The first volume of this study was focused upon the objective dimension of ethics. The introduction to that volume noted that to understand and direct human action it is necessary to comprehend the human person as part of nature and as being-in-the-world. One's powers of knowledge and feeling are sensitive to changes in one's surroundings and respond to these as promotive or destructive, that is, as good or bad. But an intensively self-centered, self-enclosed, and solipsistic human life would be inert and meaningless, insufficiently alive to be ethically engaged. We are social beings, born of others, developing with others, and depending upon our community for life, sustenance, learning and expression. Indeed, one might initially summarize the content of ethics as the project of emerging out of the self as the center and unique object of one's concern.

Nonetheless, in order to be ethical it is not enough to be other-directed. The tornado that is about to devour a house in the prairie, the avalanche crashing down upon a mountain chalet are, in a sense, other-directed, but the relation is not ethical. As a member of a family or larger community, the person must also decide and will freely but responsibly. This is precisely where ethics, as the correct direction of one's free action, is focused. It is the reason why the person has always been the subject of prolonged and careful education.

Basically, this is to recognize that one's internal character or subjectivity has always been at the heart of the objective orientation of ethics discussed in volume I, Normative Ethics and Objective Reason. This was central to Plato's project for educating future leaders for the polis. It was the essential principle for the division of the material and spiritual levels of life in Aristotle's De Anima. It was the key to the notion of synderesis, which was intensified in the schools of Western Christian spirituality and it has received predominant attention in modern times, especially the last half century. Subjectivity, as that which enables the object to be, not merely the result of action, but consciously known and responsibly willed always has been at the heart of the project of ethics and, indeed, of mankind.

From this it can be seen that any development in the appreciation of subjectivity, as well as any advance in the quality of the self-awareness this implies, would radically transform the character of ethics. This can be sensed in the shift in sensibilities from one generation to another, but it stands out at those points at which a radically new level of self-awareness is achieved. One of these was the advent of Christianity as a call to resurrection and new life; it was the task of each person and community to internalize and realize this in his or her lifetime. This not only brought out the eternal implications of the ethical. Correlatively, it radically heightened the intensity of drama of the internal struggle to overcome selfishness in order to live more fully one's personal relations in the image of the relation of Christ to the Father in the Spirit of love. The direction: to be holy as the heavenly Father is holy, moved the emphasis beyond the Greek attention to polis and law and focused it upon person and love.

The modern age has been marked by an intensification of this sense of the subject as the source of knowledge. By attending carefully to ideas and their upon the sensible origins through Lock's "historical plain method" or upon the order of clear and distinct ideas through Descartes' mathematical method, the search for a unified science pushed forward with remarkable success. Inevitably, this caused and reflected a new and ever more intense attention to the role of the subject. As enriched by Kantian formalism and Hegel's idealistic dialectic, this became an intricately detailed articulation of reality.

Nevertheless, this notion of the subject was restricted to being the source of the epistemological object. The concern with what is known hid, or distracted attention from, the subject; proposals by Pascal and Kierkegaard that one attend to what is proper to the subject were submerged by the concern to construct a clear and certain system of knowledge, a science. Hence, it was of great moment when, in this century, Edmund Husserl developed a method focused upon intentionality itself as the core orientation of the person to meaning and the good. This is to be made manifest or brought into the light; as `phe' expresses light, this would be termed `phe-nomen-ology'. Through the application of this method access was opened to the uniquely self-conscious, free and responsible life of the subject.

Gabriel Marcel helps to bring out the character of this step. To restrict knowledge to objects leaves unattended the life proper to the subject. But to attempt to correct this by making the proper life of the subject itself into an object of knowledge would once again miss the distinctive subjectivity of knowledge, and so on. This can be remedied only by moving beyond the subject-object structure of objective knowledge in order to attend to the subject not as the termination of an act of knowing, but as its distinctive point of origin. This is the subject as the point at which being emerges as intentional and evolves as self-conscious, and thus as self-directive and free.

This new sensitivity to the being of the subject has been brought out particularly in this century; its implications are immense. Subjects treated as scientific and technological objects can be written into laws and structures, state policies, production systems and educational objectives. But such treatment is not appropriate for human persons taken precisely as subjects; indeed, they would be oppressed by it. Hence, the more the technological structuring of our life succeeds, the more it generates a sense of being threatened on the part of persons. This is not a matter of mere external reaction against systems; if the subject as such is not alive, alert, free and creative, the genius needed to develop the various economic, political and social systems and to adjust their structures begins to fail from within. Systems in which success is measured only in terms of efficiency become wasteful.

Moreover, stagnant structures, which as such oppress freedom and creativity, generate dissatisfaction in proportion to the rise in the degree of sensitivity to personal subjectivity. Hence, in retrospect, it is possible now to see how scientific Marxism could be designed as a total objective philosophy of life in the last century, and why it was doomed to fail in this century precisely to the degree that it was applied with its own objective scientific rigor.

What emerges from recognition of this new dimension of human sensibility, namely, attention to subjectivity, is a project for the development of ethics. Its task will not be to supplant the objective reference of human action or its evaluation: hence, the work done in volume I, Normative Ethics and Objective Reason, remains essential, indeed foundational. In that volume the need, extent and distinctive nature of objective reasoning in ethics was sounded out. Its ability to provide ideals and general norms was examined, as was its ability to remain open and developmental in relation to the ever evolving pattern of human life.

Now, however, it is possible and necessary to look more penetratingly into the life of the subject as free and as searching responsibly to realize the good through personal and communitary action and interaction. To do this thoroughly would be to write a comprehensive ethics for each sector of human life. That is not possible here, and not merely due to lack of space. For in terms of what has just been said its formulation as an objective system would omit, and in time suppress, the creative center of the life of the human subject.

At this point, what is needed is a concerted effort to bring into the light the distinctive character of human intentionality and subjectivity. This effort has three major steps: the first is to clarify the presence of intentionality and subjectivity in the long history of ethics and its special emergence in the contemporary consciousness. The second is to search for the ultimate religious horizon which this provides for ethics. Both of these are the burden of this second volume. The third, to be treated in a subsequent volume, is to follow out the ways in which the cumulative exercise of subjectivity constitutes cultures. In their plurality, these cultures manifest the multiple ways in which the human project has been carried out and in their interrelation through time promises to manifest ever more richly men and women as true images of God.

Concretely then the present volume explores the issue of subjectivity in ethics along two axes: from the personal to the social, and from the human to the religious: the first concerns human subjectivity, while the second concerns its religious context and that of ethics generally.

In Part I S. Samay takes the decisive step, showing that the classical dichotomy of subject and object reflects past limitations of our appreciation of what it means to be. This awareness directs us to enrich that sense by an appreciation of the radical character of intentionality. Being is not simply what is, such that all meaning and purpose is fixed and external; on the contrary, being is inherently intentional and directional. Within it emerge both knowledge and love, not in isolation and opposition, but as a paired implementation of the basic thrust of being. This sets a framework within which the normative is not the limitation, but the articulation and implementation, of freedom.

This is taken up by John Caputo in his chapter on moral sensibility and moral emotion as the primordial disclosures of values for ethics. Austin Fagothy advances the study of subjectivity in ethics by tracing it from the notion of conscience in Greek and Medieval thought to the modern passion for freedom. This serves as the key to bringing into a mutually reinforcing synergy the twin elements of law and love. This direction is carried further by G.F. McLean in distinguishing three levels of freedom ranging from that of choosing between contrary things, through the Kantian imperative, to the existential order of self realization. This points to the importance of the aesthetic mode of awareness in order to integrate creative freedom and an objective world.

The dynamics of this is addressed in Part II. The chapter of L. Kelly investigates this psychologically as an emerging capability in the process of the development of the person. E. Baltazar takes a broader process view and examines its implications for a reconstitution of objective natural law theory in terms of the dynamism of love based on the evolutionary perspective of Teilhand de Chardin. Does this result in a relativism? John Cobb in his "Process and Normative Ethics" would admit to some relativization of objectivity, but would argue that objectivity remains.

The import of this is studied by R. Sweeney and J. Kockelmans who proceed to analyze in depth how this faces respectively the value and existential issues of meaning in the life of our times. In this context one can obtain a renewed appreciation of the value philosophy of Scheler and begin to draw upon the work of Ricoeur on value and symbol. Indeed Van Buren could see this as constituting a self-sufficient field for human life and identifying religion therewith as a secular Christianity. It might seem that the work of Kockelmans, which traces Sartre's inexorable journey into the ambiguity (not absurdity) of human freedom, would come to a similar conclusion. Instead, it argues in the end that his position does not logically exclude a religious context for the ethical life, and leads thereby into Part III.

As was noted periodically in Parts I and II, the ultimate interpretation of the meaning and goal of life and the basis for motivation in the ethical order generally are grounded in the religious context of the life of a person or people. Part III examines the relation of ethics to religion. It does not lead away from the human, but through the person to its foundation in an Absolute source which, out of love, created all things and guides human freedom suavely by the attractive power of the good. M. Nédoncelle illustrates how this can be discovered through phenomenological reflection and D. Schindler argues to the need for such a religious foundation.

The chapters of J. Gustafson and B. Cobb move the discussion to the properly Christian horizon by asking how religious faith and human ethics interact. Does faith add new content to ethics or deeper meaning and motivation to human action--or could it be both? Finally, this is applied to moral theology by C. Curran and B. Häring who discuss respectively the impact of the evolving sense of the person upon ethics and Christianity, and conversely the impact of Christianity upon moral values, their order and application.

The appendix by G. Stanley goes to the heart of the relation between a philosophical ethics based on reason and oriented to the natural end of mankind and a moral theology based on faith and oriented to eternal life face to face with God. Do these two ends divide the life projects of people, are they compatible, could the second be an amazingly magnanimous fulfillment of the first? Stanley's appendix, which studies Aquinas' penetrating work on this question, relates the end of humankind as considered by Aristotle with the vision of God as presented in the Christian and other faiths, East and West.

This volume is not a new moral summa, a survey of the many ethical issues and of the conclusions to be drawn. It is rather an analysis of how the appreciation of subjectivity is transforming ethics in our times. Our task is to understand and shape these forces in ways that implement human freedom as we enter upon the XXIst century. The following, third, volume, on ethics and culture will address this task with a view to integrating objectivity and subjectivity in ethics in terms of culture. This should not only contribute to overcoming the great tensions of our times between objectivity and subjectivity, but make it possible to draw from the rich diversity of the human efforts to live morally by peoples through time and in all parts of the world.