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📙 The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics

Author: Andrew Pinsent

Full Title: The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics

Highlights from January 27th, 2021.

I propose that the key to a new appreciation of Aquinas’s work is to be found in a set of dispositions that he appends to the Virtues, namely the ‘gifts.’ Although the presence of the gifts in his accounts is no mystery, I use new research to re-interpret their pivotal role. In particular, I argue that Aquinas’s descriptions of the operation of these gifts have remarkable similarities to contemporary work in social cognition, especially the phenomenon of the joint attention of two persons, which has been described as a ‘meeting of Minds’ and ‘sharing an awareness of the sharing of focus.’
In Aquinas’s texts, the non-Aristotelian virtues and gifts of his account can be interpreted as removing a person’s spiritual Autism, enabling a second-person relationship with God that is different in kind, not merely in degree, from what Aristotle considers to be possible, and transforming the goal and principles of the virtues.
Aquinas therefore holds that anyone, even young children and those with intellectual disabilities, can possess the gifts as well as the infused virtues.

Highlights from January 29th, 2021.

Love is the super-virtue or transcendent Virtue of Aquinas’s entire network of perfective attributes.
Aquinas claims that Love is included in the definition of every Virtue, not as being essentially every virtue, but because every virtue depends on it.
The recognition that Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics is radically non-Aristotelian raises a sensitive cultural issue, given the accumulated investment in Aristotle throughout the long history of commentary on Aquinas.
The brief answer is that the Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics has been in retreat for many years now, principally because of the work of analytic philosophers studying the infused virtues and by new generations of theologians such as Servais Pinckaers and Michael Sherwin, who have re-examined neglected aspects of Aquinas’s claims about the virtues and their integration with gifts, beatitudes, and fruits. So although this study is novel in certain ways, insofar as it proposes a new understanding of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics inspired by recent research in social cognition, its non-Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s account is consonant with pre-existing and converging trends in both analytic philosophy and Thomist theology.
Thomistic metaphysics acknowledges the absolute primacy of persons, who do not fit easily within the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and accident.
For Aquinas, however, this other personal agent is the Holy Spirit, and his entire network of perfective attributes is ordered toward friendship with God. The obvious objection, therefore, is that his entire approach is of little or no value to an atheist, or to a theist who wishes to develop a Virtue Ethics without dependence on God, or indeed to a theist who wants a Virtue Ethics that relates to God in a non-Thomistic manner.
Just as everyday joint attention, in which two persons share an awareness of the sharing of focus, helps provide an understanding of how Aquinas thinks that the Virtues develop in relation to God, his work may also highlight the effects of everyday joint attention on the development of virtues in relation to others.
In particular, he may help to highlight the way in which commonplace instances of joint attention, such as that between a parent and child, help to shape the formation of virtues in ways that are often overlooked.
How do people actually acquire virtue? To give one example, it is not easy to understand how virtue is acquired if one begins by being incapable of judging the virtuous mean correctly. Since a vicious person will be incapable of judging the mean correctly, it is unclear how a virtuous circle of behaviour gets started in the first place.
To give another example, while Aristotle adds that it is important to have the Virtues from youth, he neglects to examine in any detail how such Virtues are first acquired in youth, prior to a person acquiring the judgment of reason. Even within its own framework, Aristotle’s account leaves certain questions unanswered.
Such activities suggest that what motivates the infant to eat the food does not arise directly from the infant’s judgment of reason, but from a delight in an activity with the parent, an activity in which nourishment plays an incidental role.
In translating Thomistic insights into a broader context, a beloved parent or teacher might well play the role that Aquinas assigns to God as the second-personal agent in the formation of such dispositions.

Highlights from January 30th, 2021.

