Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas by Steven Jensen (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 321 pope? Sieben has provided the historical foundation; dogmatic theologians must evaluate the data and answer the remaining questions. JOHN MCDERMOTT, S.J. Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas. By STEVEN JENSEN. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Pp. 324. $35.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1727-7. Steven Jensen explores issues central to the contemporary debate about the proper understanding of Thomas Aquinas on the specification of human acts in their interior and exterior dimensions. He divides his work into seven chapters, dealing with human actions, intention, exterior actions, love of others, difficulties, teleology, and moral species. Human actions, as opposed to acts of a human being, are those actions that are knowingly and willingly performed rather than operations that can be done while unconscious such as circulating blood or growing. Jensen contrasts, in this chapter and throughout the book, two schools of thought in approaching these matters which he calls “physicalism” and “Abelardianism.” A physicalist approach regards the exterior act as able to have a moral species simply in virtue of its material properties considered independently and separately from the will of the acting person. By contrast, the Abelardian approach focuses on the intentions of the acting person which alone gives moral character to the exterior action. The latter approach Jensen associates with such authors as Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, as well as Martin Rhonheimer. Steven Long, Jean Porter, and Kevin Flannery are identified as defenders of the physicalist approach . On Jensen’s view, both physicalism and Abelardianism capture some element of truth but remain defective. In treating intention, Jensen distinguishes what he calls “a broad expansive view, a lean view, and a middle view” (45). In the first approach, all foreseen consequences count as intended, in the second approach only those effects of the action that are desired as an end count as intended, and the third view holds that intention includes both the means and the end though disagreements may arise concerning whether any particular effect is intended as a means or an end. Jensen notes the myriad of difficulties and the various senses and meanings of intention which arise in part from conflicting interpretations of Aquinas (in particular, his treatment of self-defense in STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7) but also from rival intuitions about the moral permissibility of particular actions (such as craniotomy). BOOK REVIEWS 322 In the chapter on exterior actions, Jensen highlights the difference between the exterior action as executed and the exterior action as conceived in the mind of the agent. The exterior action as executed receives its moral character from the intentions of the agent. But the intentions of the agent themselves receive moral character from the exterior act as conceived by the agent. Jensen then considers what it is that specifies the exterior act as conceived. “[T]he exterior action has an order or direction to some natural form, abstracted from its moral character” (78). This order can arise from nature, from a further intention, or from reason, and Jensen thinks that primarily reason gives order to exterior actions as conceived. Reason in turn is not merely active and constructive but also must act in accordance with the realities, including causal links, that constrain the possibilities of human behavior. One cannot travel from Seattle to New York by means of eating popcorn. Jensen writes also that there is a difference between the order that a conceived action in fact has and the order that the action should have. When these two orders are in conflict, then the action is evil. The order of love, the subject of chapter 4, is the order that an action should have, and so actions that are incompatible with this order are morally wrong. The love of friendship seeks the good of the beloved for the beloved’s own sake and refuses to use anyone for the sake of any further end. By contrast, the love of cupidity loves an object but not for the object’s sake, as the man who loves wine loves wine for the sake of his drinking it...