Intrinsically Evil Acts
“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them.”
-Genesis 1:27
Our first task will be to define what intrinsically evil acts are. It will be particularly important to examine their context within the whole of Veritatis Splendor. I believe that many theologians unfairly criticize the Pope’s use of intrinsically evil acts because they fail to see the idea in the context of the document’s focus. In paragraphs number 79 and 80 intrinsically evil acts, intrinsece malum in se, are defined as “objects of the human act which are by their nature ‘incapable of being ordered’ to God because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image,”[2] “apart from a consideration of the [ulterior] intention for which the choice is made or the totality of the foreseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned.”[3] This definition needs to be unpacked so that we can see what John Paul II is truly saying here.
So much of the controversy surrounding intrinsically evil acts centers on what is meant by the object of the act, so let us start there. The object of the act, or the end of the action itself, is one of the three traditional sources of morality, fonts moralitatis: the object, the circumstances, and the intention.[4] There are some moral theologians who dislike the use of the term intrinsically evil act. Their problem lies in describing acts as moral simply based on their object, because they feel that such a definition fails to adequately describe the interplay of intention and circumstances in the act itself. These theologians seem to describe the object as a pre-moral act, an act which in itself has no moral value until it is placed within the context of the other two founts, intention and circumstance.[5] This however is not what Veritatis Splendor is saying. It is calling us to step out of a third person morality, one which looks at the person from the outside, into a first person morality, a morality in which the observer places himself “in the perspective of the person” as opposed to looking merely at the physical behavior itself.[6] The object “is the proximate end of a deliberate decision which determines the act of willing on the part of the acting person.”[7] Here a distinction is made between the “proximate end of a deliberate decision” and the “ulterior intention.” John Paul II is not saying that intention plays no part in determining the object of an act, far from it; rather he is saying that only the direct or proximate intention that leads to the willing of the act, and not a secondary or ulterior or remote intention, determines the object. We must drop our dualistic notions of body and soul division and see a human act as containing inseparably the physical act and the directly willed intention of the person. Intention does in fact play a role in determining the object of a moral act; if the act were not intended by the will it would cease to be a moral act. It would simply be an act of a human, such as putting on one’s shirt in the morning. There is no moral value in that act. However the ulterior intention, or circumstances for that matter, can not make an intrinsically evil act good. “And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), ‘Let us do evil so that good may come’? Their condemnation is deserved!”[8] An example of the difference between proximate and remote intention is as follows. Two married couples have good reasons not to have a child at this particular period in there life. One couple chooses to use the condom to contracept in order to not have a child, whereas the second couple only has sexual intercourse during the infertile period within the woman’s cycle. Both couple’s ulterior intention is the same and good, but the proximate intentions of the objects, contracepting in the case of the first couple and having sex in the case of the second couple, are different. Another way to define the object of an act is “the content of an intentional action.”[9]
The next part of the definition in which objects are described as “by their nature ‘incapable of being ordered’ to God” has also led to many criticisms of the classical understanding of intrinsically evil acts. This stems primarily from the accusation of such acts as being determined merely on their physical realities, a physicalist approach.[10] However, as shown above, an intrinsically evil act cannot be devoid of the intention of the person; it is fundamentally connected within the moral act. The second part of the description of the object of an act, “because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image,” in conjunction with the first half, leads us to ask what it means to be made in the image of God. First let us define what is meant by “good of the person.” Fr. Melina defines it as consisting
in the perfecting of the nature of the human being, constitutively incomplete, by means of exercise of self-determining freedom. It is therefore that good that depends only on the free self-determination of the person and that is conditioned in no way by factors extrinsic to his freedom…The good of the person is not a partial, sectoral good, distinct from other goods: it concerns that good of the personal being proper to the person that depends on the exercise of his own freedom, that is, the good of action not as a production of goods external to the agent but as the perfection of the acting subject himself.[11]Man is a seemingly limitless potentialiality who actualizes himself, that is finds his fulfillment, in freely discovering himself as the image of God. Mankind’s creation, a creation in the image of God, is how we understand the end of this motion towards perfection. To what end were we created? In order to understand what it means to be made in this image and likeness let us look at the image we humans are supposed to be reflecting, the God of Jesus Christ, the Triune God of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The immanent Trinity has, since the Council of Constantinople, been officially described by the Church as mia ousia, treis hypostaseis, which can be translated roughly as one substance and three persons. The term person was meant in to be understood in terms of Aristotle’s first substance, the specific thing, such as the man John, opposed to the second substance, the general thing, humankind. The use of the word person to describe the Father, Son and Holy Spirit has since then been problematic, as can be seen through the writing of such pivotal characters as Jerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and modern day theologians, on account of its “linguistic inadequacy”[12]. “The problem was rendered even more acute in the modern age because the concept of person changed in relation to that which was current in the early church and in the Middle Ages.”[13] The term person changed from an ontological definition into a psychological definition. The modern age defines person as one who has self-consciousness. “Kant added a definition geared to morality: ‘A person is a subject who is capable of having his actions imputed to him.’”[14] This new understanding of person has led to misinterpretations of the idea of person and even making the doctrine of the persons of the Trinity utterly unintelligible.[15] However modern personalism seems to have developed a way out of this problem by moving away from an understanding of person as an “extreme individualism” to understanding person as existing “only in relation.”
