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CHAPTER TWO

Human Dignity, Free Human Action, Virtue, and Conscience

1. Three Kinds of Human Dignity

According to the Catholic tradition — as found, for example, in St. Thomas Aquinas¹ — there is a threefold dignity proper to human persons: (1) the first is intrinsic, natural, inalienable, and an endowment or gift; (2) the second is also intrinsic, but it is an achievement, not an endowment — an achievement made possible, given the reality of original sin and its effects, only by God’s unfailing grace; (3) the third, again an intrinsic dignity, is also a gift, not an achievement, but it is a gift far surpassing man’s nature and literally divinizing him — it is, moreover, given to him as a treasure he must guard and nurture and which he can lose by freely choosing to sin gravely.

The first dignity proper to human beings is the dignity that is theirs simply as living members of the human species, which God called into being when, in the beginning, he “created man in his own image … male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27).² Every living human body, the one that comes to be when new human life is conceived, is a living word of God. Moreover, in creating man, male and female, God created a being inwardly capable of receiving our Lord’s own divine life (see below on the third dignity predicable of human beings). God cannot become incarnate in a pig or cow or an ape because these creatures of his are not inwardly capable of being divinized. But, as we know from God’s revelation, he can become incarnate in his human creature, and in fact he has freely chosen to become truly one of us, for his Eternal and Uncreated Word, true God of true God, became and is a human being, a man. Thus, every human being can rightly be called a “created word” of God, the created word that his Uncreated Word became and is precisely to show us how deeply we are loved by the God who formed us in our mothers’ wombs (cf. Ps 139:11-18). Every human being, therefore, is intrinsically valuable, surpassing in dignity the entire material universe, a being to be revered and respected from the very beginning of its existence.³

This intrinsic, inalienable dignity proper to human beings is God’s gift, in virtue of which every human being, of whatever age or sex or condition, is a being of moral worth, an irreplaceable and nonsubstitutable person. Because of this dignity, a human person, as Karol Wojtyla has said, “is the kind of good that does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such a means to an end.” Because of this dignity, a human person “is a good toward which the only adequate response is love.”⁴

When we come into existence, we are already, by reason of this intrinsic dignity, persons; we do not “become” persons after a period of development. As God’s “created words,” as persons, we are endowed with the capacity to discover the truth and the capacity to determine our own lives by freely choosing to conform our lives and actions to the truth. A baby (born or preborn) does not, of course, have the developed capacity for deliberating and choosing freely, but it has the natural capacity to do so because it is human and personal in nature.⁵ Yet when we come into existence we are not yet fully the beings we are meant to be. And this leads us to consider the second sort of dignity proper to human beings, a dignity that is also intrinsic but is an achievement, not an endowment.

The second kind of dignity is the dignity to which we are called as intelligent and free persons capable of determining our own lives by our own free choices. This is the dignity we are to give to ourselves (with the help of God’s never-failing grace) by freely choosing to shape our choices and actions in accord with the truth. In other words, we give to ourselves this dignity and inwardly participate in it by making good moral choices, and such choices are in turn dependent upon true moral judgments.

The nature of this dignity has been beautifully developed by the Fathers of Vatican Council II and by Pope John Paul II, particularly in his encyclical Veritatis splendor, and a summary of their teaching will help us grasp the crucial importance of making true moral judgments and good moral choices if we are to respect our God-given dignity and participate in the dignity to which we are called as intelligent and free persons.

In a document hailed by almost everyone as one of the most important of the entire Council — namely, the Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis humanae) — the Council Fathers declared: “The highest norm of human life is the divine law — eternal, objective, and universal — whereby God orders, directs, and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community according to a plan conceived in wisdom and in love.” Immediately after affirming this truth, the Council Fathers went on to say: “Man has been made by God to participate in this law, with the result that, under the gentle disposition of divine providence, he can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth” (no. 3). Precisely because he can come “to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth,” man “has the duty, and therefore the right, to seek the truth” (ibid.). The truth in question here is evidently not a contemplative or speculative truth but a truth that is to shape and guide human choices and actions, i.e., a practical truth.

This passage concludes by saying: “On his part, man perceives and acknowledges the imperatives of the divine law through the mediation of conscience” (ibid.). The role of conscience in helping us to know the “unchanging truth” of God’s divine and eternal law and its “imperatives” is developed in another document of the Council, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes). There we find the following important passage:

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. The voice of this law,⁶ ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment, do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths. By conscience, in a wonderful way, that law is made known which is fulfilled in the love of God and of one’s neighbor [no. 16; emphasis added].

Fidelity to conscience means a “search for the truth,” and for “true solutions” to moral problems. Conscience, this passage notes, can indeed err “through invincible ignorance without losing its dignity” (so long as there is sufficient “care for the search for the true and the good”); but “to the extent that a correct conscience holds sway, persons and groups turn away from blind choice and seek to conform to the objective norms of morality” (ibid.).

Such, according to Vatican Council II, is the second kind of dignity proper to human persons. This dignity is acquired by diligently seeking the truth about what we are to do if we are to be fully the beings we are meant to be and by shaping our lives freely in accordance with this truth. According to the Council, the human person has the capacity of inwardly participating in God’s divine and eternal law — the “highest norm of human life.” It maintains that this capacity of human persons is related to their “conscience,” for it is through the “mediation” of conscience that human persons come to know ever increasingly the “imperatives” of God’s law.

Reflecting on conscience as “man’s most secret core” where “he is alone with God,” Pope John Paul II writes as follows in his encyclical Veritatis splendor:

The importance of this interior dialogue of man with himself can never be adequately appreciated. But it is also a dialogue of man with God, the author of the law.… It can be said that conscience bears witness to man’s own rectitude or iniquity to man himself, but, together with this and indeed even beforehand, conscience is the witness of God himself, whose voice and judgment penetrate the depths of man’s soul, calling him fortiter et suaviter to obedience [no. 58].

John Paul II likewise insists that “it is always from the truth that the dignity of conscience derives” (ibid. no. 63).

Later in this chapter, after considering the reality of free choice and the role of virtue in the moral life, I will return to the subject of conscience in order to consider it more fully; and in the following chapter I will examine in depth the meaning of natural law as humankind’s participation in God’s divine and eternal law. Before considering free choice and the role of virtue in the moral life in this chapter, however, it is necessary to reflect on the third kind of dignity predicable of human persons.

This is the dignity we have as “children of God,” brothers and sisters of Jesus, members of the divine family. This kind of dignity is a purely gratuitous gift from God himself, who gives this to us when, through baptism, we are “re-generated” as God’s very own children and given the vocation to become holy, even as the heavenly Father is holy, and to be co-workers with Christ, his collaborators in redeeming the world. This dignity is a treasure entrusted to us, and we can lose it by freely choosing to do what is gravely evil. There is a close bond between this kind of dignity and the second kind of dignity proper to us as intelligent and free persons. This kind of dignity, our dignity as God’s very own children, will be developed at length in Chapter Six, “Christian Faith and Our Moral Life.”

I now will look more closely at the meaning of free choice, for it is by freely choosing to observe God’s law — his wise and loving plan for human existence — as this is made known to us that we acquire the dignity to which we are called as intelligent and free persons, and which is inextricably linked, as will be seen later, to our incomparable dignity as God’s children.

2. Free Choice

A central truth of Christian revelation is that human persons, created in the image and likeness of God, have the power of free choice. In order to create a being to whom he could give his own life, God created persons (angelic and human) who have the power to make or break their own lives by their own free choices. Persons are of themselves, sui iuris, i.e., in their own power or dominion. Their choices and actions are their own, not the choices and actions of others. If God’s offer of his own life and friendship is to be a gift, it must be freely received; it cannot be forced on another or settled by anything other than the free choices of the one who gives and the one who receives.

