Moral Functioning Research Articles

Right Reason in Contemporary Ethics

RIGHT REASON IN CONTEMPORARY ETIDCS 0 NE OF THE MOST important themes in the practical thinking of Thomas Aquinas is rectaratio. It seems to me to bemuch more central in Thomistic ethics than the concept of naturallaw.1 Following a brief outline of what right reason meant to Aquinas, I propose to examine three typically contemporary approaches to ethical reasoning m order to suggest their relations to Thomistic right reason. Aquinas on Right Reason One of the best works to read, so as to get some appreciation of what St. Thomas was really doing in his ethics, is his Disputed Questions on the Virtues in General.2 What we find there is a self-perfectionist theory of the good life for man. The first five articles analyze man in terms of a highly developed moral psychology. Four operative powers (not faculties) in man are regarded as capable of moral perfection: the possible intellect (roughly, the understanding in Lockean terms), will (that is, intellectual appetite) , irascible sensory appetite, and concupiscible sensory appetite. Each of these four psychic powers is considered to be a passive operative potency-as distinguished from an active operative potency (such as the agent intellect or the cognitive sense powers). Active potencies are not improved by use; they are initially as perfect as they ever will be; such active potencies are faculties. However, passive operative powers are metaphysically imperfect in their original state and their use brings an added ability (habitus, habilitas) to their 1 See my History of Ethics (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 97-99; also my forthcoming article: "Is Aquinas a Natural-Law Ethicist?" in The Monist (1974). 2 De virtutibus in communi (in Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. II, Turin: Marietti, 1953). The Virtues ( in General), trans. with introduction and notes by John Patrick Reid, 0. P. (Providence: Providence College Press, 1951). 106 RIGHT REASON IN CONTEMPORARY ETHICS 107 original power. Hence their initial state of potency is open to development into the condition known as virtus, that is, the state of a fully perfected operative power of man.3 Emphasis must be placed on Thomas's view that the process of moral self-perfecting is not exclusively a volitional event but is a fourfold personal development. With all due respect for the unity of human consciousness, and for the fact that man and not his powers is the real moral agent, Aquinas insists that there are four different powers directly involved in the growth of moral character. Virtue is not simply a matter of training the will. The possible intellect is perfected by the virtue of prudence; intellectual appetite (will) is perfected by justice (and in the supernatural order by charity); irascible appetite is perfected by fortitude; and concupiscible appetite is perfected by temperance. Will, of course, is involved in all moral actions -but so is intellect, as used in the process of practical reasoning and in the making of practical judgments.4 Each of the four moral potencies is born in a state of imperfection , with an inborn inclination toward some specific perfection . Through his intellect man desires true knowledge (both speculative and practical), through his will he desires the good-in-general as presented by intellectual cognition, through irascible appetite he desires the sensory good of security from dangers, and through concupiscible appetite he desires sensory pleasures. These innate human inclinations may be perfected either in the direction of virtue or of vice. Virtue is both a metaphysical and a moral perfectant; vice is only a metaphysical perfectant. What distinguishes the virtuous habit, for St. Thomas, is its agreement with reason. Man is marked by rationality as his specific difference: to become a morally perfected human being is to develop all four moral powers in accord with right reason. This is how he explains the moral function of right reason: 8 Cf. G. P. Klubertanz, Habits and Virtues (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts , 1965); and my essay: "Habitus in the Thomistic Metaphysics of Potency and Act," in Essays in Thomism, ed. R. E. Brennan, 0. P. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), pp. 101-109. 'De virtutibus in communi, a. 5, c. 108 VERNON J. :SOURKE The good for anything whatever consists in the...

The Moral Function of Distortion in Southern Grotesque

The Moral Function of Distortion in Southern Grotesque

Satires

The title is uncertain. Horace usessaturagenerically in ii. 1. 1 andsaturaein ii. 6. 17, but elsewhere he uses the wordsermones, which Porphyrio asserts was the title of the work. This name best reflects the conversational style and structure.The Greek background to theSatiresHorace expressed when he described them asBionei sermones (Epist.ii. 2. 60); Bion of Borysthenes was one of a number of third-century ‘philosophers’ whose ideas were disseminated in moralizing sermons. But no Greek lay behind theSatiresas Archilochus lay behind theEpodes:their model was Lucilius, and Horace treated the relationship in three of theSatires. In each he uses the concept of an attack on himself as a framework in which to express his ideas. In i. 4 he defends the aggressiveness of satire by reference to Lucilius (whose style he criticizes) and asserts a general social and moral function for satire; the latter he illustrates by the analogy of his own father’s moral instruction (this gives a deeply personal touch to the satire). In i. 10 he uses supposed criticism of his own stylistic criticism of Lucilius as a framework for discussing his

ETHIEK IN NOORDWIJKERHOUT

SUMMARY Only a few basic tendencies were pointed out. Regarding the fundamental question as to the relation between faith and morality, it was stated that, perhaps partly due to a certain powerlessness to discuss the real questions of faith, the fact arose again and again that moral questions provided the high points of discussion. This indicated the great concern with actually making faith authentic, but also, the tendency still to be overcome, of placing faith at the service of morality, even making it a function of morality as moral obligation. The sensitivity for the moral expressed in turn the central role played by the problem of authority and conscience. This was especially true of the project reports and the discussions concerning „conceptions and experience of authority”, „the moral attitude toward life and the modern world”, and marriage and the family”. The second project report even develops a theological vision regarding the autonomy of man in the creation of ethos as core of culture. The moral order arises as a reality of the interior world based on „human creativity in virtue of God's grace”. No norm is absolute, except love, which as a reality of the spirit, is more than norm. The realization therefore, central to Noordwijkerhout was „the value of the human person”. Innumerable threats to it in the modern world were pointed out, and many tasks and concrete norms were formulated for this. Alongside this there occurs a onesided over accentuation of macro-ethics, while at the same time, moreover, this macro-ethics remained fragmentary and insufficiently synthesized. In addition, it was striking that the ethical insights were mainly sought in a dialectic, on the one hand of the inspirational ground of the Gospel-ideal and on the other, the concrete experience of existence in its entire changing and situation-bound pluriformity. Thanks to attempts toward a synthesis of „reality” and „truth” the result was not a situation ethic. Noordwijkerhout sought rather freedom and deliverance in all instances, but the quesion remains open whether it did not seek too much in ethical terms to find the joy faith brings from the „freedom of the children of God”.

The Moral Function of “Immoral” Theatre

The Moral Function of “Immoral” Theatre

The Nature and Functions of Official Morality

Residents of The Village, a small Kansas community, drink in private but support a temperance morality in public. This public, official morality is first examined as a collective reality and is then used to develop a functional hypothesis which test the relevance of this kind of phenomenon for the systems in which it occurs.

Horace and the Moral Function of Poetry

The modern admirers of Horace who take him seriously as a moralist are inclined to attribute an undue degree of originality to his views on the moral function of poetry. The conception of the poet as teacher was, of course, the traditional Greek view. But Professor A. Y. Campbell thinks—in spite of ‘passages from Strabo and Plutarch’ —that this conception ‘after the days of Plato and Aristophanes lapsed as completely as did the production of the sort of literature that had justified it.’ Strabo and Plutarch, he asserts, merely provide evidence that the older Greek view revived; the forces inspiring this ‘revival’ were ‘not Greek, but Roman.’ ‘The Greeks got it from the Romans, Strabo from the spirit of the Augustan age.’