The Boundaries and Authority of Catholic Social Teaching: A Reply to John Finnis

Abstract

This article submits that getting clearer on the complexity of practical reasoning is crucial for clarifying the relationship between Catholic social teaching (CST) and what is commonly understood as Catholic moral teaching. It engages as its principal interlocutor the philosopher and legal theorist John Finnis, who contributed three chapters to the recent, monumental Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays. It is argued that practical reasoning is more complex than Finnis allows and accordingly that a hard distinction between “authoritative moral teachings” and “matters of prudential judgment” cannot be sustained. Against Finnis’s deflationary view of the authority of CST, reducing it to a set of principles of indeterminate application, the paper concludes by proposing that there is no one, overarching answer to the question of the authority of CST for the faithful Catholic. Instead, different social teachings, on diverse topics (e.g., the rights of labor), will be found and come to have varying authority as the faithful receive, examine, and prayerfully consider them.