Aquinas On War

Aquinas identifies the virtuous man as “the one who really lives out his ‘function’ and acts in accord with reason, but even desires in accord with reason.” Both the Stoics and Aquinas would agree that the virtuous man has the virtues; temperance, fortitude, courage, and justice which are all properly ordered with his reason. When reason is removed or blurred the virtuosity of the person is called into question. Virtue cannot be fulfilled without reason, and vice versa, however the one factor that can alter or affect reason, is passion. The Stoics characterized passion as “any emotions in disaccord with or exceed reason” and Aquinas defined passions as “any movement from the sense appetite.” Aquinas believes that if all passions belong to the sense appetite, then passions can be moderated and perfected by reason. These two varying definitions of passion show the rigidity of the Stoic view by portraying the virtuous man as the passionless man, which by default means the virtuous man lacks antecedent passions.

St. Augustine provided comments on morality of war from the Christian point of view (railing against the love of violence that war can engender) as did several critics in the intellectual flourishing from the 9th to 12th centuries. Just war theorists remind warriors and politicians alike that the principles of justice following war should be universalizable and morally ordered and that winning should not provide a license for imposing unduly harsh or punitive measures or that state or commercial interests should not dictate the form of new peace. “The attraction for jus post bellum thinkers is to return to the initial justice of the war”. This means that war is considered as self-defense.

Well unfortunately some believe their (omnipotent) God has all the answers and knows of every person’s next moves and what’s yet to come. I can somewhat agree with that but I don’t believe it is my duty to judge or prove the existence, and the all mighty power God has. I certainly am a believer of faith and that the existence of good and evil lies in all of us, regardless of the control God has over us. My opinion relates to how Aquinas believes that everyone’s consequences and endings they choose are because of the free choice God gives us all. As mentioned in the book, a great example that I find makes a perfect analogy is when he states, “He can create in a multitude of ways, No

Free will must be a will that gives itself autonomy. According to the formula of autonomy, every rational agent is universal and no experience can determine universality. A rational agent may ‘will’ to act a certain way, but because they are rational beings free from sensual temptations, their ‘will’ is what imperfectly rational people ‘ought’ to act. Therefore, a rational agent’s ‘will’ becomes a universal law in which people guided by empirical experiences should abide. A rational agent is only autonomous when one can make judgments not by external “impulsion,” but by “pure practical reason.” Just as Kant states good will is a will “good in itself,” he believes a rational agent is “an end in itself” who becomes the author of the universal law which he will obey and the rest will follow. If a person can act as if one is a law-maker of a “kingdom of ends” who can be responsible for the universal law of one’s people,

He was greatly influenced by scholasticism and Aristotle. Aquinas took Aristotle’s notion of friendship and love, stated that with God, and his sharing of happiness with us, that love is a friendship with man and God. No human community based friendship, should treat killing of the innocent with sympathy, because this action would cause rejections of others and would depart from the shared divine life that is the gift of the Spirit. To be human is to be part of a larger whole, and political arrangements are said to be training us to ignore human life, to that of satisfying personal preferences. “Forfeiting love for getting rich or maintaining something called an ‘individual right to bear arms.” (pg. 612) The author of this article goes on to say that assault weapons have but one purpose and that is for destruction, unlike a ‘knife’ that can be used for multi purposes, even though it may cause death, its soul purpose is not to bring harm. He goes on to say that learning to live life, is to learn to live well, and to learn to play without cheating. Cheating in the sense of sin, and weapons such as this gun aimed at or for destruction. In his option we need to look at life for the purpose of growth in friendship and love, and questions if assault weapons could ever be a part of that definition. Pulling from Aristotle’s idea of perfect

The first reason being, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged(Article 1). It is important to note that the sovereign is the leader or overseer of a certain project. Aquinas believes that the people themeselves can not wage a private war on a country, but if the sovereign say its okay, then they are allowed to wage a war. The second reason that Aquinas gave is that, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault(Article 1). Here, Aquinas attempts to explain that war is just as long as you have a cause to attack someone,and that they did something wrong to you or others around you. It’s the famous line “and eye for an eye.” An example of this reason would be, if someone were to get hit , it would be okay for them to go back and hit the person back. Although this may be bad like in school accoriding to Aquinas it is completely legal to attack someone if they attacked you. The third reason he gives is that, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil(Article 1). Intending to demosntrate that it is okay to wage war, Aquinas says that it is always okay to wage war as long as the person you have rightful intentions.

