Ep. 381: Aquinas on Ethical Psychology (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Continuing to discuss the virtue and moral action from the Summa Theologica (1268). We discuss the definition of virtue and some subsequent questions about what parts of us the term virtue properly applies to.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I want to remind you if you're thinking about gifts that partially examined life put out a book, |
| 0:05.6 | newly retitled the partially examined life fresh takes on the world's greatest philosophers. |
| 0:10.7 | It's a great way to introduce someone to the podcast, to share some of our most important discussions |
| 0:15.6 | and biggest interviews with people who don't listen to podcasts, or maybe who are even new to philosophy. |
| 0:21.3 | So go look out up on Amazon. We're listening to the partially examined life episode 381 part two. We've been talking |
| 0:36.0 | about Thomas Aquinas on virtue and we are going to get, |
| 0:40.6 | we got toward the end of part one, to moral action. So how does Virtue fit into this overall |
| 0:45.6 | moral picture? And we have, I will, I will break the suspense that we're, this, we're not |
| 0:51.0 | going to do more Aquinas next time. We decided maybe we'll, if we don't get through |
| 0:55.0 | enough, maybe we'll have a part three to this. Nobody's committed to that, but we are going to move on in |
| 1:00.3 | our lives to something else. So let's make the most of what we've got here. We'd only gotten |
| 1:05.7 | through two questions in the virtue section. The third one, we wanted to treat very quickly before we |
| 1:09.7 | get to the fourth one, which is the actual definition of virtue. So is human virtue? We said, is it a disposition? Is |
| 1:16.1 | a disposition to act? Yes. Is it a good disposition? And you might smash yourself in the head and say, |
| 1:23.0 | haven't we established this? Has this what's been said? But if virtue were just a power, I mean, |
| 1:27.7 | isn't there a power, a power to sin? Powers can be good or bad. Doesn't seem like it has to be |
| 1:33.0 | toward the good. Right. So I could be a very skilled assassin, for instance. This also gets |
| 1:38.5 | the difference between prudence and the ethical. So if I'm, if virtue involves perfecting abilities, then do I need to put |
| 1:46.9 | some guardrails on what the abilities are? I mean, he'll say the perfection of unability is, |
| 1:52.6 | is always good. It's actually not clear to me in this section of how he would handle the, |
| 1:56.8 | the skilled assassin problem. But he wants to build in this idea that virtue, as he's defining it, implies and what he |
| 2:06.5 | calls a quote unquote orderedness towards good so that it rules out. |
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