Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904–84), best known for his integration of cognitional theory, metaphysics, and theological method, also wrote extensively about ethics. Lonergan's ethical writings were often suggestive rather than systematic, with the result that his contributions to ethics have been overshadowed by his work in other fields. A number of Lonergan scholars (Elizabeth Murray, Robert Doran, Kenneth Melchin, Joseph Flanagan, and others) have worked to interpret and extend Lonergan's ethical thought. In The Ethics of Discernment, Patrick Byrne builds upon this scholarship, systematizing Lonergan's approach to ethics into a whole that coheres with Lonergan's cognitional theory and metaphysics, filling in lacunae in Lonergan's work, connecting Lonergan's ethical approach to historical schools of thought (Aristotelian, Kantian, utilitarian), and demonstrating its relevance to contemporary debates such as whether it is necessary to choose between an ethics of the right and an ethics of the good (Byrne argues that it is not). The book is an invaluable contribution to Lonergan scholarship, but more than that, Byrne has developed ideas that were inchoate in Lonergan's own work and has made his own original contribution to ethics. The book is a valuable contribution both to Christian ethics and to the ongoing reexamination of the importance of virtue ethics in contemporary secular moral theory.

The heart of Byrne's original contribution lies in his choice of “discernment” to articulate Lonergan's central idea, self-appropriation, thereby linking self-appropriation to moral decision-making and to Pauline and Ignatian spiritual practice. While Christian ethicists at one time focused on individual examination of conscience at the expense of examining the ways that social and historical horizons both ground and limit the ethical questions that can break through to one's consciousness, ethicists today are acutely aware of the social frameworks and systems that produce injustice, but they sometimes fail to acknowledge individual conscience. The contemporary focus on fostering awareness of one's own unearned privilege represents a new attempt to meld the focus on the social with the focus on the personal. Byrne's book contributes a theoretical framework to the ongoing project of balancing and integrating the personal and the social dimensions of ethics. Byrne walks the reader through a complex range of factors, both social and personal, that can either assist or prevent one from following through on the full range of relevant moral questions that should be faced in a given situation.

Byrne pushes against the contemporary tide by defending Lonergan's claim that dedication to the activities of ethical inquiry can yield objective judgments concerning value. He draws a comparison between Lonergan's guiding questions in cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics (What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do that?) and parallel questions in ethics (What are we doing when we are being ethical? Why is doing that being ethical? What is brought about by doing that?), arguing that “unless our feeling lives are restructured so as to empower authentic judgments of value, ethical knowledge and action will be distorted and lack their proper objectivity” (7). As with Lonergan's epistemology, the claim of objective knowledge of values is grounded, not in a correspondence between the mind and the external world, but on faithful adherence to a process of asking and answering questions. Two feelings, “the unrestricted notion of value” and “the experience of unrestricted being-in-love,” provide internal norms by which one can make objective value judgments.

Byrne is a clear and engaging writer and a lifelong teacher who respects the needs of the reader for illustrative examples that bring to life the theoretical ideas explored in his book. Especially compelling are the illustrations of moral decisions drawn from his own life and the extended examples drawn from the work of novelists (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nevil Shute). The book as a whole seems aimed at scholars and graduate students, but because of its wide range of concerns and topics and its inclusion of extended examples much of it is accessible and should prove of great value to the educated public and to advanced undergraduates.