embryo in which the embryo was a product of a making, and subject to quality control. I argued that the equality that is present when a child originates from an act of love as an equal third party and an embodiment of that love was missing in the case of the laboratory generation of life.82
McCormick responded by saying that such concerns were a matter of caution, but had to be weighed against the desire for the couple to have a child and the great good of the coming to be of a new life. This view was implicit in his essay “Ambiguity in Moral Choice,” in his edited collection Doing Evil to Achieve Good,83 and it was argued later in How Brave a New World? Dilemmas in Bioethics.84
McCormick has published extensively in moral theology and bioethics but there does not appear to be any systematic presentation of his theory. Proportionalism, as a view, seemed to arise around the time of the Papal Commission on Birth Control. The majority report argued that to take another’s life is a sin not because life is under the exclusive dominion of God, but because it is contrary to right reason unless there is a question of a good of a higher order; it is licit to sacrifice a life for the good of the community.85
This argument was attributed to St Thomas Aquinas who taught that one could take the life of another in self defence:
Therefore this act, since one’s intention is to save one’s own life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to everything to keep itself in “being,” as far as possible. And yet, though proceeding from a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful, if it be out of proportion to the end.86
The standard rendition of this principle is roughly as follows:
1.The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
2.The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
3.The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words, the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
4.The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect.
Most recently McCormick wrote:
When contemporary theologians say that certain values or disvalues in our actions can be justified by a proportionate reason, they are not saying that morally wrong actions (ex objecto) can be justified by their end. They are saying that an act cannot be classified morally simply by looking at its material circa quam, or at its object in a very narrow and restricted sense. This is precisely what tradition has done in the categories exempted from teleological assessment (e.g. contraception and sterilization). It does this in no other area. I further argued that the term “object” was so inconsistently used sometimes needed to decide what should count to fit those categories. Actions that when abstractly considered, contain some important deformity or disorder but are made morally right by the circumstances, e.g, in St Thomas’s words, “The killing and the beating of a man involve some deformity in their object.” But if it added to this that an evildoer is killed for the sake of justice or that a delinquent is beaten for punishment then the action is not a sin, rather it is virtuous.87
As authority for this passage, McCormick cites Quaestiones Quodlibetales.88 However, as William E May has pointed out,89 Aquinas immediately goes on to say in this passage that there are some kinds of human acts that “have deformity inseparably annexed to them, such as fornication, adultery, and others of this sort.”90 Aquinas explicitly affirms that some actions, as specified by their objects, are intrinsically evil, and corresponding to them are absolute moral norms.91
Biblically, it is clear that the Decalogue provides a set of exceptionless norms and far from weakening them, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount explains them in terms that are, if anything, more demanding, such as adultery in the heart and, with respect to the fifth commandment, anger. He prefaces his comments by saying:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 6:17-20)
Double-effect reasoning may be understood by distinguishing between the following hypothetical examples attributed to Philippa Foot.92
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by an evil philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Most people will accept that you can and should flip the switch as the only way of saving life even though by doing so you permit or indirectly cause the death of the one person in order to save the five. But this is not just a utilitarian calculation of taking one life to save five. What makes the option acceptable to many of us is that the one person who dies does so as an indirect effect of an act the purpose of which is to save life. The direct object of the act is to save life, the act is still an act of killing, but the killing of the one is indirect. It is not the means and it is not the purpose of the act.
Foot also describes a case in which a group of rioters are demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and they are threatening to kill five hostages if the culprit is not found. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the death of the five by framing one innocent person and having him executed. Most of us would not find framing the innocent man to be an acceptable choice despite the fact that four lives are saved. This case is the same as the trolley case in terms of consequences, the lives lost and saved, but it differs in that the death is intended as a means and is not merely permitted. The act by the judge is a direct killing rather than indirect because it is a means to the end. In the case of the trolley, the death of the one man is indirect and merely permitted or merely foreseen as a result of diverting the trolley to save the lives of the five.
McCormick accepts that these two cases are different, and that the direct and indirect distinction is important. He argues that the moral guilt of the mob in being willing to take the five lives unjustly is not altered by the decision of the judge. His decision, however, does lessen the moral disvalue of their action because it does reduce the loss of life. But our concern about the morality of the judge’s decision remains. We are appalled, McCormick says, because taking a life in these circumstances would encourage similar acts of injustice and thus render more lives vulnerable. If the direct killing were rendered permissible by balancing the consequences, then this would encourage or foster similar injustices and that would be a long-term disaster. So on that score, direct killing should be excluded because there would be worse long-term consequences if we did not uphold the difference between deliberate and incidental killing or direct and indirect killing.93
On that basis, McCormick concludes that the teleological character of all our norms does not eliminate the relevance of the distinction between direct and indirect where non-moral values and disvalues are involved. The relationship of the evil that occurs to my will or purpose says a great deal about the meaning of my action, its repercussions and implications, and therefore whether the action is in the long term good.94
On this analysis, the judge’s act is wrong because it is a direct killing, but the direct killing is wrong because if direct killings were considered permissible, then this would have many other consequences tolerating other acts of direct killing and thus making lives much more vulnerable. In other words, the evil of direct killing is not in the directness of the killing but in the consequences that would result from the belief that direct killing is not wrong.
Judith Jarvis Thomson95 proposes a variation of the trolley story:
As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five.
Many would put this account in the same category as the story of the judge framing the innocent man. Many would hold that the death is a means to the end and therefore cannot be considered to be indirect because it is necessary to attain the desired result. One certainly cannot describe pushing the man over the bridge as merely permitting his death. So then, it may be asked, would it make a difference if the fat man was in fact the evil philosopher who had placed the five in danger and released the trolley in the first place? What if the philosopher is not in fact evil but simply mentally deranged and has no sense of the wrong of what he has done?
The distinction that St Thomas Aquinas makes is between two effects of the one act, saving one’s life and slaying an aggressor by the use of violence against him. What makes the slaying indirect is that the act of the will is self defence, not that the act is not an act against the aggressor. There is no doubt that St Thomas meant an act of violence against the aggressor:
Now moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention, since this is accidental as explained above… Accordingly the act of self defence may have two effects, one is the saving of one’s life, the other is the slaying of the aggressor. Therefore this act, since one’s intention is to save one’s life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to everything to keep itself in being, as far as possible. 96
He goes on to make a point about proportionality and it is this point that is the focus of the proportionalists:
And yet through proceeding from a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful, if it be out of proportion to the end. Wherefore if a man, in self defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repel force with moderation his defense will be lawful, because according to the jurists, it is lawful to repel force by force, provided one does not exceed the limits of a blameless defense.97
For Aquinas this issue of proportionality only follows if the nature of the act itself is not evil. Pope John Paul II teaches that that which is directly willed must be capable of being oriented towards God98. One must also consider whether the consequences of what one does are just and whether the evil effects are not out of proportion to the good that one intends. However whatever about the consequences, an act will be considered evil if what is directly willed is evil.
Evangelium Vitae also refers to St Alphonsus in relation to killing in self defence, although in my close reading of St Alphonsus’ text Theologia Moralis, l. III, tr. 4, c. 1, dub.3., I cannot find the passage that EV refers to (it is, admittedly, a rather long passage and my Latin is rusty). However I did find in his Homo Apostolicus Tr 1, No. 1 where he makes the point that a human act is to be judged good or bad according to an understanding of the good as it is pursued by the will, and not according to the material object of the act.
The distinction that the Magisterium has engaged is based on determining what is the immediate object, the means or the direct intention. In the language of Veritatis Splendor, the issue is what is the immediate object of the act and whether it is capable of being oriented towards God99. In the case of killing in self defence, this is a distinction between what is directly willed in an act, and the fact that the act also kills someone. Because the direct object is to save life, that the aggressor dies as a result of the act is considered to be permissible. It is important to acknowledge that double-effect reasoning does not allow one to will the evil directly.
Imagine that I could save many lives by spending an inheritance on them, but in fact standing between the saving of those lives and the inheritance is the fact that an older brother is due to inherit the money and intends to use it sustaining his profligate life style. Killing him so that the money goes to saving lives could not be considered an act in defence of those lives because it is an act of killing, The death is a means to a good end, but the direct object of the act is not saving life but killing him. The good intended consequences do not make the evil act permissible.
As Pope John Paul II expresses it:
The reason why a good intention is not itself sufficient, but a correct choice of actions is also needed, is that the human act depends on its object, whether that object is capable or not of being ordered to God, to the One who “alone is good,” and thus brings about the perfection of the person. An act is therefore good if its object is in conformity with the good of the person with respect for the goods morally relevant for him.100
St Thomas observes that “it often happens that man acts with a good intention, but without spiritual gain, because he lacks a good will. Let us say that someone robs in order to feed the poor: in this case, even though the intention is good, the uprightness of the will is lacking. Consequently, no evil done with a good intention can be excused. ‘There are those who say: And why not do evil that good may come? Their condemnation is just’ (Rom 3:8).”101
Contemporary proportionalism seems to have its origins in the history of the issue of contraception and the Papal Commission on Birth Control102 which preceded the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. Dissent from the teaching on contraception since tends to have adopted proportionalism. Peter Knauer is often quoted as the source of proportionalism. According to Knauer, “some acts which would have to be judged morally wrong according to the traditional prohibition against intending evil, ought instead to be judged morally licit so long as the good pursued is commensurate to the evil purposefully caused.”103 His principal thesis was that moral evil consisted in doing physical evil without commensurate reason. He argued, on the basis of the above passage from St Thomas on self-defence, that what made the physical act of killing someone in self-defence permissible was the presence of a commensurate reason – in this case the saving of life. He argued that the meaning of that act was therefore not derived from its external effect – killing the aggressor, but really that aspect of the act that is willed – the saving of life. The saving of the life is a commensurate reason that changes the meaning of an act which would otherwise simply be a slaying.
