Catholic Ethics in the Modern World – Prof. Marshall Bierson
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Prof. Marshall Bierson contrasts Thomistic Catholic ethics with utilitarian and Kantian moral theories by arguing that the good is fundamentally an activity of loving persons rather than a state of affairs like aggregate happiness or an abstract form of rational nature.
This lecture was given on January 23rd, 2026, at Washington & Lee University.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Marshall Bierson is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America. His research centers on the intersection of ethics and philosophical anthropology. He is particularly focused on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and in exploring how her Thomisticly inflected philosophical psychology clarifies moral absolutes.
Keywords: Aristotelian Thomism, Catholic Ethics, Catholic Moral Philosophy, Intrinsic And Extrinsic Value, Kantian Rational Nature, Love And The Good, Pleasure And Moral Value, Thomistic Axiology, Utilitarianism And Happiness
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.7 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
| 0:19.3 | To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
| 0:22.4 | to mystic institute.org. We're going to jump in. I should say by way of introduction that this is |
| 0:29.2 | not going to be a comprehensive overview of the ways in which sort of Catholic moral tradition differs |
| 0:35.1 | from and is similar to the content utilitarian theories we're going to focus on. I originally planned on having like a nice discussion of how they disagree about the nature of the good and the disagrees about the nature of the right. And then once I hit 16 pages on my handout, I realized we had to make other plans. So there'll be various places where I say like, and and there's born this in the appendix to your handout, |
| 0:55.0 | if you wanna ask about in the Q&A. |
| 0:56.7 | Just be forewarned that that's going to happen, |
| 0:58.9 | and you may be left sort of annoyed |
| 1:00.5 | that I brought up questions that were not resolved. |
| 1:03.1 | But it was a inevitable consequence of, I guess, time. |
| 1:11.1 | So let's jump right in. |
| 1:14.1 | What I want to start with in this first part of the talk is just trying to clarify some |
| 1:18.6 | useful terminology that helps us think more precisely about where different ethical |
| 1:23.5 | theories differ from one another. |
| 1:25.0 | Philosophers tend to use terms technically. |
| 1:26.6 | The problem is they don't always use terms technically the same way as everyone else who's using these terms technically, and it can produce a lot of confusion about what we mean when someone says this is a good and someone else says that's good. So I'm going to be giving some technical terms. It'll be largely consistent with the way they're used in contemporary philosophy, but there'll be some idiosyncratic elements just necessary for me to specify how I'm interpreting it against various interlocutors. |
| 1:48.3 | So it's going to be the more boring part of the talk, but it's important. |
| 1:51.5 | So you can see at the very top of your handout, sort of bottom of the first page of your handout, |
| 1:56.2 | a basic diagram of the terminology that I'm going to think is really important to clarify |
| 2:00.6 | what we're going to be talking about. And it starts with a distinction between the good, which we can |
... |
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