"In instantaneous changes, a thing is in becoming and in being simultaneously." Aquinas
By sin we lose a triple dignity: innocence, filial relation to God, and fitness for relevant office and order. The sacraemtn of penance restores the latter two and provides a new dignity to compensate for loss of the first, namely, what might be called dignity of return. By coming before the tribunal of mercy, the penitent respects their basic human dignity, which they do not lose in sin but fail to respect; the Church in turn renders respect to the same by welcome, by counsel, and by seal.
"Baptism has some efficacy toward remission of sin even before it is actually received, while one receives it in proposal.' Aquinas (SCG 4.72)
happenstantial vs unitive majorities
"The idela of integral human fulfillment is that of a single system in which all the goods of human persons would contribute to the fulfillment of the whole community of persons." Grisez
-- note that Grisez takes it to be the case that we can only know that this is actually possible by faith, which locates its achievement in "the divine act of re-creating all things in Jesus."
"The guidance which the ideal of integral human fulfillment offers to choice is to avoid unnecessary limitation and so maintain an openness to further goods."
person (or person-being) as itself a basic good of human persons
Integral human fulfillment should be seen as the social expression of the Mystical Body in its fullness.
We identify the nondispositional or categorical in contracts to and in light of the dispositional.
What most people derive from schooling is a set of drilled recipes for doing particular things, combined with a vast, foggy mass of dim impressions about what is relevant to what.
being constructed as an artifact vs receiving an artifactual designation
Every debunking argument presupposes a domain-specific PSR, because otherwise it could just be answered by denying that there even needs to be a reason.
If there is a teleology for artifacts, there is something at least very like a teleology for organisms; if there is something at least very like a teleology for organisms, tehre is something at least broadly like a teleology for natural systems of process like crystallization, ecosystems, or the internal balance of stars. The simplest account of all this is that it is all at least basically teleological.
Public schooling is not education itself but a particular instrument of education within a much larger context of education.
euthanasia as a mark of creeping totalitarianism
illocutionary & perlocutionary aspects of artifacts
"We say that the whole holy Scripture is divided into flesh and spirit, as if it were some spiritual human." Maximos
-- he goes on to analogize further -- the Law is the flesh, the Prophets the senses, the Gospel the intellectual soul "operating through the flesh of the Law, through the sensory perception of the Prophets, and manifesting its own power by its activities." (EOO Chapters 1.92)
Conscience is imperfect, but it is very dangerous to let a schematism in one's head substitute for it.
Physicists explain the behavior of physical objects by tracing it back to what is always the same. But it does not logically follow from this that everything in the behavior of physical objects is wholly explained by what is always the same; and, indeed, we know that the bheavior of physical objects is not itself always the same.
The Church's moral teaching mostly works by long, slow pressure.
deliberate monopolization as a sin against charity
aspects of just price: raritas, virtuositas (capacity to supply what is wanted), complacibilitas (capacity to satisfy want itself)
Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest communiter.
-- just price recognizes the communiter as not merely statistical, i.e., the price has to be such as to be consistent with and appropriate to common buying and selling, wehere there is a common good in exchange that is consistent with teh common good of the exchanges. This is why fair contract plays a significant role in it.
Business ethics by its nature has to be casuistical.
Usuray fails to subordinate the means of exchange to the moral ends of exchange; it treats the means as the point.
pecunia vs capitale
pecunia non paret
capitale is not pure money but money in use as a means to anend, in combination with labor (industria)
cambium non est mutuum
-- & therefore the relevant prohibition is that against unjust price rather that against usury
A viable business ethics necessarily must presuppose that profit is not a direct end of business, but a means of sustaining and achieving its ends.
the licit titles to profit:
(1) to sustain the household
(2) to aid the indigent
(3) to reward exertion in supplying needs
People often talk about medieval prohibitions on usury as if they were simply imposed on merchants by moral theologians, but in reality, and despite a fair amount of evasion, merchants took itseriously, and while many exploited ambiguities, all looked down on blatant cases and actively sought to impose the prohibitions on each other, as well as to parade, as part of their image, their own adherence to them. This is a common pattern in business ethics: businesses often give themselves all benefit of any doubt, will be very fallible in the face of direct temptation, but nonetheless put significant effort into incorporating the relevant norms into their practice.
