Well, my title, the title of my talk might be a little more accurate, actually, if the expression, the moral object, were put between quotation marks.

A good part of the talk will be concerned with this expression and some ways in which it might be and sometimes is taken.

I'd like to signal some possible confusions that I think this expression,

together with some other expressions and ideas that are associated with it,

can and sometimes do give rise to.

I hope I will not simply be adding to the confusion.

Just recently I gave a course on some of the basic notions in St. Thomas' moral thought,

and if there was anything that the students found

especially difficult, if not just unintelligible,

it was the notion of object.

It's not an easy notion.

And it's also the subject of some controversy.

Toward the end of the talk, I'll address just one of the controversial issues.

Anyway, over the last 25 or 30 years, this expression, the moral object, has become rather common in Catholic writing, Catholic scholarly work in ethics, more common, I think, than it used to be.

And one of the main reasons for this, I think, is the presence of this expression and the importance of it in the encyclical of St. John Paul II,

very thought of Splendor, which was published in 1993.

What I'd kind of like to focus on is how the encyclical's use of the expression,

the moral object, and some other expressions connected with it,

relate to St. Thomas's language and thought about

moral action. It seems to me that if we try simply to read what the encyclical says back into

St. Thomas, or to read the encyclical directly in light of him, we might get just a little confused.

Now, I don't mean, I do not mean that there is any substantive disagreement between them.

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