Comments on Patrick Brennan’s ‘On what Sin (and Grace) Can Teach Crime’

In his elegant paper, Professor Patrick Brennan engages a number of profound and subtle issues. For a variety of reasons, I cannot hope to do justice in these comments to all of them. So what follows is a rather loosely connected assortment of reflections on issues emerging from Professor Brennan’s article that struck me as either particularly significant or particularly interesting. I think that it is not unfair to characterize Patrick as maintaining that ‘in the Catholic moral tradition’ what is of most central significance is conscientiousness or, to use a term employed by Brennan himself, diligence. The idea is that what is primarily expected, morally, of the acting person is that he or she diligently inform his conscience and proceed to act, with equal diligence, in conformity to the dictates of that conscience. What the conscience is obliged to do is to inform itself concerning the moral norms of natural law, to use the traditional language of Catholic moral theology. Patrick (reasonably) prefers to understand this obligation in a less legalistic-sounding way but one that is certainly central to the traditional understanding of natural law: as an obligation to come to an understanding of what constitutes the human good and what actions are necessary for securing it. Of course, the tradition understands the ‘human good’ here not as the subjective preferences of agents but as the ‘objective’ telos of human life, in both its natural and supernatural dimensions. There is certainly ample reason to be found in the tradition of Catholic moral theology for according a very central role to conscience. One quotation from Father Bernard Häring’s widely used (and quite orthodox) theology text of 40 years ago forcefully illustrates the point: