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Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Ethics, grade: No specific grade, Stockholm (Sankt Sigfrids Prästseminarium), course: Given as a course in ethics for seimarians, 1994, language: English, abstract: The crisis of ethics in our time calls for a synoptic view capable of kindling confident teleological motivation, in persons and societies. It is futile to search for the "clear and distinct idea" in a field of such universal importance as ethics, for which the ordinary discourse of humanity is well suited. Rather, our notions must be open, open to the analogies in things and situations, and open too to the real human situation in all its depth and breadth, such things as the desires of the human heart, the burdens of finitude, misfortune and death, the polarization of the sexes, the insights and traditions of religion, the exigences of politics, the compelling witness of the arts and of literature. The reason for this universal importance, such that a field of discourse considered especially intractable or even, recently, "queer" (J.L. Mackie), cannot be isolated as if somehow less scientific and hence inherently problematical or "emotive", was clearly stated by Aristotle when founding this science, this theoria of praxis. It is that ethics is concerned with the nature and end of man, with man, that is, in view of his characteristic action or praxis. That is to say, to take the short way for the present, it is the science of human happiness, of how to be happy. But this is the object of all human endeavour without exception. Hence, if its content be ever identified, e.g. as the vision of God, then it will follow that this content is the ultimate aim of all our civil and social arrangements, a conclusion that St. Thomas unhesitatingly draws.1 1 Summa contra gentiles III 37.
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INTRODUCTION: INCLINATIONS AND BEATITUDE
The crisis of ethics in our time calls for a synoptic view capable of kindling confident teleological motivation, in persons and societies. It is futile to search for the "clear and distinct idea" in a field of such universal importance as ethics, for which the ordinary discourse of humanity is well suited. Rather, our notions must be open, open to the analogies in things and situations, and open too to the real human situation in all its depth and breadth, such things as the desires of the human heart, the burdens of finitude, misfortune and death, the polarization of the sexes, the insights and traditions of religion, the exigences of politics, the compelling witness of the arts and of literature.
The reason for this universal importance, such that a field of discourse considered especially intractable or even, recently, "queer" (J.L. Mackie), cannot be isolated as if somehow less scientific and hence inherently problematical or "emotive", was clearly stated by Aristotle when founding this science, this theoria of praxis. It is that ethics is concerned with the nature and end of man, with man, that is, in view of his characteristic action or praxis. That is to say, to take the short way for the present, it is the science of human happiness, of how to be happy. But this is the object of all human endeavour without exception. Hence, if its content be ever identified, e.g. as the vision of God, then it will follow that this content is the ultimate aim of all our civil and social arrangements, a conclusion that St. Thomas unhesitatingly draws.1Such an identification, however, before it would explain the hidden motor of society externally considered, would more proximately explain ourselves to ourselves. And so the young person reading for the first time the treatise on beatitudo in the Summa theologica is led within himself to that state of mind so habitual to, say, St. Augustine, when he said "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee." There are any number of phrases from the Psalms of David which say the same thing. For what is here logically and metaphysically grounded by St. Thomas is actually the most natural of our inclinations, whereby we are not merely open to the transcendent but crying out for it, so that the eye looks on at the passing show of this world forever unsatisfied. The most natural of our inclinations is to the supernatural (perhaps to "knowing as we are known"), from the side of which we long for an initiative, if only we might hope for such a thing. There is no human beatitude short of that, and hence it is that when we read the touching pages of St. Thomas about the fate of infants who have died unbaptized, we find that the natural felicity which indeed he there attributes to them is ultimately a species of deprivation of the fundamental human hope.1
1Summa contra gentiles III 37.
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Nonetheless, to speak of the most natural of our inclinations is to concede that we have a plurality of inclinations, among which, however, there has to be a certain order, both because order itself is something to which we are clearly inclined and because that inclination to universal good (bonum in communi) which we discuss in the text, identifying it as an end with that end which in fact specifies the human will in its being as a will and indeed with God, is already sufficient to order the rest.
