Ends and the end of man
End
Kant and the positivists exclude the link of human aims to moral values and duties, although Aristotle, St. Thomas, Kant himself and the phenomenologists considered the morality understandable and interpretable by its manifestations.
Recently emerged ethical “teleological” theories claim that morality should be weighted with non-moral or pre-moral goods to be gained, so corresponding non-moral or pre-moral values should be respected, to produce a better state with grater goods and lesser evils.
As utilitarianism and pragmatism are not related to the true and ultimate aim of man, the morality of human acts has to be founded on the moral order of the natural law that is accessible to reason and on the natural beauty that helps to reject unscrupulous abuses.
If responsibility does not engage with the truth, the free will can reject reality or fearfully escape it.
A free and courageous criticism about one’s own judgment and action assumes an objective and disciplined responsibility, which escapes both impersonal conformism and authoritarianism that are incapable of truth.
According to Kant, ethics is pure logic about norms, detached from the action dynamism, in a utilitarian concept of man's aims; however, without self-domination, man loses his dignity and honesty.
With autonomous morality, voluntary choices would not condition the moral goodness and ultimate end of the person; in the regardless of responsibilities and consequences from truth and behaviors, there would be no more obligatory choices.
According to utilitarianism, pleasures or sorrows impose a rational organization to strive for maximum pleasure and with the least of displeasure; that can be honest.
Teleology recovers the moral norm from the intended consequences of the chosen action, weighing the pursued values and goods or the greatest good or the least evil that the subject has the responsibility to achieve. The involved values or goods would be both moral (such as God’s love, benevolence, justice) and pre-moral (procured advantages and disadvantages). A too complex weave of effects would make the act morally judgeable only by the intentions and foreseeable consequences, regardless of the will.
However, a responsible circumstantial weighting of moral assets and values would allow harmful behavior for pre-moral goods almost as rules to operate, even as exceptions of the highest values of charity and prudence.
A consent to morally illicit choices would not always imply an objective moral evil, but it frees from moral obligation in a voluntary, arbitrary and dehumanizing way; the casuistry pondered the possible good only in case of uncertain law, with absolute validity of negative moral precepts, which oblige without exception: it is an honor characteristic of Christians to obey God rather than men and accept even martyrdom, rather than performing any act contrary to faith or virtue.