Aquinas as Reconciling Plato and Aristotle, Gaita and Williams/Nussbaum

    Every time I think about the role of virtues in human life, I return to the issue between Plato and Aristotle, between Gaita and thinkers like Martha Nussbaum or Bernard Williams: whether the Good=Morality is independent from consequences and considerations of human excellence. A person should never torture another human being, period, no matter what, for example. Aristotle said only someone wanting to defend a thesis at any cost could belief that consequences for one’s life were unconnected to ethics. I keep wondering whether Aquinas actually reconciled morality as absolute with morality as what makes human beings good human beings. I suppose the fact of death and its implications for meaning are part of this. I think the Platonic-Gaita position involves other-worldly or religious commitments the non-reductive naturalist view (Gaita's term for MacIntyre) doesn't, and so I suspect the real disagreement is metaphysical-ontological-religious.

      The deepest disagreement here is not about a few virtues, or even about whether consequences matter, but about what reality is like and therefore what kind of force morality can have. Aquinas is important because he tries to hold together two things that later thought often split apart: morality as unconditional (Socrates/Jesus) and morality as the path to human flourishing (Aristotle). His ethics is neither “Aristotelian virtue ethics” nor simply a morality of absolute rules; it is an attempt to show that practical reason, virtue, natural law, beatitude, and the order of Creation belong to one intelligible whole.

       The Platonic-Gaita side stresses that morality has an authority not reducible to flourishing, social success, or any inventory of natural excellences. This must be true. Evil can remain evil even when it “works,” and the dignity or preciousness of persons is not exhausted by their place in a naturalistic picture of human flourishing. Gaita’s defends an absolute conception of good and evil, centered on the preciousness of each human being and on moral responses such as remorse, love, truthfulness, and reverence. Bernard Williams, by contrast, resists the “morality system” and works within a kind of anti-Platonic, anti-reductive naturalism concerned with integrity, motivation, and the fit between ethical reflection and human life as actually lived. Martha Nussbaum also keeps ethics closely connected to human powers, vulnerability, and flourishing.

      Aristotle thinks it implausible to separate the good from what perfects human beings as the kinds of beings they are. In the standard interpretation, he rejects Plato’s stronger claim that one needs philosophical ascent to grasp the Form of the Good to be virtuous; ethical understanding rather requires habituation, moral formation, and practical wisdom about how the goods of a human life fit together. Ethical virtue, on this view, is already a complex rational, emotional, and social excellence, and practical wisdom cannot be acquired by general rules alone.

    Aquinas takes over that Aristotelian framework. He agrees that human beings have a natural end, that virtues are perfections of our powers, and that practical reason begins from the first principle that good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided. He also says that the virtues make us capable of good action and are necessary to living well; prudence in particular is “most necessary for human life” because good living requires not just doing the right thing but doing it by right choice. So far, he looks like an Aristotelian perfectionist: morality is about becoming a good kind of human being.

      But Aquinas does not stop there, and this is where the Thomist reconciliation becomes possible. For him, our natural flourishing is real but not self-sufficient. Human beings are ordered beyond themselves to beatitude, and the full perfection of human life is not attainable within merely natural limits. That is why Aquinas distinguishes acquired virtues (the cardinal or moral virtues: courage, temperance, justice, wisdom) from infused virtues (the theological virtues of hope, faith, love). Human moral virtues perfect us as beings moved by reason; the theological virtues, gifts of grace, perfect us as beings moved by God. So Aquinas’s account of flourishing is already stretched beyond non-reductive naturalism.

    Aquinas does not reconcile the two sides by reducing one to the other. He does not say morality is “really just” what promotes ordinary human excellence. Nor does he say morality is a set of sheer absolutes hanging in the air with no relation to creaturely good. He says rather that what is morally true is grounded practical reason as understanding real goods, but those goods are themselves placed within a richer metaphysical and theological account of Creation and beatitude. The “absolute” dimension of morality is not alien to flourishing; it comes from the fact that flourishing itself is understood in light of the good as created and ultimately fulfilled in Christ.

