A Concise History of Western Ethics
A Concise History of Western Ethics
San Agustin
Evil is not something positive, a positive reality, but a privation, a lack of good. Evil cannot be attributed to God, nor is it necessary to attribute it to a cause or principle of evil. Moral evil is a product of our free will inclined by original sin, physical evil is the result of moral evil, and ontological evil is the deprivation of perfection as opposed to divine perfection.
Property is a fundamental attribute of God, who possesses all possible perfections. That’s all we can be; we cannot be more. God is therefore maximally good and kind for Himself. All beings are good because they were created by God, and His perfection is reflected in them in a limited way.
Now, the virtues, for Augustine, will appear linked to the will. He understands virtue as the provision of the will that leads to love, understood as charity, which is to love God. It is a provision of the will that leads to extending love under the hierarchy of being. “Every man carries within himself the moral norms, while the exemplary is created by God” and one within himself is conscious of God as its author.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1224 – 1274)
Part of an Aristotelian basis, Aquinas believed that human activity is oriented to an end and that the ultimate end is the pursuit of happiness. The ultimate goal of man lies in the knowledge of God. Happiness is identified as salvation. Happiness is achieved through the practice of virtue. So, natural beings can achieve happiness through the practice of intellectual and moral virtues, but they also need the supernatural being of the theological virtues, which is necessary to overcome the evil impulse that is subject to original sin. Ethics leads to politics.
God directs all things to their supreme goal and orders necessary causes. Both continents, as well as the free action of man, are part of divine providence. There is eternal law, natural law, and positive law. A law is fair when it respects the rights that men have by nature and unfair when it violates them. The best form of government is a monarchy, which is easier to steer in the direction of achieving social peace. The optimum form of government is a mixture of aristocracy and democracy.
William of Ockham (1290 – 1350)
Ockham fought against the traditional metaphysics of universal essences as incompatible with faith in freedom and divine omnipotence. The attempt to safeguard the faith of reason separates definitively, breaking the scholastic synthesis of Santo Tomas. His system is based on the faith that God is omnipotent. God’s existence is the subject of faith.
He was the chief representative of nominalism, which is the denial of any extra-mental universal principle. The names we use to represent reality resemble it, but in themselves, they have no reality beyond our minds. We can only know what can be experienced or sensed.
God and everything related to the eternal salvation of man are inaccessible to reason. So, reason and faith are completely separate. Since there is nothing universal, there is no human nature on which moral principles are based. So, there is no rational criterion for differentiating between what is good and what is wrong. One can only bow to the will of God.
One can only bow to the will of God. What God wills is good, and what God has designated as bad is bad.
Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)
Salvation is understood as a free gift of God, whose spirit transforms the believer. Luther argued that faith alone saves. Good works are a result of a redeemed heart, not a cause of salvation. He states that salvation is pure grace.
The most radical version of this, Calvinism, takes the theory of predestination: man by himself cannot do anything to save himself, either by faith or by good works. From before birth, God has chosen whether a person will be saved or condemned, and man cannot do anything about it. It is believed that the elect, or those saved by God, are those who lead a virtuous, sinless life and have wealth and material success.
David Hume (1711 – 1776)
His theory is known as moral emotivism. The underpinning of morality cannot be sought in God because we cannot know God’s existence. Reason only serves to establish facts or relations between them. Morality is not the object of understanding but of feeling. One might not feel that they are a moral being. To establish a kind of moral code is the same as human nature, common to all, and custom dictates a set of moral laws that are tantamount to physical laws. Moral qualities are equivalent to those sensible qualities that are perceived by sentient beings. A natural instinct makes us differentiate between pleasantness and unpleasantness.
All human action tends to happiness, but there is no good or bad in themselves. The criterion for discerning good and moral evil is the usefulness and enjoyment or annoyance that actions cause us. The foundation of moral order is the sympathy that comes from the demonstrations of joy or pain that others cause us. Every quality that is approved of by mankind is virtuous, and every quality that is the subject of general condemnation or censure is vicious. Approval or disapproval depends on whether something is helpful or harmful to individual and social life.
Virtue is determined by sentiment. Vice is the opposite. The moral virtues are divided into: