Thomas Aquinas distinguished medieval philosophy from theology and guided ethical inquiry around ultimate human happiness and moral judgment. His ideas continue to inform modern-day considerations of morality and happiness based on human nature.

Introduction

Thomas Aquinas is one of the great figures of medieval scholastic philosophy, and along with Anselmus, he’s often the first philosopher to come to mind when the topic of “proving the existence of God” is mentioned. Of course, he’s not the only master of medieval philosophy, but there’s a reason I chose Thomas Aquinas as my subject. Western medieval philosophy often blurs the lines between philosophy and theology to the point where it’s impossible to explain it without mentioning theology. However, Aquinas is considered to have made a clearer distinction between theology and philosophy than anyone else in his time. Therefore, I was confident that an examination of his thought would provide a comprehensive, yet unbiased, overview of his work. The following article is my attempt to summarize his vast body of work, even if it is limited to ethics.

Characteristics of Thomas Aquinas’s ethics

While his ethical thought encompasses many concepts and examples, I believe that the main features of his ethical thought can be summarized in four main ways. First, his ethics deals with the metaphysical analysis of human behavior. This stems from the fact that Aquinas studied metaphysics systematically enough to accept and extend Aristotle’s concepts of actuality and potentiality to formulate the concept of disposition (habituation). Second, his ethics understands human action as personhood. This means that the basis of human understanding has shifted from human sociality to personhood. I believe it was not without the influence of his thought that the West, as it moved through the Middle Ages and into the modern era, began to view individuals as whole persons with unique personalities rather than simply as members of a society. Third, he distinguishes between acts that are in accordance with human nature and acts that are intended by the will. Aquinas refers to acts according to human nature as “necessitative acts,” and acts intended by the will as “voluntary acts,” which we will discuss in more detail later. Fourth, he situates human acts in light of the ultimate end of human beings, which is happiness. In other words, all human acts are implicitly intended to pursue metaphysical happiness, such as self-fulfillment. This means that his ethics is both teleological and deontological in nature. Let’s now take a closer look at some of the topics that Thomas Aquinas addressed from this perspective.

Thomas Aquinas’ ‘intention’ and ‘voluntary acts’

One of the striking features of Thomas Aquinas’s ethics is his distinction between human acts and human behavior. He categorized the difference between the former and the latter according to the involvement of will and reason. Aquinas called human acts (the latter) voluntary acts because they involve the intervention of reason and will, which are spiritual faculties, and in which the human being is the subject. However, human acts (the former) are not necessarily voluntary, for example, sleeping or eating of one’s own volition. To summarize, voluntariness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for human behavior. However, it is a concept that is specific to humans, who are able to understand the purpose of their actions and perform them at the same time. It is a higher concept than that of animals and plants, who act voluntarily with an imperfect or no understanding of the purpose of their actions.
His analysis of human behavior introduces the important concept of ‘intention’. Aquinas argued that in addition to internal principles such as will and intellect, the intention of the actor and the consequences of the act are also important in human behavior. Intention is, simply put, the act of realizing the purpose of the act. For Aquinas, the concept of intention was necessary to bridge the gap between Aristotle’s voluntariness and purpose. There are three main types of acts: acts that are ends in themselves, acts that are means to an end, and acts that are unavoidable, where the intention to achieve the end through the means is present in the second case. Not everything that is voluntary is intentional, which is the case in the third case. Intention is therefore a concept that is broader than purpose but narrower than voluntariness, bridging the gap between the two.

