The Doctrine of Double Effect: Philosophers Debate a Controversial Moral Principle ed. by P. A. Woodward (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 149 the subject of inquiry itself, which is alternatively described as a study of Rahner's metaphysics (1, subtitle), as the history of the idea "Rea/symbol" (5), and as the "philosophy of symbol and Rahner's place in it" (ibid.). Is the assumption that the idea "Rea/symbol," implicit in philosophy "from Kant to Heidegger," becomes realized or explicit in Rahner's philosophy? This would explain the appeal to "latent" aspects of the idea in previous thinkers and in Rahner himself (ibid.). Another issue, related to the speculative character ofthis work, is the question of the systematization of Rahner's thought. Is Rahner as systematic as Being as Symbol assumes? How are Rahner's own remarks about the unsystematic and occasional character of his writings to be reconciled with this interpretation of his work? Does this speculative appraisal impose an interpretative straightjacket on Rahner-precisely of the sort Rahner opposed in Scholasticism? Whatever the judgment about these and other questions, the speculative interpretation of Being as Symbol recalls the early philosophical appraisals of Rahner's work in terms of both its technical language and its philosophical elegance. It cuts against the grain of most contemporary research, but offers a way of reading Rahner that is internally coherent and consistent. The question, as with any interpretation, is whether it is warranted by the reading of Rahner's texts themselves. Fordham University Bronx, New York MICHAEL G. PARKER The Doctrine of Double Effect: Philosophers Debate a Controversial Moral Principle. Edited by P. A WOODWARD. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. 328. $34.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-268-00896-5 (cloth), 0-268-00897-3 (paper). The principle of double effect (PDE) has a long and rich history. While an account of the distinction between that which is intended in one's act and that which is praeter intentionem can be traced back to Aquinas, the significance of an action having a "double effect" for morality was first formulated as a principle by John of St. Thomas. Although the PDE can be found in the Catholic manuals of moral theology going back four centuries, the heyday for the formulation and application of the principle is in the casuistry of the Catholic manuals of the nineteenth century. The present volume, as indicated in the subtitle, is concerned not with the history and context of the PDE but with the debate over the principle in recent Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The most important impetus for this 150 BOOK REVIEWS discussion arose from a work a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher not primarily addressing the PDE. In her 1957 vvork Intention (and in other essays published shortly thereafter), Elizabeth Anscombe brought a Wittgensteinian sensibility to bear generally on debates in action theory and the philosophy of psychology, and more specifically on understandings and misunderstandings of the PDE. No less a philosopher than Donald Davidson referred to this work as the "most important treatment of action since .Arisrode." Inspiring or at least influencing a generation ofaction theorists who began writing on the topic in the 1960s-from Davidson, Foot, and Searle to Madntyre, Kenny, Grisez, and Donagan-Anscombe reinvigorated discussion of the PDE. Ironically, while Anscombe herself understood that the PDE lay on the periphery of moral theory and moral theology and could only be intelligently addressed if the PDE were seen as such and brought into conversation with questions about the total orientation of a person's life and his possession of various virtues and vices, significant groups of theologians and philosophers have attached (and continue to attach) great weight to the proper "resolution" of the PDE, for the most part independendy of broader questions of moral methodology. On the one hand, a whole moral methodology in moral theology (known as "proporti.onalisrn") was created out of an interpretation of the PDE. While the PDE has not had quite that impact in philosophy, The Doctrine ofDouble Effect: Philosophers Debate a Controversial Moral provides a rich range of examples of its continued appeal among contemporary .Anglo-American analytic moral philosophers. The book is divided into five sections. The first section seeks to present an understanding ofthe principle itself...