Thomistic Note: Long and Dewan on Principles of Moral Action
In 2007, Steven A. Long first published a book entitled The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act.1 In the volume’s opening pages, Long states that his intention is to offer students of Catholic moral theology a “speculative primer,” a vademecum for the admittedly complex principles of St. Thomas Aquinas’s moral act theory.2 Long’s moral handbook elicited mixed reactions from his academic peers and reviewers.3 This essay will examine Long’s position vis-à-vis the critique leveled against it by (the late and great) Father Lawrence Dewan, O.P.4
Steven A. Long: The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act and Moral Realism
Long states his book’s purpose with great clarity:
The aim of this book is to show the essential unity, suppleness, and teleological realism of St. Thomas’s moral teaching and its principled adequacy with respect to contemporary moral questions. In particular, it seeks to vindicate the speculative intelligibility and coherence of St. Thomas’s account of the teleological grammar governing the constitution of the object and species of the moral act.5
The word “realism” catches the attention of readers.6 In an effort to apprehend the reality which founds moral truth, Long attempts to “set forth a principled account of St. Thomas’s teaching regarding the object and species of the moral act.”7 Without a firm grasp of the speculative principles underlying the moral object, the theologian loses contact reality—especially in its personal and salvific aspects: “In short, without understanding St. Thomas’s account of the teleological grammar governing the constitution of object and species of the moral act, one is lost.”8
Long diagrams his understanding of the moral object in the following manner:9
The author highlights the placement of “relation to reason” above “the act itself and its integral nature.” This is important “because the relation to reason refers to the aspect under which the act in question is appetible to the agent and this, as such, is the more formal aspect of the object, for without it the act would never occur.”10 This point warrants extended consideration. The appetibility of the act is foundational for everything involved in moral analysis. Here the importance of ultimate, final causality emerges with prominence:
Without a natural end, either we would never begin to act—because there would, naturally speaking, be nothing to desire, and nothing to fear (because fear is rooted in the awareness of dangers to our possession of the good)—or, if, per miraculem, we could begin to act, we could never end (because our acts would lack any natural point of termination).11
Hence, with regard both to the origination and to the termination of moral action, the end plays a causally potent role. Long continues: “It is not simply that an action without natural ends would be ‘bad’—that is not in the least what is at stake.” Rather, his point is that an “action without natural ends is strictly and absolutely impossible. We cannot even define what we mean by an efficient cause … without referring to the end to which it is ordered.”12 In sum, the final cause is the cause of all causes, and the end is the cause of all moral motion.13
Every individual human action arises from the moral agent’s desire for the ultimate end. This inclination towards happiness is what makes certain types of actions appetible and others not. However, this subjectively situated inclination (i.e., an inclination situated within the moral agent) is only one part of the praxeological matrix that explains human conduct: “There are two elements that together comprise ‘what the act is about relative to reason,’ and not only one: for ‘what the act is about relative to reason’ always materially includes the act itself and its integral nature.” Moreover, “while it is true that the act itself and its integral nature can be generally known in such a way that some acts are determinable to be objectively contrary to right reason merely by their genus, the object of the act always includes a relation and proportion to the end sought.”14 What is Long saying here? As the human intellect is able to apprehend the nature of physical reality, so also is the human intellect able to apprehend the nature of praxeological reality (i.e. the reality of human action). In other words, certain actions do certain things and not other things. For example, if I wish to travel to Rome from Washington, I will purchase a plane ticket, board a boat, or even, perhaps, begin swimming east. If I wish to travel to Rome from Washington, I will not snap my fingers, eat a sandwich, or listen to Handel’s Messiah. The reason for this is evident: snapping fingers, eating a sandwich, and listening to beautiful music are acts not proportioned to the end of traveling to Rome. The acts of snapping my fingers, eating a sandwich, and listening to Handel are proportioned to the making of noise, sating hunger, and enhancing one’s aesthetic awareness; but they are not proportioned to physical transportation. Thus, the act itself and its integral nature—what it is—are essential components to any moral choice.
