Medieval Philosophy by Andrew W Arlig;

Author:Andrew W Arlig;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

I have said that the technical notion of an “infused” virtue is something that we see most clearly in Western scholasticism. But notice the affinities between Aquinas’s reasoning here and al-Ghazali’s account of how we are able to escape from skepticism and move forward with certainty (Section 2.3). Both of them argue that at some point, if left on our own, we will get stuck. We won’t have the confidence and conviction to embrace the starting points of an intellectual investigation, and as Aquinas notes here, we won’t have the motivation to persist on the path of righteousness. God needs to swoop in and tinker with our souls, so that the dim becomes clear and the indifferent or even undesirable becomes the only thing to aim at.

Here I can only gesture at a huge debate that develops in scholasticism between the so-called intellectualists and the so-called voluntarists. (These labels, incidentally, are given by contemporary scholars who study these debates. I know of no scholastic who used these labels.) Aquinas seems to be claiming that God makes it so that my will sees that the only rational way forward is to aim at God and God alone. This comes very close to entailing that reason forces or compels the will to choose the path toward God. (Compare this to what we said about certainty in Chapter 2, especially in Section 2.2.) Other scholastics thought that this was tantamount to God undermining our free will. John Duns Scotus (1308) and others stressed the importance of the freedom of the will. The will is so free, they thought, that it could even make the obviously irrational choice.3

Let that suffice for a brief tour of medieval Aristotelian thinking about the virtues. We can already see how the Aristotelian focus on virtues as the development of potentialities that we have due to what and how we are, helps these philosophers distinguish those aspects of human beings that are distinctive of humans from those aspects that we share with other creatures. Like all plants and animals, we take in water and nutrients, we metabolize them, and we perpetuate the species through the act of reproduction. Like other animals, we move about, which requires that we have sense organs. Some higher-order animals even seem to have memory, which allows them to solve practical problems and to be trained. According to Aristotle, what sets us apart from all other embodied animate creatures is our capacity to reason, and in particular, to reason theoretically. As we will see below, the capacities that make us distinctive as human beings, will give us crucial information when it comes to identifying the way of life that will be most meaningful for us.

But before we turn to that, let me make a couple of brief observations about how Aristotelian virtue ethics differs from many of the dominant contemporary ways of thinking about ethics.

Many philosophers nowadays, following an argument associated most famously with the British philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958), think that you cannot derive ethical insights from natures.

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