Karol Wojtyla on Ethics

I thought I'd share with you some quotes from some course material I was reading today. It comes from an essay by Karol Wojtyla (our dearly missed late Holy Father) on "Human Nature as the Basis of Ethical Formation."

The task of ethics is to justify norms, which are themselves something vital - one could say existential - for they are connected with really existing people and societies. The source of norms is found in natural law, which is not a written law. The believer finds the source of ethical norms in revelation, which to a significant degree confirms natural law.

No wonder our society is so ethically confused, we no longer affirm the norms of natural law which are vital, or as Wojtyla even proposes, existential.

Free will is that power of a concrete, individual human nature, that power of a person, by virtue of which the person becomes morally good or bad. [...] Moral good and moral evil can become crystalized in the will in a lasting, habitual way. The will can become formed or deformed in a lasting way. By becoming formed in a lasting way, the will acquires certain virtues; by becoming deformed it acquires vices.

We need a return to virtue based ethics. Enough said.