Thomas Aquinas & Natural Law: A Beginner's Guide to Ethics and Morality

Okay, guys. I'm going to do something a little bit different than I've been doing it for my other classes. I'm going

to try to record on the PowerPoint itself first and then I'll record it in Zoom by just playing the PowerPoint.

I've had some issues with internet stability while I was recording in Zoom that can like cause me to lose

everything. So hopefully this works out. I have another unfortunate technological issue, namely that the PowerPoint that I

initially my my revised and edited PowerPoint for some reason won't work um anymore. I could get it to work on the

computers at school. one one of the few times that a PC works better than a Mac. But

unfortunately that something has been corrupted in the file and I can't use it. So I've had to go back to an older

uh less edited PowerPoint. So I apologize if it's not quite as polished. I just don't have the time to redo the

whole PowerPoint, but it'll work for our purposes. So this hereby starts our natural law unit where we're talking

about Aquinus. Uh the good news is that with Aquinas we are not looking at something that's all

that incredibly different from Aristotle. Quinus used Aristotle heavily. He was a very very keen uh

student of Aristotle. Not literally a student of Aristotle because Aquinus was read writing in the 13th century AD but

nonetheless he used um the the u the basic framework and structure of Aristotle's thought as he uh produced

his natural law reasoning. So the um the issue is not going to be one of comprehension. I don't think he's

fairly easy to comprehend. Probably the biggest issue that I found that people will re react to Aquinus about is he uh

offers more of a religious perspective. He is like I said writing in the 13th century AD at the height of

Christrysendom. Um, Christendom being the time when all of the Western world practically

speaking was united under one Christian religion and that Christianity was a part of daily life. So, excuse me, I'm

having some trouble with my my voice, of course, as far as right the second I start recording a lecture.

So we we live in a little more pluralistic time where that can't take those sort of

things for granted and not everybody's going to like that part of what he has to say. But understand that he is still

a philosopher. He is not he's not offering a theological account. I think the biggest

mistake I see people make is they assume because he talks about God and he talks about the eternal life with God and

because he talks about the divine law and stuff like that that he is basing his reasoning on his understanding of

the Bible that is not accurate that he offers very specific philosophical

arguments for every position that he takes in terms of the natural moral law. obviously has some religious beliefs to

go along with that and so the way it's framed will often talk about these divine things that you could only find

in the Bible but he thinks that actually the two are very much in sync with one another that what you find in the Bible

you can also reason to using your natural reasoning alone people who have never even heard

of the Bible who've never even heard of Christianity um by just using log logic and a

reflection on common human experience can come to this to these conclusions about how to live their lives that

overlap with the things that you find in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. So this would apply to Islam

and Judaism as well, especially the Ten Commandments. So I want to just say that at the outset that just because you see

religious language doesn't mean that he is basing his conclusions off of religious reasoning and that's he's not

doing theology primarily. He's doing philosophy and he really is using Aristotle and some stoicism to a great

extent and also some Plato. So what you find in the middle ages is this grand synthesis of

Aristotle, Plato and some stoicism as well as Christianity. And that's really what characterizes the high middle ages.

This is the time when the very first universities were being founded and Aquinus is teaching at the University of

Paris, the oldest university in the world within about a generation or so from the founding of the university. So

those first universities were all the product of this massive synthesis of Aristotle, Plato and

Christianity. Sorry, I had to rehydrate there for a second. One of the interesting side features of this maybe

it's a side feature for our purposes. It's actually immensely important. But um for those of you who come from a Jew

Jewish tradition or especially a Muslim tradition uh understand that that Aquinas used as some of his primary

sources for Aristotle uh especially Muslim thinkers. These were some of the most

influential guys for him. There were a a series of Muslim arisatilian philosophers starting in well starting

way back in the 7th century and during especially the Islamic golden age guys like Iben

Cena a Veroise who's also whose is Islamic name is Iben Roo or I guess be an Arabic name as well as Al Farabi and

a bunch of other ones. These guys were immensely immensely influential for him. There's also a Jewish medieval thinker

by the name of Moses minimum who was influential for Aquinus. So he's quite cosmopolitan for his time and he's

drawing heavily on other religious traditions as well as these philosophers. Um not so much the

religious part of the other religious traditions but their own philosophical reflections. Okay. So that's all by way

of introduction to what the natural moral law is. It comes at the height of the middle ages. It comes uh from this

synthesis that we find promulgated in the very first universities. And he's really an innovator by bringing

Aristotle to bear on these questions. For close to a thousand years, the almost the only influence on

Christianity was Plato and some stoicism. But in the middle ages you have this reintroduction of Aristotle

who had been preserved in the Islamic East especially. It's a very interesting time historically. The natural moral law

reasoning of Aquinas is extremely influential in our own culture and society and and and even as a basis for

some of the legal thinking that goes into western culture. Um people like Thomas Jefferson

and Madison and all the founding fathers of the United States, those who wrote the Declaration of Independence, all

these guys who talked about rights and inalienable rights so far, they were all natural law thinkers who were drawing on

Aquinas. Our military doctrine, when we talk about things like a just war or the criteria for a just war, those are all

coming straight out of Aquinus. Okay, so without further ado, I'm going to jump into it. I apologize for having

to constantly clear my voice. It's I think just getting tired from constantly uh lecturing. Uploaded so many lectures

in the last few days. It's kind of scary. Okay, let's talk about some key words.

