Aquinas’s Claim: Love of Neighbor as Oneself is Self-evident

Abstract

Thomas Aquinas has affirmed that love of neighbor as oneself is self-evident. We shall distinguish for Aquinas three forms of self-evidence: (a) evident in itself but not to people, (b) self-evident in itself and to all human thinkers, and (c) self-evident in itself but only to expert thinkers. We shall consider only (b) and (c). (b) We shall develop an analysis attempting to show that love of neighbor as oneself is self-evident in itself and to all human thinkers, however, in evaluation we shall argue that the principle is not self-evident to all human beings since not all people love themselves wisely. Further, we shall consider arguments from Kant that some maxims of the will are self-contradictory to affirm and hence immoral whereas the denials of other moral commands are not self-contradictory to deny. (c) However, we shall develop an argument affirming that love of neighbor as oneself is self-evident to expert thinkers, namely, self-evident to some human beings who have made the wise decision to live by the Aristotelian Principle. Finally, we will consider two objections to the self-evidence of love of neighbor as oneself and answer them, noting the importance of wise love of others as one wisely loves oneself. Such wise loving of oneself and others avoids simplistic misinterpretations of love of neighbor as oneself. Keywords: Thomas Aquinas, self-evidence, Aristotelian principle, love of neighbor as oneself, morals