     Thus Aquinas can speak in a way that sounds both Aristotelian and anti-consequentialist. On the one hand, virtues are the ingrained predispositions by which a person becomes good and lives well. On the other hand, some kinds of action are excluded because they are contrary to reason and to the goods that practical reason grasps. In a Thomist framework, the fact that something might produce short-run advantages does not settle whether it is compatible with the real good of the person. Dishonesty, cruelty, adultery, or murder may “pay,” but they deform the agent and violate Creation/moral reality. The force of moral absolutes comes not from their floating free of human good, but from their expressing the non-negotiable structure of goods constitutive of human fulfillment rightly understood.

      Where Gaita goes beyond Aristotle is that he understands morality as revealing something unconditional about the worth of persons and the meanings of remorse, love, and evil. A merely naturalized ethics can’t account for why some acts are not just failures of excellence but profanations. I think death matters here. If death is final and the world has no deeper teleological or religious order, then the claim that morality is absolute can begin to look metaphysically unsupported or at least mysterious. One can still defend moral realism, dignity, or irreducible reasons, of course, but one has to do so without the full ontological backdrop that Plato or Christianity supplies. That is one reason the dispute often migrates from ethics into metaphysics.

      This also clarifies the Williams/Nussbaum side. Their worry is often not “morality is unreal,” but that certain moral pictures become alienating, abstract, or inhuman when detached from actual human life, luck, vulnerability, attachment, tragedy, and the plurality of goods. That is a fair point. Williams rejects codified moral theory and stresses integrity and the complexity of ethical life. Nussbaum’s work keeps ethical reflection close to the fragile, embodied, socially embedded conditions of human flourishing. So their criticism is often aimed less at goodness itself than at a certain style of moralism that overlooks contingency and the texture of lived life.

      A Thomist reply can partly absorb that criticism. Aquinas is much less abstract than modern deontology. He insists on virtue, formation, prudence, circumstance, passion, habituation, friendship, law, and community. He agrees that reasoning well about action requires a rightly formed character. He is therefore not vulnerable in quite the same way as a morality of bare obligation (i.e. Kant, William’s true target). But Thomism also resists Williams at a decisive point: for Aquinas, ethical life does not bottom out in integrity alone, or in whatever one can sincerely own from within one’s motivational set. Practical reason is answerable to goods that are objective, and in the end to a reality not constituted by our projects.

      So can the two positions be reconciled in a Thomist framework? I would say: yes, but only by redefining both sides. Thomism can say to the Aristotelian naturalist: you are right that morality is intimately connected with human flourishing, virtue, and excellence. And it can say to the Platonic-Gaita side: you are right that morality has an authority not reducible to success, pleasure, social function, or even merely immanent flourishing. The reconciliation comes by claiming that the human good is not a self-enclosed naturalistic category. Human flourishing is real, but its full truth points beyond itself. In Thomism, morality is absolute because the good is not just “what suits our nature” in a thin biological or social sense; it is what perfects rational creatures ordered to truth and ultimately to God.

      That is also why death matters so much. If the human vocation terminates in death alone, then tragedy has the last word, and morality can seem disconnected from fulfillment except in a noble but austere sense. In Aquinas, by contrast, death does not nullify the connection between goodness and flourishing; it reveals that merely earthly flourishing was never the whole story. Beatitude completes what natural virtue begins. In that framework, the martyr is not a counterexample to the unity of morality and flourishing; he is the most radical witness to it.

    Thus the real debate is not “virtue ethics versus morality,” but whether the goodness disclosed in morality is fully intelligible within an worldly, naturalistic account of human excellence. Aristotle says more than many modern naturalists, but less than Plato and Christianity. Gaita sees that morality discloses something absolute, which remains a mystery for him. Aquinas tries to show why that absoluteness does not abolish the link with human flourishing, because human flourishing itself is metaphysically deeper than non-reductive naturalism allows.

. . .

