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Rating: Summary: Grisez's thomistic ethics applied to real-life situations Review: *Difficult Moral Questions* is the third volume of Germain Grisez's trilogy, *The Way of the Lord Jesus*. It is, if you want, a kind of field-test for Grisez's thomistic ethics, as he tries to answer two hundred real-life moral questions "not yet the subject of explicit or clearly applicable Church teachings."Refusing both the authoritarian approach to moral guidance, which either gives people a rule and tells them to obey it or grants them an exception to such a rule, and the subjectivist approach which merely tells them to "follow their conscience", Grisez offers detailed answers, fully justified in terms of the moral principles developed in the first two volumes. The book devotes about four pages to each question, each of which is presented in a personal letter, detailing the "purposes, difficulties, commitments and apparent options" inherent in the situation. Grisez then offers a one-paragraph analysis of the question, before presenting an in-depth, three-page treatment. Though there are no chapter divisions, the questions are clearly thematized, ranging from questions about sexual morality to problems arising in the practice of business, medicine, education and law. The book also includes two very interesting theoretical appendixes updating the reflections presented in the first two volumes. In the first of these appendixes Grisez recognizes that his previous treatment of the "modes of responsibility" was unsatisfactory, and that some of them are reducible to others. Interestingly, this defeats Grisez's attempt to identify the modes with the Beatitudes, which I always believed to be an exercise in futility and wishful thinking. I recommend *Difficult Moral Questions* to two different kinds of readers: first, those with limited acquaintance with thomistic ethics, who will discover an extremely fine-grained system of moral decision, much more subtle and sound than the thou-shalt-nots we usually associate with religion; and second, those who want to confront their own moral principles to difficult real-life scenarios, so as to see what kind of guidance- if any- these principles offer.
Rating: Summary: Grisez's thomistic ethics applied to real-life situations Review: *Difficult Moral Questions* is the third volume of Germain Grisez's trilogy, *The Way of the Lord Jesus*. It is, if you want, a kind of field-test for Grisez's thomistic ethics, as he tries to answer two hundred real-life moral questions "not yet the subject of explicit or clearly applicable Church teachings." Refusing both the authoritarian approach to moral guidance, which either gives people a rule and tells them to obey it or grants them an exception to such a rule, and the subjectivist approach which merely tells them to "follow their conscience", Grisez offers detailed answers, fully justified in terms of the moral principles developed in the first two volumes. The book devotes about four pages to each question, each of which is presented in a personal letter, detailing the "purposes, difficulties, commitments and apparent options" inherent in the situation. Grisez then offers a one-paragraph analysis of the question, before presenting an in-depth, three-page treatment. Though there are no chapter divisions, the questions are clearly thematized, ranging from questions about sexual morality to problems arising in the practice of business, medicine, education and law. The book also includes two very interesting theoretical appendixes updating the reflections presented in the first two volumes. In the first of these appendixes Grisez recognizes that his previous treatment of the "modes of responsibility" was unsatisfactory, and that some of them are reducible to others. Interestingly, this defeats Grisez's attempt to identify the modes with the Beatitudes, which I always believed to be an exercise in futility and wishful thinking. I recommend *Difficult Moral Questions* to two different kinds of readers: first, those with limited acquaintance with thomistic ethics, who will discover an extremely fine-grained system of moral decision, much more subtle and sound than the thou-shalt-nots we usually associate with religion; and second, those who want to confront their own moral principles to difficult real-life scenarios, so as to see what kind of guidance- if any- these principles offer.
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