Abstract

The intellectualistic analysis of conscience Aquinas provides appears to regard conscience as mechanistic and undynamic. Such understanding fails to place Aquinas’s remarks on conscience in the context of the virtue ethics he offers in the Summa and his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. In fact, there is an intricate connection between the virtues and conscience in Aquinas’s thought, and this connection relates directly to his remarks on weakness of will. His connecting conscience to issues in Aristotelian virtue ethics affects subsequent discussions of conscience in significant ways.