Moral evaluation and the determination of good and evil

Following Aquinas’ logic in introducing the concept of intention, human actions can be further divided into three categories. These are good, evil, and neither good nor evil, which are categorized by moral evaluation. They have in common that they are done with some purpose, in some context, but to be morally good, they must be done with an intention that is accompanied by virtue. Aquinas supported Avellard’s view that goodness can be derived from the good intention that accompanies a good act. However, whereas Avellard argued that “the act itself, apart from the intention, is value-neutral and cannot be the criterion for goodness or evil,” Aquinas argued that there are acts that can have good intentions but never be good. For example, if an actor holds and follows a belief that is contrary to divine law, such as “adultery is not a sin,” it can never be a good act. In summary, whereas Abelard’s view of human behavior centered solely on intention, Aquinas saw equal importance in internal acts (intention) and external acts (what Abelard called value-neutral).
Aquinas argued that good intentions can lead to evil consequences: first, because the actor had a wrong conscience. Conscience can sometimes be wrong in that it is not a universal practical reason, but rather the judgment of the actor’s own practical reason, which can be wrong. On the other hand, he argues, if an actor has an incorrect conscience, the actor is morally responsible insofar as the act that led to that conscience is voluntary. Second, there is the evil of the means that accompanies the intention to realize the good. For example, the intention to steal bread to save a hungry child cannot be recognized as good because the means is evil, which in turn makes the act that will follow evil.
In conclusion, the morality of an act can be evaluated by, first, the voluntariness of the act itself in following/not following one’s conscience, second, the voluntariness of the act in causing the actor to ‘have’ a right or wrong conscience at the moment of the act, and third, the act itself and its means and consequences.

Discussion of evil

In terms of medieval theology, evil is defined as the ‘lack of good’. Since all beings in the world are endowed with existence by God, and they share in God’s goodness, the claim that evil itself exists as a being contradicts the logic that God endows his creatures with only goodness. Thus, although evil is not endowed with existence and attributes, the question “Does evil exist?” can only be answered “yes” as a lack of goodness.” Theologians defended this by explaining that evil is the result of man’s abuse of the free will granted to him by God, and that God did not create the concept of evil. Aquinas’s argument is not much different: He too saw evil as a state of being in which good is removed, i.e., the absence of good. However, he saw that not every absence of good leads to evil, because some of the things we perceive as absent acquire features that are consistent with nature. Furthermore, Aquinas offered three arguments for why evil cannot be a being. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

1. The necessity of being: All natural things are generated from a universal first cause of existence, and they are also generated from a universal first good. Since only individual good can be derived from universal good, evil, if it exists, would be incidental to individual good. Therefore, evil cannot be a being because it does not possess necessity.

2. The Purpose View: All beings in the world seek the good, and therefore the good is worthy of being desired as an end. Things that exist move only because of the desire for purpose, and evil has neither action nor movement.

3. the position of the famous theory: For every being in the world, there is an antithesis. Anything that is good is worthy of being desired in the sense that being itself has the most grounds for being desired, and being is good; therefore, evil, which is universally opposed to good, is opposed to being, and nothing can exist that is opposed to being.

Aquinas identified ignorance, weakness, and malice as the causes of evil. According to him, lack of knowledge, or ignorance, can be categorized in relation to the will as “insurmountable ignorance,” “ignorance that accompanies an act,” or “ignorance as the result of negligence. Insurmountable ignorance occurs when the conditions for an act are accidental, making the act involuntary and thus justifiable, even if it is bad. Ignorance accompanying an act is the ignorance that results from the actor’s having planned the action but not having accurately foreseen how it would turn out, and ignorance as a result of negligence is the ignorance that results when the actor consciously chooses to ignore the consequences of the act. In reflecting on these ignorances, Aquinas discusses whether ignorance can be a cause of wrongdoing and whether ignorance is indeed a sin. He believes that ignorance cannot completely exclude the possibility of intentionality, and concludes that if the ignorance is intentional, for example, if the sinner recognizes even one of the grounds for sin and sins anyway, then the sin is intentional. Furthermore, ignorance of a situation is not a wrong in itself, but it can be a cause of a wrong.
The weakness that is the cause of evil is weakness of the soul. Wrongdoing that results from weakness of the soul is a sensual tendency expressed as “passions.” Unlike emotional excitement in animals, human passions are induced by the mind and can be accompanied by certain physical changes. For example, when reason is paralyzed by a change in the soul. In this regard, Aquinas argued that humans are sometimes influenced by the passions prior to the action of reason.
The concept of passion does not necessarily have negative consequences prior to an act, and is therefore ambivalent. According to Aquinas, the good will and reason reinforce positive passions, which can lead to the greater good. This is a view of the passions as an external principle of the will, and although the intrinsic motions of the will (internal principles) have a greater influence on the morality of an act, even if sin results from an external act, the will itself is sinful before the act, if the actor follows it. This is entirely consistent with what Abelard argued before Aquinas. In conclusion, the passions cannot be judged good or evil in and of themselves; they can only be good or evil in relation to reason.
Of the three causes of evil, sins committed under the influence of the passions are considered to be more evil than the others, all other things being equal. This is firstly because sins of the will are internal to the human being, and secondly because sins of malice are habitual, unlike sins of passion. Crucially, sins of malice are committed ‘intentionally’ and by choice, with the consequences of the act foreseen.

