Abstract

In this study, I seek to understand the role of emotion in virtuous action according to Kant and Aquinas by asking how they would regard two common claims: namely, the claim that emotions help to motivate virtuous action and the claim that emotions help us to discern what we ought to do. ;After an introductory section, I examine Kant's and Aquinas' stance toward the emotional motivation thesis , which states that at least for some virtues, an action cannot be fully virtuous unless it is done from emotion. Toward this end, I develop three different models of how emotion could motivate virtuous action: the harmonious convergence model, the ESPR model, and the PRCD model. ;I conclude that while Kant rejects EMT, Aquinas can be said to embrace EMT because he holds a form of the PRCD model. Aquinas believes that the emotions present in virtuous action are caused by the all-things-considered judgments of practical reason. These "passions consequent to reason" aid in the execution of virtuous choices. Neither Kant nor Aquinas can accept the other two models, and their reasons for this stance are quite similar. ;I next ask whether and to what extent Kant and Aquinas believe that emotions play an essential, positive role in moral discernment. I argue that for Kant, properly cultivated sympathetic feelings do play such a role. For Aquinas, passions which arise antecedent to practical judgment bear the corruption of original sin, and hence are unreliable as sources of information about the moral world. However, both Kant and Aquinas insist that certain orientations of the will do play an essential role in moral discernment. We might regard such orientations of the will as forms of emotion, but Kant and Aquinas do not. ;I conclude the dissertation by suggesting how my results bear on future work in the history of ethics. More specifically, I argue that Aquinas' ideas about infused moral virtue strikingly foreshadow central themes in Kant's conception of virtue