Aquinas on the Dangers of Natural Virtue and the Control of Natural Vice

Abstract

I investigate Aquinas’s position that natural virtue can pose dangers to living a moral life, dangers that include natural virtue’s inflexibility to circumstance, the opposing vices it may breed if blindly followed, and its aptitude for deceiving people into thinking they are genuinely virtuous. I also consider whether Aquinas regards these problems as remediable given that he sees natural virtue and natural vice as instances of nature being determined to one. He maintains that we can overcome the moral pitfalls that natural virtue and natural vice pose, though perfect mastery is not possible without divine intervention, insofar as our bodily disposition is not directly subject to reason.