uh these keywords are going to be most of them are going to be fairly familiar to

you simply because we've looked at Aristotle and Plato and stoicism. But one of the main things to keep in mind

is he takes over this notion from Aristotle that everything in nature or every every living thing especially has

an intrinsic purpose. And this is true of human beings as much as it is true of dogs or

camels or whatever entity you can think of. There's like an unfolding of an inner purpose, an inner

directedness within each living thing. A talos is the Greek word. Um I'm using that because this is called a teological

approach to morality. Now, when you talk about human beings, you're talking about a very unique sort of organism that not

only has an internal purpose that is unfolding throughout your life as you grow toward the the the end point of

what your nature tends toward. But there's another dimension to our lives, namely that we live according

to uh rationality. that is to say that we are able to consciously reflect on our purposes and our our ultimate goal

point and that also means that we have the ability to choose to do what doesn't correspond to our

natures. So just think about that for a second. The way Aristotle early Aquinus sees it is and Aristotle saw it this way

too. A dog doesn't really have choices properly speaking um in the sense that they just do what they're

wired to do by instinct. That is to say, their nature just inclines toward an end on its own. Human beings, on the other

hand, have this weird thing called freedom. And that freedom means that we have the rational ability to decide to

go the route that our nature inclines to. Or we can choose not to. We can choose to make do things that go against

our nature. This brings up the possibility of something called ethics. Ethics treats the idea of a goal

orientedness at least this is how Aquinus sees it in terms of choices. We have the choice to go one way or the

choice to go another way. And because of that we can talk about what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. There's

that word ought which I've talked about before is heavily embedded into the very notion of ethics. If you don't have a

choice, we talked about this a little bit in class. If you don't have a choice about where you're going to end

up, if it all is determined in advance, then there's no meaningful way to talk about what you ought to do. It's a

fiction. It means nothing. If everything happens automatically and in a deterministic way, then you really don't

have a choice and there's no meaningful sense in telling somebody what they ought to do. In fact, it doesn't even

make sense to talk about consciousness because consciousness seems to be a kind of awareness that steps outside the

causally closed system of nature. Obviously, we could debate this a little bit further. That would be a

very fruitful debate at this point. But you don't really need to know all that right now. We just need to understand

that this is the way Aquinus see sees things. There is purpose in nature. Every living organism has an internal

purpose that unfolds according to its nature. We have an internal purpose that unfolds according to our nature. But we

have this additional thing called a choice that we can do or not do what our nature inclines toward. And that's where

the realm of peace comes up. Okay, another key term, eternal law. There's going to be four kinds of

law that I really need you to become very familiar with. Um, and then you'll be able to make a lot of sense, I think,

of what Aquinus is talking about. Above all the laws, the most important law is what he

calls the eternal law. You can really think of this as the overarching structure of the very

cosmos. It is the ver it is the very mind of God himself. So if there is a rational ordering of

the cosmos that is the foundational structure of everything that's what Aquinus is

calling eternal law. This is really similar to the notion that the stoics had of providence. Remember when we

talked about the stoics they talked about this rational ordering of the whole cosmos that happens according to

necessity. There's no sense in trying to resist. I really think that Aquinus's notion of eternal law, he's taking this

in large part from the Stoics, the Stoics themselves, where an application of Platonic philosophy. When when Plato

talks about the the good that overarches everything, he's talking about a rational superructure to the whole

reality that we find ourselves in. That's what Stoics call providence and it's what Aquinus is calling the eternal

law. I need you to distinguish though in your minds the eternal law from the divine

law. They look kind of similar on the surface because they both deal with the mind of God, but they are different.

Um well, I mean the the the divine law is part of the eternal law. Let's put it this way. All the divine law is

contained in the eternal law, but not all of the eternal law is contained in the divine law. Think about that for a

moment. So really, you can talk about the divine law as a subset of the eternal law. And for Aquinus, it's very

simple. It's kind of like the the published version of the eternal law. It's the subset of the eternal law that

gets written down in in divine revelation. And for him, this would have been the

Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament. That that is that comprises the the divine law.

for the sake of our class and for the sake of what we're focusing on. Um, the divine law is is is actually pretty

comprehensive. There's a lot of stuff in both the Old and New Testament, but in particular, Aquinas is focusing directly

on the Old Testament, what he would have called the Old Testament, what Jew Jews call the

Hebrew Bible, um, or just called they just call it the the scriptures or whatever. He he's focusing on the ten

commandments in particular. So if you don't know the ten commandments, I'm going to let you look those up. Um I

suspect you know most of them or many of them. Don't lie. Don't don't steal. Don't you know commit adultery. All

those basic um pre all those basic precepts of of the Judeo-Christian ethical system. Okay. So

that's the divine law. It's a subset of the eternal law.

Another subset of the eternal law is the natural law, which is of course our focus in this class. So, Aquinas is not

talking for the sake of what we're learning, he's not talking about the divine law.

Um, again, like I said before, it overlaps with the natural law. They're basically end up saying the same thing.

