Defining Intrinsic Evil

While Greg is packing his suitcase, I’d like to throw into the mix of Tom’s and Greg’s exchange about prudential judgment and intrinsic evil a passage from Veritatis Splendor number 80, which suggests a striking array of examples of “instrinsic evil” – and which I believe throw an important monkey wrench into conversations that try to figure out how Republican and Democratic party platforms line up with CST:

“Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image.  These are the acts which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances.  Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object.”

John Paul then goes on to quote a section Gaudium et Spes from which in the context of discussing the respect due to the human person gives a number of examples of intrinsically evil acts:

Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator. (quoting Gaudium et Spes number 27).

Thoughts about what difference this makes?

Amy