Abstract

For all the strengths the recent recovery of the virtues brings to moral philosophy, opponents of virtue-based theories claim that such theories cannot do the essential work of guiding action. This dissertation responds to that objection by drawing upon Thomas Aquinas's account of the four cardinal virtues in the secunda pars of the Summa Theologiae. I argue that Aquinas's moral theory has an emphasis on the virtues such that proper attention is given to the character of the agent, but at the same time, it also gives sufficient evaluative importance to particular actions and enough practical advice about action to counter any worry that a virtue theory's emphasis on character precludes its ability to offer anything beyond vague and unhelpful recommendations for practice. ;Chapters one and two lay out the objection and the virtue theorist's two strategies for answering it. Those strategies include, first, making the demand for action-guidingness reasonable and appropriate to the limits of moral theory, and second, offering evidence that virtue theories can indeed meet the demand. Through a constructive account of Aquinas's thought on each of the four cardinal virtues and their complex relationships to action and practical guidance, I argue in chapters three through six that Aquinas's moral theory uses both strategies effectively to answer the action-guiding objection. From this study of Aquinas on the virtues, I conclude in chapter seven that not only does his theory successfully meet the objector's challenge, but further, by introducing at least three new ways to guide action, it does so even more successfully than the theories which were originally held up as paradigms of action-guidingness. Theories that fit the principle-application model of practical guidance thus turn out to be less well-equipped to guide action than a theory of the virtues like Aquinas's, whose more various and comprehensive methods of guiding action give us rich new resources for practical guidance and moral pedagogy