Moral System
Section 1 - VII.
The subjective necessity of the moral law
132. Moral evil is reduced, therefore, to defective action in our will which prevents the will from attaining the term for which it was made, that is, the entity of things according to their truth. The will, which is indeed made to direct the soul to adhere to the entity known by the intellect, does not guide the soul to its term. The result is evil, defect, privation; the spirit remains cut off from the entity whose contact would bring it to perfection. The evil of the will is the evil of the spirit and of the whole soul.
133. We have to understand that evil in the will is personal evil. The person resides in the will as the supreme active principle in an intelligent spirit, the principle to which all other powers are joined and to which they are subject.(91) This enables us to understand better still the nature of `moral obligation, moral necessity.
134. The reason why `moral obligation is so difficult to understand lies in our concept of necessity as `the impossibility of doing the contrary. We call `necessary anything whose contrary is logically absurd. In the same way we understand physical necessity as a real force which we are unable to conquer and overcome. But in applying the word `necessity to free actions, we no longer know the sense in which to take it because we no longer find any real force to necessitate action. On the contrary, morality in an action requires that the action lie within the power of freedom or the power of the will, and that it may be done in some way or other without compulsion. In this case, how can there be necessity in moral actions? What does the expression moral necessity mean? This is the difficulty that faces us in understanding the concept.
135. We begin our answer by noting that the expression certainly refers in the first instant to necessity originating from moral laws, not from physical forces. In the moral order, obligation comes from moral, not physical laws. But moral laws constrain quite differently and independently of the constraint placed by physical laws. If we succeed in describing the nature of moral constraint, therefore, we shall have solved our problem.
136. We maintain that as physical necessity is found in the order of reality, so logical necessity is found in the ideal order, and moral necessity in the order of morality. Physical necessity is essential to the order of real things; take away necessity from real things and you will no longer be able to conceive any real being. Logical necessity is essential to the order of ideas; take away necessity from ideas, and no idea will exist. Moral necessity is essential to the order of moral things; take away their necessity, and moral being is rendered impossible.
137. If the moral order is necessary, therefore, it must possess its own necessity, just as the ideal order and the real order must have their ideal and real necessity if they are to be necessary. But ontology shows that being is necessary, and that it is necessary in all these three primordial forms, that is, in its real, ideal and moral form. It cannot be in one or two of the forms unless it exists in all three. Moral necessity is the same, therefore, as the necessity of being, and originates in the intrinsic, essential order of being itself. But let us try to explain simply the nature of this moral necessity.
138. Moral necessity is `the necessity according to which persons must act in a given way in order not to render themselves defective. This necessity does not depend on physical necessity, therefore, but exists without it. Persons can act physically in one of two ways, but not in one of them without losing their personal perfection. If these persons wish to preserve or increase their own proper perfection, they are necessitated, and have to act in a determined way. If they do not follow this course of action, they lose something of their dignity, their integrity and their being. And their evil consists precisely in this loss.
This is the source of moral obligation. Obligation is simply the kind of necessity which requires action in one way rather than another if the loss of personal dignity, that is, of the good proper to the person, is to be avoided.
139. It may be objected that personal good and evil are only some kind of subjective good and evil. If so, they are not in any way absolute good and evil. I have already shown,(92) however, that moral good is the point where subjective and objective good come into contact, embrace and intermingle as one.
It is indeed true that moral good and moral evil is personal good and evil, and that persons are subjects. From this point of view, personal good and evil are certainly subjective. Persons, however, are a special kind of subject. Consequently, it is not enough for this good to be subjective if it is to be moral; it must also be personal. So we ask: what kind of subject is the person?
140. We define person as an intelligent subject, that is, a subject of such a nature that its good consists in adhering to objective entity taken in its fullness, and therefore in its order. The good proper to the human person does not originate therefore from the human person. Rather, persons find it in the object to which they unite themselves by means of a willed act of intelligence. This fact takes persons outside themselves in order to find the object which when found provides their perfection. The act of bringing persons to perfection is simply their sharing in the goodness of the object, their coupling with being.
141. What is this object? What is being? It is everything present in the idea, in the truth, in entity taken in all its extension, in eternal, impassible, divine being, full of beauty.
142. But how can persons be obliged to adhere to this object if they wish to be perfect? Does this necessity, to which they are subject, arise from the laws of their subjective nature? Yes, this necessity also has a relationship with the laws of their subjective nature. Nevertheless, this necessity is not formed by the laws of subjective-contingent nature, but rather forms and constitutes these laws. It is not the human person who produces the object; it is rather the object which produces the human person and which therefore imposes its laws on persons in the act by which they are formed.
This is a difficult concept, I admit, but persuasion of its truth is possible through profound meditation on the whole of the teaching we have so often formulated.
143. Let me try to express myself in another way. `Person is the power for affirming the whole of being (this involves sharing and delighting in being) as and to the extent that it has been apprehended intellectually by person. The necessity for doing this is imposed upon persons by the nature of being, not by themselves. When they see being, persons also see that it is immutable, identical with itself, and so on. They also see and feel that to say otherwise would be a falsehood. Falsehood, intrinsic disorder, and evident evil are synonymous. The nature of objective being, therefore, gives rise to the necessity of the acknowledgement of being by persons. Acting otherwise, persons incur their own degradation and the personal, moral evil that is its consequence.
Notes
(91) Cf. AMS, 832 ss., where the highly important teaching on human personship is developed.
(92) SP, bk. 4, c. 6.