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

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Published: Dec 1, 2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13153/diam.38.2013.544
Keywords:
Thomas Aquinas, virtue, nature, principles of natural law

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Eileen C. Sweeney
Boston College

Abstract

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.

Article Details

How to Cite
“Reasoning about Nature in Virtue, Action and Law: The Path from Principles to Practice”. 2013. Diametros, no. 38 (December): 176-92. https://doi.org/10.13153/diam.38.2013.544.
Issue
No. 38 (2013)
Section
Special topic – THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS AQUINAS AND CONTEMPORARY PRACTICAL ETHICS

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Author Biography

Eileen C. Sweeney, Boston College

Eileen C. Sweeney
Professor of Philosophy
Stokes N221
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
USA
e-mail: eileen.sweeney@bc.edu

Eileen C. Sweeney is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. She is the author of Logic, Theology and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things (2006) and Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word (2012) and numerous articles on Thomas Aquinas and other Medieval thinkers. She is presently working on several topics -- the development in the notion of science from the 12th to the 13th century, the history of the theory of the passions from the Middle Ages to Kant, and the notion of ‘nature’ in the work of Thomas Aquinas.

How to Cite

“Reasoning about Nature in Virtue, Action and Law: The Path from Principles to Practice”. 2013. Diametros, no. 38 (December): 176-92. https://doi.org/10.13153/diam.38.2013.544.
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