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Moral Choice

Moral choice is a key issue in human thought and can be approached in various ways. Hallie tries to connect moral thought with history and so to indicate that morality reflects the times in which we live, while Pope paul suggests that moral thought is not tied to a time but to something deeper and more lasting, to man's relationship with God, which is not dependent on history.

Pope Paul in his encyclical "Veritatis Splendor" discusses the issue of martyrdom and celebrates the reality of individual free choice as a determinant of behavior. He notes that the issue of freedom has become more important in our own day and that a variety of authors have thus addressed it and explained it in different ways. He makes his position clear:

There is no doubt that Christian moral teaching, even in its biblical roots, acknowledges the specific importance of a fundamental choice which qualifies the moral life and engages freedom on a radical level before God (Paul 317).

Such a sense of moral choice is structured on the relationship of man to God.

Hallie's view of ethical action as connected to history is not so clear as to the meaning of a term such as freedom. Hallie says that ethical action "must not be a way of trying, by a use of abstract, traditional terms, to cast a fitful light within the inward worlds of men's souls" (Hallie 280). Rather, he sees the actions of human beings as influenced by their times, and this would mean that what is moral would change as times change or as the external force acting on men change, while for Pope paul this is not the case at all and morality does not change but is something eternal and connected to the eternal.

Consider again the issue of freedom, which is tied in our minds with the issue of free will. Americans, because of their history, are much concerned with the issue of freedom, and freedom in the political sense is something most of us understand intuitively. Free will is a di...

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Moral Choice. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:41, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690141.html