Personal Morality
Some preliminary things to clear up
Before beginning this sketch of the characteristics we have as human and the implications of these characteristics for our actions, I want to stress several things:
First, I am going to be talking about morally wrong acts, not immoral choices, except when I explicitly presuppose the person knows or suspects that the act is wrong and chooses it anyway. I want it very clearly understood that when I condemn certain acts as wrong, I am simply stating a fact about how the act is related to the person's humanity: that it is inconsistent. I am not accusing anyone who does these acts of being immoral. That is between that person and God, and depends on all that was said in the preceding chapter about emotions and conscience.
In that sense, this chapter and the ethical sections of those that follow are nothing but academic exercises. They do, however, give the grounds a person would use in judging whether the act he is about to perform is morally wrong, which would make his choice to perform it immoral (supposing the wrongness cannot be kept out of the choice, by some such thing as the Double Effect).
Second, I am going to be talking about morally wrong acts in general, and am fully aware that the individual's situation can modify his common humanity in such a way that the rightness or wrongness of what he does is also altered. For instance, in general, it is wrong to put your life at risk; but using the Double Effect, this can sometimes be done. Or if you are dying anyway, the positive obligation we generally have to take care of our health does not apply to you in significant ways. A person's conscience recognizes the actual state of his humanity at the moment, and can know what is inconsistent with it; so these general principles of morality are not really as "rigid" as the proportionalists would have us believe.
Third, it might be asked why I bother doing an analysis of our humanity and the implications for our action if morality depends on the choice anyway, and the choice depends on the actual knowledge of the person who makes it rather than some philosopher's analysis of his reality.
The answer is twofold. First of all, if you refuse to try to find out what the facts really are about your humanity so that your freedom won't be restricted by knowing things you weren't aware of before, then that refusal is itself immoral, because it is the equivalent of saying, "Don't tell me because I want to do this act regardless of its wrongness, and I'll feel better doing it if I don't know."
Let me call this "President Nixon's ignorance." It is said that when he was approached with the plan to break into the Democratic headquarters, he said, "Don't tell me what you're going to do! I'm telling you to help me get elected, and how you do that is up to you; I don't want to know it." In this case, his "ignorance" made him morally responsible for everything that the man did afterwards, because he could have kept control by being informed and vetoing anything that was illegal, but deliberately relinquished this control; and this was the equivalent of saying, "I concur with everything you do."
The second part of the answer is that a morally wrong act is by definition at cross-purposes with the agent. True, the eternal consequences of this are avoided if you don't suspect that it is, but the temporal consequences of doing something that contradicts what you are trying to do can be quite severe also (though they do not always happen). Many a woman who has had an abortion comes to realize after the fact (sometimes because of it) that she has killed her child; and killed her child by the most barbaric of methods, like dismemberment. What of the rest of her life after she realizes this? And what of the child in any case? Those who try to keep kids from getting pregnant by handing them condoms (so they can have irresponsible sex responsibly) wonder why more kids get pregnant. Those who advocate "freedom of expression" (amoral license) in the arts wonder why our kids are into drugs after a generation of listening to music telling how nice it is and scoffing at those who are against it.
So going through these aspects of what it is to be human is by no means a waste of time; and so let us get started.
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