So what is left of the Good=Morality when you subtract God out? As Gaita wants to do? Coming back with this question to The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky dramatizes the same philosophical tension I have been describing: if God is removed, what remains of the claim that goodness has absolute authority over us?

      Gaita shows that certain moral realities such as innocence, cruelty, remorse, and the preciousness of persons have a kind of absolute significance. When we encounter radical evil (torturing a child, Auschwitz, Ivan Karamazov’s stories), we do not merely say: “this undermines human flourishing” or “this violates a social contract.” We experience something more like moral horror or profanation. The act seems wrong in a way that is not dependent on consequences, preferences, or human conventions. Gaita’s project is to argue that this experience of moral absoluteness is real, but it does not require belief in God. So he wants to keep the moral phenomenology while subtracting the theological framework, which I think he treats as a kind of picture (in Wittgenstein’s sense) of a reality beyond our comprehension.

      In The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan Karamazov in an early scene in the novel voices the suspicion that it cannot. His famous formulation is roughly: If God (immorality) does not exist, everything is permitted. Ivan does not mean people would suddenly behave badly. He means something deeper: Without God, it becomes difficult to explain why moral prohibitions have absolute authority. They may remain psychologically powerful or socially useful, but their ultimate grounding ceases to be considered real.

     Several possibilities remain, and modern philosophy has explored all of them. Some philosophers claim that moral truths simply exist as objective facts, somewhat like mathematical truths. Cruelty is wrong in itself, independently of God or human opinion. But this raises questions: What kind of reality do moral facts have? Why should they bind us? This is the metaphysical puzzle Ivan is pointing toward.

      Another approach says morality arises from the conditions of human life. Human beings are vulnerable, social, dependent creatures. Practices like honesty, justice, and compassion are necessary for our flourishing. This is roughly the Aristotelian / non-reductive naturalist route (Nussbaum). But if morality is based on flourishing, what happens when flourishing conflicts with morality? Gaita’s examples are designed exactly for that case. For Ivan that seems like self-indulgence given the scandal of human evil.

     Some modern theories say moral judgments express deep emotional commitments rather than objective truths. But that seems unable to account for the seriousness of moral condemnation. It makes Ivan’s rebellion look like a strong preference rather than a profound protest.

    Thomas Aquinas avoids the dilemma. He does not say that morality = divine commands. Nor does he say that morality = human flourishing alone. Rather he argues that human beings have a natural orientation toward goods (truth, life, friendship, justice). Practical reason recognizes these goods as intrinsically worthwhile. These goods ultimately participate in the divine order of creation. So morality is both the path to human flourishing and the participation in a deeper order of goodness. Remove God, and the second dimension disappears. The remaining question is whether the first dimension can still support the full weight of moral obligation.

   Dostoevsky does not argue philosophically that morality collapses without God. He does show that when belief in God collapses, human beings tend to seek substitutes, whether in ideology, revolutionary justice, nihilism, power, or self-assertion. Ivan’s intellectual rebellion eventually produces psychological disintegration. Meanwhile Alyosha Karamazov represents another response: goodness grounded in love and reverence for persons. The novel show that love of neighbor ultimately points beyond itself.

    Without God, moral experience – the sense that cruelty and injustice are truly wrong – remains. Virtue ethics – the idea that certain qualities make a human life admirable – also remains. And human solidarity – compassion grounded in shared vulnerability – can perhaps also survive the death of God. What becomes fragile is the claim that morality has ultimate authority independent of all consequences. That is precisely Ivan’s torment.

     If death is final, then the universe may not guarantee that goodness and fulfillment coincide. The righteous may suffer and perish. The wicked may flourish. Plato, Christianity, and Dostoevsky all respond by saying: the moral order of reality extends beyond the visible life of the world. Without that horizon, the unity of goodness and happiness becomes much harder to defend. Is morality a feature of human flourishing, a fundamental aspect of reality, or both? Aristotle emphasizes the first, Plato the second. Aquinas tries to unite them. Dostoevsky explores what happens when people try to live with the first option alone. And it may be that the deepest point of The Brothers Karamazov is not to answer it abstractly but to show that the question itself touches the foundations of how a human being lives.

