Moral-Philosophical Reflection and Development of Doctrine Lecture with Dr. John Finnis

Dr. Finnis delivered his lecture, Moral-Philosophical Reflection and the Development of Doctrine, during the Contested Moral Questions and Development of Doctrine Conference at the University of Dallas on October 9, 2024. This distinguished conference, organized by Ryan T. Anderson, the St. John Paul II Fellow in Social Thought at UDallas, brought together scholars and thought leaders to examine critical issues related to Catholic faith, ethics and cultural challenges. The event provided students with an opportunity to deepen their faith through critical thinking and meaningful moral discourse. 

Discover more insights from the conference here. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to give a little introduction both to the conference itself, and then I want to introduce our keynote speaker tonight, and then I'll um get down for I should probably introduce myself. My name is Ryan Anderson. Um, I'm the John Paul II Teaching Fellow here at the University of Dallas, and then I'm the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. And the reason we're here both tonight and tomorrow for the conference is to think together, uh, to think about the concept of the development of doctrine, to think about the role that moral and philosophical analysis can play in assisting the church and her leaders in the formal process of the development of doctrine. Much thought has focused on theological doctrine and the development of theological doctrine as applied to kind of core truths about God, uh things like Christology, um, Trinitarian heresies and Trinitarian truths, um, uh ecclesiology, Marian doctrines, soteriology, sanctification, justification, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and this was especially the case of, especially if you look at someone like um Newman's writing on the topic, when Jews, Catholics, and Protestants largely agreed about moral questions and the divisions when it came to things like the development of doctrine were doctrines that divided various sects of Protestants from Catholicism. So I thought when um uh JJ had asked me to organize another conference was we should uh focus on contested moral issues and issues where we see Catholics internally disagreeing, um, and not just kind of like Orthodox Catholics and heterodox Catholics, but orthodox Catholics who are on board with the fullness of um uh revealed truth, the fullness of magisterial truth, having questions about, all right, well, what about unanswered questions? Questions that the church has not yet definitively taught on, or questions where it seems like the church is uh developing the doctrine and pray, I do not develop it any further. Um these were the sorts of things that Dan, Dan got the joke about a minute after everyone else. Um these were the sorts of things that um uh we thought would be uh helpful to think through. Um a couple things to say by way of uh preface for the conference. The truth doesn't change, but our understanding and our appreciation and our application of the truth can. We can gain deeper insights into the truth, uh, we can develop newer and hopefully better articulations of the truth, uh, we can apply the truth to new situations. Um, and in the in this sense, we can add to the truth, not in the sense of we're creating new truths, but because new questions have come up, we can apply perennial truths about the human person and about morality to um new moral uh questions. What you'll see tonight in Professor Finnis's lecture, what you'll see tomorrow during the three panels is uh critical thinking, um, analysis, uh, distinctions we'll be drawing, uh, where we'll think through like what are the more foundational truths, what are truths that we're more certain of, and what are things that are more speculative, what are things that are more um applied? How do we apply core Christian revelation versus mere proof texting? You'll also see disagreement, uh, and that will be an achievement of the conference. Uh it will be good if we have panelists tomorrow who don't just talk past each other, but actually disagree and who can articulate why they uh disagree. This isn't meant to be like a gladiator sport where you go and you cheer for your team and the other people cheer for their team, like a sporting event. It's meant to be really smart people assisting the church in thinking through what the truth is. Now, we're lucky that tonight's keynote speaker, when I do the formal introduction, he has served on three different Vatican commissions. Um, like very much like his vocation as a scholar was directly at service of the church by going to Rome and serving, but all of the scholarship that the scholars who will be speaking uh tomorrow, uh, including the conference itself, is meant to be a way to serve the church, including you as students, uh, to think through what's the truth of these questions, what's the truth. Um, you know, we'll start tomorrow with a panel on embryo adoption. Um, we know what the church has taught on things like contraception, on IVF, on surrogacy. Um, the magisterium has not definitively taught about embryo adoption. What should the church teach on embryo adoption? And right, and we will have two scholars who will draw insights from previous magisterial teaching from moral theology to assist us in thinking through about that. It seems that first John Paul, then Benedict, and now Pope Francis are all developing doctrine when it comes to capital punishment. How should we think about one, what they are doing, and then two, whether it's a good development or a corruption, right? Thinking about how Newman uh would talk about authentic developments versus corruption. Um, how should we think about sexual ethics, particularly um in light of supposedly new discoveries, scientific discoveries about sexual orientation and therefore the nature of marriage and marital ethics? That'll be the third panel tomorrow. Okay, let me um uh introduce tonight's uh keynote lecturer. Uh John Finnis uh will be speaking tonight um on uh what what the philosophical analysis um can add, uh moral and philosophical analysis can add to the development of doctrine. Uh Professor Finnis taught for over 40 years at Oxford University from 1966 until he took emeritus status in 2010. He started as a lecturer and then a reader and then eventually was a chaired professor at the University of Oxford. Uh he also concurrently from 1995 until taking emeritus status in 2020 was a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. He's known for his work in moral, political, and legal theory, as well as constitutional law. He earned his undergraduate degree from Adelaide University in Australia. He then earned his doctoral degree at the University of Oxford as a road scholar in 1965. He's been a visiting um or uh visiting or associate professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. I don't think UC Berkeley would be welcoming John Finnis back uh in today's time at the University of Malawi in Africa and um at Boston College. In terms of his service to the church, he was, if I believe, the first um lay member of the International Theological Commission of the Holy See from 1986 to 1991. He was a member of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace from 1990 to 1995, and then a member of the Pontifical Academy Pro Vita, so the pro-life pontifical