BOOK I
HUMAN ACTS
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS A HUMAN ACT?
i. THE Christian faith teaches that the end of human life is to know, love, and serve God. If a man fulfils this obligation faithfully till death, it further gives him the assured hope of eternal happiness with God in heaven. All our actions should be directed towards the end for which the whole man exists; if an action is such that it conduces to that end, it is a good, moral action; if, on the contrary, it does not conduce to that end, it is a bad, immoral action.
Not all man's actions, however, are capable of being invested with this moral quality. There are many actions of man which have no more moral quality than the growth of a tree in the garden or the running of a dog in the street. Good or bad digestion is an operation to a great extent removed from man's control; he is in general no more responsible for it than for the condition in which he was born. Or, if some immoral picture is suddenly thrust under his eyes, he cannot help seeing it. Such acts are neither moral nor immoral; they are neither capable of conducing to the end of moral human action, nor of diverting the agent from it: they merit neither praise nor blame.
2. A man is a good man morally if he performs well the good actions over which he has control; he is a bad man if he wilfully performs bad actions. So that the actions over which a man has control, the actions which he freely performs, are alone capable of making him a good or a bad man; they are the only actions of man which have a moral quality; they alone are treated of in moral theology. It is the task of moral theology to frame rules for human conduct according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, to decide what actions are good and what bad according to the principles of the Christian faith.
3. The actions over which a man has control are in a special sense called human acts, because they are due to his free
