Thomas Aquinas and Natural Patterns of Virtuous Conduct

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas to comment on natural patterns of flourishing in human virtuous life. Through the concept of “natural goodness” borrowed from Philippa Foot, I aim to show how in light of Aquinas’s moral philosophy the realm of physical nature serves as an exemplar for human reason and action. While acknowledging a great variety of cultures and the crucial role of free choice in shaping human action, I emphasize the inherent orientation of human freedom towards moral flourishing, as I find it in Aquinas’s doctrine. The desire for happiness and the natural seeds of moral virtues, terms of which the human mind discovers from various instances of natural or morally virtuous action, provide some basic orientation to human virtuous conduct according to reason. The diversity of virtuous flourishing of human lives and cultures has an immense scope according to the degree to which ordered practical reasoning allows and fosters it. At the same time, however, virtuous flourishing depends on and keeps in congruence with the intelligible patterns of nature that reason and virtue imitate.