The following are examples from the literature that clarify what is meant by double-effect reasoning.
a) A surgeon operates to remove an aggressive tumour on a woman’s face and in the process leaves her with a mutilating injury to her face. Most of us would accept that what he did is properly described as life saving and that the damage that he has done to her face is a side effect and not something directly willed even though he would reasonably have predicted that that would be the consequence of the incision that he made to remove the tissue. This is a legitimate application of double-effect reasoning. The act can be described as causing a mutilation to the woman’s face. The mutilation is a direct physical result of the act. But this is not the description that is most apt for moral purposes. The immediate object is to remove the cancerous tissue that would threaten the woman’s life.
b) As the Russian armies drove westward to meet the Americans and British at the Elbe, a Soviet patrol picked up a Mrs. Bergmeier foraging food for her three children. Unable even to get word to the children, she was taken off to a POW camp in Ukraine. Her husband had been captured in the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a POW camp in Wales. When he was returned to Berlin, he spent months rounding up his children, although they couldn’t find their mother. She more than anything else was needed to reknit them as a family in that dire situation of hunger, chaos and fear. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Mrs. Bergmeier learned through a sympathetic commandant that her husband and family were trying to keep together and find her. But the rules allowed them to release her to Germany only if she was pregnant, in which case she would be returned as a liability. She turned things over in her mind and finally asked a friendly Volga German camp guard to impregnate her, which he did. Her condition being medically verified, she was sent back to Berlin and to her family. They welcomed her with open arms, even when she told them how she had managed it. And when the child was born, they all loved him because of what they had done for them. After the christening, they met up with their local pastor and discussed the morality of the situation.104
Most moralists do not consider this to be an example of double-effect reasoning because the good effect happens only as a result of the bad effect. In other words, the act of adultery is the means to the good end of reuniting the family. For double-effect reasoning to apply, the good effect must not be dependant on the bad effect. In other words, the end cannot justify the means.
What makes St Thomas’ account of self-defence acceptable is that the use of violence is to save life, the aim being to stop the aggressor. That the act of violence also kills the aggressor is a result of stopping the aggressor rather than being directly willed. Obviously there is a fine line between killing the aggressor in order to stop him and stopping the aggressor and in the process causing his death. On a traditional interpretation of the principle, the first would not be permissible but the second may be, provided that there is no less drastic way of stopping the aggressor that would not have killed him – the proportionality or justice criterion requiring moderation.
The point that a proportionalist is likely to make is that the same physical, bodily reality of killing may be several different intersubjective realities: murder, waging war, administering the death penalty, self-defence, suppressing an insurrection or saving the life of a mother with an ectopic pregnancy. Taking something from another may intersubjectively be stealing, borrowing, satisfying dire need, repossessing one’s property.105
In this view, we may not classify an act as evil until we have explored its intersubjectivity. The physical act is not right or wrong of itself until we understand its intersubjective context. Proportionalists classify the evil done by an act prior to an assessment of its intersubjectivity as “premoral evil.” They argue that we cannot judge the moral nature of an act on the basis of the physical act alone.
By contrast, a position that classifies some moral norms as absolute, such as the commandments of the Decalogue, does not describe them as mere physical acts. When it came to expressing the fifth commandment in Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II expressed the norm in the following way:
Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.106
“Direct and voluntary killing” is not a description of a physical act alone but qualifies the intentionality or object of the act.
There is some truth in what is claimed by proportionalists. The mere physical description of an act does not provide sufficient information for moral assessment. We do need to know the mind of the acting person.
Peter Knauer offers the complex notion of what he calls “commensurate reason”. For him it is not just a matter of any countervailing reason of significant gravity being enough to justify the physical evil done. He insists that the value being realised by measures involving physical evil must not be undermined or contradicted by that evil. Thus for an act to be immoral because it is contraceptive, it must be shown that the act in the last analysis does not serve the end of preservation and deepening of marital love, but in the long term subverts it. The refusal to bear a child in that instance is only commensurately grounded if it is ultimately in the interests of the otherwise possible children.107
Some claim that proportionalism is mistaken because the premoral evil and the commensurate reason are incommensurable. Knauer’s account of commensurability, however, is not open to this claim. He requires the reason and the evil to be connected to the same goods. Thus Knauer appears to interpret double-effect reasoning to contain the notion that one may not directly will moral evil in order to achieve good and what constitutes moral evil would be a physical evil for which there was no commensurate good effect on the same goods that define that physical evil.
Thus one could contraceive by acting against the possibility of bearing a child if the good of bearing children was also served by not having a child at this time, or if suppressing the unitive dimension of love expressed in having a child who embodies that love and whose coming to be gives witness to the fruitfulness of divine love was outweighed by the fact that the suppression facilitated a deepening of that unitive love by, for instance, permitting the couple more time to express that love for each other and attain greater fruitfulness.
The idea is that these consequences alter the nature of the evil involved so that in fact what is directly chosen is not, on balance, destructive of the goods that would otherwise define the evil. This would therefore not be a turning against a good but in fact a pursuit of it. What makes the fatal act of self defence permissible is that the act is done to preserve life, and this changes the meaning of the physical event of the aggressor’s death.
Thus this argument may not be open to the claim that Grisez108 and others have made that proportionalism allows us to turn directly against the good. For Knaeur, the physical evil of acting against a good may be justified by acting in service of the same good. Grisez claims in response that Knauer has had to separate moral intent from psychological intent. McCormick admits that that is so and that it makes it difficult for Knauer to deal with cases like the Mrs. Berhmeier case given above. The good at stake in her adultery is the love between her and her husband, and the unity of their relationship, but the benefits of her act are intended to serve exactly that good and to bring them back together. There would therefore appear to be a commensurate reason involving the same goods that would make the physical evil of the adultery not a moral evil: any damage to their love from the adultery is overcome by the act being a service towards permitting them to come together again.
What this latter case illustrates is that the Knauer version of the double effect reasoning seemingly makes the direct and indirect distinction redundant. The end can in fact justify the means provided the same goods are at issue.
On this account, one could directly take life to save life, but one could not directly take life for any other reason. Direct abortion to save the life of a mother for whom continued pregnancy was a life risk, such as during the treatment for acute Leukaemia, when miscarriage would be likely to occur when her blood platelets were lowest and thus fatal haemorrhage would be likely, would in that case be permissible because the same good, the good of life, is at stake.
The problem for many moralists in this case is that direct abortion remains a direct killing, an offence against the fifth commandment, and what Pope John Paul II defined as the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being.109
McCormick’s initial response to Knauer was critical. He saw that Knauer made the direct/indirect distinction redundant, and did away with the concept of the “object of the act” as it had been understood psychologically, replacing it with a moral notion that treated the good at stake as a single item so that the overall effect on that good could override the evil effect with respect to that same good. Later however McCormick seems to have come to a position in which he is prepared to accept these difficulties with Knauer’s position.
McCormick recognised the incommensurability of basic goods and therefore the impossibility of identifying a simple maximisation of good and minimising of evil, but Knauer’s approach would seem to have avoided that difficulty by the way in which commensurate reason is defined so that the good and the evil effects relate to the same good. Thus the theory limits the application to conflict cases such that a value of the same kind and at least equal to that sacrificed is at stake, and there is no less harmful way of protecting the value here and now.
In McCormick’s most recent account, evil is permissible if there is a proportionate reason for which the good sought will not be undermined by the proposed action; that is, if there is a proportionate reason that will not be undermined if the means chosen involve evil effects that involve that same good. He refers to an “association of, or necessary connection between the goods” to help to explain how one good might be undermined through harm to another.110
McCormick returns to the Mrs Bergmeier case.111 He says that there is an absence of a proportionate reason for her adultery because there is an absence of a connectedness between the sexual intimacy of her adultery with the good she seeks as a result of it, her freedom. He argues similarly the immorality of obliteration bombing such as Nagasaki and Hiroshima because,
Making innocent (noncombatant) persons the object of our targeting is a form of extortion in international affairs that contains an implicit denial of human freedom. Human freedom is undermined when extortionary actions are accepted and elevated and universalized. Because such freedom is an associated good upon which the very good of life heavily depends, undermining it in the manner of my defense of life is undermining life itself – is disproportionate.112
The point seems to be both that there is an absence of a connection between the goods that would permit one to be a commensurate or proportionate reason for permitting the other, and that permitting direct killing produces greater long-term harm for human freedom and life.
The distinction between direct and indirect thus retains its significance in that killing with a proportionate reason for doing so can be considered to be indirect, as the act is directly in service of the good that is affected by the evil indirect consequence; and that permitting direct killing without a proportionate reason will in the long term result in greater harm.
