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The Thomist 69 (2005): 79-125 ANGELIC SIN IN AQUINAS AND SCOTUS AND THE GENESIS OF SOME CENTRAL OBJECTIONS TO CONTEMPORARY VIRTUE ETHICS CHRISTOPHER TONER Air University Montgomery, Alabama DESPITE ITS RETURN to prominence in the past twentysome years, virtue ethics1 has been the target of a standard battery of objections. Perhaps chief among these is that, in counseling the agent to pursue eudaimonia (flourishing or happiness), (1) it embraces egoism, (2) it leaves no room for a special moral motive, and (3) it eliminates freedom or autonomy. All these closely related objections have roots in Kant, who argues in the Groundwork ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals that the principle of one's own happiness reduces virtue to sharp-sightedness for one's own advantage, destroys the sublimity of morality (so that the virtuous and vicious are pursuing the same thing, happiness), and submits us to determination by an empirical principle. What I hope to show in this paper is, first, that these objections have deeper roots in a running debate in medieval theology regarding the nature and causes of the fall of the devil; and, second, that cogent answers to all three objections were developed more than seven hundred years ago. While I hope my exposition and comparison of texts on angelic sin will be of some exegetical value, its chief purpose here is to support a genealogy of a mindset that makes these objections to virtue ethics look compelling. 1 My focus in this article is on Aristotelian or eudaimonistic virtue ethics. 79 80 CHRISTOPHER TONER The preoccupation of medieval thinkers with the theme of the fall of the devil was not solely due to their theological concern with the angels. In exploring this question, they sought also to understand what it is about freedom that makes sin possible. The first sin of the angels was a case presenting this question in its purest and thus most difficult form. As Augustine puts it, Man saw both options before him: one from the commandment of God, and the other from the suggestion of the serpent. But from what source did the devil himself receive the suggestion to desire the impiety by which he fell from heaven?2 Augustine and those who followed him desired to make dear how a rational creature could choose evil, apart from the ignorance and incontinence that characterize our present (fallen) condition, indeed even apart from the evil persuasion of a tempter. What is it about the wiH that makes such a choice possible? It was on this anvil that the medievals forged their theories of the will, theories that were to be greatly influential upon later moral thought, even of those who rejected their theological beliefs. It is Scorns who will emerge as the villain in this story-a conclusion with which I am somewhat uncomfortable and will later qualify. Here, however, let me anticipate my reason for drawing it in the first place. What Scorns did-and in this he was admittedly picking up threads from no lesser figures than Augustine and Anselm-was to divide the will. The natural inclination to stand in the right relation to the good that was fundamental in Aristotle and Aquinas was replaced by two affections, one for justice and one for advantage. The will itself now stands over against these determined drives and, roughly put, freely chooses to follow the one or the other. I call this a "dualism of ultimate principles."3 The idea of freedom as the product of 2 St. Augustine, De libero arbitrio 3.25 (On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). 3 This expression is derived from C.D. Broad's "Egoism as a Theory of Human Motives" in Twentieth Century Ethical Theory, ed. Steven Cahn and Joram Haber (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995). Where Broad speaks of monism or pluralism of ultimate desire, I speak of principle, leaving it open as to whether the principle is desire or something else (such ANGELIC SIN IN AQUINAS AND SCOTUS 81 "superdetermination" (as in Aquinas) is rejected or ignored, and freedom is instead seen as a fundamental indetermination or indifference.4 With this division within the will, it...

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