SOURCE: “Intrinsic Evil, Truth, and Authority,” in Religious Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2, June, 1995, pp. 209-19.

[In the following essay, O'Neill examines the argument for intrinsic evil and moral authority in Veritatis Splendor. Though supporting John Paul's view that some acts are intrinsically evil, O'Neill objects to the pope's claim to “epistemological authority.”]

Pope John Paul's recent encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, addresses itself beyond its immediate audience in the Catholic Church to ‘all people of good will’. While my Catholic friends assure me that the Catholic Church is one club that once entered can't be left, I assume myself to be in the wider audience: I write here as an atheist and one still happy to be called a Marxist, both condemned in the document. The paper is not written, however, from a position of hostility to all in the document. My aim in the first part of the paper is to defend one claim in Veritatis Splendor, that some human acts are intrinsically evil, and to relate that claim to another central thought of the document, that one should live in truth. I outline two versions of the idea of living in truth and suggest why the Thomist position defended in the encyclical is to be preferred. In defending the claim that some acts are intrinsically evil, I am not endorsing the specific claims about which acts are intrinsically evil, in particular that claim which, in media coverage of Veritatis Splendor, was construed to be one of its main messages, namely that contraceptive practices which intentionally render the sexual act infertile are intrinsically evil. Indeed one problem with that claim is that it trivializes the otherwise prima facie plausible Vatican II list of intrinsically evil acts that precedes it. Even contentious members of that list, for example abortion and euthanasia, have a recognizable moral seriousness that the question of contraception lacks. However, the problem with John Paul's reaffirmation of Paul IV's teaching on contraception is that it misdescribes a particular act, not with the claim that there are intrinsically evil acts. More generally, the claim that some acts are intrinsically evil can be defended independently of any theological position. The first part of the paper provides such a defence of the position.

In the second section of the paper I outline where, as a part of the wider audience addressed, I have difficulties with the encyclical. I refer here to the authoritarianism of the document. The problem lies not with the concept of ‘authoritative teaching’ as such. All teaching presupposes some form of epistemological authority. It lies rather in the way that the document defines such authority in a way which is incompatible with one precondition of it, that is, reasoned dialogue.

I

To assert that some acts are intrinsically evil is to affirm the Pauline principle, that it is not permissible to do evil that good might come of it (Romans 3:8). To affirm that principle is to deny consequentialism: there are acts one ought not to perform even if their consequences are good or even the best. That denial of consequentialism is quite independent of how what is intrinsically good is characterized: it rules out for example not just classical utilitarianism, and its modern ideal and preference-based versions, but consequentialist reasoning employing traditional Christian characterizations of the good. One reason that Catholic teaching remains influential especially in the sphere of medical ethics is that it offers a theoretically grounded opposition to the consequentialism that dominates discussion. What I want to do here is link it with another powerful set of objections to consequentialism which might at first sight seem distant from the Catholic tradition.

An objection to consequentialism which has informed a great deal of recent discussion of the doctrine is that it fails to respect personal integrity. The objection is developed by Bernard Williams, in part, through the example of George, an unemployed chemist of poor heath, with a family who are suffering in virtue of his being unemployed. An older chemist, knowing of the situation tells George he can swing him a decently paid job in a laboratory doing research into biological and chemical warfare. George is deeply opposed to biological and chemical warfare, but the older chemist points out that if George does not take the job then another chemist who is a real zealot for such research will get the job, and push the research along much faster than would the reluctant George. Should George take the job? For the consequentialist, given any plausible account of the good, the right thing to do is obvious: George should take the job. That will produce better consequence both for his family and the world in general. However, to do that would be to undermine George's integrity. He must treat his own projects and commitments as just so many desires to be put into the calculus with others.

It is absurd to demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which the utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of everyone's projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which his actions and his decisions have to be seen as the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most literal sense, an attack on his integrity.

