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Notes on Moral Theology: 1984

object to their country's nuclear policies, by refusing to participate in them or to support them in any way." A deductivist approach to moral decisions may encourage the development of heroic virtue, but it may also be compatible with blindness to important values or reflections that point to contrary conclusions. This possibility is one reason why the bishops have held back from prescribing personal responses for concerned Catholics. Second—and this is confirming evidence for the first point—Okin fails to advert to the problem of how the right of defense is to be preserved in an effective way after the renunciation of nuclear weapons and how the important values of freedom and justice are to be protected against Soviet threats. The crucial step that is taken in paragraph 175 of The Challenge of Peace, when the authority of John Paul II is invoked to justify the conditional acceptance of deterrence, is based on a recognition of what may be lost or at least jeopardized if the goal of avoiding nuclear war and its enormous evils is given a uniquely dominant position. The point is that morally weighty considerations are found on both sides of the balance in this decision. The effort to protect two vitally important and logically distinct goods can give rise to a certain incoherence, an incoherence that looks suspiciously like muddle and weakness if the observer is effectively concerned about only one of the goods at stake. Third, Okin's method and the features which it shares with the method of the pastoral should lead us back to the continuing debate on moral norms and methods discussed by Richard McCormick in the first section of these "Notes" and in many preceding years. In the meantime, the pastoral stands as a decisive, though incomplete and imperfect, contribution to the moral debate over American strategic policy and over the resort to force for political objectives in a divided and sinful world. In 1983 it was acclaimed and criticized; in 1984 it continues to open up wider vistas and closer readings. It will probably continue to do so for quite a while.