academy from 2001 to 2016. He's the author of a number of really influential books. Um, his groundbreaking 1980s, uh 1980 book, Natural Law and Natural Rights, from Oxford University Press, Fundamentals of Ethics, three years later from Georgetown University Press, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism, co-authored with um Joseph Boyle and Jermaine Griset from Oxford in 1987, Moral Absolutes, 1991 book from CUA Press, Aquinas, Moral, Political, and Legal Theorist, 1998. And then in 2011, Oxford published five volumes of John's collected essays on five different topics. You know, one is on reasons for action, one is on intention and action theory, one's on the common good, one's on philosophy of law, and one is on religion and public reasons. And he's currently on at work on a variety of books. He's now in his um in his 80s, and he has not slowed down, as you will see from tonight's lecture. Um, and one of the books that I'm most excited about is um a book that we've been fortunate to workshop in a small group on the historicity of the New Testament, um, where Professor Finnis has shown that the New Testament is actually much more historically reliable and accurate, and the composition date is much earlier than what much of the biblical scholars, including Catholic biblical scholars, are prone to believe. Um and so with that, I will turn over the lectern to Professor John Finnis.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Thank you, Rahman. Well, I found um Professor Anderson's um invitation to think together in the service of the church uh irresistible. Uh I thought it would be an opportunity for me to think through a few things that I haven't thought through as much as I would like to. And so it has proved, although, as I will confess at the end, not um not as fully successfully as I had hoped. I'll be talking mainly about the development of moral doctrine on killing with intent to kill, on the moral implications of the good of marriage, and on in vitro fertilization. But first I will focus on two terms in my title. So the title is moral philosophical, which is hyphenated actually, not moral and philosophical, but moral philosophical reflection and development of doctrine. So here are the two terms, doctrine and moral philosophical reflection. For because doctrine, or as St. Thomas calls it sacred doctrine, expresses what has been divinely revealed, the deposit of faith or deposit of revelation that was received and handed on by Christ's apostles, someone might doubt that moral philosophy or moral philosophical reflection could appropriately contribute either to doctrine's understanding and exposition in the teaching of the apostles' successors, bishops transmitting, defending, expounding, and clarifying that doctrine, or to its authentic development by them. And that's a rather abstract question, so for about twenty minutes, I'm afraid, I will deal with it in its abstractness by locating it in some history. For an example of a development of doctrine that can seem not to have been guided or even assisted by moral philosophical reflection, take, for example, the doctrine that contraception is wrong, and consider its emergence as Jermaine Griset and John Ford S. J. portray it in a famous article on the tenth anniversary of Humane Vitae, a portrayal that they offer on an explicit assumption. They grant, for the sake of argument, although they do not concede, that contraception's wrongness was not asserted in explicit teaching of Christ or his apostles. On that assumed basis, then, and deploying the evidence about the early Christian centuries that it was assembled by John Noonan in his famous 1965, very influential, alas, contraception book, and in Rabbi David M. Feldman's Pro-Contraception but careful account of Jewish teaching on birth control in that era, Griset and Ford argued that, and I quote, when all Christians reached and maintained one judgment about some non-Christian attitude or practice, the principle of their response is manifest. It is their Christian heritage held in common. In other words, the Christian consensus on contraception is no accident but a properly Christian judgment, clarified by the light of the Spirit teaching inwardly, and grasped by a sense of faith already shaped by Christian teaching, on the creative activity of God, on the value of human life, on the design design of marriage, on the meaning of Christian parenthood, and on sexual morality. If the condemnation of contraception by the fathers of the church was not a restatement of primitive teaching, but was a fresh initiative, as Noonan urges, then the formation of this teaching ought to be viewed as a creative response faithfully developing Christian moral teaching. And Ford and Griset go on, in preaching the gospel of Christ, the apostles promulgated in the pagan world a morality truly new to it in respect to creation and life, sin and death, sex and marriage, virginity and parenthood. Elements of this morality already existed in the pagan world, but the balanced and tightly integrated ensemble was truly new and distinctively Christian. Reflecting upon this new morality of Christ, which excludes homosexual acts, incest, fornication, and adultery, the fathers of the Church were forced by advocates of contraception whom Noonan discusses to take a stand on the matter. Does contraception pertain to the new morality of Christ, or does it pertain to the old pornea sexual misconduct of the pagans? Christians took their stand on this matter, and the stand was so appropriate that they continued to agree in the judgment which was their initial response centuries after the stimulus had ceased. Moreover, despite their divisions, Orthodox and Protestant as well as Catholic Christians proposed the same teaching until the present twentieth century. So the reflection by the fathers that Griset and Ford mention in that passage as resulting in a creative and faithful formation of doctrine, of a teaching about contraception that by hypothesis they did not find formulated in the apostolically transmitted revelation of Christ, does not, at first glance, look at all like moral philosophical reflection. Grise and Ford present it, however, as extending what they call a balanced and tightly integrated ensemble of teachings on sex and so forth. And to talk of an integrated ensemble is, I think, to begin to talk of an analysis, followed by a synthesis, of a whole bundle of particular norms articulated in the sources, that is, in the canonical gospels and epistles, and I would add, in a non-canonical and relatively little studied document discovered in 1899, Doctrina Apostolorum, I think I've shown that it, this document, dates from the 30s, the decade of the crucifixion, because, as is widely accepted, the document most probably underlies the two-ways teaching of the much studied, much misunderstood letter of Barnabas. And that notable document dates, as I believe I have shown, to late spring or ill early summer of 39 AD. See the 42-page article by me in the Journal of Theological Studies for April this year. Starting with the Gospels, then, in Matthew 15 we find what Christians in Jerusalem, Damascus, Caesarea, Maritima, and Antioch in the thirties heard or read. Christ in Galilee, in the course of explaining privately to his disciples his public controversy with Jerusalem based scribes and Pharisees about divine commandments and human traditions, saying Out of