Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

30 JOSEPH A. SELLINGbetween proportionate and consequentialist thinking, it is hardto understand why anyone would go through the trouble of providinga new name for this alternative approach. 12I believe that Johnstone is accurate in his description ofproportionate thinking when he observes that it,emerged within the tradition from the same historical framework,namely that in which the subject was separated from object,and where the dominant moral theory held that the objective lawsdetected by reason in the objective structures of nature, were renderedobligatory by the invocation of the divine will (119) 13He also states that, “proportionalists generally criticized thestandard conception of ‘intrinsically evil acts’” (122). Beyondthis, however, it is hard to recognize any systematic presentationof this theory of moral reasoning. 14When discussing the reasons why proportionalists rejectthe concept of “intrinsically evil”, Johnstone does observe thatthey “are objecting to the separation of the object from the subject”(123). However, he immediately follows this with what12VS, 75 also does this, in describing a method of moral reasoning itrefers to as ‘teleologism,’ a term that was apparently coined for the encyclical.13It is at least somewhat inconsistent for the author to write this when,just nine pages earlier, he had written, “I have not found a moral theologianwho asserted that the physical ‘biological laws’ were identical with the naturalmoral law” (110). If “physical” here does not apply to the “objectivestructures of nature”, one might wonder what other meaning it could have.If those “objective structures of nature” are made obligatory by divine will,does this not constitute the “natural moral law”?14Johnstone does mention that Peter Knauer had a role to play in someof the thinking about proportionate reason, but neither did Knauer outlinea theory nor does Johnstone provide any analysis of Knauer’s work thatwould give reason for believing that he would be the “origin” of the theory.See, Peter Knauer, “The Hermeneutic Function of the Principle of DoubleEffect,” McCormick & Curran (eds.), Moral Norms and Catholic Tradition:Readings in Moral Theology, 1 (1979) 1-39. This article was first published inFrench in 1965, subsequently revised and republished in Natural LawForum 12 (1967).