Moral Theology Research Articles

An Introduction to the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

This introduction is intended to orient the reader of the Journal of Moral Theology special issue on artificial intelligence in several ways. First, it offers a primer on the terminology and concepts of necessary to begin to understand the field of artificial intelligence. Second, it provides a general overview of many of the ethical issues that have arisen as a result of the development of artificial intelligence. Finally, it offers an outline of the general structure of the issue that follows.

Beyond Transcendence and Immanence: The Moral Theology of Mordecai Kaplan and Hermann Cohen

In this essay, I seek to highlight the continuities between Mordecai Kaplan’s and Hermann Cohen’s theological projects in order to better facilitate the incorporation of Kaplan’s theology—and that of his successors—into the broader field of modern Jewish thought, as well as to better position Jewish thought to respond to currents in academic theology beyond Jewish Studies. I begin by examining Kaplan’s reading of Cohen’s Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums in his The Purpose and Meaning of Jewish Existence. Claiming that Cohen’s posthumous work anticipates Kaplan’s own functionalist rationalism, Kaplan recasts Cohen’s project in immanent theological terms. Next, I argue that despite Kaplan’s attention to Cohen’s posthumous opus, the affinities between his thought and Cohen’s are more readily apparent with regard to Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens, where God functions to secure the compatibility of morality and nature. I then turn to Kaplan’s The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion in order draw attention to significant affinities between Kaplan’s and Cohen’s respective theologies. Both Kaplan and Cohen turn to a notion of God to secure the integrity of morality in the face of the ascendance of naturalism. However, where Cohen fears that configuring God in immanent terms threatens the integrity of morality by subsuming it into nature, Kaplan hopes that it will provide the basis for a more expansive sense of naturalism, one capacious enough to accommodate morality and spirituality.

The deep roots of Anglican moral theology

The deep roots of Anglican moral theology

Doing the Truth: The Life and Religious Vision of Enda McDonagh

Doing the Truth:The Life and Religious Vision of Enda McDonagh Linda F. Hogan (bio) Keywords Enda McDonagh, moral theology, St Patrick's College, Maynooth, Second Vatican Council, George Steiner, social ethics, ecumenism, New Ireland Forum, Garret Fitzgerald, non-violence, Humanae Vitae With the passing of Enda McDonagh in February 2021 Ireland lost one of its most original and important theologians. The second half of the twentieth century saw a flowering of theological creativity in Ireland, as around the world, and in this context Enda's brilliance shone through. His impact on the Irish theological landscape was profound, and his distinctive voice brought him international acclaim. Nor was his impact in Ireland and internationally confined to the worlds of theology and church. Rather, his wisdom was sought by politicians and diplomats, by business leaders, humanitarians and artists who recognised what the late Vincent MacNamara noted as his 'talent for humanity'.1 Each book, each essay, each lecture conveyed the greatness of his intellect, the subtlety of his vision and the depth of his compassion. He lived, ministered, taught and wrote through an incarnational lens that shaped his life and work. Born in Bekan, County Mayo in 1930 to school-teacher parents, Enda studied at St Jarlath's College, Tuam and entered St Patrick's College, Maynooth in 1948, where he was ordained to the priesthood in 1955. At Maynooth he took a BSc, BD, and STL, followed by a DD in 1957. Following his degrees in Maynooth he studied at the Angelicum University in Rome and at the University of Munich. At Munich he completed a second doctorate in Canon Law (DCL), its subject being church–state relations in the Irish constitution. He had already been appointed as Professor of Moral Theology and Canon Law at St Patrick's College, Maynooth in 1958 when he was just twenty-eight years old – an indication that the leadership at Maynooth had recognised his intellectual brilliance and future promise. Apart from occasional short-term appointments at the University of Notre Dame (1979–82) and St John's University New York (1990) as well as time spent in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) (regularly between 1973 and 1978) on behalf of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, his career and retirement were mainly spent in Maynooth. Yet this rootedness in Maynooth belied an extraordinarily [End Page 26] cosmopolitan life and global orientation. He retired from the Faculty of Theology in 1995 and continued to write, teach, advise and advocate on behalf of those who are vulnerable until his death on 24 February 2021. Enda's vision was deeply religious and incarnational. Even in his earliest writings, such as his 1964 essays 'Moral Theology: The Need for Renewal'2 and 'The Primacy of Charity'3, Enda was laying out a new vision for moral theology embedded in the gospel values of freedom, justice, peace and truth. These early writings show how deeply rooted and personal Enda's vision was. Indeed, although his vision chimed with the renewal of moral theology that was catalysed by the Second Vatican Council, one can see from these early writings that Enda drew mainly from his own moral sensibility to develop his distinctive theology of morality. Of course, he was influenced by the writings of moral theologians like Bernard Häring, Josef Fuchs, Franz Bökle and Gerard Gillemann, who were beginning to develop a more biblically based, virtue-oriented language to speak about Christian morality. He was also influenced by the spirit of renewal that was animating the church, including some parts of the Irish church, but from the beginning Enda's theological voice was unique and wholly his own. Moreover, even as his theological voice and vision developed over the decades its essential character was evident in his earliest writings. Two festshcriften, Between Poetry and Politics4 and Beauty, Truth and Love5, honour Enda's contribution to theology, church and society and develop different dimensions of his preoccupations as a theologian. In these volumes distinguished theologian friends including Charles Curran, Gabriel Daly, Sean Freyne, Raphael Gallagher, Stanley Hauerwas, Patrick Hannon, James Keenan, Nicholas Lash, Vincent MacNamara, Terence McCaughey, James P. Mackey, Joseph O' Leary and Geraldine Smyth reflect on...

Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. Anderson

Reviewed by: Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Justin M. Anderson David Elliot Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. By Justin M. Anderson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 341. $99.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-1-108-48518-0. Struck by the unique way he combines comprehensive genius and judicious balance with an air of serene detachment, many regard St. Thomas Aquinas as such a complete thinker that the idea of him repeatedly changing his mind can seem outlandish. While it is not controversial to say that his thought developed from his early to his later works, few could imagine him writing a book like St. Augustine’s Retractations, or would suggest that Thomism would have taken some radically different shape had he lived a decade longer. His mature works come across not as brilliant detours but as fully ripened conclusions, making the notion of an incessantly “evolving” Aquinas seem deeply eccentric. At the same time, there were a few periods—such as his fruitful stay at Orvieto and then Rome in the 1260s—where Aquinas made remarkable discoveries and changed course in important ways. Recognition of this is sometimes traced to the twentieth century, but already in the 1440s John Capreolus (the “Prince of Thomists”) noted major shifts in Aquinas’s teaching on grace after his earlier Scriptum on the Sentences, as did Cardinal Cajetan and the Salamancan Dominic de Soto a century later. For Capreolus the Summa theologiae was a kind of understated Retractations in that Aquinas fully “moved back from the Pelagian error” which his contemporaries and his own earlier Scriptum did not completely root out. On this view, it is to the late Aquinas that we owe a fully adequate doctrine of grace from which the theological and infused cardinal virtues flow. In this excellent book, Justin Anderson takes up the role of a latter-day Capreolus, pushing firmly against any current trends toward a “Thomistic Pelagianism” (169). He argues that Aquinas’s theology of virtue and grace underwent “titanic developments” that led him to stress themes such as the moral necessity of grace and the damaging effects of sin in ever more refined and emphatic ways. This argument is substantially correct and vast in its implications, but Anderson holds that these shifts have yet fully to impact Thomistic moral theology, like a detonation that has flashed on the horizon but whose fallout has yet to land. The book seeks to trace the fallout, showing how Aquinas’s mature teaching on grace and sin pulled his virtue theory in ever more Augustinian and Pauline directions, yet without forfeiting core Aristotelian [End Page 299] commitments. The book also joins this stress on Christian particularity with a quite different effort to affirm the category of “pagan virtue” on very generous terms. It is by turns an in-depth exegesis of Aquinas’s texts, an historical examination of the hundred years preceding, and an attempt to shift the conversation in Thomistic virtue scholarship toward the moral consequences of Aquinas’s later teaching on grace. It is an engaging story that in some ways could have been better told, but there is no doubting its importance. The first chapter gives a general outline of Thomistic virtues as habits perfective of human powers. Anderson distinguishes virtues based on their causes and ends, and as bundled into cardinal and theological, acquired and infused, and other familiar clusters. The second examines Aquinas’s exact vocabulary of virtue to describe its many meanings and analogous senses. The most important concern virtue simpliciter or “without qualification,” and virtue secundum quid or in a “qualified sense.” Gratuitous or infused virtue, which directs us to our ultimate end, is virtue simpliciter (61). By contrast, connatural or acquired virtue falls short of that end, and yet its level of perfection does qualify it as virtue secundum quid. It can be said that the full definition of virtue (simpliciter) is theological while leaving space for “pagan virtue” in a secondary sense (secundum quid). But it is from the third chapter onward that the really significant achievement of this book emerges. Anderson gives a detailed study of how the...