This objection to consequentialism, that it fails to respect an individual's integrity, has import outside any merely theoretical arguments of philosophers. It has its counterpart in the practical world of political conflict, most notably in Havel's defence of living in truth in his essay ‘The Power of the Powerless'. Thus, to take Havel's example, a greengrocer puts up in his window each day a slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite’, not because it expresses an ideal he holds and which he wants others to know and share, but for a quiet life, because if he refuses he and his family will be in trouble. In doing so he lives a lie, and Havel argues that what he calls ‘post-totalitarianism’ (I'm not sure why the ‘post’ is pre-fixed, but then it's a rather vacuous pre-fix in all its recent uses) is a society whose foundation lies in its members colluding in acts in which they live a lie. Hence, for Havel, its vulnerability to those who live in truth: ‘Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself … His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.’ While Havel's justification for this revolt occasionally slips into a consequentialist mode, it is a gamble to produce desired results, the thrust of his argument is anti-consequentialist. The prevalence of utilitarian modes of thought represents one of the ideological buttresses of living a lie. Against it Havel invokes an ethic of integrity. To live within the truth is to live in accordance with one's basic beliefs, to refuse the unwillingness of the consumer-orientated ‘to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity’, to refuse to be ‘alienated from themselves’, to live an ‘authentic existence’. The concepts invoke a picture of the individual who refuses in her acts to live against her own commitments, even if the consequences are for the worst. To have integrity is to live in accordance with that one believes to be true. It is to live in truth.

How might the consequentialist respond? Both chemist and greengrocer are open to a consequentialist temptation that might undermine the claim that there is in consequentialism something incompatible with integrity. Consider the chemist. Surely, like the older chemist, the consequentialist might tempt the agent in terms of his or her own commitments: ‘Look, if you are really opposed to chemical weapons, you want to do all you can to stop their development, and that's best achieved by your taking the job. That is what it is to be committed to opposition to them.’ What can George say? I think if he is to retain his integrity he has to resist the consequentialist temptation: he has to say something like: ‘Even if that is true, I don't want to be the kind of person that could do that. Regardless of the consequences, I won't collude with that with which I am opposed. I refuse to engage in making chemical weapons. There are some things I simply won't do.’ The consequentialist temptation is corrupting of integrity because it will not allow an agent to refuse to perform some acts, in virtue of the kind of act it is alone, an act of doing research on chemical weapons, of murder, of torture, and so on, regardless of actual consequences or the desire to realize such consequences. But to say that, that there acts of a kind that one simply won't perform, is to affirm the Pauline principle: there are acts I cannot permit myself to do, even though I believe, in my own terms, that they will produce the best outcome. The Pauline principle is built into the concept of integrity. If integrity is to be possible then the Pauline principle has to be accepted.

Why should integrity be of such basic value that it can override consequentialist reasoning? There are two influential, but very different forms of justification that might be offered. One justification of that position is that of the virtues ethic. Both integrity and its Pauline presupposition have their basis in an ethic of virtues. Integrity is of basic value, which cannot be overridden by consequentialist considerations, since one believes that primitives of ethical appraisal include about the excellences of character, the virtues. There are acts I cannot do as such, because I do not want to be the kind of person that can do them. To hold a virtues ethic is to take the question ‘what kind of person should I be?’ to be primitive in ethical deliberation. Integrity is a central virtue, because it is a condition of having others. As Williams notes, it is closely related to the Socratic concept of courage as the virtue concerned with having a sense of what is important and staying firm to it.

A second and very different justification is that of a pure ethic of authenticity which is based on a strong sense of individual moral autonomy, a sense that individuals are the authors of their own values. There is no moral authority beyond the individual, each individual is the author of her ethical beliefs, and, given that this is true, the only basic value one can assert, true of every agent from her own perspective, is that they have integrity. One demands that individuals live authentic lives, that they be true to their own beliefs and desires, whatever they be, that they refuse to engage in acts of ‘bad faith’.

