CHRISTIAN MORAL PRINCIPLES

Chapter 7:Natural Law and the Fundamental Principles of Morality

Summary
Much Catholic teaching on natural law refers to the work of St. Thomas
Aquinas, and Vatican II commends him as a guide. We can therefore examine
his treatment of natural law to see how the Church views the subject.
Law for St. Thomas primarily means a reasonable plan of action. He begins
from what he calls the eternal lawGods plan in creating and redeeming.
Any other reasonable plan of action must somehow derive from it. People
can plan their lives reasonably only because, in one way or another, they
share in the universal plan present in Gods law; to the extent they try to
follow some other plan, their lives are unrealistic.
Human beings, according to St. Thomas, are naturally disposed to
understand some basic practical principles. These are the primary principles
of natural lawwhat St. Paul calls the law written in ones heart (see Rom
3.1416). However, truths of natural law, including specific norms, are also
part of revelation. As Vatican I says, this is in part so that even in the
present condition of the human race, those religious truths which are by their
nature accessible to human reason can readily be known by all men with
solid certitude and with no trace of error (DS 3005/1786; translation
supplied). Thus natural law and divine law can be distinguished, but not
separated and opposed.
Practical thinking is reasoning and judging about what might and ought to
be. According to St. Thomas, its first principle is: The good is to be done and
pursued; the bad is to be avoided. Scholastic natural-law theory formulated
this as a moral imperative: Do good and avoid evil. But, as Thomas
formulation shows, the first principle is not a moral norm. It expresses the
intrinsic, necessary connection between human goods and actions which
bear upon them; in thinking about what one might do, it is impossible to
disregard entirely the goods and bads involved.
People grasp as goods all the fulfillments to which they are naturally inclined.
Corresponding to each natural inclination, therefore, is a basic precept of
natural law: Such and such a basic human good is to be done and/or
pursued, protected, and promoted. These are general determinations of the
first principle. In their light we can see why human nature and natural law
morality are both stable and changing: stable because they are based on

fundamental, unalterable natural inclinations; changing because these

potentialities are open to continuing, expanding fulfillment.
But such principles of practical reasoning do not tell us what is morally good.
Moral norms are needed to guide choices toward the fulfillment of persons in
relation to human goods.
The first principle of morality might best be formulated as follows: In
voluntarily acting for human goods and avoiding what is opposed to them,
one ought to choose and otherwise will those and only those possibilities
whose willing is compatible with a will toward integral human fulfillment.
Note that this conceives human goods not simply as diverse fields for
possible action, but as together comprising the totality of integral human
fulfillment. This avoids subordinating moral reflection to specific objectives;
instead, the upright person is to remain open to goods which go beyond his
or her present capacity for realizing them in action.
There is also need for intermediate principles of morality, midway between
the first principle and the completely specific norms which direct particular
choices. These are the modes of responsibility. An example is the principle of
fairness or impartiality expressed by the Golden Rule. These modes exclude
choices involving various unreasonable (immoral) relationships of willing to
the human goods. People who are thinking in a morally sound way commonly
take them for granted. But for the most part they have not been
systematically discussed up to now, though at one time or another almost
every one of them has been mistaken for the first principle of morality.
Scripture and Christian moral teaching do not speak of modes of
responsibility but of virtues. However, the virtues do not constitute moral
norms distinct from the modes; rather, virtues embody modes. For virtues
are aspects of a personality integrated around good commitments, and the
latter are choices in accord with the first principle of morality and the modes
of responsibility.