The perspective of the acting person: essays in the renewal of thomistic moral philosophy

2. Norm-Ethics, Moral Rationality, and the Virtues: What’s Wrong with Consequentialism?

2 Norm-Ethics, Moral Rationality, and the Virtues What’s Wrong with Consequentialism? The Quest for Truth and Moral Rationality According to a conviction that I share with many others, morality is accessible to a rational discourse, and offering a clear understanding of this basis is essential for both Christian ethics and moral theology. I wish to add that this is properly the task of the philosopher, whose work is presupposed by the moral theologian, and integrated into his work. Philosophical ethics has its proper methodology1 and its own sources of intelligibility which are not in competition with the theologian’s work; however , it will come to results which are not accessible to an exclusively theological method. Philosophy, even if it is understood as ancilla theologiae, has its own grounds and justification. So, given that human reason, to be fully reasonable and to attain truth in its integrity, needs the assistance of faith, one should not overlook that faith and theology, too, need reason’s proper work and assistance. Otherwise, theology would risk becoming either a sort of “revelation-positivism” or a rationally uncontrolled discourse which would be anything but genuine scientific knowledge. 18 1. Cf. Martin Rhonheimer, La prospettiva della morale. Fondamenti dell’etica filosofica (Rome: Armando, 1994). There existed formerly a tendency toward what I have labeled “revelationpositivism .” It is, in the case of morals, the so-called “legalistic” position which gives to revealed moral standards the status of “moral rules” (“norms”) and thus totally determines or even replaces the insight into the essence of morality . Therefore, it is not able to give evidence for the proposed “moral norms” in terms of human goods, actions, and choices to which they refer. Even the very term “moral norm” turned out to be unclear. This tendency led to no problems as long as basic moral norms were not put into doubt, that is, as long as there existed a general social acceptance of these norms, so that dissenting from Christian ethics was equal to dissenting from generally accepted moral standards. Today, however, this is no longer the case. What formerly was dissent from moral standards is, in our day, generally accepted and lived. Today those who are really the dissenters are precisely the Church’s Magisterium and those who follow it. The so-called “dissenting” or “revisionist” theologian is, in reality, the one who does what theologians in the past usually did: he identifies himself with the moral standards generally accepted and held as reasonable. He even asserts—and this is new—that the very generality of acceptance and practice of these standards forms part of their rationality. So, the moralist dissenting from the Church’s teaching holds his position in the name of humanity, progress, and rationality . However, this is the question: which moral standards can claim for themselves to correspond to the rationality involved in every truth, including the truth of revealed morality? The question of truth, however, which is the capital and fundamental question for the moral philosopher and the moral theologian, does not seem to be the question that concerns present-day moralists. They have, as they say, primarily “pastoral concerns.” They want people to be well-off and happy. And they strive to convince people that Christianity, rightly understood, is something that indeed makes people well-off and happy. This desire of theirs is entirely legitimate. But by opposing pastoral concerns to the quest for truth, one makes a pivotal move: one implicitly maintains that the issue of happiness is not an issue of truth. The Essential Moral Question This, in any case, was not the classic view of moral philosophy. The Greek philosophers were convinced that the question about happiness was the question about what man reasonably—and that means: according to truth—may norm-ethics, moral rationality, & the virtues 19 desire for its own sake and as his ultimate fulfillment. So “good action” (eupraxia ) was intimately bound up with what Aristotle called “practical truth”: the congruence of particular choices with right desire. Having abandoned the quest for “truth,” moral theory, with all its pastoral concerns, has instead found a new rationality: the one implied in every sort of proportionalism or consequentialism. This is rationality, but it is not, I would argue, the rationality of moral decision making. It rather belongs to what we may call the rationality of poiesis, that is, of technical decision making , of “making a better world.”2 The...