Abstract
Joseph Selling rightly defines human intentions and motivations as part of human nature and an important determinant of the morality of personal actions. The thesis of this paper is that Selling’s view of agency, as focused on the individual, must be expanded to include social relationships and the social constitution of selves and communities. This requires cross-cultural dialogue about human nature, the goods for persons and societies, and social ethics.
Highlights
Joseph Selling’s Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics1 is a brilliant recap and culmination of major streams of renewal in Catholic moral theology that flowed from the Second Vatican Council and that were, ironically, given impetus by the 1968 “birth control” encyclical Humanae vitae
Selling’s key point is that the fullness of morality and moral agency cannot be captured by the simple evaluation of physical actions, guided by the “bottom line” of avoiding “intrinsically evil acts”
I totally agree with Selling’s conclusion that condoms should in such cases be an option. This is an example of practical reason, discerning in a specific kind of situation how to prioritize and realize competing goods, such as the marital bond, its sexual expression, children and new life, and the lives and health of the spouses
Summary
Joseph Selling’s Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics is a brilliant recap and culmination of major streams of renewal in Catholic moral theology that flowed from the Second Vatican Council and that were, ironically, given impetus by the 1968 “birth control” encyclical Humanae vitae. In 1980, Selling’s teacher Louis Janssens applied the lens of “the human person integrally and adequately considered” to the problem of artificial insemination, developing a general perspective found in a 1972 article of Karl Rahner, and refuting the pre-conciliar act-based analysis of Franz Hürth (Janssens 1980; Rahner 1972; Hürth 1946).5 This more holistic, agent-centered trajectory follows upon the Enlightenment “turn to the subject”. They become that gift in their masculinity and femininity, discovering the spousal significance of the body and referring it reciprocally to themselves in an irreversible manner—in a life-long dimension (Paul 1983) Those who take issue with the way magisterial teaching after the Council continues to assert more or less the same norms in personalist guise share with their adversaries a more contextual view of moral realities and a more relational view of the agent. Though, let us look more carefully at our 21st century context
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