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A DEFENSE OF PHYSICALISM STEVEN J. JENSEN University ofMary Bismarck, North Dakota THE CHARGE OF PHYSICALISM is often made in discussions of sexual ethics. Some people, so the accusation runs, mistakenly explain the evil of certain sexual actions, contraception in particular, in merely physical terms, while ignoring the truly human element of actions, that element essential to all moral good and evil, namely, the will. But physicalism , while especially rampant in sexual ethics, is not confined to it. It is an ailment that can afflict an entire moral outlook. And, like any affliction, philosophers hope to avoid it, making sure that they themselves are not physicalists. It seems to me that perhaps physicalism should be defended. The problem is that the accusation seems to have as many senses as there are accusers. I am forced, therefore, to settle upon a definition of physicalism with which not everyone will agree, and perhaps I will end up with a defense not of physicalism but of a physicalist look alike.1 Physicalism, then, according to my designation , claims that the moral good or evil of an action can be determined merely by its physical features, physical features being contrasted to acts of the will. My precise definition of physicalism will involve Aquinas's distinction between exterior and interior actions within one human action. When someone opens a door, for example, he has the interior action of choosing 1 I will not focus upon natures, functions, and teleology, elements that are often seen as essential to physicalism (see Charles Curran, 1Yansitions and 1Yaditions in Moral Theology [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979], 31), although teleology is implied in my account. 377 378 STEVEN J. JENSEN to open the door and the exterior action of physically opening the door. Concerning the relationship between these two actions, there are two general approaches. According to the first, the exterior action has its own moral good and evil, by its very nature, and it bestows this moral character upon the will. The exterior action of killing an innocent human being, for example, is evil by its very self. On account of this evil, the will becomes evil, so that the interior act of intending to kill an innocent human being is evil only because the exterior act of killing is first of all evil. The second account is exactly opposed. The exterior action has no moral good or evil of its own but receives its moral character from the will, which is itself inherently good or evil. What matters in the act of murder is not so much the physical activity performed as the evil intention of the agent.2 Now physicalism is the view that an action takes its moral character from its physical features, apart from the good or evil of the will. Put in terms of the interior and exterior actions, physicalism is the view that the exterior action has a moral character in itself, by the very nature of its physical features, and that acts of the will receive their good or evil from the exterior action. The opposite view I will call Abelardianism, for the common counter-accusation to physicalism often brings in Peter Abelard. In this paper I do not exactly wish to defend physicalism, to show that physicalism is true in the very nature of things; I want only to show that Aquinas thought it was. In other words, I hope to show that Aquinas was a physicalist. When we move the debate into the arena of the philosophy of Aquinas, it takes on the nature of a disagreement over what Aquinas calls "the specification of human actions." According to Aquinas human actions are good or evil in their very species or essence. Physicalists claim that this moral specification moves from the exterior act to the interior while Abelardians claim that it moves from the interior to the exterior. For example, the physi2 Thomas D. Sullivan, "Active and Passive Euthanasia: An Impertinent Distinction?" in Killing and Letting Die, 2d ed, ed. Bonnie Steinbock and Alastair Norcross (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 131-38. A DEFENSE OF PHYSICALISM 379 calists claim that the exterior action of killing is...

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