Tag: good

Aquinas on the Evaluation of Human Actions

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AQUINAS ON THE EVALUATION OF HUMAN ACTIONS

BY William H. Marshner

Christendom College
Front Royal, Virginia
[Reprinted from The Thomist, 59, 3, July, 1995]

Among the questions dealt with in the Prima Secundae are those of what moral goodness “is” and on what basis it is attributed to some human actions but denied of others. Aquinas’s answers are currently a matter of contention between the proportionalists and their critics, as is his answer to the question of how human actions are classified. Continue reading “Aquinas on the Evaluation of Human Actions”

A Tale Of Two Beatitudes

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Reviews: A Tale of Two Beatitudes

Review of Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame, 1987), 232 pp.

By W. H. MARSHNER

FAITH AND REASON
Vol. XVI, No. 2
Summer 1990

The job of ethics is to tell us which actions are right and wrong, while the job of a “grounding” for ethics is to tell us why. For example, a “grounding” might show that right actions measure up to something, and the wrong ones don’t, and then tell us why this measure matters. Different kinds of grounding have been tried in the history of ethics; one is called “natural law” theory, and the three authors at issue in this review — Thomas Aquinas, Germain Grisez, and Russell Hittinger — all favor some version of it.
Continue reading “A Tale Of Two Beatitudes”