If aggiornamento and ressourcement were at the heart of Vatican II, they are also central to Selling's outstanding work. Selling's core argument is that the primarily act-based, normative ethical method that has dominated Catholic moral theology since the sixteenth century is both inadequate for contemporary theological ethics and inconsistent with the full Catholic tradition. Selling thus returns to key sources in Catholic moral theology and contends that the tradition must “reverse the traditional tendency first to evaluate material actions, then to consider the circumstances within which those actions take place, and only in a third step to take into consideration the end or goal that acting person was attempting to achieve” (169).
Selling shows how Catholic moral theology mistakenly, although understandably, moved from teleology toward deontology: writing amid the currents of act-focused confessional moral manuals, Cajetan (1469–1534) and his followers largely ignored Thomas’ focus on dispositional interiority in ST I-II, qq. 1–17 and interpreted q. 18 to mean that “it is the object of the act, the external action chosen by the will, that gives moral species to the human act” (86). Based on this interpretation, Selling shows that much of Catholic moral theology between the sixteenth century and Vatican II was concerned with sin understood as acts that depart from the natural law.
Against this backdrop, Selling observes that the Council Fathers’ relatively historicist view of persons and society inspired them to emphasize human dignity, human experience, and conscience in morality. These developments enabled subsequent shifts toward greater ethical “consideration of motivation and intention” in conciliar and postconciliar Catholic theological ethics (120). At the same time, he shows how Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor subsequently prevented a wider Catholic return to teleology.
Following these descriptive insights, Selling offers several prescriptions by which to reframe Catholic theological ethics. First, he argues that authority and the natural law are inadequate “‘candidates’ for the fundamental norm of morality” (emphasis added): the former is relatively naïve while the latter can lead to naturalistic fallacies (131). Instead, Selling identifies eight “aspects of being a human person” that together make up the “human person integrally and adequately considered (HPIAC),” which should be the standard of Catholic morality (173; cf. 131–146).
Next, Selling advocates for a revised approach to virtue ethics: virtues properly exist in complementary pairs on a spectrum between two extremes and between which “virtuous attitudes” occur (167). He then identifies numerous pairs of virtues that ought to animate each HPIAC and guide progression through “the components of the moral event,” which is a “unified whole” and sequentially includes consideration of (1) end/goal; (2) circumstances; (3) act/object (167–70). The arrangement of these entities is, of course, the exact inverse of how the parts of a moral event have been conceptualized in traditional Catholic theological ethics.
Selling then further develops his model of the moral event by noting that intention is “directed to a circumstantiated end” between end/goal and circumstances while behavior is “a circumstantiated action” between circumstances and act/object (170). Moreover, Selling emphasizes the need for proportionality in ethical decision-making to account for the unavoidability of ontic evil. Finally, he says moral norms should rightly be understood as principles that are rarely absolute and that help persons in particular historical/geographical contexts “recognize the real or potential presence of both good and evil in concrete (circumstantiated) human behavior” (191). Therein good benefits the HPIAC while evil harms the HPIAC.
Selling thus presents a revised method of moral analysis that, as the title suggests, reframes Catholic theological ethics in ways that are both significant and consistent with the tradition. The work is well researched, carefully argued, and clearly written. In substance and style, the book will thus be of substantial interest to both theologians and graduate students. The latter will likely especially appreciate the nine appendices that lucidly outline key texts and concepts in moral theology.
The work does seem limited in at least three ways. First, Selling does not fully describe how moral norms historically developed in the Catholic tradition, information that would further contextualize his discussion of traditional Catholic theological ethics. Second, he does not outline the connection between virtues and norms/precepts in the Summa Theologiae. This is a notable lacuna given Selling's topics and sources, and his discussions would benefit from engagement with Daniel Daly, among others. Third, Selling largely ignores prudence in his discussions of virtue and ethical reflection—a curious omission given his Thomistic foundations. Despite these relatively minor points, however, Reframing Catholic Theological Ethics is an important book that will surely generate substantial conversations in the field.