We might ask how it is that we can have this plurality of inclinations if inclinations are to perceived goods and "good" has the meaning of "end", such that there is just one ultimate end not only of all human life but even, St. Thomas makes clear, of each and every human action. Here already, I believe, is the place to introduce the essential notion of participation. Human beings are so situated that there are a variety of ways of participating, of taking part in, the universal goodness of beings, whether in the order of learning or in the order of desire, use and enjoyment. The basic realities of birth and education to maturity are sufficient evidence of this. Before one even asks the question why do I live, how shall I be happy, not to speak of answering it, one has lived some years with one's energies bent upon nourishment, play, the search for love, or whatever it may be. Again, after those first, typically adolescent days of spiritual enlightenment in which, it may be, one discovers one's eternal destiny and the dignity of one's own soul as a necessary being, after those intense days of conversion the exhausted spirit will be forced to remember its continuing need for, and hence inclination, at least at some level of its nature, towards those finite goods which in its ardour it had forgotten, a recurring pattern to which we must not forget to add the need for healing and forgiveness of our own wounded being.
In all these ways we participate in the ultimate good which draws us to itself, and so it is only good for us to use these other goods when they do, in the particular circumstances as evaluated by the virtue of prudence, constitute such a participation. Hence we are advised never to seek fulfilment in them on their own, and even that such a desire defiles the soul. It is possible, however, to abstract such goods in the mind for separate consideration as to what is or is not to be done with respect to each, assuming the circumstances are otherwise right, and hence we arrive at those formalities of justice which are enunciated as laws . It is indeed characteristic of the legal mode that it be analytic, considering each element on its own. Nor is there anything wrong with such a mode. Hence if it be said that there is a law such that adultery is forbidden, then, as law, this holds without respect to circumstances of place or person. The example is Aristotle's, and we may say that the whole thrust of the Kantian ethic, for example, arises from Kant's insistence upon viewing matters of behaviour exclusively in the
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legal mode, this of course being in pronounced tension with his wish to deny any real role to an external legislator, so as to secure "autonomy".
The tension is pronounced because it is this external reference that specifies the legal mode itself, and which is the reason why, as we said, laws, whether moral or societal, do not in themselves reflect consideration of the total situation or intrinsic aims of those subject to these laws, this being the very ground, in fact, upon which Kant praised the dignity of duty. It cannot be denied that this is the mode under which morality is presented to us in scripture, precisely in consideration of the infinite dignity of the law-giver. Even if we see the wisdom of a given commandment and how it will help us to attain our ultimate end, yet that is not the reason why we are to obey it, if we are religious. Justice though the heavens fall! In this perspective the doctrine of natural law faces in both directions at once, preserving that complete reality which is deformed in one way or its opposite by the positivist theologian and philosopher of duty or by the consequentialist humanist respectively. There is no need to stress the doctrine's analogical character as a legal theory. For the claim is that our inclinations really promulgate to us laws, as arising from the reflected divine light in our immortal souls, it being through the weakness of our minds and not because of some positive open-ended quality (of the laws) that we for the most part do not, prior to metaphysical analysis, perceive them to be laws. "What is in fact law is only inferentially grasped by us as law " (L. Dewan). We simply grasp, straight off, the goodness of being, a seed in the mind which the mind, after some labour according to its own laws, will come to see as the law of loving God more than oneself, something which we in fact do without realising it in that initial grasping of the goodness of being. And so with the other laws in their proper order. An angel would know from the first that these are laws.
The strength of natural law doctrine, however, lies precisely in this internal derivation of law from inclination, since, as we have explained, law is superficially the opposite of inclination, as what comes from outside is opposed to what comes from inside. The claim is that in coming to know our own inclinations, and there is no human inclination that is not a known and indeed willed inclination, we are having the creator's law promulgated to us. We are not just using our inclinations as a way of working out what ought to be done. In fact what Kant and St. Thomas have in common, as philosophers in the Christian tradition, is just this insight both that law must be preserved in all its dignity ("not one jot or one tittle shall pass away") and that it must and can be internalized ("I will plant my law within their hearts"). Now Kant's solution internalizes law by the simple expedient of transferring the alienation experienced by the subject of positive law into the depths of the human soul itself. So it seems, at any rate, to most interpreters, this being the effect of proposing a nobler end than