the heart come forth evil intentions, murders, adulteries, fornications, pornei, thefts. And then in Mark seven we find, I think, a better version, clarified and amplified no doubt by Peter himself, dating from a decade later, I'd say, about forty seven. For from within out of the human heart proceed evil intents, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, mayhems, fraud, impurity, or shamelessness or lustfulness or the vice of perversion, envy, defamation, pride, folly. Thus our Lord. Meanwhile, in the Doctrina Apostolorum's exposition of the two ways of life and light, and death and darkness, we begin with love of God, love of neighbor as oneself and the golden rule, and everything that everything that follows is proposed as an interpretatio of those, an interpretation that begins you shall not commit adultery, commit murder, corrupt or violate boys, fornicate, engage in magic, use medicamenta mala, perhaps oral contraceptives, as Noonan and Griset, noticing the similar list in a slightly later first or second century document, the D decay, thought possible, or maybe it means just enchantments, sorceries. You shall not kill the unborn child by abortion or put to death the newborn. And further on, demarcating the way of death, doctrina lists adulteries, homicides, false testimonies, fornications, evil desires, magical practices, medicamenta iniqua, wrongful medicines. And then there are the epistles. Fifteen or twenty years later, Paul sets down in 1 Corinthians 6, 9 to 10, the most famous of his lists of kinds of wrongful act. Neither fornicators or practices of sexual immorality, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sodomites, or pederasts, nor thieves will inherit the kingdom of God. And eighteen months later, near the beginning of his letter from Corinth to the Roman Christians, Paul makes two moves that each insert a surely philosophical insight and reflection into doctrine at its source. A source in divine revelation by inspired apostolic writing. The first move is to declare that the doctrine of creation announced at the beginning of Genesis is accessible to natural reason. He affirms the fact, not that phrase. So accessible that those who fail or refuse to integrate it into their personal pattern of thinking not the Hebraic doctrine in Genesis, but the truth of creation, those who fail to integrate it into their personal pattern of thinking, render that pattern futile and distorted, so distorted that they become in practice fools and often enough perverts. L or G, if not also B, and then or also vicious in nonsexual ways, of which he sets out in a vice list twenty-one items long, in Romans 1, 29 to 31. Such people, he says, are heedless of God's decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die. And the second move that Paul makes is in the next chapter, Romans 2, 14 to 15, the justly famous passage which rivets the truth of natural law, a philosophical truth if ever there was one, into revealed doctrine without compromising it without compromising in the least its philosophical soundness and accessibility. When he says, When Gentiles who do not have, have not heard or had reason to accept as true the law, meaning of God revealed to and written down by Moses, nevertheless do by nature fuse naturalita, what that law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though, as I said, they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law, the work maybe the gist of the law, is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or, as the case may be, excuse them. One of the propositions in this extraordinarily strategic passage, there are other propositions that I will touch on later, is that the is that the divine law revealed to Moses is also accessible to natural reason, reason unaided by divine revelation as natural law. Very commonly, theologians have gone a bit astray by taking the revealed law that the Gentiles find written in their hearts and accessible in conscience to be or to be coextensive with the law articulated in the Decalogue, the ten words or ten commandments of Exodus 21 to 17 and Deuteronomy 5 6 21. And I've done this myself, at least by omission. But Aquinas does not make this mistake. As he makes clear in questions 99 and especially a hundred of the prima secunde of the Summa Theologiae, the natural moral law, which Gentiles, like everyone, find in their heart, mind, conscience, practical reason, contains as its first and highest set of propositions the three that we saw heading up the way of life in the Doctrina Apostolorum. God is to be loved, neighbor is to be loved as one loves oneself, do to and for others as you would have them do to and for you. These, says St. Thomas, are not part of the Decalogue, because they are higher and too obvious to need further promulgation as divine positive law, which is what the Decalogue is. They are, he adds, principles, grounds for the precepts of the Decalogue, which is a more specified set of divine positive laws that give a revealed articulation to the second level of precepts of natural moral law. And here's the point. Beyond the Decalogue, there is also, Aquinas says, a third level of natural law, moral precepts, true normative propositions that are less obvious than the moral elements of the Ten Commandments. Only the wise, says St. Thomas, securely reach them by natural reasoning, as sound moral philosophy or ethics. Some of them, therefore, have been the matter of divine pedagogy as moral precepts of the Old Testament law, moral precepts of the Old Law, that are not in the Decalogue, and yet are not abrogated, unlike all the ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Mosaic law, that were all hundreds of them abrogated by the new dispensation in Christ. Thus, says St. Thomas in Question 100, Article 11, to the sixth commandment, for example, he gives various examples to the sixth commandment of the Decalogue against adultery, there was added the commandment in Deuteronomy 23.17 against prostitution and resort to prostitutes or loose women, and the prohibition in Leviticus 18.22 against copulating with animals or with persons of the same sex as oneself, and so on. All such additional precepts of the divine moral law are just as much matters of natural law accessible to a soundly reasoned moral philosophy as the precepts of the Decalogue are, and these additional precepts are just as much part of a faithful exposition of Christian doctrine. Not articulated in the Decalogue, they are nonetheless traceable to the precepts of the Decalogue as conclusions are traceable to principles or premises, and they can be said to be contained in the Decalogue, but only as conclusions are contained in principles, and principles are, in reverse, contained in conclusions from them, as he says in Article III of Question 100. To repeat, they were appropriately found in moral precepts articulated in moral parts of the old law that are nonetheless additional to the Decalogue, because only the wise, and they only after diligent consideration are able to judge that these are true moral propositions, true implications of practical reasons, principles in the circumstances of human existence. Question 100, Article I. The domain of these genuinely moral, genuinely natural law propositions is ripe for moral philosophical reflection, whether independently of Jewish and Christian doctrine or in service of Christian doctrine, and so far forth theological