Brandon Dahm

A recent discussion in virtue ethics revives the question of how virtue relates to skill. Is skill merely a useful analog to explaining the nature of virtue, or is virtue actually a skill? The motivation objection is one of a number of arguments that virtue is not a skill. The idea is that virtues are motivationally constrained by requiring their possessors to have certain concerns, goals, and motivations, but skills are not. In this paper, we argue that the motivation objection fails because, contra the objection, skills include at least four motivational constraints: aspiration for excellence, commitment to the game, beauty and truth, and the goods of persons. These four constraints ground our evaluation of skills and the skillful. Together, they form a motivational spectrum of skill. We conclude by arguing that the motivational spectrum of skill defeats the motivation objection and provides some evidence for virtue being a skill.

Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest philosophers and theologians of the medieval period, and his account of happiness is one of the most influential in the Western tradition. For Aquinas, happiness is the final end and highest good that all of us seek in life. But not everyone agrees about what makes human beings happy. This piece is an exposition and commentary on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Part I-II, Question 2, which asks the question: What does happiness consist in? What is the final end and highest good that fulfills our human nature and satisfies our desires? Aquinas examines various answers, including wealth, honor, fame, glory, power, pleasure, life, health, knowledge, and virtue. He argues that none of these things can make us perfectly happy, and that true and perfect happiness is found in God alone.

A healthy Thomism is one engaged with the discoveries and challenges of other traditions and disciplines. In this article I argue for one way of integrating Thomistic ethics and recent work in psychology. I assert that Thomists should think of virtue as a kind of expertise, something that psychologists have studied for decades. First, I provide context and motivation for my integration project. Next, I offer a definition of expertise and contrast it with recent discussions of skill and Aristotle's account of techne. Third, I argue that virtue and expertise are deeply similar. Finally, I conclude by showing some benefits of considering virtue to be a kind of expertise for virtue formation.

In recent years an old Thomistic debate on the separated soul has been resurrected. All parties to the debate agree that, for Aquinas, the separated soul (anima separata) designates the rational soul of a human person that survives the death of the human and, prior to the resurrection, the rational soul subsists in itself unnaturally apart from the body of which it is the substantial form in statu viae. According to some Thomists, called ‘corruptionists,’ the separated soul is not a person. Contrary to the corruptionists, other Thomists, called ‘survivalists,’ contend that the separated soul is a person. Both views seem to have a point, and neither side seems able to convince the other. Corruptionism is the exegetically stronger position with respect to the texts of Aquinas; survivalism’s strength rests in the clarity with which it draws attention to the person-like features of the separated soul. We aim to carve out a middle way. In this paper, we argue on Thomistic grounds that the separated soul is an incomplete person. We defend this novel position by drawing upon Aquinas’s application of a distinction between a complete and incomplete ‘this something’ (hoc aliquid) to human nature and the rational soul, respectively. We argue that since Aquinas’s metaphysics of personhood is framed by and tracks his quixotic metaphysics of the rational soul as an incomplete hoc aliquid, his metaphysical principles entail that the separated rational soul is an incomplete person. Consequently, our position has the fortuitous result that the views presented by corruptionists and survivalists are both partially correct, but incomplete; the separated soul after death is not a person simpliciter, but it is an incomplete person. Our argument proceeds in two stages. In the first part of the paper we identify and explain Aquinas’s three criteria for personhood: subsistence, rationality of the supposit, and completeness. Satisfying these criteria is individually necessary and jointly sufficient for any being to be a person. Said otherwise, any being that satisfies these criteria also satisfies the Boethian definition of person that Aquinas appropriates, ‘an individual substance of a rational nature.’ The subsistence criterion requires a person be a per se subsistent individual. The rationality of the supposit requires a person be a supposit that performs rational operations in virtue of the rationality of its nature. And the completeness criterion requires that a person be complete or whole. In the second part of the paper, we argue that the separated soul as understood by Aquinas satisfies each of these criteria. Yet, it satisfies them imperfectly and therefore must be qualified as an incomplete person instead of a person simpliciter.

In the capital vices tradition, acedia was fought through perseverance and manual labor. In this paper, I argue that we can also fight acedia through practicing wonder and gratitude. I show this through an account of moral formation developed out of the insight of the virtues and vices traditions that character traits affect how we see things. In the first section, I use Robert Roberts’s account of emotions to explain a mechanism by which virtues and vices affect vision and thus moral formation. Then, by looking at the capital vices tradition, I argue that restless boredom is a primary construal of the vice of acedia. Third, I explain wonder and gratitude through the work of G.K. Chesterton and Roberts, respectively. In light of their accounts, I explain how the construals of wonder and gratitude are contrary to the construal of acedia. Finally, I offer some practices that encourage gratitude and wonder.