Veritatis Splendor is of interest in part because it represents an encounter of the older virtues tradition with the modern ethic of authenticity. And I think the latter is rightly characterized in the encyclical as a modern variant on the Romantic version of an ethic of conscience. And again, while one might differ on specific ethical claims, the position of the Thomist virtues ethic does provide a well-founded criticism of any pure ethic of authenticity. Whatever the general truth of the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, it is true that integrity is only a virtue amidst virtues. Thus, consider the story told by Williams re-written from the perspective of the zealot for the chemical weapon. Would integrity or authenticity be a virtue? Authenticity is the last quality one would hope the zealot possessed. The sooner he is tempted to betray his beliefs for a comfortable job in advertising the better. Likewise, if Havel's greengrocer is an unrepentant fascist, who since 1945 has been untrue to his convictions for the sake of a quiet life, one might hope he continued to do so, that he live a lie, that he eschew an authentic existence, that anti-semitic slogans fail to appear in his window in place of those required of him and he does not refuse to serve Jewish customers. While a lack of integrity or failure of authenticity might be a fault, it does not follow that integrity or authenticity is a good; and inauthenticity and a lack of integrity might save both agent and victims from much worse. Integrity or authenticity is a virtue only in good company, in particular the company of good ethical judgement.

To live in truth is not merely to live in accordance with what one believes to be true, but involves a responsibility to discover what is true. Authenticity is a virtue only given good ethical judgement, and that concept presupposes it makes sense to distinguish what I believe is good and what is. The subjectivist foundations of the pure ethic of authenticity needs to be rejected.

[I]t is always from the truth that the dignity of conscience derives. In the case of the correct conscience, it is a question of the objective truth received by man; in the case of the erroneous conscience, it is a question of what man, mistakenly subjectively considers to be true. It is never acceptable to confuse a ‘subjective’ error about the moral good with the ‘objective’ truth rationally proposed to man in virtue of his end, or to make the moral value of an act performed with a true and correct conscience equivalent to the moral value of an act performed by following the judgement of erroneous conscience.

With this rejection of a subjectivist account of ethical reasoning, I have no disagreement.

II

Where then does disagreement exist? It exists over different kinds of claim: (I) on substantive claims about what it is for a person to lead a good life; (2) on epistemological claims about the proper criteria for accepting the truth or falsity of propositions about what it is to live a good life. Differences on the first set of claims would require a book unto itself. Differences on the second set of issues do warrant further comment.

The defence of moral realism in Veritatis Splendor, and the corresponding rejection of ‘relativism, pragmatism and positivism’, is associated with a reassertion of hierarchical authority:

While exchanges and conflicts of opinion may constitute normal expressions of public life in the representative democracy, moral teaching cannot depend simply upon respect for a process: indeed, it is in no way established by following rules and deliberative procedures typical of democracy. Dissent, in the form of carefully orchestrated protests and polemics carried on in the media, is opposed to ecclesiastic communion and to a correct understanding of the hierarchical constitution of the People of God. Opposition to the teaching of the Church's Pastors cannot be seen as a legitimate expression either of Christian freedom or the diversity of the Spirit's gifts. When this happens, the Church's Pastors have the duty to act in conformity with their apostolic mission, insisting that the right of the faithful to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity and integrity must always be respected.

That passage is worth quoting in length in virtue of the strength of the anti-enlightenment view of reason in moral matters that it expresses. The passage is not aimed against anti-realism about ethics, but against an account of the right epistemological criteria for the acceptance or rejection of a putative ethical truth. It is instructive to set beside it Kant's classic statement of the nature of the enlightenment:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. The immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of the enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding … For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all—freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters. But I hear on all sides the cry: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, get on parade! The tax-official: Don't argue, pay! The clergyman: Don't argue, believe!

Kant in thus defining the enlightenment is not here claiming that every individual is the author of their morality. His concern is rather with the epistemological conditions under which an individual can be said to have good grounds for a moral belief. Right moral belief emerges from the public use of reason, and an individual's grounds for a belief must be that it has been tested against public argument. John Paul, by contrast, asserts an epistemological authority of a hierarchical kind, in which public argument is rejected, and the believer's right is that of receiving doctrine untainted by controversy. While public controversy is allowable outside of the church, it is understood simply as political principle required for ‘representative democracy’. It is not a necessary epistemological condition for right moral belief: the proper process is a hierarchical one.

