Originally published at The Catholic Thing
Experience suggests, and multiple studies show, that people don’t act as ethically as they think they will. It is easier to imagine being just and heroic than to be just and heroic. But sometimes the issue isn’t a lack of character, it’s a skewing of our vision of things.
Josef Pieper, in his masterly book The Four Cardinal Virtues, begins his chapter on prudence with this passage from the Gospel of Matthew (6:22): “If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light,” which continues: “but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
One crucial question, then, is how we blind ourselves to the moral character of our acts and enter that darkness. Often, it depends on how the issue is framed.
In one instance, we might be focusing on the act. But then later, we must face the potential consequences. And then we might start doing a “cost-benefit” analysis. (In ethics, this is sometimes called “consequentialism,” “utilitarianism,” or “proportionalism.”) Yes, I thought it was wrong to experiment with stem cells from aborted fetuses, but what if we
