Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

THE SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATION IN CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY 53theologians, and also official Church teaching, seem to havemoved away from attributing moral normative status to biologicalstructures on the basis of the divine will.Now, in some accounts, the legitimating of the morallybinding status of bodily structures is provided by the thesis thatthe body is united to the soul in the unity of the person.Therefore a “touching” of the body is a touching of the soul,and so of the person. Thus an intervention on the body affectsthe person, and is, for this reason, morally significant. I do notchallenge the unity of soul and body, but I do not find themoral argument based on it conclusive. Having claimed thatthe structures of the body are morally binding because the bodyis united to the soul in the unity of the person, we still have toshow that the person is morally normative. It seems to me thatit is often simply presumed that it is so. We need to be able toshow that this is so.I would concede that my account of the “Basic HumanGoods” theory could be more developed. However, I was notaiming to give a complete treatment of the theory, but to showwhere it was situated within the tradition and within the frameworksadopted in that tradition. In my article, I was concernedwith the foundations of ethics rather than normative ethics andI drew on what was presented by the authors themselves as thestandard statement of their theory. 22 I did not say that the theoryexcludes reference to others: what I wrote was that, “…itdoes not include reference to the other in the basic formulationof the theory.”I did not present Grisez or Finnis as “defenders” of the“separate subject.” I argued that their theory presupposes sucha separation. My analysis of the theory in question is that itbegins with the subject, as was typical of influential philosophiesof the modern era. Grisez’s and Finnis’s theory beginswith the analysis of the free choice of the subject and the intelligiblefactors presupposed by such a choice. It does not beginwith a consideration of what or who is chosen. The basic goods22Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle and John Finnis, “Practical Principles,Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 32(1987) 99-151.