Aquinas on the Goodness of Creatures and Man’s Place in the Universe: A Basis for the General Precepts of Environmental Ethics

1 “The mode of headship is twofold: one is certainly ordered to governance, the other, however, to domination. The headship of master to servant is as that of tyrant to subject. A tyrant, however, differs from a king . . . because the king orders his headship to the good of the people whom he directs, making statutes and laws for their benefit; the tyrant, however, orders his headship to his own benefit; and therefore the twofold mode of headship spoken of above differs in this, that in the first the good of the subjects is aimed at, whereas in the second the proper good of the head; and therefore, the second mode of headship in the state of unfallen nature could not exist, except with respect to the things which are ordered to man as to an end. These, however, are irrational creatures, all of which he directed to his advantage much more fully than now. But the rational creature, of itself, is not ordered to the end of another, as man to man; but if this happens, it will not be except insofar as man on account sin is compared to irrational creatures” (II Sent., d. 44, q. 1, a. 3). Quotations from 73 The Thomist 76 (2012): 73-124 AQUINAS ON THE GOODNESS OF CREATURES AND MAN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE: A BASIS FOR THE GENERAL PRECEPTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS MARIE I. GEORGE St. John’s University Jamaica, New York E NVIRONMENTAL ETHICS is a field of inquiry that has blossomed only in recent times. It addresses questions concerning the way we ought to treat nonrational natural beings. It might not seem that Aquinas could shed much light on such questions, given that he was ignorant of or in error about many natural things. For example, he was wrong in thinking that species never become extinct, and he lacked the concept of “ecosystem.” He also had a relatively static vision of nature compared to the evolutionary vision modern science provides us with. Such deficiencies admittedly limit both the questions he asks about how we ought to treat natural things and the answers he comes up with. For example, he says in one place that human beings wield a solely tyrannical rule over nature, rather than a kingly one,1 arguably because he did not know that humans can MARIE I. GEORGE 74 the commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard are based on the Latin edition in Scriptum super libros Sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi Episcopi Parisiensis, ed. P. Mandonnet and M.-F. Moos (Paris: Lethielleux, 1929-47). 2 In his article “Thomas Aquinas and Environmental Ethics: A Reconsideration of Providence and Salvation,” Journal of Religion (2005): 446-76, Francisco Benzoni maintains that there is no way one can overlook Aquinas’s flawed science so as to find in him the basis for an ethical precept obligating us to avoid the loss of biodiversity. According to Benzoni, Aquinas’s error about species extinction is inseparably tied to certain of his fundamental teachings on God’s power and providence (see ibid., 465). Later in this paper I will try to show that this is not the case, but rather that certain positions that are non-negotiable for Aquinas allow us to draw Thomistic conclusions concerning how we ought to treat nature that take into account the reality of extinction. 3 There have been relatively few attempts to date to formulate an environmental ethics based on Thomistic principles. I will list here the more comprehensive and/or substantive treatments of this topic in chronological order. Note that virtually all address at some point the question of whether Aquinas would advocate care of the environment for any reason other than the “anthropocentric” reason that failure to do so would constitute an injustice to other human beings who also need to use the goods of the earth. (1) Patrick Halligan, “The Environmental Policy of Saint Thomas Aquinas,” Environmental Law 19 (Summer 1989): 767-806. Halligan is a non-Thomist who misunderstands Aquinas on a number of basic points (e.g., “the difference between human beings and higher animals is qualitative,” when Aquinas maintains the difference is one in kind). He concludes that “Thomas’s...