Later, however, McCormick comes to reject the distinction between direct and indirect intention altogether. McCormick refers to sterility caused to remove a cancerous uterus as a life-saving procedure and sterility caused in order to control conception as a marriagestabilizing and family stabilizing procedure. The former is an example often given to illustrate indirect intention and is usually held to be permissible even though sterility is the result. The immediate object is to save life. The second example is usually considered to be direct and impermissible because sterilization is a means to the end. However of these two cases McCormick writes, “Whether either intervention is justified depends not on the directness or indirectness of intentionality, but on the goodness of the end and the proportion between the means chosen and the end.”113
There are a variety of problems for proportionalism including:
•How far into the future do you consider consequences?
•Who counts in considering consequences?
•How do you evaluate different consequences against each other?
•How do you explain free choice?114
McCormick is not prepared to give the direct-indirect distinction away completely and writes in favour of it: “… even though our spontaneous and instinctive moral judgments can be affected by cultural distortions and can be confused with rather obvious but deeply ingrained conventional fears and biases, still they remain a more reliable test of the humanizing and dehumanizing, of the morally right and wrong, of proportion, than our discursive arguments.”115
There is currently further, not completely unrelated tension over double-effect reasoning and the concept of direct killing. Germain Grisez has claimed that craniotomy in the circumstances of arrested labour is not direct killing.
In times past complications of delivery raised serious problems. Now where medical facilities are available such difficulties are rare, most difficult cases are prevented by timely surgery. However, if it were impossible to prevent the mother’s death (or, worse, the death of both) except by cutting up and removing the child piecemeal, it seems to me that this death-dealing deed could be done without the killing itself coming within the scope of the intention. The very deed which deals death also (by hypothesis) initiates a unified and humanly indivisible physical human process which saves life.116
Originally Grisez’s argument appears to have been based on an action theory that analyses an act as being an indivisible set of constituent parts.117 In this case, according to Grisez, the surgeon performing craniotomy performs just one human act to save the life of the mother, but that act has a number of identifiable physical acts. He argued that it is only the human act, saving the life of the mother, that is subject to scrutiny. This chosen human act has an end, an intended end, namely, the preservation of the mother’s life. The individual physical acts are not human acts and therefore do not fall under the scope of the intention. Therefore the act of dismembering the foetus is not a human act, rather it is part of the indivisible series of physical acts of saving the life of the mother. He held that it is therefore not a direct killing, because the death of the child is not required in order to save the life.118
On revisiting the issue, however, Finnis, Grisez and Boyle119 appear to have repudiated that approach, but without changing their view about craniotomy. They say that the concept of indivisibility has not been used since 1970 and that it was a false step caused by the failure to appreciate the decisive significance of the perspective of the acting person.120
Grisez is a strong critic of proportionalism, but one could be forgiven for wondering how his original account of the indivisibility of the moral act essentially differs from McCormick’s claim that “an act cannot be classified morally simply by looking at its material circa quam, or at its object in a very narrow and restricted sense,” and we must look at the intersubjectivity of the act in order to determine whether it is a moral evil. More to the point, why is Grisez’s current analysis of the subjectivity of the human act not open to the same criticism that he made of proportionalists: that it involves separating moral intent from psychological intent?
A concern I have with the Finnis, Boyle and Grisez analysis of the account of the moral act in Veritatis Splendor is that they seem to interpret the document in a way that suits their own argument, in particular the passage:
By the object of a given moral act, one cannot mean a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the world.121
They say of this passage, referring to St Thomas, that the species of the moral act as good or bad is not in its species in genere naturae but in its species in genere moris. They argue that it is necessary to get beyond common-sense accounts of what is being done and factors such as causal sequences, to which they give an unreflective priority over the perspective of the acting person.122
However, they seem to deny any role at all for the physical reality in determining the psychological reality. The issue is certainly to assess the act from the perspective of the acting person, but the latter cannot be completely unrelated to the reality of what he or she does. My concern is that in claiming that the narrowing of the child’s head is the immediate object in order to save the life of the mother, the description omits a large part of what would be in the mind of the surgeon. “Narrowing the baby’s head” is only one aspect of this and is not an adequate description of what the surgeon intends to do. Finnis et al assert that a surgeon performing craniotomy “resisting the undue influence of physical and causal factors that would dominate the perception of observers, could rightly say “No way do I intend to kill the baby” and “It is no part of my purpose to kill the baby.” They say that the killing in this case is not brought about as a chosen means and thus is not the immediate object in the sense defined in Veritatis Splendor.123
I cannot see that there can be a separation between the moral description of the act and the clear psychological intent, which is to dismember the head in a way that is death dealing in itself not as a side effect. There is a false distinction being made between moral and psychological intent. The major problem in the Finnis et al analysis is that they permit a moral narrative that is psychologically strained, so strained as to be totally implausible as a way in which anyone would actually reason. The acting person who reasoned like that could only be self-deceiving.
The morally relevant description of the act is narrowing the head of the child by dismembering it. That may save the life of the mother, but the direct object is the dismembering, and that is synonymous with the death of the child.
There is a difference between this case and the types of cases for which double-effect reasoning ordinarily applies, where the death is clearly a side effect, such as bombing a military installation and killing citizens who happen to be in the vicinity, or removing a gravid cancerous uterus resulting in the loss of life of the child. In the case of dismembering a child to save the life of the mother, the death is integral to what is chosen rather than beside it. The death is synonymous with the act that is necessary to achieve the end of saving life. Someone who dismembers a child but describes their act according to the preferred consequence of saving life and not as a killing is deceiving themselves as to the nature of the act. A morally relevant feature is that the desired consequence is only part of the reality of what is deliberately chosen. Nevertheless, to say that in dismembering the child, which is clearly the immediate object, I did not intend the death is just plainly untrue. This case, it seems to me, is quite unlike removing the gravid but cancerous uterus. In the latter case the act results in death but the act is clearly separable from the death in that the latter is a side effect and therefore beside the intention. Death is not a side effect of dismembering a baby, it is the main event.
There is a difference between attempting to remove the child by forceps delivery and causing the child’s death in the process, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, deliberately dismembering the child, as Grisez has described it, in order to achieve removal. The difference is between what is the immediate object and what is truly a side effect. Thus I can accept dismembering the head of the child (and death) if it happens as a side effect of attempts to remove, but not where the procedure in the first instance involves dismembering the head as a step on the way to removal.
I disagree with Finnis et al when, in response to Kevin Flannery, they say that the relevant description of the act of dismembering the head would not involve killing the baby. Psychologically killing the baby would stand foremost as what the surgeon is doing in dismembering the head. On the other hand, if the surgeon attempted a forceps delivery in these circumstances and that resulted, or was likely or even certain to result, in dismemberment while trying to remove the child, that would be different from going in with a procedure to dismember the head of the child. The surgeon could consider the dismemberment to be a side effect of forceps delivery but not if the dismemberment was the immediate goal of the procedure, presumably with instruments designed to dismember rather than forceps.
Finnis et al analyse a case that would seem to bear upon this problem. In their case E, they refer to a farmer who castrates male calves in order to effect hormonal changes that will make them fatter and calmer. The authors say sterilizing is not a means or an end and hence is not part of the proposal to fatten the claves. The case, they argue, makes it clear that, depending on what one proposes to do and what one only accepts as a side effect, one can be doing either of two acts different in kind even though everything about one’s behaviour and the observable context is the same. The point seems to turn on their claim that sterilization is not essential to the goal of fattening the calves but is a side effect.
The removing of the testes, which is what the sterilization procedure involves, results in the loss of a source of hormones and that loss causes fattening and calmness. The loss of fertility is also an effect of the loss of the testes as they produce sperm. Finnis et al would claim that the loss of capacity to produce sperm (sterilization) is a side effect because it is not part of the proposal but foreseen or permitted. I struggle with this. I am unable to separate conceptually removing testes and removing the capacity to produce sperm. Generating sperm is what testes do. Psychologically it would seem to me that the procedure is to sterilize, because sterilizing causes fattening and calming. Unmanageable stallions are gelded for similar reasons. But the gelding could not be considered a side effect. Gelding is the event that usually produces the manageability and anyone who told a farmer that gelding was not sterilization would risk being laughed at or pitied.
Finnis et al argue that their account differs from previous accounts that have led the Magisterium to find teaching that supports craniotomy to be unsafe. The difference lies in their rejection of the position that they attribute to Henry Davis SJ and which appears in most accounts of double-effect reasoning:124 that the good effect must follow at least as immediately and directly as the evil effect. It seems that this principle is an attempt to capture, in part, how it is that the evil in the act is indirect. It is a notion that extends beyond direct lines of causality; that is, the Davis principle does not claim that the impermissible evil is a means to the good, but rather that it precedes or is more immediate than the good.
This is, of course, the case with craniotomy. The dismembering and thus the death precede and are more immediate than the removal of the child that results in the saving of life. The latter is secondary to the procedure to dismember. Finnis et al argue that the traditional principle (the Davis principle) is a mistake, referring to the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save others. We applaud his heroism, but his body being destroyed is more immediate than the grenade not doing injury or as much injury to his fellows.
There is, however, a substantial difference between the soldier’s heroism and my actions were I to have thrown the soldier on top of the grenade to save others. I am not sure that our acceptance of the heroism has anything to do with claiming that his act is indirect killing. As a psychological narrative, would it be indirect killing in the case of my throwing him on to the grenade? I think not.
