Double Effect Essay

a. Finnis’ defines the principle of double effect as the fact that humans are, sometimes, allowed to do actions that will have bad side effects under certain conditions. The criteria under which people can do these actions is that the action cannot be one that is intrinsically evil, it has to have the right intention, and it is proportionate, meaning that the outcome is to equal the action that has been done. An example of double effect could be a person who is now forced to be on life support and the family decides to take the person off of the life support because they feel as if it is not helping the person. The double effect would say that that is correct because of the proportionate aspect of it.

b. If the life support was able to make

The area that I decided to talk was dealing with was ethics. I wanted to, particularly, discuss moral actions and how they’re influenced by erroneous reasoning or an erroneous conscious. I feel that this topic is important because it shows humans whether or not we should go with our guts if we know that it’s leading us in the wrong direction. Aquinas was a moral realist and this meant that he believed humans could figure out what was right and wrong through reasoning. He also believed that humans should follow moral laws wholeheartedly without any exceptions. Though these were his beliefs, there are instances in which someone does not follow the moral laws and part of this is due to erroneous conscience. The err- in erroneous conscience means to make a mistake and this is part of what erroneous conscience means. Erroneous conscience is when a person knowingly, or unknowingly, makes a mistake in judgement by doing the wrong thing which they, consciously, believed was the right thing to

Aquinas, however, believes that any will that goes against an erroneous conscious does so because of the object of the will. The erroneous conscience recognizes that the evil object should be something that the human being should either follow or not follow. Consequently, if a person starts to perform an action that goes against their conscience, then the will of the action would be evil. This, in turn, would cause the action to be evil because in order for the action to be good there would have to be a good will or intention. An evil intention or will would result in the action being evil. An example of this would be a person who decides to not come to school on time (Baumgarth, Regan, 6).

g. Another example, that is given in this text, is the idea of abstinence. It is considered good, by Catholic Church standards, to avoid having sex with someone who is not your husband. It is, also, only considered a good thing when your conscience believes it to be so and if a person has an erroneous conscience believes it to be evil, it will cause the will of the action to be evil. This example is similar for people who believe in