as well as philosophical. And the topics of our discussions here tomorrow fall, I suggest, largely in this third domain of precepts, whose truth and content calls for philosophically, historically, and doctrinally informed good judgment, St. Thomas's wisdom, sapienti. And such good judgment is not a matter of incommunicable intuition, but importantly includes analytical philosophical precision, careful clarification of terms, a firm critical grasp of key concepts such as intention, all based on attention to a wide range of actual and hypothetical cases, as well as to the major biblically and traditionally established theologically appropriated doctrinal fixed points. As a ready-to-hand instance of such moral philosophical reflection, perhaps accompanying preaching doctrine or theology, one may ask oneself now, and one might have asked oneself in Jerusalem or Antioch in the thirties and forties of our era, what principle or principles underlie such lists as I gave examples of, samples from, in the Doctrina, in Mark, less fully in Matthew, in 1 Corinthians and in Romans. And the same sources themselves, especially Matthew and Mark, point us to starting points and some main lines of an answer. For in Mark 10, we have first Christ's explanation of his reversal of Jewish and Gentile acceptance of divorce. Because we from the beginning were made male or female, a man and a woman can, leaving their fathers and mothers, become one flesh, no longer two but one flesh. So from the beginning there was to be no separating by divorce, even though because of your hardness of hearts Moses allowed you to divorce. But I say to you, whoever divorces his or her spouse and marries another commits adultery. Development of doctrine. And a few verses further on, the question what one must do to inherit eternal life is answered by Jesus first recalling the commandments against killing, adultery, stealing, false witness, and the affirmative commandments to honour father and mother, and to love one's neighbour as oneself. The last mentioned, already long ago articulated in Leviticus 19, Christ will later in Jerusalem, Matthew 22, identify as like unto the first and greatest commandment to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Words from Deuteronomy 6.5, which adds immediately that the commands thus given, and to be given on the same occasion, will be in your heart and soul. A thought surely not far below the surface of Paul's mind as he dictated to Timothy or Sergius those decisive words that I just recalled from Romans 2. The Gentiles who do not have the law have the same law written on their hearts. The evidence I've just set out has an implication which is most important for considering development of moral doctrine, and which I do not recall seeing or hearing spelled out. What I have in mind is this. Assuming first that the abrogation by the Apostolic Council of, it seems, AD 49 or so, and by the practice of that apostolic generation, the abrogation of all the hundreds of provisions of the old law of Moses, that subsequent theology, as witnessed to by Thomas Aquinas, called judicial and ceremonial precepts, assuming that that abrogation left intact and in force the moral precepts, and assuming second, that those moral precepts include propositions that were not articulated in the Decalogue, but are additional to it, we must conclude that the only general criterion for identifying which moral precepts of the old law remain valid and true is they are the prescriptive, affirmative, or negative propositions of the natural moral law that a truly sound moral philosophy can and would under ideal epistemic conditions affirm as true. Now, of course, epistemic conditions are not ideal, and so as the first Vatican Council taught in Dei Filius and Vatican II in Dei Verbum VI, each council echoing Paul in Romans 1 about the analogous propositions of a philosophically sound and critical metaphysics, that the existence of God, the originating source of everything, can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, considering the things God has created. They are propositions that in the present condition of humankind cannot easily be known by everyone without some uncertainty and admixture of error Dephilius chapter two. And so are appropriately included in God's revelation of Himself and of the eternal decrees of His will. Fourth chapter quoted in De Verbum six. That divine revelation was perfected and confirmed by Christ, who commissioned apostles to preach to all men that gospel which is the fount of all saving truth and moral teaching, De Verbum 7. A preaching which is found in a special way, but not exclusively in the inspired books of the canon, De Verbum VIII, and which includes everything that contributes towards the holiness of life of the people of God. Same chapter. This tradition that comes from the apostles develops in the church, goes on De Verbum, because understanding of the things and words handed down grows, develops, crescent, both by believers' contemplation and study and penetrating understanding of spiritual things they experience, and by the preaching of bishops in the apostolic succession. Those bishops, even when dispersed throughout the world, teach infallibly when at some point or period of time they agree or agreed in teaching a proposition of faith and morals as to be held definitively because part of the deposit of faith, or integral to guarding that deposit religiously and expounding it faithfully. Lumengenium twenty-five and de verbum ten. And so we have circled back to Ford and Griset's argument for the infallibility of the long unanimous teaching which Humana Vita fourteen with other sections of that encyclical repeats, identifying as contrary to natural law and human reason and to divine law. I quote, any act which, when marital intercourse is anticipated, being engaged in or leading to its natural consequences is intended, any act which is intended either as end or as means to impede procreation. What's important for my reflections tonight is the large philosophical advance or advances made by the 1968 encyclical over Pius XI's articulation of the traditional teaching in Casti Canubia 37 years earlier, which said Since the Conjugal Act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who, in doing it, deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose act against nature and do something shamefully and intrinsically wrong. In eliminating all the obscure and question-begging uses of the word nature in that would be explanation of the tradition, Vatican II, in Gaudium et Spes 51, extremely closely tracked by Paul VI in Humane Vitae, was able to provide an explanatory articulation which, though it's no doubt in need of further unpacking, is much closer to the sources and principles of good judgment, wisdom. Those sources and principles of good judgment we find in Christ's teaching on marriage and in his insistent teachings on the primacy of action's interiority, its intention and object. Its coming from the intelligent option shaping and choosing heart, from which come all those evil intentions and actions coming out of the heart, as stated in Christ's debriefing of the apostles after his dispute with the Pharisees about defilement. Or again, the heart in which, according to the Sermon on the Mount, one has committed adultery as soon as one looks with lustful intent. This profound understanding that external behavior has its primary moral significance as the executing of a choice whereby in the heart one adopts a proposal shaped up however rapidly in deliberation by and with oneself for attaining some set of end or ends and means, a set that one intends to attain by one's action, almost always external behavior, more external than merely beyond one's thinking and willing. This understanding of external behavior's morally significant content is vastly closer to what the best philosophers have identified as the requirements of natural reason, alias natural law, in relation to marital and non-marital sexual acts. Exactly fifty years after Humane Vita, I offered an exposition of what I called its dual foundation. And here is an excerpt about its first and main foundation, the anti-marital meaning and character of the choices in question, as distinct from the encyclical's other foundation, in their anti-life meaning and character. In the first part of this quotation, I'm talking about another development of doctrine, the doctrinal development, whereby Vatican II and Paul VI set aside the muddled scholastic or neoscholastic disputations and corresponding magisterial interventions about primary and secondary ends, or purposes, or rationales, or intelligibilities, or goods of marriage. A hierarchizing that you saw doing work in the sentence I read to you from Casti Connubi. And this is what I said in 2018. It is a truth about human fulfillment and therefore about human nature itself, that marriage is a basic human good and a basic human institution with two primary ends or purposes or rationales. First, the unity of a lovingly committed and permanent friendship, and second, the procreation and nurturing of new human persons engendered by the acts that express, actualize, and enable the spouses to experience that friendship. Union and procreation are each an end that is in some respects primary relative to the other end, and in other respects secondary to and supportive of the other end. Neither is essentially instrumental or merely secondary to the other. Each is an intrinsically essential element of the properly indivisible and basic human good of marriage, a single good with two irreducible basic elements or aspects. That is the teaching of Humanae Vita of Gaudium et Space, and I believe of the whole Catholic tradition in its integrity. Unquote. From there I went straight on from ends to acts, bringing to light, without saying so, the remarkable shift in argumentation by Vatican II in Gaudium et Space, and identically by Paul VI in Humane Vitae, away from Casti Connubi's poor argumentation about nature, to a consideration of the relation between choice and human goods. In this case, the basic good, whose two aspects are linked indissolubly in and as the point of the institution and project and lifelong act of marrying and being married. I said the second decisive moral thesis is that whatever conduct, behavior, actions the spouses choose to do in and in relation to their marital intercourse cannot be morally acceptable unless it respects and preserves the full meaning of mutual giving and human procreation in a context of true love, quoting Gaudimetz Base 51. That is to say, in the words of Humane Vita 12, what they choose and do must not, quote, sever the two inherent meanings of marital intercourse, unitive and procreative, and must preserve each essential intelligibility, union and procreation, I'm quoting from Humana Vita, and keep intact the act's meaning of mutual and true love and the act's orientation to parenthood, unquote. Those statements, I went on, of the of the council and the encyclical, do no more and no less than apply without restating the fundamental proposition of the true morality of sex. The activation of one's sexual capacity is to be, that means must be, reserved exclusively to marriage. And within marriage, one's sex acts are to be, that is, must be, marital in kind. I went on, these are moral precepts of divine law taught by Christ as implicit in part of the full meaning of God's commandment not to commit adultery, a commandment which Jesus himself insists upon, and which he also says includes the prohibition of all porneia, non-marital intercourse, and all azilgeia, every perverted or shameless kind of sex act. But they are also, and equally, precepts of natural morality, natural law, natural right. That is, they are standards and requirements that can in principle be known to be true even without instruction by divine teaching or revelation. The most reasonable teachers of the high Greco-Roman culture of the first century of our era, the Stoic Musonius Rufus and the Middle Platonist Plutarch, each seemingly quite unaware of Christianity and uninterested in Judaism, each taught that marriage has two ends of inseparably equal primacy, unitive friendship and procreation, and that sexual acts are to be reserved to it so that the spouses may, in sexually expressing, actualizing, and experiencing their marriage, be on a footing of equality with each other. And the best recent study in English of Plato's sexual morality by the philosopher Anthony Price in 1989 concludes with apparent, I should have said, obvious, regret that Plato's sexual ethics is, in his words, like that to which Pope Paul VI in Humano Vita. I adhered. So that's the end of my quotation from myself. However, from a more pointed and dialectical discussion of Plato than Anthony Price's, emphasizing more than Plato did, more than Price did, Plato's unequivocal judgment that homosexual sex acts are wrong, a judgment made in the midst and in the face of a fashionable homoerotic and pedophiliac culture. My writings in the Colorado run-up to the debacle of the United States Supreme Court's string of pro-gay decisions provide a fair examination of all Plato's and Aristotle's similar writings on the matter, and these writings of mine remain accessible. And my 2018 discussion of this first foundation of Humana Vitae proceeded for several more pages before reaching in this final quotation from it a subsequent development of doctrine closer to the theme of at least one of our sessions tomorrow. I said, as Cardinal Ratziger and Pope John Paul II made clear in the instruction Donum Vitae, the gift of life, in 1987, God's design of human procreation, with all the features I've been recalling, makes it the case that human and morally appropriate and just procreation of children by marital intercourse differs radically and intrinsically from in vitro fertilization. For IVF is always radically different from the procreation that supervenes upon an act of self-giving in marital one-flesh intercourse, and even from the one-flesh intercourse of fornicators and adulterers. And the intrinsic difference remains even in the almost imaginary pure or simple case, when those involved use only the gametes of a wife and her husband and are committed to accepting each conceptus, never culling the embryos for destruction or indefinite freezing. For IVF is always generation by production, albeit with natural materials. And the relation between producer and product is always one of radical inequality. Unlike the child who's coming to be supervenes on an interpersonal act of self-giving. And that's what's articulated as one of the three rationales in Donum Vitae and the exclusive rationale in the Catechism of the Catholic Church for condemning IVF. That culling of defective products, which in the real world virtually always