Each participant evaluated eight stories, three regarding naturalizable categories (sex, age and race) and five regarding entitative categories (nationality, religion, economic condition, political beliefs, and social condition).
Given that the response is dichotomic, an index of essentialization was created for naturalizable and entitative categories.
In general, human beings value life and liberty, and we can say (in the entitative sense) that life and freedom are human values.
As illustrated above, entitative uses of "value" are common in mainstream and peripheral bioethics, and instrumental in creating this dichotomy, which is generally used but philosophically problematic.
Aquinas will use it to name the
entitative distinction of whatever is being considered, whether it be Socrates as distinct from Plato, man as distinct from horse, a substance as distinct from an accident, subsistence as distinct from inherence, material being as distinct from immaterial, the good as distinct from the true, the creator as distinct from the creature, and so on.
I emphasize the importance of the theorem of natural proportion in the theology of grace and the critical guideposts it supplies for translating the idea of an
entitative habit into the language of interiority.
1) The conscious reflection of the
entitative habit is found in a given grasp of evidence, at a most elemental level, and, at the same level, in a given affirmation of value proceeding or emanating from that grasp (a given "yes," where "given" signifies "gift," that is, faith as the knowledge or horizon born of religious love, that is, born of the gift of God's love).
The point of my analysis has been to show that the difference would be described more fundamentally and accurately as the choice between a worldview governed by the assumption that metaphoric signification provides the only proper logic for speaking and thinking of the mystery of God and a worldview governed by the logic of
entitative analogies.
God's being as actus purus is the source and ground of all that is, releasing an efficient causality that can never be reduced to the finite
entitative actuality of what is created.
In Scholastic metaphysical terms we are talking about an
entitative habit rooted in the essence of the soul.
Traditional Catholic accounts of the
entitative constitution of human persons share two allied assumptions: first, that one's personhood is incommunicable to others; and second, that God cannot infuse a single rational soul into two or more distinct bodies.
That is, if the nature of God is simply to be, then the personal or
entitative reality of God is to be the subject of that unlimited act of being.
