To live a life of pleasure, to think only of getting rich, appears as good only to a sensual and grasping man. From the moral point of view, pleasure and wealth are neither good nor evil. They only become so when the will, guided by the reason, either does or does not employ them in the service of the truly human good, by allocating them their proper place in the scale of values. Morality will differ with the end assigned, since it consists in the relation between act and end. The conception of morality will accordingly be different in the hedonistic systems which regard pleasure as the only end, and in the intellectualist system of morality of the Schoolmen.
Morality belongs to the sum total of human volitions, but more especially to our free acts.
Thus man has the awful power of choosing his path. He can turn away from that which constitutes his true well-being, and attach himself instead to things which are doubtless endowed with real goodness of a sort, but are nevertheless destructive of his own true interests. Liberty takes on a moral aspect when it is considered in conjunction with the end of human conduct. The end of man follows from his nature. The supreme human good is what it is because man has consciousness, is rational, and is endowed with free will.