The Status of the Sexual Good as a Direction for Moral Theology

Abstract

Anyone who is even remotely aware of contemporary Catholic moral theology has heard something of the ongoing debate which now rages within it. Revisionist and traditionalist moral theologians are engaged in a seemingly endless critique of each other's methodology and viewpoints. Nowhere is this debate more sharp than in the area of sexual ethics. Thus revisionists charge their opponents with a 'classicist' approach to reality which seeks to deduce moral norms from a static and unchanging human nature,' and a 'physicalist' understanding of natural law and human action which attempts to deduce the moral character of actions purely from their physical structure and therefore reduces the rational individual to the status of a slave to his or her physical processes.* Traditionalists counter that revisionist methodology is impractical in its emphasis on weighing future consequences of an act in determining its m~r a l i t y ,~ and that it is dangerously relativistic in its refusal to allow for absolute moral norms.4 These debates will no doubt continue.After listening to these discussions for a time one gets the impression that they have reached something of an impasse. Those engaged in these mutual critiques seem to be talking past one another rather than talking to one another and there seems to be little hope of a substantive agreement on any of these matters in the near future. Is there any prospect of freeing this logjam which constitutes much present ethical discussion? It would seem that one possible way to move the present discussions forward is by taking a more foundational and theological approach to some of the issues at stake in the present debate. That is, one must focus not merely on the morality of particular sexual acts, but on the meaning and status of sexuality in relation to the person as the necessary precondition of such analysis.There are a number of reasons for expressing optimism that such an approach might prove fruitful. First, in current discussions much is made of the fact that the Second Vatican Council opened the way for new reflection on sexual morality by refusing to speak of the procreative and unitive aspects of marital sexuality as the 'primary' and 'secondary' ends of marriage as had previous formulations (cf. Gaudium et Spes,