Toward a Moral Theology of Social Consciousness

Abstract

AbstractA certain “rugged individualism,” characterizing classical Catholic moral theology, can be traced to theology's defining love according to the model of appetite. This model of love, in turn, is part and parcel of the prepersonalistic, static “faculty psychology” that logically and inevitably flows from the Aristotelian, substance-accidents worldview. To overcome classical individualism in principle and to become solidly established as a socially conscious science, moral theology must operate from a new understanding of love—love understood according to the model of freedom.