     Aquinas’ third way argument states that there has to be something that must exist, which is most likely God. He starts his argument by saying not everything must exist, because things are born and die every single day. By stating this we can jump to the conclusion that if everything need not exist then there would have been a time where there was nothing. But, he goes on, if there was a time when there was nothing, then nothing would exist even today, because something cannot come from nothing. However, our observations tell us that something does exist, therefore there is something that must exist, and Aquinas says that something is God.

It is imperative to understand Aquinas’ definition of just and unjust laws. Through defining these terms, we will be able to understand Aquinas’ claim. A law that is just has the power of “binding in conscience” (Aquinas in Dimock, ed., 2002, p.20). It is derived from eternal law and therefore inherently morally correct. An unjust law lacks this integral quality. Aquinas is willing to say that an unjust law is a so-called law, but a just law is a law proper in its entirety.

In Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will he explains that the human soul is predisposed to have a good will and that “it is a will by which we desire to live upright and honorable lives and to attain the highest wisdom” (Augustine 19, 1993). Augustine believes that in order to be free we must live according to our good will. To follow our good will we must live according to the four main virtues in life: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. He defines prudence as having “the knowledge of what is to be desired and what is to be avoided” (Augustine 20, 1993). Augustine establishes fortitude as “the disposition of the soul by which we have no fear of misfortune or of the loss of things that are not in our power” (Augustine 20,1993).

but if it's for the common good then it is just. Aquinas states it is

     According to Augustine, “Human beings are endowed with a power that he calls the will.” He emphasizes the will to being the center of freedom. Unlike other philosophers, who are determinists, Augustine, who has a libertarian view, sees our will as free choice. So for whatever we may choose to do, we become solely responsible for our actions which are caused by external factors instead of internal ones.

“For war, as a grave act of killing, needs to be justified.” These words were written by Murray N. Rothbard, dean of the Austrian School and founder of modern libertarianism, who spent much of his academic career trying to determine what, exactly, defined a “just war”. In fact, for as long as humans have been fighting wars, there have been quotations referring to the justification and moralities of wars and how warfare can be considered fair and acceptable to each society’s individual standards. While the time and place of each war differs, the reality of the devastation of battle may be found warranted by those fighting using these just war standards to vindicate their actions.

Augustine’s irrational behavior slowly unfolds into his devotion towards Christianity. Since birth, his free will has caused him to sin numerously. This free will originated from Adam and Eve who separated from God’s will when they disobeyed Him, also known as Original Sin. From then on, every human who existed after had the tendency to sin. The good deeds we’ve done were from free will, but only through the encouragement of God to do so because everything God created is good. Therefore, Augustine states that there is no such thing as evil, and if something evil existed, then it was not God’s

First off, Aquinas is concluding his argument that human laws are made by the natural law. By natural law, he means this in the sense that all the natural law comes from the varying amount of rational reason put into each of us by God. One example of the natural law is to not kill others Human laws can be derived from this in two ways. The first way is a direct conclusion of the natural law. For example, on page 47, not killing people is a part of the natural law and we can take away the principle to not harm people from it (Aquinas 47).

Thomas Aquinas interprets evil similarly to Aristotle, as a cause and effect or potency and act. He sees it as everything has a meaning and purpose particular to its own good, implying the absence of some good. God created Existence and therefore it must be good, evil exist in a world that God created as a deprivation of some good. In other words, evil is dependant upon good to manifest itself as lack. It is a necessary part of humans achieving God’s will, perfection, because it is the obstacle that force us to strengthen our wills.