REVIEWER no. 4: MORALITYA. Desire of Man for Happiness
1. The Beatitudes respond to the natural desire for happiness. This desire is of Divine origin. 2. St. Augustine - He said “How is it, then, that I seek you, Lord? Since in seeking you, my God, I seek a happy life, let me seek you so that my soul may live, for my body draws life from my soul and my soul draws life from you.” 3. St. Thomas Aquinas – He said “God alone satisfies.” 4. The desire for God is written in the human heart because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. 5. Heaven - is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness. B. Character Formation 1. Catechism of the Catholic Church - teaches, '"The role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute. - The right and the duty of parents to educate their children [is] primordial and inalienable... 2. Pius XI's - encyclical On the Christian Education of Youth, "consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created. It is clear that there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man's last end … 3. Moral or character formation is essential than intellectual formation. 4. Aristotle - calls the character, or habitual formation of a man, his 'second nature.' 5. Aristotle calls the character, or habitual formation of a man, his 'second nature.' 6. Character formation cannot be separated from the person. 7. Plato – said that a person who is a slave to the inclinations of his passions is a slave. Such a person is not ultimately happy. 8. The virtue of obedience opens the door to the other virtues, and to the acquisition of prudence. 9. Prudence - is the acquired ability—that is, the habit—of discovering and judging what is right in any given set of circumstances. 10. Character matures somewhere between the ages of 24 and 30, so children complete the process of character formation on their own. 11. Virtue is a habit, and habit is gained and perfected through repeated action. C. Morality of Human Acts 1. Freedom makes man a moral subject. 2. Sources of Morality – object, end/intention, circumstance 3. End/Intention - is an element essential to the moral evaluation of an action. 4. It is not proper to consider only the intention in determining the morality of the human acts. 5. Circumstances - contribute to increasing or diminishing the moral goodness or evil of human acts. 6. A morally good act requires the goodness of the object, of the end, and of the circumstances together. 7. An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention. D. DO GOOD AND AVOID EVIL 1. The Catechism of the Catholic Church provides that one may never do evil so that good may result from it. 2. The purpose of increasing in knowledge of good and evil is to call good what God calls good and to call evil what God calls evil. 3. In order to be able to choose to be good and do good one must learn to recognize evil. 4. The first thing that was not “good” during the creation of man according to the book of Genesis is that man was alone and isolated. 5. Sin - is the state of disobedience and the individual act of falling short of perfection, literally “missing the mark.” 6. Teleology – refers to everything that has an end or purpose. Morality involves working out what our purpose as humans is, and acting in a way that fulfils it. 7. Deontology – morality is about doing your duty, an obligation to follow rules or do right actions. 8. The efficient cause is what gets things done, while the final cause is the purpose of a thing. 9. St. Thomas Aquinas - said that acting accordance with reason was the same thing as acting in the way a Christian would act. 10. Morality is not based on following commands from the Bible but on following rules that can be discovered through reason. E. The End Does Not Justify the Means 1. Is it excusable or morally permissible to lie and cheat in order to get a promotion? What principle is violated? = NO. Just because you were given the promotion does not excuse the fact that you lied a cheated. The End Does Not Justify the Means 2. To justify abortion, euthanasia, and suicide is to argue that the end justifies disobedience to God's word. 3. Happiness and love they do not justify disobeying God's teaching about marriage and sexual purity. 4. No one can do evil that good may come - we commonly know this as “the end does not justify the means.” 5. Direct abortion - abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. 6. Direct killing is not similar to allowing a person to die. F. Principle of Double Effect 1. In the principle of double effect, the evil effect is not intended. 2. In the principle of double effect, the intended effect, good or evil, is called “direct”. 3. The Principle of Double Effect states that an action, good in itself, which has two effects--an intended good effect, and a foreseen, but not intended evil effect—is moral provided there is a just order between the intended good and the permitted evil. 4. In the principle of double effect, the good must be willed and evil effect merely tolerated. 5. In the principle of double effect, the good effect must not come about as a result of evil effect, but must come directly from the action itself. 6. We do not permit directly destroying a subordinate good for the sake of the greater, but we can allow the sacrifice, as in martyrdom or totality. 7. In the principle of double effect, the good effect must be at least equivalent in importance to evil effect. 8. If the good effect could be obtained in an equally expeditious and effective way, without the unintended evil effect, this must be done. 9. A Merely Permitted Evil Effect is called the indirect voluntary effect that is, although foreseen as an evil effect resulting from the action, it is no way an object of the act of the will. G. Moral Conscience 1. Conscience is a practical judgment "which makes known what man must do or not do, or which assesses an act already performed by him. 2. Conscience formulates moral obligation in the light of the natural law. 3. Conscience is not a "decision on how to act in particular cases". 4. Conscience is the proximate norm of personal morality," but its dignity consists in its capacity to disclose the truth about moral good and evil, the truth "indicated by the 'divine law', the universal and objective norm of morality". 5. The obligation, in conscience, to "form" one's conscience, i.e., "to make it the object of a continuous conversion to what is true and to what is good," and obviously "Christians have a great help for the formation of conscience in the Church and her Magisterium....the authority of the Church, when she pronounces on moral questions, in no way undermines the freedom of conscience of Christians 6. "Conscience is man's most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths". 7. A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. 8. Sources of Formation of moral conscience: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, Magisterium, and Natural law H. Responsible Freedom 1. The power to decide what is good and what is evil does not belong to man, but to God alone. The man is certainly free, inasmuch as he can understand and accept God's commands. And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom, since he can eat "of every tree of the garden". But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil", for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfilment precisely in the acceptance of that law. God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of his very love proposes this good to man in the commandments. 2. There is no real conflict between human freedom of choice and the moral "law" because the moral "law," which has God as its author, is not a set of legalistic impositions but rather a set of truths meant to help human persons make good moral choices. 3. In the Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II repudiates the theories which so exalt human freedom that they end up in the subjectivistic notion that men are creators of the moral order, of what is good and bad. 4. The origin of moral law is God. I. Veritatis Splendor – paragraph numbers 6-7, 15, 19, 21, 27, 35, 41, 48, 50 J. Christian Morality According to the Catechism - (number 4 - What We Must Do in Order to Become Fully the Beings God Wills Us to Be) K. Law and Authority – objective moral truth, eternal law, and beatitudes |
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