The truth that human persons have the capacity to determine their own lives through their own free choices is a matter of Catholic faith. It is central to the Scriptures, as the following passage from the book of Sirach, cited by the Fathers of Vatican II in Gaudium et spes (no. 17), shows:

Do not say, “Because of the Lord I left the right way”; / for he will not do what he hates. / Do not say, “It was he who led me astray”; / for he has no need of sinful man. / The Lord hates all abominations, / and they are not loved by those who fear him. / It was he who created man in the beginning, / and he left him in the power of his own inclination. / If you will, you can keep the commandments, / and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice. / He has placed before you fire and water: / stretch out your hand for whichever you wish. / Before a man are life and death, and whichever he chooses will be given to him. / For great is the wisdom of the Lord; / he is mighty in power and sees everything; / his eyes are on those who fear him, / and he knows every deed of man. / He has not commanded any one to be ungodly, / and he has not given any one permission to sin [Sir 15:11-20].

The reality of free choice, so central to the biblical understanding of man, was clearly affirmed by Church Fathers such as Augustine⁷ and by all the great Scholastics. As St. Thomas put the matter, it is only through free choice that human persons are masters of their own actions and in this way beings made in the image and likeness of God.⁸ The great truth that human persons are free to choose what they are to do and, through their choices, to make themselves to be the persons that they are was solemnly defined by the Council of Trent.⁹ Vatican Council II stressed that the power of free choice “is an exceptional sign of the divine image within man” (Gaudium et spes, no. 17).

Germain Grisez, who, in collaboration with others, has authored an important work defending the reality of free choice against the attacks of contemporary determinist philosophers,¹⁰ rightly notes that free choice is an existential principle or source of morality. It is an existential principle of moral good and evil because moral good and evil depend for their being on the power of free choice. This is so because what we do is our doing and can be evil doing or its opposite only if we freely choose to do it.¹¹ A dog or a cat or a chimp cannot be morally good or evil; human persons can, and they can because they have the power of free choice. It is through free choice that human persons make themselves to be the sort of persons that they are, that they make themselves to be morally good or morally bad persons. It is for this reason that free choice is an existential principle of morality.

Pope John Paul II also emphasizes the self-determining character of free choice, its significance as the existential principle of morality. Thus, he writes that “freedom is not only the choice for one or another particular action; it is also, within that choice, a decision about oneself and a setting of one’s own life for or against the Good, for or against the Truth, and ultimately, for or against God” (Veritatis splendor, no. 65).

Free choice is experienced when one is aware of a conflict. Different possible alternatives of action are present to one, but they cannot all be realized simultaneously. One deliberates about these possibilities, but deliberation cannot settle the matter. Deliberation cannot determine which of the alternatives promises unambiguously the greater good (although, as we shall see later, one can determine which alternatives are morally good and which are not), and it cannot do so precisely because each alternative, to be appealing and eligible as a possibility of choice, must promise participation in some good that is simply incommensurable with the good promised by other alternatives.

For example, if one is thinking about buying a house and wants a house (a) within a certain price category, (b) with four bedrooms and a family room, (c) within walking distance of church and school, and (d) proximate to good public transportation, and if one house out of four that are examined promises all these benefits (a, b, c, d), whereas none of the other three houses do so, then no choice is possible or even necessary, so long as one is still willing to buy a house fulfilling these conditions. Of the alternatives available, only one has all the benefits one is looking for; hence, the appeal of the other houses — what makes them alternatives of choice — simply disappears. They are no longer eligible or choosable because they promise no good that is not present in the house that has all the benefits one is looking for. But if one is in the market for buying a house, and indeed must buy a house, and none of the houses available has all the “goods” or benefits one wants, then one will have to make a choice from among those that offer some of these benefits; each of these houses is choosable because each offers some good or benefit incommensurable with the good or benefit offered by the other houses. And ultimately the matter is settled by the choice itself. As Grisez says: “One makes a choice when one faces practical alternatives, believes one can and must settle which to take, and takes one. The choice is free when choosing itself determines oneself to seek fulfillment in one possibility rather than another. Inasmuch as one determines oneself in this way, one is of oneself.”¹²

The experience of free choice can be summarized in the following way. First, a person is in a situation where he or she is attracted by alternative possibilities and there is no way to eliminate the incompatibility of the different alternatives or to limit the possibilities to only one. A person can do this or do that, but not both; they are real, i.e., choosable but incompatible possibilities. Second, the person realizes that it is up to him or her to settle the matter and determine which possibility is realized. Third, the person is aware of making the choice and aware of nothing that “makes” him or her make it. In other words, one is aware that one is free in settling the matter, in making the choice among the alternative possibilities.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes a section (nos. 1730-1748) to the subject of free choice.

3. The Significance of Human Action and the Meaning of Character

Free choice bears upon actions that we can do. But the actions in question are not simply physical events in the material world that come and go, like the falling of rain or the turning of the leaves. The actions at stake are not something that “happen” to a person. They are, rather, the outward expressions of a person’s choices, the disclosure or revelation of a person’s moral identity, his or her being as a moral being. For at the core of an action, as human and personal, is a free, self-determining choice, which as such is something spiritual and abides within the person, determining the very being of the person. The Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, are very clear about this. Jesus taught that it is not what enters a person that defiles him or her; rather, it is what flows from the person, from his or her heart, from the core of his or her being, from his or her choice (cf. Mt 15:10-20; Mk 7:14-23). We can say that a human action — i.e., a free, intelligible action, whether good or bad — is the adoption by choice of some intelligible proposal and the execution of this choice through some exterior act. But the core of the action is the free, self-determining choice that abides within the person, making him or her to be the kind of person he or she is. Thus, I become an adulterer, as Jesus clearly taught (Mt 5:28), when I look at a woman with lust, i.e., when I adopt by choice the proposal to commit adultery or to think with satisfaction about doing it, even if I do not execute this choice externally.

This illumines the self-determining character of free choice. It is in and through the actions we freely choose to do that we give to ourselves an identity, for weal or for woe. This identity abides in us until we make other, contradictory kinds of choices. Thus, if I choose to commit adultery, I make myself to be an adulterer, and I remain an adulterer until, by another free and self-determining choice, I have a change of heart (metanoia) and repent of my deed. Even then I remain an adulterer, for I have, unfortunately, given myself that identity; but now I am a repentant adulterer, one who has, through free choice, given to himself a new kind of identity, the identity of one who repudiates his freely chosen adultery, repents of it, and is now determined, through free choice and with the help of God’s never-failing grace, to amend his life and to be a faithful, loving spouse.

The significance of human acts as self-determining is beautifully brought out by Pope John Paul II. After noting that “it is precisely through his acts that man attains perfection as man,” he goes on to say: “Human acts are moral acts because they express and determine the goodness or evil of the individual who performs them. They do not produce a change merely in the state of affairs outside of man, but, to the extent that they are deliberate choices [emphasis added], they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits” (Veritatis splendor, no. 71).

Continuing, John Paul calls attention to a remarkably perceptive passage from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s De Vita Moysis, II, 2-3: “All things subject to change and to becoming never remain constant, but continually pass from one state to another, for better or worse.… Now human life is always subject to change; it needs to be born ever anew.… But here birth does not come about by a foreign intervention, as is the case with bodily beings …; it is the result of free choice. Thus we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as we will, by our decisions” (cited in Veritatis splendor, no. 71).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 1749) speaks of the significance of human action.

We might say that our actions are like “words” that we speak and through which we give to ourselves our moral character, our identity as moral beings.¹³ Character, as Grisez notes, “is the integral existential identity of the person — the entire person in all his or her dimensions as shaped by morally good and bad choices — considered as a disposition to further choices.”¹⁴ We shape our character, our identity as moral beings, by what we freely choose to do. We are free to choose what we are to do and, by so choosing, to make ourselves to be the kind of persons we are. But we are not free to make what we choose to do to be good or evil, right or wrong. Our choices are good or bad insofar as they conform to what Vatican Council II called “the highest norm of human life” (Dignitatis humanae, no. 3), God’s divine and eternal law and its “imperatives,” which are made known to us by the mediation of conscience. But before examining the role of conscience in our moral life we need first to examine the role of virtue, which is rooted in free choice, in that life.

