Life Ethics The Life Ethics columns are a project of the Archdiocesan Committee on Health Care Ethics, health care professionals of the archdiocese who advise Cardinal Adam Maida on bioethics issues.

We all make moral judgments, usually with some confidence. Yet, we rarely articulate the specific criteria to which we, at least implicitly, appeal. Catholics draw upon not only the life of Christ for moral guidance, but we also benefit from a rich tradition of moral theology. In "Veritatis Splendor," Pope John Paul II reiterated a set of criteria originally set forth by St. Thomas Aquinas. The Holy Father identified three sources for the morality of any action: (1) The object of the action, (2) The end for which the action is done, and (3) The circumstances of the action.

The object is the primary moral determinant of an action. The object of an action is the immediate behavior that one has chosen. If the object of an action is directly at odds with certain kinds of fundamental human goods or flourishing (such as life, procreativity, knowledge, worship of God, and sociability) then the action is intrinsically wrong. For instance, the object of the act of euthanasia, its immediate end, is the taking of someone’s life — an innocent person’s life.

A physician may have good reasons for wanting to end a patient’s life; he may want to end the patient’s suffering. Ending a person’s suffering is, the end, purpose, or goal of the act. Unfortunately, since the object of such an act renders it intrinsically wrong, the good end for which the action is performed cannot offset the wrongness. If an action is to be morally good or permissible, both the object and the end must be good (or at least neutral). If the object of an action is good, but the end is not, the action is not moral. For example, if someone saves the life of another simply so that he can gain access to that person’s finances, the act of saving the person’s life is not morally good.

The third determinant of an action consists in its circumstances. The circumstances of an action entails all of the facts of a situation, including the harms and benefits that might follow from that action. In a medical context, relieving pain might be moral or immoral depending on the circumstances. Consider a patient with no life-threatening health problems. A physician would not be morally justified in relieving the pain of such a patient by means of a life-threatening dosage of a pain medication. Notice that there is nothing wrong with the object and the end of the action. Relieving pain (the object) for the purpose of making the patient more comfortable and less anxious (the end) is presumably morally unproblematic. However, given the circumstances that the dosage would threaten the life of an otherwise fairly healthy person, it would be wrong to go forward with the action. If the circumstances were different, and the patient was in unbearable pain at the end-stages of a terminal disease, a dosage of pain medication that might cause the death of the patient may be morally justified. This is assuming that the object and end of the act are good.

So, in the Catholic moral tradition, all three sources of the morality of an action, its object, its end and its circumstances must be considered when determining the moral status of a given action.

Martin G. Leever, Ph.D., an associate professor and chair, Department of Philosophy at University of Detroit Mercy, is a member of Archdiocesan Committee on Health Care Ethics.