accompanies IVF, is only a manifestation of the injustice of this mode of bringing a baby to be as a product, not an equal. The uh writing of mine in um 1984, called which I published in 2011, called C. S. Lewis and Test You Babies, which I read to the C. S. Lewis Society in Oxford, is by far my fullest attempt to grasp and explain the sense of the difference between marital intercourse and IVF. The former as an act that profoundly embodies, expresses, and enacts submission to membership in a partnership, the latter as willy-nilly, despite whatever good resolutions those involved may have, a form of production entailing the radical maker-product, master-slave relationship of total domination, for howsoever benevolent motives, perhaps. The argumentational explication deployed in Donum Vitae, and then more simply and essentially in the Catechism 2377, constitutes a notable development of doctrine. And that despite the fact that the moral that the bottom line judgment on such techniques of reproduction remains the same. The same as preceded it, Pius XII, for example. For to have remained with the explications that satisfied Pius XII and his advisors seems now, and seemed in 1983 and 1987, almost unimaginable. Cardinal Ratziger, as I had the opportunity to observe close up for two days in 1984, personally devoted much time and effort to getting it developed and right. And for the essential problems, what was decisive was getting beyond observable patterns of behavior to the interiority of the heart that makes the behavior the action it really is. That is, to a straightforward understanding of proposals for choice, proposals comprising sets of ends, end and means, or ends and means, all or most ends being also means, and all or almost all means being also ends, and all ends and all means being by logical necessity intended, not side effects. And there I'm inclined to think you have philosophy's main contribution to the development of moral doctrine, including the precise and humanly adequate understanding of the moral precepts that are both of natural law and revealed, yet are more mere additions to those included in the decalogue. Let's consider now four more cases of development of moral doctrine, all involving what, on the surface, so to speak, of preaching and practice involved apparent change of content and practice. Ujury, slavery, religious liberty, and intentional killing by public authority. Usury is making a charge for a loan of money. And there were many centuries when it was preached against in detail as a mortal sin by lender and usually by borrower. But what is for a loan? What is the charge, the interest, we would say, intended to be for, to be justified by? Is it for the lender's provision of the money, the principal? He will get it back, or its equivalent. Because lenders typically, like pawnbrokers, to take the simplest case, took real security from the borrower. Security out of which the lender could and would recover the sum lent, the principal, in the event of the borrower's failure to pay back on time. So far, making a charge for lending the money seems to be a refined form of stealing, of getting something for nothing. And thus far it was stringently condemned, a correct judgment. But now suppose the borrower has no real security to pledge, and the lender therefore insures himself against the risk of non-payment. Can the lender not agree with the borrower a charge for the insurance premium? And similarly, a charge for any expenses the lender incurred in transporting the borrowed money to the borrower, and for maintaining a portal to which would-be borrowers can conveniently resort. And if the lender gave up a real, not fictitious opportunity to invest his money in some profitable enterprise, can he not make a charge suitably discounted for disparity of risk for having foregone the prospective profits really likely from that alternative investment? And so we begin to see the simple rule, no charge for a loan, being refined and qualified by considering the genuine alternative intentions with which the charge might be imposed. And then as capital markets developed to the point where one could trade in and between bonds, that is to say loans, and equities, that is to say shares in probably profitable enterprises, it became possible, appropriate, reasonable to define a market-led average rate of interest that on an intention-based definition of usury could be charged on loans without committing the wrong of usury. So we now have a series of correct judgments to add to and thereby qualify the original and still correct judgment. By such implicit additions, essentially moral philosophical clarifications, a huge change in preaching and practice that for centuries had weighed on consciences could be and was warranted without impairing or involving the church's infallibility. Intentions were decisive, real psychological intentions, in that sense, subjective, but not rightly understood as being subjective in the sense of fudged up or detached from objective facts and circumstances, such as the real costs of transport or insurance or the real market and wider economic conditions affecting average rates of return on investment. Slavery, servitus, in one of that slippery word's meanings, similarly turns out to be defined most fundamentally by the intent of the owners. While it is genuinely for punishment as penal servitude, judicially authorized for real offenses, perhaps in war, it differs radically from the intent to hold someone as a slave because he or she is the child of a slave, or because he or she was for sale in a market in which penal servitude was simply not the legal or moral basis of the availability of the slave's labor power. The apostolic generation treated slavery in its, for example, Roman imperial non-penal forms as a fact of life, in no urgent need of being challenged. And so matters in substance remained for very many centuries. Apostolic and early Christians were content, by and large, on the whole, with the correct judgment that penal servitude intentionally instituted to find an enforced deprivation of liberty plus obligation of laboring is defined by its intentional object as a penalty, and so is not inherently unjust when ring-fenced with immunity from sexual exploitation and by freedom to worship and, if practicable, to marry. And the further correct judgment that just confiscation can involve confiscation also of the dependent rights of dependents. So the Church counseled those we would call slaves to work honestly and diligently for their masters and reformed the institution without identifying and therefore without challenging its distinct principle, which comes into view when its connection with guilt punishment and punitive confiscation is perceived to be overextended to the point of sheer fiction in relation, for example, to the children of slaves, and to populations in newly discovered lands, and finally to virtually everyone reduced to the status of slave, a possession of private or public persons who bought and sold not simply their labour power, but realistically their persons, and without any concern whatever for wrongdoing and penalty as a basis of title. Clarification of these and related differences enabled the original correct judgments to be accompanied now by further correct judgments, condemning all slavery as distinct from penal servitude for defined periods of time in state prisons. Denial of