{"id":123,"date":"2008-12-20T08:20:01","date_gmt":"2008-12-20T14:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/?p=123"},"modified":"2008-12-20T08:20:01","modified_gmt":"2008-12-20T14:20:01","slug":"the-aroma-of-voluntarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/the-aroma-of-voluntarism-123.htm","title":{"rendered":"The Aroma of Voluntarism"},"content":{"rendered":"

On dotCommonweal<\/a> someone commented<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The question that occurs to me is that some things now considered \u201cintrinsically evil,\u201d such as slavery, can be recognized as evil at the time, if not by the perpetrators, at least by the victims. But it seems like other \u201cintrinsic evils\u201d (mainly those involving sexual behavior) are kind of like victimless crimes. And if the perpetrators don\u2019t know they are evil \u2014 how can I put this? \u2014 where does the evil go? For example, suppose in the movie Blue Lagoon, the two youngsters that grew up on the island together had not been Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins, but two males or two females who developed, in all innocence, a sexual relationship. They would not be guilty of doing anything wrong, and assuming it was a loving, caring relationship, no harm would come of it. So where there is no culpability and no negative outcome, what does it mean to say that objectively there was evil? Are some \u201cintrinsic evils\u201d kind of like \u201ctechnical violations\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThey would not be guilty of doing anything wrong.\u201d What I find interesting in this comment is the underlying voluntarism: that harm is done only by disobeying a known law. That is, actions are wrong because God forbids them; God doesn\u2019t forbid them because they are wrong in themselves. This error still pervades many Catholics\u2019 approach to moral questions. <\/span><\/p>\n

\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On dotCommonweal someone commented The question that occurs to me is that some things now considered \u201cintrinsically evil,\u201d such as slavery, can be recognized as evil at the time, if not by the perpetrators, at least by the victims. But it seems like other \u201cintrinsic evils\u201d (mainly those involving sexual behavior) are kind of like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,131],"tags":[1144,132,1143],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-theology","category-voluntarism","tag-guilt","tag-noonan","tag-voluntarism","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.podles.org\/dialogue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}