But he's not talking about the divine law which would be the subject for theologians to unpack the meaning of the

Old Testament etc etc. That's that's the proper subject of theology not of philosophy. And this is why I said at

the beginning really it's not fair to talk about Aquinas basing his arguments on his understanding of divine

revelation because that's not what he's doing here. He he's for our what we're doing he's focusing on the natural law

and the natural law is a is a theory of this eternal law as something that we can

discover through our intellects. That is to say through our rational reflection on common human

experience. So think about that for a second. Just like with the divine law, the natural law is a subset of the

eternal law. It's not co-extensive with it. It is a part of the eternal law. Why is that? Because our intellects are

finite. Our intellects are limited. We're not going to be able to comprehend the entire eternal law. To do that,

you'd have to be God. You'd have to be more than a finite human being. So he thinks we can come to really pretty

certain objective conclusions about the nature of things. and he thinks that those are a reflection of the eternal

law and that they are a subset of the eternal law but they're not the entirety of the eternal law. Okay. So just it's

what we can discover using our reason our reason is this sort of tool to understand the very nature of reality

and from that we can derive conclusions about how we ought to live our lives. Finally, there is the

human law. This one's pretty easy to understand. Um, it comprises all of the rules and regulations and laws of a

land, anything that has been laid down by a human being. So, you're probably asking yourself, well, what the heck is

the difference between this and the natural law? Well, the simple answer is nothing.

Um, it's it it comes from the natural law. It is a subset of the natural law as well as and this is much more

controversial which not everybody's going to be okay with I suspect but it's also a product of the divine law. So the

way Aquinas saw it because the divine law and the natural law say the same thing in different

words and because he's living in a Christian society, he believes that you can take the natural and the divine law

and put them together in order to derive concrete rules for how to live our lives here and now. Now, the the human law

that that and anything that you can think of that is a rule. Um, from the speed limit all the way down to the

rules I have for our classroom, which aren't very many, but I don't even know what they are to be honest with you, but

you know, rules about not cheating on exams, rules the college produces, um, all the way up to the rule that our

society has decided on that you shouldn't murder people. All of those are products on Aquinus's account of the

natural law. So hopefully you can see the logic of this. If you start all the way up at the eternal law, you can

reason all the way down to how we live our lives in a very detailed concrete fashion here and now. But hopefully you

can also see that for the way Aquinus sees things, the human law can never go against the natural law. It can never go

against the eternal law. Every law for it to be a legitimate law in Aquinas's understanding has to be a reflection of

the eternal law itself. One of the interesting effects of this way of looking at

law, well, there's two interesting effects. One is that for Aquinus, morality

and legislation really should never contradict one another. You should never be able to legislate something that is

immoral. Now this this has broadreaching ramifications. He literally says that a

law that is unjust is to say a law that goes against the natural law, the eternal law, the

divine law, all of those, all of the above, that's not actually a law, but is instead an act of violence. Why an act

of violence? because you you have to be like coercively so to speak going against the grain of nature. You have to

be forcing something forward to be able to promulgate an unjust law. Well, if it's not a law, then

nobody's beholden to it. So, not to not to already go to Nazi Germany, but if you're living in Nazi Germany and

they're they're um promulgating a law that discriminates or that that well, let's let's leave Nazi Germany out of

it. In our own society, we've had some very unjust laws at different times in history, and we probably still do. Well,

for Aquinus, those aren't actually laws, and you have every right, moral and otherwise, to be a to resist those laws

because the only kind of law that could ever be a true law is something that exists or something that is derived from

the eternal ordering of the cosmos in the mind of God. So, he even encourages civil

disobedience under very restricted circumstances. If something is immoral, you have a right to resist it. Okay,

I'll say a lot more about those things as we go forward about these different kinds of

laws, but hopefully you can see the the main thrust of it. The next thing we need to talk about

are inclinations. Inclinations are I've kind of already mentioned them. These are the

directedness of our of our natures, so to speak. So we talked about this with Aristotle.

Remember Aristotle thinks that there is such a thing as an objective human nature that is the way it is

independently about h of how we feel about it. Aquinus just takes up that idea

directly. He thinks that there are certain things that our nature is inclined toward. We're going to talk

about what those are. So he's he's saying the exact same thing as Aristotle, but he's going to give more

specific structure to it. He's going to tell us more specifically what those inclinations are. One thing I want to

pause here to like really emphasize when he talks about inclinations, you you got to adjust your

mind in this regard. He is not talking about how people feel about things. Obviously, when we use the word

inclination, we often think in terms of I I feel like going to the movies, so I'm inclined to go to the movies or I'm

inclined to go to class or I'm inclined not to go to class. That is a different understanding of inclination. It's not

what he means. People get this confused all the time in the discussion forum. They will accuse Aquinus of trying to

make a rule based on how people feel. And of course, how people feel varies from person to person. So that would be

ridiculous. It's literally like trying to come up with a a law about what kind of ice cream somebody likes. And it

would make no sense. It would be a totalitarian nonsense and an unjust thing to try to force people to feel

differently than how they actually feel. He's not talking about that. He's talking about how our natures inclined

independently of how we feel about it. So think of it like this. My heart my my the physical apparatus called a heart

works according to physics the laws of physics according to the way it's designed like the structure that it has

and it is going to function a certain way there's that word function from Aristotle's final cause independently of

