It's a great honor, delight to be here with you to talk about this question, which is both more timely than ever, deeply controvert and very difficult.

It's the thesis of my remarks today that evil operation and evil co-operation are isomorphic.

That is to say that the analysis of the nature and structure of human

action enabling us to place acts in their moral species provides the basis for an analysis of the

same type regarding cooperation with evil. Further, most differences about just what constitutes wrongful

cooperation with evil derived from prior differences regarding the analysis of the human act.

Thus almost all my time will be preoccupied with analysis of operation. Only at the end will I turn to cooperation.

First, I will give an account of end object of the external act and circumstance and treat

of the different senses of intention and of choice.

This involves identifying potential errors regarding the nature of the object of the external act.

It also requires a treatment of the order of the object of the external act to the intended end

because this order for St. Thomas Aquinas

determines whether an action is unified in its moral type or species. As for example, when we say

that the several acts involved in a life-saving surgery, all are medical and good, or alternately, whether an action is disjuncted

and disunified in its species, as when we say that a thief who commits adultery for the

sake of theft is guilty of two different kinds of evil, namely adultery and theft, and not merely of different modalities of theft.

Second, having addressed operation, I will turn to the issue of the nature of cooperation with

evil. Here I will briefly consider a common understanding of cooperation with evil that in part proceeds from an

interpretation of the teaching of St. Alphonseus Liguri. I will also argue that

this reading is not only inconsistent with St. Alphonsis's teaching, but that it

is founded on prior difficulties in the analysis of the nature of operation.

Thirdly and finally, I will conclude by proposing what the analysis of human action implies

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