Yet MacIntyre makes an assessment of Aquinas that often provokes surprise, even though it is set out very clearly in chapter 13 of After Virtue. MacIntyre advises that, [It] is worth picking out some central features of Aquinas’ treatment of the virtues which make of Aquinas an unexpectedly marginal figure to the history which I am writing. This is not to deny Aquinas’ crucial role as an interpreter of Aristotle; Aquinas’ commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics has never been bettered. But at key points Aquinas adopts a mode of treatment of the virtues which is questionable.
Despite these many similarities, however, Aquinas’s treatment of the virtues also diverges from that of Aristotle in a number of important ways, and these divergences become more rather than less mysterious as they are explored in detail.
Aquinas does acknowledge that we can acquire virtues in the Aristotelian manner by repeated good actions; he refers to such virtues as acquired. Aquinas also claims, however, that perfect virtues are not acquired, but infused in us by God.
What has given traction to the problem of interpretation in recent years is that there are certain virtues that seem to be Aristotelian in certain ways but that are described as infused rather than acquired. I shall refer to this issue as the problem of the infused moral virtues. As I shall show, this problem is widely recognized as important.
Indeed, like the epicycles added to save the appearances of the Aristotelian model of the solar system, I shall argue that the modifications required for the Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics lack any obvious connections to one another or to the kinds of experiences that Aristotle taught us to relate to the notion of virtue.
William of Ockham later expanded Scotus’s arguments against the theoretical necessity of the infused virtues, and Kent has suggested that Luther’s dismissal of the infused virtues can be traced back to these developments.
MacIntyre suggests that Aquinas adopts a mode of treatment of the virtues that is ‘questionable’ at key points. Commenting on Aquinas’s overall scheme, he judges that, “Aquinas’ treatment of the classification of the virtues and his consequent treatment of their unity raises questions to which we find in his text no answer.”
We need not only the natural principles, but also the dispositions of the virtues, in order to be completed as human beings in the way that is natural to us, as I said above. Similarly, then, by divine influence man pursues not only the Supernatural principles just mentioned but also certain infused virtues, through which he is completed for doing whatever is ordered to the goal of eternal life.
Aquinas’s introduction of a ‘Supernatural end’ introduces yet another novel element to the interpretation of the virtues. According to the passages above, the infused virtues are ordered to a Supernatural end, described as eternal life with God. The acquired virtues, by contrast, are ordered to the capacity of human nature. So Aquinas proposes a twofold human end, natural and Supernatural.
Although this twofold end is fulfilled in an integral manner in the state of eternal life, Aquinas’s surprising proposal also raises the possibility, at least as a hypothesis, that there might be an alternative state of human flourishing in which only the natural end is fulfilled. This condition, as traditionally understood, would correspond to the fulfillment of the most refined aspirations of the pagan philosophers, especially Aristotle.
Perhaps the most famous literary portrayal of such a state is Dante’s description of limbo, in which Aristotle is given the highest place of honor as the ‘master of those who think’: Past that enameled green we six withdrew 115 into a luminous and open height from which each soul among them stood in view. And there directly before me on the green he master souls of time were shown to me, I glory in the glory I have seen. 120 The Inferno, Canto IV33
Given its modern connotations, influenced especially by Nietzsche, it is tempting to assume that the word ‘Supernatural’ has a well-defined referent. Taken in isolation, however, the Latin term Supernaturalis simply means ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the natural.
In particular, McGilchrist describes how patients with right parieto-occipital lesions, when asked to draw persons or animals, exhibit considerable difficulty in assembling the parts correctly. Essential elements often lack even a rudimentary presentation of their correct relations to one another, “The productions of those with right-hemisphere damage, relying on their left hemisphere, lose overall coherence and integrity, and become so distorted they are barely recognisable: there is no grasp of the Gestalt, the whole.”
If we apply this general insight to the problem of the infused moral virtues, McGilchrist’s account corroborates a commonsense intuition, namely that a satisfactory solution is not going to depend simply on analytic reasoning about Aquinas’s many puzzling claims. To understand what Aquinas means by the infused virtues, it will also be necessary to find an adequate metaphoric understanding, the cognitive role more closely associated with the right-brain hemisphere, by which Aquinas’s words can be unified and related to some kind of embodied experience.
Together with the influence of Aristotle on Virtue Ethics generally and his undoubted influence on Aquinas, it is then easy to see why the idea that Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics is a modified form of Aristotelianism still exercises a powerful hold on the scholarly imagination. In recent decades, however, new research has strongly criticized even a quasi-Aristotelian interpretation of Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics.
