CRITIQUE OF PROPORTIOALISM

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D. 2009.

Central to the dissenting (also called “revisionist”) theory of proportionalism1 is its

denial of moral absolutes and the existence of intrinsically evil acts in the area of concrete
1
The term “proportionalism” was introduced by dissenting theologians in the mid-1960’s who sought an
historical continuity with the traditional Catholic teaching of the “principle of proportionality” involved in the
principle of double effect developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, and with the dissenters’ own utilitarian and
consequentialist methodology. However, it is important to point out that the traditional principle of
proportionality explained in detail by Aquinas in his distinguishing between murder and self-defense using the
principle of double effect, is not the proportionality that the dissenters advocate. In traditional Catholic moral
theology the “principle of double effect” is based on the fact that evil must never be voluntary in itself, not
willed either as an end or as a means, for if so it becomes the direct object of the will-act and necessarily renders
the act evil. Also, evil cannot be voluntary in cause, as a foreseen but unwanted consequence, unless it can
somehow be reduced to an incidental and unavoidable by-product in the accomplishment of a certain good that
the agent subject is rightfully seeking.
Traditional moral theology’s principle of double effect states that it is morally allowable to perform an act
that has a bad effect under the following four conditions, namely: 1. The act to be done must be good in itself or
least indifferent ; 2. The good intended must not be obtained by means of the evil effect ; 3. The evil effect must
not be intended for itself but only permitted ; 4. There must be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the
evil effect.
On the other hand, much of proportionalist, revisionist moral theology grew out of an erroneous
reinterpretation of the principle of double effect. The central position in this reinterpretation remains the denial
of intrinsically evil actions and the justification of intrinsically evil acts like contraception, masturbation,
adultery, fornication and homosexual acts “for a proportionate reason,” focusing on condition number four,
which proportionalists believe to be the most important condition in the principle of double effect. If the
principle of double effect justifies killing in self-defense, then, proportionalists claim, the principle should also
justify the doing of acts of contraception, fornication, adultery, masturbation, etc. (acts that traditional Catholic
moral theology has condemned as intrinsically evil), “for a proportionate reason.”
Janet Smith critiques this proportionalist, revisionist misinterpretation of the principle of double effect,
writing: “…revisionists misunderstand the traditionalist position; traditionalists are not saying that ‘killing’ is a
premoral evil that is justified in such circumstances as those that require one to defend oneself. Rather,
traditionalists argue that ‘killing’ is an action that in itself is not morally good or evil but that further information
must be acquired to determine when killing is bad. Certainly, traditionalists share with revisionists the view that
any action that causes the death of another, any act of killing, obviously would rarely be justified, for there are
few instances in which the good to be gained is proportionate to the evil of the death of another. Killing in self-
defense (and killing for other reasons may be justified, too) is an occasion when the good to be gained is
proportionate to the good endangered. But it must also be noted that the life lost in justifiable killing in self-
defense must be that of the individual who is threatening one’s own life. This principle is not based on the view
that one life is equal in value to another but on the view that innocent life deserves defense against one
threatening that life. The calculation is not just of one life for another but it is a consideration of justice that is
essentially at work in an act of justifiable self-defense.
“The principle of double effect serves to justify killing in self-defense in this way: The life of Alice is
threatened by Bill, who wants to kill Alice to get her inheritance. It is good and right for Alice to defend herself,
for her life is a good worth protecting. Were Alice to shoot Bill in order to defend herself her action would have
two effects, one good and one bad; her life would be saved, but Bill’s life would be lost. What justifies Alice’s
shooting of Bill is not that her life is ‘worth more’ than his (she may be terminally ill and he a scientist who
alone is capable of discovering a cure for AIDS). What is crucial to the moral analysis is that she is innocent of
wrongdoing and thus not deserving to die and that he is guilty of wrongdoing and has thus put himself in a
situation in which he is risking his own life. Alice’s shooting of Bill is a justifiable means to the effect, or end of
saving her life, a means that has the double effect of threatening Bill’s life. But the point here is not that a life
has been balanced against a life but that an innocent life has been protected from a malevolent threat.
“This point can be clarified by noting that it is not permissible to kill someone who is not threatening one’s
life even if one thereby preserves one’s own. If a terrorist cammanded a hostage, Alfred, to kill another hostage,
Bob, and threatened to kill Alfred if he refused, Alfred would not be justified in killing Bob. Nor would he be
justified if the terrorist threatened to kill both Alfred and Bob, if Alfred would not kill Bob. The killing of Bob

1
moral norms. “Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature
‘incapable of being ordered’ to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person
made in His image. These are acts which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed
‘intrinsically evil’ (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on
account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and
the circumstances.”2 Intrinsically evil acts are acts which can never be done for any reason
whatsoever, acts such as deliberately killing an innocent human being (murder), adultery,
fornication, contraception, homosexual acts, and direct abortion. Moral absolutes are
exceptionless moral norms.
Denying the possibility of intrinsically evil acts in the area of concrete moral norms as
this is has been traditionally understood, one of the fathers of dissident proportionalism, Josef
Fuchs, S.J., writes: “If the absoluteness of the moral norm signifies objectivity more than
universal validity, can moral norms be universal at all, in the sense of being applicable
always, everywhere and without exception, so that the action encompassed by them could
never be objectively justified? Traditionally we are accustomed to speak of an ‘intrinsece
malum.’
“Viewed theoretically, there seems to be no possibility of norms of this kind for
human action in the inner-worldly realm. The reason is that an action cannot be judged

by Alfred would be an action of ‘directly killing an innocent human being’ that is always morally evil or
intrinsically wrong and, thus, can never be chosen as an action, no matter what good effects might come from
this act. Bob has done nothing worthy of losing his life and thus to kill him would be not a justifiable act of self-
defense but unjust killing.
“To say that the justification of killing in ‘self-defense’ is to allow an evil means to pursue a good end, is,
then, based on a misreading of the justification of self-defense made by the traditionalist. The traditonalist on
occasion allows actions that may result in the death of human beings but never permits an ‘evil’ killing for good
ends. Thus, it cannot be said that since the traditionalist allows the ‘premoral’ act of killing on occasion, so too
should the traditionalist allow such ‘premoral’ acts as contracepted acts of sexual intercourse, homosexual
sexual intercourse, and masturbation. The traditionalist does not put these actions in the category of acts such as
killing that cannot be morally defined until further specified. Rather, the traditionalist claims that a parallel is
better made between ‘murder’ and ‘contracepted sexual intercourse, and so on. (One hopes it is not necessary to
note that murder is a much greater evil than contraception, and so on). Traditionalists claim that ‘murder’
(maliciously killing a human being) and ‘contraception’ (deliberately rendering infertile an act of sexual
intercourse) are actions that can be specified as immoral apart from any circumstances, whereas ‘killing a
human being’ cannot be so specified. The traditionalist argues that no application of the double effect would
serve to justify the choice to murder. So, too, the traditionalist argues that ‘contraception, and so on,’ are the
kinds of acts that cannot be justified by the principle of double effect, for one cannot choose an immoral means
to a moral end”(J. E. SMITH, Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later, Catholic University of America Press,
Washington, D.C., 1991, pp. 212-214).
Dissenting revisionist positions on the principle of double effect: P. KNAUER, The Hermeneutic Function of
the Principle of Double Effect, “Natural Law Forum,” 12 (1967) ; C. J. VAN DER POEL, The Principle of
Double Effect, in Absolutes in Moral Theology?, edited by C. E. Curran, Corpus Books, Washington, D.C.,
1968, pp. 186-210 ; R. A. McCORMICK, Il principio del duplice effetto, “Concilium,” 12/10 (1976), pp. 1723-
1743 ; B. SCHÜLLER, The Double Effect in Catholic Thought: A Reevaluation, in Doing Evil to Achieve Good,
edited by R. A. McCormick and P. Ramsey, Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1978, pp. 165-191 ; J.
SELLING, The Problem of Re-interpreting the Principle of Double Effect, “Louvain Studies,” 8 (1980), pp. 47-
62.
Defenses of the traditional understanding of the principle of double effect and critiques of the revisionist
position: G. GRISEZ, Toward a Consistent )atural Law Ethics of Killing, “American Journal of Jurisprudence,”
15 (1970), pp. 79-83 ; J. BOYLE, Toward Understanding the Principle of Double Effect, “Ethics,” 90 (1980),
pp. 527-538 ; J. BOYLE, The Principle of Double Effect: Good Actions Entangled in Evil, in Moral Theology
Today: Certitudes and Doubts, Pope John Center, St. Louis, 1984, pp. 243-260.
On the history of the traditional understanding of the principle of double effect and its revisionist re-
interpretation: L. I. UGORJI, The Principle of Double Effect. A Critical Appraisal of Its Traditional
Understanding and Its Modern Interpretation, Peter Lang, New York, 1985.
2
JOHN PAUL II, Veritatis Splendor, no. 80.