religious liberty. Again, the church was long content with certain correct judgments, in this case, three, that no one can rightly be compelled to convert to the true faith, that error as such cannot be the basis of rights, and that state law can rightly suppress threats to public order, that is, to public peace, public morals, andor the rights of other citizens, including threats arising from external acts putting into practice one or another tenet of mistaken religious belief. And the last mention, third correct judgment, entails a fourth, that it is false to assert that everyone has a right to religious liberty, understood as moral liberty to give practical effect to whatever is the content of what they believe to be a true religious tenet. But later that false assertion of religious liberty was differentiated from a different sense of religious liberty, one that can rightly be claimed to encapsulate a fifth correct judgment, not only compatible with the other four, but reasonably regarded as a true implication of the first. Everyone has the moral right, not liberty, that is absence of a duty, but a claim right, that is, a right correlative to others' duty to respect it, to be immune from coercion in pursuing the truth about religion and putting it into practice as true, even if in fact mistaken, unless such putting of a religious belief into practice would threaten the public order, protected by the second of the Church's correct judgments. And so we get the development of doctrine in Vatican II's document on religious liberty, they're carefully defined not as the false religious liberty incompatible with public order, nor as a right to profess error, but as immunity from state or social coercion in relation to religious practices within the limits of public order as defined above. In that development, we should notice nothing in the traditional teaching as such was reversed. What was reversed was a vast amount of practice that had been based on both an unawareness of the just mentioned difference between senses of religious liberty and a factual, so-called prudential opinion that any and every religion that is false will constitute a threat to public order, including always the rights of others, if not by the falsity of one or other of its moral teachings, then at least by inculcating disloyalty to any political community that officially or as a matter of predominant social practice adheres to the moral and other tenets of the true religion. And that now rejected factual opinion, prediction, prudential judgment, could with further historical experience be modified or even reversed without reversing or even modifying either the first four traditional teachings or the fifth teaching articulated by Vatican II. And so at long last I come to that notable development of doctrine which in 2018 I suggested deserves our closest reflection. It is not specifically among the announced topics of tomorrow's discussions, but arguably it implicitly includes one of those topics. The development I refer to is the exclusion of all killing intended whether as end or as means to kill. And it is a development that with surprising clarity is announced and made in the catechism of the Catholic Church in sections that have remained intact and undisturbed by the numerous amendments made since 1992 to the subsections concerned with capital punishment. In an article in public discourse on the 22nd of August 2018, I set out the intricacies of those capital punishment amendments, which extend from 1993 to 2018, and tonight I'll say nothing more about capital punishment, to which I returned in public discourse on the 23rd of August and on the 18th of December, or 15th of December 2018, where I also outlined and documented a bit the stable and more general newly developed teaching about intentional killing in war, police action, and other acts of actual or purported public authority. The catechism section on legitimate defense, the section that ends with capital punishment, begins with number 2263. This opens with a confusingly worded sentence dealing both with the murder of the innocent and intentional killing. The sentence's meaning and thesis. There was a muddle in the translation of the French made by the English translator and followed, or sort of limply followed, by other translators. The sentence's meaning and thesis is then made clear by the sentence following it. So let's forget the first sentence. A quotation from Aquinas' famous statement that private persons' defense of themselves or those for whom they're responsible can have a double effect. The preservation of oneself and the killing of the aggressor. The one is intended, the other is not, unquote. And the catechism quotes St. Thomas saying that. Aquinas makes this explicitly clear, and Catechism 2263 takes for granted that such sort of defense is morally permissible only if it includes no intent to kill, even when the means used to repel the aggression, are known to be lethal. That's the point of Aquinas' discussion. Now Aquinas in the same article goes on to say that public officials, police, military, judges, and so forth, can permissibly act against aggressors or criminals with, if need be, intent to kill them. But this part of Aquinas' teaching, long accepted in the tradition, is implicitly but unambiguously rejected by the catechism. Catechism 2263-6.5 extend the moral exclusion of intention to kill, even when using very lethal weaponry, to all instances of legitimate defense, including the actions of, quote, those holding legitimate authority, exercising, quote, the right to repel by armed force aggressors against the civil community, unquote. All this is confirmed by number 2307, which heads up the section devoted to just war and Christianity's rejection of pacifism. 2307, the Fifth Commandment forbids the intentional destruction of human life, and so forth. Evangelium Vita in 1993 left intact the catechism's remarkable adjustment of the tradition, its elimination of any permissible difference between private persons and public officials in relation to permitted intention. No intentional killing, no intending to kill, not even while deciding upon or carrying out as one permissibly may, and as is often the case morally required, the lethal, forcible, violent measures reasonably judged to be needed to stop evil criminals in their crimes or enemy forces who may include unwilling and in that sense subjectively innocent conscript soldiers participating under duress in their unjust operations. This whole set of teachings, in all its formulations, is based, as the context in the unified section 2263-2269 on legitimate defense, as clarified or confirmed by 2307, makes clear on two foundations. First, the fundamental good and sacred status of the life of each and every human being. And second, the reality and significance of the distinction between effects one intends and effects one does not intend, but knowingly causes as a side effect, hence double effect, of carrying out what one does intend. These are foundations that have emerged in the manner mentioned in Evangelium Vitae II and 28 and described in Evangelium Vitae 55, when it says Christian reflection has sought a fuller and deeper understanding of what God's commandment prohibits and prescribes. And then the footnote says, see Catechism 2263 to 2269. So, first of all, as to sacredness, it's predicated of every human life, not as pious rhetoric, but as