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Natural law and ethics: some second thoughts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Students of the Thomistic synthesis have always had to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the project of bringing together an Aristotelian vision of ethics and the inevitable-—for a Christian—intrusion of the law-centred vision of the Bible. And because of the centrality of the Bible in Western culture, discourse about ethics has remained largely law-centred. We think of ethics in terms of law, even, as been suggested, long after belief in, or acceptance of, a notion of divine law had been largely eroded. In the Church, in spite of Aquinas's espousal of Aristotelianism, the law-centred idiom remained dominant. And it can be argued that this conception of ethics is a source of many of the problems faced in discussions of ethics in the Church today.
In the light of this, it may be worthwhile to look again at Aquinas's attempt to reconcile the ethical discourse of Christianity, based on the Torah, with that of Aristotle. For reasons that may in fact be familiar to readers of G.E.M. Anscombe’s now famous 1958 article on modem moral philosophy, Aquinas chose to make the Aristotelian account the centre of his own thought on ethics, to the extent of incorporating theological elements such as the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity into an Aristotelian format.
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- Copyright © 1996 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 See G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy”, in Philosophy, 1958, pp. 1‐19, passim.
2 art. tit.
3 Translation: English Dominicans, London, Bums, Oates, Washbourne, 1926.
4 For Aquinas the Gifts are not a rare privilege of saints, but part of the normal economy of salvation for the Christian.
5 The allusion is to Illich, Ivan, In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar: “With the detachment of the text from the physical object, the Schriftstiick, nature itself ceased to be an object to read and became the object to be described. Exegesis and hermeneutics became operations on the text, rather than on the world” (p. 117).
6 Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1981) p. 141Google Scholar. The distinction is important to avoid anachronism.
7 See Maclntyre, op. cit., p. 167. This is also why the Gifts of the Spirit are so important in Aquinas's notion of Christian life. Human decisions are inherently fallible. Those who are led by the Spirit may expect greater certitude in their decisions.
8 See also my brief note on this question: “Bonhoeffer's Footnote and the Moral Absolute,” in New Blackfriars, September 1981, pp. 387‐393.
9 This is also why most legal systems exclude ex post facto legislation, and while in criminal matters changes in legislation are applied so that criminals, even convicted ones, are subject to the more benign of the punishments after laws are changed.
9 Translation for 1‐2, 106: Blackfriars, London, 1969.