81. How much of life does ethics cover?
81. HOW MUCH OF LIFE DOES ETHICS COVER?
Is ethics a kind of “Remember your umbrella and boots” sort of thing, a P.S., an afterthought? Or does it color most of the things we do? How many moral choices do we make during an average day? Aren’t most of our actions neither morally good nor evil?
. . . [E]very individual action must needs have some circumstance that makes it good or bad, at least in respect of the intention of the end. For since it belongs to the reason to direct, if an action that proceeds from deliberate reason be not directed to the due end, it is by that fact alone repugnant to reason, and has the character of evil. But if it be directed to a due end, it is in accord with reason, wherefore it has the character of good. Now it must needs be either directed or not directed to a due end. Consequently every human action that proceeds from deliberate reason, if it be considered in the individual, must be good or bad.
If, however, it does not proceed from deliberate reason but from some act of the (instinctive rather than deliberate) imagination, as when a man strokes his beard, or moves his hand or foot, such an action, properly speaking, is not moral or human, since this depends on the reason. Hence it will be indifferent, standing apart from the genus of moral actions (I-II,18,9).
We usually think that our lives, our choices, and our actions are something like 5% bad, 15% good, and 80% neutral. St. Thomas erases the neutral. But what’s left is not a 3-1 majority of good over evil, but more like a 95-5 majority, because all those neutral acts are good too!
How do you make eating and falling asleep and getting dressed and driving a car morally good acts? Simply by having the right end, the right ultimate end, to your whole life, and intending them to come under that end. You may not understand or think about how driving your car to the supermarket is a step on the road to God, to Heaven, but it is. Especially if you offered up all your prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of each day this morning. God counts that. You may forget the covenant you made with Him this morning, but He doesn’t. (See point #55, above.)
Everything that is distinctively human, that is, everything that proceeds from and obeys reason, is good. (There are also, of course, many things that we do without reason, like breathing or scratching an itchy beard.)
St. Thomas is a great optimist. There is far, far more good than evil in life, just as there is far, far more joy than suffering. The glass isn’t half full, it’s 95% full.
Unless, of course, God is not your God but you are your own God. In that case all these little acts are acts of worship to the wrong God. In that case, St. Thomas says, they are directed to an undue end. They must be either directed to the due end, the right end, the true end, or else a false one. That’s St. Augustine’s point in The City of God: there are only two “cities”, two bodies of people: the invisible Body of Christ and the invisible Body of the World. As C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, “There are only two kinds of people, in the end: those who say to God ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ ”
But because of the presence and power of the unconscious, even a conscious atheist or pagan may be directing his actions to the good, though wrongly conceived, like the polytheists in ancient Athens whom St. Paul said were already worshipping the one true God, though in ignorance (Acts 17:23).
Ethics is about good and evil. Everything human, if it’s not evil, is good. Ethics is therefore not like an umbrella and boots; it’s like food. It’s not about a checklist, a postscript; it’s about everything.