whether I like that like it or not so my heart has an inclination to pump blood that is intrinsic to it and that is part

of its nature. And if you think about it, you go to a cardiologist, the cardiologist is going to give you advice

on what you ought to do based on what your heart inclines toward, not based on what you want it to be like. Yes, I

would love it if my heart functioned better because I eat crispy cream donuts and because I smoke and and drink and

and don't ever go go get exercise. That would be really nice if if my heart actually functions better

because of that. Or if I could just decide that my heart should function differently than what it

does. But the reality is the hard reality is it doesn't work that way. My heart functions the way it does because

of its structure. And so that's the inclination of my heart. I hope you understand that. That's the the basic

idea. Okay. So he's going to talk about inclinations. And then from inclinations you get precepts. Precepts

are fundamental norms from which all other norms can be derived. I'll say that again. These are

fundamental norms. That is to say ought statements that are the the sort of building block for every other kind of

um ought statement that you're going to make. So it's called a precept. It's kind of like a preconcept. It's just a

really basic building block. They're very, very general. They're so general that very few people

would disagree with them except maybe the second one that we'll look at. But nonetheless, they're derived directly

from the inclinations. So, I'm going to give you a really quick example. We're obviously going to go into a lot more

detail about this when we get to it, but if you think about he talks about the inclination to self-preservation, he

thinks that that is hardwired into us as well as every creature actually. That's the objective

inclination. From that, you can derive a really basic ought statement, namely that I ought to preserve life, my own

and others. Okay. So he just goes from is an is statement to an ought statement based on this kind of logic. The way

things are is the objective statement of inclination generates a logical ought statement. What you ought to do is the

way in which things objectively incline. This would be silly if it weren't for the fact that we have the

choice to do what goes against our nature. I guess is the way you would think about it. Okay, let's talk about

these two figures um in tandem with each other. I've already talked a little bit about it. So, you got Aquinus on the one

hand, this 13th century philosopher and theologian. If you know of any schools named the University of St. Thomas or

St. Thomas this or they're named after him. He's a real giant in the history of thought whether you agree with him or

not. Really smart guy. He only lived to be 41, 42 years old, died in a kind of tragic accident.

But he's kind of like this absent-minded philosopher. He was right. Apparently, he was riding along

on a burrow or a donkey. I guess they don't have burrows in Europe, but donkey on his way from one university to

another to give a a lecture and um he ran into a a tree branch that was hanging low and it

knocked him off his donkey. I mean, I don't want to say comical, but it's kind of farical how this happened.

Unfortunately, it killed him. Um so, that's that's kind of his story. But in the time that he lived, he was an

incredibly prolific guy. The Sumatloa, which is the the work that we're going to focus on, it's like 3,000 pages long.

So when you do the primary text reading and you're like sitting there thinking, man, this is really detailed and really

tedious. Um, just be thankful I didn't assign the whole thing. It's 3,000 of those pages.

Um, he also wrote a number of other works to boot. So like if you're sometimes I ask myself is like I've got

word processing. I've got all this ability to generate content and I can't even generate like a hundred pages of

the sort of work that he did and he did thousands of pages. The other figure is Aristotle which we've already talked

about. We don't need to talk too much more about him but just understand that he is utterly foundational for Aquinus's

work. There's the sumatologica and it in in that in a

little part of it he talks about the natural law as this moral code and he's he's resting a lot of his reasoning on

the arisatilian notion of there being purpose in nature. Everything has an end.

Everything is directed toward an end. It's no use trying to fight against those ends. And hence we have this

notion of law. Okay. And then here's I got to give you the the definition of law. Quinus's definition. It actually

makes sense. Law is nothing else than the ordination of reason for the common good. So in other words, ordination

there means our intellect looks at reality, understands it, and then generates rules for how to live in

accordance with nature and to bring about the common good. This is say the good of all human

beings. So it's it's universal in its scope. It's very similar to the the stoics. Remember the stoics thought the

way you find udeimmonia way you find happiness is to live in tune with the entire

cosmos. Okay. Well, Aquinus is another udeonistic thinker. He's going to give a twist to it, but nonetheless, that's

where he's coming. His is an objectivist theory of ethics. We talked a lot about that last

time in class, I believe. What does it mean to be an objectivist? I think somebody asked that question. Well, to

say that something is objective is to say that it acts like an object and not like a matter of subjective preference.

So, if I'm walking along and there's a if I'm walking along the sidewalk and there's a lamp post in the

sidewalk, I need I need to try to avoid that lamp post if I don't want to be hurt because it is an object that exists

independently of my mind and it exists independently of what I think about it. So, an objectivist theory of ethics says

that there is an objective reality that we can ground our behavior according to. What is objective about his theory of

ethics? Human nature, the essential features of what it means to be

human. Again, we talked about this before when we we actually did a whole discussion on is there a human nature?

We saw that all three of the previous theories we looked at assume and even argue for there being an objective human

nature that doesn't change is not malleable is not relative to time or place is not relative to preference is

not relative at all it's objective so one of the things I've seen with people when they do a

discussion online I used to have a discussion that asked people to evaluate Aquinus's theory and they almost always

accuse him of making rules that don't apply today because we think differently today. And I think the immediate obvious

comeback from someone like Aquinus would be that is a silly objection because I'm giving rules that are grounded in human

nature. Human nature itself doesn't change just because the time moves and it doesn't change from place to place.

