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The last sentence in #75 in Veritatis Splendor is confusing to a lot of people. The following analysis by Abyssum should help those who are puzzled by it.
First, one must understand that all of #4 of #75 is concerned with the errors of those who construct a moral theory, or ethics, around the concept of teleologisms. Wikipedia offers a shortcourse in understanding teleological thought:
The broad spectrum of consequentialist ethics, of which utilitarianism is a well-known example, focuses on the end result or consequences, with such principles as utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill‘s “the greatest good for the greatest number”, or the Principle of Utility. Hence this principle is teleological, but in a broader sense than is elsewhere understood in philosophy. In the classical notion, teleology is grounded in the inherent natures of things themselves, whereas in consequentialism, teleology is imposed on nature from outside by the human will. Consequentialist theories justify inherently what most people would call evil acts by their desirable outcomes, if the good of the outcome outweighs the bad of the act. So for example, a consequentialist theory would say it was acceptable to actively kill one person in order to save two or more other people. These theories may be summarized by the maxim “the ends can justify the means.”
Consequentialism stands in contrast to the more classical notions of deontological ethics, such as Immanuel Kant‘s Categorical Imperative, and Aristotle‘s virtue ethics (although formulations of virtue ethics are also often consequentialist in derivation). In deontological ethics, the goodness or badness of individual acts is primary and a desirable larger goal is insufficient to justify bad acts committed on the way to that goal, even if the bad acts are relatively minor and the goal is major (like telling a small lie to prevent a war and save millions of lives). In requiring all constituent acts to be good, deontological ethics is much more rigid than consequentialism, which varies by circumstances.
Practical ethics are usually a mix of the two. For example, Mill also relies on deontic maxims to guide practical behavior, but they must be justifiable by the principle of utility.[14]
Next, one needs to see the relationship between consequentialism and proportionalism. The follow is an extract from the writing of David Oderber taken from the blogsite: Lex Christianorum:
According to consequentialism, the criterion of rightness and wrongness of actions is whether they maximize good consequences. What are those good consequences? This is one of the first matters on which consquentialists differ.
[I]t does not matter for the morality [of a person’s] action how [he] fails to maximize X in a given situation: he may deliberately choose an act that is sub-optimal (less-than-X-maximizing), or he may simply refrain from performing the act that is optimal (X-maximizing), with the result that, in one way or another, a sub-optimal state of the world eventuates; either way, he is equally guilty of immorality.
[T]he defining feature of consequentialism . . . is that there is no such thing as an action that is wrong whatever the consequences, and conversely, there is no such thing as an action that is right irrespective of the consequences. No actions are absolutely right or absolutely right: they take whatever moral complexion they have from their contribution, in the circumstances, to the maximization of X.
Proportional moral reasoning grew out of consequentialism by stressing that it was not so much the final outcome of an act that mattered as it was the proportion of good and evil that was taken into consideration by the one acting. But since consequentialism and subsequently proportionalism denied in denying the telos or end of human acts directed to God, they denied the existence of intrinsic evil, and so the attempt to balance the proportion of good or evil in moral situations often resulted in the act producing evil results. So it comes down to the opposition of justifying acts based on the telos of man acting always with reference to the Creator and justifying acts based on teleologisms that are solely rational and have no reference to the Creator.
– Abyssum
