An Introduction To Moral Theology, 2nd Edition. William May
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her make it. In other words, one is aware that one is free in settling the matter, in making the choice among the alternative possibilities.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes a section (nos. 1730-1748) to the subject of free choice.
3. The Significance of Human Action and the Meaning of Character
Free choice bears upon actions that we can do. But the actions in question are not simply physical events in the material world that come and go, like the falling of rain or the turning of the leaves. The actions at stake are not something that “happen” to a person. They are, rather, the outward expressions of a person’s choices, the disclosure or revelation of a person’s moral identity, his or her being as a moral being. For at the core of an action, as human and personal, is a free, self-determining choice, which as such is something spiritual and abides within the person, determining the very being of the person. The Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, are very clear about this. Jesus taught that it is not what enters a person that defiles him or her; rather, it is what flows from the person, from his or her heart, from the core of his or her being, from his or her choice (cf. Mt 15:10-20; Mk 7:14-23). We can say that a human action — i.e., a free, intelligible action, whether good or bad — is the adoption by choice of some intelligible proposal and the execution of this choice through some exterior act. But the core of the action is the free, self-determining choice that abides within the person, making him or her to be the kind of person he or she is. Thus, I become an adulterer, as Jesus clearly taught (Mt 5:28), when I look at a woman with lust, i.e., when I adopt by choice the proposal to commit adultery or to think with satisfaction about doing it, even if I do not execute this choice externally.
This illumines the self-determining character of free choice. It is in and through the actions we freely choose to do that we give to ourselves an identity, for weal or for woe. This identity abides in us until we make other, contradictory kinds of choices. Thus, if I choose to commit adultery, I make myself to be an adulterer, and I remain an adulterer until, by another free and self-determining choice, I have a change of heart (metanoia) and repent of my deed. Even then I remain an adulterer, for I have, unfortunately, given myself that identity; but now I am a repentant adulterer, one who has, through free choice, given to himself a new kind of identity, the identity of one who repudiates his freely chosen adultery, repents of it, and is now determined, through free choice and with the help of God’s never-failing grace, to amend his life and to be a faithful, loving spouse.
The significance of human acts as self-determining is beautifully brought out by Pope John Paul II. After noting that “it is precisely through his acts that man attains perfection as man,” he goes on to say: “Human acts are moral acts because they express and determine the goodness or evil of the individual who performs them. They do not produce a change merely in the state of affairs outside of man, but, to the extent that they are deliberate choices [emphasis added], they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits” (Veritatis splendor, no. 71).
Continuing, John Paul calls attention to a remarkably perceptive passage from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s De Vita Moysis, II, 2-3: “All things subject to change and to becoming never remain constant, but continually pass from one state to another, for better or worse.… Now human life is always subject to change; it needs to be born ever anew.… But here birth does not come about by a foreign intervention, as is the case with bodily beings …; it is the result of free choice. Thus we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as we will, by our decisions” (cited in Veritatis splendor, no. 71).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 1749) speaks of the significance of human action.
We might say that our actions are like “words” that we speak and through which we give to ourselves our moral character, our identity as moral beings.13 Character, as Grisez notes, “is the integral existential identity of the person — the entire person in all his or her dimensions as shaped by morally good and bad choices — considered as a disposition to further choices.”14 We shape our character, our identity as moral beings, by what we freely choose to do. We are free to choose what we are to do and, by so choosing, to make ourselves to be the kind of persons we are. But we are not free to make what we choose to do to be good or evil, right or wrong. Our choices are good or bad insofar as they conform to what Vatican Council II called “the highest norm of human life” (Dignitatis humanae, no. 3), God’s divine and eternal law and its “imperatives,” which are made known to us by the mediation of conscience. But before examining the role of conscience in our moral life we need first to examine the role of virtue, which is rooted in free choice, in that life.
4. Virtue and Our Moral Life
We have just considered free choice and its existential significance and the meaning of “character” as the “integral existential identity of the person — the entire person in all his or her dimensions as shaped by morally good and bad choices.” From what has been said regarding free choice and its existential significance, we can conclude that the free, self-determining choices at the core of a human act abide within the person as dispositions inclining the person to make similar kinds of choices in the future unless contradictory choices are made. Thus, if a person freely chooses to tell the truth, to reject immediately proposals to commit adultery, he or she makes himself or herself to be the kind person willing to tell the truth and to be faithful to his or her marital commitment, whereas the person who freely chooses to lie or to commit adultery makes himself or herself to be the kind of person disposed to lie or to commit adultery.
Moreover, among the choices we make, some of them serve to organize a person’s life. Grisez calls these kinds of choices “large” choices or “commitments,”15 which put us in the position of having to carry them out by many “smaller” choices — for example, in choosing to marry we commit ourselves to a way of life and to integrate other, smaller choices into this central commitment. Similarly, Pope John Paul II in Veritatis splendor emphasizes the “importance of certain choices which ‘shape’ a person’s entire moral life, and which serve as bounds within which other particular everyday choices can be situated and allowed to develop” (no. 65). The role of those choices — which we can call “commitments” — in the development of a person’s character is well summarized by Grisez in the following passage: “The enduring, spiritual reality of one’s choices, especially the larger ones which mainly shape one’s identity, is the principle of an integrated moral self. Character simply is this self, regarded as the source of further acts.”16 This will be set forth more fully below. But from what has been said already regarding the existential significance of freely chosen human acts and “character” as shaped by free choices, we can easily understand what Grisez had to say in a book he co-authored with Russell Shaw:
Typically, we say of good people that they have good character. “Character” here signifies nothing less than the totality of a person integrated around good choices. And virtues? They are the different aspects of a good character. Looking at the matter from one point of view — relationships with other persons — we say that the individual of good character is fair or just; considering the individual from the aspect of sexuality, we say that he or she is chaste or modest; from the aspect of response to dangerous situations, that the individual is brave or steadfast; and so on. These virtues … are different aspects of a good character, considered in light of different problems and challenges.17
In other words, we can regard virtues — and their opposites, vices — as both a residue of a person’s prior acts and dispositions to engage in further acts similar in moral quality to those that gave rise to the dispositions. “St. Thomas,” as Grisez points out, “and many later Catholic writers called virtues and vices ‘habits,’ but in an unusual sense. In ordinary speech a habit is what shapes an unthinking routine of behavior. Thomas and his successors did not mean that virtues and vices are habits in this sense; they considered them aspects of character that make for consistency in deliberate behavior done by free choice.”18
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