Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

46 BRIAN V. JOHNSTONEvirtue calls for an ethic that is ordered according to reality: itreflects and interprets the correspondence between reality andthe structures of the human person, that is between the objectelementand the subject-element. 10 In its contemporary Englishusage, “attitude” means “a settled opinion or way of thinking,”or “behavior reflecting this.” (Concise Oxford Dictionary).“Attitude” is a subject-oriented word.When Selling contrasts “attitude” to “order” he is fallingprecisely into an error he could have avoided had he paid closerattention to my interpretation of St. Thomas. The point of myexposition was, precisely, to find proper links between the “subject-oriented”elements, namely, reason, will and the “objective”order in St. Thomas. Selling does not demonstrate that myposition is false. As I pointed out, for St. Thomas, a voluntaryact is not composed of a “subject oriented,” “mental process”on the one hand, and an “objective,” “separate action,” on theother. The two are elements of a unified whole, of which thebasis is his view that the reason-ordered will of God is participatedin both by the action itself and the reason-ordered will ofthe human agent.Selling’s introduction of “attitude” is permissible if hewants to speak like that (though I believe such a way of speakingis an indication of precisely the problem I amaddressing–the separation of the subject from the object) but itis not acceptable as a way of presenting the thought of St.Thomas, which is the point at issue.From my interpretation of the unity of the moral act, it followsthat I agree with Selling that, for St. Thomas, object, circumstancesand end were not separate and independent“sources” of morality. This is the point I endeavor to make inmy critique of “objectivism.” They were, for St. Thomas,aspects of a “single, unified and integral voluntary act.” Theproblem is, how we are to account for the unity. I suggestedthat St. Thomas was able to do this, in principle, if not in thedetailed working out of his argument, because he was working10Eberhard Schockenhoff, Bonum Hominis: Die anthropologischen undtheologischen Grundlagen der Tugendethik bei Thomas von Aquin (Mainz:Matthias-Grünewald Verlag, 1987) 574.