As examples of this reasoning, Finnis et al then cite the mention in Evangelium Vitae of double-effect reasoning in relation to pain relief and refusal of burdensome life support where death is a side effect. EV says that in those cases the death is not willed or sought. But both of those cases are quite different from Finnis et al’s account in which the evil is more immediate than the good. In the EV instances, the pain relief and the lessening of the burden of treatment are more immediate than the death. If in fact the death was expected to precede lessening of the burden or the relief of pain, then death would appear psychologically to be the immediate object (rather than the lessening of the burden). Rather than demonstrating their narrative of the moral act the EV text would seem to indicate difference from it.
There is something of a connection between the Finnis et al account and proportionalism in that both seem to override the significance of direct killing. In Finnis et al, the moral narrative overrides the psychological narrative of direct killing. In the case of McCormick, the evil of direct killing is overridden by a commensurate reason. It seems to me that Finnis et al’s account strengthens McCormick’s position by substituting a moral narrative in place of the psychological narrative. In both narratives, what is psychologically direct killing is not considered to be morally relevant.
The issue of proportionalism is addressed in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor. The precise goal or purpose of Veritatis Splendor is to recall “certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied.”125
Pope John Paul II refers to “false solutions, linked in particular to an inadequate understanding of the object of moral action.” He argues that such false solutions lead to a denial of the existence of “intrinsically evil acts.” These last are particularly linked with certain “teleological ethical theories (proportionalism, consequentialism).”126
Pope John Paul II rejects as erroneous any theory “which holds that it is impossible to qualify as morally evil according to its species – its ‘object’ – the deliberate choice of certain kinds of behaviour or specific acts, apart from a consideration of the intention for which the choice is made or the totality of the foreseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned.”127
In my view this teaching not only excludes proportionalism, it also excludes Finnis et al’s separation of a moral narrative from the psychological narrative and their rejection of the time-honoured claim that in double-effect reasoning the evil must not be more immediate than the good sought. The latter, it seems to me, reflects accurately the psychological reality and the moral narrative cannot rightly be separated from the psychological reality. If I deliberately dismember someone’s head, I mean to kill them.
The Pope reaffirmed that there exists “moral commandments … which prohibit always and without exception intrinsically evil acts.”128 An up-to-date version of double-effect reasoning might therefore be expressed as:
1.The immediate object of the act must be capable of being directed towards God and must therefore not violate a divine commandment or otherwise destroy a basic human good.
2.The agent may not positively will the bad effect as a means to the good end but may permit it as a side effect of what is positively willed. If he or she could attain the good effect without the bad effect, he or she should do so.
3.The bad effect must not be directly willed but may be permitted as being indirectly voluntary. For the evil to be indirect and thus permissible, the good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately as the bad effect.
4.The bad effect must not be disproportionate to the good effect, nor unjust.
An attractive approach to Christian ethics was taken by Karl Rahner, who related moral theology to his accounts of prayer and grace. Rahner was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council and both prolific and enormously influential.
Rahner focused on our relationship to God and referred to what he calls the “fundamental option” in which a person is in friendship with God in his or her whole being, not just by a particular choice or act. Recognising the imperfect nature of our knowledge of our selves and of the nature of our relationships and our acts, adherents of the fundamental option conclude that no ordinary decision can be such as to reverse the basic direction of our friendship with God, as the individual’s choosing ordinarily lacks the necessary understanding to choose to reject God at that deep level at which the friendship with God is formed.129
In a similar vein, Joseph Fuchs SJ, distinguishes between the ordinary level of freedom of moral acts and a deeper level about which he writes:
Basic freedom, on the other hand, denotes a still more fundamental, deeper-rooted freedom, not immediately accessible to psychological investigation. This is the freedom that enables us not only to decide freely on particular acts and aims but also, by means of these, to determine ourselves totally as persons and not merely in any particular area of behaviour. It is clear that man’s freedom of choice and his basic freedom are not simply two different psychological freedoms. As a person, man is free. But this freedom can, of course, be considered under different aspects. A man can, in one and the same act, choose the object of his choice (freedom of choice) and by so doing determine himself as a person (basic freedom).
Rahner recognizes self-determination and moral responsibility in free choices and, seemingly accurately, represents the importance of free choice in the Christian tradition. However his theory of fundamental option is not so much about moral principles but theological anthropology; for him, fundamental freedom of the will corresponds to the preconceptual orientation of intellect to God.130 He identifies freedom with the commandment to love, which may characterise the underlying orientation of the person in his or her friendship with God such that this love at that deep level may transcend the person’s choices with respect to the other commandments.131
Germain Grisez summarises the attraction of fundamental option as appealing to:
•a rejection of legalism that requires correct performance with respect to individual acts, such as the Decalogue, with the focus instead on the person’s general orientation of friendship with God;
•the Christian life considered as a unified and developing whole, rather than on particular choices considered in isolation;
•an explanation that people can act out of character at times without permanently changing their character and thus their basic orientation towards God.132
Fundamental Option may thus be adopted as a very comforting theory that allows us to attach less importance to individual acts because the focus is on the deeper, underlying relationship.
Pope John Paul II addressed this matter in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor (nos. 66-70), in which he explained that the theory is contrary to the teaching of Scripture itself, which sees the fundamental option as a genuine choice of freedom and links that choice profoundly to particular acts. This is the meaning of the divine law and evident in the Decalogue. The commandments so express God’s love for us and teach us how to love that violating a commandment is an act against love of God or neighbour.
It is true that we can make a fundamental choice that gives purpose and direction to our lives and through that choice, with the help of God’s grace, we can follow God’s call. However, following that call is actually exercised in the particular choices of specific actions through which we conform ourselves to God’s Word. The Pope states:
…the so-called fundamental option, to the extent that it is distinct from a generic intention and hence one not yet determined in such a way that freedom is obligated, is always brought into play through conscious and free decisions. Precisely for this reason, it is revoked when man engages his freedom in conscious decisions to the contrary, with regard to morally grave matter.133
3.7.1 Introduction
St Paul claims that even pagans know God’s law because it is written in their hearts. This is generally referred to as “natural law”. We can thus appeal to natural law rather than to revealed religion on matters of public policy. There are however tensions about what natural law is, its sources, and its teleology. One such tension is over a distinction between synderesis and anamnesis, which may be characterised in terms of a distinction between nature and grace and a distinction between a priori or a posteriori moral knowledge. A second significant tension is over teleology and the difference on that issue separates those who treat natural law anthropocentrically from those who treat it theocentrically. That distinction affects the characterisation of the basic human goods. This section examines the effects those differences have on natural law approaches to evangelization in the public forum of our secular societies, focussing particularly on the challenge of defending the Pauline Principle which is fundamental to a natural law approach but not well understood or accepted in secular discussion. Finally the section draws some conclusions, from that discussion of the sources of natural law and defending the Pauline Principle, about the nature of the task of moral evangelisation in the public forum of western secularism.
3.7.2 Synderesis and Anamnesis
In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II affirmed the right to life in terms of a natural law that results both from reason and from grace:
Even in the midst of difficulties and uncertainties, every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognise in the natural law written in the heart (cf Rom 2:14-15) the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected…134
The contribution of divine grace and reason to our natural law is something of a tension in our tradition.
Natural law approaches to morality have in common the claim that there are objective moral grounds for knowing what is morally good and bad. One of the tensions over this knowledge is whether it is a priori or a posteriori. Those who follow Augustine may claim that it is a priori because placed directly by God from the outset, and in that sense “written in their hearts”. Others may follow St. Thomas Aquinas in holding that it is a posteriori knowledge, believing that God gave us the capacity to reason and that we can gain knowledge of right and wrong by applying reason to our experiences of our human nature.
Two crucial concepts about which there are differences of opinion are “synderesis” and ‘anamnesis”. Synderesis is the natural or innate ability of the mind to know the first principles of ethics and moral reasoning. The concept is both intellectual and volitional and it fits those versions of natural law that argue for the self evidence of the basic human goods in our experience of our human reality and our relationships and thus as the basis for forming conscience as a reasoning process guided by that experience of the basic human goods. In other words, synderesis is a posteriori and reflects a confidence in human reasoning which may be based on us being made in the image and likeness of God and thus possessing the capacity to the intellectual and volitional capacity to reason in this way and to recognise goodness and to choose it.
However the present Pope, then as Cardinal Ratzinger criticised the notion of synderesis insisting that the concept of anamnesis better reflects what is meant by the Pauline passage and the law written in our hearts. Cardinal Ratzinger writes:
The love of God is not founded on a discipline imposed on us from outside, but is constitutively established in us as the capacity and necessity of our rational nature.” Basil speaks in terms of “the spark of divine love which has been hidden in us,” an expression which was to become important in medieval mysticism. In the spirit of Johannine theology, Basil knows that love consists in keeping the commandments. For this reason, the spark of love which has been put into us by the Creator, means this: “We have received interiorly beforehand the capacity and disposition for observing all divine commandments … These are not something imposed from without.” Referring everything back to its simple core, Augustine adds: “We could never judge that one thing is better than another if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us.”135
Cardinal Ratzinger claims that conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. He writes:
This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: “That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.136
This difference between synderesis and anamnesis has serious implications for evangelization in Bioethics and in all areas of public policy. If we take the view that there is an innate moral sense, then our task of moral evangelization is to so present the truth that our audience recalls that innate knowledge, despite the ravages of sin having so dimmed that moral sense. If we take the view that moral knowledge is attained through applying our inherited capacity to reason to our experience, then our task of evangelization is to seek to convince by building an argument for our principles through pure reason.