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human happiness to the point of an absolute altruism divorced from all inclination. It is clear though that no other consistent outcome can be expected once one has accepted the Suarezian definition of law as something proceeding essentially from will, as a compulsion from outside (which can then only be quasi -internalized in all its externality, so that reason itself becomes the heteronomous enemy of any natural appetite). If, however, law be understood as a principle of rational order, intrinsic to reason in the first place, reason as in its own intellectual nature being the cause of the very faculty of will, then it becomes possible to understand the Thomistic and Augustinian view according to which the New Law of the Gospel is not written down but poured into the depths of our own hearts severally by the Holy Spirit. We can then understand, furthermore, in virtue of this superior vision which the Christian philosopher has at his disposal (though without needing to make formal appeal to it), how, in the very being of man himself prior to this infusion of divine law, there is implanted a law which is nothing other than a reflected divine light in our souls whereby we know good from evil just as participants in the eternal law which is God himself creating and governing his creation. It is the view of the nobility of intellect and of its potentially directive role which is paramount. Nor is this in any sense part of a project of reducing the majesty, the uncompromising demand in particular of divine law, in general of any law. That is why we said that one should not feel bound to view natural law as an analogy, a mere way of speaking, so that we might describe natural law, with Vasquez, as lex indicans only. It is lex praecipiens; i.e. it consists of precepts and even, says St. Thomas, of enunciations, corresponding, for example, to the Ten Commandments. He adds, however, that it belongs to the very ratio or essence of a precept that it be given for some end, and this, as much as anything else, is a doctrine of God, that God is wise, good and loving, and not evil, stupid and indifferent. Indeed one might say that this is the only intelligent doctrine of God and that any other view, as history has demonstrated, is simply a camouflage of the loss of God under a cloud of theological or even merely legal language. Thus, in his discussion of the nature of law, which includes the eternal law which is God himself, St. Thomas, clearly thinking of God himself as preceptor and law-giver, writes that "it is because someone wills the end that reason ordains those things needed for the end", adding to this that "otherwise the will of the prince would more be iniquity than law."2The giving of law, then, is part of God's eternal willing of himself just as universal good, in virtue of his nature as universal being, ipsum esse subsistens. A God who does not will good, not as set above him but as grounded in his very nature as end of all things, is not even a possible being.
This, indeed, is the only possible solution. Kant would seem to have enthroned law to
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the exclusion of God and hence of that happiness which is ultimately founded in the divine being. He could see no other way to preserve its majesty, due to the voluntarist conception of law just referred to. But then law loses the very majesty which he is emphasising, being now immanent to a human reason which stands alone, no longer reflecting the divine, and which seeks to exalt itself as an absolute end in virtue of a purely negative freedom from even the first determinations of a thing's nature. St. Thomas had stressed that just because intellect is open to all being, able to have the form as the other as other, it needs, since it is a nature, and a very exalted nature, to have, like God himself, its own natural inclination, from which proceeds the faculty of will as such and, indeed, all the inclinations of our nature.3Before we were to go on to examine more closely the nature and role of the inclinations, however, it would be desirable to remove a few remaining doubts and ambiguities. It was perhaps the fear of Kant and his predecessors that the law, in Aristotelian and Thomist perspective, had been made the servant of the inclinations and of happiness in utilitarian and consequentialist fashion. There is a certain imputation of guilt by association here but in fact, and whatever the tendencies of Aristotle in this regard, St. Thomas, guided, we may suppose, by the light of revelation, is perfectly free of them, as may be seen, for example, in the different emphases in the doctrine of epieicheia as presented by the two thinkers, or in the way that St. Thomas stresses, in contrast to Aristotle, that to live well it is necessary to know what it is in which man's ultimate end consists.4
St. Thomas, again, is more definite about man's natural inclinations and their role, thus resolving Aristotle's circular definitions of right reason and right appetite in terms of each other merely.5These inclinations, consequently, are presented as a real, majestic and all-demanding law, to which, however, man is inclined in the depths of his own nature in its noblest aspect, viz. its aspect as a reflection and image of the eternal law, under which aspect, specifically, man is called upon to be a providence for himself in the freedom of individual personality.6On this view of law as proceeding from the divine goodness happiness, in the sense of living well, flourishing, personal fulfilment, is in fact the highest development of life according to law and hence of morality; so it is the fulfilment of all the virtues. Hence St. Thomas will describe charity as the end of all precepts and moral life. It is a question not of being for or against the relevance of happiness in a moral context but of what view one holds of happiness, that is to say, of motivation, without which there can be no meaningful consideration of law in the first
2Ia-IIae 90, 1 ad 3um.
3Cf. QD de veritate 22, 10 ad 4um; Summa theol. Ia-IIae 9, 1 ad 2um; 49, 4 ad 2um.
4Cf. Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, Rome 1969, Bk. I, lesson 2, p.8, ll.52-71.
