It ' s not my intention to separate the corporeal nature of actions from the will , anymore than it ' s my intent to separate the meaning of words from the words themselves , or the sacramental signs from the reality they both signify and effectachieve . This is a separation . Words have no necessary connection to their meanings . They are arbitrary significations initially attached by humans to otherwise meaningless sets of symbols . Actions are not related to the will in a symbolic way . Rather the will and the physical consequence of it together compose one thing , the action , and the physical consequence is in some sense the completed act of willing , as the act of willing is the inchoate action . Honestly I don ' t know enough about how sacraments work to comment on that point . The action is not the act of the will . It is the act of the man through the will , who has a voluntary aspect and a physical aspect , both of which operate in most true human action . And a defect in either one e . g . , having bad intentions , or misusing our physical faculties contrary to their goods renders the action bad . If someone asked , What is chastity , what does it look like ? we can only offer than an image which conveys the idea , and that image is no doubt a single faithful marriage where sexual intimacy is open to life . That is the icon of chastity , nothing else is . Right . And deviations from this are not chastity , and therefore are to be condemned . I mean , the whole tradition basically defines evil as defective good . At the same time , a mere arrangement of bodies indicates nothing . Nature is suffused with intelligibility and purpose , given by substantial form . For example , a knife is called good insofar as it acts in a properly knifelike way , i . e . , insofar as it cuts well . That can be specified by an arrangement of bodies , but that does not mean that the word good is out of place to describe it . The reason is because good x should be understood as fulfilling the function of x specified by its substantial form and yes knives don ' t have substantial forms but never mind that . But some of the functions of x , for any corporeal x , are going to deal with x ' s physical interactions with other bodies . Good knives cut things well . Good humans . well it ' s more complicated . But the knife analogy should show that there is no unbridgeable conceptual gap between good and physical or arrangement of bodies . Sometimes whether an x is a good x is determined by how it physically interacts with other bodies , like for the knife . Sometimes it ' s more than that , like with us , but that doesn ' t mean that it has none of that . What is special about us is that we can think about the goods our nature specifies for us , and then choose whether or not we are going to pursue them . But this does not mean the goods themselves become wholly abstracted from our partly corporeal nature . We can imagine a knife that is intelligent and therefore moral its good is still at least partly , qua knife to cut well it can just decide now whether it wants to pursue that good . But what determines whether its will is good or not is whether it chooses to act according to its proper function . This is a ridiculous example , but the point is that the presence of a will does not mean that the good is no longer rooted in functions specified by the thing ' s nature . It just means that we have a choice about whether or not to act in accordance with our nature , whereas other things are compelled by their natures . So it is not that the mere fact of a bad arrangement of bodies , out in the world , cuts us off from God . Clearly that has no moral force in and of itself . There are many bad things in the world that are not cut off from God , because they are not moral beings . What does cut us off from God is using our wills to choose something that is bad . But included in the class of things that are bad might be an arrangement of bodies or use of our physical faculties that is contrary to the goods specified by our natures . You never answered how you think duress even works for example , whether you think that if a rapist puts a gun to your head and tells you to have sex with him . My immediate reaction would be you may refrain from active resistance , but you may not actively participate . So it would not be immoral to be forcibly raped , and even not to resist such actions . But you cannot become an active participant in sex I won ' t elaborate too much for fear of being indelicate , but I think you get the idea . The reason is because in the first option , the object of the will is simply passive nonresistance , whereas in the second option , the object of the will is having sex with a nonspouse . The former is not an evil object , whereas the latter is . And obviously a gynecologist isn ' t cheating on his wife just because he touches the genitals of women not his wife . Right , but there are also certain objective boundaries which he should not cross in doing that , and those boundaries can ' t purely be specified by interior things . So it is not really touching the genitals which is wrong , but that in a certain manner , and that manner can at least to a decent degree be specified with additional physical information . I mean , there is at least some kind of difference between a touch which accidentally stimulates and a touch which essentially stimulates .