Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

396 BRIAN JOHNSTONE
More is being said here than the simple assertion, mentioned
earlier, that an intention is required if the act is to be considered
“moral” at all, that is, as more than a physical act. The
direction of the intention, prior to the choice of an act (with its
object) is constitutive of the moral meaning of the act. If the
basic will or intention of the person acting is such that he or she
is prepared to adopt a lie, believed to be wrong, as the expression
of that will, then that will is deficient or bad. It is distorted
by the vice of untruthfulness. The intending of the act of lying
expresses this lack in the will, confirms it and specifies the kind
of badness as that of lying. We could sum up: there cannot be a
moral object (and act) without the intention. But without a pregiven
orientation in the intention, the person would not choose
this kind of act (lying).
The pre-given orientation of the will does not determine the
will to act in a certain way, but disposes it to so act; the will can
freely accept its disordered condition, or, with grace, choose to
change it. (As we might say in more contemporary language, the
subject can choose the moral “self” he or she wants to be.) We
may say that persons attain “perfection” through their acts, but
the term “acts” here must include these interior acts by which
intentions are originally formed, prior to the exterior acts which
express them.
But there cannot be an intention without something which
is intended, that is an object (for example, in the case of the lie,
the communication of something which is not in one’s mind).
The moral meaning is constituted by the inter-relationship
between intention and object. We may note that the question
asked in the Summa is whether the whole goodness and badness
of the exterior act depends on the goodness of the will. The
answer is that it does not. But we cannot cite this article to support
the interpretation that the goodness or badness of the will,
that is the intention, contributes nothing at all to the moral
meaning of the external acts and that the goodness or badness
of such acts depends solely on the proper objects of those external
acts, considered as separate from the intention. We may note
that St.Thomas holds that the whole goodness of the act does
not depend on the intention alone: he does not say that the goodness
of the act does not depend on the intention at all.
In this line of inquiry, it is established that a human act has