So it's not relative or indexed to culture, but is instead universal and timeless. Now maybe we could argue that

that there is no human nature that doesn't change. But if you think of people that lived in Aquinus's time as

human beings, then the immediate philosophical argument would be then you think that there is a universal human

nature because otherwise you wouldn't be able to categorize them in the same category as human beings today. So it's

not going to be most things that fall under this category. Most things we do are culture

dependent, time bound relative to preference and etc etc. But there are a few things at least on Aquinus's account

that do not change from place to place or time to time. And those are what mean what what are meant by the term

human nature. And that's why it's objective. Now, you if you're going to take him

down, you don't want to say his rules are antiquated. That's that won't work. It's illogical because he's not making

that kind of argument. That would be a straw man attack on his argument. If you're going to try to take him down,

you're going to have to provide arguments for why each of the inclinations that he outlines are

actually incorrect or not actually part of universal human nature. So human nature is what's objective, not

duty, not consequences. We're going to see when we get into more modern philosophies that duty and consequences

become the two poles of moral reasoning. On the one hand, Kant talks about duty. On the other hand, the utilitarians talk

about consequences. Aquinus is talking about neither of those. Well, he's actually talking about both of those. He

does talk about duties and he does talk about consequences, but he folds them together in a in a ethics that is

focused instead on the structure of human nature. So we use our reason to reflect

on our human nature. We discover our tilos and our purpose and go from there.

we can then work to achieve the very thing that we've discerned through using our reason

are the the best ways to live our human lives. Okay. So, it's a discernment. It uses intellect and and reason, etc.,

etc. And, you know, it's it's it's very similar to what we've been looking at with these different thinkers. He's just

going to get a lot more detailed about it, which is part of what I think frustrates some people because not

everybody likes to be told what to do. I don't particularly like to be told what to do, but he's going to not hold any

punches and he's he has no problem with saying this is how you you want to be happy, this is how you have to live your

life. Okay, a little quick review of Aristotle. Remember the final causality we talked about? What is the purpose of

a knife? Well, you could probably answer this. It's not The purpose of a knife is

not to split firewood. It's not to drink from. It's not to brush your teeth with. I If I'm being ridiculous enough,

purpose of a knife is to cut. And everything for Aristotle has a purpose, has a final cause, and you're

going to figure out the good of something based on its purpose. So, if I bring you a knife that I don't know, I'm

trying to think of a ridiculous example. If I bring you a knife that is shaped like a

cup, you're you're going to look at it and say that's not going to do the job. That's not a good knife. That might be a

good cup. That is to say, something designed to hold water, but it's terrible as a knife. So, don't bring me

that again. Like likewise, if you say you want to brush your teeth and I bring you a

knife, you'd say that's not a very good toothbrush. That's a that's a a very very good good for cutting but not for

toothbrushing teeth. So that's all he's saying. You're going to find the supreme good in something based on its

purpose. That's the Greek word there for happiness, udeimmonia, which you're probably getting sick of hearing by now.

But the ultimate supreme good for all human beings according to Aristotle according to Plato according to the

stoics is udeimmonia and Aquinus believes that udeimmonia is our purpose but he's going

to redefine it for him simple natural udeimmonia wasn't enough and I I know

that this is where some people are going to jump off board and be like okay I was following you up to this point but I

can't go further. But if you remember when we talked about udeimmonia, especially with Aristotle,

one of the funny little features of this notion of a life well-lived is you can't really assess it until the end of your

life. You can't really assess it until after all things are said and done. It's like, well, how helpful is this as a

paradigm if I if I can't make sense of my own life here and now in terms of whether or not I'm achieving

udeimmonia? Well, Aquinus picks right up on that and this is where the Christian part of his thinking comes in. He says,

"Yeah, that's because we're we're destined for something more than just a natural existence. We're destined. We're

not going to find true happiness here and now, but instead we're going to find it in an

afterlife. So for Aquinus, the true happiness of human beings. You can find happiness, but it's a limited

provisional happiness in the natural realm. But he thinks that we alone amongst cre creatures have an eternal

destiny that is our ultimate purpose. And so this part does bleed admittedly bleeds a bit into theology, but he

thinks it's a a rational and a logical conclusion based on examining Aristotle and Plato just examining their

framework. And even Plato, you could see it. Plato talks about ascending out of the cave of ignorance toward the good.

But the good itself is immaterial and beyond all of our natural reality. Heck, it looks a lot like God in the

more Judeo-Christian framework. And that's exactly what Aquinas is picking up on. If you look at

all of the ancient philosophers, they all end up talking about some kind of eternal ideal order. And for Aquinus, he

sees this in Aristotle. And Aristotle struggles to put shape to what the ultimate good of human beings are is.

