The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas's Ethics

The primary aim of Andrew Pinsent's excellent book is to argue that the traditional Aristotelian way of understanding Aquinas's virtue ethics should be substantially revised. Pinsent does this primarily through developing a metaphoric understanding of Thomistic virtue, centred on a second-person relationship (I-You) between the agent and God. In order to clarify this metaphor, he makes use of contemporary work in social cognition on the phenomenon of joint attention and gives careful focus to the structure and details of Aquinas's virtue ethics. In the first chapter, Pinsent discusses the infused moral virtues and how they pose a problem for Aristotelian interpretations of Aquinas. This problem cannot be solved by simply distinguishing infused moral virtues from acquired moral virtues with reference to a supernatural end for the former and a natural end for the latter. This distinction in Aquinas rests on more than this, and Pinsent points out that Aquinas defines virtue itself as something ‘which God works in us, without us (ST 1a2ae q. 55)’. For Aquinas, the acquired virtues are virtues in a restricted sense; infused virtues are virtues without qualification. Pinsent goes on to show that there are many other distinctions between the acquired and infused virtues, and then turns to the primary focus of the book.

Epistemology · Focus (optics) · Metaphor · Order (exchange) · Perspective (graphical) · Theology · Virtue · Virtue ethics · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment