Aquinas argues that practical reasoning requires foundations: first practical principles (ultimate ends) grasped by us per se from which deliberation proceeds. Contrary to the thesis of an important paper of Terence Irwin's, I deny that Aquinas advances two inconsistent conceptions of the scope of deliberation and, correspondingly, two inconsistent accounts of the content of the first practical principles presupposed by deliberation. On my account, Aquinas consistently takes first practical principles to be highly abstract, general, or formal ends, ends subject to (...) specification and determination by a process of reasoning. Aquinas therefore gives deliberation wide scope, allowing (indeed, requiring) it not only to settle for us the things that are for the sake of our ends but also to engage in determining in important respects what our ends are. Accordingly, I conclude that Aquinas's foundations in ethics are “thin.” Our natural grasp of first practical principles gives us very little in the way substantive ethical principles. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of Thomas Aquinas’s and Godfrey of Fontaines’s moral philosophies. In this study, I conduct a detailed analysis of two Aristotelian commitments concerning the character virtues, namely, The Plurality of the Character Virtues and The Connection of the Character Virtues. Both Aquinas and Godfrey think that there are many distinct character virtues, however, one cannot possess these character virtues in separation from each other. In Chapter I, it is established that Aquinas believes in the plurality of (...) the character virtues not because of a specific account of the human soul, but because he is committed to a plurality in what he calls “the notion of goodness.” In Chapter II, it is argued that Aquinas’s account of virtuous action requires that there be a likeness between a person and their actions in terms of the notion of goodness explored in Chapter I. Chapters III through V lay out my account of how to reconstruct both Aquinas’s and Godfrey’s arguments for The Connection of the Character Virtues. The focus here lies on finding an interpretation that provides a valid argument for the connection of the character virtues. I argue that we ought to focus on a dependence between prudence and the character virtues. A central problem for this analysis is how to account for prudence as a unified virtue. On this issue, Godfrey provides an explicit argument that conceives of prudence as unified because prudence strikes a balance between the character virtues. Chapter VI investigates whether different groups, such as men and women, possess different types of character virtues. Godfrey offers a novel argument for the impossibility of male- and female-specific virtues. Finally, Chapter VII explores the question of how we should understand Godfrey’s account of prudence itself. I show that his discussion emphasizes the variable nature of ethics and that he endorses a view that has certain affinities with ethical particularism. (shrink)