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Law, Virtue, and Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Theory
- The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Volume 61, Number 3, July 1997
- pp. 425-447
- 10.1353/tho.1997.0020
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
LAW, VIRTUE, AND HAPPINESS IN AQUINAS'S MORAL THEORY MARIA CARL Seattle University Seattle, Washington SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS, in STh I-II, q. 94, formulates his theory of the natural law as a system of primary and secondary principles or precepts that are accessible to human reason insofar as they are our imperfect and human, rational participation in God's eternal law. The primary precepts of the natural law are inflexible standards and guides for human conduct insofar as they are universal and exceptionless. Accordingly, Aquinas's moral theory is portrayed as an ethics of principles and rules and, often pejoratively, as "legalistic," and it is precisely as such that it is characteristically distinguished from virtue-based moral theories.1 In light of the recent, renewed interest in virtue ethics, however , a number of commentators have begun to highlight Aquinas's substantive discussions of virtue and to focus both on his account of the virtues in general and on his treatments of specific virtues such as courage, justice, and prudence.2 There is an 1 Alan Donagan, for example, associates Thomas's natural law theory with the "legalism " of Kantian ethics (see The Theory of Morality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 57-66; and "Teleology and Consistency in Theories of Morality as Natural Law," in The Georgetown Symposium on Ethics, ed. Rocco Porreca [Washington, D.C., University Press of America, 1981]), and Germain Grisez distinguishes his reformulation of Thomistic natural law from an ethics of virtue (see "A Contemporary Natural Law Ethics," in Moral Philosophy, ed. William Starr and Richard Taylor [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1989], 125-43). 2 For recent discussions of the role of virtue in Aquinas's moral theory, see E. A. Goerner, "On Thomistic Natural Law: The Bad Man's View of Thomistic Natural Right," Political Theory 7 (1979): 101-22; idem, "Thomistic Natural Right: The Good 425 426 MARIA CARL offsetting tendency in many of these recent rereadings to downplay , criticize, or repudiate particular elements in Aquinas's moral theory that had typically garnered the preponderance of attention in many standard readings, elements that are legalistic, universal, and deductivist (e.g., the foundationalism of selfevident first principles, the intuitionism of synderesis, the deductivism of the practical syllogism, the analogy between speculative and practical reason). Daniel Mark Nelson, for example, writes that "for Thomas, the moral life as well as reflection on it depend on prudence and not on knowledge of the natural lawat least not the versions of natural law commonly attributed to him," and that "Thomas is not primarily concerned with teaching a doctrine of natural law but with presenting an account of moral understanding in which the cardinal virtues under the direction of prudence have priority."3 Although discussions of Thomistic moral theory have typically emphasized, and too often exclusively featured, the account of law, it is clear that Aquinas's exposition of what is relevant to his moral theory is not at all confined to his treatment of the natural law. In order to present a genuinely comprehensive picture, it is essential also to investigate Aquinas's description of the nature of the good (which entails an excursion into metaphysics for a Man's View of Thomistic Natural Law," Political Theory 11 (1983): 393-418; Thomas S. Hibbs, "Principles and Prudence: The Aristotelianism of Thomas's Account of Moral Knowledge," New Scholasticism 61 (1987): 271-84; Alasdair Macintyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); Kevin Staley, "Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Ethics of Virtue," Modern Schoolman 66 (1989): 285-300; Lee Yearley, Aquinas and Mencius: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (New York: SUNY Press, 1990); Joseph Boyle, "Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions," in Natural Law Theory, ed. Robert George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3-30; Russell Rittinger, "Natural Law and Virtue: Theories at Cross Purposes," in George, ed., Natural Law Theory, 42-70; Daniel Mark Nelson, The Priority ofPrudence: Virtue and Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas and the Implications for Modern Ethics (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Pamela Hall, Narrative and Natural Law (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). 3 Nelson, The Priority of Prudence, xii and...