Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

THE SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATION IN CONTEMPORARY MORAL THEOLOGY 35sary life-threatening situation. When one assesses the entirestate of affairs, there is clearly a lack of proportion since moreevil than necessary is allowed to take place. The insistence thatone must apply the PDE to this case simply to relegate an evil tothe status of an effect rather than being associated with the “actin itself”, demonstrates that this approach effectively presumesthat consideration of an “act in itself” and consideration of aneffect constitute two, separate moral assessments.The development, or perhaps better put, the re-discovery, ofproportionate thinking makes a plea to restore our understandingof human activity to an integrated whole. Act, circumstanceand end constitute different aspects of a single moral event.One cannot understand and subsequently assess such an eventuntil one knows what all the relevant aspects are and how theyrelate to each other. It is only with the description of the humanmoral act (actus humanus) as a whole that one can make a“moral judgment”.Preliminary to that assessment is the analysis of the differentaspects of the “moral event” with a view toward reaching amoral decision. In order to carry this out in a systematic or disciplinedmanner, one first distinguishes the various aspects ofthe entirety of this integrated activity so that one can assess thestatus of each aspect relevant to the moral judgment. Eachassessment is morally relevant, but not yet sufficient for makinga complete moral judgment. The assessment that is made isreferred to as “pre-moral”. It is pre-moral because other elementsstill need to be taken into consideration before an overallmoral judgment can be made about this particular moral event.It is pre-moral because the entire exercise is carried on with aview to an ultimate, moral judgment.The reason why these distinctions are made in the firstplace is because the different aspects of a moral event need tobe assessed in a different manner. As Johnstone illustrated inhis example of giving a gift, there are different criteria thatapply to different aspects of the event. In order to assess theintention of the gift giver, we need to consider things that arerelevant to that person’s intention. Is one giving a gift out oflove, is one motivated to please the recipient, does one want to