Reading Group
6:15pm — 7:45pm, September 3, 10, & 17
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, we will consider the following questions: How are human actions different from the activities of other living things? What is ethics really about? What is the “will”, and how does it figure in ethics? How do we make decisions, and how should we? What are fundamental criteria for deciding whether an action is good or bad, just or unjust, etc.?
Led by Michael Lang (Ph.D. Candidate)
Email office@houstoninstitute.org for more information.