5Ibid. Bk. VI, lesson 2, p.337, ll. 109-127.
6See the Prologue to Pars IIa of the Summa, and the treatise on prudence in general.
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place, if law is given to agents and if indeed it is a physical truth that every agent acts for an end.
Now St. Thomas, inspired by the Gospels, holds the very highest view of happiness. To accuse him of an instrumentalist eudemonism is to miss all that he has to say about that participåatio which we mentioned earlier. St. Thomas is quite uncompromising in saying that happiness is not to be had in its perfection in this life, not even in the practice of virtue. One of the virtues, in sign of this, and indeed it is a theological virtue of the highest dignity, is hope, hope indeed of a praemium, a reward. This reward, however, is intrinsic to virtue in so far as virtue, as we know it on earth, is already an initial participation in this reward which it thus genuinely merits, as a light growing ever stronger, or rather as a sick body recovering vigour in such a way that each new access of strength is itself used to develop more of the same, the compound interest principle so to say.
Such is St. Thomas's perspective on the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, which, with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, hold a central place in the Second Part of the Summa, the book of man as on the way to that same beatitude. For St. Thomas, in fact, takes his conceptions of happiness from this most Christian source, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. Once we have realised this then the strictures upon his teaching as unworthily eudemonistic appear misplaced and even uninformed.
For what we are presented with is an exact replica of the Gospel teaching upon human blessedness,7that same Gospel which Kant (like J.S. Mill or R.M. Hare) had claimed to translate into philosophical terms, but with lamentable effect. St. Thomas claims, in sober truth, that they are happy who are poor, meek, merciful, pure in heart, who mourn over their sins and hunger and thirst for justice, who seek to make peace and who are persecuted and reviled by the generality of men. This last characteristic, in fact, shows that it is an aristocratic account of happiness. Each person must detach himself from the crowd and enter by the narrow gate. This move in itself, however, is natural to the dignity of personality and not peculiar to the Christian dispensation in any particularist sense.
If it seems paradoxical that these categories, in various ways categories of suffering or at least of painful effort, are the categories of happiness here on earth, then this is so in proportion as it is stressed that beatitude, in which they participate, lies outside the world, simply because it lies in God, whom no man may see and live, in the kingdom of heaven, to be peopled by those who shall inherit the earth, who shall be comforted, who shall obtain mercy, who shall be filled with justice, who shall see God and be called his children and who now rejoice in being persecuted like the prophets before them as a sign, they may hope, of their
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predestination. In St. Thomas's conception this Christian vision follows as it were naturally upon consideration of the greatness of God in comparison to the creature, of eternity in comparison to time, considerations which of course this teaching in turn fortifies and confirms. The idea that the purity of virtue is somehow compromised by its association with these hopes springs from that same failure to see that they are internal to virtuous living, as good and the end are internal to law. Hence indifference to hope, like despair, is a sin, a vice, sloth perhaps. Indeed, if the patristic doctrine common to St. Augustine, St. Gregory and St. Anselm, that to live according to the rule of rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata8is just to live "according to God" (secundum Deum), a doctrine which St. Thomas's endorsement of the eternal law shows that he too teaches, besides his explicit affirmations of it, then indeed the blessedness of divinity cannot be other than intrinsic to the moral effort, to the arrow aimed at the unseen glory above the clouds not merely at the same time but inasmuch as it is aimed at that visible point which is purity of heart. For this aim of its nature participates in the other, as was the doctrine of Cassian and St. Benedict and indeed of St. John the Apostle when he said that a man who loves God cannot be other than a man who loves his brother, whom he has seen, as well. Since he cites love of the brethren as proof of love of God9he cannot mean, as is sometimes supposed, that the latter could be the foundation. That desire for God is intrinsic to moral rectitude means that the latter must be understood as religious, as participating in the transcendent, or else become a form of spiritual vice. This vice indeed is present where one seeks to misrepresent these texts as primitive foreshadowings of secularist altruism in the manner of Feuerbach.
Thus St. Gregory the Great explicitly denies that there can be a rule of right which abstracts from the law, cult and love of the true God10while, conversely, St. Augustine states, in tune with St. Thomas's endorsement of the beatitudes, that those are happy who have wished, not merely to be happy, as do all men, but to live "rightly, i.e. according to God, as evil people do not wish to do."11
7Ia-IIae 69, 2.