But this leads us to a further consideration: how are we to apply this principle to the various kinds of human action that possess a greater complexity? Here Long offers a helpful clarification:
The object of the act always includes a relation and proportion to the end sought. This is important in two ways: (1) clearly the object will always have a proportion to what it itself is naturally or per se ordered to; and (2) it will also always have some relation, whether per se or per accidens, to whatever further end the agent may seek through the act.15
The example of eating a sandwich is helpful here. The act of eating a sandwich is per se ordered to providing nutrition. However, people can eat sandwiches for reasons other than nutritional gain. The generic consideration of an act in abstracto is grounded in its (native) per se order. Eating a sandwich is per se ordered to nutrition. This is true and knowable without any consideration of a specific person’s individual act of eating a particular sandwich. The specific consideration of an act in concreto, however, considers both the act’s per se order and the moral agent’s subjective intention for performing the act. Here, I suggest, we find an analytical confluence of what, perhaps, we could call “objective” and “subjective intentionality.”16 This theme runs throughout Aquinas’s speculative corpus even from his earliest works.17
The most basic instance of specific human action is found when the subjective intentionality of the actor/agent aligns with the objective/generic intentionality of the act itself. An example of this is a person eating a sandwich for the purpose of sating hunger or gaining nutrition. The agent’s (subjective) intention here matches the (objective) per se order of the act itself. An example of a complex act is a person eating a sandwich in order to win an eating contest. The eating of a sandwich is only per accidens ordered to receiving monetary recompense for victory. Receiving monetary recompense is itself an act per se distinct from the act of eating. And this complex, accidental, further ordering of the act of eating to the act of winning money is established by the intention of the agent which reaches beyond the per se order of the act itself. Long explains:
The generic consideration of the object is abstract (in the sense of being abstracted from the full context and any per accidens further ordering by the agent) and in a sense does not consider it qua object of a particular act, but rather as possible object in myriads acts all defined by the same type of end. Understood in this way, lacking the further specification in concrete act, such a consideration will be adequate in one respect (with regard to the genus) and inadequate in another respect (with regard to the any further specific determination of the act in relation to reason and the end beyond the immediate per se ordering of the object).18
Long frequently states that the most foundational unit of moral currency is the simple or per se act. Indeed, “all other cases of human action depend upon this case and are related to it.”19 This must be the case: the per se precedes absolutely the per accidens. Here we arrive at a critical point in Long’s praxelogical analysis:
As St. Thomas puts it most clearly in ST I-II, q. 18, a. 7… where the object is per se ordered to the end, the most formal, containing, and defining moral species is derived from the end…. It follows that to know the fundamental type or moral species of any particular action, we must first know whether the object is, or is not, naturally (per se) ordered to the end. For if, and only if, the object is naturally (per se) ordered to the end, will the moral species derived from the end be most formal and most containing such that the moral species derived from the object is merely a specific difference of that species.20
In order to elucidate the significance of the end vis-à-vis objects per se ordered to the end, he explains: “This kind of action, wherein the object is essentially ordered to the end of the will, is the very unit of currency for Thomas’s consideration of human acts.”21 This point suggests subtle and important implications:
Let us be clear: the basic unit of action is the case where an object is essentially ordered to the end of the will, whether the end of the will be the normative natural end (and thus the action good) or the end of the will be, in some case, deprived of right reason owing to unrectified appetite and so wicked (and the act accordingly contrary to reason). It is the unit of currency of St. Thomas’s analysis, because this is the nature of simple as opposed to complex acts, and before we understand complex acts we must understand simple ones, for complex acts are composed of simple acts. The act wherein object is per se ordained to the end is indeed the per se instance of human act as such.22
Long anticipates questions we might raise at this point: what does it mean for an act to be per se ordered to an end? He provides an answer: “For one thing is said to be per se ordered to the other either if the achievement of one thing is absolutely required for the achievement of the other, or if one thing simply by its nature tends toward the achievement of another.” Because of this, “Where the object is per se ordered to the end the most defining moral species is derived from the end.”23 Long proceeds to summarize what he considers to be the most determinative question of moral analysis: “According to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, we cannot so much as determine the moral species of an action unless we first know the answer to this question: is the object of this action naturally [i.e., per se] ordered to the end?”24 This question (and the answer it elicits) is essential to a realist understanding of the relationship between the moral object, intention, and end:
One should carefully observe that according to St. Thomas, ‘we can have intention of the end without having determined the means which are the object of choice.’ Per se the term ‘intention’ for St. Thomas designates either the end simpliciter, or the end as acquired by the means, but in either case principally the end. Whereas, per se, for St. Thomas ‘choice’ designates the movement of the will to the means.25
