Thomas Aquinas

After reading St. Thomas Aquinas’s book named “Treatise on Law”, it’s not hard to see that Aquinas believes there is a distinct bridge between the way of virtue and the command of the law. Specifically, I believe Aquinas shows this relationship in the 100th question in the ninth article. What I read was that people generally want to be virtuous and when they do not have this general “desire”, the law mandates it. This can spark quite the debate because I can find it hard to conclude that almost all human beings are born with this general want of virtue. Aquinas relates the two by naming the 3 ways of virtue. Also he lists a set of objections and answers to his objections and that is where I think we can draw a comparison of his idea of virtue to how it may or may not be displayed in “Antigone” by Sophocles.

Aquinas states in his first objection that the way of virtue consists of persons doing just deeds, justly and then doing brave deeds, bravely and therefor he concludes from that, that virtue falls under the command of law. When he puts it this way it is somewhat hard to object to most of it. However I disagree on the fact where you must commit the act in a certain way that possess virtuous. To me, no command of law promotes the fact that you must act in a deeply specific way, for example you must walk on the sidewalk and not on the road is a seemingly just rule, but if you added to it that you must walk with perfect posture it somewhat makes the law seem unjust. But when Aquinas states that in simply preforming the deeds I would agree that it’s related to a command of law.

In the second objection from Aquinas, he states that a lawmaker’s chief aim is to make human beings virtuous. This one I severely disagree with, due to the fact that I think law makers ultimate goal is to protect the public. This may lead to more virtuous humans in doing so but to go as far as calling it a chief objective is over the fence. Not to mention some laws seem to only...