8St. Anselm's definition of justice. St. Thomas corrects it at Ia-IIae 58, 1 ad 2um: rectitudo is what the habit of justice, the will to give each his own, attains, as giving a straight course (recte) to the ultimate end, the common good (bonum in communi possessed as bonum commune), for which justice, as an initial participation in it, is required.
9I John 3, 14.
10Moralia 5, 37.
11St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will I 14, The City of God XIV 9; cf. St. Anselm, Letter 156: "the things that are done in God are done according to God, that is, they are done recte". To translate by rightly would be misleading, as if Anselm were a moralist of the order of Kant or Sir David Ross. Recte has ultimately to do with the divine government of the world and the ordering of things to their final end, which those pursue recte, on a straight course, who live secundum Deum, being already, by participation, in Deo.
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This is why St. Thomas says, as we noted, in correction of Aristotle, that to live well it is necessary to know in what our ultimate end consists. And this, incidentally, explains those Gospel paradoxes about losing one's life as a condition for finding it; not, be it noted, as a means to finding it since that would be the seeking to find or save it which we are told will fail, but as a participation in the new life by losing the old, something only to be explained by what God is, the total good to which one can only give oneself totally, as being the secret of one's own being ("closer to me than I am to myself"), and what we are, viz. images, reflections, of that supreme good, who find our fulfilment in the return to our common exemplar. The Gospel, that is, never fails to promise a reward to those who live in this way and it is indeed this reward, like Christ's own resurrection, which is the essential justification of virtue, the proof that the wicked were mistaken in despising it. This reward, however, is itself, in the divine wisdom, the intrinsic flowering of the virtues, a doctrine which in some form the virtuous man is required to believe, at least through some commitment to the beauty of virtue, beauty of life being unintelligible except as some form of participation in blessedness, in that which pleases. But any such concession to the theory of fides implicita should in no way be confused with making of the religious dimension of ethics an optional superstructure. "This is perverse and repugnant to charity."12
1. ETHICS
This term is derived from Greek ethos, custom, corresponding to Latin mos (gen. moris), hence morals, moral philosophy.
As founded by Aristotle ethics is the science of action, of human acts (actus humani, see Chapter Two), already extensively considered in the dialogues of Plato, building upon the life and work of Socrates.
Ethics is a practical science in the sense that it aims to achieve something, viz. man's good. It does not, however, aim at secondary goods (as does, say, the science of medicine, as aiming at health), but at man's absolute good, the finis ultimus or ultimate purpose (meaning) of life. For this reason it is a part of philosophy, given that philosophy studies the first causes or highest principles of things (in so far as these belong to the natural order alone, i.e. apart from revelation).
As science ethics is a theory of practical living, however, and hence it is not essentially
12IIa-IIae 25, 8.
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practical, like an art or a moral virtue. There are degrees of practicality, in other words. Ethics is imperfectly practical. It does not, for example, apply rules to practical cases; it merely supplies or provides such rules.
Hence ethics is distinct from (the virtue of) prudence. This is more clear in St. Thomas than in Aristotle (See his Commentary to Nicomachaean Ethics, Bk. 1).13St. Thomas agrees that ethics aims at making men good14, but in several places in the Commentary he stresses, as Aristotle had not done, the difference between ethics as a science and practical prudence, which he says uses ethical knowledge.
Again, where Aristotle supplies a somewhat circular dialectic between right reason and right desire (each, to be right, must accord with the other), St. Thomas stresses the existence of a hierarchy of natural inclinations in human nature15as supplying the order of the precepts of morality, which are thus established as the natural law, a doctrine in some continuity with early Stoic doctrine, but fundamentally a development of the thought of St. Augustine, employing his doctrine of the eternal law, lex aeterna, which natural law as enunciated by human reason reflects. It is only as being this reflection that natural law can exert any authority or obligation upon us.16
Later moral philosophy often focussed upon this element of obligation while at the same time attempting to divorce it from its roots in the eternal law, making it a purely formal quality of reason (Kant and the rationalists; cf. the later philosophy of value). Existentialism was the reaction to this rationalist moral theory.17
That the material object of ethics is human actions, considered as free and deliberate, entails that ethics is in some respects subalternated to anthropology or rational (philosophical) psychology, since this studies human actions in relation to the faculties of intellect and will, viz. as part of the philosophy of nature. Ethics adds to this object the accidental difference of morality, i.e. it considers actions in relation to an actual or possible rule of behaviour, of customs.18The ethical thought of St. Thomas includes and is indeed indissolubly united to a considerable work of metaphysical reflection upon this, the specifically ethical situation. In this
13Cf. Leo Elders, "St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Nicomachaean Ethics", Autour de Saint Thomas d'Aquin I, Bruges 1987.
