Moral norms, like any other practical principles and norms, provide intelligent and rational guidance toward choice and action. They do so by identifying some intelligible good or goods which one can instantiate (make actual) and participate in by right action and spoil or miss by wrong action.
"Intelligible goods": There are many objects of human interest, but many of them make sense only as instrumental to, or parasitic on, the realization of other, more basic purposes and benefits. By reflectively analyzing human volitions—one's own and other people's—with their intelligible objects, one can uncover a number of basic purposes, basic benefits of human action, basic human goods. Each of these is an irreducible aspect of the fulfillment of human persons and is instantiated in inexhaustibly many ways in the lives of human persons.
These basic human goods correspond to the inherent complexities of human nature, as it is manifested both in individuals and in various forms of community. As animate, we are organic substances. Human life itself, in its maintenance and transmission, health and safety, is one category of basic good. As rational, we can know reality and appreciate beauty and whatever intensely engages our capacities to know and to feel. Knowledge and aesthetic experience are another category of basic good. As simultaneously rational and animal, we can transform the natural world by using realities, beginning with our own bodily selves, to express meanings and serve purposes. The realization for its own sake of such meaning-giving and value-creation is another category of basic good: some degree of excellence in work and play.
Each of these substantive basic goods is shared in by each of us, as a gift of nature and part of a cultural heritage, even before we understand them as goods and, as understood, begin to foster them, enhance them, and hand them on to others. But there are other basic goods which are only instantiated through the choices by which one acts for them. These reflexive basic goods correspond to that dimension of our reality whereby we are acting persons, acting through deliberation and choice. Not all instantiations of these reflexive goods are morally good, though true and lasting fulfillment in them must be.
Most obvious among the reflexive goods are various forms of harmony between and among individuals and groups of persons: living at peace with others, neighborliness, friendship. But within each of us, in one's personal life, similar goods can be realized; for feelings can conflict among themselves and can also be at odds with one's judgments and choices. The good opposed to such inner disturbance can be called inner peace. Again, one's choices can conflict with one's judgments and one's behavior can fail to express one's inner self. The corresponding good of harmony among one's judgments, choices, and performances is peace of conscience, with consistency between one's self and its expression. Finally, there is the peace which overcomes the tension which everyone who is alive to reality experiences in relation to reality's wider reaches and its depths: peace with whatever more-than-human source of reality, meaning, and value one can discover.
(John Finnis, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth [Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991], 41-3 [boldface added])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 