Intrinsic Evil

From the Thomistic perspective, evil can generally be understood as the absence or lacking of a good, that is, the absence of some trait that perfects or completes a thing’s being. For example, blindness is a physical evil because it entails the absence of sight and prevents the completion of a person’s physical constitution. To say that blindness is a physical evil, however, does not imply that individuals who are blind are morally bad or lead less valuable lives; only that they lack a physical capability that normally accompanies a complete human life. Moral evil, on the other hand, concerns the disordered nature or defect of a voluntary action (also known as a human act) that in some way fails to correspond to the will of God or proper human fulfillment. For St. Thomas Aquinas, every morally evil act is good in a certain respect, but is a deficient good and so is evil simply (see Summa Theologica I-II Question 18, Article 1, reply to 1). The greater the absence of perfection or completion, the greater the evil. In other words, the more the act fails to correspond to the will of God or proper human fulfillment, the more evil it is. It follows that some evil acts are worse than others.

For an appropriate understanding of the concept of intrinsic evil, one must appreciate first the Catholic understanding of goodness. From the perspective of the Catholic moral tradition, in order for a human act to be morally good, it must be good in all three of its aspects: in it’s deliberately chosen object, in the agent’s circumstantial intention and in the circumstances of the act. In order for a human act to be considered morally evil it need be defective in only one of these three aspects.

Intrinsic evil refers to actions that are morally evil in such a way that is essentially opposed to the will of God or proper human fulfillment. The key consideration here is that intrinsically evil actions are judged to be so solely by their object, independently of the intention that inspires them or the circumstances that surround them (See the Catechism, Part Three, Section One, Chapter One, Article 4, n. 1756). In this sense, "intrinsic" does not convey the notion of a particularly heinous act (although all heinous acts are intrinsically evil), but that the act is wrong no matter what its circumstances. Aquinas says that the goodness of the will is derived from the fact that a person wills that which is good (see Summa Theologica I-II, Question 19, Article 1). In other words, the object of the act must be good in itself (essentially ordered to the will of God or proper human fulfillment) in order for the will that intends that object to be good. Although Aquinas never used the actual term "intrinsic evil" (intrinsece malum), he does in a way define the term, by saying that "the goodness of the will’s act depends on that one thing alone, which of itself causes goodness in the act; and that one thing is the object, and not the circumstances, which are accidents, as it were, of the act" (see Summa Theologica I-II, Question 19, Article 2). According to this understanding, while a morally good action may be made more or less good by the circumstances in which it occurs, the circumstances of an act or the good intentions of the agent may never make an intrinsically evil action good. Actions that are intrinsically evil, then, may never licitly be performed. Indeed, the term itself is commonly used in a more general way to refer to actions that are never morally permissible.

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