Is there anything to be said for the epistemological authoritarianism defended by John Paul? A case might be made of a negative kind. There is a problem with the Enlightenment view defended by Kant that forms the strong epistemological core of conservative political thought. The problem is that any person who relied simply on his own understanding would understand very little. Any process of education, be it in the sciences, the arts, in language or in morals depends on the acceptance of the authority of others. There is a sense in which all teaching is authoritative and all learning requires some deference to an authority:

The acceptance of authority is not just something which, as a matter of fact, you cannot get along without if you want to participate in rule-governed activities; rather, to participate in rule-governed activities is, in a certain way to accept authority. For to participate in such an activity is to accept that there is a right and a wrong way of doing things, and the decision as to what is right and wrong in a given case can never depend completely on one's own caprice.

Take science, the model of rational activity for the enlightenment. One learns science from school to university by practising standard cases of good experiment, adopting exemplars of good inference and theory, and accepting correction from an authority when one goes wrong. Such epistemological authority is not a luxury that one could do without, preferring one's own understanding: one can only exercise one's own understanding given authoritative education. Failure to do so when one enters some practice like science involves no lack of courage: it is a requirement which must be followed if one is ever to be in a position to exercise epistemological courage against received opinion. To dare to refuse to believe any opinion on authority takes not courage but foolhardiness. It is only when equipped with good judgement and belief born of authoritative education that the question of courage arises, and enlightenment could conceivably be its result. Moreover, the conservative notes that acceptance of epistemological authority is not something that can be done in abstract: the authoritative way of doing something is necessarily embodied in the practice and teaching of other human persons, who, for all their fallibility, are the only way into a practice. Thus goes the conservative argument, and the case is a powerful one.

Let us grant that conservative case. Does epistemological authority thereby rest in a hierarchical form of organisation, as John Paul assumes? Or is there something that can be rescued from Kant's enlightenment view? I believe that a more sophisticated version of the Enlightenment position can be rescued, and it is not clear indeed that the Kantian passage quoted above is not compatible with that position. Consider the imperatives discussed by Kant: ‘I hear on all sides the cry: Don't argue! The officer says: Don't argue, get on parade! The tax-official, Don't argue, pay! The clergyman: Don't argue, believe!’ Even given the conservative's defence of epistemological authority there is a powerful point to be made here. Given an imperative ‘Do X’ there are two kinds of answer that might be made to a response ‘Why?’: (1) because I am your officer, your tax collector, your clergyman, paying you, etc.; (2) because it would be the right thing to do, the best thing to do, because it is a valid inference, etc. The first set of responses make essential reference to the individual's occupancy of a particular institutional position or status. If it turned out that the individual did not have that position, or that the addressee was not within the range of the person's institutional authority, that for example the officer was addressing a civilian or a general, then the imperative is infelicitous. On its own terms there is no backing for its authority. The second set of responses are not of this kind. They make no essential call on institutional positions of authority, but, rather, on standards independent of institutional positions and status. The felicity of the speech act calls only on impersonal standards. A feature of the imperatives that Kant criticises is that they are the first institutional kind. Their felicity is essentially founded upon institutional authority, not on any standards independent of those positions. I take it that part of Kant's point here is that to defer to the beliefs of another, to believe simply in virtue of a person's institutional position is never defensible. A person's status, wealth or power is never good reason to defer to their judgements: to do so is mere sycophancy. The only good grounds a mature individual has for deferring to the judgements of other persons is that there are good reasons to believe that they meet standards independent of those persons.

This is true even where, as in the case of a teacher, their institutional authority is called upon. Consider, a mathematics teacher who in an exasperated moment in the classroom, when faced with students who argue with what she says: ‘Look this isn't the time for argument; for the moment take it on authority, and later you'll be able to see why your objections can be met.’ In all teaching there is a time and place for making a claim on authority, for saying something like ‘Don't argue, believe’. However, the grounds for the deference to authority in that context will be one that is independent of the institutional position of the individual as such. It is because she has the position she has in virtue of publicly recognized competences that one has good reasons for the temporary silencing of one's dissent.

