The Catholic Church opposes euthanasia, understood as the deliberate killing of a person in order to end his or her suffering. We profess that all human life in endowed with dignity and value, whether healthy or sick, productive or disabled. Life is God’s gift to us and is ours to Read more…
We are once again considering the wrongfulness of direct abortion and, more generally, the deliberate killing of human beings in the early stages of their development. We will recall that the term “abortion” refers to the death of an unborn child in the womb of his or her mother and Read more…
A direct abortion is an abortion that is deliberately chosen and is always morally wrong. It is morally wrong because it is a kind of murder, an instance of deliberately killing an innocent human being. Since it is an instance of murder, direct abortion is in violation of the natural Read more…
Human life is a precious gift from Godwho made man and woman in His own image and likeness. The human being has the dignity of being a person, not just a something but a someone, by virtue of possessing a rational and spiritual soul. Human life, which begins the moment Read more…
I have set before you life and death . . . Choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19). With these words, Moses exhorts God’s people to follow God’s law and thereby receive His life-giving blessings. We might, however, take the liberty of reapplying these words in our consideration of health care ethics, where they Read more…
We often use the word “patient” when speaking of men and women who are receiving medical care without giving much thought to what that word means. That is not necessarily a problem. The word “patient” is a helpful signifier in the context of health care. Everyone knows who is being Read more…
Conscience, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, is the act of the human intellect by which “we judge that something should be done or not done.”1 This judgment is to be based on our knowledge of what is right and wrong for us to do, knowledge that we acquire both from Read more…
To “cooperate with evil” sounds like a horrible thing to do—and it can be. But some cooperation with evil is inevitable and unavoidable for almost everyone. The reason for this is that human beings are inherently social creatures. We live with, interact with, and depend on one another, and so Read more…
Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his great Summa Theologica, begins his treatment of ethics with the Christian understanding that human beings are created in the image of God. Following Saint John Damascene, he observes that human beings image God most especially through having intelligence and free will. Saint Thomas teaches that Read more…
For human beings, doing good means choosing a good moral object for the sake of a good end. If a man chooses something morally bad as a means to achieving something morally good, his action is bad altogether. Likewise, if a man chooses something morally good as a means to Read more…
Good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. This is the first principle of ethical human action as articulated by Saint Thomas Aquinas, who relies on the classical wisdom of Aristotle and represents much of the Catholic tradition (Summa TheologiaeI-II, q. 94, a. 2). In Read more…