The Perspective of the Acting Person: Essays in the Renewal of Thomistic Moral Philosophy by Martin Rhonheimer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Perspective ofthe Acting Person: Essays in the Renewal ofThomistic Moral Philosophy. By MARTIN RHONHEIMER, edited with an introduction by WILLIAM F. MURPHY, ]R. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Pp. xxxix + 329. $39.95 (paper). ISBN978-0-81321511 -2. This book collects ten essays by Martin Rhonheimer on moral philosophy, some of which are published for the first time in English. The essays center on two major topics: the moral object and natural law. Rhonheimer's main points of reference in this book are Thomas Aquinas and the encyclical Veritatis Splendor. The book contains an excellent introduction in which the editor, William Murphy, Jr., recounts Rhonheimer's intellectual biography, provides a summary of his major books, and gives a concise and useful introduction to each essay. Towards the end of the review I will discuss an aspect of Rhonheimer's account of natural law. But for the most part I will concentrate on the topic of the moral object, with regard to which Rhonheimer has recently sparked a lively debate. He presents the most comprehensive account of the moral object in the eighth essay of this book, "The Perspective of the Acting Person and the Nature of Practical Reason: The 'Object of the Human Act' in Thomistic Anthropology of Action," originally published in 2004 in the journal Nova et Vetera, English edition. (N.B. The first issue of the 2008 volume of Nova et Vetera is almost entirely dedicated to the discussion of this essay.) Rhonheimer has the merit, in fact, of raising a number of important questions regarding Aquinas's account of the moral object. The debate ignited by these questions promises to provide us with a better understanding of a fundamental topic in Aquinas's ethics-Qne that is among the most difficult of his teachings, from both the exegetical and the philosophical point of view. What is philosophically at stake in the topic of the moral object? The moral object defines the intelligibility or essence of an intentional action. In other words, the moral object establishes an action within a given species in the moral order: "this homicide is murder," or "this homicide is a judicial execution." Apart from its intentional dimension, an action is merely a natural event. As a purely natural event, it is described according to its natural characteristics and possesses a natural species, such as death that occurs by a falling rock. From the 661 662 BOOK REVIEWS natural perspective, it does not matter whether the rock fell down by itself, or was kicked off by accident, or was dropped intentionally. From the moral perspective (which is the "perspective of the acting person" [VS 78]), the way in which an act is achieved is of course crucial. The same natural kind of action might in fact be done by accident or intentionally, and in the latter case, either for a good or bad motive. A judge might order that someone be executed either for the sake of justice or to appease his anger (see STh I-II, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3). Moral specifications do not necessarily line up with natural specifications. Two acts might share the same natural characteristics but be of different moral species; conversely, two acts might be morally equivalent but differ in natural species. Thus what belongs naturally speaking to the same kind of homicide might be either an act of justice or injustice, and what is morally speaking the same kind of homicide might happen either by strangling, stoning, or stabbing (see STh I-II, q. 72, a. 6). What is at issue here is not classification for its own sake, but the moral evaluation of actions. In fact, moral specification, that is, describing an act as being of such and such a moral character, means above all to specify the act as good or bad (see STh I-II, q. 18, a. 5). Up to this point, there is nothing controversial. Disagreement, however, surfaces when one attempts to articulate the factors that determine the moral object. In the second, third, and fourth essays, Rhonheimer discusses proportionalist theories, according to which the moral object is seen as an "expanded object...