summoning, summarizing rather a doctrine. God alone is the Lord of life and death. The doctrine heads up the paragraph, Gaudium Metz Bayes 52, in which, 51, rather, in which Vatican II lent its weight to the Church's age old, indeed apostolic teaching against abortion, infanticide, and contraception, I'd say. For God, the Lord of life has entrusted to men, this is uh guardian space, for God the Lord of life has entrusted to men and women the preeminent ministry of safeguarding life in a manner worthy of man. Of course, a life about to emerge that naturally will begin unless I do something to prevent it. This is me, not the council, is greatly different from a life already in being, and Paul VI in Humana Vitae, therefore perhaps soft-peddled the contraceptionist contra life, rationale of Christianity's perennially double rationale teaching against contraception. He highlighted, uh, like my remarks here tonight, rather the marital chastity rationale, contraception is contra marriage. Still, the lordship of God over life, even in its initial inception, is quietly asserted in Humana Vitae's very first sentence, and then is spelled out, referring also to human life's sacredness, in the second paragraph of Humano Vitae's key central section about what's wrong with contraception, section 13. Evangelium Vita explains this sacredness in 53. God proclaims that he is absolute lord of the life of man. Human life is thus given a sacred and inviolable character. The encyclical then thematizes this. In line with the catechism, it appeals to this divine lordship over human life in various sections. One of them roots the doctrine in Deuteronomy 32.39, the Lord kills and I, sorry, I the Lord kill and I make alive. Catechism 2318 roots it in Job 12.10. Aquinas gave prominence in Question 100, Article 8, add 3, to the formula Deus dominus vitae et mortis. God is the Lord of life and death. To compress his thesis, that the natural and divine law against killing does not rule out killing, if ever God, by a special revelation, specifically authorizes a particular person, say Abraham, or group, so to act. As Ford and Griset noted for Paul VI in 1966 in a private communication through Cardinal Ottaviani, as he began deliberating on his commission's recommendation to reverse the teaching on contraception, dignity is a necessary but never a sufficient ground for the natural and Christian moral truths about killing. It is sanctity of life, God's sole lordship over the passage from life to death, that is needed and available even in unaided natural reason at full stretch, as premise for the exclusion of autonomous acts of suicide and voluntary euthanasia. So as the 20th century church had to face up to ever more insistent calls to legitimize these options, it had to deepen its appropriation and understanding of the moral implications of both the unpopular truth, available, I would argue, to a truly sustained and reflectively critical course of natural reasoning, that each and every human being was at his or her very origin the object of a special act of creation, insolvent, by God, and the truth, more popular, wholly dependent for its truth on divine revelation, but sadly often taken lightheartedly for granted, both as a datum of existence and as unconditional, that each human being thus summoned into life as is a creature so significant that God has prepared for him or her a place in his kingdom and a sharing in his divine life. So, secondly, as to intention, Catholic tradition, as articulated by Aquinas, is intrinsically and thus exceptionlessly, according to in Catholic tradition, it's judged intrinsically and thus exceptionlessly immoral for me to form an intention to kill while defending myself or others against an aggressor, but also judged it morally permissible for public officials to act on such an intention while defending the common good by suppressing serious crime, administering just penalties, and so forth. And it's crucial to see that the catechism, as I've stressed, replaces and reverses that second judgment by extending the moral judgment and norm, excluding private intentions to kill defensively, so that that judgment and norm now covers also public officials acting in their course of duty. This extension exhibits high confidence in the practical possibility of carrying out the lethal, police, or military operations needed for just defence of the common good without precisely intending their lethality. As everyone here doubtless knows, that judgment about practical possibility is widely doubted and derided, rejected, from the left and the right, so to speak, and in the name of philosophy or theology or common sense. But working through the objections reflectively only confirms that the objectors, be they Anskom herself or Edward Feeser, or any of the many others, including friends of ours, who earnestly offer to interpret and apply St. Thomas's analysis of human action and willing, have just misunderstood that analysis in one or more crucial respects, or, as in the case of Anskom, have judged that they should treat it, and indeed treat her own masterly and similar analysis of action and willing, as for some reason inapplicable in practical moral contexts, contexts where they seem to exaggerate the church's degree of commitment to a teaching such as about craniotomy. Or the objectives presume that the risk involved in our Thomistic and Anscomian thesis, that the intention and object of external acts is determined entirely by the inter-interior course of deliberation, the risk that such an understanding of intention and object and thus of the external acts' specific identity and type will be manipulated by cunning redescription in the cause of rationalizing anything one wants to do. They presume that this is not just a risk, but a virtual certainty, not just a bug, but a feature. Christopher Tollofson has a most penetrating discussion of these issues in relation to two of these earnest critics in the 2013 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. And there I must leave off. And I confess that when I gladly accepted the invitation to talk here tonight, I hoped to be able to deepen my own understanding of the relation between the old dispensation and the new, especially in relation to the concept and perhaps the fact of the campaigns of extermination spoken of in Deuteronomy 7, 13, and 20, Joshua 6, 8, and 11, Numbers 31, 1 Samuel 15, and Leviticus 27, and revived from time to time in the thought and practice of Christians and in the words of at least some influential people in the wake of October 7th, 2023. I have improved it a bit, but not enough by way of conclusions to be able to advance much beyond what Griset, Boyle, and I said in Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism, that book of 1987, when we said in the New Testament, killing in war is not treated. Christianity, moreover, set aside the earlier idea of enemy peoples, because the gospel, following the prophets, enlarged the idea of God's people to include all humankind. That, together with God's lordship over life and death, points the way to understanding the authentic development from Old Testament to New. And that, of course, that development from Old to New was, of course, a development more radical than any that can fittingly be anticipated as authentic developments by the Church of the apostolic deposit of which it is the guardian beneficiary and cultivator. Thank you very much.