From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume. By Tim Stuart-Buttle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 277p. $82.00 cloth.

From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume. By Tim Stuart-Buttle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 277p. $82.00 cloth.

Moral theology and the historian’s conscience: is there a license to besmirch?

ABSTRACT This article examines how Catholic moral theologians analysed the constraints imposed by the rights of the dead to their good name on historical writing and research. The concern of Catholic moral theologians for persons’ rights to their good name coupled with their concern for the rights of dead persons placed serious moral constraints on the work of historians. At the same time, from very early on, these moral theologians showed appreciation of the benefits of historical writing, including writing on the less public aspects of historical figures. The general tendency was to allow historians some moral elbow room. There was, however, a clear red line: what was and had always been secret could not be revealed, regardless of the benefits. By the end of the nineteenth century, the authors of the casuist manualists revised the traditional doctrine and removed the moral red line that had been accepted until then. Historians could now reveal what had always been secret. This doctrinal development was the result of two historical events: the opening of the Vatican Archives and allowing propagandists and journalists within politically organized Catholic conservatism to fight as equals in the printed media.

Computational Topic Models for Theological Investigations

ABSTRACT Sallie McFague’s theological models construct a tensive relationship between conceptual structures and symbolic, metaphorical language to interpret the defining and elusive aspects of theological phenomena and loci. Computational models of language can extend and formalize the conceptual structures of theological models to develop computer-augmented interpretations of theological texts. Previously unclear is whether computational models can retain the tensive symbolism essential for theological investigation. I demonstrate affirmatively by constructing a computational topic model of the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas from Summa Theologica (Second Part, in English translation) useful for interpreting not only the Thomistic text but also recent papal encyclicals.

The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology, MatthewLevering, Eerdmans, 2021 (ISBN 978‐0‐8082‐7950‐9), viii + 360 pp., hb $45

The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology, MatthewLevering, Eerdmans, 2021 (ISBN 978‐0‐8082‐7950‐9), viii + 360 pp., hb $45

The influence of moral principles on the formation of a healthy family according to blessed father Michał Sopoćko

The article is based on the doctoral thesis of blessed father Michał Sopoćko: “The family in the legislation on Polish soil. Ethical and moral study ”, which he defended in Vilnius in 1926. The Author dedicated his work to the legislators who were working on creating the state legislation in Poland after regaining independence after 123 years of partitions, in order to unify the family law which was diversed in various partitions. This dissertation presents the moral aspects concerning the family discussed by Father Michał Sopoćko with regard to the contemporary social norms. The article is divided into 3 chapters: 1. The general concept and position oft he family in moral theology; 2. The mutual relations of the spouses; 3. Relations between parents and children Chapter 1. presents the basic role of the natural law, reference to the conscience and property law. Chapter 2 is focused on marital relations, among which the most important one is the integrity of the marital union, next there is a debate on the mutual life as a relation of two people of equal dignity with the variety of tasks and the property relations. Chapter 3 is a reference to the tasks which are connected with the childcare. It contains information about education, material security and the duties of parents and children and about the problems connected with divorces and maintaining illegitimate children. The article emphasises the importance, validity and contribution of Father Michał Sopoćko to establishing legislation which concerns the family in the independent Poland.

