Posted on 04/09/2010 7:35:57 AM PDT by Salvation
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The factors in human conduct that determine whether it is good or bad. There are three such determinants of morality, namely the object, the end, and the circumstances.
By object is meant what the free will chooses to do--in thought, word, or deed-or chooses not to do. Be end is meant the purpose for which the act is willed, which may be the act itself (as one of loving God) or some other purpose for which a person acts (as reading to learn). In either case, the end is the motive or the reason why an action is performed. By circumstances are meant all the elements that surround a human action and affect its morality without belonging to its essence. A convenient listing of these circumstances is to ask: who? where? how? how much? by what means? how often?
Some circumstances so affect the morality of an action as to change its species, as stealing a consecrated object becomes sacrilege and lying under oath is perjury. Other circumstances change the degree of goodness or badness of an act. In bad acts they are called aggravating circumstances, as the amount of money a person steals.
To be morally good, a human act must agree with the norm of morality on all three counts: in its nature, its motive, and its circumstances. Departure from any of these makes the action morally wrong.
If the man believes in the wrong determinants then he practices a wrong morality. The moral determinants are by the way not the Bible itself, but the Christian ethical teaching as a whole. As a system they are absolute, although, as we noted there are some moving parts in the system itself
Who is to say what is wrong, what of non-Christians?
Reason. The Catholic moral teaching is based on the natural law that is discernible through reason alone.
Does that mean non-Catholics cannot reason?
Not at all. There is great agreement around the world about a number of moral principles. There is disagreement about details, and sometimes those details make a great deal of difference. But for a very long time and in a wide range over the earth it has generally been thought good to honor one’s parents, to avoid stealing, murder, lying, and so forth.
OK, thanks
Here, not as an argument but as something I’d like to hear your thoughts on, are some cases where circumstances make some difference, IMHO:
(1) A man steals fruit from an orchard because he just feels like eating an apple
v.
A man ditto because his children don’t have enough to eat.
(2) A man in Africa participates in brutalities against unarmed civilians and he is a officer who imbibed Stalinism when he was on an exchange program at an American University
v.
A young man who was kidnapped from his village, threatened, beaten, and drugged participates in ditto.
(3) A young woman consents to an abortion because neither of her divorced parents will help her if she carries the baby to term, and, besides, her church, the Episcopal Church, says there is nothing morally wrong with abortion v.
a young woman gets an abortion because a baby will ruin her modelling career.
They can, and those who do agree with the Catholic Church’s moral theology. They may lack the belief in the things that were revealed to the Church supernaturally, but there is broadly speaking an agreement among people of reason on the morality of things.
The relatively minor disagreements are to be expected, because of imprecise nature of the subject matter. More often disagreements exist because of the underlying unreasonableness of, for example, atheistic worldview. Not surprisingly people who cannot rightly reason about God are the same people whose atrocities are time and again recorded by history.
Circumstances always make differences, that is why I believe in moral relativity.
That’s interesting.
Me myself personally, I think there are actions which have some intrinsic evil to them. That’s already a complicated statement, IMHO, so I deserve to be asked what the heck I mean, and I will flounder as I try to get more definition and clarity.
But certainly the ‘freedom’ of the will of the person choosing the action has some weight. The drugged, brain-washed, just plain ignorant, or sadly misled person has a different kind of culpability from the healthy, knowledgeable person doing the same act. For ME to kill innocents is a grave thing because (at least for the sake of argument, ahem) I have some information, have done some thinking,and am currently under no compulsion.
Try this, just fer spekkerlatin’ purposes: I think our kidnapped, beaten, drugged Congolese boy, IF he is to enjoy “the glorious liberty of the children of God,” will at some point have to come to terms with the dreadfulness of what he did when he was not free. To indulge in jargon, freedom may involve, in some sense, “owning” what one did when one was not free and viewing the act with the newly informed eyes of moral freedom.
Similarly, the young woman, brow-beaten into an abortion, in my conjecture, will have to get some appreciation of the dreadfulness of the act, and even of the lousy choices she made (if any) to contribute to her brow-beaten state.
I don’t know. This is just offered for comment, not raise as a flag I will fight to the death to defend. I think my underlying notion is that bad choices not only proceed from a sick(disordered) will, but exacerbate the sickness.