2
morally at all, considered purely in itself, but only together with all the ‘circumstances’ and
the ‘intention.’ Consequently, a behavioral norm, universally valid in the full sense, would
presuppose that those who arrive at it could know or foresee adequately all the possible
combinations of the action concerned with circumstances and intentions, with (pre-moral)
values and non-values (bona and mala ‘physica’). A priori, such knowledge is not
attainable.”3
Therefore, for Fuchs, acts like contraception, euthanasia, masturbation, homosexual
acts are not intrinsically evil in the traditional understanding of the term, as immoral acts
never to be justified for whatever reason. Even the killing of an innocent human being.
Another proportionalist and fellow Jesuit, Fr. Richard A. McCormick, in fact, takes issue
with classifying ‘the intentional killing of an innocent human being’ as intrinsically evil,
writing: “When one says that ‘direct killing of the innocent’ is forbidden, he need not and
should not imply that such killing is morally wrong ‘independently of whatever reasons, the
agent might have had.’ He may and ought to imply that the conceivable reasons for killing in
such circumstances are, under careful analysis, not proportionate to the harm done; for if it
was a weighing of alternatives that honed the rule to its present precision, it is a weighing of
alternatives that must test its continuing viability.”4
So with Fuchs and McCormick, if they are faithful to their proportionalist
methodology, a set of conceivable circumstances could arise that would foresee evils that
would outweigh the harm done in directly killing the innocent, and such an action would be
morally permissible. Such is the methodology of dissident proportionalism.
What is proportionalism? Proportionalism is a method of evaluating human actions
where, by a “weighing of various values and goods being sought, focuses on the proportion
acknowledged between the good and bad effects of that choice, with a view to the ‘greater
good’ or ‘lesser evil’ actually possible in a particular situation.”5 Proportionalists, also called
revisionists, deny the possibility of formulating an absolute prohibition of particular kinds of
behaviour which would be in conflict, in every circumstance and in every culture, with those
values. For the proportionalist the moral ‘goodness’ of an act would be judged on the basis of
the subject’s intention (or remote end, also called the finis operantis) in reference to moral
goods, while its ‘rightness’ would be judged on the basis of a consideration of its forseeable
effects or consequences and of their proportion. Thus, for the proportionalist, “concrete kinds
of behaviour could be described as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, without it being thereby possible to
judge as morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the will of the person choosing them. In this way, an act
which, by contradicting a universal negative norm, directly violates goods considered as ‘pre-
moral,’ could be qualified as morally acceptable if the intention of the subject is focused, in
accordance with a ‘responsible’ assessment of the goods involved in the concrete action, on
the moral value judged to be decisive in the situation.
“The evaluation of the consequences of the action, based on the proportion between
the act and its effects and between the effects themselves, would regard only the pre-moral
order. The moral specificity of acts, that is their goodness or evil, would be determined
exclusively by the faithfulness of the person to the highest values of charity and prudence,
without this faithfulness necessarily being incompatible with choices contrary to certain
particular moral precepts. Even when grave matter is concerned, these precepts should be
considered as operative norms which are always relative and open to exceptions.

3
J. FUCHS, The Absoluteness of Moral Terms, in Readings in Moral Theology, )o. 1: Moral )orms and
Catholic Tradition, Paulist Press, New York, 1979, p. 124.
4
R. A. McCORMICK, )otes on Moral Theology: 1965-1980, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 1981,
p. 542.
5
JOHN PAUL II, Veritatis Splendor, no. 75.

3
 “In this view, deliberate consent to certain kinds of behaviour declared illicit by
traditional moral theology would not imply an objective moral evil.”6
Though proportionalism has its roots in the moral relativism and utilitarianism of the
nineteenth century, and later on in the situation ethics of Fletcher in the middle part of the last
century, the Catholic Church was relatively unharmed by this form of dissent affecting moral
theology from the 1930s to the first years of the 1960s. Dissident proportionalism was a
product of the middle 1960s, reaching its maturity in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s,
with advocates like dissenters Josef Fuchs, Charles E. Curran, Franz Böckle, Bernard Häring,
Louis Janssens, Richard A. McCormick, Timothy E. O’Connell, Richard Gula, Franz Scholz
and Bruno Schüller.
Richard A. McCormick, S.J., describes proportionalism this way: “Common to all so-
called proportionalists…is the insistence that causing certain disvalues (nonmoral, premoral
evils such as sterilization, deception in speech, wounding and violence) in our conduct does
not by that very fact make the action morally wrong, as certain traditional formulations
supposed. The action becomes morally wrong when, all things considered, there is not a
proportionate reason in the act justifying the disvalue. Thus, just as not every killing is
murder, not every falsehood is a lie, so not every artificial intervention preventing or
promoting conception in marriage is necessarily an unchaste act.”7
McCormick affirms that proportionalism considers as morally permissible certain
actions condemned as intrinsically evil by the Magisterium. In the same 1993 America article
he notes that proportionalism does justify masturbation, contraception and sterilization when
done for proportionately good reasons. But McCormick is angry at the Magisterium, in
particular, with Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, for claiming that the principles of
proportionalism justify doing morally wrong actions for proportionately good reasons. But
this a case of McCormick setting his proportionalist redefinition of traditional terms against
the terms of traditional moral theology defended by the Magisterium. He defends his terms
against the terms of the Magisterium. Proportionalists admit that their principles do indeed
justify what the Magisterium teaches as intrinsically morally wrong, so why do they persist in
accusing Pope John Paul of grossly misrepresenting their proportionalist methodology in
Veritatis Splendor?
For traditional moral theology there are actions that are intrinsically evil by their
object, while for proportionalism no actions are intrinsically evil by their object (object here
meaning the action itself apart from the circumstances and the intention of the agent); they
are only premoral evils.
McCormick claims that proportionalists would admit that some acts are intrinsically
evil from their object, if the object is broadly understood as including all the morally relevant
circumstances. However, traditional moral theology does include all the morally relevant
circumstances in the object of the act. But McCormick thinks the Magisterium inconsistently
does this for some actions but not for others, like for example, in the definition of theft on the
one hand, and the definition of direct sterilization on the other. McCormick writes that “the
tradition has defined certain actions as morally wrong ex objecto because it has included in
the object not simply the material happening (object in a very narrow sense) but also
elements beyond it which clearly exclude any possible justification. Thus, a theft is not
simply ‘taking another’s property,’ but doing so ‘against the reasonable will of the owner.’
This latter addition has two characteristics in the tradition. (1) It is considered as essential to
the object. (2) It excludes any possible exceptions. Why? Because if a person is in extreme
difficulty and needs food, the owner is not reasonably unwilling that his food be taken. Fair

6
JOHN PAUL II, Veritatis Splendor, no. 75.
7
R. A. McCORMICK, Veritatis Splendor and Moral Theology, “America,” (Oct. 30, 1993), pp. 9-10.

4
enough. Yet, when the same tradition deals with, for example, masturbation or sterilization, it
adds little or nothing to the material happening and regards such a materially described act
alone as constituting the object. If it were consistent, it would describe the object as
‘sterilization against the good of marriage.’ This all could accept.”8
Against the position of McCormick just quoted, Catholic moral philosopher Dr. Janet
Smith writes: “What McCormick fails to see is that the magisterium defines sterilization,
masturbation, and contraception in the same way that it defines theft (and lying, and murder).
As McCormick states, ‘theft is taking another’s property against the reasonable will of the
owner. The ‘matter’ of this act is ‘taking another’s property,’ the morally relevant and
specifying circumstance is ‘against the reasonable will of the owner.’ Lying has the matter of
‘telling a falsehood’ and the morally relevant and specifying circumstance of ‘to one who
deserves to know the truth.’ Murder has the matter of ‘killing a human being’; the morally
relevant and specifying circumstance is that the human being is ‘innocent of wrong doing
worthy of being killed.’
“Now consider intrinsic evils where McCormick thinks the tradition does not include
relevant circumstances. Sterilization (let’s consider a hysterectomy) has the matter of
‘surgically removing one’s reproductive organs’ and the morally relevant and specifying
circumstance of ‘for the purpose of preventing conception’ (which the magisterium considers
to be ‘against the good of marriage’). Masturbation is ‘the manipulation of one’s sexual
organs’ with the morally relevant and specifying circumstance of ‘intending to have an
orgasm.’ Contraception is the ‘taking of drugs or using devices that render one incapable of
conceiving’ with the morally relevant and specifying circumstance that this is done with the
intent to prevent the sexual act from achieving its procreative end.
“All actions that have the same matter could be performed under other morally
specifying circumstances that would make them good actions; the evils that may result would
be considered to be justified by the principle of double effect. One could take what belongs to
another, to save the owner’s life (e.g., a gun with which the owner intends to kill himself);
one can kill a human being in self defense, one can tell a falsehood to one who does not
deserve to know the truth (e.g., the Nazi searching for Jews). One could have one’s
reproductive organs removed for the sake of removing a cancerous growth (the prevention of
conception would be the double effect); one could ‘manipulate one’s sexual organs’ for the
purpose of discovering a cancerous growth (if orgasm occurred it would be the double
effect); one could use drugs to regulate a menstrual cycle (the resulting infertility being the
double effect).
“The magisterium is not inconsistent. Every moral act considered evil by its object
has within its description some morally relevant and specifying circumstances (and the
intention can be considered one of the circumstances). At this level, the real source of the
debate about terminology is what counts as morally relevant and defining circumstances.
Whereas the magisterium counts as morally specifying circumstances those that transcend
particular circumstances, proportionalists want to count as morally relevant and defining the
circumstances of particular agents. For proportionalists, none of the acts described above
would qualify as intrinsically evil. For instance, if one had a proportionately good reason
given one’s circumstances to kill an innocent human being, one would be justified in doing
so. The proportionalist does not think this would be an act of murder, since for the
proportionalist ‘murder’ is the ‘killing of an innocent human being without a proportionate
reason.’ For a proportionalist ‘killing an innocent human being’ is not an intrinsic moral evil;
it is a premoral evil that could be outweighed by the good consequences that the act might
produce. Still, proportionalists readily admit that they think there are ‘virtually’ intrinsically

8
R. A. McCORMICK, op. cit., p. 10.

5
moral evils; there are acts, such as, perhaps, ‘killing an innocent human being’ for which one
can hardly conceive of a justifying circumstance. But, for the magisterium, ‘killing an
innocent human being’ is an intrinsic moral evil called murder and not because one cannot
conceive of circumstances that would justify it. The magisterium does not accept the
principle of the proportionalists, that one must weigh premoral evils to determine what is
moral evil. It judges acts to be either in accord with right reason or not in accord with right
reason. If an action is not in accord with right reason, it ought not to be done no matter what
the consequences. The magisterium considers sterilization, masturbation, and contraception
to be against right reason, against the very meaning of the sexual act, and thus it considers
them to be intrinsically evil.”9

9
J. E. SMITH, Moral Methodologies: Proportionalism, “Ethics and Medics,” 19:6 (June 1994), pp 1-3. In her
article Veritatis Splendor, Proportionalism, and Contraception, published in the Irish Theological Quarterly,
Smith writes: “Proportionalists argue that the Church is inconsistent because they claim that the Church will
allow ‘killing,’ ‘telling falsehoods,’ and ‘taking another’s property,’ for example, for proportionate reasons,
whereas it will not allow that it is moral to perform such actions as ‘contraception,’ ‘masturbation,’ and
‘sterilization’ for proportionate reasons. They claim that the Church condemns various sexual acts on the basis
of their physical description only while allowing other considerations to alter the moral evaluations of the
‘physical’ acts of ‘killing,’ ‘telling falsehoods,’ and ‘taking another’s property. Proportionalists are correct that
the Church allows some ‘proportionate reason’ to ‘redefine’ certain acts and that the three actions just defined
are among those actions. They are wrong to think that the Church treats sexual acts differently.
“First let us address a fairly clear error. Those proportionalists who seem to think that the Church is
balancing goods and evils when it calls an action morally evil are not correct. They seem to think that the
Church condemns murder, theft and lying because so much evil comes from such actions and that the Church
allows killing in self-defense, the occasional ‘taking of another’s property’ and the ‘telling of falsehoods’ in
instances where the bad consequences outweigh the good. They believe that in all instances the ‘physical action’
is the same, but that the consequences are what determine the morality of the actions. Portions of the actions
may be the same, but there are some features of the actions, the moral features, that render the actions to be of
different kinds.
“The fact is that the Church holds that murder, theft, and lying violate certain fundamental goods, that they
are against right reason. Murder (deliberate killing of an innocent person) is wrong because it violates the good
of innocent life; theft (taking property needed by the one who owns it) is wrong because it violates the good of
property, and lying (telling what is false to someone who deserves to know the truth) is wrong because it
violates justice. Bad consequences may come from respecting these goods, but these goods ought never to be
deliberately violated nonetheless.
“The Church allows killing in self-defense because reason requires that the innocent be able to defend
themselves against the guilty, even if great evil comes from such defense. The Church allows the telling of a
falsehood to defend the innocent, again, because reason establishes that the guilty are not deserving of the truth.
The Church allows a starving man to take from another’s excess because in God’s universe we are really only
stewards of our goods; excess goods belong in some important sense to those who have true need of them. (The
description of these actions can be explained in terms of allowing a ‘specifying circumstance’ to enter into the
‘object’ of the action).
“Proportionalists are wrong to think that the Church permits such actions as ‘killing,’ ‘taking the [excess]
property owned by another,’ and ‘telling a falsehood’ when good consequences outweigh the evil. First let us
note that the evil consequent upon any of these actions may in fact outweigh the good but the actions may still
be morally good. That is, someone killing an unjust aggressor may in fact be a reprobate without social value,
whereas the unjust aggressor may be a famous scientist who knows a cure for a devastating disease. His death
may deprive more people of good than the death of the victim would, but the act of self-defense would
nonetheless be morally good. Someone may tell a falsehood to a Nazi looking for Jews in hiding. By doing so,
he may protect those Jews, but in fact lead to the retaliatory death of many others. Also a reasonable owner of
excess food may not withhold that food from a needy man who takes it without his permission (who ‘steals’ it)
and it may be right that the needy man get the food. Still, the needy man may be a horrible murderer who with
the strength he acquires from the food is now able to kill several innocent victims. The reasonable owner did
right allowing his food to be taken but more evil than good resulted from his action.
“The Church would allow that all of the above agents acted morally: the reprobate killing the famous
scientist in self-defense, the man who told a falsehood to the Nazi, the needy man who ‘stole’ food from a
reasonable owner. Nonetheless in each case, more good than evil issued from the action; a balancing of goods
and evils, then, is not the criterion used to judge such actions to be good.

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 The Magisterium Against Proportionalism

Against proportionalism, the Magisterium has constantly re-affirmed the existence of

moral absolutes and intrinsically evil acts. In his 1984 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation,
Reconciliatio et Poenitentia, Pope John Paul II states that “there exist acts which, per se and
in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their
object.”10 The Holy Father affirms that “there are moral norms that have a precise content
which is immutable and unconditioned…for example, the norm…which forbids the direct
killing of an innocent person.”11
With regard to contraception, the Pope, in his 1988 Address to Moral Theologians, re-
affirmed the Church’s teaching that all contraceptive acts are intrinsically evil: “By
describing the contraceptive act as intrinsically illicit, Paul VI meant to teach that the moral
norm is such that it does not admit of exceptions. No personal or social circumstances could
ever, can now, or will ever, render such an act lawful in itself. The existence of particular
norms regarding man’s way of acting in the world, which are endowed with a binding force
that excludes always and in whatever situation the possibility of exceptions, is a constant

“To summarize: murder, taking another’s property and lying are intrinsically wrong and can never be done.
Killing in self-defense, taking [excess] property owned by another, and telling a falsehood are not exceptions to
the rules; they are not instances of murder, theft, and lying that have become permissible because of
circumstances that exempt one from absolute prohibitions; they are not justified because of the magnitude of
evil that they prohibit. Rather, they are different acts entirely that share some physical features in common.
“Nor is the fact that evil usually results from contraception, masturbation, or sterilization the reason why the
Church condemns such actions. Rather, it holds that all these actions are wrong because they are violations of
fundamental human goods. It holds that all these actions are intrinsically against the goods of sexuality that are
integrally a part of the “good of marriage.’ It believes that these actions cannot be transformed into good actions
by good consequences. To be perfectly clear, the Church holds it to be impossible that there are acts of
contraception, masturbation, and sterilization deliberately chosen as such that can be in accord with the good of
marriage – exceptions cannot be made since the acts as defined are irredeemable.
“Let us use contraception as our paradigm case to elaborate this point. And since different modes of
contraception would need to be defined differently, let us use the contraceptive pill as our example.
“A partial [A full physical description would need to include the harmful physical side effects] physical
description of the use of the contraceptive pill would be ‘taking female hormonal treatments that render one
infertile’; as described this is a morally indifferent action. That is, one is not able to make a moral judgment of
that action on the basis of the physical description alone (though the physical evil of infertility does already
suggest a negativity about the action – an ontic evil). ‘Taking female hormonal treatments that render one
infertile for the purpose of frustrating the fertility of the sexual act’ adds a moral dimension: it defines the
ultimate ordination of the act as one against the good of fertility. The magisterium judges that the deliberate
frustration of the fertility of the sexual act is a direct violation of an intrinsic human good – of the good of
marriage. The human good that is violated is twofold: it includes both procreation and union. These are
distinctively human goods and not simply ‘physical goods.’ If they were simply physical goods, we would
expect that they could be sacrificed to higher human values. Certainly we permit the sterilization of other
animals and their physical processes for higher goods.
“‘Taking female hormonal treatments that render one infertile, for the purpose of reducing cysts’ is an act
physically identical to the physical act of contracepting; the two actions are distinguished morally on the basis of
their ultimate ordination, not on some ‘physical basis.’ (In this second case the resulting infertility is a side-
effect of the medication; in the case of contraceptors the infertility is precisely what is intended). The difference
between the magisterium and proportionalists, then, is not that proportionalists look beyond the physical act.
Indeed, proportionalists allow that there is evil in contracepting but they find it to be only a premoral, ontic, or
physical evil; it is the magisterium that finds contraception to violate distinctively human goods”(J. E. SMITH,
Veritatis Splendor, Proportionalism, and Contraception, “Irish Theological Quarterly,” 63 (1998), pp. 317-321).
10
JOHN PAUL II, Reconciliatio et Poenitentia, 1984, 17; AAS 77 (1985), 185 at 221. See also: JOHN PAUL
II, Address to Moral Theologians, 10 April 1986, 3; AAS 78 (1986) 1100: there are actions which “are always
and everywhere in themselves and of themselves illicit.”
11
JOHN PAUL II, Reconciliatio et Poenitentia, par. 4, 1101.

7
teaching of Tradition and of the Church’s Magisterium which cannot be called in question by
the Catholic theologian.”12
The norm on the intrinsic evil of contraception, in short, is a moral absolute. What
exactly is a moral absolute? Oxford professor and natural law specialist John Finnis explains
that moral absolutes have the following characteristics: “The types of actions they identify
are specifiable, as potential objects of choice, without reliance on any evaluative term which
presuppose a moral judgment of the action. Yet this non-evaluative specification enables
moral reflection to judge that the choice of any such act is to be excluded from one’s
deliberation and one’s action.
“Thus, the norms in dispute exclude not merely needless acts of city destroying
directed against noncombatants and combatants alike, but every act so directed. Not merely
those abortions which are chosen as a means to some insufficiently important end, but all
killing of unborn babies as a means to an end. Not merely the manufacturing of babies for
frivolous or selfish purposes, but all choices to generate babies by production instead of
sexual union. Not merely adultery in the sense of extramarital intercourse by (or with) a
married person and inadequately attentive to the good of marriage, but adultery as that term
was used throughout Jewish and Christian tradition: extramarital intercourse by (or with) a
married person, period.”13
Finnis goes on to explain that moral absolutes are exceptionless moral norms. “They
are,” he writes, “exceptionless in an interesting way. Exceptions to them are logically
possible, and readily conceivable, but are morally excluded. In some of them, the type of act
is described partly by reference to ‘circumstances,’ for example, the circumstance that one of
the parties to a sexual act is married to someone else. But of all these norms, the following is
true: Once one has precisely formulated the type, one can say that the norm which identifies
each chosen act of that type as wrong is true and applicable to every such choice, whatever
the (further) circumstances. An exceptionless norm is one which tells us that, whenever we
are making a choice, we should never choose to do that sort of thing (indeed should never
even deliberate about whether or not to do it).”14
A staunch defender of the Magisterium, moral theologian William E. May defines
moral absolutes as “moral norms identifying certain types of action, which are possible
objects of human choice, as always morally bad, and specifying these types of action without
employing in their description any morally evaluative terms.”15
May writes that “deliberately killing babies, having sex with someone other than
one’s spouse, contracepting, and making babies by artificial insemination are examples of
types of action specified by norms of this kind. Such norms are called ‘absolute’ because they
unconditionally and definitively exclude specifiable kinds of human action as morally
justifiable objects of choice. They are said to be true always and for always, under every
circumstance (semper et pro [or ad] semper). The types of actions specified by such norms
are called ‘intrinsically evil acts.’ Although exceptions to these norms are logically possible
(one can, of course, deliberately kill babies or have sex with persons other than one’s spouse),
they are morally excluded. Thus, these norms are also called ‘exceptionless.’ The
magisterium of the Church proposes some norms as absolutes, including norms

12
JOHN PAUL II, Address to Moral Theologians, 12 November 1988, par. 5; AAS 81 (1989), 1206-11 at 1209.
13
J. FINNIS, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth, Catholic University of America Press,
Washington, D.C., 1991, pp. 2-3.
14
J. FINNIS, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
15
W. E. MAY, An Introduction to Moral Theology, Our Sunday Visitor, Huntington, IN, 2003, p. 142. Since the
traditional teaching on moral absolutes operates with descriptive, not evaluative definitions of moral terms, the
absolute prohibitions involved in moral absolutes are not tautologies. For more on this see: J. SMITH, Humanae
Vitae: A Generation Later, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1991, pp. 204-207.

8
unconditionally proscribing the deliberate killing of the innocent, adultery, remarriage after
divorce, fornication, contraception, the generating of human life in the laboratory, etc., and
the magisterium proposes these norms as true.”16
With the 1993 Encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II dealt a massive blow
to the dissenting proportionalist movement, which had made huge inroads in the First World
countries of Europe and North America, causing immense confusion in ethics and moral
theology, resulting in the emptying of seminaries and religious houses in the reigning chaos.
Against the relativist Culture of Death zeitgeist suffocating an already sickened world, the
Pope re-affirmed the existence of moral absolutes and intrinsically evil acts (nos. 79-83), and
also exposed in detail the errors of “teleologism,”17 which include the erroreous moral
theories of consequentialism and proportionalism (nos. 71-83).18

16
Ibid.
17
Rhonheimer notes that the “term ‘teleological’ as a characterization of ethical theories became successful
through C. D. Broad’s essay, ‘Some of the Main Problems of Ethics,’ Philosophy XXI (1946), reprinted in C. D.
Broad, Broad’s Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. D. R. Cheney (London: Allen and Unwin; New York:
Humanities Press, 1971), pp. 223-246. Broad simply identified any ‘teleological’ argumentation with a
consequentialist one. So he says (p. 230 of the reprinted essays): ‘One characteristic which tends to make an act
right is that it will produce at least as good consequences as an alternative open to the agent in the circumstances
(…) We can sum this up by saying that the property of being optimistic is a very important right-tending
characteristic. I call it teleological because it refers to the goodness of the ends or consequences which the act
brings about.’ Broad, then, goes on to say that a ‘non-teleological’ characteristic of an action would be, for
example, the obligation, independent from considering consequences, to perform what one has promised. But
already in 1930 Broad had distinguished ‘teleological’ from ‘deontological’ ethical theories; see C. D. Broad,
Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930), pp. 206ff… The term ‘teleological
ethics’ was ‘imported’ by German moral theologians, mainly by Bruno Schüller; see his Die Begründung
sittlicher Urteile. Typen ethischer Argumentation in der Moraltheologie, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1980), pp.
282-298 (first published in 1973). According to Schüller, a normative ethic would be ‘teleological’ if it affirms
that ‘the moral character of all the actions and the omissions of man is exclusively determined by its
consequences’ (282). So he uses ‘teleological ethics’ as synonymous with ‘consequentialism’ (a term in fact
created by G. E. Anscombe) and even with ‘utilitarianism’”(M. RHONHEIMER, ‘Intrinsically Evil Acts’ and
the Moral Viewpoint: Clarifying a Central Teaching of Veritatis Splendor, “The Thomist,” 58 [1994], pp. 1-2).
“Teleological ethics,” explains Finnis, “is a label often favoured by utilitarians or consequentialists who
dislike both the narrow historic connotations of ‘utilitarian,’ and the fact that the label ‘consequentialist’ was
brought into use by opponents of their method and thus savors of opprobrium. It is also rather favoured by
Continental philosophers and theologians and their Anglo-Saxon followers. For it recalls the grand modern
bifurcation of ethics into ‘teleological’ and ‘deontological’: the ethics of ends and the ethics of duty. That
dichotomy, however, fails to accommodate Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic and any other substantially
reasonable ethics. For the moral terms, ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ‘duty,’ ‘obligation,’ ‘vice’ and ‘virtue,’ and so forth,
express the requirements of practical reasonableness, but those requirements are nothing but the implications of
an integral pursuit of the basic forms of human good (including the good of practical reasonableness itself)
which constitute the basic ends of all rational decision and action”(J. FINNIS, op. cit., p. 84).
18
Pope John Paul II states, in Veritatis Splendor: “‘Intrinsic evil’: it is not licit to do evil that good may come of
it (cf. Rom 3: 8). 79. One must therefore reject the thesis, characteristic of teleological and proportionalist
theories, which holds that it is impossible to qualify as morally evil according to its species – its object – the
deliberate choice of certain kinds of behaviour or specific acts, apart from a consideration of the intention for
which the choice is made or the totality of the forseeable consequences of that act for all persons concerned.
“The primary and decisive element for moral judgment is the object of the human act, which establishes
whether it is capable of being ordered to the good and to the ultimate end, which is God. This capability is
grasped by reason in the very being of man, considered in his integral truth, and therefore in his natural
inclinations, his motivations and his finalities, which always have a spiritual dimension as well. It is precisely
these which are the contents of the natural law and hence that ordered complex of ‘personal goods’ which serve
the ‘good of the person’: the good which is the person himself and his perfection. These are the goods
safeguarded by the commandments, which, according to Saint Thomas, contain the whole natural law (cf.
Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 100, a. 1).
“80. Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature ‘incapable of being
ordered’ to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts
which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed ‘intrinsically evil’ (intrinsece malum): they are such