Most words for banking trace back to words for 'table'; this is an etymology with several independent originations. And I don't think this is trivial: a space for negotiation and account, jointly open to all parties, is the central and essential component of all banking.
A common pattern in banking and finance: trade --> receipts --> trade of receipts.
It does not 'impede' business to hold it to moral standards.
The three public functions of legitimate business:
(1) to supply from elsewhere what is needed
(2) to preserve what will be needed for when it will be needed
(3) to change what is less needed into what is more needed.
All business ethics must be structured in such a way as to recognize that desire for gain itself is bottomless and as such is all-destroying.
Just as there is reason to take genera as being in the substantial order without being substances, so too there is reason to take unified systems as being in the substantial order without themselves being substances.
While we know more than forms, the activity of forms is the primary anchor of knowledge.
We should perhaps think of atomic orbitals as having measurable 'electronicity' with integer values rather than electron particles; and indeed probably should only think of 'sites of interaction' rather than particles at all.
particle : site of interation :: wave : scope of interaction
What makes human 'normative attitudes' normative attitudes is that they already presuppose a normative framework.
Human beings can create norms because we build on norms we already have.
People are regularly responsive to norms that they do not regard as authoritative. Some of this is just a matter of default -- the norm is there with no obvious better alternative -- and some a matter of derivative deference -- they take the norm to be useful for complying with a norm they do regard as authoritative -- and some a matter of social pressure -- it's the norm other people are already using, so it's easier to go along with it.
Children are born apt for society, but also must grow into it.
It is a recurring pattern of human experience that people coming to be happy find that happiness is much more simple than they were making it.
The actual decisions of courts have less influence than generally assumed; the perceived reasons for those decisions, on the other hand, have immense influence.
All artworks are communal by nature.
The great goodnesses that matter in politics are systems creating conditions for many small goodnesses.
Utilitarianism only works to the extent that is account of happiness approximates common good.
the state as a corporate agent/representative of the people vs. teh state as a territorial management corporation
Everything has an intelligibility adequate for it.
'things like that do happen' as an explanation
-- it seems clear that this can only explain the possibilities for a particular case
-- relation to Humean accounts of explanation
To explain is to set intelligilibty within a larger intelligibility.
What corresponds must cohere.
Titus 1:5 and the essential nature of the sacrament of order
Relligion is a theurgy for God and His will having an influence on us; that is to say, by formulas, spiritual exercises, purifications, and expiations we open ourselves to God.
(1) To think within oneself.
(2) To think with other people.
(3) To think with all.
The Enlightenment period was an age that had no equal in the history of human misunderstanding.
"According as one acts, according as one conducts oneself, so does one become. The doer of good becomes good." Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (IV.4.5)
Machiavelli criticizes Charlemagne for receiving the imperial crown from another, but here he is certainly wrong. As we see from Augustus, from the formation of kingships, from medieval popes, from the rise of colonial empires, from American hegemony, power consists in the accumulation of effective titles and offices, where the efficacy of title or office is the combination of authorization and means.
People who actually have a conscience don't usually experience moral rules and pragmatic rules as the same.
All human bodies, by being human, have their character in part as being for the service of others. The muscle of the man, for instance, is partly explained by, and continues to have function for, its value to others of the human species.
What can be treated as obvious is never itself a matter of reasoning.
A problem with many proposals for increased lay participation in the Church is that they require a very well catechized laity that the proposals do nothing to establish or guarantee.
In politics, violence is often a sign of weakening power.
One cannot separate powers until one develops them.
"The connatural mode of proceeding for our intellect proceeds from potency to act, and from the imperfect to the perfect." Poinsot
All inquiry is from being relatively indeterminate to being relatively understood.
Metaphysics intimates sacred doctrine.
Being *falls* into our apprehension.
In every inquiry we are concerned with the kind of being, the way it is being, and the orientation of being to being.
the intellect as principal sense of being; the internal and external senses as instrumental senses of being
The externality of the external world is received by the mind as a kind of directionality or oder of experience within the experience itself.
Hyperbole is dangerous in politics.
Christian evangelization involves broadening propagation combined with narrowing interaction.
Experiemental replications are checks, and resampling accounts of replication do not cover the multiple ways in which they are checks.
1 Tim 5:8 and the domestic church
Eden as a probationary state of freedom for the human race
