Moral Conscience and the Objective Norm: Why Individual Consciences Cannot Change the Moral Law on Contraception

* In my previous post, I have attempted to present the Church's rational teaching on contraception.  Now, I would situate the role of consciences in making moral judgments and how it relates to the current debate on contraception.

We hear it said nowadays that God judges people by their consciences.  In the current debate on contraception, many theologians, notable among them some Jesuits here in the Philippines and abroad, and dissenting priests, nuns, and prominent lay Catholics, would emphasize the role of conscience in the decision to use artificial contraceptives and to do away with the Church's teaching on contraception.

What is the place of conscience in morals? Can the primacy of conscience do away with the Church's perennial teaching on the non-use of contraceptives?

The Ten Commandments, the so-called
Natural Law, together with Sacred Scripture
as understood and proclaimed in the constant
Tradition of the Church determine the
objective moral norms.

Every moral action, always involves two elements: the objective moral norm and the subjective moral culpability.  The objective moral norm is known from the Ten Commandments, the so-called natural law, and from the Scriptures as understood in the Sacred Tradition of the Church.  Moral declarations of the Magisterium are based on these objective sources.  They are norms set in nature, discoverable through the light of human reason, and even made known and illuminated by Divine Revelation.  As such, they are not subject to any person's judgment nor are they dependent on any person's consent.  Subjective moral culpability, on the other hand, is a person's "praiseworthiness" or "blameworthiness" in the doing of any moral act.  Call it the gravity of a person's blame, or even his innocence in relation to the moral law.  A person's subjective moral culpability depends on the situation in which a moral act was committed, the gravity/importance of an action, and the intention of the act together with the honest-to-goodness decision to do the action according to the state of a person's judgment (which is no other than the person's conscience).  Thus within the subjective moral culpability is found situation, intention, gravity, intensity of an act, and conscience.

We can illustrate the interplay of these two in day-to-day experience:  take for example, the case of not telling the truth (lying).  We are all called to abide by the truth and to tell the truth always.  And yet there are a lot of instances in which we resort to half-truths, to falsehoods, and to lies.  The objective moral norm always calls us to stay in the truth.  Yet the subjective moral culpability of a person depends on the fact that the telling of a lie is always done within a particular situation, with a particular intention, which in turn determines the gravity of the wrongdoing.  If a lie is told to hurt, to destroy a person's reputation, to steal, to sabotage, to seduce and even to kill then you may have a very grave situation of sin.  But if a lie is told to entertain, or to conceal something important or to keep something out of public rumormongers, then you have a very different subjective culpability.  The objective moral norm however stays the same.  It doesn't mean that even though we sometimes can tolerate falsehoods, our ideal and objective norm with regard to the truth is now to tell lies and falsehoods.  NO! That is a fallacy, I always encounter from people.  "We do this, we do that, they are not the ideal things to do; nevertheless many people do it, so now it is what we should have as the ideal."  Wrong!

Intentions and the person's blameworthiness
or non-blameworthiness in every moral act
can never change God's moral laws.

With regard to contraception, the above illustration is similar.  There are a lot of people who cannot live up to the ideals of the Church's teaching on contraception, or who have skewed consciences (maybe because they don't want to be told what to do, they don't want any objective moral norms telling them what is right or what is wrong, or they are just simply uninformed).  There may be a lot of reasons why people are blameworthy, or are not gravely blameworthy why they cannot live up to the ideals of contraception.  Nevertheless, the subjective moral culpability of any person does not change in any way the call and the challenge of the objective moral norms.  We can push our argument further: if it is true that individual judgment which deviates from objective moral norms can change the objective moral norms themselves, why do we not, as I have argued in my previous post, idealize and legalize child porn, wife-beating, drug trafficking, prostitution, corruption, etc. since they are all deviations from moral norms whose culpability may sometimes be lessened by the situation, even by the so-called state of a person's conscience?  A prostitute may tell you that he or she needs to resort to selling his or her body after exhausting all other means so that his or her family may have something to eat, otherwise they would die.  If such a reason is really honest-to-goodness (yes, it may be a possibility if not in fact, at least in theory), the person's culpability is somewhat lessened compared to the lazy guy or woman who does not want to explore other options and who just take the easy money route with pleasurable sex.  In such a case however, are we going to say then that prostitution is praiseworthy and something which we ought to promote as an ideal and as a new moral norm?  Does this deviation although somewhat lessened in its moral culpability, the new standard of morality?  Far from it.  The same is also true with lying.  Although we tell a lot of lies, we do not idealize lying nor do we institutionalize it (I hope I am not mistaken that no sovereign state does this).  That is why there is no date on any calendar that celebrates "National Lying Day".

Remember this false argument: a lot of people contracept, a lot of people use condoms, IUDs, vasectomies, injectables, etc. etc.  and a lot of people cannot live up to the ideals of the Church's teaching; so let us just change the teaching, and understand the so-called deviations are not anymore deviations but the reality!  No, no, no, no! There is a big difference between what is the ideal and what is real.  People in reality always fail in living up to the ideal.  But that doesn't change the ideal.  With regard to the objective moral norms, people may have a host of reasons why they fail to live up to the ideal.  And their blameworthiness or innocence will be scrutinized through their consciences honest-to-goodness before God.  But as I have said, not even less culpable deviations can change the moral norms.  God does not fail to call us to the ideals of His commandments.  Yes, we fail left, right, and center.  And He forgives.  That is true.  God is a compassionate God.  But He will never cease to call us to the ideals of His moral laws... until we learn our lessons in this world or in the next.

So that's it folks.  The Church's teaching on contraception has been constant throughout the ages because of her firm regard for the sacredness of the marriage vow and how it is lived out in the marital exchange in the sacred act of intercourse.  (And for those dissenting Catholics who do not believe this, just read this for yourselves and stop saying that Church teaching on contraception only began with Pius XI's Casti Conubii in 1930). There may be a myriad of different reasons why people fail in living up to the ideals.  Yes, we recognize them.  But we are not going to change the ideal because of the failures in the real world.  In my next post, we will discuss how the Catholic faith treats of deviations from the ideals of God's moral law and specifically how best to deal with the problem of deviations in practice on the teaching on contraception.