9
always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from ulterior intentions of the
one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality
exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that ‘there exist acts which per se
and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object.’(Post-
Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Penitentia, 1984, 17: AAS 77 [1985], 221; cf. PAUL VI,
Address to Members of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, September 1967: AAS 59 [1967], 962:
‘Far be it from Christians to be led to embrace another opinion, as if the Council taught that nowadays some
things are permitted which the Church had previously declared intrinsically evil. Who does not see in this the
rise of a depraved moral relativism, one that clearly endangers the Church’s entire doctrinal heritage?’). The
Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of
such acts: ‘Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and
voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental
torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living
conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children;
degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible
persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate
those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the
Creator.’(VATICAN II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 27).
“With regard to intrinsically evil acts, and in reference to contraceptive practices whereby the conjugal act is
intentionally rendered infertile, Pope Paul VI teaches: ‘Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a
lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for
the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (cf. Rom 3:8) – in other words, to intend directly
something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of
man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in
general’(PAUL VI, Humanae Vitae, 25 July 1968, 14: AAS 60 (1968), 490-491).
“81. In teaching the existence of intrinsically evil acts, the Church accepts the teaching of Sacred Scripture.
The Apostle Paul emphatically states: ‘Do not be deceived: neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers,
nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the Kingdom of
God’(1 Cor 6:9-10).
“If acts are intrinsically evil, a good intention or particular circumstances can diminish their evil, but they
cannot remove it. They remain ‘irremediably’ evil acts; per se and in themselves they are not capable of being
ordered to God and to the good of the person. ‘As for acts which are themselves sins (cum iam opera ipsa
peccata sunt), Saint Augustine writes, like theft, fornication, blasphemy, who would dare affirm that, by doing
them for good motives (causis bonis), they would no longer be sins, or, what is even more absurd, that they
would be sins that are justified?’(ST. AUGUSTINE, Contra Mendacium, VII, 18: PL 40, 528; cf. SAINT
THOMAS AQUINAS, Quaestiones Quodlibetales, IX, q. 7, a. 2: Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1753-
1755).
“Consequently, circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object
into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice.
“81. Furthermore, an intention is good when it has as its aim the true good of the person in view of his
ultimate end. But acts whose object is ‘not capable of being ordered’ to God and ‘unworthy of the human
person’ are always and in every case in conflict with that good. Consequently, respect for norms which prohibit
such acts and oblige semper et pro semper, that is, without any exception, not only does not inhibit a good
intention, but actually represents its basic expression.
“The doctrine of the object as a source of morality represents an authentic explicitation of the Biblical
morality of the Covenant and of the commandments, of charity and of the virtues. The moral quality of human
acting is dependent on this fidelity to the commandments, as an expression of obedience and of love. For this
reason – we repeat – the opinion must be rejected as erroneous which maintains that it is impossible to quality as
morally evil according to its species the deliberate choice of certain kinds of behaviour or specific acts, without
taking into account the intention for which the choice was made or the totality of the forseeable consequences of
that act for all persons concerned. Without the rational determination of the morality of human acting as stated
above, it would be impossible to affirm the existence of an ‘objective moral order’(VATICAN II, Dignitatis
Humanae, 7) and to establish any particular norm the content of which would be binding without exception.
This would be to the detriment of human fraternity and the truth about the good, and would be injurious to
ecclesial communion as well.
“83. As is evident, in the question of the morality of human acts, and in particular the question of whether
there exist intrinsically evil acts, we find ourselves faced with the question of man himself, of his truth and of
the moral consequences flowing from that truth. By acknowledging and teaching the existence of intrinsic evil
in given human acts, the Church remains faithful to the integral truth about man; she thus respects and promotes

10
 Proportionalism and the Papal Birth Control Commission

Though proportionalism as a type of consequentialist situation ethics had been present

in the Church before the Second Vatican Council, thanks to the admirable vigilance on the
part of the Popes and Bishops, as well as alert Catholic intellectuals and concerned laymen, it
was always an underground movement. Unfortunately, proportionalism exploded into a
gigantic crisis in the Church after Vatican II. The catalyst for the massive, organized
proportionalist dissent was undoubtedly the rejection of the Church’s teaching on
contraception. Dissent began in the academe with articles and books by thinkers like
Georgetown professor Louis Dupré19 and Louvain professor Louis Janssens.20 This dissent
received major impetus with the radicalization, by dissenting theologians (i.e., Josef Fuchs,
S.J., Philippe Delhaye, Raymond Sigmond, O.P., Alfons Auer, Paul Anciaux, Michel
Labourdette, O.P.) of the Papal Birth Control Commission (formally named the Papal
Commission for the Study of Population, the Family and Natality), which was a purely
advisory body with no magisterial authority. Originally formed by Pope John XXIII for the
study of population problems (the hysterical “population bomb” scare was just beginning to
go into full swing), the Commission was enlarged by Paul VI and eventually tackled the
whole issue of contraception, especially the morality of the birth control pill, which was, back
then, beginning to be widely promoted around the world by heavily funded population
controllers such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID. The
Commission later on became composed of a majority of dissenters against the Church’s
teaching on the intrinsic evil of contraception, the majority members issuing the so-called
Majority Report, which included proportionalist reasoning for justifying the use of
contraception for the greater good of conjugal life. There was, fortunately, an enlightened,
and one might add prophetic, minority (moral theologians John C. Ford, S.J., Jan Visser,
C.SS.R., Marcelino Zalba, S.J., and Stanislaus de Lestapis, S.J.) among the Commission’s
members who opposed the Majority Report as being against the Magisterium’s constant
teaching on the immorality and intrinsic evil of contraception. They warned that the
proportionalist justification of contraceptive acts in the Majority Report would pave the way
for the justification of other immoral and perverted acts, such as oral and anal sex, as well as
homosexual acts, for “valid reasons,” and “for the greater good” of the persons involved.
Pro-contraception dissenter Robert Blair Kaiser wrote a history of the Papal Birth
Control Commission. Originally called The Politics of Sex and Religion, the title was later
changed in a later edition to The Encyclical That )ever Was: The Story of the Commission on
Population, Family and Birth, 1964-66. In his book Kaiser described the majority dissenters
out to be courageous and enlightened reformers, while the minority members upholding the
traditional position against contraception were made to look intolerant, narrow minded and
bigoted. An orthodox Catholic account of the Papal Birth Control Commission is given by
Janet E. Smith in her highly recommended book Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later,
published in 1991 by the Catholic University of America Press.

man in his dignity and vocation. Consequently, she must reject the theories set forth above, which contradict this
truth”(JOHN PAUL II, Veritatis Splendor, nos. 79-83).
19
J. DUPRÉ, Contraception and Catholics, Helicon, Baltimore,1964.
20
L. JANSSENS, Morale Conjugale et Progestogènes, “Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses,” 39 (1963), pp.
787-826.

11
 The Proportionalist “Preference Principle” or “Principle of Proportionate
Good”

The authors of the Majority Report presented a number of proportionalist arguments

to justify the use of contraception by married couples, in particular, in two crucial passages.
The first passage reads: “To take his or another’s life is a sin not because life is under the
exclusive dominion of God, but because it is contrary to right reason unless there is question
of a good of a higher order. It is licit to sacrifice a life for the good of the community.”21 May
calls the proportionalist principle set forth in this passage the “Caiaphas” principle, whereas
dissenting moral theologians describe this principle as the “preference principle” or the
“principle of proportionate good.” Dissenter Bruno Schüller describes the “preference
principle,” the “principle of proportionate good” or “principle of proportionate reason” in this
way: “Any ethical norm whatsoever regarding our dealings and omissions in relation to other
men…can be only a particular application of that more universal norm, ‘The greater good is
to be preferred.’”22
This principle advocated by the proportionalists claims that it is morally justified to
intend what they call a “nonmoral evil” (Schüller, McCormick), an “ontic evil” (Janssens), a
“premoral evil” (Fuchs), or a “physical evil” (McCormick), such as, for example, the death of
an innocent person, if this evil is required for a “proportionate reason,” for a “proportionately
related greater good.” The Georgetown Jesuit Richard A. McCormick, writes: “Where a
higher good is at stake and the only means to protect it is to choose to do a nonmoral evil,
then the will remains properly disposed to the values constitutive of human good…This is to
say that the intentionality is good even when the person, reluctantly and regretfully to be sure,
intends the nonmoral evil if a truly proportionate reason [i.e., good] for such a choice is
present.”23
For proportionalist dissenter Louis Janssens, ontic evil (also called “premoral
disvalue” by him) is “any lack of fulfillment which frustrates our natural urges and makes us
suffer.”24 Some examples of ontic evil are “hunger and thirst, pain and suffering, illness and
death, neuroses and psychoses, ignorance, error, violence, segregation, etc.”25 Examples of
ontic good, the opposite of ontic evil, would be “life, bodily or psychic health, pleasure and
joy, friendliness, the cultural values of science, technique, art, etc.”26 Being imperfect beings,
ontic evil is implied in every thing we do and for Janssens, this inevitably leads to ambiguity
in moral action, for every choice that we do, even morally good choices, necessarily
sacrifices some good, thus involving ontic evil or premoral disvalue.27

