Thomas Virtue Ethics

St. Thomas Aquinas pioneered the concept of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics was revolutionary in the day because doing good things or bad things. One was developing habits that would either allow them to do good things in the future, or prevent them from doing good in the future based for the virtues that they cultivate. There were several good things that came of Thomas’s ideas, for example it took a tremendous amount of pressure off of any one particular sinner. Now once you have sinned, you are not just utterly a sinner, but rather you have an opportunity to be able to cultivate more virtues. This later morphed into the modern-day Catholic view of penance. Virtue ethics has a far standing reach into society today. It affects how people view, and react to sin. It

Thomas thought that everything has a purpose or an end. Every single thing exists to do something, a knife to cut, a chair to be sat on, etc. He eventually thinks that humans end is to desire God, and in that is the experience of true and lasting human happiness. It is important to note that Thomas envisions true and fulfilling happiness in God as the end or goal to virtue. That means that the more virtuous someone is, then supposedly the closer to their end of happiness they are. Therefore Thomas’s framework is that virtue ethics leads to happiness. If virtue ethics themselves inherently create less happiness then they are not fulfilling their need or utility. There are two particular ways in which virtue ethics do not accomplish this end: their need for a moral bright line, and their creation of a moral spectrum. Beyond this Thomas also presents a dichotomy between cardinal virtue and supernatural virtue saying that the two can and never will overlap each other. If there are cases in which these could overlap there could be uncertainty to the reliability of virtue