Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Wickedness - Coggle Diagram

- - - - We understand the excessive and the deficient and the mean regarding moral virtues in relation to right reason, which determines the virtuous mean, and not as to absolute quantity, as the very definition of virtue in the Ethics makes clear.18 And so virtue may sometimes belong to an extreme as to absolute quantity but belong to the mean in relation to right reason.
        
        n "is indeed extreme in greatness," namely, in that such a person strives for the greatest things, but the person "is at the mean by what is proper."19 Therefore, virginity and poverty and penitential fasting belong to an extreme as to absolute quantity but to the mean in relation to right reason, and it is a sin if one should likewise fail to observe the mean by excessive abstinence. And so also Gregory says in his work Morals: "The flesh when restrained more than right is often weakened even for the performance of good deeds, so that while hastening to stifle the forces of sin within, it does not have enough strength to pray or preach. And so while pursuing the enemy, we slay the citizen we love.";!0
- - - - In the case of the stone therefore, the perfected stone, the stone in its natural place, is a purpose for the cause that brought the stone into being; it is not a purpose for the stone itself. It is the purpose of the stone within the purposive scheme of its cause, but the stone itself merely acts naturally, deriving its inclination from the purpose of its generator.
      - McCabe, Herbert, et al. God and Evil : In the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=601863.
      - Created from uts on 2024-03-13 07:09:12.
      - But practical reason can determine whether the desire for food is moderate or immoderate, even if this cannot be easily discerned when there is no great departure from reason, as I have said. 16 Nonetheless, human beings can do so, especially with the help of God. And so Augustine after the cited words adds: "Whoever the persons are," namely, the per- sons who do not consume food beyond the measure of need, "they are great; let them magnify your name." 17
        
        Nature and need induce us to consume food, but the natural need for food, in accord with which reason moderates desire, is exceeded in acts of gluttony.
      - According to Aquinas, "Law is nothing but a dictate of practical reason issued by a sovereign who governs a complete community."95
        
        What is practicable reasoning
        
        For Aquinas, then, acting persons intend (aim at) what attracts them. But what is going on as they act in specific circumstances? Aquinas's answer is that they live out or engage in examples of what he calls "practical reasoning." On his account, human action is al- ways a reasonable business since it always involves seeking what one takes (even if mis- takenly) to be somehow desirable. And, in this sense, he conceives of it as always con- forming to a certain pattern of reasonableness comparable to what is involved when we reason not about what to do (practical reasoning) but about what is the case (theoretical reasoning). We may, so he thinks, reason to the truth of some matter. We might work
        
        Summa theologiae Ia, 82, 4. As Daniel Westberg observes (Right Practical Reason, Oxford, 1994, p• 37), when it comes to Aquinas: "The key is to understand human choice and action not as a process of reasoning followed by an 'act of will' to carry it out, but as an operation combining both belief and desire."
        
        And so virtue may sometimes belong to an extreme as to absolute quantity but belong to the mean in relation to right reason. Just so, the Philosopher says in the Ethics that the greatsouled person "is indeed extreme in greatness," namely, in that such a person strives for the greatest things, but the person "is at the mean by what is proper."19 Therefore, virginity and poverty and penitential fasting belong to an extreme as to absolute quantity but to the mean in relation to right reason
        
        And gluttony primarily and intrinsically signifies the intemperate desire to consume food, not the intemperate consumption of food, as I have said.15 And we understand the measure of the consumption of food by the norm of our bodily nature. And so medical skill can ascertain that norm better than practical reason can. But practical reason can determine whether the desire for food is moderate or immoderate, even if this cannot be easily discerned when there is no great departure from reason,
        
        A black and white conception is morals is not flexible enough to encompass the nauce of the human experience and the issues that we have to deal with
        
        But we can also, he says, reason as to what is to be done. We might work out how to behave. And this, he thinks, is what we are doing as we settle down to action in practice.
        On Aquinas's account, essential to human action is what he calls "choice" or "deci- sion" (electio). Or, to put it another way, Aquinas takes human action as a doing in the light of alternatives.
        
        Example:
        
        I want to get to Paris
        
        If I catch this flight it will get me to Paris So I should catch this flight.
        
        Might additional information leave me unable but to conclude that I should catch the flight? Well hardly. What about "If I catch this flight I shall be boarding an aeroplane with terrorists on it"? If I consider the flight under that description, then I will not con- clude that I should catch it. And yet, Aquinas thinks, when reflecting on the world we can always view it under different descriptions. So he also thinks that we can engage with it not because we are forced to think about it only in one way. We can engage with it as able to think about it in different ways. And we can act accordingly. Or, as Anthony Kenny helpfully explains:
        
        Ifthe will is a rational appetite, an ability to have reasons for acting and to act for rea- sons, then the nature of the will must depend on the nature of practical reasoning. In practical reasoning the relationship between premises and conclusion is not as tight or as easy to regiment as that between premises and conclusion in theoretical reasoning.
        
        Aquinas uses poignatly demonstartes this through his examination of the a pratical and theortical approach to gluttony
  - - - Aristotle and Aquinas are similar in this respect in that they endorse the use of reason in making a decision, a precept which WARD J himself, poignatly articulates
        
        “What are the doctors to do if the law imposes upon them a duty which they cannot perform without being in breach equally serious duty of respecting Jodie’s life. In asking this question, Ward J highlights the paradoxical nature between the law and morality, that is: Simply because something is legal does not make it a morally acceptable. In response to this Justice Ward, proposes that in such circumstances, “ the law must be allowed to escape through choosing the less of the two evils”. the law cannot say, 'heads I win, tails you lose'. Faced as they are with an apparently irreconcilable conflict, the doctors should be in no different position from that in which the court itself was placed in the performance of its duty to give paramount consideration to the welfare of each child…The respect the law must have for the right to life of each must go in the scales and weigh equally but other factors have to go in the scales as well.
        
        In this way Ward's decision substantively encapsulates an Aquinas and Aristotle esque approach to manuvering between the two vices avaliable to him
        
        While different in many ways Aquinas may be seen as offering a solution of Artistole's ambigious provisions; that is how do we determine the intermediary between two vices.
        
        Aristotle
        
        That moral virtue is a mean, then, and in what sense it is so, and that it is a mean between two vices, the one involving excess, the other deficiency, and that it is such because its character is to aim 25 30 1109a 5 10 15 20 the nicomachean ethics ii.9 EBSCOhost - printed on 2/7/2023 8:24 AM via FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-us
        36 at what is intermediate in passions and in actions, has been sufficiently stated. Hence also it is no easy task to be good. For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for everyone but for him who knows; so, too, anyone can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. Hence he who aims at the intermediate must first depart from what is the more contrary to it, as Calypso advises—
        
        1 more item...
        
        Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by reason, and by that reason by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.* Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of what it is, i.e. the definition which states its essence, virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme.
        
        2 more items...