Intrinsic Good

The Catholic Church lays out for us the concept of intrinsic evil. 

In Pope John Paul II's Encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, he offers the following definition.

80. Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature "incapable of being ordered" to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church's moral tradition, have been termed "intrinsically evil" ("intrinsece malum"): they are such "always and per se," in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that "there exist acts which "per se" and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object".

One might ask,"What then is 'intrinsic good'?" In the first volume of Theo-Logic Balthasar offers an idea of intrinsic goodness.

p.35 – “Thus, there may be people who … have become used to doubting the existence of intrinsic goodness.”

“If, however, such people come face to face with the evidence of a selfless act that another … performs for its own sake, and they realize by their own inward experience that the naked overcoming of self is a really attainable possibility, they … bow before the simple fact of goodness.”