A preliminary indication that Aquinas adopts a radically non-Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics is the way in which he introduces the category of Virtue. It should occasion some wonder that, despite having the greatest respect for Aristotle and a detailed knowledge of the structure of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas chooses not to use Aristotle’s definition of a virtue to introduce the category of virtue.
Virtue is a good quality of the Mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us.
The most important further implication of this metaphor, as revealed in the case of joint attention, is that the ability to be moved by other persons is correlated with the ability to relate to others in a specifically second-personal sense. As noted previously, Autistic children, who do not generally engage in joint attention, have difficulty grasping the second-person relationship.
Conversely, to lack the gifts means that one is unable to relate to God in a second-personal way, a condition that can be understood, metaphorically, by consideration of what specifies Autistic spectrum disorder in human relations.
So Aristotle holds that while it is reasonable to assert that there is a God, it is not possible to be friends with any god, owing to their disparity with human beings. It is only in the case of the non-Aristotelian dispositions described in Aquinas’s account that it is possible to be friends with God and to relate to God in a second-personal sense.
The gifts enable a person to be moved by God in a manner that can be understood, metaphorically, in terms of a person appropriating the psychological orientation of a second person in joint attention. Expressed from the standpoint of a first person before God, I take on your stance toward something, in a desired union of my soul with you. Since, by means of the gifts, one’s cognition and appetites are moved in a second-personal way, a gift could be characterized as a second-personal disposition, classifying a virtue, by contrast, as a first-personal disposition.
In Marcia Homiak’s essay, cited previously, she describes the experience of shared activities, such as being in a team or an orchestra, as follows, “If when they act, it is as though we are acting too, their pleasure is a pleasure for us and their good is our good. In short, engaging in shared activity with others transforms us—our ‘I’ becomes ‘we.’” This language of harmonious joint activity suggests a certain consonance of approach to extending Aristotelian ethics, even though Aquinas writes as a Christian theologian whereas Homiak’s essay is to be found in a book with the title Philosophers without Gods.
In conclusion, the fact that Aquinas’s account of human flourishing is inherently theological does not limit its scope to theological matters. The role assigned to God in Aquinas’s account of Virtues is plausibly played, to some extent, by other second-personal agents in everyday situations, such as parents interacting with their children.
Even beyond a theological context, Aquinas’s insights, supported by new research into social cognition and character formation, may therefore help to promote a kind of ‘Copernican revolution’ in the understanding of the virtues: a shift in the locus of…
academic developments frequently have a broader impact. In this final section, I would like to anticipate very briefly how the results and…
Late Have I Loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new; Late Have I Loved You! For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside and in my ugliness fell upon those lovely things that you have made. You were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness: and you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness: you breathed fragrance upon me, and I drew…
One could summarize Aquinas’s achievement, in the light of this present study, as mapping out the kind of second-personal relatedness to God expressed above by Augustine…
Nevertheless, it seems peculiarly easy in human relationships for second-person relatedness to collapse, almost without noticing, into a mere exchange of goods by which a person offers something in order to secure some benefit in return. Such transactions are third-personal, insofar as there is no union of soul or alignment of the will between supplicant and benefactor, but simply an exchange of goods. Similarly in the religious life, even prayers and pious practices…
Indeed, it is possible for a high degree of apparent perfection to be achieved such that a person appears, to himself and others, to be religious and virtuous. Nevertheless, insofar as he lacks second-personal relatedness to God, such perfection can be entirely without divine love, like a dazzling arch without a keystone,…
Finally, in the context of society as a whole, this study may help reinforce, in a roundabout way, a good deal of conventional wisdom about relationships between persons in general, an example being the…
About a decade ago I watched my father play a game with one of my nieces, who was about eighteen months old at the time. The game was very simple, involving hiding and discovering matchsticks under tumblers. The girl was obviously fascinated and delighted by the game, as her attention constantly shifted from the tumblers to my father’s face and back again. What fascinated me, however, was to see the effect of the game on the girl. In the…
Nevertheless, I could find no trace of any understanding of this interaction in the works of Aristotle, who wrote comparatively little about children and sometimes classified them with animals, to be guided by the reins of pleasure and pain. I began to wonder if the Aristotelian tradition was the last word on the virtues, and whether a relationship of…