The root of a great deal of modern relativism lies in a refusal to recognize the difference between authority grounded solely in institutional position and authority grounded in standards independent of such positions. There is a widespread anti-enlightenment view that all epistemological authority is simply a disguised way of enforcing social power. That view cannot be sustained. The very statement of it is difficult, since on its own terms it must itself be interpreted as an act of power: it denies the very conditions for there to be utterances critical of unjustified social power. However, reading Veritatis Splendor it is possible to detect a similar identification of epistemological authority and social authority. The distinction between social authority and epistemological authority is nowhere clearly drawn and the defence of epistemological authority often appears to be primarily aimed at the reassertion of hierarchical authority. To the question ‘why should I believe P?’ the answer looks like ‘because I, the pope/church pastor, tell you so’: hence the rejection of dissent.

It might be objected that this judgement is too harsh. The Catholic tradition in which the papal letter is written does recognize the distinction between authority that is backed by standards of reason and authority that is not. Both the distinction and the use to which it is put are ancient ones that are, for example, recognized by Augustine: ‘with regard to the acquiring of knowledge, we are of necessity led in a twofold manner: by authority and by reason. In point of time, authority is first; in order of reality, reason is prior.’ While in learning sometimes one must first accept a proposition on authority since that is a condition for coming to a position to understand it, reason is ultimately prior. The object of learning is to arrive at propositions justifiable by standards of reason, and which the learner can recognize as such. Nothing in the papal defence of ‘the right of the faithful to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity’ entails a conflation of epistemological and social authority.

This response does not yet fully resolve the differences between the revised Kantian and papal perspectives on epistemological authority, although it does clarify where the differences ultimately lie. They concern the conditions a community of inquiry must possess in order that authority be accepted at all. The point is again one that is recognized by Augustine: ‘Authority demands faith, and prepares man for reason. Reason leads on to knowledge and understanding. But reason is not entirely useless to authority; it helps in considering what authority is to be accepted.’ A mature individual needs reason to decide to which authority deference is justifiable. This point provides I believe a way of rescuing the core of Kant's position.

The sophisticated defender of the enlightenment position might accept that the public use of one's reason might not always and everywhere be appropriate: there may be occasions in which deference to authority is justifiable. However, one needs some reason to believe that the practice in which authoritative teaching is made is itself in order. Justifiable deference to epistemological authority is possible only if one has grounds for believing the authority in question could be redeemed in public argument. Deference would be quite improper if no public use of reason is possible even at level of those competent and, hence, that the doctrines in question could not be subject to the scrutiny of competent peers. Where the possibility of public dialogue and argument is absent one has good reason to believe something is amiss. A practice that allows only opinion untainted by dissent is not one in which authoritative utterances could be redeemed, and hence is not one in which deference to authoritative judgments is justifiable.

It is at this point that the Kantian defence of public reason does have power against the position asserted by Pope John Paul. The encyclical defends a silencing of internal dissent, and insists on ‘the right of the faithful’ to receive doctrine without the stain of controversy. Now whatever one thinks of modern theologians—and I find it difficult to take seriously those among them who combine anti-realism with religious belief—an institution that insists on a hierarchical power to silence dialogue and to state what is to be the ‘pure’ doctrine which the faithful are to receive lacks those marks which would make deference to authority rational. Here of course problems arise in particular for those ‘people of good will’ outside of the Catholic church to whom the document addresses itself. Specific problems of religious authority are at stake. The papal position relies on the possibility of authority beyond reason—that of revelation—and the claim to represent that authority. In Augustinian terms ‘the authority of the mysteries’ over-rides ‘the circumlocution of disputation'. However, even given that specific background, which is unlikely itself to move the outsider, there is a problem. Augustine adds a qualification that the papal document lacks: ‘but human authority is often deceiving'.

Human authority is never more deceiving than when it is self-deceptive, and self-deception is never more likely than when an authority fails to admit the possibility that it is sometimes in error. A central virtue of moral realism is that it is a condition for accepting one's own views can be mistaken—that one's beliefs about the good may be wrong. Hence, combined with the virtue of intellectual humility, it allows space for being corrected. Correction, however, requires openness to public dissent. The strong social authoritarianism of the papal document undermines the conditions for correction of belief. Hence, it undermines the grounds for claims on others to defer to its putative epistemological authority. The document defines its epistemological authority in a way that is incompatible with one necessary condition of any proper instance of it, that is, reasoned dialogue.