4. Virtue and Our Moral Life

We have just considered free choice and its existential significance and the meaning of “character” as the “integral existential identity of the person — the entire person in all his or her dimensions as shaped by morally good and bad choices.” From what has been said regarding free choice and its existential significance, we can conclude that the free, self-determining choices at the core of a human act abide within the person as dispositions inclining the person to make similar kinds of choices in the future unless contradictory choices are made. Thus, if a person freely chooses to tell the truth, to reject immediately proposals to commit adultery, he or she makes himself or herself to be the kind person willing to tell the truth and to be faithful to his or her marital commitment, whereas the person who freely chooses to lie or to commit adultery makes himself or herself to be the kind of person disposed to lie or to commit adultery.

Moreover, among the choices we make, some of them serve to organize a person’s life. Grisez calls these kinds of choices “large” choices or “commitments,”¹⁵ which put us in the position of having to carry them out by many “smaller” choices — for example, in choosing to marry we commit ourselves to a way of life and to integrate other, smaller choices into this central commitment. Similarly, Pope John Paul II in Veritatis splendor emphasizes the “importance of certain choices which ‘shape’ a person’s entire moral life, and which serve as bounds within which other particular everyday choices can be situated and allowed to develop” (no. 65). The role of those choices — which we can call “commitments” — in the development of a person’s character is well summarized by Grisez in the following passage: “The enduring, spiritual reality of one’s choices, especially the larger ones which mainly shape one’s identity, is the principle of an integrated moral self. Character simply is this self, regarded as the source of further acts.”¹⁶ This will be set forth more fully below. But from what has been said already regarding the existential significance of freely chosen human acts and “character” as shaped by free choices, we can easily understand what Grisez had to say in a book he co-authored with Russell Shaw:

Typically, we say of good people that they have good character. “Character” here signifies nothing less than the totality of a person integrated around good choices. And virtues? They are the different aspects of a good character. Looking at the matter from one point of view — relationships with other persons — we say that the individual of good character is fair or just; considering the individual from the aspect of sexuality, we say that he or she is chaste or modest; from the aspect of response to dangerous situations, that the individual is brave or steadfast; and so on. These virtues … are different aspects of a good character, considered in light of different problems and challenges.¹⁷

In other words, we can regard virtues — and their opposites, vices — as both a residue of a person’s prior acts and dispositions to engage in further acts similar in moral quality to those that gave rise to the dispositions. “St. Thomas,” as Grisez points out, “and many later Catholic writers called virtues and vices ‘habits,’ but in an unusual sense. In ordinary speech a habit is what shapes an unthinking routine of behavior. Thomas and his successors did not mean that virtues and vices are habits in this sense; they considered them aspects of character that make for consistency in deliberate behavior done by free choice.”¹⁸

From what has been said thus far, we can gain an initial appreciation of the role that moral virtues have to play in our moral life. They give the person the facility to do what is good with facility and readiness. They make the person’s “work” — i.e., his or her actions — good, and in addition make the person himself or herself morally good.¹⁹ We must, however, understand properly what all this means. We must not “hypostasize” the virtues, i.e., erect them into agents of some sort. It is rather the person (with God’s never-failing help, I must add immediately) who makes himself or herself, and his or her “work” or action, good by making good moral choices; but virtues are dispositions that the person gives to himself or herself (again, with God’s never-failing help) by consistently making morally good choices, and these dispositions facilitate “doing” the good well.

Note, too, that in the preceding paragraph I have referred to “moral” virtues as the dispositions or “habits” engendered by consistently choosing freely to do what is good by shaping one’s choices and actions in accordance with the truth that makes the person, as well as his or her “work,” good. There are other “virtues” that persons can acquire that enable them to do some things well which do not make the persons themselves good. These are virtues in a “relative” sense, and among them the Catholic tradition, particularly as represented by St. Thomas, includes the “intellectual” virtues of understanding, scientific knowledge, and metaphysical wisdom that perfect the intellect in its speculative inquiry and through which those who have acquired, say, the intellectual virtue of scientific knowledge of medicine can do what doctors are supposed to do; and the “intellectual” virtue of art, concerned with making things, such as speeches, poems, symphonies, etc., beautiful and well. But such virtues do not necessarily make the medical doctor or research scientist or great painter a morally good person.²⁰

Virtuous, morally upright persons know how to shape their choices and actions in accordance with the truth and to take care to form their consciences in an upright way. They know how to choose well among alternatives of choice and to distinguish those that are morally good from those that are morally bad, even if, at times, they might find it difficult to articulate reasoned arguments to support their moral judgments. They nonetheless have an authentic kind of moral knowledge, and, unlike some professional moral philosophers or theologians who might be capable of presenting cogent arguments in support of the judgments these morally upright persons make, they are ready and willing to choose in accordance with their moral judgments and not devise clever rationalizations in order to avoid doing what ought to be done because doing so might have undesirable consequences for themselves.

These morally upright women and men “know” what they are to do if they are to become fully the beings they are meant to be, and they are ready to “do” it because they are virtuous, either because they have, with God’s never-failing grace, acquired virtues, or because God in his great love and mercy has infused virtues into their being when they turned from sin, repented it, and changed their hearts. Their knowledge is “connatural,” that is, it is knowledge mediated by a love for the good, a love for God and their neighbor, a love for the truth. Their knowledge is analogous to the knowledge that close friends, for instance, husbands and wives, have of each other, a knowledge different from that of disinterested observers, a knowledge rooted in love.²¹

Grisez, upon whose work (along with that of St. Thomas) this book depends greatly, maintains that it is possible to “distinguish among virtues in different ways, by using as a principle of distinction any intelligible set of factors relevant to choices. Thus, virtues (or vices) can be distinguished by the different dimensions of the acting person, by different fields of behavior, and so on. No one of these accounts is definitive to the exclusion of others. Each is a way, helpful for some purposes, of dividing the same whole into intelligible parts.”²² Grisez’s own way of distinguishing among virtues is different from St. Thomas’s way of doing so, although both agree in distinguishing naturally acquired virtues (e.g., chastity, courage, justice) from the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

The principle used by St. Thomas in distinguishing the naturally acquired virtues is based on the distinction among the different “operative powers” of the human person that are subject to perfection — the intellectual and appetitive powers — and among the appetitive powers the distinction between the sensitive powers of simple emotions of desire for food, drink, sex, etc. (the emotions of what he called the “concupiscible” appetite) and of emotions evoked in the presence of danger or difficulty (the emotions of what he termed the “irascible” appetite) and finally the “intellectual appetite” or the will. The principle used by Grisez to differentiate among the moral virtues is the kind of fundamental moral truth in light of which persons can discriminate among alternatives of choice in order to discern which alternatives are morally good and which are morally bad.

I will first briefly outline Grisez’s way of distinguishing among virtues, noting that further aspects of his teaching on virtue will be set forth in the following chapter (on natural law) and in the chapter devoted to the specific nature of the Christian moral life. I will then summarize St. Thomas’s way of distinguishing among virtues insofar as it has become classical and, moreover, offers us valuable insights into the nature of our moral life that are surely compatible with and complementary to the light Grisez’s analysis of virtue sheds on the moral life. I will conclude by briefly commenting on the contemporary debate — a misplaced one, I believe — that sees a dichotomy between a “virtue”-based ethics and a “normative”-or “principle”-based ethics.

A. Grisez on Virtue

Earlier in this section, I spoke of “commitments,” i.e., of certain kinds of choices committing us to a way of life into which lesser, everyday choices, are to be integrated. Reflecting on this, Grisez maintains that “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.”²³

To understand what Grisez is saying here, it is necessary to anticipate matter to be taken up in the following chapter on “natural” law. There we will see that the great moral issue is this: in order for us to choose well — i.e., to choose those alternatives of choice that are morally good — we must in some way know, prior to choice, which alternatives are morally good. In other words, we need moral truths to guide our choices. In the following chapter, we will see that the natural moral law — written in our hearts by God — is precisely a set of such truths, beginning with the first principle of morality (religiously expressed in the commandments that we are to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves) and its specifications, principles such as the Golden Rule, and that in the light of this first basic moral principle and its specifications we can indeed make true moral judgments and good moral choices.