Highlights from January 31st, 2021.

this special virtue, Humility, can be defined as a disposition to resist the temptation to attempt to achieve the goals of magnanimity by means other than second-person relatedness.
What about those characteristics of the magnanimous person that seem remote from an ideal of Christian virtue? While the phraseology seems strange, a good many of these characteristics can be understood in terms of confident second-person dependence, and are hence compatible with Humility, rather than a self-sufficient arrogance.
a child who is confident in her parent is not going to be over-anxious about what she possesses herself in order to complete some difficult task, and can afford to hold to ‘barren’ things, for their own sake, rather than those that are ‘fruitful.’
Finally, in the context of society as a whole, this study may help reinforce, in a roundabout way, a good deal of conventional wisdom about relationships between persons in general, an example being the importance of shared games and activities in raising children.
About a decade ago I watched my father play a game with one of my nieces, who was about eighteen months old at the time. The game was very simple, involving hiding and discovering matchsticks under tumblers. The girl was obviously fascinated and delighted by the game, as her attention constantly shifted from the tumblers to my father’s face and back again. What fascinated me, however, was to see the effect of the game on the girl. In the course of the game, I could almost see this girl changing, her intellect and character blossoming before my eyes.
Nevertheless, I could find no trace of any understanding of this interaction in the works of Aristotle, who wrote comparatively little about children and sometimes classified them with animals, to be guided by the reins of pleasure and pain. I began to wonder if the Aristotelian tradition was the last word on the Virtues, and whether a relationship of extraordinary importance had been hidden from the learned and wise and revealed by mere children.

Highlights from February 1st, 2021.

