Abstract

This historical critical study of Louis Janssens' moral methodology is the first complete treatment to appear in English. The work articulates the developmental context of Janssens' work against an existential and personalist backdrop of pre-Vatican II European theology. It exposes and analyzes Janssens' thinking and its interface with philosophical ethics and with Roman Catholic moral method. Finally, it illustrates by application to selected questions of individual and social ethics both Janssens' development and his significant contribution to Roman Catholic moral theology. ;The investigation concludes that Janssens' moral method is personalist, teleological, and proportionalist. It is personalist, centered on the human person adequately considered--in his/her relationship to self, others, world, and God--as the foundational existential norm of morality and its central value. It is teleological, focused on the end of the moral agent, the human person taken seriously as situated in time and space. It is proportionalist, its linchpin the ratio of ontic good and evil present in concrete moral choices and the election of a means which proportionally is best suited to the actualization of the human person here and now. Janssens' work offers an adequate moral methodology for a late twentieth century context, because it provides a dialogical system capable of responding to new moral questions without abandoning the moral wisdom of the past