Fr. Fessio Taking the Minority View?

Contraception and Abortion. Which Is the Greater Evil by Sandro Magister

The first withholds life from one who could be born. The second takes it from one who is already alive. A back-and-forth between two theologians, on a question that remains open to free discussion

James Chastek: Beginner-level notes on double effect

A quick response:

And so we distinguish things that knowingly belong to an act from those that define it. Since acts are defined by their goals or the things we intended, it makes sense to distinguish what is knowingly done from what is intentionally done.

What defines the act as opposed to what knowingly belongs to it - this is important consideration. But it is also important to note that two acts may be similar in their physical description (~the matter of the moral act), and yet what is being aimed at by the agent is different. (~the form of the moral act). The object of the moral act would include both the form and the matter, and not one to the exclusion of the other.

Notice these things, in a concrete case, are notionally distinct as opposed to being really distinct. A man might do surgery on the battlefield while thinking to himself “Gosh, I just love that sound they make when they scream and beg me to stop”. If this is so, he is not just a surgeon but a sadist too.

I don't agree that they are notionally distinct rather than really distinct - the intention of an act is really different from the object of the act. The intention of the will is the end to which the act is ordered.

A thing can be done knowingly without being done intentionally (at least in the sense of “intentional” set out here), and this is opens the possibility of what became the doctrine of double effect.

What opens the possibility of the doctrine of double effect is the distinction between the 'form' and 'matter' of the moral act (and foreseeen consequences and willed consequences and the like).  Does Brock offer the best treatment of these points? I'll have to review my notes.).

NovAntiqua

Discovered this blog today while doing a search for information regarding the conference dedicated to John Finnis. One of the blog authors, Kevin Feiser, has written a series on the "action theory"/moral psychology of Martin Rhonheimer:

Regarding Rhonheimer…
On Rhonheimer, Part II: Moral Action Theory
On Rhonheimer, Part III: Virtue Ethics

Mirror of Justice: Kevin Flannery on the Phoenix case

Father Kevin Flannery S. J., who teaches philosophy at the Gregorian, has this to say about Cathy Kaveny's position on the Phoenix case:

--- If one follows Thomas Aquinas’s action theory—and I would argue that the Church’s action theory is Thomas’s action theory—the basic error of Kathy’s argument lies in the sentence, "The immediate aim (object) of the procedure is simply to separate the baby from its dependence on the mother’s system, not to kill the baby, either as an end in itself or as a means to another end." The object of the procedure is not the "aim" in the sense of what the agent hopes to achieve but rather the fetus’s skull (or spine or whatever). Scholars who oppose traditional Catholic teaching on cases such as the craniotomy case (and also, for instance, on the use of condoms where one spouse is HIV positive) tend to argue that the object of a human action cannot be physical object such as a skull. This goes against what Thomas says, for instance, at ST 1-2.18.2 ad 1. He also maintains that a moral object (such as a baby’s skull) is a moral object in so far as it is part of the larger structure of a human act [ST 2-2.58.3 ad 3]. These are not incompatible propositions.

In any case, it is the object of the external act that gives it its species, "what it is." What the external act is has a bearing upon the human act’s moral character: that is why Kathy does not want to say that the act is (has the species of) (e.g.) crushing a fetus’s skull. If one knows that such an act will kill the fetus, it is called ‘killing a fetus,’ i.e., killing a human being. The act performed in the Phoenix case apparently had a fetus’s skull (or some other vital part) as its object; that object makes that act to be an act about that object, not about separating the baby from its dependence on the mother’s system—or, at least, not solely about that. Anscombe would not have tolerated such selective descriptions of what one was intending. As she says in paragraph 25 of Intention: "The idea that one can determine one’s intention by making such a little speech is bosh."

I think I'd have to agree with those "scholars who oppose traditional Catholic teaching" -- the object of the act cannot be some thing, like the skull, by itself. The skull can be the matter of the object, but the object cannot be limited to it.

The (what is the word I am thinking of -- not proximate) remote end of the act may be to separate the baby from its dependence on the mother's body, but the proximate end, which is what the act achieves, is the crushing of the baby's skull, which does end the baby's life. Can one intend to crush the baby's skull without intending its death? I don't think the morality of the act can be "saved" through an attempt at double-effect reasoning.

The separation of right from good

Not right, ius, but right, rectus, as in "right reason," "That action is right," and the opposite of wrong.

Often relativism arises when one begins to doubt one's standards for right action, or fails to understand why an action is deemed to be right, how "rightness" is tied to good. The meaning of rectus is straight. So an action is right (or good) if it achieves the good that we should be aiming at, and thus is "straight."

Alisdair MacIntyre, following Elizabeth Anscombe, offers a different explanation of how this separation came to be, by looking at the history of moral philosophy. While there may be some value in his approach, I do question whether the musings of a select few really had that much of an impact on the populace. (Still, his explanation of the purpose of deontologists (primarily Kant)
to find some sort of basis of right in how reason works or applies itself to human action does make sense.)

I tend to think that this separation in the general population can be explained rather by an incomplete moral development, and the loss of tradition and obedience to the proper teaching authority(-ies). When we are growing up, we are told that certain things are right and wrong, and we act in accordance with the rules that we have been given by others. But as we mature we seek the reasons behind these standards, and if we do not get the answers, then some may be tempted to reject them as being "irrational" and not binding.

Now some may be able to intuit that some actions are right and wrong because they lead to or away from some good, and they can do this without the need for moral science. But if they do not understand moral reasoning, they may be lead astray when confronted with consequentialism, failing to see how right reason is not the same as consequentialist reasoning.

If the virtue of obedience is emphasized, and tied to charity, then a society can continue to flourish, even if most people are not educated in moral science or moral theology. But once the teaching authority of the Church is rejected, the value of tradition separate from authority cannot prevent those who are more daring from supplanting traditional norms with their own desires.

More on this topic to come, perhaps...

Analysis of the Moral Act by Antonio Pardo

index

see ST I II 18, 10-11
Steven J. Jensen, "Do Circumstances Give Species?" The Thomist (Jan. 2006)