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Natural Obligation: How Rationally Known Truth Determines Ethical Good and Evil

2002; Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tho.2002.0008

2473-3725

John C. Cahalan,

Theology and Philosophy of Evil

The Thomist 66 (2002): 101-32 NATURAL OBLIGATION: HOW RATIONALLY KNOWN TRUTH DETERMINES ETHICAL GOOD AND EVIL JOHN C. CAHALAN Methuen, Massachusetts RISTOTLE, THE MEDIEVALS, and Hume, in their own ways, held that the "good" is that which is desired or desirable in ome manner. Hume concluded that reason cannot dictate to desires about values since desires determine what things are values and what are not. When reason makes value judgments, it is a "slave" of desire; it only reports what desires do. Hume was, in effect, saying that his predecessors had not gone far enough in drawing out the implications of the fact that "good" means that which is desired. But some of Hume's Scholastic predecessors had seen more of those implications than he did. In fact, they had seen enough to provide the basis for a reply to Hume about how reason prescribes to desire. I will try to make that reply explicit. To paraphrase Aristotle and Hume, calling something "good" presupposes an inclination (a desire or a choice) toward some goal. Inclinations toward goals, in turn, presuppose dispositions for those inclinations (appetites). If there is a specifically moral kind of goodness, calling something morally good or evil must reflect an inclination toward some specific kind of goal whose achievement is what we mean by "moral" good, an inclination of which we are capable because we have dispositions to be inclined to that achievement. I hope to show that insufficient attention to the nature of that goal is what generates reason/appetite, is/ought, fact/value and deontology/teleology problems in ethics. The implicit reply to Hume that I will explicate bases ethics on a "natural inclination" to the goal of acting "in accord with 101 102 JOHN C. CAHALAN reason."1 I will argue that we necessarily have that goal and that "accord with reason" means accord with premoral knowledge of what things, especially persons, are. Hume failed to see that rational beings must have that goal. That goal implies that love of persons for their own sake (traditionally called "love of friendship") has priority over love of other goods ("love of concupiscence"), and that the duty to love persons, human or divine, for their own sake is both self-evident and ethically primary.2 But if "accord with reason" refers, as it often seems to do, to value judgments reason makes by the standard ofsome goal other than accord with knowledge of what things are, the other goal would be a good (for example, happiness, pleasure, or even contemplation or virtue) other than persons as such, and the duty to love persons for their own sake would be neither primary nor self-evident but derived from the duty to will that other good. I What is the nature of moral obligation, or the nature of the good and evil that are specifically moral, rather than aesthetic, medical, economic, etc.? Assume that by a printing error a mountain ranger's manual says that physical action X will prevent an avalanche, when in fact X will cause an avalanche. A ranger believes the manual and inculpably uses that belief in choosing to perform X. Lives are lost. Here there is evil but no moral evil. Now someone deliberately performs X with the intention of killing innocent victims. There is moral evil, but what is it? Whatever the nature of that evil is, it characterizes the internal act of choosing. It consists neither of the physical motions performed nor of the accumulation of external goods and evils in their results, because these can be the same in both cases. If it consists of a relation between the choice and results external to the choice, that relation is a property of the choice, not the results. 1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 3. 2 This primacy and self-evidence are explicit in Aquinas (STh I-II, q. 100, a. 3, ad 1), although standard accounts of acting "in accord with reason" cannot explain them. NATIJRAL OBLIGATION 103 When we judge choices to be morally good or bad, we imply a standard by which choices are to be judged. A standard expresses a goal, a finality...