Grisez, as we will see, calls the specifications of the first moral principle — principles such as the Golden Rule — “modes of responsibility.” These fundamental moral truths can be known in some way by everyone — as the Church and such Christian saints and doctors as St. Thomas teach.²⁴ Thus, ordinary persons who seek to act in a morally upright way can come to know them, perhaps not explicitly formulating them but recognizing them and appealing to them if asked to give basic reasons for making the kind of choices they make — analogously to the way ordinary persons know such principles or starting points of speculative inquiry as the principle of non-contradiction. If they then choose to shape their choices and actions — and in particular, their “big” choices or “commitments — in accord with these truths, they will become virtuous, i.e., inwardly disposed to choose well and to do what is morally good with facility. Grisez thus concludes that virtues embody these truths, i.e., the first principle of morality and its specifications or “modes of responsibility.”

His way, then, of identifying the natural or acquired moral virtues is, as will be seen more fully in the following chapter, closely related to his way of identifying and articulating the “modes of responsibility,” and he thus speaks of virtues such as “diligence,” “self-control,” “courage,” “fairness,” or “justice” etc. Grisez, moreover, believes, as will be seen in Chapter Six, that the beatitudes of our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount can rightly be regarded as “Christian modes of response,” and that those who choose in harmony with these divinely revealed moral principles — principles rooted in the new commandment that we are to love others as Jesus has loved us — acquire and are given with God’s grace such Christian virtues as “humility,” “detachment,” “Christian fortitude,” “mercy,” “single-minded devotion to God,” etc.

The virtuous person is the person whose reason, as Grisez expresses the matter, is “unfettered” — i.e., he or she is the one who shapes his choices and actions in accordance with the truth, the one who is in possession, through the virtues, of his or her desires and emotions and is not possessed by them.²⁵

B. St. Thomas Aquinas on Virtue

St. Thomas’s teaching on virtue is provided in many of his writings,²⁶ and there are several excellent studies of his thought on this matter.²⁷

I have noted already that the principle St. Thomas uses for distinguishing among virtues — or the stable dispositions through which the acting person is able to do the good well — is based on the distinction among the operative “powers” or “faculties” of the human person. St. Thomas says that the proper subject or seat of virtue, as an operative habit (i.e., a quality disposing us to act well, i.e., to choose in accord with the truth), is some power of the soul. But the human soul has different powers; those properly the subject of virtue are those from which human acts proceed: (1) the intellect (whose operation concerns the truth, in light of which we can make choices), (2) the will (whose operation concerns choice and intention of end), and the (3) irascible and (4) concupiscible appetites, not insofar as they are sensitive powers of the soul but insofar as they “participate” in reason by obeying it, so that we can say that “the virtue which is in the irascible and concupiscible powers is nothing else but a certain habitual conformity of these powers to reason.”²⁸

“Qualities” or “habitus” of the intellect through which it can carry out its operations well are intellectual virtues. As we have seen already, some of these are virtues in a relative sense inasmuch as they enable the person to do some things well, i.e., (1) to understand (the virtue of understanding or intellectus, which embraces not only “intellectus” — understood as our grasp of the first principles of speculative inquiry — but also what St. Thomas called synderesis or our habitual grasp of the first principles of practical reasoning), (2) to know things in their causes (knowledge or scientia), (3) to grasp the deepest causes of things (wisdom or sapientia), and (4) to make things (art). Virtue in the strict sense, however, not only enables a person to do things well but also makes its possessor good and his work [human act] good likewise. This kind of virtue also exists in the intellect insofar as it is moved by the will. A supernatural virtue of this kind perfects the speculative intellect, namely, the virtue of faith. The natural virtue perfecting the intellect is the virtue of prudence, which perfects reason as practical, not speculative.²⁹ And prudence, St. Thomas insists, requires moral virtue and is itself moral virtue.

“Since prudence is the right reason of things to be done,” he writes:

It is a condition thereof that man be rightly disposed in regard to the principles of this reason of things to be done, that is, in regard to their ends, to which man is rightly disposed by the rectitude of the will.… Therefore, just as the subject of [the virtue] of science or understanding, which is right reason with respect toward beings whose truth is to be contemplated, is the speculative intellect in its relationship to the agent intellect [through whose light we can come to grasp the essences of things], so the subject of [the virtue] of prudence is the practical intellect in its relationship to a rectified will.³⁰

Of the virtues perfecting a person through his intellect, then, the only one that is a moral virtue — one that makes not only the person’s “work” good but also the person himself or herself — is that of prudence.

In Summa theologiae (q. 58, a.2), Thomas further discusses more fully how moral virtue differs from a purely intellectual virtue. There he writes:

… for a man to act rightly, it is requisite not only that his reason be well disposed by means of a habit of intellectual virtue, but also that his appetitive power [and he has three such appetitive powers: the will, and two sensitive appetites, the concupiscible and irascible] be well disposed by means of a habit of moral virtue. And so moral virtue differs from intellectual virtue, even as appetite differs from reason. Hence, just as appetite is the principle of human acts in so far as it partakes of reason in some way, so a moral habit has the meaning of human virtue insofar as it is in conformity with reason.³¹

This text prepares the way for Aquinas’s division of the moral virtues perfecting the appetites into the classical “cardinal” virtues, namely, those of prudence (perfecting one’s practical reason), justice (perfecting the appetite of the will), temperance (perfecting the concupiscible appetite), and fortitude (perfecting the irascible appetite).³²

Prudence, in other words, presupposes that a person be rightly disposed inwardly to the “ends” or “goods” of human action, because a person’s moral choices involve affective knowledge or judgments to which assent is given on the basis of appetitive dispositions. Consequently, a person’s appetites must be rightly disposed toward the “ends” or “goods” of human conduct if he or she is to make prudent judgments.³³ Prudence is “right reason about things that are to be done” (recta ratio agibilium),³⁴ because it is reason rectified by right appetite: the appetite of the will being rectified by the virtue of justice, the concupiscible appetite by the virtue of temperance, and the irascible appetite by the virtue of courage or fortitude.

In an illuminating passage in which he shows that fortitude is a virtue necessary for a good moral life, St. Thomas clearly expresses his thought on the cardinal virtues and their role in the moral life. In it he writes:

As Aristotle says, “a virtue is what makes the one who has it good, and good too his activity.” But the good of man is to be in accord with reason.… It follows that it pertains to human virtue that it make a human being and his activity to be in accord with reason. But this happens in three ways. In one way insofar as reason itself is made right, and this is done through the intellectual virtues (of which prudence is chief). In another way, insofar as the very rectitude of reason is instituted in human affairs, and this belongs to justice. In a third way, insofar as impediments to this rectitude are removed. But the human will can be hindered in two basic ways from putting the order required by reason into human affairs. In one way, from the fact that it is so strongly attracted by some delightful good that it fails to bring about the good required by reason; and this impediment is removed by the virtue of temperance. In another way, from the fact that it is kept from doing what is good on account of some terrible difficulty that it encounters. And for removing this impediment the virtue of fortitude is required, a fortitude or courage of the mind or spirit, whereby the person resists this difficulty, just as through bodily courage he overcomes and resists bodily impediments. It is thus evident that fortitude is a virtue insofar as it makes man conform to reason.³⁵

The foregoing offers a summary of the teaching of St. Thomas on the acquired natural virtues. I will not here consider his teaching on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and his teaching that, with charity, God infuses supernatural moral virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, etc. These aspects of his teaching are well set forth by Romanus Cessario in The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics and Virtue or the Examined Life. An excellent brief account of Thomas’s teaching on the virtues can be found in T. C. O’Brien’s article on virtue in the New Catholic Encyclopedia.³⁶

