For St. Thomas Aquinas morality is about human actions.
What makes us human is that we are masters of our action.
We can know not only why we act the way we do, which is to say we make choices for reasons,
but we can also know that certain things we choose will achieve the reasons for which
we choose them.
If you need to go to work, you choose to get out of bed, choose to shower, and to get dressed.
You choose to eat your breakfast, you choose to get into the car and to drive to work.
And you know that each of these activities have a purpose and that they will get you
ultimately to work in the morning.
We deliberate our choices.
Sometimes that deliberation is easy and quick, especially when we have a routine like the
route we drive to work.
But sometimes a choice is difficult and requires a period of moral deliberation, sometimes
intense moral deliberation.
For St. Thomas Aquinas, the moral life is comprised of particular choices, particular
actions, strung together by our pursuit of various goals in life, one leading to the
next.
To get down to the rub of things, we're talking about particular actions and particular choices.
That's what morality is first about.
Is this or that choice, a moral one, a good one?
When looking at particular actions we've taken to speaking as Catholics about
what we call the fonts of morality, which is to say the components of every human action.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church echos St. Thomas's teaching on this matter when it
says that every human choice has three basic components:
The intention, the object, the circumstances.
The intention is the very personal reason we're making a choice at all.
I intend to quench my thirst.
I choose to drink water.
I intend to show my love.
I choose to tell my mother "I love you," or I choose to bring her flowers.
I intend to grow closer to God, so I choose to pray.
I choose to do penance.
I choose to worship.
The object is the movement, if you will, of the activity.
We choose every activity, whether it's walking, or running, or speaking, or punching, every
activity has a purpose that is quite apart from why I choose to do it.
So walking gets me from point A to point B. In the language of Aquinas and the Catechism,
that's the object of walking to get to point B. That's its point.
Why I'm choosing to walk where I'm going.
That's my intention.
It's very common for people to think that we can't judge an action as good
or evil apart from somebody's intention.
That's generally true, but not always.
The intention certainly can tell why someone chooses to do the thing they do.
But there are some choices, some activities whose objects are always evil.
In one of his encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor, St. John Paul II, following the
teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas taught that some activities are intrinsically evil, and
no good intention can redeem them.
For instance, the choice to kill an innocent person.
There is never a reason to do that.
No intention can ever make that good.
Circumstances are the who, the where, the how, the when of a choice.
Sometimes the morality of an act can change depending on where the act is done.
For example, there are ways a husband and a wife relate to each other that are moral
in the privacy of their own home that wouldn't be moral in Central Park.
Also, the when of a choice may change its morality.
For instance, how old somebody is with whom you're interacting.
You might choose to challenge or correct children differently when they're five from when they're 15.
For St. Thomas, any action we choose, any choice is good and moral if everything
about it is good, the intention, why we're doing it, the object, what we're actually
doing and the circumstances.
If we intend to deceive somebody, for instance, and we do so while we tell them that we love
them, that's immoral.
If we intend to do something good and wonderful, like to love someone, but we choose to punch
them in anger, that's immoral.
It's immoral because punching someone in anger is not a way to demonstrate the intention
of love.
While the intention is good, the object, the activity, the punching is not the proper way
to achieve that intention.
All of our activities fit into a string of future choices, of further goals, and further
intentions.
But we have to judge each action individually on that string, because the ends never justify
the means.
We can never do evil, even for good reasons.
We can't because choosing evil activities regardless of intention does something to us.
While the intention is always deeply personal, what we're still choosing, the activity
we choose, is still very personal.
And though we can be prevented from doing good things by people, by people who are in
authority over us, or people who might even persecute us, we can never be forced to do evil.
St. John Paul said, "Especially if we are prepared to die rather than to do evil."
The ultimate gauge here is whether all three of these things, the intention,
the object or activity, the circumstances, whether all of these line up with reason,
our highest power, what makes us in the image of God and which participates in God's reason.
Which is to say apart from ignorance and sometimes stupidity, our choices are truly good when
they are in accord with right reason.
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