Reasoning about Nature in Virtue, Action and Law: The Path from Principles to Practice

• Authors: Eileen C. Sweeney
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper argues that the role of nature in Aquinas’s account of virtue, action and law does not require the kind of adherence to Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’ that is refuted by Darwin because of the way Aquinas transforms nature as applied to a rational being and as an analogy to elucidate virtue, habit and law. Aquinas’s grounding of ethics and law in the notion of nature is also not a kind of intuitionism designed to answer all moral questions and stop all ethical debates but a model which gives principles; these principles in turn are not that from which all conclusions can be derived with universality and certainty but are principles which are the topic of reasoned and ongoing debate about their interpretation and application in particular laws or practices. The paper then examines Aquinas’s application of the principles of natural law to evaluate human law as an example of this reasoned debate, which is both subject to error and correction, showing how Aquinas’s notion of nature can work in practical applied ethics.

Keywords

EN

Thomas Aquinas; virtue; nature; principles of natural law

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii - Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Diametros
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 38
• Pages: 176-192

Contributors

author

Eileen C. Sweeney

• Boston College

References

• Augustine, De libero arbitrio [in:] Corpus Augustinianum Gissense, (electronic edition), Cornelius Mayer (ed.), Schwabe, Basel 1995.
• Boler John, Aquinas on Exceptions in Natural Law, [in:] Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, Scott MacDonald, Eleonore Stump (eds), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1999.
• Carl Maria, “Law, Virtue, and Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Theory,” The Thomist (61/3) 1997.
• Grisez Germaine, The Way of the Lord Jesus, available at http://www.twotlj.org/ index.html, 2008.
• Hittinger Russell, “After MacIntyre: Natural Law Theory, Virtue Ethics and Eudaimonia,” International Philosophical Quarterly (29/4) 1989.
• Jordan Mark D., The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL 1997.
• Kaczor Christopher R., Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C. 2002.
• MacIntyre Alastair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN 1981.
• MacIntyre Alastair, “Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (26/1) 1996.
• MacIntyre Alastair, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Open Court Press, Chicago, IL 1999.
• Niebuhr Reinhold, Christian Faith and Natural Law, [in:] Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, D.B. Robertson (ed.), Westminster Press, Philadelphia, PA: [1992], c1957.
• Pincoffs Edmund, Quandries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 1986.
• Porter Jean, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI 1999.
• Ross James F., “Justice as Reasonableness: Aquinas on Human Law and Morality,” The Monist (58) 1974.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, available at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth0000.html.
• Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, Paul E. Sigmund (ed.), Norton, New York, NY 1988.
• VanDrunen David, “Aquinas and Hayek on the Limits of Law: A Convergence of Ethical Traditions,” Journal of Markets and Morality (5/2) 2002.
• Walter James J., Proportionalism, [in:] The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Richard McBrien (ed.), Harper, San Francisco, CA 1995.
• Williams Bernard, Shame and Necessity, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 2008.

Identifiers

DOI

10.13153/diam.38.2013.544