Unlike acquired virtues, infused virtues can be obtained by anyone, can co-exist with contrary acquired dispositions, are unified by love, and can be gained or lost immediately.
Being dependent on divine love, infused virtues are a mark of having the prerequisites for entering heaven, the state of ultimate happiness in Aquinas’s moral universe. Acquired virtues, by contrast, can do nothing by themselves to attain this goal.
contend that much of the reason that Aristotle’s virtue ethics has proved so durable and dominant is that Aristotle communicates a synthetic picture of a virtue that is familiar from everyday life.
By contrast, in the case of Aquinas’s account of the infused virtues, gifts, beatitudes, and fruits, we lack a corresponding synthetic picture. No matter how many lists and connections are marshalled, these facts are ‘dry bones’ without a grasp of the living whole. What is needed to complement and animate these facts is a metaphoric understanding that embodies the facts about Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics and places them in a living context.
Just as glass that transmits red light only permits a person to see red objects, the assumption that Aquinas presents a modified or ‘higher’ version of Aristotelian virtue ethics may have been responsible for a degree of cognitive bias, filtering out consideration of those attributes of Aquinas’s virtue ethics that do not fit into this metaphor of elevation.
In order to show why the beatitudes and fruits form an organic whole, together with the virtues and gifts, a metaphoric understanding is required that can unify Aquinas’s claims and relate them to experience. Without such understanding, specifications drawn from Aquinas’s texts can sometimes resemble complex lists of interconnected dry bones in medical textbooks.
The general idea is clear, namely, that these beatitudes and fruits in some way ‘actualize’ the virtues and gifts.
Insofar as this progression begins with some implied conflict or some undesirable state and ends with resolution, the beatitudes singly and collectively share the basic characteristics of Narrative. A subtlety, however, is that this progression refers to a future completion. So the beatitudes might be classified as belonging properly to the genre of Narrative only retrospectively, once the end has been attained. Prior to this completion, the beatitudes share something of the characteristics of a promise, since the second clause of each beatitude is a future contingent proposition that is true to the extent to which its speaker is reliable.
The very fact that the beatitudes have a promissory characteristic is a preliminary indication of the principle of second-person relatedness, insofar as promises are normally expressed in the context of an ‘I’ making a commitment to a ‘you.’
Abraham therefore has to trust God, an action of second-person relatedness, despite the utter impossibility of attaining the desires of his heart according to any conclusion based on first-personal reasoning alone. This situation is therefore radically different in kind, and not in degree, from any scenario in which one sets out one’s own path for the attainment of one’s desires, as in the case of the virtues and mode of flourishing described in the Nicomachean Ethics.
A child, intent on attaining or holding onto what she desires, will often struggle to ‘let go’, to surrender to the will of a loving parent regarding some course of action that is for the child’s own good. Being moved in a second-personal manner to will, with the parent, what the parent wills, is often strangely difficult for a child.
Development toward a state of maturity is not simply a matter of choosing in accordance with practical wisdom, since Elly is perfectly content with the state she is in. Nor is development steered simply by means of pleasure and pain, for such incentives fail with Elly. What is missing (or at least strongly inhibited) in Elly’s case is second-person relatedness, by which she could be led to make a series of small daily surrenders to being moved by her parents and siblings, thereby being drawn out of herself and her small, enclosed world.
This central role of second-person relatedness in a child’s development appears to provide a useful metaphor for understanding at least part of what Aquinas means by the beatitudes. They are Narratives made possible uniquely by second-personal relatedness, oriented toward goals that a person might not anticipate attaining or even be able to imagine in advance.
As promissory Narratives, I suggest therefore that the contribution of the beatitudes in the VGBF network is to encourage the virtue of hope in such a way as to lead to the maturing of love.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins with an inchoate description of eudaimonia and then reasons about the means for achieving that end, like an archer aiming at a target. In the case of Aquinas’s account, by contrast, the process of perfection begins with what one loves for oneself but ends with loving with God the things that God loves.
At first glance, ideas of ‘harmonizing with God’ or ‘God abiding with or in a person’ seem arcane to say the least. If, however, Aquinas is describing a second-personal divine relationship that can be understood metaphorically in terms of certain human relationships, it may be possible to find some suitable metaphor for the fruits in everyday life.
The challenge in addressing this question is to find a suitable metaphor that enables a fruit to be understood as something final.
The principle of resonance is one of the key unifying ideas in contemporary physics, and has been used to account for an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena from the behaviour of subatomic particles to planetary orbits. The key characteristic of the phenomenon is a qualitative change, a disproportionate decrease in effort and increase in intensity, when coupled systems are almost exactly in harmony with one another.
The reason why this phenomenon is relevant to the fruits is that persons can also be said to be in a state of resonance. Consider, for instance, the experience of musicians in an orchestra or a troupe of dancers. When their harmonization is imperfect, with discordances, mistimings, and mistakes, the playing or dancing is hard work. When joint operation becomes second nature, however, with the participants being near-perfectly attuned to one another, there is a disproportionate improvement in the quality of the activity. Subjectively, the musicians or dancers who participate in such activities experience the pleasurable exhilaration of ‘flying along’, as if their playing or dancing has suddenly become effortless, and the sound or movement they generate practically takes on a life of its own.
Consider, for instance, the work of Colwyn Trevarthen, who has studied in minute detail the way in which mothers interact with young infants, highlighting the role of harmony in these interactions. Trevarthen has noted the many ways in which a responsive mother will ‘dovetail’ with her infant, the mother imitating the infant at the level of the infant’s capabilities, just as the infant imitates the mother, as far as possible. He describes the way in which “the two behave in complete concert as if dancing together.”
Within the context of the music, the musicians can then be said to know one another perfectly and immediately, just as Aquinas associates the fruits with an immediate experience of God being with or even abiding in a person. Among the poetic images that Dante provides in the Paradiso, that of Aquinas dancing in heaven provides an especially fitting metaphor for this fruition.
Finally, in the context of society as a whole, this study may help reinforce, in a roundabout way, a good deal of conventional wisdom about relationships between persons in general, an example being the…
About a decade ago I watched my father play a game with one of my nieces, who was about eighteen months old at the time. The game was very simple, involving hiding and discovering matchsticks under tumblers. The girl was obviously fascinated and delighted by the game, as her attention constantly shifted from the tumblers to my father’s face and back again. What fascinated me, however, was to see the effect of the game on the girl. In the…
Nevertheless, I could find no trace of any understanding of this interaction in the works of Aristotle, who wrote comparatively little about children and sometimes classified them with animals, to be guided by the reins of pleasure and pain. I began to wonder if the Aristotelian tradition was the last word on the virtues, and whether a relationship of…

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