Abstract

In the dissertation I support the contention that the papal ethical method, by determining the moral good of the person through exceptionless legal precepts formed a priori, both fails to give a meaningful role to human experience when formulating moral norms and fails to address adequately the phenomenal reality of the marriage as a personal relationship, subordinating its importance to the so called "juridical reality" of marriage. The expanding use of love as an ethical category in relation to marriage in the papal teachings may give the impression that personal values and the human relationship of marriage are being adequately addressed. However, the category of love in fact remains a function of the juridical personalist ethical methodology and concomitantly subordinate to the tenets of law as interpreted by the popes. In the terms of that methodology, what is loving, what achieves the good of the person in marriage, is absolute obedience to the laws governing marriage, whether ecclesiastical, natural or divine. Human experience betraying evidence to the contrary is not admitted by the papal methodology, because the moral good of the person is a matter predetermined in law. It is my thesis that a personalist ethical methodology grounded in a theory of virtue, as opposed to one which is juridical in character, enables one to develop a more adequate theological ethic of marriage with respect to both the importance of human experience and the actual relationship of the spouses. ;Such an alternative to the papal teachings, while retaining love as a primary evaluative reference point, would also be capable of admitting a role for human experience in the discernment of the moral good of the person and of making coherent sense of the phenomenon of the personal relationship of the spouses as distinct from a "juridical reality." With a virtue-based personalist methodology, marriage primarily would be described not as a legal bond and juridical reality but as a phenomenal reality, a habit of personal relationship. Prescriptively, marriage would be described not as an absolutely indissoluble bond but as a virtuous habit, a habit of love