C. Virtue-based Ethics and Principles-based Ethics

Some today oppose a “virtue-based ethics” to a “normative” or “principle-based ethics.” This debate is in my opinion misplaced. The following passage from Grisez indicates the proper relationship between virtues and moral principles: “What,” he asks, “is the connection … between moral principles and virtues? Do we have two distinct, perhaps even competing, approaches to morality — an ethics of moral truth versus an ethics of virtue? Not at all. Take the Golden Rule. One who consistently chooses fairly and works consistently to carry out such choices is a fair person — a person, that is, with the virtue of fairness or justice. A virtue is nothing other than an aspect of the personality of a person integrated through commitments and other choices made in accord with relevant moral norms derived from the relevant modes of responsibility. In other words: living by the standard of fairness makes a person fair. Moral norms and virtues are not separate standards of morality; virtues grow out of norms in the lives of people who consistently live by them; righteousness and holiness are fruits of truth in hearts recreated by God’s grace (see Eph 4:24).”³⁷ The same truth can be expressed by saying that “virtues do not constitute moral norms distinct from the basic principle of morality and its ‘modes of specification.’ ” Quite to the contrary, virtues embody this principle and its specifications. For “virtues are aspects of a personality integrated around good commitments, and the latter are choices in accord with the first principle of morality and the modes of responsibility.”³⁸

Some of Grisez’s critics have complained that he ignores the role of virtue in the moral life and is “Kantian” because of his emphasis on normative principles. I believe that here it has been shown that he does not neglect the role of virtue, and more of his thought on this matter will be considered in later chapters.³⁹

Moreover, at times virtuous persons disagree, and disagree in a contradictory way, with regard to specific moral issues on which the magisterium of the Church has not made a firm judgment. For example, some (including bishops) argue that ordinarily one is required to provide food and hydration to persons in the so-called “persistent vegetative state” unless it is clear that doing so fails to nourish the person or imposes unnecessarily harsh burdens, whereas others (again including bishops) vigorously maintain that there is no moral duty to do so. One of the parties to this debate must be wrong and the other right, insofar as contradictory views are championed. One presumes that the parties to the debate are equally virtuous (or are the bishops of Pennsylvania, who hold the first view, morally more virtuous than the bishops of Texas, who hold the second? — and this seems impossible to prove). Hence, the debate can only be resolved by examining the arguments advanced and the moral norms invoked to support the different views.

I will conclude this chapter with an examination of conscience and the moral life.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives an extensive treatment of virtues and the moral life in Article 7 of Chapter One, Section One, of Part Three, “Life in Christ,” nos. 1804-1829.

5. Conscience and Our Moral Life

Today the term “conscience” has many meanings, among them, that of a “psychological conscience.” When conscience is understood in this way, it is frequently identified with the Freudian superego, which is, as it were, the distillate of parents’ influence upon their children. The superego is described by Freud in the following way: “The long period of childhood during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents leaves behind it a precipitate, which forms within his ego a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name of ‘superego.’ The parents’ influence naturally includes not only the personalities of the parents themselves but also the racial, national, and family traditions handed on through them, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu which they represent.”⁴⁰

Conscience understood in this sense is essentially related to feelings of moral approval or disapproval. In this sense, conscience is the result of a process of psychological conditioning; and the spontaneous reactions, impulses, and feelings associated with conscience understood in this sense may be either realistic and healthy or illusory and pathological. Conscience in this sense is shaped largely by nonrational factors, and it is frequently found to condemn what is not wrong or to approve what is not right. “Psychological conscience,” therefore, cannot of itself provide a person with moral guidance, and there can be no obligation to follow conscience understood in this sense.

Obviously, the Fathers of Vatican Council II, in using the term “conscience” to designate the agency whereby human persons participate in God’s eternal and divine law, were using it in a much different sense. For them, conscience designates first and foremost our awareness of moral truth. The documents from which passages have been cited, moreover — namely, Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et spes — make it clear that there are different levels of our awareness of moral truth. These documents use the term “conscience” to designate different levels of our awareness of moral truth.

In order to grasp properly the different levels of awareness of moral truth to which conscience, as used in the documents of Vatican Council II, refers, it will be helpful, I believe, to take into account some perceptive comments on conscience made by the noted Scottish theologian John Macquarrie and to relate his observations to the Council documents’ use of the term “conscience.”

Macquarrie, after noting the ambiguity that at times surrounds the term “conscience,” observes that it is possible to distinguish several basic levels of conscience when the term is used to designate a person’s awareness of moral truth. At one level, it refers to a practical judgment terminating a process of moral deliberation. At this level, it designates one’s personal and reasoned judgment that a particular course of action is right and therefore morally permissible or that a particular course of action is wrong and therefore morally excluded.⁴¹ Gaudium et spes uses conscience in this sense when it says that at times the voice of God’s law, made known to us through our conscience, tells us “to do this, shun that” (no. 16). Conscience in this sense does not refer to one’s “feelings” of approval or disapproval, nor to some mysterious nonrational agency; rather, here it refers to reflective moral judgment that serves to bring to a conclusion a process of moral deliberation. Since the judgment of conscience is the result of a person’s reasoned and thoughtful evaluation about the morality of a particular course of action, conscience in this sense can be called “particular moral conscience.” The judgment that one makes can be about an action that one is considering doing or not doing (and in this instance, some theologians rightly speak of antecedent conscience); or it can be about the morality of an action that one has already done (and in this instance, it is referred to as consequent conscience).⁴² As John Paul II points out, “the judgment of conscience is a practical judgment, a judgment which makes known what man must do or not do, or which assesses an act already performed by him” (Veritatis splendor, no. 59).

Here it is important to stress that conscience, understood at this level of moral awareness, is a judgment or an act of the intellect. It thus cannot be a mere subjective feeling or option to act and live in a certain way. In saying this, I am in no way denying the importance that affections and feelings can have in our moral life, nor am I saying that they are irrelevant in making judgments of conscience.⁴³ My point is simply that upright moral life requires one’s personal conviction that given acts are or are not in accord with correct moral standards. Concern for the truth is essential here. Intelligent judgment, not nonrational feelings or preferences, should direct human choices and actions. A person is obliged to act in accord with his or her conscience precisely because one of the central meanings of conscience is that it is one’s own best judgment about what one ought or ought not to do.⁴⁴ This matter will be taken up more fully after other legitimate meanings of conscience have been examined.

At another level, Macquarrie writes, conscience can mean a “broader … more generalized knowledge of right and wrong, of good and bad.”⁴⁵ In this sense, conscience is one’s personal awareness of basic moral principles or truths. Vatican Council II refers to conscience in this sense when it affirms that it is through the mediation of conscience that man comes to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth and comes to recognize the demands of God’s divine and eternal law (Dignitatis humanae, no. 3). It is to conscience at this level that Gaudium et spes refers when it says that the voice of God’s law, made known through conscience, calls upon man to “love and to do what is good and to avoid evil” (no. 16). It is in this sense of the term that one’s conscience can be said to be an awareness of the law of God written in the human heart (cf. Rom 2:14-16 and Gaudium et spes, no. 16). At this level, conscience can rightly be called “general moral conscience,” for it is an awareness of moral truth not at the level of particular actions and situations but at the level of general principles. Medieval theologians such as St. Thomas had a special term for designating this level of awareness of moral truth, namely, synderesis or our habitual awareness of the first principles of practical reasoning and of morality.⁴⁶

Particular moral conscience, or conscience at the level of a practical judgment that one makes about the morality of given acts, is the termination of a process of moral deliberation. General moral conscience, or conscience at the level of one’s awareness of the basic principles of morality, is concerned with the moral truths that serve as the starting points or principles for moral deliberation, principles to which one can appeal in order to show the truth of the particular moral conclusions reached in the judgments terminating the process of moral deliberation.