3.7.3 Teleology
The distinction between synderesis and anamnesis may also impact the way in which natural law reasoning is undertaken particularly in relation to teleology because anamnesis is obviously theocentric rather than anthropocentric. Nevertheless, St Thomas outlines an approach based on synderesis that is still theocentric. For St Thomas the true ultimate end of all human beings is God alone, attained by the beatific vision.137 St Thomas had not moved far from St Augustine, who favoured anamnesis over synderesis. For St Thomas, God remained central to his approach to understanding human nature and the natural law. However some contemporary natural law theorists have adopted an anthropocentric teleology.
Natural law in Catholic thinking is usually sourced to St Thomas. In recent times it has had its defenders in what has come to be called “New Natural Law” which was initiated by Germain Grisez in the 1960s and his collaborators include Joseph Boyle, John Finnis, and Olaf Tollfeson. Others who have joined the ranks more recently include Robert P George, Patrick Lee, Fr Peter Ryan SJ, Gerald Bradley, William May, Christian Brugger and Christopher Tollefson.
Contemporary new natural law theorists (NNLT), such as Germain Grisez, argue that our ultimate end is not the beatific vision but a state of affairs that includes all persons with whom or for whose sake we can act, including God, with whose creative activity we cooperate in pursuing basic goods. We thus seek integral communal fulfilment by pursuing the basic goods and avoiding evil.138 Thus synderesis for new natural law is even more distant from anamnesis than it was for St Thomas for whom it retained its theocentrism.
The NNLT approach may be attractive because it better suits the challenge of secular discussion because it is anthropocentric and religion becomes just one of the basic human goods. The theocentrism of St Thomas leaves us with less to say to those who do not believe.
For a Christian philosopher to ignore what has been revealed to us in the Scriptures and what has developed in our tradition would be foolish. However we may be inclined to do so when engaged in secular debate in which others do not share our beliefs and culture. That is to say in public discussion we may be more inclined to offer a justification for what we believe in a way that may persuade others rather than to appeal to the “spark of the divine” within them that has us recall knowledge of good and evil. A politician wishing to explain why he wishes to vote to protect human life, is unlikely to do the latter.
Alasdair MacIntyre is a contemporary defender of new natural law approaches. MacIntyre makes a distinction between moral truth and moral justification in response to relativism. He argues that moral truth exists independently of a justification offered from any particular standpoint or view. However to give an account of moral truth we need to give an account of the existence of pluralism despite moral truth. Thus in considering all the rival justifications that are offered, he suggests that which has the greatest claim to truth is that which has moved furthest from initial local, partial and one-sided points of view towards a type of understanding – and in the case of the moral life a type of practice – freed in some significant way from the limitations of such partiality and one-sidedness and possessed of the resources which would enable it to explain, in the light of the comprehension thus achieved, just why it is that they appear otherwise from the limited perspectives of those local, partial, and one-sided standpoints which limitations have now been transcended.139
MacIntyre argues that the natural law tradition has attained that goal. In general, theories of natural law are teleological. That is to say they propose a goal or goal for human beings and then discuss how that goal may be attained. Natural law has a positive, even optimistic, understanding of human nature and the power of reason.140
I offer a summary of Grisez’s account on natural law here as a possible approach to justification of a moral view which may still be standing in comparison to other views subjected to the approach that Macintyre proposes of excluding local, partial, and one-sided standpoints and able to explain the mistakes that other views may make in the latter respects.
Grisez follows St Thomas in saying that according to St. Thomas, the very first principle of practical reasoning in general is: The good is to be done and pursued; the bad is to be avoided.141 By this is not meant explicitly moral good and evil. Rather “good” in this context simply means that which is intelligibly worthwhile. Applying Macintyre’s notion of justification devoid of any particular standpoint, this principle seems self evident, it reflects what the words “good” and “evil” mean, and they do not at this point contain a particular notion of the good that might be derived from an individual standpoint. To say the opposite, “evil is to be done and good avoided” would seem to be contradictory. As Grisez expresses it, the first principle of practical reasoning articulates the intrinsic, necessary relationship between human goods and appropriate actions bearing upon them.142
“As it comes from the hand of God, all creation is good. “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gn 1.31). Even things touched by sin can be redeemed, for their original goodness is not wholly corrupted. “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving; for then it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tm 4.4–5). Made in God’s image, human persons as created, fleshly beings are completely good.”143
This assumption that all creation, and specifically all human beings, are good may be challenged, firstly by those who do not believe in a Creator. Some such as Ronald Dworkin, accept it, but only as a religious belief and hence in his view not properly the subject of law and public policy. The assumption that human beings are good may be defended on other grounds. A moral theory that did not accept the worthwhileness of human beings would be possible, but would seem to be somehow self defeating.
Grisez defines “bad” in terms of the negative of good: “The bad is present in what is distorted, damaged, and corrupted in creatures. The badness of what is bad is precisely the distorting, damaging, or corrupting factor. This factor is a privation, a real lack of something which should be present and perfect.”144
From his notion of the good we can derive the assumption that a goal of practical reason is the well-being of happiness or well-being of people. On that basis Grisez invokes the notion of “fullness of being” to explain what the basic human goods are. These are not instrumental to human well-being, such as food or property, but those goods that are actually constitutive of human fullness of being. Because the goods are constitutive of fullness of being human, for us a basic human good provides a reason for choosing and acting that requires no further justification. Basic human goods perfect human beings and contribute to their communities.145
Grisez distinguishes between reflexive or substantive good. Reflexive goods are both reasons for choosing and are in part defined in terms of choosing and they include:
(1)self-integration, which is harmony among all the parts of a person which can be engaged in freely chosen action;
(2)practical reasonableness or authenticity, which is harmony among moral reflection, free choices, and their execution;
(3)justice and friendship, which are aspects of the interpersonal communion of good persons freely choosing to act in harmony with one another; and
(4)religion or holiness, which is harmony with God, found in the agreement of human individual and communal free choices with God’s will.146
The reflexive goods also can be called “existential” or “moral,” since they fulfill human subjects and interpersonal groups in the existential dimension of their being.147
The other three categories of basic human goods fulfill persons in the other three dimensions of their being. These goods can be called “nonreflexive” or “substantive,” since they are not defined in terms of choosing, and they provide reasons for choosing which can stand by themselves. These are:
(1)life itself, including health, physical integrity, safety, and the handing on of life to new persons;
(2)knowledge of various forms of truth and appreciation of various forms of beauty or excellence; and
(3)activities of skillful work and of play, which in their very performance enrich those who do them.148
Not everyone agrees with this analysis of the basic human goods. Some are troubled by Grisez’s teleology which makes the good of religion just one of the basic human goods in pursuit of integral human fulfilment, rather than the pursuit of communion with God. But more of this later.
In his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II asserts that it is in the light of the dignity of the human person – a dignity which must be affirmed for its own sake – that reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the person is naturally inclined. And since the human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end, and never as a mere means, also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods, without which one would fall into relativism and arbitrariness.149
There is a congruence between Grisez’s practicable reasonableness or natural law and Scripture. Jesus taught that we should love God and love our neighbour and keep the ten commandments.150 Pope John Paul II writes that the different commandments of the Decalogue are really only so many reflections of the one commandment about the good of the person, at the level of the many different goods which characterize his identity as a spiritual and bodily being in relationship with God, with his neighbour and with the material world.151
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Ten Commandments are part of God’s Revelation. At the same time, they teach us man’s true humanity. They shed light on the essential duties, and so indirectly on the fundamental rights, inherent in the nature of the human person.152
According to Pope John Paul II, the commandments are meant to safeguard the good of the person, the image of God, by protecting the goods that are constitutive of the fullness of being of a human person. “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness” are moral rules formulated in terms of prohibitions. These negative precepts express with particular force the ever urgent need to protect human life, the communion of persons in marriage, private property, truthfulness and people’s good name. The commandments thus represent the basic condition for love of neighbour.153
He writes:
Judgments about morality cannot be made without taking into consideration whether or not the deliberate choice of a specific kind of behaviour is in conformity with the dignity and integral vocation of the human person. Every choice always implies a reference by the deliberate will to the goods and evils indicated by the natural law as goods to be pursued and evils to be avoided. In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behaviour as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the “creativity” of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.154
Thus the structure of natural law in the way in which it has been explained by Grisez and others in the tradition of St Thomas Aquinas begins with the logical principle that the good is to be done and pursued; the bad is to be avoided. Bad is understood as the negative of good.
The assumption is made that human beings are good, which for believers is understood in terms of our being made in the image and likeness of God, but it is an assumption that has broad acceptance in that for us to believe otherwise would be self defeating.
That goodness is then understood in terms of the fullness of our being as human beings and the goods that are constitutive of the fullness of being. It thus follows that we should pursue those basic human goods and avoid acting against them.
