Natural Teleology and Human Dignity: Reading the Second Vatican Council in the Light of Aquinas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sommario: Nella Costituzione Gaudium et Spes e nella dichiarazione Dignitatis Humanae, il Concilio Vaticano II non solo presenta la dignita della persona umana come il punto di partenza del suo insegnamento morale, ma fonda addirittura la dignita umana nella teleologia naturale.Per teleologia naturale si intende la tesi, secondo la quale il bene di ogni cosa corrisponde ai fini a cui essa e indirizzata in virtu della sua natura, sia quelli particolari, sia quelli che le spettano in quanto parte di un ordine piu ampio, in modo che il bene della cosa possa essere rilevato da questi fini. In quanto insegnamenti ufficiali della Chiesa, i menzionati documenti si astengono dal fornire una spiegazione filosofica della dignita umana. L’esistenza della teleologia naturale, d’altronde, viene generalmente contestata nella filosofia moderna. Per questo motivo, la fondazione della dignita umana nella teleologia naturale costituisce un approccio assai discutibile a tale argomento. Fra tutti i principali teologi cattolici, Tommaso d’Aquino e molto probabilmente quello che offre le risorse filosofiche piu sviluppate per articolare una tale concezione della teleologia naturale e del suo rapporto con la dignita umana. Il presente studio esamina e valuta il modo in cui egli fonda la dignita umana sulla teleologia naturale. A suo avviso, costatiamo che l’uomo e la parte principale dell’universo e che le altre parti sono ordinate al suo bene. Dopo aver esaminato la sua giustificazione generale dell’esistenza di fini particolari a cui ogni cosa e ordinata in virtu della propria natura, l’articolo considera la sua spiegazione del modo in cui ogni parte dell’universo prosegue dei fini ulteriori all’interno dell’universo come totalita, nonche il suo principale gruppo di argomenti sul modo in cui percepiamo la dignita umana sullo sfondo della teleologia naturale dell’universo (CG III, c. 112). Parole chiave: Gaudium et Spes, Dignitatis Humanae, dignita umana, teleologia naturale, causalita finale, S. Tommaso d’Aquino.. Abstract: In Gaudium et Spes and Dignitatis Humanae the Second Vatican Council not only presents the dignity of the human person as the parting point for its moral teaching but also grounds human dignity in natural teleology. Natural teleology is the view that the good of any thing corresponds to, and so can be discerned from, the ends to which it is directed by its nature, both that end which is proper to it and those ends that it has as part of a wider order. As official Church teachings, these documents refrain from providing a philosophical justification of their account of human dignity. The existence of natural teleology, however, is generally contested in modern philosophy. For this reason, grounding human dignity in natural teleology constitutes a questionable approach to the issue. Of all major Catholic theologians, Thomas Aquinas is arguably the one who provides the most developed philosophical resources for articulating these views on natural teleology and its connection with human dignity. This paper examines and assesses the way in which he grounds human dignity in natural teleology. In his view, we see that human beings are the principle part of the universe and that the other parts of the universe are ordered towards the good of human beings. After surveying his general justification of how a thing is ordered to particular ends in virtue of its nature, the paper considers his explanation of how each part of the universe assumes further ends within the universe as a whole, and his main set of arguments on how we perceive human dignity against the backdrop of the natural teleology of the universe (CG III, c. 112). Key words: Gaudium et Spes, Dignitatis Humanae, human dignity, natural teleology, final causality, St. Thomas Aquinas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".