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Aristotle 's Virtue Ethics And Aquino 's Natural Law

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Merriam-Webster defines ethics as “the moral principles that govern a person’s or group’s behavior” and “the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.” People, in their free actions, naturally notice the rightness or wrongness of such actions. Everyone has experienced some satisfaction or remorse for actions taken. When this spontaneous knowledge of the events is integrated into an orderly knowledge, based on some understanding of the causes, it originates ethical science. Ethics is a practical science because it is not limited to the theoretical study of the good of human acts, but also seeks to apply this knowledge to human actions. Ethics is not studied to know what is good, but to do good. In this essay, we will explore the differences in argumentative work from Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics and Aquino’s Natural Law and the difficulty of applicability of the theory to contemporary issues and putting the theory into practice.
Aristotle was born in Northern Greece in the year 384 BC. He moved to Athens when he was 17 years old to study in the Plato Academy for 20 years before founding his own school, the Lyceum. Throughout our lives we will forge a way to be, a character (ethos), through our actions, in relation to the appetitive and volitional part of our nature. To determine what our own virtues are, Aristotle proceeds to the analysis of human action, determining that there are three fundamental aspects involved in it: volition, deliberation and decision. That

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