The Relationship between Vice and Malice According to Thomas Aquinas (original) (raw)

This project aims to examine the relationship between vice and malice according to Thomas Aquinas. The first chapter begins with a consideration of the categories before moving on to disposition and habitus. Habitus, it is argued, is a disposition that resides in certain powers of the soul that is difficult to change; they make action prompt, easy, and pleasurable, and their objects connatural to their subjects. The second chapter takes up unsuitable habitus: vices. The features of habitus are applied to vice, and the relationship of vice to virtue and to the mean, the connection of the vices, and the generation, strengthening, weakening, and corruption of vices are examined. The third chapter focuses upon that to which vicious habitus are directed: sinful actions. Here, sin is examined as a philosophical concept as well as as an act. The fourth chapter considers malice, which is an interior cause of sinful actions, consisting as they do in a disordered will that loves some temporal good more than a spiritual good, and which, when the temporal and spiritual good are perceived to be incompatible with each other, result in an agent who knowingly chooses a spiritual evil so that the temporal good may be obtained. Malice is contrasted with the exterior causes of sinful action, as well as with the other interior causes of sinful action: ignorance and passion. Special emphasis is placed upon the roles of intention and choice in the malicious action, as well as upon the role of evil in the choice that characterizes malice. The groundwork being laid, the fifth and final chapter considers the relationship between vice and malice, which consists in large part of an examination of Thomas's two claims that, first, all sins arising from one's vicious habitus are malicious, and, second, that not all malicious sins are from a vicious habitus. In the former case, this is in part because a vicious habitus makes its object connatural to the sinning agent. In the latter case, this is because malicious sins need not be committed in the manner which vicious sins are: promptly, easily, and pleasurably. Thus, for Thomas, the relationship between vice and malice is characterized differently whether one approaches malice from the side of vice, or vice from the side of malice. I argue that the result is a progression of vice and malice in the sinning agent, according as one's appetites are more or less inclined to their respective objects.