21
Majority Report, Documentum Syntheticum, in The Birth Control Debate, edited by R. Hoyt, National
Catholic Reporter, Kansas City, MO, 1969, p. 69.
22
B. SCHÜLLER, What Ethical Principles Are Universally Valid?, “Theology Digest,” 19 (1971), p. 24.
McCormick comments on this text writing: “Stated negatively, it [this principle] reads: put in a position where
he will unavoidably cause evil, man must discover which is the worst evil and avoid it. Stated positively, this is
its formulation: put before two concurring but mutually exclusive values, man should discover which must be
preferred and act accordingly. These statements imply that a physical evil can be caused or permitted only if it is
demanded by a proportionate good”(R. A. McCORMICK, )otes on Moral Theology, 1965-1980, University
Press of America, Lanham, MD, 1981, p. 315).
23
R. A. McCORMICK, Ambiguity in Moral Choice, in Doing Evil to Achieve Good, edited by R. A.
McCormick and P. Ramsey, Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1978, p. 39.
24
L. JANSSENS, Ontic Evil and Moral Evil, “Louvain Studies,” 4.2 (Fall, 1972), p. 134.
25
L. JANSSENS, )orms and Priorities in a Love Ethic, “Louvain Studies,” 6.3 (Spring, 1977), p. 211.
26
L. JANSSENS, op. cit., p. 210.
27
Another proportionalist dissenter, Fr. Richard M. Gula, S.S., explains Janssens’ description of ontic evil,
writing: “Ontic evil or…‘premoral disvalue’ is Janssens’ way of accounting for the ambiguity of human actions.
This ambiguity is the result of the limitations of being human. Ontic evil/premoral disvalue expresses the lack of
perfection in anything whatsoever. These notions express limitation, the failure to reach the full actualization of

12
 Since there is ontic evil in everything that we do and ambiguity in every choice that
we make, it follows that it would be impossible to act were we morally required to avoid all
ontic evil. So the question must be asked: when and to what extent are we justified in causing
or allowing ontic evil or premoral disvalue? Janssens is quick to point out that one should
never will ontic evil for its own sake. An action would be immoral if ontic evil is the end of
the inner act of the will, “if by end is meant that which definitely and in the full sense of the
word puts an end to the activity of the subject.”28 The reason for this is because ontic evil or
premoral disvalue, when willed in and for itself, “makes the end of the acting subject into an
immoral end, which, as formal element, contaminates the totality of the action with its
malice.”29 Here we see a central tenet of Janssens’ proportionalist methodology with regard
to the moral meaning of human action, namely, that the end of the inner act of the will, i.e.,
the end the agent has in view of acting, the end for whose sake the action is ultimately
undertaken (the finis operantis, the remote end or remote intention) is the formal determinant
of the morality of the action as a whole. If the end of the inner act of the will is evil, then the
entire act will be evil; if this end is good, then its goodness will be communicated to the
entire act and the entire act will be morally good.30
In stressing that the end of the agent has in view is the formal element determining the
morality of human acts, Janssens is not retreating into a sort of pure subjectivism, nor does he
forget the finis operis that the agent wills in order to achieve his finis operantis. First of all,
for an action to be morally good, the finis operantis, that is, the remote end intended by the
agent, must be something truly, and not merely apparently, good. Also, in addition to an
objectively good end that one must intend as the final term of one’s action, it is also
necessary that the means chosen to attain this end, that is, the external act, must be in due
proportion to that end. If the means or external act (called by Janssens the material element
of the human act) is not adequately proportioned to the end, then the action will be, as a
whole, morally bad. And the means or external act chosen cannot be in due proportion to the
end if it contradicts the agent’s remote end (the finis operantis). It is clear that one can judge
whether or not the means or external act is proportionate only by relating it to the remote end.
Therefore, for the proportionalist methodology of Janssens, no moral judgment of the moral
goodness or badness of the external act can be made without taking into account the end
toward which it is ordered.31
In Janssens’ proportionalist world, contraception, for example, would be an external
act or means that can be morally good when the ontic evil or premoral disvalue involved in
this means or external act is proportionate to the good intended as end (finis operantis, remote

human potential. Ontic evils or premoral disvalues are what we experience as regrettable, harmful, detrimental
to full human growth. These would be such things as suffering, injury, fatigue, ignorance, violence, death, etc.
Ontic evils are inevitably present in human actions because of the unavoidable limitations that come with being
human. As Janssens puts it, ontic evil is present in our actions ‘because we are temporal and spatial, and live
together with others in the same material world, are involved and act in a common sinful situation.’ This means
that we are not able to realize the good without causing or admitting to some ontic evil, or premoral disvalue.
“Ontic evil is not moral evil. If these were the same, we could not act morally at all. Moral evil is causing or
permitting ontic evil without a proportionate reason”(R. M. GULA, What Are They Saying About Moral
)orms?, Paulist Press, New York, 1982, pp. 71-72). Although both proportionalists and the Magisterium agree
that ontic evil expresses the lack of perfection in anything whatsoever and that some ontic evils outweigh others
(e.g., one can throw valuable cargo overboard to save a ship in a storm), the Magisterium also teaches that some
ontic evils can never be the object of a morally correct choice, whereas proportionalists think that all ontic evils
can be the object of a morally correct choice if proportionate reasons exist for choosing them.
28
L. JANSSENS, Ontic Evil and Moral Evil, “Louvain Studies,” 6.3 (Spring, 1977), p. 141.
29
L. JANSSENS, op. cit., p. 142.
30
Cf. Ibid.
31
L. JANSSENS, op. cit., pp. 142, 148-149.

13
intention, remote end), like the alieviation of psychological stress and harm on the part of the
wife were another unwanted birth were to occur, or for reasons of dire poverty.
We see that for Janssens the external act or means, which for him is a merely material
event in the physical world,32 does not have to be an ontic good. The external act or means
may very well involve ontic evil (e.g., in the case of contraception, for example, the loss of
fertility), but the evil entailed may be licitly intended if willing and intending this ontic evil
or premoral disvalue can be justified by a proportionately higher or greater ontic good.
Janssens states: “It can be right to intend an ontic evil as end of the inner act of the will, if
that end is not willed as a final end, but only as a finis medius et proximus to a higher end.”33
“An action admitting or causing a premoral disvalue is morally right when it serves a higher
premoral value or safeguards the priority given to a lesser premoral disvalue.”34
Because the means or external act chosen (e.g., masturbation, contraception, direct
sterilization, a homosexual act, direct abortion) can include ontic evil or premoral disvalue
intended as a proximate end (finis operis) to a proportionately greater ontic good or premoral
value intended by the agent as a final end, Janssens holds that “it is impossible to pronounce a
judgment on an exterior action which contains ontic evil, e.g., to kill somebody, to utter a
falsehood – if this action is viewed only as a factual and actual event (secundum speciem
naturae) and without paying attention to the end of the inner act of the will”35
For Janssens, we are morally obligated to promote and realize ontic goods or premoral
values as much as possible. In conflict situations, i.e., in situations were ontic good is
unavoidably connected with ontic evil, we must “choose the alternative which indicates our
preference for the lesser premoral disvalue or for the higher premoral value.”36
For Janssens, concrete moral norms are relative, not absolute. They admit of
exceptions. Denying the existence of intrinsic evils in the area of concrete moral norms,
Janssens promotes his principle of the proportionate good, writing with regard to concrete
moral norms the following: “An action admitting or causing a premoral disvalue is morally
right when it serves a higher premoral value or safeguards the priority given to a lesser
premoral disvalue. …In other words, we can have a proportionate reason to depart from the
norm. Consequently concrete material norms are relative in the sense of conditioned. They
are not binding, if there is a proportionate reason why the case at issue is not governed by
them.”37
The Proportionalist Justification of Moral Evil. Though what in fact they are doing is
justifying the committing of intrinsically evil acts, proportionalists vehemently deny that they
are advocating that a morally good end justifies a morally evil means. What they do claim is
that one can intend and do a “nonmoral evil” “ontic evil” “premoral evil” or “physical evil” if
such an intending and doing of evil is ordered towards a “proportionately greater” nonmoral

32
Cf. Ontic Evil and Moral Evil, pp. 142, 148-149; )orms and Priorities in a Love Ethic, pp. 210, 216, 231,
232-233.
33
L. JANSSENS, op. cit., p. 141.
34
L. JANSSENS, )orms and Priorities in a Love Ethic, p. 217. Cf. Op. cit., p. 231: “Even when the material
content of an action involves a premoral disvalue, the whole action can be morally right, when we have a
proportionate reason for admitting or causing the premoral disvalue.”
35
L. JANSSENS, Ontic Evil and Moral Evil, p. 148. Cf. )orms and Priorities in a Love Ethic, p. 231: “It is
impossible to make a moral judgment about the material content of an action without considering the whole act:
material content (actus externus, what is done), the situation or, classically, the circumstances and the
foreseeable consequences. A judgment about moral rightness or wrongness is only possible with respect to that
totality, because only concerning that whole is it possible to argue whether or not it expresses the priority of the
lesser premoral disvalue or the higher premoral value.”
36
L. JANSSENS, )orms and Priorities in a Love Ethic, p. 214.
37
L. JANSSENS, op. cit., p. 217.