Sixty Years of Moral Theology. Readings in Moral Theology, No. 20

Sixty Years of Moral Theology. Readings in Moral Theology, No. 20

Moralists as Historians: Papal Authority, Humanae Vitae, and Defining Catholic Moral Theology in the United States

The twentieth century was a time of enormous change in Catholic moral theology. The move from seminary to university helped end the use of the manuals that priests used to judge moral matters and inform their response to confessions. Though steeped in the manualist tradition, John C. Ford and Gerald Kelly, seminary professors in the 1950s and 1960s, recognized deficiencies with Catholic moral theology but feared that those seeking to correct the problems would ultimately remove moral theology's defining characteristics, especially the role of papal authority. A historiographical analysis of the works by contemporary moral theologians John Mahoney, Charles E. Curran, and James F. Keenan demonstrates that Ford and Kelly's concerns were well-founded. The historical assessments these three scholars provide are remarkable for their first-hand accounts and knowledge of moral issues. Inversely, their weakness is the subjectivity of their analyses. In considering papal authority in relation to the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae, this article demonstrates how the three authors' historical perspectives necessitated altering the definition of Catholic moral theology. While Ford and Kelly believed that Catholic moral theology without papal authority could only be considered Christian ethics, later moral theologians preferred a discipline without an explicitly Catholic basis.

Jansenism and England: Moral Rigorism across the Confessions

Jansenism and England: Moral Rigorism across the Confessions

Matthew Levering, The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Moral Theology

Matthew Levering, The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Moral Theology

Economics and the Moral Theology of Mutual Benefits

Economics and the Moral Theology of Mutual Benefits

Tim Stuart-Buttle. From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 288. $77.00 (cloth).

Tim Stuart-Buttle. From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 288. $77.00 (cloth).

Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R.: America's Moral Barometer

Often unappreciated by scholars, the Redemptorist Francis J. Connell (1888–1967) significantly contributed to moral theology in the twentieth century and was a key figure in the Church's encounter with modernity. This article places his life and work in a broad context, including the manualist tradition and the thought of St. Alphonsus Liguori, both in which he was formed. In his effort between the 1920s and 1960s to enable a sound and orthodox basis for Catholic teaching on numerous questions, Connell's legacy is hardly negligible. Having taught hundreds of priest-students and influenced thousands more by letter or through his numerous publications, he helped set the tone for Catholic moral thought prior to the Second Vatican Council. An analysis of his life and writings offers a nuanced understanding of the man rather than viewing him only as a conservative moralist. In the classroom, in print, and through radio and television, Connell helped shape Catholic thinking on notions of rights, medical ethics, religious liberty, and the modern state, as well as approaches to American culture's more esoteric aspects such as the morality of smoking or boxing.

Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality by Michael J. McGrath

Reviewed by: Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality by Michael J. McGrath James Nemiroff McGrath, Michael J. Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality. Purdue UP, 2020. Pp. 189. ISBN 978-1-55753-899-4. During the past century, Don Quixote has been analyzed from a variety of critical approaches, whether it be from the perspective of theories of the novel, how the novel dialogues with other disciplines, such as visual art or political philosophy, or, more basically, whether Cervantes’s novel exaggerates Catholicism or is informed by it. In Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality, Michael J. McGrath tackles this third question and argues that Don Quixote is a novel inherently informed by the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy (5). McGrath’s goal in his study is “to reclaim Cervantes’[s] Catholicity from the interpretative tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel” (5). McGrath’s study is divided into six chapters. Chapters 1–2 provide historical and critical context for the literary analyses he will pursue in chapters 3–6. Chapter 1 focuses on how Cervantes’s life experiences and intellectual upbringing informed not only his spirituality but also his literary works. For example, McGrath mentions how his allegiance to the Holy League, his fighting in the Battle of Lepanto and subsequent imprisonment in Algiers exposed Cervantes to a variety of cultures and religious traditions that helped inform his early dramatic works (namely El trato de Argel). Moreover, McGrath discusses how his formal education in the works of St. Ignatius of Loyola and Santa Teresa de Avila can help critics understand both Don Quixote’s journey, insofar as the knight imitates the life of St. Ignatius, but also his literary references. Beyond simply being a satire of various genres popular during the Early Modern Period, McGrath [End Page 145] contends that Don Quixote’s readings are indeed acts of contemplative prayer, which evoke mental images or mental symbols (27). Using the conceptual vocabulary of St. Ignatius, McGrath contends that Don Quixote can be read as a manual of Cervantine spirituality that privileges Ignatian spiritual practices over Erasmian Christian Humanism. However, before exploring the different spiritual elements in Cervantes’s novel, McGrath contextualizes his study further in chapter 2 by discussing Erasmus’s impact on Jesuit spirituality, and in so doing responds to the classic Erasmian readings of Don Quixote offered by Américo Castro and Marcel Bataillon. In chapters 3–6, McGrath analyzes both parts of Don Quixote from this Catholic lens attempting to see to what degree Don Quixote mirrors Cervantes’s Catholic upbringing. In chapter 3, McGrath analyzes the novel from the perspective of moral theology, a discipline that became increasingly important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to Spain’s conquest of the New World. McGrath takes as his point of departure Don Quixote’s confession at the end of Part II to probe about the nature of Don Quixote’s morality throughout both parts. The author claims that the morality of the knight’s actions can be evaluated based on the degree in which he perceives the objective and subjective morality of his actions defined as “the relationship between what a person does and the moral order, or the difference between whether an action is good or evil and whether the human being believes it to be so” (66). In order to prove the degree to which morality drives Don Quixote’s actions, McGrath considers the knight’s encounters with Andrés, his first encounter with Ginés de Pasamonte and his meeting with the galley slaves. While the first criterion focuses more on Don Quixote’s justifications for actions, McGrath concludes the chapter exploring the degree Don Quixote is moral, taking into account the consequences of his actions on other characters. In order to assess this consequence, McGrath introduces the concept of the double effect, a concept derived from Neo-Thomist philosophy popular in the period. After considering how Don Quixote’s actions are driven and determined by a Catholic morality, chapters 4–6 consider how the knight errant and his squire Sancho Panza imitate tenets of Jesuit spirituality in a variety of ways. Chapter 4 focuses on episodes...

Moral Interiority in the Context of Dominance of the Technical and Other Positive Sciences

In this paper, the author seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the reality of the human personal moral interiority from the perspective of the Belgian moral theologian, Servais Pinckaers. It is understood in the context of the present-day dominant scientific view of the world in which the categories of technical and other positive sciences, through their dominance, bring into question the human form of existence and activity. Following introductory thoughts on the importance, value, and necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration, we are given an insight into the basic features of human life, which are twofold, depending on whether the same features are underpinned in the moral inferiority of the human person or merely stem from the technical and a positive view of the world.

For the Life of the World: Some Reflections

As its title would suggest, For the Life of the World: Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church offers a comprehensive statement of the ideals and principles that should guide Orthodox Christians, and the church itself, in the effort to live a Christlike life in today's pluralistic society. The expression “social ethos” might suggest that this document limits itself to social questions as these are commonly understood, offering a kind of Orthodox equivalent of Roman Catholic social encyclicals. On examination, it is clear that this document goes beyond the standard topics pursued under the rubric of social ethics. It includes an extended discussion of marriage and family life, addressing questions of marital relations and family dynamics as well as the social dimension of marriage; a comparably extended discussion of medical ethics; extended comments on ecumenical and interfaith relations; and reflections on the liturgy as the ultimate context for the moral life. We even find brief but perceptive remarks on our treatment of animals. This document is not so much a presentation of social ethics as a treatise on moral theology comprehensively considered. The nearest Roman Catholic parallel would be Veritatis Splendor, rather than one of the social encyclicals.