Beyond the New Morality: The Responsibilities of Freeedom

by Germain Gabriel Grisez, Russell B. Shaw

Successfully and widely used in college ethics classes, this well-written text has in revision been made even clearer and more precise in its presentation as a result of extended classroom experience. Beyond The New Morality seeks to state clearly and simply a particular approach to ethics. The ethics here proposed seeks to put the concrete situation into the context of a whole person's life; it seeks to show how love requires a free response to human goods, a response generating responsibilities; it seeks to defend the person and the community of persons against theories and attitudes that would make of them mere objects, mere means.

Genres: Philosophy

251 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1975

About the author

Germain Grisez was a French-American philosopher and a prominent and influential Catholic moral theologian. Grisez's lengthy masterpiece is his three-volume Way of the Lord Jesus.

Reviews

[John Lucy]

First of all, Grisez and Shaw don't do a great job explaining what the "new morality" is. They try to start from the basics to establish their own ethics, and that sort of works, but when they pivot to indeed staking the boundaries of their thought, the borders are still unclear. There are a number of ideas from the "new morality" that I strongly disagree with, but I wouldn't know it from reading this book; and, likewise, a number of ideas that I do agree with but am left not knowing for sure why Grisez and Shaw would argue against them.

Perhaps one of the main issues here is that the authors write about the building blocks of ethics and then transition into their own as if assuming that the building blocks obviously translate to their own ethics. But, clearly, with a diverse history in ethics, that's not the case.

[Michael Glawson]

In short, this is the most precise, subtle, comprehensive, methodic, and powerful piece of natural theology I've ever read. An excellent book.