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was willing to allow the alcoholic’s conscience to serve as the judge of his or her responsibility for becoming an alcoholic. Ironically, in the case of contraception, where the severe impairment of reason was not the main issue, Ford was less willing to allow the individual conscience to serve as the final arbiter in assessing personal responsibility for the use of contraception. This was because there was already a body of authoritative teaching on contraception that required religious assent from the faithful. In the contraception case, Ford insisted that it was the magisterium that sets the criterion for judging the morality of the use of contraception. For individual cases of contraception , Ford refused to allow couples to make their own conscientious decision regarding contraceptive use. Yet he still saw the pastoral possibility of considering factors that might limit the subjective culpability of contraceptive use in some cases.65 The Case of Chemical Comforters Another case where Ford respected the prudential judgment of affected individuals was the case of the use of chemical comforters. Ford had proposed a new virtue, pharmacosophrosyne, to help persons find the proper balance in using drugs that lessened pain as well as altered mood and disposition. Although Ford was aware of the dangers of addiction and adverse physical effects that could result from the abusive use of chemical comforters, Ford believed that the ordinary person was capable of making reasonable and prudent decisions in the use of these comforters . He left it to individuals to make responsible use of these potentially addictive and dangerous substances. “This is a highly personalized exercise of judgment,” he wrote. “A man must use his own reason to settle his own case. He must study the scientific facts, look around him, compare and evaluate, select and reject, in this matter as in any other if he wants to find the permissible course, the wiser course, the more perfect course for himself. No one can do it for him. He cannot even do it for himself without the enlightenment of God’s grace.”66 In this case, Ford exercised his role as a moral theologian in a manner much like that of the postconversion Fuchs in the Majority Report. Rather than give concrete directives about what drugs to avoid or what specific drug intakes were allowable, Ford simply gave a general criterion to guide persons in their choice and use of chemical comforters. John Ford and Josef Fuchs 151 In the use of such substances, where there was a wide range of options between what was considered safe usage and what was considered harmful, Ford did not want to impose rigid universal norms to prevent persons from developing addictions. Knowing that different persons respond differently to the same substance, Ford allowed the person involved to make the prudential judgment about the appropriate use of chemical comforters. “In matters of this kind one must be careful about imposing strict moral obligations on the whole community and on each individual within it on the basis of the statistically calculated danger of what may take place in the far distant future.”67 Similarly, Ford also did not want to impose on persons any strict norm regarding how they should avoid chemical comforters for the sake of mortification and growth in holiness. “That is why we leave so much to the liberty of the individual in his choice of appropriate objects of mortification. It does not help people grow in holiness to insist on uniform measures of renunciation which are too heroic for them.”68 The difference between Ford’s trust in individual moral discernment in the case of chemical comforters and his insistence on strict adherence to established norms in the contraceptives case is not based on a difference in Ford’s perception of the moral competence of two different groups of people. It is not the case that Ford saw drug users and recovering alcoholics to be more responsible and trustworthy moral agents than faithful and well-formed married couples. The difference between Ford’s positions in the cases of chemical comforters and contraceptives is rooted in Ford’s view of the moral nature of two different acts. Ford saw the use of chemical comforters as morally neutral and not strictly regulated by church law while he considered every act of artificial contraception as a violation of natural law condemned by the Church as intrinsically evil. He could therefore allow the use of comforting substances within the boundaries of moderation, while he would...

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