30 years on, the lessons of ‘Veritatis Splendor’ are being ignored

Why not say that war crimes are not wrong in themselves, because they might, after all, be conducive to “Peace”?

Anthony McCarthy October 24, 2023

In her ground-breaking paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958), Elizabeth Anscombe famously stated  “if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration – I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind”. 

Her target in these words was secular “consequentialist” thinkers, who deny that there are any intrinsically evil choices –  choices “off the table” as moral options. In other words, she believed that there are exceptionless moral norms such as “do not deliberately execute the innocent”. 

Consequentialists deny that it is possible to know in advance that there are actions one can never choose.  According to them, moral principles only make sense if connected with the production of consequences which serve overall human happiness, wants and needs.  It is only insofar as an act contributes to or detracts from these that it is morally assessable at all. On this theory, our immediate intentions are never decisive in ruling out any action. Only an assessment of the overall consequences can rule out actions, and these consequences will necessarily vary. 

Such a view tends to regard traditional or common-sensical morality as irrational, taboo-ridden and unable to account for serious calculative moral reasoning.  It invites radical revision of many areas of moral experience which people, religious or non-religious, have assumed to be crucially important in leading a morally good life. Moreover, in seeking to come up with a calculus as to how to decide quasi-scientifically what counts as “best”, such theories tend to look for one value to which they can reduce morality so that calculations can be made (e.g. pleasure, happiness or simply whatever individuals prefer).  

Morality becomes, in a sense, “extrinsic” to our moral experience, inner life and normal understanding of what we are doing.  It is not that consequences aren’t very important in assessing the morality of certain acts, but with consequentialism, they become the sole determinant of an act’s moral quality.   

Anscombe believed that theories which rule out the idea that there exceptionless moral norms were a sign of moral corruption. To intend to commit such an action is already to do something “morally impermissible” in itself, regardless of any evaluation of the consequences which are certain or likely to follow. 

Related theories which denied outright that there could be categories of intentions and acts which were intrinsically evil seeped into moral theology within the Catholic Church in the twentieth century. The problem became so serious that 30 years ago this year, Pope John Paul II issued the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which took aim at those theories which sought, one way or another, to eliminate the idea of exceptionless moral norms. The encyclical noted with alarm that such theories were being propounded “even in Seminaries and Faculties of Theology” and noted “the lack of harmony between the traditional response of the Church and certain theological positions”.   

The desire of some within the Church to eliminate from moral theology and moral philosophy the idea of exceptionless moral norms had already been recognised by Pius XII in 1952 when he addressed the World Federation of Catholic Young Women and condemned ‘Situation Ethics’ as “a radical revision of morality”. This form of ethics, like consequentialism, denied that there could be exceptionless moral norms, on the ground that any given situation was highly complex and therefore not assessable according to universal moral laws (such as, for example, the Ten Commandments). It held itself to be opposed to “legalism”, which it took to be the blunt and crude application of universal moral norms to complex situations which made insufficient room for conscience. 

However, it is one thing to condemn those who dismiss human moral experience on the basis of some crude conception of moral law modelled on codified positive law;  it is quite another to undermine the idea that we can know and apply universal moral laws at all. 

Moral theologians who propounded this view gave it a pious flavour by saying that all acts must be fundamentally motivated by “Love”; but this was a love that was apparently incapable of accommodating the common moral experience of mankind, namely the sense of universal moral norms. And in an antinomian touch, dividing the interiority of a person from his exteriority, they started to refer to a “fundamental option” made in the realm of transcendental freedom which somehow meant that if our overall orientation was towards God (or “God who is Love” as some felt the need to add) then that somehow colours all our particular acts, thereby redeeming them. Gregory Holub, the Polish philosopher and interpreter of John Paul II’s thought, has noted the latter’s objection to this dualistic position, summarising it thus: “The person is at the same time his interiority and exteriority; one cannot exist without the other, for example, exteriority always fuels interiority with various data and values, and the latter is shown and manifested only through the former, namely through exteriority.”

Pope John Paul II, a pope trained in moral philosophy, sensitive to the importance of moral phenomena in our lives and with direct experience of ideologies which sought to override ordinary moral experience in the name of utopian goals, raised the banner against such theories by reflecting on the Splendour of Truth. In that encyclical he takes issue with those who “in their desire to emphasise the ‘creative’ character of conscience… no longer call its actions “judgments” but “decisions”: only by making these decisions ‘autonomously’ would man be able to attain moral maturity”.

This position pits freedom against truth in a manner echoing the existentialists of an earlier age. For what on earth is conscience if not a faculty for judging with moral awareness, in the light of a moral reality which is not one’s own creation?  Our judgements may sometimes miss the mark – but is this not what conscience is for?  

In a key passage of Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II states:

“The morality of the human acts depends primarily and fundamentally on the ‘object’ rationally chosen by the deliberate will…In order to be able to grasp the object of an act which specifies that act morally, it is therefore necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the acting person. The object of the act of willing is in fact a freely chosen kind of behaviour…

“By the object of a given moral act, then, one cannot mean a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on the basis of its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the outside world. Rather, that object is the proximate end of a deliberate decision which determines the act of willing on the part of the acting person…

“The reason why a good intention is not itself sufficient, but a correct choice of actions is also needed, is that the human act depends on its object, whether that object is capable or not of being ordered to God, to the One who ‘alone is good’, and thus brings about the perfection of the person.”

In other words, acts can be wrong at the level of what is immediately chosen by the acting person. A good “further” intention (which is what the Pope means by intention) cannot redeem the bad “object” which is more immediately chosen and can be quite incapable of being ordered to God. 

30 years on, the lessons of this great encyclical are ignored. As the Catholic Herald reported earlier this month, the bishop of Antwerp has set about justifying euthanasia in certain circumstances in terms of his own situationist ethics.  In the secular world you will hear justifications of revolutionary terrorism in terms of “liberation” and of state war crimes in terms of the need for self-defence. Horrific acts are excused by those who seemingly look more to an assumed “innate virtue” on the part of the perpetrators than to a careful, objective assessment of the acts they carry out. Approaches to ethics which seek to overthrow universal moral norms, whether in the language of “rational calculation”, “love” or patriotism, end up overriding our moral experience and the moral consensus of mankind. Thus we end up with the absurdity of ideas such as that committing adultery is not wrong in itself, for it could be conducive to “Love”. And if that is true, then why not say that war crimes are not wrong in themselves, because they might, after all, be conducive to “Peace”? The Ten Commandments find themselves in ironical speech marks. 

Five years before his great Encyclical, Pope John Paul II firmly told an audience of moral theologians,  “The existence of particular moral norms regarding man’s way of acting in the world, which are endowed with a binding force that excludes always, and in whatever situations, the possibility of exceptions, is a constant teaching of Tradition and of the Church’s Magisterium which cannot be called into question by the Catholic theologians.”

Moral theologians who reduce morality to a consequentialist calculus or prioritise the “fundamental option” over responsibility for particular acts manage to combine a sentimental and blasphemous worship of man with a moral worldview which is, in the end, the destruction of the possibility of morality itself.

https://catholicherald.co.uk/30-years-on-the-lessons-of-veritatis-splendor-are-being-ignored/