THE CURRENT DEBATE

In recent years there have been two emerging traditional Roman Catholic ways of dealing with an intrinsically evil act such as abortion. One way is to evaluate the act itself using a three-step process. The first is to state or ask the intention of the act that was committed. The second is to look at what was involved in the act itself. The final step is to search out the circumstances which may have determined the decision to commit the act. This idea of focusing on the act itself is formally known as the deontological method or the basic good theory. The second theory that has emerged is that of a proportionalist or teleological method. It describes moral decision making as the process of assessing the proportion of value and disvalue in specific acts, (O Connell, 205). Although O Connell agrees with many of the points within both of these theories, he also feels that using just one of them as your guide is not the best way of evaluation. He proposes a compromise between the two, a relational-responsibility method.

An intrinsically evil act is an act which in and of itself is evil no matter what the circumstances. That is, are there specific external acts that, irrespective of intention, ought to be judged as always wrong and, therefore, never to be intended by human persons? (O Connell, 209). Traditional Catholics view abortion as one of these intrinsically evil acts. Yet in Timothy O Connell s The Current Debate his third alternative suggests that there may be some certain times and certain circumstances under which there might be no way around committing an intrinsically evil act.

Both of these points have their weaknesses about them. The teleological/proportionalism method has a hard time filling in through time and does not always apply. Likewise, the basic goods theory has a certain degree of incommensurability which may cause conflict when deciding which life is more important the mother s or the child s? The combining of these two methods into the third alternative allows people to judge for themselves by determining all the surrounding factors of the act in making a decision. However it is not without its own fallacies. As was stated in Gula, it may leave on with a less settled feeling because it is not black and white, which is something humans traditionally look for in a method of rationalizing.

Although it may have its faults, I feel that this is probably the most ideal. Yet saying that I also feel that there are still places to improve on such as was stated above. Allowing people to have freedom to choose what fits them best is probably good in the long run. However, we must not let people forget that they cannot go making decisions without putting some deep personal toil into it and once they have exasperated all other means then they must choose the lesser of two evils, if there is such a thing.