Aquinas’ Natural moral law
- to start with everything i know abt Aquinas
- ‘the mind of man making moral judegement’ - start with this
- Natural law theory posits that God has designed humans with moral behaviours, leading us to naturally gravitate towards certain ethical actions.
- Aquinas asserts that reason possesses the ability to discern fundamental judgement known as synderesis.
- “This therefore is the principle of law: that good must be done and evil avoided.”
Secondary precepts & conscientia
- The primary precepts are to protect and preserve human life, educate, reproduce, live in an orderly society and worship God.
- It also has a power called conscientia, which allows us to apply the primary precepts to moral actions/situations and figure out what we should do. = know as secondary precpets
- Conscience is the whole process of synderesis and conscientia together.
- Our reason knows which actions are good and which are bad, and causes us to feel guilty if we do something we know to be bad.
Aquinas’ view of the conscience
- Conscience is ratio (reason) - a tool that allows us to know God natural law and the divine truth.
- Humans have an innate capacity to know the difference between right and wrong. Every person has a conscience, however this alone is not enough to make a person virtuous. Humans need God’s grace as well as conscience.
- features of conscience:
- Witness – by knowing whether we have done something or not done.
- Bind & incite – “through the conscience we judge that something should be done or not done”
- Accuse, torment & rebuke – “by conscience we judge that something done is well done or ill done
- This is how the conscience causes guilt. Conscience is our ability to know whether we have done something, and if its was done well.
Ratio
the ability to discern/make moral judgements
- To understand conscience you must understand ratio (reason) - an act of working things out - helps us to get to our eternal realm - similar to ‘Jesus the rebel’ = reaches beyond what is socially accdeptable to a higher morality
- ratio is fundamental part on how humans were created (imago dei) - “God created mankind in his own image.” Genesis 1:27
- Humans are special, e.g. imagination,intellect, creative, complex etc
- distinguishes from other animals
- St Augustine of Hippo said that reason, intellect and the mind were all one power in human beings, yet Aquinas distinguishes ratio as separate.
Arendt on Ratio
- Arendt, writing about the Holocaust, argues that when the norms of society become profoundly immoral you must reject them.
- “Human beings to be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own moral judgement”
Synderesis
- the direction of doing good
- but Sensuality within each of us that tempts us towards evil, e.g. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - only gods grace can save us
- we can use ratio to cultivate the habit of synderesis
conscience
Conscienta
- Some people think of it as a spark of moral wisdom
- our reason makES the right decision. Reasoning starts with the understanding of the principles naturally known and moves to intellectual activity making judgements.
- “Conscience is an act”
- For example moving from the Primary to Secondary Precepts - Preservation of human life= Do not murder.
- Conscience is ‘reason making right decisions’, Summa Theologica
AQUINAS ON IGNORANCE
- Conscience is falliable,(not perfect) even though it gets mistaken (aquinas dOEs not recognise that)
- To go against reason is always wrong
- ‘Everything that does not come from faith is sin’ Romans 14:23
- Humans are able to discern the correct action through their reason
- Yet humans make mistakes as their ratio involves knowledge
- Whether errors in conscience that lead to sinful acts will be forgiven or pardoned depends on the type of ignorance that caused the error.
There are two types of ignorance = vincible/invisbible
Vincible ignorance
Blameworthy
Vincible ignorance:
- Lack of knowledge for which a person is held responsible: they should have known better.
- Making mistakes when tempted by sensuality or not educating yourself on a mater.
- e.g. euthansaia
Invincible ignorance
Not Blameworthy
- Involves circumstances where a person could not have known better and so are not to blame for their action.
- Making a mistake when you have educated yourself fully in the matter and believing you are doing the right thing.
- Aquinas does not believe that God will condemn humans for invincible ignorance
Cardinal Newman on Ignorance
“Conscience is the voice of the lawgiver…”
* we know what is right/wrong through illative (guilt) - links to freud and aquains
* Stressing the importance of obedience to conscience
* conscience is a messenger from God
Criticism on Aquinas view on Conscience
- pros: highly influential view supported
- explains why conscience can sometimes ccan be incorrect
- open to everyone
- X: assumes good and evil is the same for everyone
- Shame, guilt, past regrets etc all impact our decision-making
- Aquinas is too optimistic about human nature. If you consider the terrible things that humans have done e.g. slavery and Nazism - cant say that conscience helps with desion making
Freud’s psychological approach to conscience
- Provides an aletrnative account to conscience in his book:An Outline of Psychoanalysis and The Ego and the Id
- Conscience is not based on rational decision-making but is a product of psychological factors that influence human beings in ways that may/may not be healthy
- Freud believed the mind was divided into the 3:
- Id (our unconscious part = seeks immediate gratification)
- Ego (Our conscious decision-making self = teachings of parents/society)
- the Super Ego (dominates the ego, based on behaviourism = leads to a person acting to please authority figures during childhood. It stops us from breaking rules due to the guilt/ fear of punishment) = he saw the suoerego as an aspect of conscience
‘ego..jUDGES IT AND THREATENS IT’
similar to arisitole souls
Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual development
- Freud thought children had to learn to control the Id in stages. If self-control is not learned at each stage, it can lead to problems later in life:
- Oral stage – the stage at which babies learn to interact with the world through putting things in their mouth.
- Anal stage – children must learn to control going to the toilet – they can control too much or little.
- Phallic stage – concerned with absence of sexual motivation.
- Genital stage – Controlled sexual desires result in a desire for love and marriage.
Our minds are completely unique. Every conscience is different
Supporting scholars of Frued
Bababra Engler
- Bababra Engler = ‘In disucssing the Id, ego and super ego, we must keep in mind that these are not three seperate entities, but rather that they represent a variety of different processes & functions within a person’ - Personality Theories
- supproting the notion that Our minds are completely unique. Every conscience is different
Frueds dimensions
- conscience has both a mature/immature dimension
- Mature dimension: Healthy, identifies the ego, concerned with right and wrong acts. = looks outward to the future
- Immature dimension: guilty feelings, little rational importance
non-religious views on conscience
piagment
- proposed a universal series of stages throughout childhood
- two different stages of morality: heteronomus = child looks beyond self moral authority/immoral - told what to do
- autonomus: personal code
- their views are over inflicted ^
Evaluation of Freud:
pros:
- recognises the importance of childhood
- explains why our morals our different - parents = rough bringing? /enviornments /cultures - aquains doesnt recgonise this
weakness:
- Freud has been criticised by contemporary psychologists for not being empirical enough.
- Freud is not a proper scientist – he didn’t do any real experiments, he studied a small sample size of people who were not a good cross-section of society.
- Because of this, Popper (inventor of falsificationism theory) said Freud’s theories were ‘unfalsifiable’ – not real science. There was no way to prove them wrong because they were not based on reality.
Comparing Freud and Aquinas
(ON GUILT)
both
- Guilt
- The presence of God within the working of the
conscience.
- The process of the moral decision making.
- For Aquinas, guilt is a sense of not being in acordance with the divine law
- consequence of sin are damaging as they disrupt a persons relationship with God.
- But guilt is good as it helps us to know about our sin and restore a proper relationship
- God grace helps to forgive us
Frued:
- Guilt is a result of internal conflict: the struggle bewteen what you desire and what you should/shouldnt do.
- Guilt can cause bad things
Freud’s critique of religion’s approach to developing the conscience
- Freud argues that the better approach for society would be autonomy.
- Freud claims this is because the religious approach to conscience is external imposition by authority, similar to how children are treated, the result being comparable to a ‘childhood neurosis
- Although rules are in place to reduce suffering,they also cause suffering through repression
- People can rationally understand that repressing their instincts is for the good of social order, making them capable of choosing autonomously to follow social rules.
- This makes them more likely to happily accept and follow them.
- Freud concludes that society would be much better off if it could admit that the purpose of its social rules is the maintenance of social order, rather than their “pretended sanctity”.
Aquinas’ natural law ethics arguably gets around Freud’s critique
- Aquinas thought that following of the natural law did involve the engagement of a person’s rationality with God’s eternal law in a way that enabled their virtue and flourishing.
- It’s not simply externally imposed and there is a degree of flexibility in the application of the primary precepts and use of the double effect.
Perhaps Freud’s critique only really works against approaches to the conscience like Augustine’s where it simply involves an external imposition of God’s law