. . .

     The Thomistic idea that grace perfects nature is actually one of the key places where Aquinas tries to hold together the tension between Aristotelian flourishing and the Platonic / Christian sense of moral absoluteness. For Aristotle, morality is intelligible because human beings have a nature. We are rational, social, truth-seeking animals. Certain excellences perfect these powers: e.g., honesty perfects truthfulness in speech; justice perfects our social nature; courage perfects our response to danger; temperance perfects our relation to pleasure. So morality is connected with human flourishing. Virtues make us good human beings.

      But Aristotle’s system contains a tension, already pointed out: What happens when the morally right action destroys flourishing? I am thinking of the martyr, the person who tells the truth and is killed, the innocent victim of injustice, such cases. Aristotle can admire such people, but his framework struggles to explain why their lives remain fully meaningful. Plato responds differently. The Good is not simply what perfects human nature; it is a deeper aspect of reality. Therefore, goodness may demand sacrifice that goes beyond human flourishing as ordinarily understood. But Plato leaves an unresolved question: How is the Good connected to the actual lived flourishing of human beings?

   Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s insight that virtue perfects human nature. But he adds that human nature is ordered (eingestellt) beyond itself. Human beings have a natural desire for truth, goodness, and happiness, perhaps prefigured in the natural love of parents for their newborn children. But these desires ultimately point toward God. Therefore, the highest fulfillment of human life cannot be achieved by natural virtue alone.

     This is where the principle that grace perfects nature rather than destroying it enters. What does that mean in this context? It means that the natural virtues are real and necessary, but they are not the final horizon of the moral life. Grace introduces faith, hope, and charity (love).  These virtues orient human life toward God as the ultimate good. And love (agape) becomes the form of all virtues. This allows Aquinas to reconcile two claims that otherwise appear to conflict: that virtues make a human life flourish; that goodness may require sacrifice beyond ordinary flourishing. In Aquinas both remain true. Natural virtue perfects our human nature, but love elevates that life toward a higher end. Thus the martyr is not a tragic contradiction of flourishing. The martyr’s life is fulfilled on a supernatural level.

     If the supernatural dimension disappears, the Thomistic philosophy collapses back into something closer to Aristotle, with virtue, flourishing, community, and moral formation. But we lose the ultimate horizon in which goodness always finally coincides with fulfillment. That is the tension haunting Ivan Karamazov. Ivan cannot accept a world in which innocent suffering + death = the final reality. He says he is not disputing God’s existence but of course his idea is that if God exists, God is Goodness itself; Goodness itself would never create a world in which innocent suffering is the price of admission. Therefore, God doesn’t exist. If he did, Ivan would return his ticket, but the idea of an immoral God is self-contradictory. Without God, the unity of Goodness and ultimate meaning becomes impossible.

     In Aquinas, love transforms the moral life. Justice becomes love of neighbor; honesty becomes fidelity to truth in love; courage becomes participation in Christ’s self-giving. Thus morality is not merely self-perfection but participation in divine love. This is why Dostoevsky’s moral vision often looks Thomistic even though he was Orthodox. Characters like Alyosha embody the idea that love reveals the deepest aspect of reality. In other words, love discloses the Good, God. Without that horizon, morality risks becoming either heroic but tragic (Aristotle alone), or psychologically powerful but metaphysically unsupported (Gaita’s problem, as I see it). Aquinas’s reconciliation could be summarized like this: virtue perfects human nature; Grace perfects human destiny. Love reveals the ultimate meaning of goodness. Thus morality is both the path to becoming a good human being and participation in a deeper order of love.

     

At the beginning of this entry I suspected that the real disagreement between Gaita, Aristotle, and Plato is metaphysical or religious. I still think that is right. The real question is whether goodness is fully contained within the nature or points beyond nature? Aquinas thinks both. Nature reveals the good, but grace reveals its ultimate depth.