Properly speaking, intention pertains to the end. Choice pertains to the means. Human agents intend ends, and choose means. This correlation between intention and end, and choice and means, is found explicitly in the text of St. Thomas himself:
A movement which is one as to the subject, may differ, according to our way of looking at it, as to its beginning and end, as in the case of ascent and descent (Phys. iii, 3). Accordingly, in so far as the movement of the will is to the means, as ordained to the end, it is called “choice”: but the movement of the will to the end as acquired by the means, it is called “intention.” A sign of this is that we can have intention of the end without having determined the means which are the object of choice.26
The relevance of this distinction is manifest in a consideration of private self-defense. STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7 is one of the most controversial portions of the Summa theologiae relevant to contemporary debates surrounding moral act theory.27 In this article Aquinas addresses the question: “Whether it is lawful to kill a man in self-defense?” The second chapter of Long’s book The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act applies his approach to moral analysis to this admittedly difficult moral question. The essence of his conclusion is easy to summarize: in a given case where lethality is a necessary and integral part of an act of legitimate self-defense (i.e., the only means possible is lethal in nature), the moral agent may choose to kill an attacker as a means to fulfilling is intention of self-defense. Because the means chosen (i.e., killing the attacker) is per se ordered to the end intended (i.e., self-defense), the act is specified as an act of self-defense:
Where the [moral] object is per se ordered to the end the most formal and defining species is from the end; hence … where the object of a lethal act is proportioned to defense (such as to kill solely for the sake of defense and for no ulterior reason) the act is defensive in its fundamental moral character: a defensive homicide.28
Long emphasizes that the moral agent does not intend to kill the attacker. The death of the attacker is praeter intentionem. Rather the moral agent intends to save his life (self-defense). This defensive formality reveals the species of the act because the chosen means (i.e., killing the attacker) are per se ordered to the good intended end (i.e., self-defense).
Lawrence Dewan’s Engagement with Long’s Teleological Grammar
The late Canadian Dominican, Father Lawrence Dewan, O.P., ranks among the most formidable of Long’s critics. In his 2010 response to Long’s account of the moral act vis-à-vis lethal self-defense, Dewan expresses gratitude to Long for writing The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act. However, Dewan also reveals that he retains some reservations about Long’s account of the moral object.
Dewan begins by summarizing Long’s position on the relationship between end and intention, choice and means:
Long’s position is that we must carefully distinguish between the intention and the choice. If we do that, we can say that the killing is not intended, but is chosen. Only this approach, he holds, admits the full description of the act performed. Morally, it is a case of justified homicide.29
Dewan objects to this description of the elements integral to human conduct because he believes it fails to do justice to the text of Aquinas himself: “I disagree with Long’s views of both intention and choice. Indeed, I see them in what we might call a ‘mirror-image’ opposition.”30 Dewan argues that one can recognize Long’s error in the light of an adequate consideration of Summa theologiae I-II, q. 12, a. 4, ad 3 in its entirety.31 Dewan explains, “What I mean to insist on is the basic description of the two acts, in the comparison to the two opposite movements over the same route. In the picture of the two acts in their perfect condition, both include the end and the means, but in inverse order.”32 The reason for this is simple: the will is a self-mover: “As willing the end, it moves itself to will the means.”33 Indeed, Dewan suggests that “it is intention precisely inasmuch as the order to the means is introduced, no matter how indeterminately.”34 In order to confirm this point, Dewan cites another passage from Aquinas’s Summa theologiae:
In a third way the end is considered according as it is the terminus of something which is ordered to it; and thus intention relates to the end: for it is not merely from this that we are said to “intend health,” viz. that we will it, but rather that we will to arrive at it through something else.35
Thus, while the means may be indeterminate in the beginning, the intention remains the “driving force of the deliberation, the act of reason under the direction of the intending will.”36 According to Dewan:
The intending will is the mover of the choosing will. Accordingly, we must expect that in the beginning the intention will aim at means which are still indeterminate. However, with the conclusion of its servant, deliberating reason, the intention is perfect, and intends the means which are the matter of choice. No wonder, then, that Thomas, in presenting the difference between intention and choice, includes the willing of end and means in both, but in a different order.37
The key to Dewan’s position is easily summarized: “the will intending [the end] is the cause of the will choosing [means].”38 And thus, “Thomas, in presenting the difference between intention and choice, includes the willing of end and means in both, but in a different order.”39 (Of course, the will intending the end is the cause of choosing the means. Nonetheless, the inclusion of “both, but in a different order” could be ambiguously read in such a way that intention and choice, both, could indiscriminately regard the end and the means. The end is absolutely primary. Ends enjoy intelligibility without reference to the means. Intention of the end arises independent of the means—and gives rise to the choice of the means precisely as choice and as means. The means, precisely as such, reside in an order subordinated to the end. Thus the choice of means is always derivative in nature—derivative from the intended end. Unlike the end, the means never morally subsist as such.)
All of these nuances come to bear on Dewan’s reading of Aquinas’s account of lethal self-defense. Dewan states the following as his view: “I come then, to the view that in self-defense the act of the private and the public agent can be physically the same, resulting in the particular case in the death of the attacker.” Thus far, he and Long are on the same page. “However,” Dewan specifies, “there are two morally good acts”:
The private agent intends as an end his own survival, and the external act of force is the one necessary to effect that result. (The killing is incidental, belonging to the physical act as such). The public agent, performing the same physical act, intends the killing of the attacker in order to save his own life, in the interest of the common good (his exterior act, as a moral act, is formally a killing).40
In short, Dewan believes that although “physically the act by which the public servant saves himself and the act by which the private citizen saves himself can be identical; the difference is that the former intends the lethal means as lethal whereas the latter intends the lethal means only as self-saving.” He observes that St. Thomas teaches in STh II-II, q. 64, a. 6 that it is never licit to kill an innocent person. Moreover, the private citizen is in no position to offer “judgment of the attacker in self-defense as being a criminal. Hence, to kill this human being is not an availably morally good act. Rather, what is available to the private citizen who is attacked is the act of self-defense.” Admittedly, “this act is naturally the application of force on the attacker.” However, “the force to be applied is the force that will effectively stop the attack. It happens that sometimes only lethal force is adequate. It is chosen, not as a killing act, but as an appropriate use of force in self-defense.”41
Conclusion
Certainly, Lawrence Dewan and Steven A. Long agree far more than they disagree. Both Dewan and Long themselves acknowledge their fundamental speculative harmony.42 However, there do remain points of significant disagreement.43
Although Dewan’s criticisms warrant careful thought and consideration, Long’s account of the moral act affords the theologian an accurate “grammar” by which the object of the moral act can be evaluated. Although there are certainly subtle nuances present within St. Thomas’s writings on the object and nature of the moral act, Long’s emphasis upon the primary relationship between intention and end, and choice and means emerges as speculatively foundational and requisite. Although a Thomist could, certainly, point to passages within the text of the Angelic Doctor where Aquinas speaks of “intending” the means, the fact of the matter remains: means are only “means” because of a causally prior end. Thus, there is an analogical sense in which the agent intends the means as well as the end (again, because without the intentional establishment of the end, there are no means). The means, however, only receive their moral motion as mediated by the intentionality of the end.
The importance of this latter point emerges when one considers the relationship and difference between simple and complex acts. Complex acts are integrally united only accidentally via the subjective intentionality of the moral agent (e.g., in the case of the adulterating thief, there is nothing about the essence of marital infidelity that is per se ordered to stealing).44 Thus, in order to understand the blueprint, so to speak, of a moral act, one needs to understand whether it is simple (and, thus, the object is per se ordered to the end) or complex (and thus, one simple act is per accidens ordered to another simple act as object to end).