An exciting trend in virtue ethics is its engagement with empirical psychology. Virtue theorists have connected virtue to various constructs in empirical psychology. The strategy of grounding virtue in the psychological theory of habit, however, has yet to be fully explored. Recent decades of psychological research have shown that habits are an indispensable feature of human life, and virtues and habits have a number of similarities. In this paper, we consider whether virtues are psychological habits (i.e., habits as understood by the field of psychology). After some background to frame the interaction between the two disciplines, we explain the predominant account of habit in psychology, which we call “standard psychological habit,” in the next section. We then consider Servais Pinckaers’s objections that virtue cannot be a habit and conclude that standard psychological habits cannot be virtues. Finally, we argue that another psychological account of habits, goal-directed habits, withstand Pinckaers’s objections and provide a promising construct for understanding virtue.

Thomas Aquinas consistently defended the thesis that the separated rational soul that results from a human person’s death is not a person. Nevertheless, what has emerged in recent decades is a sophisticated disputed question between “survivalists” and “corruptionists” concerning the personhood of the separated soul that has left us with intractable disagreements wherein neither side seems able to convince the other. In our contribution to this disputed question, we present a digest of an unconsidered middle way: the separated soul is an incomplete person.

It’s strange that sleep doesn’t come up more when we think of virtue. In this paper, I argue that there is a virtue concerned with sleep, which I call “somnience,” and I develop an account of this virtue. My account of somnience builds on the virtue tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas and recent research about the nature of sleep. In the first section I argue that there is a need for such a virtue. Next, I argue that somnience is a form of temperance. Third, I show how somnience connects to a number of other virtues, which helps us fill out the nature of the virtue. Finally, I argue that sleep also relates to virtue by aiding virtue formation.

Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In our estimation, the complicated reality is that, in using slightly different but related concepts, Kierkegaard is providing a unique look at acedia as it manifests differently at different stages on life’s way. Thus, on this “perspectival account”, acedia will manifest differently according to whether an individual inhabits the aesthetic, ethical, or religious sphere. We propose two axes for this perspectival account. Such descriptions of how acedia manifests make up the first, phenomenal axis, while the second, evaluative axis, accounts for the various bits of advice and wisdom we read in the diagnoses of acedia from one Kierkegaardian pseudonym to another. Our aim is to show that Kierkegaard was not only familiar with the concept of acedia, but his contributions helped to develop and extend the tradition.

In his book, An Essay on Divine Authority, Mark Murphy argues that God does not have practical authority over created, rational agents. Although Murphy mentions the possibility of an argument for divine authority from justice, he does not consider any. In this paper, I develop such an argument from Aquinas’s treatment of the virtue of religion and other parts of justice. The divine excellence is due honor, and, as Aquinas argues, honoring a ruler requires service and obedience. Thus, a classical conception of God coupled with some of Aquinas’s theses concerning justice show that God has practical authority over all created, rational agents.

Aquinas’s doctrine that infused virtues accompany sanctifying grace raises many questions. We examine one: how do the infused virtues relate to the acquired virtues? More precisely, can the person with the infused virtues possess the acquired virtues? We argue for an answer consistent with and informed by Aquinas’s writings, although it goes beyond textual evidence, as any answer to this question must. There are two plausible, standard interpretations of Aquinas on this issue: the coexistence view and transformation view. After explaining the views, we present plausible reasons for and against each view. The evidence suggests, we argue, that the acquired virtues are both present and absent in the Christian. We then survey Aquinas’s account of virtual presence. Finally, we argue that the case of the presence of acquired virtues in the Christian is a good candidate for virtual presence.

Germain Grisez has recently argued that Aquinas’s claim that God alone is our ultimate end is incompatible with other claims central to Aquinas’s account of happiness. Two of these arguments take their point of departure from Aquinas’s distinction between essential perfections and perfections of well-being. I argue that both of these arguments fail. The first, which argues that the distinction is incompatible with the beatific vision being perfect fulfillment, fails because it neglects a distinction between essential and accidental perfectibility. In the second, Grisez argues that Aquinas’s distinction between types of happiness is incompatible with his claim that the beatific vision satisfies all desire. I argue that Aquinas makes a distinction between two types of desire that rebuts the objection. I conclude by explaining how clarifying these distinctions in perfectibility and desire allows for a more nuanced account of the happiness of the separated, beatified soul.

In a recent paper, Eleonore Stump argues that Aquinas thinks the acquired virtues are “not real at all” because they do not contribute to true moral life, which she argues is the life joined to God by the infused virtues and the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. Against this, I argue in two stages that Aquinas thinks the acquired virtues are real virtues. First, I respond to Stump’s four arguments against the reality of the acquired virtues. Second, I show four ways in which the acquired virtues contribute to the highest ethical life for Aquinas.