Before we get into talking about what makes a human act good or evil, we first have to make clear what role human beings have—and don’t have—in relation to morality.
A commonplace error of our times is that somehow human beings decide what is good or evil. That’s not true. We may decide what we think is good or evil, but whether what we think is right or not is a separate question. If Hitler thought gassing six million people was right, did it make it right? And if you think that an exaggeration, if one over-sexed husband thinks cheating on his wife is okay, does it make it morally okay?
In his pre-papal writings, Karol Wojtyła (St. John Paul II) speaks about “the experience of obligation.” It tells us something about morality and our relation to it.
All of us have had the experience of morality. All of us have, at one time or another, felt “I should do X” or “I should not do Y.” Let’s look closely at that commonplace human experience.
“I should not do X.” Why not? If morality is of my making, I should be able to dispense myself, shouldn’t I? Give myself a one-time exemption? But even if I attempt that ruse, I remain unconvinced. In the depths of my being, I still hear “I should not do X.” But I gave myself a waiver, didn’t I? What does that experience tell me?
It tells me that I am not the source of morality. If I were, I could change it or release myself from it. But try as I might, I cannot. I cannot, because I did not determine morality in the first place.
St. Paul said that God “wrote his law on our hearts” (Rom 2:15). In his Letter to the Romans, he describes the “experience of obligation” when he talks about the Law. He declares that “all men are sinners” (3:23). But how does he get away with that claim? The Jews had revelation: the Ten Commandments. The Christians had revelation: the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ teaching.
But nobody faxed a copy of the Ten Commandments to Rome. Nobody emailed the Sermon on the Mount to the Capitoline Hill. So how can you say that poor Roman pagans, deprived of revelation, are “sinners”?
Easy, says Paul. They recognize a law within themselves, a law they are consciously aware of having violated. They recognize moral disorder in themselves. Nobody has to sit down with little Julius and teach him, “Son, you seem to be falling behind for your age. Let’s practice lying!” Every man experiences a law he did not impose on himself, a law he also experiences as having violated.
It is because God wrote his Law in our hearts, not just on stone tablets.
That Law is not just some caprice, some arbitrary power move by God that he imposed on us. The moral law is not sheer divine willpower: God is bigger and stronger than us, so he can say, “Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not commit adultery!” And if he wanted, he could have said the exact opposite: “Thou shalt kill! Thou shall commit adultery!”
No, he couldn’t. That is the error of nominalism, a medieval philosophy that focused on God being all-powerful and, therefore, able to make morality however he wanted. It got a new lease on life in the Reformation, because most of the Reformers were nominalists, Luther at the head of them.
But we—as complex creatures (body and soul) and even more so as sinners—are internally divided. Our reason tells us what we should do, but our will doesn’t want to. Our emotions want to do good but like the prospect of the bad.
God is not like that. Who God Is (note the capital—God is Being itself—Exod. 3:14) is Good (the Supreme Good), True, and that is what he Wills. God could not make a world in which murder or adultery is “good” because God cannot be untrue to himself. He cannot declare “good” what is not he—e.g., Life and Fidelity.
Why harp on nominalism? Because it’s alive and well in our day. In the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, it might have been plausible to some: we say, after all, that God is “almighty.” But God is also all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good—and all those attributes are in harmony, not contradiction. So when we were talking about God, some thinkers may have imagined morality as “whatever God willed.”
But lots of things have happened since the Reformation, the most important of which is that people have stopped believing in God. What’s happened is that the role God used to have, applying the labels of “good” and “evil,” was taken over by man.
But man is a sinner. He’s not perfect. He’s hardly all-knowing. And his reason, emotions, and will are often at loggerheads. He’s hardly the substitute to exercise the divine role in saying what’s “good” or “evil.”
And yet some do. That’s why we hear such nonsense as “my good” or “your good.” Morals are not a matter of possessive pronouns; there is the good. And man’s experience of obligation—his inability to escape the awareness of moral duty despite his efforts to talk himself out of it—confirms that.
Only when we disabuse ourselves of the idea that we make morality can we start understanding what Christian, specifically Catholic, morality is. And that’s critical to understanding properly the role of conscience. Consciences are not looms; they don’t spin morality. They are, rather, mirrors: they reflect it. Some mirrors reflect well, others less so. But mirrors image things; they don’t make them.