But he he seems to indicate it. It's something that goes beyond our ordinary natural existence. He just doesn't have

words for it. And Aquinus says, "Well, we know why you don't have words for it. Because you haven't had the benefit of

having the ultimate end of human beings confirmed by divine revelation." He's the reason Aristotle struggled is

because it requires things to be brought into even keener focus through an understanding of the divine order of

reality. So for Aquinus um perfection is not achievable in this life. I mean kind of makes sense. You're

never going to be quite there but it is achievable. It's just only achievable after death. And so for Aquinus, the

purpose of human life is to achieve perfection with God or more succinctly, eternal life with

God. That's ultimate human happiness. And he would say that all human strivings

ultimately are ordered toward that whether you realize it or not. And in so far as you fail

to in so far as you fail to connect with the divine source of your of your being, you will fail to find

happiness. So answers the question, what is our purpose? If the purpose of a knife is to cut and the supreme good of

a knife is its cutting ability, the question of what our purpose is on Aquinus's account is

answered by the notion of there being an eternal life with God. What are we designed for? We're designed for

that. Okay. So returning back to the inclinations and the

precepts, I'm going to talk about first about this gets a little bit confusing because we're going to talk

about primary precepts which are rooted in primary inclinations. But before you even get to

any of those primary precepts, there is a fundamental precept that is the main source of ethics itself.

Okay. So, it's just like the metaphysical first principle that you have to start with. Remember when we

were doing Aristotle, I started off with a discussion about why you were here or or why you were in the

classroom. We had to define something ultimate as a purpose to be able to talk about the more limited in individual

temporary purposes that lead us to that ultimate point. you have to start with an metaphysical ultimate principle to be

able to make sense of any of the more um derivative conclusions that you you come to. So if we're doing philosophy in

general, the first principle of philosophy is going to be the law of non-contradiction. The law of

non-contradiction states that something cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same way. That is

utterly basic. You can't have any rational thought or any rational discussion if you do not start from the

the principle of the law of non-contradiction. That is a metaphysical first principle for

rationality itself. So when Aristotle does his he writes a metaphysics he starts with that

with the princip the law of non-contradiction. If you think about it that what that is to philosophy this

fundamental precept is to moral philosophy. So the first principle the very utterly basic fundamental precept

of all moral thinking according to Aquinus is the basic notion of do good and avoid

evil. So it's kind of similar to Aristotle. Remember Aristotle's answer to the question of why you were here is

happiness. Everybody's always acting for happiness whether they realize it or not. And that's exactly why why you know

he starts with that because he wants to show that all moral striving has to do with the pursuit of happiness. Well, if

you remember, I pointed out a couple of different times that as we were coming

to a close of stoicism and arisatilian ethics, I pointed out that the ancient philosophies all um kind of operated

under this paradigm that the moral life is about finding happiness and that it's not really

asking so much about obligation. It's not talking so much about duty. It's not talking so much

about moral guilt and such things. This is where you see that turn away from that. Not away from it, but certainly a

modification of it. If we were in class, I think we did do this actually now that I think about it. I would have a whole

discussion about Oh, I we did do this. We'd have a whole discussion about um how somebody like Aristotle would

handle murder. And it became clear that like you could answer that question of why murder is wrong using Aristotle, but

it's kind of an unsatisfactory answer in some sense because it only talks about you and your

pursuit of happiness. So the caricatured version of it would be to say

um we shouldn't murder people. Well, you know, if you do it once, that's that's bad, but it's not ultimately, you know,

immoral in the deepest sense of things because it's not a habit. and only habits are bad

vices. So, you know, a caricature riskilian response might say something like, uh, don't make a habit of

murdering people because it's bad for you. You won't end up being happy. And, you know, like if you commit

murder, you're you're just not going to flourish as a person. that just doesn't seem to quite doesn't quite deal with

the I mean, I'm I'm speaking from a subjective point of view here, but it doesn't seem to quite deal with the

entirety of the moral gravity of something like murder or cheating or stealing or any of those things that

victimize other people. as somebody pointed out during our stoicism discussion, it's kind of like,

so I'm just trying to figure out how I can be happy and I don't have to care about what other people are dealing

with. Obviously, they didn't think that way, but the the basis isn't really there in their thinking for making sense

of it. Okay, so as a long kind of um digression, my my point here is Aquinus though he's drawing on Aristotle has

modified the first pre the fundamental precept of moral life and he's modified it in a direction of obligation and

guilt. It's not just that it's bad for you in terms of finding happiness to commit murder or any of those things.

It's also because it's cosmically bad. and you know it represents a disorder in the cosmos and it causes you to acrue

something like guilt because you don't follow your obligations. Okay. So that's the

fundamental precept of the natural moral law. Do good and avoid evil. You might be confused about things. You might be

intending to pursue good but actually pursue something evil. But nonetheless, he thinks that anybody who acts morally

is always at least trying to pursue the good and trying to avoid that which is evil. Okay, so that's the fundamental

precept. Don't get it twisted with the with the basic primary precepts. They are more derivative and they're they're

they're more that's the most general statement about morality in general. And then the the precepts themselves are

going to be more specific and they're going to be derived directly from an observation of human

nature. Okay, I'm kind of getting redundant here. I think this is the part of the lecture that's not as edited

unfortunately. So for the arisatilian notion, there is this notion of a life well-lived. Quinus doesn't stop with

that. He instead thinks of the universe itself as having a structure that is created by

God and we are accountable to it. So we are accountable to it in the sense that we have an obligation to follow the the

the rules so to speak um and that that you're guilty if you don't. It's not just that you won't be

happy though you won't be. It's also because it's just wrong basically. So we see a kind of a mix here of the ancient

udeimmonistic theory of ethics and the more modern notions that are based on the notion of obligation and

guilt. You find both of them in the synthesis with Aquinas. But I would argue that this is kind of where it

starts to shift in our culture toward this more obligation centered and and you can hopefully see how this would be

connected to people who have more religious belief. Obviously they they think that the universe was created by

God a certain way that to go against that is to go against the will of God which is I I can't think of a more

fundamental definition of something being immoral than to disobey the will of God as as communicated in this case

through the structure of the cosmos itself. Okay. Basic inclinations. So, like I said, there's a

reasoning here. There's a logical process here. The logical process starts with objective statements about what

human nature is inclined toward. From those inclinations, he is going to derive in a

logical fashion the precepts that is to say the the ought statements about how we ought to live. So, let's go through

the first the basic human inclinations first. Then we'll look at the precepts. First inclination, as basic as

it gets, the inclination to preserve life. Think of this more at even more basic level. This this sounds like an

inclination to preserve other people's lives, etc. He's not saying that quite yet. He just means that you have an

inclination to continue to exist. In fact, that's part of the definition of life. Life is according to Aristotle,

according to um Aquinus, according to many others the tendency of of a particular

kind of material organization to reach out and grab onto its environment and and consume it and convert it into

energy in order to continue in existence as the kind of thing it is. That's a very abstract statement, but it's really

basic. when you do anything, when you get up in the morning, when you eat, when you uh

when when people reproduce and have children, any any of those things, those are rooted in this basic preser

self-preservation instinct. So, as you can probably understand immediately, he's not going

to thinks that somebody who subjectively, you know, wants to commit suicide, as tragic as that is, somebody

who subjectively feels that way is is subjectively feeling in a way that cuts against the ve their very nature at

the basement level. Our natures are inclined to continue to exist. Our cells function in order to continue to exist.

At least that's the the entire thrust of nature. And so to go against that is going to be like immediately an

aberration. And uh and I I think probably most people feel that way. Like if you look at somebody who wants to

commit suicide, it's really tragic that there's something just really off about wanting to end your

life while you are alive because you you have um a natural inclination to continue to

exist in your nature, not not in how you feel. We could argue about that, but I think most people at least recognize

that there's something very tragic about that. So that's the first inclination. Second inclination is actually related

to it. Um obviously he's talking about living things here but the inclination

to reproduce. Pass on your genes. You didn't know about genes but to pass on

to pass on your life. I mean you can see how this is connected to the inclination to preserve life. It's kind of like that

individual inclination spills out into an inclination to pass on life to another generation. It's like the writ

large in the cosmos is an inclination and a thrust to continue in existence. So the inclination to

reproduce is very folded into the very nature of human beings um as organisms. Obviously, we're going

to have to dance around a little bit some of the issues that come out of that because not everybody feels like

reproducing and it does he's not saying you need to go reproduce at every moment as many times as you can. There's going

to be constraints to this. But he does think it's a fundamental inclination of human nature. Even if you feel

differently than that, you're going against your nature, which obviously you're not going to be a big fan of.

If you notice the first two inclinations, they're both things that we have in common with the with other

animals and the other organisms in the natural world. Those are kind of like the animal part of our nature, so to

speak. They they're that fundamental and that that basic. When I look at my dog, and I'm he's sitting here right beside

me right now, aren't you, Newman? Yes, you are. He um he has an inclination to preserve his life. He told me all about

it this morning when I didn't feed him right away. Um, and he has an inclination to reproduce, which came

became abundantly clear when he ran off with a husky a couple weeks ago that snuck into my kitchen while I had the

door open. Ended up having to track him down a couple days later. Anyway, we don't need to get into the details of

that. It's not hard to see that those two inclinations are very deeply folded into nature itself and living organisms.

The third inclination, however, this one is the uniquely human inclination. The inclination to gain

knowledge and live in society. Um, now you're probably looking at that, you're like, well, that sounds

like two inclinations. And I kind of agree, but he he's really just saying that these both of these are rational

inclinations. For Aristotle, for Aquinus, human beings are distinct from

other organisms in so far as they are rational. We have the ability to think about our lives in an abstract way. We

communicate using symbols. Symbols involve abstractions. We have senses of humor.

If you ever think about it, like a sense of humor requires abstract thinking. We set goals, intentional goals for

ourselves. Why are you even listening to this lecture right now? I I presume there's other things that would be more

entertaining for you to do, but you have a rational sense of a a higher goal that you're ordered toward. And most

importantly for what we're talking about, human beings make ethical choices because we are rational beings.

It doesn't make sense to talk about a lion as being unethical because it and the male lion comes in and hunts down

the cubs of the previous lion and kills and eats them, which they do, by the way. I don't know if you knew that.

That's a that's a fundamental thing that lions do. It looks horrifying to us, but it it just makes no sense to talk about

them having made an ethical choice there. They're not guilty or innocent. They just are.

Well, that's because of our our our rationality that we have all these features of our lives that that involve

abstract thinking. So the third inclination is rooted in that we have an inclination to gain knowledge as I say

to to think about things abstractly and to gain that knowledge. Now, obviously, some people are not going to feel that

way, but again, subjective feelings don't really matter here. He would argue they need to attune how they feel to the

objective fundamental part of being human. And we also live in complex societies and civilizations that we are

the only entity that I know of that organizes itself around ideas. Think about that for a second. We

organize ourselves into schools, universities, corporations, clubs, all manner of

things that are voluntary associations. Meaning we choose to organize ourselves around something that is itself not

physical but is instead abstract. So our in our inclination to live in society is very different from

the way in which say an ant lives in a community of other ants. Um, they also have complex

organizations, but they're not the same thing because there isn't intentionality and there isn't conscious that we know

of anyway, conscious apprehension of what they're doing. Okay, let's talk about the precepts of

the natural law. So, following this logic, we've now outlined the basic structure of human nature.

Um, those are the three basic inclinations of being human. See how broad they are, how incredibly

general they are, open to a lot of interpretation and misinterpretation. We're going to have to do a lot of work

to make sense of how we put those to practice in how we live our lives. From those inclinations, we can

logically derive precepts, basic preliminary rules for how to live

your life. First primary precept because that's kind of redundant. So, but these are primary.

They're not fundamental. They're primary. Fundamental precept is do good and avoid evil.

The the first of the primary precepts, let me put it that way, is that we should preserve innocent human life and

not intentionally destroy it. Now, see how that's a lot more particular than just the inclination to

preserve life. Now, we have a a concrete obligation to preserve human life and not intentionally destroy it. We have a

lot of defining to do. What is account to be innocent? What do you mean by intentional? But

that's the basic one. And you can see how a lot of things are going to be derivable from that. Like the the rule

not to murder people, for example. Second primary precept, procreate and raise your

children. So he doesn't think you should just go around procreating willy-nilly. um

obviously and the reason for that is in part because it re you all these precepts imply one another. So the way a

human being is going to go about fulfilling the pime second primary precept is it's

going to have to accord with rationality and ethics. So whereas a dog might just reproduce as often as it possibly can

because it's on automatic pilot, we're going to make conscious choices about procreating and we're going to take into

account the good of the children as well as the good of all of society, etc., etc. So I want to like put that out

there right off the bat. Also, what comes with that is an obligation, a moral ob obligation to raise and educate

your children, basically to take care of your children. I hope nobody doesn't think that that's true. I I mean that

seems really basic. If you go and have children, you should try to take care of your kids. It really is that simple.

Now, I want to address something really quickly here which I will come back to. He is not saying that in order to be

happy, everybody has to be out there procreating. Um I know that you could kind of derive that from it. I think he

probably thinks in general you will be more happy, you will be happier if you do that. But it doesn't mean that like

everybody has to be procreating, everybody has to get married. It more means that you can't go against this. So

you can't go you can't do anything that would intentionally frustrate this just like you can't do anything to

intentionally destroy human innocent human life. And obviously so like he himself he was

a Catholic priest. He did not have children. So he does think that there are other goods that can override this

second primary precept. For him it was the supernatural good of well we don't have to get into the reasons for that.

The supernatural good of um being committed completely to his vocation to the church. That was the

main idea behind that and to be a witness of a different reality on the other side of this natural

existence. But that's that's the basic idea there. He was a Dominican frier. Dominicans were a religious order that

started in the Middle Ages and they're still around and he himself was part of that.

So he didn't have children. So if somebody is sterile, for example, it doesn't doesn't mean they can't they

can't get married or something like that or if somebody hasn't had the chance to get married. But I think he thinks that

there is like a a basic inclination there that you'll want to try to work with and not against.

Um finally the third precept well if it follow if it if our inclination is to pursue knowledge to

live in society it's pretty simple. pursue knowledge. There's your your ought statement. You have an obligation.

Pursue knowledge and an obligation to promote and maintain society. You don't get to just exempt

yourself from it. Right now, we're experiencing this horrible corona virus pandemic and these kind of like issues

are coming right to the surface that people don't just have an obligation to themselves and doing whatever they feel

like. Even if you don't mind getting Corona virus, at least this is the way most people see it, you have a further

obligation to protect other people in society and not go out and do things that you want to do just because you

want to do them. That's a fulfillment in Aquinus's understanding of the third primary

precept that you would take into account more than just yourself. And you see how this works in

tandem with the first two. That's your your your obligation to promote and maintain society is also

connected to your obligation to preserve life. And obviously procreation on his understanding and raising children

happens in a social context. You've heard the saying it takes a village to raise a child. Aquinus actually would

agree with that. These are all connected to each other. Procreating and raising children is pro-social and being

pro-social is fulfilling the third primary precept. So also like the fact that

you're doing this listening to this lecture right now even if you're doing it begrudgingly in some sense you're

fulfilling this third primary precept to pursue knowledge. It's not just a on his account, it's not

just a something that people do if they feel like it. It's something that everybody has a

responsibility to do. Now, obviously, not everybody has the context or the conditions or even the ability to go get

a high level university education, but that doesn't mean that you can't pursue knowledge in your own measure in your

concrete particular life. Okay, I'm going to end this part of the lecture here. pick up next time with the

secondary precepts where he gets much more specific about how to derive further rules and laws and norms for

life based on the primary precepts of the natural law.