14NE 1103b 27.
15Cf. Summa Theologica Ia-IIae 94, 2.
16Cf. G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy", Philosophy (London), 1958; S. Theron, Morals as Founded on Natural Law, Frankfurt 1987-8, ch. V.
17For the history of this development away from Aristotelian Thomist teleology one may profitably consult A.C. MacIntyre's writings, principally After Virtue, London 1981, Whose Justice, which Rationality? Notre Dame 1988.
18So one can also say that ethics treats of virtues and vices, as habits (rules?) of action, the matter of which, in turn, are the passions.
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respect it is ideally suited to our times, when all foundations have been shaken, as having sought to address the most fundamental questions.
This book is principally concerned with what the scholastics call general ethics, i.e. human action as generally and directly ordained to the end or purpose of life. However it will also touch upon special ethics, which considers human acts as ordained mediately to other human beings (ius naturae).19
2. HUMAN ACTS
Human acts (actus humani) are those of our acts which are voluntary and deliberate or conscious. These are the acts which are proper to man (proprii hominis). They are distinguished from mere actus hominis, where we act at least to some extent involuntarily (e.g. in scratching one's chin); but the passions, which form the material of many virtues and vices, are also treated by St. Thomas under this head, viz. as actus hominis, acts common to men and other animals (qui sunt homini aliisque animalibus communes, qui dicuntur animae passiones).20Such properly human acts (actus humani) proceed from intellect and will, which are powers of the rational soul proper to man, according to Aristotelian and Thomist psychology. It is because the soul is immaterial or spiritual that it is able to know and hence to love (immaterialitas est radix cognitionis21). It is able to have the form or nature of the other as other, so as to identify with it. These two powers, then, are said to "flow" (fluunt) from the soul's essence.22
Every agent acts for an end. Omnis agens agit propter finem.23This is a fundamental principle, for, says St. Thomas (art. 3), it is the end (finis) which specifies the act as what it is morally, finis here being understood as end of the (human) will, which as coming to the action from outside is contrasted with the act's own proximate or natural end, also called its object. This objectum is intrinsic to the act, and so acts which have bad or forbidden objects, e.g. the death of an innocent, cannot be justified by any good intention or end in the will whatever. Such acts are intrinsically bad. An act is an act of a certain kind before anyone's intention is brought to bear upon it. Prima bonitas actus moralis attenditur ex obiecto... primum
19Cf. J. Gredt, Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae, Freiburg 1929, Vol. II, p. 297, paragraph 880.
20Summa Theologica Ia-IIae, VI (Prol.).
21Ibid. Ia 14, 1 et al. One should not underestimate the role played by a positive doctrine of the spiritual soul in St. Thomas's ethics.
22Ibid. Ia 77, 6. Cf. Lawrence Dewan, "The Real Distinction between Intellect and Will", Angelicum LVII (1980), pp. 557-593.
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malum in actionibus moralibus est quod est ex obiecto... Et dicitur malum ex genere, i.e. it is intrinsically or unalterably bad.24
At the same time St. Thomas distinguishes a twofold act in voluntary action, viz. the individual interior act of the will, of which the end (finis) is in fact also the object, and the exterior act, which, as being of a certain kind, has its own (natural) object, which the acting person's end may not contradict.25Parallel to this is his distinction between the finis operantis (end of the agent) and the finis operis (end of the work or thing done), or again between the remote and the proximate end. Hence the first and specific moral quality of the human act derives from the moral object; only secondarily does it derive from the circumstances and from the end intended by the agent.
As we say, stealing is stealing, and Aristotle too speaks of acts which are wicked no matter where or by whom or for what reason they are performed. If there were no such acts it would, it can be argued, prove impossible to have any ethical theory whatever.26Finis and bonum are in many ways equivalent (bonum habet rationem finis, good has the meaning of end). Hence bonum is characterized by Aristotle as what all desire (sc. as end). The good of a being is explained by St. Thomas as the perfecting of a being, as what perfects it. Hence the ultimate good of any rational being, i.e. of any person, is that person's happiness, when he is all that he could wish to be.27