14
good.38 In consequence, proportionalists use the “preference principle” or “principle of
proportionate good” to deny exceptionless moral norms. They would affirm that it is indeed
wrong to kill an innocent person, commit adultery, homosexual acts, fornicate, contracept,
etc., unless when doing so is required to attain a proportionately greater good. Therefore, acts
of direct abortion, contraception, adultery, fornication, homosexual acts, euthanasia, etc., are
morally justifiable, are morally right, say the proportionalists, if such actions are done for a
proportionately greater good.
Against the proportionalist principle of “proportionate good” moral theologian
Bartholomew Kiely argues that the principle fails to seriously take into account the reflexive
or immanent consequences of human acts as self-determining choices.39 Kiely argues that we
make the kind of persons we are to be by the free choice of certain actions. In the choice of
an evil action, even for the sake of some “greater good,” we make ourselves to be evil
persons or evildoers.
Janssens tries to recruit St. Thomas Aquinas to justify his proportionalism,40 but
against proportionalist methodology, the moral theology of St. Thomas affirms that it is
possible, indeed necessary, to make a moral judgment about an exterior act as specified by its
object without relating this to the end that the agent has in view (the finis operantis) in
choosing the external act as means. Aquinas, against Janssens, held the position that certain
kinds of actions specified by their objects and describable in nonmoral language (e.g., to have
intercourse with someone who is not one’s spouse41) are of themselves (secundum se)
morally evil and never justifiable by relating them to any end, however noble, that the agent
may intend.

Proportionalist Justification Based on the “Totality” of Human Acts

A second passage defending proportionalism in the Majority Report, an argument

justifying contraceptive acts in favour of a so-called “totality” of human acts, reads as
follows: “When man intervenes in the procreative purpose of individual acts by
contracepting, he does this with the intention of regulating and not excluding fertility. Then
he unites the material finality toward fecundity which exists in intercourse with the formal
finality of the person and renders the entire process human…Conjugal acts which by
intention are infertile,42 or which are rendered infertile [by the use of artificial
contraceptives], are ordered to the expression of the union of love; that love, moreover,
reaches its culmination in fertility responsibly accepted. For that reason other acts of union
are in a sense incomplete and receive their full moral quality with ordination toward the
fertile act…Infertile conjugal acts constitute a totality with fertile acts and have a single
moral specification [namely, the fostering of love responsibly toward generous fecundity].”43

38
J. FUCHS, Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C.,
1983, p. 138.
39
Cf. B. KIELY, The Impracticality of Proportionalism, “Gregorianum,” 66 (1985), pp. 656-666.
40
Cf. L. JANSSENS, Ontic Evil and Moral Evil, “Louvain Studies,” 4.2 (Fall, 1972), pp. 115-156 ; reprinted in
Readings in Moral Theology, )o. 1, )orms and the Catholic Tradition, ed. by C. E. Curran and R. A.
McCormick, Paulist Press, New York, 1979, pp. 40-93 ; )orms and Priorities in a Love Ethic, “Louvain
Studies,” 6.3 (Spring, 1977), pp. 207-238 ; St. Thomas and the Question of Proportionality, “Louvain Studies,”
9.1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 26-46.
41
Cf. Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3 ; Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 6.
42
By “conjugal acts which by intention are infertile” the authors of the dissenting Majority Report mean
conjugal acts chosen during the wife’s infertile period. The authors see no moral difference between the use of
artificial contraception and abstinence from sexual intercourse during the wife’s fertile time.
43
Majority Report, Documentum Syntheticum, in The Birth Control Debate, edited by R. Hoyt, National
Catholic Reporter, Kansas City, MO, 1969, p. 72.

15
 In his critique of this passage from the Majority Report, May explains how the
authors depart from traditional Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evils and the object of the
human act, redefining the human act as a whole that receives its moral specification from the
end for whose sake it is done. May explains that the passage above from the Majority Report
“presents an understanding of the ‘totality’ of human acts that is, as we shall see, central to
the denial of moral absolutes. The argument holds that there is a ‘material privation’ (or what
will later be called an ‘ontic,’ ‘premoral,’ or ‘nonmoral’ evil) in contraceptive activity insofar
as it deprives a conjugal act of its procreative potential. However, the contraceptive
intervention is only a partial aspect of a whole series of contracepted marital acts, and this
entire ensemble ‘receives its moral specification from the other finality, which is good in
itself [namely, the marital union] and from the fertility of the whole conjugal life.’44
According to this line of reasoning, married couples that rightly use contraception are not
choosing to exclude children selfishly from their marriage, or expressing what the authors
elsewhere call a ‘contraceptive mentality.’45 Rather, what they are doing – the moral ‘object’
of their act – is ‘the fostering of love responsibly toward a generous fecundity.’ And this is
something obviously something good, not bad.
“This line of argumentation is very significant for the question of moral absolutes
because it foreshadows the revisionist theologians’ understanding of human action as a whole
that receives its moral specification from the end for whose sake it is done. Revisionists, as
will be seen, claim that the specific moral absolutes defended in the Catholic tradition and
affirmed by the magisterium isolate partial aspects of human acts and, on the basis of such
isolated aspects, render decisive moral judgements about them. Their claim is that reason,
objectivity, and truth require that an action be evaluated as right or wrong only as a totality
that includes all the circumstances and motivations, considered in relation to all the
‘premoral’ (but morally relevant) goods and bads involved in that totality, for the purpose of
identifying the behaviour that will further human self-realization and self-development46 or at
least will not contradict or negate its own good purpose.47”48
May explains in detail the denial of moral absolutes on the part of proportionalists by
their use of the nature of a human act as a whole or totality. He writes that “in the report the
majority had argued that a moral judgment about contraception could only be made in terms
of the purposes of contracepted marital acts and the whole of the married life. The ‘Majority
Report’ claimed that if a couple deliberately prevents conception in individual marital acts in
order to express their marital union and orders these contracepted marital acts towards
generous fecundity, then one could properly say that what the couple was doing – the ‘object’
of their moral choice – was ‘fostering love responsibly towards generous fecundity,’ even,
though this required the ‘material privation’ (= nonmoral evil) of individual acts of marital
union of their openness to human life.
“One major supporter of this ‘Majority Report,’ it should be noted, was Josef Fuchs.
In subsequent writings, Fuchs insisted that it is not possible to make a moral judgment about
the intending and doing of ‘premoral’ evil as such, because, he claimed, ‘an action cannot be
judged morally in its materiality (killing, wounding, going to the moon) without reference to

44
Ibid., p. 75.
45
See: Schema Documenti de Responsabili Paternitate, a document included in the Majority Report, in The
Birth Control Debate, edited by R. Hoyt, pp. 88-90.
46
Cf. J. FUCHS, )aturrecht oder naturalistischer Fehlschluss?, “Stimmen der Zeit,” 29 (1988), pp. 409, 420-
422; J. FUCHS, Christian Ethics in a Secular Arena, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 1984, p.
75 ; J. FUCHS, Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality, Georgetown University Press, Washington,
D.C., 1983, pp. 131, 139.
47
Cf. L. JANSSENS, Ontic Evil and Moral Evil, “Louvain Studies,” 4 (1972), p. 144; L. JANSSENS, )orms
and Priorities in a Love Ethic, “Louvain Studies,” 6 (1977), p. 231.
48
W. E. MAY, op. cit., pp. 144-145.

16
the intention of the agent; without this, we are not dealing with a human action, and only of a
human action may one say in a true sense whether it is morally good or bad.’49
“It is important to recall here that Fuchs and other revisionists identify the moral
absolutes they deny with ‘material’ or ‘concrete behavioral’ norms specifying ‘physical acts’
or ‘material acts,’ including, in some cases, their ‘direct’ effects, described independently of
any purpose of the agent. Revisionists claim that the tradition affirming such absolutes
arbitrarily abstracted some elements of an action from its total, concrete reality and rendered
a moral judgment on this abstraction and not on the total human act. In their view, such
judgments simply ignored the moral reality of the act as a whole.
“According to revisionists, therefore, if one properly evaluates the whole act and not
merely partial aspects of it, one will arrive at the correct moral judgment. Thus, for example,
one will see that contraceptive intercourse, if done by married persons for a truly
proportionate good, is only a partial aspect of a whole human act that can rightly be described
as ‘fostering love responsibly towards a generous fecundity.’ Likewise, if a married couple
resorts to contraceptive sterilization (tubal ligation or vasectomy) because any further
pregnancy might endanger the mother’s life, the choice to sterilize, when seen within the
totality of what the couple is doing, can be truthfully described as a ‘marriage-stabilizing’ act.
Accordingly, in the view of revisionists, to absolutize norms proscribing contraception and
contraceptive sterilization is to be blind to the wholeness of the concrete human act. And the
same is true, they claim, of other alleged moral absolutes, such as those proscribing the
deliberate killing of the innocent, having sex with someone who is not one’s spouse, etc.
Such material norms, while useful and valid for the most part, ought to be set aside when the
action as a concrete whole demands that this be done if the greater good is to be served.”50
After giving the main arguments of the proportionalist reasoning of the “totality” of
human acts, May goes on to critique this erroneous and morally dangerous reasoning, first by
giving a correct analysis of the object of the human act, the first and most important of all the
determinants of the morality of a human act: “Revisionist theologians uniformly refer to
moral absolutes as ‘material’ or ‘concrete behavioral’ norms. They say that these norms
identify ‘physical acts’ or ‘material acts,’ including, in some instances, the direct effects of
these acts. They maintain that such ‘material’ acts are physical or material events considered
in abstraction of any purpose or intention of their agents.
“But Catholic theologians who today defend the truth of moral absolutes and those
who did so in the past, including St. Thomas Aquinas, offer a much different account of these
‘material’ or ‘behavioral’ norms, which they never call ‘material’ or ‘behavioral’ norms.
According to these theologians, the human acts identified and morally excluded by such
norms are not specified independently of the agent’s will. Rather, they are specified ‘by the
object’ (ex obiecto), and by ‘object’ they mean exactly what the agent chooses, i.e., the act to
be done or omitted and the proximate result sought in carrying out the choice to do this act.51
Thus, for example, Pope John Paul II, in Reconciliatio et Poenitentia, referred to a ‘doctrine,
based on the Decalogue and on the preaching of the Old Testament, and assimilated into the
kerygma of the Apostles and belonging to the earliest teaching of the Church, and constantly
reaffirmed by her up to this day.’ What doctrine? The doctrine that ‘there exist acts which per
49
J. FUCHS, Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C.,
1983, p. 138.
50
W. E. MAY, op. cit., pp. 149-150.
51
Cf. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, In II Sent., d. 40, q. un., a. 1, ad 4; In IV Sent., d. 16, q. 3, a. 1b, ad 2; Summa
Theologiae, I-II, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3; De Malo, q. 2, a. 4c. ; K. HOERMANN, Das Objekt als Quelle der Sitt-
lilchkeit, in The Ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by L. Elders, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City,
1984, pp. 122-123, 126-128; M. RHONHEIMER, )atur als Grundlage der Moral, Tyrolia Verlag, Innsbruck,
1987, p. 95; T. BELMANS, Le sens objectif de l’agir humain, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 1980,
pp. 214-216.

