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So I'm supposed to be talking about the cardinal virtues tonight, and I could talk about this for an entire semester.

It's just an incredibly rich topic that I love talking about.

So I'm only going to give a very condensed version of very rich material. I don't know how

many people have looked at the Sumatea Logie, but the chunk on the cardinal virtues is like four separate treatises.

It's enormous and it's wonderful and I love it.

But I'm just going to give like a super fast version and then I want to leave a lot of time for questions.

So please feel free to ask any question at the end of this talk. No question is a bad question.

But before I talk about the cardinal virtues, I want to just situate Thomas' account of virtues in a much wider context of the basic account of his moral theology.

And Thomas' account here really follows,

to a significant extent, that of classical philosophy.

So it's the basic framework that you also find

in Plato and Aristotle. But for Thomas Aquinas, talk about the virtues really only gets any traction or makes

any sense in a much larger context of talk about the point or purpose of human life more generally.

Now Aquinas puts this in terms of ends or goals. So he begins his

discussion of the moral life with sort of a bold but important claim. And that bold and

important claim is that the goal of the moral life or what is the same thing, the goal of

human life is happiness. So that's kind of the moral life, or what is the same thing, the goal of human life is happiness.

So that's kind of the main claim.

The goal of the moral life is happiness, where happiness is understood as something like complete human fulfillment.

Now, according to Aquinas, there's sort of a basic framework of what I will keep calling ethical naturalism.

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