In the concrete, personality exists only as interpersonality, subjectivity only as intersubjectivity. The human person exists only in relations of the I-Thou-We kind. Within the horizon of this modern understanding of person, an isolated unipersonal God is inconceivable. Thus it is precisely the modern concept of person that offers a point of contact for the doctrine of the Trinity.[16]The persons within God are interdependent upon each other in their unique relations to each other. “The Father is a pure self enunciation and address to the Son as his Word; the Son is a pure hearing and heeding of the Father and therefore pure fulfillment of his mission; the Holy Spirit is pure reception, pure gift.”[17] Cardinal Ratzinger takes this idea of person even further by saying by saying that ultimately persons are relations. This greatly affects our understanding of “made in the image and likeness of God.”
Man is neither a self-sufficient in-himself (substance) nor an autonomous individual for-himself (subject) but a being from God and to God, from other human beings and to other human beings; he lives humanly only in I-Thou-We relations. Love proves to be the meaning of his being.[18]To be made in the image of God means that man’s very existence is dependent, not just on God Himself, but on our fellow man, a dependence which is played out through Love. Thus the ordering to God for the good of the person made in God’s image is made explicitly clear in the Son’s Incarnation. In becoming man, Christ made clear that love of God, neighbor and self are not just arbitrary commandments, but constitutive of our very being.[19] When man willingly fails to uphold this relational reality, he is committing a moral evil, not because some precept or law has deemed it so, but because man is ceasing to be man. Coming back to the definition of intrinsically evil acts with this idea of made in the image of God in mind we can see that these are acts which go against the relation of love between man’s self to other, both human and divine.
Before moving forward and examining if there are any concrete acts which can be labeled as intrinsically evil, per se and always, let us summarize what those acts are. An intrinsically evil act consists of two major parts, the object itself and the incorrect ordering of one’s self to his proper end through the act. The object itself is not defined merely as the physically observable act, but as the willfully intended act of the person, the thing directly or proximately intended. It is separable from the other two sources of morality, intention (remote intention) and circumstances in so far as the objective morality of the act is concerned. These two founts provide the degree of morality. The object of the act is intrinsically evil when it can never order one to mankind’s proper end, namely upholding the dignity of the person, which can be restated as upholding the loving relationality found between man and man, and man and God. Simply put if there are actions which always without exception go against the dignity of the person, they are intrinsically evil.[20]
Now that we have a working definition of an intrinsically evil act, the next question that surfaces is, can we formulate a concrete moral norm from this idea. It is simple to form an abstract moral norm that is always evil, such as disrespecting the dignity of the human person is always morally evil. To this extent the majority of Catholic theologians agree that intrinsically evil acts exist, but many, proportionalists for example, do not agree that there can be particular acts always defined as such and so many do not want to employ the term, or if nothing else use it with much caution.[21] It is fitting that John Paul II quotes the Vatican Council II document Gaudium et Spes when giving examples of such acts:
“Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all of these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”[22]These are actions which, when they are the object of a person’s action, can in no way be considered morally good. For example let us examine enslaving another human. By enslaving a person you turn the person from a subject, in which an interaction of relations as I-Thou can occur, into an object, whereby the only interaction of relations that occurs is I-It. The other person becomes less than human, a mere thing, in the enslaver’s eyes, and by dehumanizing the other, he actually becomes less human, as he is failing to see himself as human, one who relates as I-Thou to other humans. There can be no mitigating circumstances or ulterior intentions which can allow one to perform such an act and call it morally good. As Veritatis Splendor points out “man can never be hindered from not doing certain actions, especially if he is prepared to die rather than do evil.”[23] So it appears that in light of the definition that Veritatis Splendor sets forth for intrinsically evil acts, they do not only apply to abstract moral realities, but also concrete moral realties due to the fact that any concrete intentional breaking of the relation between man and man, and man and God, are always morally wrong.
Over the next couple of months I would like to continue in this direction in order to better understand the relationship of our ordering to God and our actions. It seems to me that this personalistic approach to Moral Theology would call into question some old and well established principles, such as Just War Theory (you were waiting for that one, weren’t you!).
[1] James T. Bretzke, A Morally Complex World: Engaging Contemporary Moral Theology(Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2004), 239.`
[2] Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1993), No. 80.
[3] Ibid., No. 79.
[4] Bretzke, 228.
[5] Sean Fagan, Does Morality Change? (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1997)
[6] Pope John Paul II, 78.
[7] Ibid., 78.
[8] Romans 3:8, NRSV.
[9] Martin Rhonheimer, “The Moral Viewpoint of Veritatis Splendor,” The Thomist 58 (1994): 6.
[10] Richard M. Gula, S.S, Reason Informed by Faith (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 227
[11] Livio Melina, Sharing in Christ's Virtues: For a Renewal of Moral Theology in Light of Veritatis Splendor (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 72-3.
[12] Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, trans. and ed. Matthew J. O’Connell. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2005), 286.
[13] Ibid., 287.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., 289. “This can only be applied analogically to the Trinity” For a more in depth look at this analogy and the development of the use of person: Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, trans. and ed. Matthew J. O’Connell. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2005).
[17] Ibid., 290.
[18] Ibid., 290.
[19] Pope John Paul II, No. 53.
[20] Ibid., No. 80.
[21] Bretzke, 75.
[22] Pope John Paul II, No. 80.
[23] Ibid., No. 52.
Labels: Moral Theology
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