Avoiding Slipko’s Slips: Karol Wojtyla’s Two Levels of Value

Abstract

the moral fact that adultery has a negative moral value and is morally bad by examining the positive attribute of marital fidelity. Aquinas used remotion to show how we can understand God from what he is not. There is no reason why Wojtyła should be held to the standard that Ślipko is claiming. The Decalogue contains many “thou shall not” statements which point back to the moral norm. It would be hard to see how someone would be able to make any headway starting from these well-known examples unless we use abstraction in this same sense that Wojtyła and Aquinas have used it in remotion. In fact Ślipko later suggests this himself. Nonetheless, Wojtyła is not looking for the kind of abstraction that Ślipko is advocating. The difference between intellectual virtues and moral virtues is that the intellectual virtues are aimed at the speculative and the moral virtues are aimed at practical matters of action. Hence, the moral virtues are concerned with means as Aristotle notes. The kind of abstraction required has an aim to lay hold of the facts and recognize things for what they are, not describe what they are or to create new categories. This is why conscience is not described as a method for deriving knowledge but referred to by Aquinas as a kind of practical or particular syllogism known as synderesis. As Wojtyła notes, “the theory of morality develops not just as a certain abstraction in relation to the living, and existential reality of human morality . . . it goes straight to the dynamic core of moral facts and 44 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Hanover House, 1955–1957), I, 14: “Now, in considering the divine substance, we should especially make use of the method of remotion. For, by its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form that our intellect reaches. Thus we are unable To apprehend it by knowing what it is. Yet we are able To have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not.” Available online—see the section References for details. 45 Ślipko, “Concept of Value,” 23. 46 Thomas Aquinas, “On Conscience,” in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings, trans. Ralph McInerny (New York: Penguin, 1998), 226–227.