Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

200 TODD A. SALZMAN
Therefore, any choice of an act prohibited by the norm would
necessarily be morally bad. Since a specific norm entails a presumption
about the nature of the will that chooses an act proscribed
by the norm, there can be absolute specific natural law
norms. Such norms would be the proper object for the magisterium’s
teaching on the primary (part of revelation) or secondary
(truths closely associated with revelation) object of infallibility.
Revisionists, however, refer to such norms as synthetic
norms. For example, whereas murder and lying are always
morally bad, killing and falsehoods are not always such, precisely
because the former include a description of a disordered
will whereas the latter do not.
For revisionism, the possibility of evolution, change, and development
– in a word, historical consciousness – within the human
experience, rules out, by definition, material natural law
norms that could be taught infallibly by the magisterium. A necessary
prerequisite for infallibility is that a teaching is irreformable,
that is, “the formulation [of an infallible teaching]
can be improved, but the meaning must be retained.” 91 According
to SULLIVAN, however, “we can never exclude the possibility
that future experience, hitherto unimagined, might put a moral
problem into a new frame of reference which would call for a revision
of a norm that, when formulated, could not have taken
such new experience into account.” 92 In response, GRISEZ cites
genocide as a specific moral norm that is an absolute and, therefore,
could be considered the subject of an infallible judgment
by the magisterium. 93 No future experience could put genocide
into a new frame of reference that would transform the norm
prohibiting genocide from an absolute to a non-absolute norm.
As noted above, however, the point of contention here would not
be on whether or not genocide is an absolute norm, but on the
nature of the norm being debated. Revisionism denies the existence
of absolute material norms, not absolute synthetic norms
that include both a description of the act and the moral nature
91 SULLIVAN, “‘Secondary Object’” 546.
92 SULLIVAN, Magisterium 152.
93 See GRISEZ, “Infallibility and Specific Moral Norms” 274.