We can readily understand this notion of natural law as the “law written in our hearts” of which St Paul wrote because it is based on the imago dei and thus fits within what Cardinal Ratzinger referred to as “anamnesis’, our recall of our essential goodness in being made in God’s image and likeness, the “spark of divine love” within us by which we have been given the capacity to recognise the goods and the disposition for observing all divine commandments.155
An important aspect of natural law morality therefore is that it explains that the divine law is not arbitrary. The Decalogue protects the fullness of human being and thus gives meaning to the commandment to love God and love one another:
Jesus was asked by the rich young man, “Which is the greatest commandment in the law?” And Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”156
This is consistent with the Old Testament attitude to the Law: “observe all these laws … so as to be happy…”157
The natural law tradition goes back at least as far as Aristotle and the Stoics and the Old Testament, and is consistent with the fulfillment of the law in Christ. The aim is to respect goodness in order to participate in the fullness of life. We choose the good and avoid evil not as the price for getting into heaven, but because it is essentially what is good for us. God as unqualified goodness can be seen as the source of the goodness of all the basic goods. Fulfilment through instantiations of human goods can be seen as participation in divine goodness – in that sense, God can be seen as ultimate end.158
The first principle that we choose good and avoid evil and the explanation of what is good and what is evil gives us a basic structure for morality that does not require single standpoint assumptions. It is on those grounds that Macintyre can claim that natural law is a candidate for being the most justifiable of alternative moral theories.
In Grisez’s account he also includes what he calls “modes of responsibility”. He writes that the modes of responsibility specify – “pin down” – the primary moral principle (choose good and avoid evil) by excluding as immoral those actions which involve willing in certain specific ways inconsistent with a will toward integral human fulfillment.159
Grisez’s eight modes of responsibility160 are:
1.One should not be deterred by felt inertia from acting for intelligible goods.
2.One should not be pressed by enthusiasm or impatience to act individualistically for intelligible goods.
3.One should not choose to satisfy an emotional desire except as part of one’s pursuit and/or attainment of an intelligible good other than the satisfaction of the desire itself.
4.One should not choose to act out of an emotional aversion except as part of one’s avoidance of some intelligible evil other than the inner tension experienced in enduring that aversion.
5.One should not, in response to different feelings toward different persons, willingly proceed with a preference for anyone unless the preference is required by intelligible goods themselves.
6.One should not choose on the basis of emotions which bear upon empirical aspects of intelligible goods (or bads) in a way which interferes with a more perfect sharing in the good or avoidance of the bad.
7.One should not be moved by hostility to freely accept or choose the destruction, damaging, or impeding of any intelligible human good.
8.One should not be moved by a stronger desire for one instance of an intelligible good to act for it by choosing to destroy, damage, or impede some other instance of an intelligible good.161
I do not want to explore the individual modes of responsibility here, except that I think that they have a bearing on the notion of virtue.
The virtues are dispositions to goodness and the vices are dispositions to badness. A good moral character or personality is shaped by our moral education and experiences by which we learn to recognise and to choose good and avoid evil. Virtue thus has an existential meaning in that we form it and reinforce it by our decisions.
As Grisez explains the relationship, like the modes of responsibility, virtues are not concerned with specific kinds of acts. Virtues are aspects of personality as a whole when all the other dimensions of the self are integrated with morally good commitments.
Commitments establish one’s existential identity; a whole personality integrated with a morally good self is virtuous. Since such a personality is formed by choices which are in accord with the first principle of morality and the modes of responsibility, the virtues embody the modes. In other words, the modes of responsibility shape the existential self of a good person, this self shapes the whole personality, and so good character embodies and expresses the modes.162
Thus the natural law in Church teaching reflects an openness to all the basic human goods constitutive of human flourishing and the pursuit of a coherent set of goods in a reasonable way. We may choose to do this in different ways depending on our aptitudes, opportunities and life circumstances. There is no one prescribed way of being a good person.
Pope John Paul teaches that
Acting is morally good when the choices of freedom are in conformity with man’s true good and thus express the voluntary ordering of the person towards his ultimate end…163
Our capacity for goodness is grasped by reason in the very being of a human being, as a matter of the integral truth about human nature, including our natural inclinations, motivations and purpose for existing. The Pope goes on to say it is precisely these which are the contents of the natural law. The ordered complex of ‘personal goods’ which serve the ‘good of the person’ are the good of the person tending toward perfection. These are the goods safeguarded by the commandments which, according to St Thomas, contain the whole natural law.164
A criticism of new natural law is that the end is not the beatific vision but a state of affairs that includes all persons with whom or for whose sake we can act, including God, with whose creative activity we cooperate in pursuing basic goods. In thus seeking integral communal fulfilment by pursuing the basic goods and avoiding evil,165 the place of God in our lives appears to be just another good rather than the primary goal. As noted earlier this is a difference between Grisez and Aquinas.
Relegating God to an also ran status in our purposes does seem a little odd. However in practice the difference between, on the one hand, seeking fulfilment in communion with God and therefore also seeking communion with human beings made in God’s image and likeness and loved by God, and, on the other, seeking fulfilment in communion with all persons including God, may not amount to much. We end up basically doing and pursuing the same range of goods and avoiding the same evils.
I guess one of the advantages of Grisez’s schema is that, in placing human fulfilment through communion with other persons first, it is more open to those who do not believe but, like Aristotle and the Stoics, can accept the fundamental ideas of human beings as social beings and their fulfilment being in each other by the pursuit of human goodness, with religious belief being basically whatever is made of it by the individual including, perhaps non-belief for those who do not believe. Grisez’s schema permits dialogue with believers and nonbelievers alike rather than being dependant on belief in God.
Certainly in the task of seeking a universal ethic to apply to medicine and public policy, Grisez’s approach may be more flexible. On the other hand it is open to the criticisms above that Cardinal Ratzinger made of philosophical approaches that added Jesus as a kind of “crowning”. It also leaves the theological virtues in some kind of limbo.
However, the difference between Grisez and Aquinas on the matter of our teleology, may not be without consequence for our assessments of the nature of a moral act.
There are different concepts of virtue. Some have a strong moral content and are considered to be thick notions of virtue such as those espoused by Plato and Aristotle.
For Platonist moral theorists, their concept of the virtuous citizen is linked to a political ideal of citizenship enjoined by reason – the set of virtues is internally compatible and causally related to citizenship. The virtues are those aspects of character that are needed for someone to be a good citizen. By acting virtuously I act in ways that tend toward the good of my community. So someone who recognises the needs of others and aims to fulfil their needs practises the virtue of justice, which is an important element of relationship in a just society. Someone who is courageous in seeking to pursue the goods necessary for a community exhibits a character trait that is important for the society. Someone who is able to manage or moderate his or her sexual or other inclinations for the purpose of achieving good relationships displays the virtue of temperance which is also important for the members of a community to have.
For Aristotelians the virtue of a thing is determined by its overall nature and purpose for existence. A virtue is that state of a thing that constitutes its peculiar essence and enables it to perform its function well – in humans, the activity of reason and of rationally ordered habits. Thus virtue may be recognised not just as a disposition necessary for being a citizen in a community, as the Platonists would have it, but may also be a disposition that tends to make our life go well. In other words, it is about our individual fulfilment. It is thus a causal notion in which we are disposed to recognise and choose the goods that are constitute of human fulfilment, and to avoid evil. The virtue of truth-telling protects the pursuit and sharing of knowledge, and is thus related to the good of knowledge. The virtues of chastity, temperance and fidelity involve the integration of sexuality into the fullness of the human person and tend to protect parenthood and nurturing of children and the loving relationships between persons, but more than that, it may be argued that, in possessing those virtues, we may in fact be happy in ourselves because those virtues tend towards the fullness of our own being and not just our community.
Post-modernism tends to treat the notion of virtue as a thin concept, merely as desirable characteristics. That is, a virtue is a characteristic that is met with approval by many or most people in our community. In that case, it is not a rational notion in the sense of being causally related to a theory about what is good and evil, and it is subject to differing views of the person and what is to be approved or disapproved.
Virtue is therefore a concept that may be affected by the moral views of a community and the circumstances of that community. For the ancient Greek writer Homer, virtue meant excellence in the standards of the time. For a man, that meant having the attributes of an heroic warrior king: fleet of foot, strong of arm, clear-sighted and capable in leadership and military tactics.
For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, virtue is the strength of one’s will to fulfil one’s duties in the face of obstacles. Thus one is virtuous when one’s will predominates over one’s natural inclinations. This differs from an Aristotelian view. For an Aristotelian, to act virtuously is not to act against inclination (as Kant would have it) but to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues on rational grounds. For the contemporary or neo-Aristotelians, virtues are the attitudes, habits, dispositions, willingness that can be justified as reasonable modes of response to the opportunities which intelligence makes evident to us.166
Because of the causal relationship between virtue and the goods that constitute the fullness of human being, Aristotelian virtue is not rule-based, rather virtues relate to reason, to eudaimonia or having an objectively desirable life. Aristotle recognized the social nature of humanity – hence eudaimonia is to some extent dependant on good citizenship and what is necessary to be a good citizen (which might be relative to the existing social order or to a reasonable ideal of social order).
Aristotelian virtue includes the notion that moral virtues make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life. The virtuous person freely practices the good unimpeded by vice (dispositions toward evil). At the same time, the moral virtues are acquired by human effort and are the result and the source of morally good acts.
Once when travelling with one of my daughters and a friend in the car their conversation focused on one of their classmates whose character they attacked with adolescent stridency. I attempted to explore their attitude towards her, suggesting that in fact their attitude was one of envy rather than any great character deficit of their peer. Conversations of that nature seldom quite go as one might hope. But the thrust of what I wanted to say was that the emotion that they experienced would be better directed toward exploring why they felt inferior and what they might do to improve in areas in which they felt that way.
