ON NATURAL ETHICS

2. The view which I have advanced does not entail the dispossession of all purely natural ethics. It is my view that a natural morality really exists, and that its role is absolutely fundamental (as is plainly evidenced, to choose but one example, by the theory of natural virtues which an Aristotle found it possible to formulate) . But this natural morality does not exist separately as a fully true science of conduct (any more than without charity the natural virtues exist as fully true virtues).^{5} It exists merely as a structural framework of the integral moral science: a living framework, as it were, which is part of a living organism, and which is not viable -- as a science of human acts sufficiently complete and in gradu verae scientiae -- a part from this living whole. It is incapable of separate existence as a science of human conduct; it can be considered apart only if set off by way of abstraction as a part of this science and as a collection of truths which is incomplete and fragmentary, unable (if taken alone) to achieve the organic unity a science should have, and to achieve in the mind a fully and entirely correct preparation, even remote, of the act which is to be brought into concrete existence.

For this it lacks two things: the knowledge of the true ultimate end to which man is actually ordained, and the knowledge of the integral conditions of man's actual existence. Let us realize at this point that moral science is not a speculative but a practical (speculatively practical) science, from the outset turned toward the existential and toward real behavior. As a body of doctrine constituting an authentic science of human behavior, a purely natural ethic could merely be the science of conduct of man supposedly in the state of pure nature. And precisely the existential conditions which this state connotes are not, and were never given, in actual fact, but occupy the realm of simple possibility; in other words, they fall outside the province of moral science.

{5} Without charity a man can have, for example, not only the false temperance of the miser (specified by the bonum utile), but true acquired natural temperance (specified by the bonum honestum in such matter). Nevertheless, without charity this true temperance remains in the state of disposition (facile mobilis), and does not attain the state of virtue properly so-called (difficile mobilis); in other words it is not fully true virtue.