Reading Group
5:30pm – 7:00pm, September 3, 10, 17, & 24.
All undergraduate and graduate students are warmly welcome.
Fundamental Principles of Ethics: Aquinas’s “Treatise on Action”
According to philosophers in the eudaemonist tradition, the fundamental question of ethics concerns the nature of happiness (eudaimonia), because happiness is the highest good. However, besides the nature of happiness, there are additional, secondary principles that we must also grasp in order to live the good life. Many of these secondary principles have to do with human actions: how actions are, and should be, ordered towards happiness and other goods. These are the principles of “action theory.” In his Treatise on Action, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) gives us one of the best and most influential accounts of action theory.
In this reading group, then, will consider some fundamental topics of action theory: the distinction between voluntary and involuntary acts; the the will (voluntas) as source of our actions; the circumstances of action and how they affect whether an action is voluntary or involuntary, good or bad; the nature of moral weakness and the extent to which it excuses agents from bad actions; the distinction between interior and exterior acts; and the fundamental criteria by which we judge one human action to be better or worse than another.
Led by Michael Lang (Ph.D. Candidate)
Email office@houstoninstitute.org for more information.