That response was in essence Aristotelian. The virtuous person is a happy person precisely because they shape their desires and their acts towards the pursuit of the good. In that sense they achieve self mastery and can be at ease with themselves and their circumstances.
The causal relationship between the goods of human fullness of being and what are often called the “Cardinal Virtues” are easily identified. They include:
•Wisdom (Prudence) – which disposes practical reason to discern good and to choose the rights means to achieve it;
•Justice – uprightness of conduct towards one’s neighbour;
•Courage – firmness in difficulties in the pursuit of good;
•Temperance – which ensures the mastery of the will over instincts.
The Cardinal Virtues are upheld by most if not all societies, because if one lacked any one of them, one would find it very difficult to live in a community and one would in all probability be very miserable, and perhaps even mentally ill. One can appreciate the importance of the Cardinal Virtues by reflecting, for a moment, on what it would be like to not be able to recognise goodness, not be able to recognise the needs of others and to respond to them, to lack the courage to go out and face the community or the tasks that are necessary just to survive, or to lack control of one’s base desires and instincts.
The fundamental question that underlies what virtues are is: What kind of person ought I to be? Logically it is prior to the question: What ought I to do? On the other hand, however, what I do determines the kind of person that I am.
In his book The Ethics of Authenticity the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that reasoning in morality is reasoning with someone else; it is a dialogue, and not a solitary activity. On that basis he argues that morality is essentially communitarian rather then individualist, and that individual choice needs “horizons of significance.” A causal concept of virtue provides horizons of significance that relate to the fullness of being human through pursuing good and avoiding evil.
A thin concept of the human person and human community tends toward individualism and upholding autonomy as the highest value, and avoiding heteronomy (where we accept the rules of others). It sees us basically as survivors in the necessary evil of community.
A thick or rich notion of the human person and community is likely to focus on relationships and co-operation as being constitutive of who we are, and to embrace pursuing goods in common and having life plans influenced by the needs of others and a common humanitarian duty of care.
Some virtues that are a result of such a thick notion may include:
•respectfulness and fellow-feeling;
•prudence;
•courage and patience;
•temperance;
•justice, fairness and solidarity;
•liberality, mercy or rescue;
•fidelity;
•respect and gratitude;
•truthfulness;
•efficiency.
A thick notion would avoid vices such as:
•maleficience;
•infidelity;
•impiety;
•meanness;
•prodigality or inefficiency;
•cowardice;
•intemperateness;
•partiality or bigotry.
One of the puzzles for moral philosophy is the significance and derivation of what are called the “Theological Virtues” – faith, hope and love. It is often argued that these are not derivable from pure reason and that they are either recalled by us in faith through our origin in the image and likeness of Christ or learned through revelation in Holy Scripture.
For a Christian, faith is belief in God and in all that he has said and revealed to us. For a Catholic, faith includes belief in what the Church proposes for our belief. We accept the authority of the Church as appointed by Christ. Faith is a commitment of self to God, trusting in his infinite goodness, because he is truth itself. For this reason the believer seeks to know and do God’s will.
The Catechism teaches that faith is a gift and remains in anyone who has not sinned against it; and that when it is deprived of hope and love, faith does not fully unite the believer to Christ and does not make him or her a living member of Christ’s Body.167
St Augustine teaches that hope has for its object only what is good, and only what is future, and only what affects the person who entertains the hope.168 The virtue of hope is linked to happiness by inspiring us, preventing discouragement, sustaining us at times of loss, and laying open our expectation of eternal happiness with God.
The practice of all the virtues is affected by love, which “binds everything together in perfect harmony;” it is the form of the virtues; it articulates and orders them among themselves; it is the source and the goal of their Christian practice. Human love connects us to God who is love.
An area that is highly relevant to a book on bioethics is a account of virtues in relation to being a health professional.
Post modernism may see the set of virtues of health professionals as being determined by social approval. However, someone who sees virtue in the context of practical reason will instead see the virtues causally as those character traits that are necessary to be a good health professional and hence shaped by the purposes, ends or teleology of medicine.
The first step would be to list the aims or purposes of medicine, perhaps including:
1.curing ill-health and or disease;
2.maintaining health;
3.preventing or at least slowing down the progress of disease;
4.maintaining or improving function or at least slowing the progress of disability;
5.preventing the development of disease or illness;
6.helping a patient in a holistic way to understand ill-health or disease and its treatment;
7.relieving or controlling uncomfortable or distressing symptoms;
8.helping a patient and family to accept a prognosis of illness, disease, disability and eventually death.
The question about the necessary virtues of the health professionals then is about what is required for those ends to be attainable. We can certainly see a place for the cardinal virtues:
1.prudence or wisdom in determining what is good for the patient, taking into account not just the physical nature of illness and disease, but also the holistic effects on the patient in all his or her circumstances;
2.temperance in managing one’s own inclinations, especially in circumstances in which the patient is particularly vulnerable, or is difficult or irritating or downright hostile and angry.
3.courage in undertaking treatments, such as surgery, that require confidence in the health professional’s great skill and ability, especially in the usual circumstances of relative factual uncertainty and therefore the possibility of doing harm, and courage to communicate a terminal diagnosis or prognosis;
4.justice in managing the efficient use of relatively scarce resources and in making bedside rationing decisions that take into account not just what is due to this patient but also the needs of others.
Many other virtues are needed to service the above goals, such as:
5.knowledge and skills to be able to diagnose and treat competently
6.piety – respect for the health and medical authorities including colleagues and their judgements, but also respect for the elderly and their place in the community;
7.ability to communicate complex information in a way that can be understood by a lay person;
8.counselling skills including the ability to listen to the patient and his or her values and perceptions, and to respond sensitively;
9.truthfulness in communicating information
10.respect for the person – his or her worth, autonomy and privacy so that the patient continues to trust the health professional;
Beyond those, however, are the virtues needed to deal with the inevitable nature of suffering and death. Patients die and not all suffering can be relieved. That calls on reserves in health professionals for them to accept suffering and death. This may require the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. There is much to consider in determining what is needed for someone to be a good health professional, including matters related to religious belief.
On this account, virtue is therefore a causal notion that relies on the teleology or goals of the role or function.
33 International Theological Commission, “The Search for a Universal Ethic 2009”, n. 52. There is no official English version available. However an English translation by Joseph Bolin, March 9, 2010 is available at www.pathsoflove.com/universal-ethics-natural-law.html. The official French and Italian versions are available at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_index.htm, (accessed August 6, 2010).
34 “The Search for a Universal Ethic”, op. cit., n.11.
35 “The Search for a Universal Ethic”, op. cit., n. 101.
36 “The Search for a Universal Ethic”, op. cit., n. 8.
37 “The Search for a Universal Ethic”, op. cit., n. 7.
38 Dignitas Personae, n. 6.
39 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person” in Herbert Vorgrimler (ed) Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Volume V, (London: Burns & Oates, 1969) pp. 115-163. I am grateful to my colleague Tracey Rowland for identifying the quotations from Cardinal Ratzinger.
40 Gaudium et Spes, n. 59.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 I am grateful to my colleague Tracey Rowland for drawing my attention to the Thomists’ differences of opinion. I read with interest the contributions to Volume 83, Summer 2009, No.3 of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, which was devoted to a discussion of contemporary Thomisms.
44 International Theological Commission, op. cit., n 52.
45 Dignitas Personae, n. 7.
46 This is discussed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in “Faith, Religion and Culture” in Truth and Tolerance (San Francisco; Ignatius Press, 2004), pp. 90-95, in which he argues that there is simply a congruence of Greek philosophy and Biblical themes that had in any case occurred before Christ.
47 Romans 2:14-16.
48 Joseph A. Fitzmeyer SJ, Paul and his Theology: A Brief Sketch (New Jersey: Prentice Hall,1989) pp. 27-34; see also Troels Engber-Perdersen, Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).
49 Troels Engber-Perdersen, op. cit.
50 Ibid.
51 Pope John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), p. 382.
52 A Pauline Colloquium conducted by the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Melbourne July 27-8, 2007.
53 Troels Engber-Perdersen, Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).
54 Libertas Praestantissimum, n. 8.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Veritatis Splendor, n. 44.
58 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “An address to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Current Situation of Faith and Theology’” 1996, http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/dissent/ratzsitu596.htm (accessed June 18, 2008).
59 Fides et ratio, n. 4.
60 See the preambles of the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”; http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm; or the “International Covenants on Economic Social and Cultural Rights”; http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/pdf/cescr.pdf (accessed August 6, 2010).
61 See my doctoral thesis N. Tonti-Filippini, (2000). “Human dignity: autonomy, sacredness and the international human rights instruments”. PhD thesis, Department of Philosophy, The University of Melbourne, http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/1396, (accessed August 6, 2010).
62 Fides et Ratio n. 106.
63 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame,1981).
64 St Thomae Aquinatis, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Q. 63, Art I, English Dominican Friars Edition, 1976.
65 John Finnis offers a robust defence of the Pauline Principle in his Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991).
66 Deus Caritas Est, n. 3-8.
67 Germain Grisez, “Faith, Philosophy and Fidelity”, Fidelity, Vol. 3, No. 8, July 1984, p. 20. In a recent email exchange Professor Grisez referred me to this article as representative of a view that he still holds.
68 Ibid.
69 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction Donum Vitae, II, A, 1: AAS 80 (1988), 87.
70 Ibid
71 Morals and Medicine (N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954); Situation Ethics: The New Morality, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966); Moral Responsibility: Situation Ethics at Work, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967); The Situation Ethics Debate, with Harvey Cox, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968); Hello Lovers: An Introduction to Situation Ethics, with Thomas A. Wassmer SJ, (New York: Corpus Books, 1970); Situation Ethics: True or False, with John Montgomery, (Minneapolis: Dimension Books, 1972); The Ethics of Genetic Control: Ending Reproductive Roulette, (New York: Doubleday, 1974).
72 Pius XII, Allocution on “New Morality,” April 19, 1952, Acta Apostolica Sedis Volume 44, 1952, p. 270.
73 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966) p. 82.
74 Ibid., p. 26.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., p. 115.
77 Joseph Fletcher, The Situation Ethics Debate, with Harvey Cox, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968) p. 260.
78 Joseph Fletcher “Ethics and Euthanasia” in Regulating How We Die: The Ethical, Medical and Legal Issues Surrounding Physician-Assisted Suicide, Linda L. Emanuel, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
79 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64, a. 7.
80 Joseph Fuchs, “The Absoluteness of Behavioural Moral Norms” Gregorianum, 1971 cf. Zachary C Eyster, Imagining ethics: re-imagining salvation: Josef Fuchs, fundamental option, and the soteriological implications thereof Villanova University, 2009.
81 Joseph Fletcher, Moral Responsibility: Situation Ethics at Work (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967).
82 Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, Ethics and the Treatment of Infertility (Melbourne: Holy Name Press, 1983); Nicholas Tonti-Filippini “IVF: the role of the technician” in Persona Verita e Morale, (Rome: Citta Nuova Editrice 1986).
83 Richard McCormick and Paul Ramsey, Doing Evil to Achieve Good: Moral Choice in Conflict Situations (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1978, pp.7-53.
84 Richard McCormick, How Brave a New World? Dilemmas in Bioethics (New York: Doubleday, 1985).
85 “The Question is not Closed,” in The Birth-Control Debate, ed. Robert Hoyt (Kansas City, MO: The National Catholic Reporter, 1969), p. 69.
86 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 7.
87 Richard McCormick, “Classification Through Dialogue” in Richard McCormick and Charles Curran The Historical Development of Moral Theology in the United States (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999), pp. 193-4.
88 St Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, 9, q. 7, a. 2.
89 William E. May, “Moral Theologians and Veritatis Splendor”, http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/MORALVS.HTM, (accessed August 6, 2010).
90 “Quaedam enim sunt quae habent deformitatem inseparabiliter annexam, ut fornicatio, adulterium, et aliae huiusmodi, quae nullo modo bene fieri possunt.” St Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, 9, q. 7, a. 2.
91 Ibid.
92 Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).
93 Richard McCormick, “Ambiguity in Moral Choice” in Richard McCormick and Paul Ramsey Doing Evil to Achieve Good: Moral Choice in Conflict Situations (Chicago: Loyola University, 1978) p. 33.
94 Ibid.
95 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem”, The Monist, Vol. 59, 1976, pp. 204-17.
96 “Morales autem actus recipient speciem secundum id quod est praeter intentionem, cum sit per accidens, ut ex supradictus patet. Ex actu igitur alicuius seipsum defendentis duplex effectus sequi potest; unus quidem conservatio propriae vitae; alius autem occisio inadventis. Actus igitur huismodi ex hoc quod intenditur conservatio propriae vitae, non habet rationem illicit: cum hoc sit cuilibet natural quod se conservet in esse quantum potest.” St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica II II Q. 64, Art. 7.
97 “Potest tamen aliquius actus ex bona intentione proveniens illicitus reddi si non sit proportionatus fini. Et ideo si aliquis ad defendendum propriam vitam utatur maiori violentia quam opoteat, erit illicitum. Si vero moderate violentiam repellat, erit licita defebsio: nam secundum iura, vim vi repellere licet cum moderamine inculpate tutelage.” Ibid.
98 Veritatis Splendor, n. 78.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 St Thomas Aquinas, In Duo Praecepta Caritatis et in Decem Legis Praecepta. De Dilectione Dei: Opuscula Theologica, II, No. 1168, (Ed. Taurinen, 1954), 250. cf Veritatis Splendor, n. 78.
102 Papal Commission on Birth Control, The Tablet, April 22, 1967, pp. 449-454; April 29, 1967, pp. 478-485; May 6, 1967, pp. 510-513; September 21, 1968, pp. 949-951.
103 Peter Knauer, “The Hermeneutic Function of the Double Effect Reasoning,” first published in French in 1965 and in English in the journal Natural Law Forum, Vol 12, 1967, pp. 132-62.
104 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1966) p. 1.
105 Richard McCormick and Paul Ramsey, Doing Evil to Achieve Good: Moral Choice in Conflict Situations, (Chicago: Loyola University, 1978) pp.7-53.
106 Evangelium Vitae, n. 57.
107 Knaeur, op. cit., cf. McCormick.
108 Germain Grisez et al, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities and the Arguments, Washington: Corpus Books, 1970, p. 331.
109 Evangelium Vitae, n. 73.
110 Richard McCormick, “A Commentary on the Commentaries” in Doing Evil, op. cit., p. 238.
111 Ibid.
112 Ibid., p. 236.
113 Ibid., p. 241.
114 I am indebted to Ray Campbell for these points which were made in a lecture that he gave to my graduate students at the John Paul II institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, Summer 2007.
115 Richard McCormick, “A Commentary on the Commentaries” in Doing Evil, op. cit., p. 251.
116 Germain Grisez, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments, (New York: Corpus Books, 1970), p. 370.
117 Jean Porter, “‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’ in Grisez’s Moral Theory”, Theological Studies, Vol 57, 1996, p. 612.
118 Grisez, op. cit., pp. 333, 340, 341.
119 John M. Finnis, Germain G. Grisez, & Joseph M. Boyle, “‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’: A Reply to Critics of Our Action Theory”, Thomist, Vol 65, No. 1, 2001, pp. 1-44.
120 Ibid.
121 Veritatis Splendor, n. 78.
122 Finnis et al, op. cit., pp. 22-3.
123 Ibid., p. 23.
124 Ibid., pp. 19-20.
125 Veritatis Splendor, n. 4.
126 Ibid., n. 75.
127 Ibid., n 79.
128 Ibid., n. 115.
129 Karl Rahner SJ, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych, (New York: Seabury Press, 1978) pp. 93-106; Karl Rahner SJ, “Theology of Freedom,” Theological Investigations, Vol 6, Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger, (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969), pp. 190-93.
130 Karl Rahner SJ, “Theology of Freedom,” Theological Investigations, Vol 6, Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger, (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969), pp. 178-86.
131 Karl Rahner SJ, Theological Investigations, Vol 5, Later Writings, trans. Karl-H. Kruger, (Baltimore: Helicon 1966) pp. 445-51.
132 Germain Grisez, “The Distinction Between Grave and Light Matter”, in his The Way of the Lord Jesus, Volume 2, Christian Moral Principles, (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983).
133 Veritatis Splendor, n. 67.
134 Evangelium Vitae, n. 2.
135 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth”, presented at the 10th Workshop for Bishops February, 1991, Dallas, Texas, http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/ratzcons.htm (accessed August 6, 2010).
136 Ibid., Section 3.
137 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1–2, q. 1, aa. 1, 4, 6. and q. 2, a. 8, c.
138 Germain Grisez, “The True and Ultimate End of Human Beings: The Kingdom, Not God Alone”, Theological Studies, Vol 69, 2008, pp. 38-61.
139 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Moral Relativism, Truth and Justification” in his The Task of Philosophy, Vol 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) pp. 52-73.
140 Ray Campbell in lectures to graduate students at the John Paul II Institute January 2006.
141 St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica 1–2, q. 94, a. 2.
142 Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol 1, Christian Moral Principles, ‘Natural Law” and the Chapter 7 “Fundamental Principles of Morality”, 7 F n. 6.
143 Ibid., 5 A 1.
144 Ibid.
145 Ibid., 5 D n. 11.
146 Ibid.
147 Ibid.
148 Ibid.
149 Veritatis Splendor, n. 48.
150 Matthew 5-7.
151 Veritatis Splendor, n.13.
152 Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2070.
153 Veritatis Splendor, n.13.
154 Veritatis Splendor, n. 67.
155 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth”, op. cit.
156 Matthew 22:36.
157 Deuteronomy 6:24.
158 Veritatis Splendor, n. 13.
159 Grisez, op. cit., 7 G n.2.
160 Grisez’s three volumes of The Way of the Lord Jesus and the modes of responsibility are explained at: http://www.twotlj.org/G-1-8-S.html (accessed August 6, 2010).
161 Grisez, op. cit. Vol 1, Chapter 8 G.
162 Grisez, op. cit., Chpt 7, H, 3.
163 Veritatis Splendor, n. 72.
164 Veritatis Splendor, n. 79.
165 Germain Grisez “The True and Ultimate End of Human Beings: The Kingdom, Not God Alone”, Theological Studies, Vol 69, 2008: pp. 38-61.
166 JN Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 56
167 Catechism of the Catholic Church n. 1815.
168 St Augustine, The Enchiridion, Ch. 8. n.71.