17
se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason
of their object (propter obiectum).’52
“The Catholic tradition affirming these moral absolutes held that these norms do not
bear upon acts ‘in their natural species’ but rather upon them ‘in their moral species (or
genus).’53 The ‘form’ or ‘intelligibility’ of such acts is not given in their nature as physical or
material events in abstraction from the agent’s understanding and willing but from their
intelligibly chosen objects.54 In this tradition, moreover, ‘direct’ does not mean merely
causal, material, or behavioral immediately but rather the adoption by the will of what serves
as either end or means.55 For example, the very same physical or material act (the ‘natural’
species of an act) – namely, sexual intercourse – can be, by reason of its intelligibly chosen
‘object,’ either a marital act, which is good in its moral species, or an act of incest or of
adultery or of fornication, all of which are evil in their moral species.”56
Object, End and Circumstances. There are three “sources” of the morality of human
acts, namely the object chosen, the end in view (or intention), and the circumstances of the
action. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains these constitutive elements of the
morality of human acts in this way: “The object chosen is a good toward which the will
deliberately directs itself. It is the matter of a human act. The object chosen morally specifies
the act of the will, insofar as reason recognizes and judges it to be or not to be in conformity
with the true good. Objective norms of morality express the rational order of good and evil,
attested to by conscience.
“In contrast to the object, the intention resides in the acting subject. Because it lies at
the voluntary source of an action and determines it by its end, intention is an element
essential to the moral evaluation of an action. The end is the first goal of the intention and
indicates the purpose pursued in the action. The intention is a movement of the will toward
the end: it is concerned with the goal of the activity. It aims at the good anticipated from the
action undertaken. Intention is not limited to directing individual actions, but can guide
several actions toward one and the same purpose; it can orient one’s whole life toward its
ultimate end. For example, a service done with the end of helping one’s neighbor can at the
same time be inspired by the love of God as the ultimate end of all our actions. One and the
same action can also be inspired by several intentions, such as performing a service in order
to obtain a favor or to boast about it.
“A good intention (for example, that of helping one’s neighbor) does not make
behavior that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying and calumny, good or just. The end
does not justify the means. Thus the condemnation of an innocent person cannot be justified
as a legitimate means of saving the nation. On the other hand, an added bad intention (such as
vainglory) makes an act evil that, in and of itself, can be good (such as almsgiving).57
“The circumstances, including the consequences, are secondary elements of a moral
act. They contribute to increasing or diminishing the moral goodness or evil of human acts
(for example, the amount of a theft). They can also diminish or increase the agent’s

52
POPE JOHN PAUL II, Reconciliatio et Poenitentia, no. 17.
53
Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 20, q. 2 ; In II Sent., d. 40, q. un., a. 2.
54
For texts from St. Thomas, analysis, and commentary, see: P. LEE, The Permanence of the Ten
Commandments: St. Thomas and His Modern Commentators, “Theological Studies,” 42 (1981), pp. 431-432 ;
T. BELMANS, op. cit., pp. 62, 109-119, 124, 162, 237; M. RHONHEIMER, op. cit., pp. 91-99, 317-345, 367-
374.
55
Thus ‘direct’ killing of the innocent is always explained as killing intended by the will either as an end or as a
means. See: POPE PIUX XII, Discorsi e Radiomessagi di sua Santità Pio XII, 6, November 12, 1949, pp. 191-
192 ; POPE PAUL VI, Humanae Vitae, footnote 14; CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE
FAITH, De Abortu Procurato, November 18, 1974, no. 7, and Donum Vitae, February 22, 1987, note 20.
56
W. E. MAY, op. cit., pp. 151-152.
57
Cf. Matthew 6:2-4.

18
responsibility (such as acting out of a fear of death). Circumstances of themselves cannot
change the moral quality of acts themselves; they can make neither good nor right an action
that is in itself evil.”58
In order for a human act to be morally good all three determinants, object, end and
circumstances, must be good together. An evil intention corrupts an action, even if the object
freely chosen is good in itself. For example, a politician spends money for the relief of
poverty in his constituency but with the intention of fostering political corruption among his
beneficiaries. His object, giving money for poverty relief is something undoubtedly good, but
his evil intention or end (fostering corruption among his beneficiaries) corrupts the act,
making it bad.
Now, if the object freely chosen is intrinsically evil, no end or circumstance can make
the act a morally good act. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “…The object of the
choice can by itself vitiate an act in its entirety. There are some concrete acts – such as
fornication – that it is always wrong to choose, because choosing them entails a disorder of
the will, that is, a moral evil.
“It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the
intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or
emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves,
independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their
object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that
good may result from it.”59

Critique of the Revisionist ature of the Human Act as a “Totality”

May’s critique of the dissenting proportionalist’s nature of the human act as whole or
totality argument goes as follows: “Revisionists claim that we cannot judge whether a given
act is morally good or bad unless we consider this act in its wholeness or totality; because we
cannot do so, it follows that there can be no moral absolutes insofar as such absolutes
arbitrarily abstract the ‘material’ or ‘physical’ character of the act from its human totality,
without any reference to the agent’s purposes or intentions.
“I have already shown that this claim rests upon a prejudiced description of moral
absolutes. For, as we have seen, theologians who defend the truth of moral absolutes do not
ignore the purposes or intentions of the agents; rather, they insist that both the ‘remote’ or
‘ulterior’ end and the ‘proximate’ end of the agent’s action – i.e., both the purpose for whose
sake the deed is done and the deed willingly chosen as a means to that purpose – must be
taken into account. It is true that an act must be good in its ‘totality’ or ‘wholeness’ if it is to
be morally good (bonum ex integra causa). But it is not true that we cannot judge that a
proposed act is morally bad without taking into account all of its elements, for if we know
that any of its elements is bad, we know that the whole act is morally vitiated (malum ex
quocumque defectu). Consequently, human acts already known to be bad by reason of their
‘objects’ (i.e., the intelligible subject matter upon which the agent’s will must bear as a
chosen means to some ulterior end) remain morally bad even if the circumstances in which
they are chosen or the end for whose sake they are adopted as means are good. Revisionists,
in their arguments based on the ‘wholeness’ or ‘totality’ of the human act, focus on the
agent’s ‘remote’ or ‘ulterior’ end or ‘further intention,’ i.e., on the good that the agent hopes
to realize by choosing to do x here and now, or the evil that the agent hopes to avoid by
choosing to do x here and now. But they fail to take seriously – indeed, they even ignore – the

58
CCC, nos. 1751-1754.
59
CCC, nos. 1755-1756.

19
moral significance of the x that is chosen to realize this end and the fact that the agent freely
wills this x as a chosen means, for it is the ‘proximate’ end of the will act and the ‘present
intention’ that shapes his moral being.
“Revisionists are thus led to redescribe human actions in terms of their hoped for
results. Thus, as we have seen, they describe a series of contracepted marital acts not as acts
of contraception but as a single act of ‘fostering love responsibly toward a generous
fecundity.’ Similarly, they describe the choice of contraceptive sterilization as a ‘marriage-
stabilizing’ act. To do this is like describing an act of embezzlement, when done in order to
gain money to build a park for children, as ‘obtaining money for a children’s park.’ It
conceals, rather than reveals, what a person is doing.
“The argument to support the denial of moral absolutes based on the ‘totality’ or
‘wholeness’ of a human act is, thus, fallacious. It fails, first of all, to recognize that, although
one cannot definitely say that a human act is morally good unless one takes into account all
of the elements that enter into it (insofar as all aspects of a human act must be morally good if
the act as a whole is to be good), one can definitely say that a given human act is morally bad
as soon as one knows that any of its elements is morally bad. Secondly, it falsely redescribes
actions in terms of their anticipated results and by doing so fails to reveal and at times even
conceals what moral agents are in fact choosing and doing.”60

60
W. E. MAY, op. cit., pp. 156-157.

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