In Veritatis splendor, Pope John Paul II neatly shows how the practical judgment of conscience is related to what I have here called “general moral conscience” or “our awareness of the basic principles of morality.” Centering his attention on what I have here called “particular moral conscience” or “conscience at the level of a practical judgment” about the morality of given acts, the Holy Father observes that this judgment “applies to a concrete situation the rational conviction that one must love the good and avoid evil. This first principle of practical reason is part of the natural law; indeed it constitutes the very foundation of the natural law inasmuch as it expresses that primordial insight about good and evil, that reflection of God’s creative wisdom which, like an imperishable spark (scintilla animae), shines in the heart of every man. But whereas the natural law discloses the objective and universal demands of the moral good, conscience is the application of the law to a particular case; this application of the law thus becomes an inner dictate for the individual, a summons to do what is a good in this particular situation” (Veritatis splendor, no. 59).

The third level of conscience to which Macquarrie refers is “a special and very fundamental mode of self-awareness — the awareness of ‘how it is with oneself.’ ”⁴⁷ At this level, conscience is indeed, as the Fathers of Vatican Council II, following Pope Pius XII, put it, “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man, where he is alone with God” (Gaudium et spes, no. 16).⁴⁸ The character of “conscience” as a special mode of self-awareness is indicated by the etymology of the word. Our English term derives from the Latin conscientia, which means both “consciousness” and “conscience.” As a special mode of self-awareness, conscience has as its basic function the disclosure of ourselves to ourselves as moral beings. As Macquarrie puts it: “Specifically, conscience discloses the gap between our actual selves and that image of ourselves that we have already in virtue of the ‘natural inclination’ toward the fulfillment of man’s end. Thus, conscience is not merely a disclosure; it is also … a call or summons. It is a call to that full humanity of which we already have some idea or image because of the very fact that we are human at all, and that our nature is to exist, to go out beyond where we are at any given moment. Although we commonly think of conscience as commanding us to do certain things, the fundamental command of conscience is to be.”⁴⁹

At this level, in other words, conscience is a mode of self-awareness whereby we are aware of ourselves as moral beings, summoned to give to ourselves the dignity to which we are called as intelligent and free beings. This is the level of conscience to which Dignitatis humanae referred when it declared that “… all men … are by their own nature impelled, and are morally bound, to seek the truth” about what they are to do (no. 2). It is our realization that we are not yet fully the beings God calls us to be, and that we are capable of becoming by shaping our lives and actions in accord with the truth. It is the summons, deep within our being, to be fully the beings God wills us to be and to make ourselves to be, by our own choices and actions, lovers of the true and the good. At this level, conscience is a dynamic thrust within the person for moral truth.

Because conscience at this level dynamically orients the person to transcend himself or herself by continually progressing to a fullness of being, it is called transcendental conscience by some. This is indeed a valid meaning of conscience. Here, too, as at the level of particular moral conscience and general moral conscience, “conscience” is concerned with our awareness of moral truth, of the truth that we are called to conform our lives and actions to objective standards of morality so that we can be fully the beings we are meant to be.

There are, however, some theologians who develop a theory of “transcendental conscience” that is seriously flawed. The leading representative of these theologians is Walter Conn. He rightly says that “transcendental” conscience is “the dynamic thrust toward self-transcendence at the core of a person’s very subjectivity, revealing itself … as a demand for responsible decision in accord with reasonable judgment.”⁵⁰ However, he goes on to claim that authentic moral living “is determined neither by absolute principles nor by arbitrary creativity relative to each situation; authentic living, rather, is defined by a normative structure of consciousness which demands that a person respond to the values in each situation with creativity that is at once sensitive, critical, responsible, and loving.”⁵¹

Conn is correct, of course, in denying that authentic moral living is determined by “arbitrary creativity relative to each situation.” However, in this passage he denies that there are basic moral criteria or principles in terms of which one can determine whether one’s response is indeed “sensitive,” “critical,” “responsible,” and “loving.” His understanding of transcendental conscience seems to make it completely autonomous and unrelated to the other meanings of conscience that have already been considered. By rejecting the crucial role played by the basic moral principles that are made known to us through the mediation of conscience at the level previously considered, Conn makes “transcendental conscience” more similar to a “funny internal feeling” than to a mode of awareness of moral truth. Unless there are basic moral principles, made known to us through the mediation of conscience, it is difficult to see how the “dynamic thrust toward self-transcendence” could be directed toward those goods that are truly perfective of the human person. In my opinion, it is this “creative” understanding of conscience that John Paul II firmly repudiates in Veritatis splendor. He notes that some authors, emphasizing the “ ‘creative’ character of conscience” (Veritatis splendor, no. 55), have been led to stress “the priority of a certain more concrete existential consideration” beyond “the doctrinal and abstract level.” This concrete existential consideration, according to these authors, “could legitimately be the basis of certain exceptions to the general rule. … A separation, or even an opposition, is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid in general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision about what is good and what is evil” (ibid., no. 56).

A person has the obligation to follow his or her conscience — i.e., to act in accordance with his or her own best judgment of what he or she is to do — precisely because this judgment of conscience is the final judgment that a person makes about the moral goodness or badness of the alternatives possible for him or her. If one were willing to act contrary to this judgment, one would be willing to do what one had personally judged one ought not choose to do. One would thus be willing to be an evildoer if one were willing deliberately to act contrary to one’s own best judgment.

There is, indeed, a relationship between the various levels of conscience that have already been considered, and by looking at this relationship we can see clearly why we have the obligation to “follow” our conscience in the sense of acting in accord with the judgment of conscience. We have seen that, at one of its levels, conscience is our awareness of ourselves as moral beings, as persons summoned to act in accordance with the truth and to show ourselves to be lovers of the true and the good and in this way to become fully the beings God wills us to be. But to become what we are meant to be, to become more fully human, we are to do good and avoid evil. The judgment that we make, conscientiously, that this act here and now is the good that I am obliged to do or the evil that I am obliged to avoid if I am to be faithful to the “me” that I am in virtue of being human to begin with, is our own personal way of knowing what we must do if we are to answer the call or summons to become what we are meant to be. Moreover, we make the judgment about what we are to do here and now in light of the basic norms of morality of which we are aware. Thus, all three levels of conscience are inherently interrelated, and their interrelationship helps us to see why we are obligated to act in accordance with our own best reasoned judgment. The Catholic theological tradition and, as we have seen, the Fathers of Vatican Council II emphatically affirm that this indeed is a serious moral obligation.⁵² “The judgment of conscience,” John Paul II stresses, “has an imperative character: man must act in accordance with it. If man acts against this judgment or, in a case where he lacks certainty about the rightness and goodness of a determined act, still performs that act, he stands condemned by his own conscience, the proximate norm of personal morality. The dignity of this rational forum and the authority of its voice and judgments derive from the truth about moral good and evil, which it is called to listen to and to express” (Veritatis splendor, no. 60).

Yet our own judgments about what we are to do can be mistaken. There is thus the serious obligation, stressed by the Fathers of Vatican Council II and John Paul II, to seek the truth. Our judgment of conscience does not make what we choose to do to be morally right and good; in other words, we are not, through our judgment of conscience, the arbiters of good and evil. Our obligation is to conform our judgments of conscience to objective norms of morality, norms that have as their ultimate source, as Dignitatis humanae put it, “God’s divine law — eternal, objective, and universal” (no. 3). It is for this reason that the Council Fathers spoke of a “correct” conscience, declaring, “the more a correct conscience prevails, the more do persons and groups turn aside from blind choice and try to be guided by objective standards of moral conduct” (Gaudium et spes, no. 16).

