Happiness and Virtue: Can it be Good for You to Be Bad? – Prof. Thomas Osborne

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Thomas Osborne argues that, on an Aristotelian–Thomistic account of human nature, it is never truly good for you to be bad, because vice damages your very being as a rational, social creature ordered to common goods and ultimately to God.

This lecture was given on October 29th, 2025, at University of Pittsburgh.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D, Duke University, 2001) is the Frank A. Rudman Endowed Chair in Philosophy and the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. He has published widely on Thomas Aquinas, Thomism, and medieval and late scholastic philosophy. His interests cover moral psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and metaphysics. His latest book is Thomas Aquinas on Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Keywords: Aristotelian Natural Law, Common Good, Human Dignity, Justice And Self-Interest, Moral Rectitude, Natural Law Theory, Plato’s Republic, Political Community, Prudence And Charity, Vice And Human Defectiveness

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.3	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:24.7	There's always been a particular worry about the virtue of justice.
0:28.7	Justice involves our relations with others, to some extent, and others good.
0:35.6	Now, some of you are interested in Plato's Republic, where we have at the
0:40.1	beginning of book two, Glauquin, arguing, for the sake of argument, again, Plato does not defend
0:46.6	this view, that it's better to appear just and to be unjust and to get everything than to, in fact, be just and to be unjust and to get everything, then to in fact be just and not reap the reward.
1:00.5	So it seems like justice, a lot of people think about it as the best policy. Honesty is the best
1:07.5	policy, right? So they want to justify, or crime doesn't pay.
1:13.6	So people want to make justice valuable because of what it brings.
1:20.6	When Plato's concern is to think about justice,
1:25.6	does it have some worth in itself?
1:32.3	This is a feature in some way of ancient philosophical discussions.
1:39.3	We can even find it today.
1:42.3	We have different notions of morality, a different history, of moral discussion.
1:49.5	But there's this concern with what's just and what's useful, in particular, what's useful for me.
2:05.7	Okay. useful for me. There are different views that you can have.
2:08.1	Cicero, I think, he's a popularizer of philosophy.
2:11.2	He draws it out very clearly in this text from the day of Fickees.
2:18.7	He says,
	...

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