conscience and virtue

tenets of the catholic moral vision: review and meaning

• happiness
  • Final Cause of humans
• virtue
  • habits that lead us to Happiness
• freedom
  • FOR good and not FROM rules
• conscience
  • must be followed and formed
• love
  • foundation of Catholic morality
• sin and conversion
  • in a broken state and must be healed
• dignity of the human person
  • upheld in the fullest way

conscience

• conscience: the ability of the human intellect to use knowledge of the moral law to guide moral choices
  • the church teachers that Church teaches one must ALWAYS follow their conscience
• if you are going to possess the Good, you need to know what the Good is
  • choosing actions that lead you closer to it and not further away
• conscience is the ability to use one’s knowledge of good/evil to make moral choices well
• forming your conscience
  • requires conscientious effort—one needs to actually think about it
  • the process by which our thoughts line up with the goodness of God’s thoughts (seek relationship w/God)
  • requires habitual thought
  • virtues vs. values
  • virtue: a disposition towards objectively higher Goods
  • value: what an individual believes is most important
  • forming one’s conscience can involve a LOT of trial and error
  • important to be patient with self
  • multiple ways to miss a target (vices)
  • only one way to get a bullseye (virtues)
  • must FORM our conscience in a way that helps us reach the center

virtue

• virtue: habitual dispositions towards objectively higher Goods
  • good habits
• we form our conscience by growing in virtue and eliminating vice

theological virtues are gifts from God

• grace builds on nature - theological virtues are primarily gifts from God, but we still need to practice them just like any other virtues!

1. faith

   1. natural level - the habit of consistent belief, usually in answer to big questions in life
   2. supernatural level - the virtue by which we believe in true things about God and God’s relationship to humanity

2. hope

   1. natural level - persevering in desiring good things despite struggle or opposition
   2. supernatural level - the virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness and trusting in Christ’s promises rather than our own strength

3. charity (love)

   1. natural level - willing the highest good of another

   2. rightly forms/orders all other virtues; charity is to virtues as soul is to the body.

      1. if fortitude seems to go against prudence, who wins? whatever action is more charitable

   3. supernatural level - the virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves

“Achieving happiness, however, requires a range of intellectual and moral virtues that enable us to understand the nature of happiness and motivate us to seek it in a reliable and consistent way.”

— Saint Thomas Aquinas

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