Happiness

So far, we’ve covered Thomas Aquinas’ views on the human will, voluntary acts, moral judgment, and good and evil. It’s probably safe to say that these discussions have all started with the idea that humans ultimately intend to realize the most important goal of all: happiness. Indeed, the nature and purpose of each virtue is evaluated in light of this goal of human existence. So what was Thomas Aquinas’ view of happiness? For starters, he believed in the existence of God as the source of all things in the world, as evidenced by his proof of the existence of God. He also argued that intelligent beings reflect God in a special way, and that they find ultimate fulfillment in acts such as grasping and contemplating God. This is where the concept of happiness comes into play. It is a continuation of Aristotle’s idea, and refers to the end goal and highest good of all human spiritual realities. For Aquinas, it is a state of perfection, or perfect good, in which no evil can exist, and it is a state of God-recognition. Human beings are naturally meant to reach this state of perfect happiness. However, paradoxically, it is a utopian concept that is unattainable in reality. If it is the absolute good, then reaching it would mean the exclusion of all evil, which is impossible in reality.
By fleshing out the concept of the celestial good, Aquinas derived the logic that human happiness, or the attainment of the celestial good, cannot be derived from external good, or from physical good, which includes health and physical pleasure, because the desire to pursue these things is not the highest good and therefore can never be a good in itself. However, he argued that only the good of the soul, in that humans can access God through mental exercises such as meditation, can be the path to happiness. According to his logic, humans can only attain ultimate happiness through a sense of self-sufficiency that comes from within.

Conclusion

This has been an overview of Thomas Aquinas’s thought in ethics, along with some of his keywords, and while I’ve intentionally rearranged the order of the keywords, if you’ve read this far, even if you’re not familiar with his ideas and philosophy, you’ll notice that they all lead back to the same age-old question of ultimate happiness. I, too, have dived into this great saint’s ocean of knowledge with only a shallow knowledge and almost lost my way, but I’ve come to one conclusion. I believe that the purpose of philosophy, regardless of the time period, is to answer the ultimate questions about the world in which we live, the identity of beings in this world, including humans, and the direction of human life derived from these questions. In this particular case, I was able to indirectly experience the old saint’s view of happiness, a topic I have always pondered, and ponder the direction of human life with true reason in relation to his concept of reason.
I didn’t mention it in the introduction, but the reason I chose ethics aside from a myriad of other subjects, including metaphysics and theology, is that I believe that the importance of morals and ethics for human beings to live together in society is still relevant not only in the time of Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers, but also in the 21st century, where we live today. Furthermore, I believe that we all need to explore a more fundamental and ultimate morality based on human nature, rather than trying to fit ourselves into a framework established by previous generations.
This is not to say that the morals I’ve been learning are superior or more valuable than those of Thomas Aquinas, but rather that, as we’ve seen with the concept of the circle of life, we are never perfect, and that we need to look to the old as well as the new. Although I’ve limited my discussion to ethics, I think it’s our destiny to continue to reflect on other topics with an open mind and an open heart.