I can’t think of anything off-hand, which doesn’t have a cause, that is why I believe all things, including the direction one’s moral compass points, to be relative. I also believe God has a plan for each of us and everything in this universe, that is why I question the concept of free-will. I know why it is necessary for us humans to believe it, but that’s where it ends. Like an absolute moral authority, we need to believe in both of those concepts to be able to function as humans on this one planet, but I don’t believe they actually exist. There are a lot on innate, sort of contradictory phrases and anecdotes to freewill that we are exposed to almost daily. Things like...’xxxx will happen, God-willing’, or the Lord’s prayer...’Thy will be done on earth as in heaven’...’good luck’...’God has a plan for everyone’...’it’s just one of God’s mysteries’. To me, if God truly does know the future, and cannot be wrong, then I think everything that happens, is part of His plan, good or bad and whatever happens, is ultimately His doing. I think whatever terms we come to, are restricted to here on earth, even when it doesn’t seem fair to us.
Of course since I doubt we can know or truly understand what God is thinking or why He does things, this is just what I believe. I think God deals with each of us individually, after all, He is all-powerful and capable of anything, even the stuff we can’t comprehend.
Have you read Kant? Free will is one of what he calls “antinomies”— you have to think it but it can’t really make sense.
I do thing that “Free Will” is deep enough of a mystery that it will never be plumbed to everyone’s satisfaction. And while it is important to remember that “knowing isn’t causing,” I think tracing out the interplay between the freedom of God and the freedom of Man is, well, too hard for me.
However, on the other hand, my experience reading Catholic ethicists is that just because I CAN reason (sometimes, on a good day, etc.) doesn’t mean I DO reason often or very well — or long enough to get as far as some of these guys have gotten.
For example, I find the shift FROM the idea of freedom as the ability to make an uninfluenced choice between good and evil TO the idea of freedom as the ability to know and to do the good is EXTREMELY helpful. For one thing, it supports the notion that people who try to do good understand good better then people who don’t and that people who try for a long time grow in understanding and virtue.
So personally I am finding more and more to like in Thomas Aquinas and his approach to the Bible and all.
hello -
I’m not so sure.
In the first sentence, change in one of the determinants does not necessarily mean overall change will occur.
For example, under certain circumstances, one can swap the legs around without making a difference in the stool being level.
Additionally, circumstances as Hardon refers to them are secondary properties of a moral act - so they as it were make more or less obvious the moral goodness or evil of an act, something perhaps akin to the height of all of the legs.
So the example of a stool seems like an accurate analogy, but falls short when we start to try to unravel what Hardon is saying.
Hello -
If a person goes back and back and back, then maybe one can come to “the original cause” that you appear to refer to.
Is this cause complicated?
Or is this simple: away from God or toward God ?
On a separate note, is there a difference between what God wills and what God allows? Is there more than one path from A to B ?
thanks
Personally, I think that with God, knowing is causing.
I’m not familiar with Kant.
I just know my own self. I also don’t believe that any man knows God any more than any other, regardless of how long they’ve studied or devoted their lives to it.
That is something I do not know.
Yes, it is not a perfect analogy. I simply came up with it to illustrate that in a system of several parts “relative” needs a better definition. I agree that circumstance is not like the other two determinants.
circumstances as Hardon refers to them are secondary properties of a moral act
But Hardon does mention also that "[some] circumstances so affect the morality of an action as to change its species". He gives two examples: one when the character of an immoral act changes with circumstance -- theft becomes sacrilege, etc., and the other when the degree of goodness or badness changes. But can circumstance change the bad into good or vice versa? This is not among the examples he gives, but I can recall this story that actually happened to some friends of mine a while back.
A group of college kids go out camping and drinking in the mountains. At night one of them, still drunk, walks out of the tent and accidentally walks off the cliff, suffering a serious injury. His buddies recover his body, still alive. Now they have a moral dilemma: no one is sober yet a life can be saved if the victim were taken to the hospital (it was in the age before cell phones in a sparcely populated country). So one of them decided to drive drunk (as it happened, the victim died in the car).
Here we have, arguably, a case when an intrinsically immoral object, drunk driving, is combined with a noble end, to deliver a victim to the hospital, and the circumstance of no sober driver being available.
It seems that here the circumstance, and not any other determinant, is deciding in favor of the act. Indeed, if there was a sober driver in the party, yet a drunk man insisted on driving (for example, because he was a close friend of the victim, or was the car owner), the drunk driving becomes unexcusable.
OK !
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