Steven A. Long, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2007). A second edition of this volume was published in 2015. All citations in this Thomistic Note refer to the second edition.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 59.↩︎
Some of the reviews include Mark Graham, review of The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act, by Steven A. Long, Theological Studies 69 no. 4 (2008): 965–66; Romanus Cessario, O.P., “Human Action and the Foundations of the Natural Law, Nova et Vetera 8 no. 1 (2010): 185–9; Daniel McInerny, “Commentary on Steven A. Long’s The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act,” Nova et Vetera 8 no. 1 (2010): 207–13.↩︎
Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” Nova et Vetera 8, no. 1 (2010): 191–205.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 63. Emphasis original.↩︎
For an extended treatment of the characteristics of a “realist” approach to moral theology, see Romanus Cessario, O.P. Introduction to Moral Theology, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 16–21.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 64.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 64.↩︎
See Long, Teleological Grammar, 78.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 78.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 69–70.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 70. Emphasis original. “Snow shoveling” is one of Long’s favorite examples illustrating this truth. He frequently remarks that it is impossible “to define the act of ‘snow shoveling’ without any mention that the purpose of the act is to move snow by means of some shovel-like implement” (Long, Teleological Grammar, 70).↩︎
See STh I, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 77. Emphasis original.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 77–78. Emphasis original.↩︎
Of course, the sense of “objective” presupposes the Thomist Tradition’s precision regarding the nature of objectivity in general and moral objectivity in particular.↩︎
A young Thomas Aquinas made the following statement: “Every agent, both natural and voluntary, acts for the sake of [intendit] an end, though it does not follow that every agent knows the end or deliberates about the end…. [T]he natural agent can act for an end without deliberation. This intending is nothing other than the natural inclination to something” (De principiis naturae, chapter 3). This translation is from Ralph McInerny’s Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 22.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 89–90. Emphasis original.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 151.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 91–92.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 92. Emphasis original.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 92. Emphasis original.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 94.↩︎
“If the object is ordered to the end then, whatever else may ensue on the part of the object, we will know that the most defining species is derived from the end willed (of course, again, all this presupposes knowledge, since simple ignorance makes an act, just so far considered, to be other than voluntary). If, on the other hand, the object is not naturally ordered to the end, then we will know that we have a complex act, that is to say, that we are dealing with a case wherein one simple act with its own per se ordering of object to end is itself per accidens further ordered to another simple act with its per se ordering end: as a simple act of theft (with per se ordering of action ordered to stealing) may per accidens, in the mind of the agent, be further ordered to the end of the simple moral act of fornication (with its per se ordering of actions that by nature are fornicative), such that we may speak of the first act as being like an object, and the second as being like an end” (Long, Teleological Grammar, 96). Emphasis original.↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 107. Emphasis original. However, Long also concedes that “in a sense, even in a simple act, wherein the object is naturally ordered to the end, one may say that because the will goes out toward the end through the means that the will ‘intends’ the means: but this is a secondary and analogous use of ‘intend.’ For there would indeed be no means were there not first, and as a condition of having such means, intention [of end]” (Long, Teleological Grammar, 107).↩︎
STh I-II, q. 12, a. 4, ad 3.↩︎
“Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention. Now moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention, since this is accidental as explained above [STh I-II, q. 12, a. 1]. Accordingly the act of self-defense may have two effects, one is the saving of one's life, the other is the slaying of the aggressor. Therefore this act, since one’s intention is to save one's own life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to everything to keep itself in ‘being,’ as far as possible. And yet, though proceeding from a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful, if it be out of proportion to the end. Wherefore if a man, in self-defense, uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repel force with moderation his defense will be lawful, because according to the jurists, ‘it is lawful to repel force by force, provided one does not exceed the limits of a blameless defense.’ Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense in order to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another’s. But as it is unlawful to take a man's life, except for the public authority acting for the common good, as stated above (STh II-II, 64, a. 3), it is not lawful for a man to intend killing a man in self-defense, except for such as have public authority, who while intending to kill a man in self-defense, refer this to the public good, as in the case of a soldier fighting against the foe, and in the minister of the judge struggling with robbers, although even these sin if they be moved by private animosity” (STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7).↩︎
Long, Teleological Grammar, 114. Emphasis original.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 192.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
“[I]t is to be said that a movement which is one as to the subject can differ intelligibly in function of beginning and end: for example an ascent and a descent; as is said in Physics 3 [202a19–22]. Therefore, in this way, inasmuch as the movement of the will bears on that which is ordered towards the end, inasmuch as it is ordered towards the end, it is choice. However, the movement of the will which bears upon the end, inasmuch as it is acquired through that which is towards the end, is called ‘intention.’ It is a sign of this that the intention of the end can exist even when those things which are ordered towards the end, the objects of choice, have not yet been determined” (STh I-II, q. 12, a. 4, ad 3. Translation by Dewan).↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 193. Emphasis original.↩︎
Ibid. See STh I-II, q. 9, a. 3.↩︎
Ibid. Emphasis original.↩︎
STh I, q. 12, a. 1. Emphasis original (translation by Dewan).↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 194.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 195.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 193.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 195.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 203. Emphasis added.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 204.↩︎
Dewan, “St. Thomas, Steven Long, and Private Self-Defense,” 192; Steven A. Long, “Engaging Thomist Interlocutors,” Nova et Vetera 9, no. 2 (2011): 267–295 at 269.↩︎
Long responds to a number of Dewan’s specific objections in the article cited in the previous footnote (“Engaging Thomist Interlocutors”).↩︎
See STh II-II, q. 64, ad 4.↩︎
