Abstract

This paper argues that the sin of sloth (acedia), as understood by the Christian tradition, has been replaced by its opposite in the modern world. Sloth, according to Aquinas, is the sin of the soul that does not act for the good in itself, that does not act out of love for God, but rather, that acts merely on the basis of fear or out of a desire to gain benefits. The slothful person was the one who acted (or did not act...) according to his or her own calculated interests instead of acting according to his or her telos. Thus, total inaction from the slothful sinner came from his or her belief that he or she was lost and that nothing he or she could do could save him or her. Inaction was thus considered incidental to, a mere symptom of, one's dispersion of will. The modern conception of sloth tends to reverse this scheme by focusing instead on the unresponsiveness to incentives. Not following one's telos appears to have nothing to do with the modern conception of sloth. Inaction is considered rational if an agent is not subject to appropriate incentives to act (i.e. the potential to gain benefits or avoid losses through action). In effect, acting without the appropriate incentives only means spending irrationally one's energies, it means being wasteful. At the opposite, inaction is considered slothful when the agent does not take positive steps to materialise potential gains or to avoid potential losses. The structure of modern law reflects the inversion of meaning that struck sloth when we moved from the Medieval man to the homo economicus. This inversion of meaning explains to a large extent the attitude that a majority of jurists have about social and economic rights: if those rights are not justiciable, they are not real rights, they impose no duty, people are thus not bound by them, thus, they are not real law. Through a genealogy of the sin of sloth, this paper offers a criticism of this dominant mode of legal thinking.