Reasoning about Nature in Virtue, Action and Law: The Path from Principles to Practice

This paper argues that the role of nature in Aquinas’s account of virtue, action and law does not require the kind of adherence to Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’ that is refuted by Darwin because of the way Aquinas transforms nature as applied to a rational being and as an analogy to elucidate virtue, habit and law. Aquinas’s grounding of ethics and law in the notion of nature is also not a kind of intuitionism designed to answer all moral questions and stop all ethical debates but a model which gives principles; these principles in turn are not that from which all conclusions can be derived with universality and certainty but are principles which are the topic of reasoned and ongoing debate about their interpretation and application in particular laws or practices. The paper then examines Aquinas’s application of the principles of natural law to evaluate human law as an example of this reasoned debate, which is both subject to error and correction, showing how Aquinas’s notion of nature can work in practical applied ethics.