If the error or mistake in one’s judgment of conscience is not attributable to the person, then acting in accordance with such a judgment of conscience does not make the person to be an evildoer or an evil person, for the person has not, in his or her conscience, ratified or endorsed the evil in the course of action that is chosen. The action will still be wrong, and one who learns later that his or her judgment of conscience was erroneous will have cause for regret (not remorse), and must, of course, reorder his or her life in accord with the knowledge of the truth. Speaking of errors of this kind, the Fathers of Vatican Council II noted: “It often happens that conscience goes astray through ignorance which it is unable to avoid, without thereby losing its dignity” (Gaudium et spes, no. 16). But, as they went on to say, “this cannot be said of the man who takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin” (ibid.). As John Paul II says, “Conscience, as the ultimate concrete judgment, compromises its dignity when it is culpably erroneous.… Jesus alludes to the danger of the conscience being deformed when he warns: ‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!’ (Mt 6:22-23)” (Veritatis splendor, no. 65). In such instances, remorse, not regret, is called for, or what the gospels call metanoia or repentance.⁵³ In their pastoral letter on the moral life, To Live in Christ Jesus, the bishops of the United States put the matter this way:

We must have a rightly informed conscience and follow it. But our judgments are human and can be mistaken; we may be blinded by the power of sin in our lives or misled by the strength of our desires. “Beloved, do not trust every spirit, but put the spirits to a test to see if they belong to God” (1 Jn 4.1). Clearly, then, we must do everything in our power to see to it that our judgments of conscience are informed and in accord with the moral order of which God is creator. Common sense requires that conscientious people be open and humble, ready to learn from the experience and insight of others, willing to acknowledge prejudices and even change their judgments in light of better instruction.⁵⁴

Here the bishops speak of the obligation to have an “informed” conscience. Thus, to bring to a close this discussion of conscience, it will be necessary to offer some observations on the meaning of an informed Catholic conscience.

The purpose or goal of particular moral conscience, or conscience in the sense of one’s best judgment about what one is to do here and now, is true knowledge of what ought to be done in this particular situation. If one is to make a true judgment of this kind, one needs to be aware, first of all, of the basic principles of morality and how these relate to the situation at hand. One thus needs to know the facts of the situation. Thus, forming one’s conscience involves the following: first, one must grasp the implications of the basic principles of morality; second, alert to all the morally significant features of the situation, one must learn how to apply these norms so as to form reasonable judgments of conscience.

The person eager to make true moral judgments will, of course, be anxious to learn what he or she can from moral advisers who can be trusted. Thus, the person who is seeking to make a truly informed judgment of conscience will be willing to listen to the truth and to seek it from sources where it is most likely to be found. The Catholic, aware that the Church is God’s gift to him or her, that it is indeed the pillar of truth, will therefore be ready to accept the moral teachings of the Church, for the Catholic realizes that Christ speaks to him or her through the authoritative teaching of the Church that is the bride and body of Christ. Indeed, as the Fathers of Vatican Council II remind us, “in forming their consciences the faithful must pay careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church. For the Catholic Church is by the will of Christ the teacher of truth. It is her duty to proclaim and teach with authority the truth which is Christ and, at the same time, to declare and confirm by her authority the principles of the moral order which spring from human nature itself” (Dignitatis humanae, no. 14). John Paul II, after citing this important conciliar text, has this to say: “It follows that the authority of the Church, when she pronounces on moral questions, in no way undermines the freedom of conscience of Christians. This is so not only because freedom of conscience is never freedom ‘from’ the truth but always and only freedom ‘in’ the truth, but also because the Magisterium does not bring to the Christian conscience truths which are extraneous to it; rather it brings to light the truths which it ought already to possess, developing them from the starting point of the primordial act of faith. The Church puts herself always and only at the service of conscience, helping it … especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and to abide in it” (Veritatis splendor, no. 64).

The Catholic, therefore, will be connaturally inclined to embrace as true what the Church teaches in the moral order. For the Catholic, the moral teachings of the Church are not some kind of legalistic code imposed arbitrarily upon the Catholic from without. Rather, the Catholic regards, or ought to regard, the moral teachings of the Church as truths intended to remind us of our dignity as beings made in the image and likeness of God and called to shape inwardly our choices and actions in accordance with the truth. The moral teachings of the Church are meant to help Catholics walk worthily in the vocation to which they have been called as children of God and adopted brothers and sisters of the Lord, whose reign makes sovereign claims upon them, requiring them to love even as they have been and are loved by God in Christ.

Today some look upon the moral teachings of the Church as a set of legalistic and arbitrary norms, imposed on persons from without. They regard these teachings as a “party line” that the “official” Church proposes. This way of looking at the moral teachings of the Church is totally erroneous. When a person becomes, through an act of living faith, a member of the Church, Christ’s bride and body, that person commits himself or herself to a life in unity with Christ and his Church. The Catholic accepts, as part of his or her own identity, the identity of a Catholic, of one to whom life in Christ is mediated through the Church. And central to this life is the moral teaching of that Church. The Catholic, thus, will be eager to embrace as true what this Church proposes and will be anxious to shape his or her life in conformity with the moral truths that the Church proclaims.

We have seen that in forming conscience one needs to be aware, first of all, of the basic principles of morality. Indeed, one of the levels of conscience examined in this chapter is the awareness of moral truth at the level of principles or starting points for moral deliberation. In the following chapter, devoted to the subject of natural law, we will be concerned with identifying these principles.

In this chapter, we have seen that a Catholic, in forming his or her conscience, can do so only by paying “careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church.” In the final chapter of this work, the role of the Church as moral teacher and the issue of dissent from authoritative teachings of the Church on moral questions will be taken up in detail. Here it suffices to note that for the Catholic the authority of those who teach in Christ’s name is a more-than-human authority, and the truths these teachers propose are to be taken to heart so that one’s life in Christ may be deepened and enriched. (On conscience and the moral life, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1776-1802.)

Notes for Chapter Two

1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 93, 4. In this article, St. Thomas distinguishes a threefold human dignity proper to human persons. The first is the dignity human beings have by virtue of being made in God’s image and likeness; the second is their dignity as beings who know and love God by conforming to his grace, but in an imperfect way as sojourners in this life; the third is their dignity as beings now living in complete union with God, and this is the dignity of the blessed.

2. On the “beatifying beginnings” of human existence, see the probing analyses of Pope John Paul II in The Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on Genesis (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981).

3. The Church has always taught that human life, precisely because it is a gift from God and is destined for life everlasting in union with him, is priceless and merits the most profound respect from its beginning. Perhaps the most profound and eloquent presentation of this great truth is given by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), in particular in Chapter II. A useful collection of earlier Church documents on the sanctity of human life extending from the time of the Didache in the early second century up to the 1976 pastoral letter of the U.S. bishops, To Live in Christ Jesus, is the anthology Yes to Life (Boston: St. Paul Publications, 1977). See also Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origins and on the Dignity of Human Procreation (Donum vitae) (1987).

4. Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), p. 41.

5. On this matter, see my book Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life (Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington, IN, 2000), Chapter 3; see also Patrick Lee, Abortion and the Unborn Child (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), Chapter 1; Germain Grisez, “When Do People Begin?” in Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (Washington, DC: The American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1986). See also Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (Cleveland/New York: Meridian Books, 1968).

6. In the Abbott edition of The Documents of Vatican Council II (New York: America Press, 1965), this passage from Gaudium et spes (no. 16) is incorrectly translated as “the voice of conscience.” The Latin text is cuius vox, with the antecedent of cuius being lex (“law”), not conscientia (“conscience”).

7. St. Augustine devoted one of his earliest works after his baptism to the subject of free choice, namely, De Libero Arbitrio. The apostolic Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, stressed free choice in the face of pagan determinism. Early in Christianity, Justin developed a line of reasoning to be used over and over again by such writers as Augustine, John Damascene, and Aquinas. He wrote: “We have learned from the prophets and we hold it as true that punishments and chastisements and good rewards are distributed according to the merit of each man’s actions. Were this not the case, and were all things to happen according to the decree of fate, there would be nothing at all in our power. If fate decrees that this man is to be good, and that one wicked, then neither is the former to be praised nor the latter to be blamed. Furthermore, if the human race does not have the power of freely deliberated choice in fleeing evil and in choosing good, then men are not accountable for their actions” (The First Apology, 43; trans. W. A. Jurgen, The Faith of the Early Fathers [College-ville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970], Vol. 1, no. 123).

8. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, Prologue.

9. The Council of Trent solemnly defined the truth that human persons, even after the Fall, are gifted with free choice. For the text, see Henricus Denzinger and Adolphus Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum (35th ed., Rome: Herder, 1975), no. 1555. This source will henceforth be referred to as DS.

10. Joseph Boyle, Germain Grisez, and Olaf Tollefsen, Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

11. Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), p. 41. On this, see also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 83, 1; 1-2, 1, 1; 1-2, 6, 1; 1-2, 18, 1.

12. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 50.

13. On this, see the interesting account of human action as language in Herbert McCabe, O.P., What Is Ethics All About? (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1969), pp. 90-94.

14. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 59.

15. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

16. Ibid., p. 193.

17. Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw, Fulfillment in Christ: A Summary of Christian Moral Principles (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 23-24.

18. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 58. Grisez provides a reference to St. Thomas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 49, 1-3 and 55, 1-2, for the way in which Aquinas understood virtues and vices to be “habits” or, in Latin, habitus.

19. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 55, 4.

20. On the difference between intellectual virtues of this kind, which he calls virtues in a relative sense, and moral virtue, see St. Thomas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 57-58.

21. On knowledge by connaturality, see my article, “Knowledge, Connatural,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), Vol. 8, pp. 228-229.

22. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 59.

23. Ibid., p. 192; boldface in the original text.

24. On this, see Vatican Council II, Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis humanae), no. 3; Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes), no. 16; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 94, 2, 4.

25. On this, see in particular the essay co-authored by Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis, “Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate End,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 32 (1987), 121. See also Chapter Three, below, pp. 104-105.

26. In Summa theologiae (1-2, questions 55-67), St. Thomas offers an extended treatment of virtue and its kinds (intellectual, moral, cardinal, theological), its causes, duration, etc. In Summa theologiae (2-2), he considers in depth (1) the theological virtues of faith (questions 1-16), hope (questions 17-22), and charity (questions 23-46); and (2) the cardinal virtues of prudence (questions 47-57), justice (questions 58-122), fortitude (questions 123-140), and temperance (questions 141-170).

27. Among the more significant are the following: (1) Josef Pieper’s “classical” presentation of The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), a reprint of three books — one on prudence, another on justice, and the other on fortitude and temperance — published originally in the 1950s by Pantheon Books, New York; (2) Romanus Cessario, O.P., The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991); The Virtues or the Examined Life (New York: Continuum, 2002); (3) Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1993). See also Pieper, Belief and Faith (New York: Pantheon, 1963); Pieper, Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986); Pieper, About Love (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978). In 1997, Ignatius Press published the three titles of Pieper listed here in one volume, entitled Faith, Hope, and Love.

28. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 56, 1-6; the citation is taken from 56, 4.

29. See ibid., 57, 1-5.

30. Ibid., 56, 3. The Latin text, which I translated freely above, reads as follows: “Cum enim prudentia sit recta ratio agibilium, requiritur ad prudentiam quod homo se bene habeat ad principia huius rationis agendorum, quae sunt fines; ad quos bene se habet homo per rectitudinem voluntatis, sicut ad principia speculabilium per naturale lumen intellectus agentis. Et ideo sicut subiectum scientiae, quae est ratio recta speculabilium, est intellectus speculativus in ordine ad intellectum agentem, ita subiectum prudentiae est intellectus practicus in ordine ad voluntatem rectam.” See the excellent treatment of virtue and in particular of prudence in St. Thomas in John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (New York: Oxford, 1998), pp. 163-170.

31. Ibid., 58, 2: “… ad hoc quod homo bene agat, requiritur quod non solum ratio sit bene disposita per habitum virtutis intellectualis; sed etiam quod vis appetitive sit bene disposita per habitum virtutis moralis. Sicut igitur appetitus distinguitur a ratione, ita virtus moralis distinguitur ab intellectuali. Unde sicut appetitus est principium humnani actus secundum quod participat aliqualiter rationem, ita habitus moralis habet rationem virtutis humanae, inquantum rationi conformatur.”

32. See, e.g., ibid., 61, 2.

33. See ibid., 65, 1.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid. 2-2, 123, 1. “… secundum Philosophum, ‘virtus est quae bonum facit habentem et opus eius bonum reddit’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 3.8, 1116a16); unde ‘virtus hominis,’ de qua loquimur, ‘est quae bonum facit hominem, et opus eius bonum reddit.’ Bonum autem hominis est secundum rationem esse.… Et ideo ad virtutem humanam pertinet ut faciat hominem et opus eius secundum rationem esse. Quod quidem tripliciter contingit. Uno modo, secundum quod ipsa ratio rectificatur: quod fit per virtutes intellectuales. Alio modo, secundum quod ipsa rectitudo rationis in rebus humanis instituitur: quod pertinet ad justitiam. Tertio, secundum quod tolluntur impedimenta huius rectitudinis in rebus humanis ponendae. Dupliciter autem impeditur voluntas humana ne rectitudinem rationis sequatur. Uno modo, per hoc quod attrahitur ab aliquo delectabili ad aliud quam rectitudo rationis requirat: et hoc impedimentum tollit virtus temperantiae. Alio modo, per hoc quod voluntatem repellit ab eo quod est secundum rationem, propter aliquod difficile quod incumbit. Et ad hoc impedimentum tollendum requiritur fortitudo mentis, qua scilicet huiusmodi difficultatibus resistat: sicut et homo per fortitudinem corporalem impedimenta corporalia superat et repellit. Unde manifestum est quod fortitudo est virtus, inquantum facit hominem secundum rationem esse.”

36. T.C. O’Brien, “Virtue,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), Vol. 15, pp. 704-708.

37. Grisez and Shaw, Fulfillment in Christ, pp. 84-85.

38. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 195.

39. On this, see Grisez and Boyle, “Response to Our Critics and Our Collaborators,” in Natural Law & Moral Inquiry: Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics in the Work of Germain Grisez, ed. Robert P. George (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998), pp. 213-237, at 235-236.

40. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 3-4.

41. John Macquarrie, Three Issues in Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 111.

42. In the New Testament, the use of conscience was apparently limited to consequent conscience or the judgment of one’s past actions. On this, see James Turro, “Conscience in the Bible,” in Conscience: Its Freedom and Limitations, ed. W.C. Bier, S.J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1971), pp. 3-8. But see Eric D’Arcy, Conscience and Its Right to Freedom (New York: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1961), pp. 8-12, for an interesting argument that St. Paul has a directive or antecedent sense of conscience as well.

43. In his Themes in Fundamental Moral Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 211, Charles E. Curran mistakenly argues that the traditional view of conscience as one’s best moral judgment cannot account for the legitimate role of affectivity in conscience. For a more adequate account, see Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, ch. 10, q. D; ch. 31, q. E.

44. On this, see St. Thomas Aquinas, Dc Veritate, q. 17, a. 3. See D’Arcy, Conscience and Its Right to Freedom, pp. 87-112, for a commentary on St. Thomas’s position.

45. Macquarrie, Three Issues in Ethics, p. 111.

46. On this, see St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 79, 12.

47. Macquarrie, Three Issues in Ethics, p. 114.

48. Pope Pius XII, “Radio Message on Rightly Forming Conscience in Christian Youth,” March 23, 1952, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 44 (1952), 271.

49. Macquarrie, Three Issues in Ethics, p. 114.

50. Walter Conn, Conscience: Development and Self-Transcendence (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1981), p. 205.

51. Ibid., p. 213.

52. See St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 17, a. 3.

53. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 19, 6.

54. To Live in Christ Jesus: A Pastoral Letter of the American Bishops on the Moral Life (Washington, DC: USCC, 1976), p. 10.