The Desire for Happiness and the Virtues of the Will (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas's Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions
Coakley/Faith, Rationality, and the Passions, 2012
Scholars discussing Aquinas's ethics typically understand it as largely Aristotelian, though with some differences accounted for by the differences in worldview between Aristotle and Aquinas. In this paper, I argue against this view. I show that although Aquinas recognizes the Aristotelian virtues, he thinks they are not real virtues. Instead, for Aquinas, the passions-or the suitably formulated intellectual and volitional analogues to the passions-are not only the foundation of any real ethical life but also the flowering of what is best in it. Passions are constituents of a virtue in so far as they are subject to reason and moved by reason. 5 Adopting a similar view, Peter King says, Aquinas holds contra Hume, that reason is and ought to be the ruler of the passions; since the passions can be controlled by reason they should be controlled by reason. 6
The relationship between will and reason in the moral philosophies of Kant and Aquinas
Logos i Ethos, 2015
Both Kant and Aquinas ground moral action in reason and will; however, this seems to be the end of the similarity in their approaches with respect to the role of reason and will in moral action. The goal of this essay is to show that Aquinas’ notion of the will as the rational appetite is superior to Kant’s notion of good will in providing the foundation for moral action. To this effect, I analyze the relationship between will and reason in their moral philosophies. I discuss Kant’s notion of will in both its moral and phenomenal modes, and Aquinas’ notion of will as the rational appetite and of human act. I argue that Aquinas’s notion of will and moral act is superior to that of Kant for several reasons. First and foremost, the notion of morally worthy action accommodates human nature with its inclinations, tendencies, and desires. It is not divorced from human physical and emotional nature. Second, in contrast to Kant’s will, Aquinas’s will retains its own identity. That is, it av...
Happiness as the Constitutive Principle of Action in Thomas Aquinas
Philosophical Explorations, 2019
Constitutivism locates the ground of practical normativity in features constitutive of rational agency and rests on the concept of a constitutive norm—a norm that is internal to a thing such that it both defines and measures it. In this essay, I argue that Aquinas understands happiness as the constitutive principle of human action, since happiness is the end that both defines and measures it. Turning to the thought of Aquinas opens up new possibilities for constitutivism by showing how the constitutive principle of action can be the ground of a practical realism in ethics.
The Shifting Prominence of Emotions in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Diametros, 2013
In this article, I claim that emotions, as we understand the term today, have a more prominent role in the moral life described by Thomas Aquinas than has been traditionally thought. First, clarity is needed about what exactly the emotions are in Aquinas. Second, clarity is needed about true virtue: specifically, about the relationship of acquired virtue to infused, supernatural virtues. Given a fuller understanding of both these things, I claim that emotions are not only auxiliary to the life of flourishing, specifically with regard to moral motivation and morally relevant knowledge. In fact, at the highest stage of moral development, emotions have a more prominent role than at lower stages. Pointing this out helps us to resist over-intellectualizing interpretations of Aquinas's moral philosophy.
Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good
2013
This book traces the collapse in the idea of an overarching objective moral framework in a line of development that proceeds from the Protestant Reformation to liberalism, secularism, relativism, and nihilism. The analysis charts the dissipation of objective morality from the intersubjectivism and universalism of Immanuel Kant to the nihilism of Nietzsche. The book identifies Max Weber as a key figure in giving sociological expression to the moral impasse which characterises the modern world. Weber’s much vaunted polytheism is shown to be an heterogeneity of values, the reduction of morality to value judgements, a conflict of irreducible value positions in which there is no objective way of deciding between them. The modern world is not so much a Nietzschean world which is beyond good and evil so much as a world in which objective moral criteria no longer apply. The book proceeds to argue the case for the importance of St Thomas Aquinas’ epistemological realism, rationalist metaphysics of being and natural moral law as supplying the objective foundations capable of resolving the impasse of morality in the modern world. The book considers Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx as key moral and political philosophers undertaking the task of recovering the common good that has been lost with the rejection of rational metaphysics and the natural moral law. To the extent that these thinkers failed, and the key aspects of modernity have remained in place, Max Weber remains the central theorist of modernity. Though profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, Weber’s tough-minded realism led him to reject notions of a ‘gay’ and ‘joyful’ nihilism and draw pessimistic conclusions with respect to the future. I argue that there is a line of development connecting Kant’s achievements and his failure to Weber and Nietzsche. I argue against the common understanding of Kant as a deontologist theorist pure and simple. A Thomist reading reveals that Kant sought not to reject virtue, but to place virtue ethics on a rational foundation. A Thomist reading also reveals Kant to be a teleological thinker concerned that human beings realize their rational nature through the pursuit of the summum bonum, the highest good. The problem is that Kant’s commitment to the highest good is undermined by Kant’s rejection of rational metaphysics, cutting his moral law off from its foundation in ontological nature. Kant cuts mind off from reality, denies causality and as a result comes to be trapped within a series of dualisms which undermine his commitment to universality – ‘is’ and ‘ought-to-be’, moral duty and natural inclination, reason and nature. Kant therefore fails to overcome the diremption of the modern world. Rather than achieve a genuinely universal ethic, Kant supplies an ethic which seeks to constraint the behaviour of agents in the modern world from the outside. Rather than a morality which operates at the level of character, Kant’s ethic takes on a legal form, constraining behaviour from the outside instead of forming behaviour from within natural inclinations and dispositions. As such, Kant’s ethical project fails. Kant’s self-legislation of practical reason amounts to no more than the self-sufficiency of reason. I argue that this fails to supply a secure foundation for Kant’s ethics of the summum bonum . I affirm Kant’s commitment to the highest good. The view is taken, however, that Kant is ultimately agnostic on the good, on account of his separation of reason from ontological nature. In time, Kant’s intersubjectivism and universality degenerates into the myriad relativisms, subjectivisms and nihilisms that inhabit the modern world. At this point, Nietzsche and Weber become key figures, showing the only form that Kantianism could possibly take within the framework of modernity. The book thus argues the case for the philosophical/theological synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas as providing the only secure basis for the objective and universal foundations of the moral law and the common good. I show how Aquinas’ rational metaphysics and natural law theory join reason and nature together on the basis of a necessary ontological connection. I argue that to make good Kant’s moral claims, we need to recover St Thomas Aquinas’ natural moral law, rationalist metaphysics and realist epistemology. I argue that the universal claims of the greatest of the modern moral and political philosophers – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx - can only be realised by being grounded in the natural law. This book has now been published and is available for purchse.
Journal of Religious Ethics, 1999
Aquinas is often presented as following Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics when treating moral virtue. Less often do philosophers consider that Aquinas's conception of the highest good and its relation to the functional character of human activity led him to break with Aristotle by replicating each of the acquired moral virtues on an infused level. The author suggests that we can discern reasons for this move by examining Aquinas's commentary on the Sententiae of Peter the Lombard and the Summa theologiae within their historical context. The author's thesis is that Dominican pastoral and intellectual concerns led Aquinas to argue that moral virtue must necessarily be ordered toward the highest good. Understanding this purpose helps to explain his presentation of moral virtue and its implications for standard philosophical interpretations of his work.
"Aquinas and the Epistemic Condition for Moral Responsibility." Res Philosophica.
There has been much discussion in the past few decades concerning Aquinas's views on free will and moral responsibility. Scholars have been split on a number of questions, most importantly, whether Aquinas thinks free will is compatible with determinism. 1 Although this has been a fruitful area of discussion, other elements of Aquinas's view of moral responsibility have been neglected. Perhaps most notable in this regard is his view of the relationship between knowledge and moral responsibility. Like most philosophers, Aquinas is committed to the view that assessing the epistemic states of an agent is relevant to assessing whether the agent is morally responsible. Although his account is complex and sometimes puzzling, it has been largely ignored.
TOP42 E. Stump, The Non-Aristotelian Character of Aquinas's Ethics. Aquinas on the Passions
Although Thomistic philosophy has often been equaled to a Christianized Aristotelianism, Eleonore Stump weakens this common conception through the unraveling of the notions of virtue and passion within the Thomistic ethics, and comparing these with their Aristotelian counterparts. The exposition of the Thomistic theory of virtue serves as a starting point to the development of the classification of the passions that Thomas Aquinas presents. Given their different cultures, one pagan and the other Christian, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas construct two different theoretical apparatus, dependant on their own fundamental final realities: non-personal metaphysics for the former, and Trinity for the latter. In the case of Aquinas, the perfection of virtues and the passions do not only depend on rationality, but God plays a main role in this respect.