I'm supposed to talk today about Thomas Aquinas. We've skipped quite a few years. We ended
with the death of Aristotle in 322 BC. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225, which is quite a
number of years from 322 BC. There are some accounts that have him being born in 1224
1224, 1226, but 1225 I think is the most frequent date. The date of his death is, there's no
controversy, that was March 7, 1274. Now, Thomas Aquinas was the son of an Italian knight
that he lived in a place called Rocaseca in Italy.
He attended the University of Naples,
which had been organized by the great emperor Frederick II,
the famous wonder of the world, the stupor of Mundi.
He, who was, as you know,
was involved in all sorts of fights with the papacy.
People in Thomas Aquinas' family were involved in these fights.
First, some of his older brothers had fought first for the emperor and then they shifted
against him and I think one of his brothers was executed by the emperor, but Thomas Aquinas
never mentions the emperor, the Holy Roman Empire in his discussion of politics.
He tends not at all to comment on current events. If someone were just looking at what
Aquinas wrote, he wouldn't be able to get any idea at all of what was going on in the
Middle Ages. Aquinas is much more interested in more general ideas than a description or
Reactions to Particular Events of His Time.
Aquinas decided to join the Dominican Order, which was fairly new at the time.
The Dominican Order was an order of friars.
These are people who were white monks in the sense they take vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience to their superiors.
But they don't live as monks do in special places. They're separate from the world. They
travel from place to place preaching and begging. The Dominican Order was an order of preachers.
They were the first order founded specifically for preaching. So Aquinas was very attracted
to this order and he joined it, but his family didn't like the idea of his joining the order
because that wasn't a very high status. They approved of him going into the church, but
they had in mind that he would be appointed to some very high office such as the abbot
of the Monte Cassino Abbey, which was near where they lived, and they had necessary connections
to get him that post, but he wasn't interested. So the family got permission of the emperor
to seize him. He was, I think, coming through on a trip to Tuscany. They seized him, and
He was imprisoned in the family castle for about a year.
He took the time when he was, he wasn't really imprisoned when he was able to tutor his sisters
and receive friends and visitors, but he took the time to study, among other things he did
of Benworth. He memorized the Latin Bible and also the commentary, the sentences of
Peter Lombard, which was an enormously long theological work. He had an amazing memory,
so when he wrote, he could always refer to different sources and quotations that he just
had learned, but eventually the family let him go and he continued his work in the Dominican
Order throughout his life. He studied with Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus, and he
then taught at various places, including most, especially the University of Paris. He was
He was offered various important jobs in the church, such as the Pope, when the Pope wanted
to make him Archbishop of Naples, and he was also offered continued, he could become abbot
of Monte Cassino even though he was remaining as a Dominican, but he turned those down.
He was an amazingly productive writer. I'm sure he wrote the most of any of the people I'll be talking about.
In the approximately 25 years that he was active as a writer, he wrote about 8.5 million words.
His method of writing was that he would dictate to a secretary,
he would just compose it, just orally dictate to a secretary.
Sometimes he would have several secretaries,
and he'd be dictating different books or different works to them at the same time.
So he was capable of intense concentration. He would sometimes concentrate on a problem so much that even in a conversation he would appear to be going into a trance and he wouldn't notice what was happening.
There was one account that he was, there was some very important official in the church who was visiting the Dominican Priory that he was staying.
They introduced him to Aquinas, and Aquinas really didn't take any notice, he just seemed to be mumbling to himself.
So the ecclesiastical official thought he was being rude and he was going to tell him off.
Before he could do it, one of the other friars noticed what was happening.
He just nudged Aquinas, started shaking him a bit, then he came out of the trance and then he was very polite to the person, they explained what had happened.
He was also very good friends with King Louis IX of France, who had a very high opinion of him, St. Louis IX, he was the person that the city of St. Louis is named for, that's King Louis IX.
One other detail about Aquinas, not only was he probably the philosopher who wrote more than any of the other great philosophers,
he was also the fattest of the great philosophers. He was enormously fat.
In fact, one of the stories is when he would celebrate mass and kneel at the altar,
They had to cut out a part of the altar in front of him so he would be able to fit in.
I think that probably David Hume was probably second fattest to Aquinas, but Aquinas holds
the record.
In Aquinas' comments on politics, ethics are not concerned very much with contemporary events.
The principal writings of Aquinas on politics, first what is in the reading list is given as a treatise on law.
Law. This is a certain questions in his main most important philosophical work called Summa
Theologica. The Treatise on Law is called, Summa is organized in different parts which
are divided into further parts. So the Treatise on Law is the first part of the second part,
1990-1908, called the Prima Secundae, and the other important short work he wrote on
and Politics is something called On Kingship de Regno. This is dated about 1268. There's
some controversy on whether he actually wrote it or was written by one of his followers,
but the usual opinion is that he did write it. Now, I'll just mention something on the
The way the Summa Theologiae is organized, what Aquinas generally does when he wants to give his views on a philosophical question is he'll first say, he'll give the denial of the proposition he wants to defend.
In one of the famous articles where he wants to prove that God exists, he starts off by saying that it would seem that God does not exist.
Then, after that, he lists a whole series of reasons for upholding the thesis that he wants to deny.
He gives all sorts of reasons why God does not exist.
Then after that, solicit the objection, then he'll say, I answer that, and he'll state his thesis, God does exist.
Then he'll give his arguments for that. Then, after he's given the arguments, then he replies to each of the counter arguments he's raised in the first part.
So, in the Middle Ages, it was very, this is the way, the disputes where people would propose arguments and counter-arguments were a very common method of proceeding, that sometimes these debates would be organized formally, other cases people could send in questions or the teacher, the professor would simply ask questions,
Professor would simply make himself available, people could ask questions to which he would
have to respond and people would send Aquinas various questions and he would answer them
for example, somebody asked a question, if Christ had not performed any miracles would
Will Christianity Still Be Believable?
That was an example of a question he answers, yes it would, giving reasons for that.
So, first I have to ask him, considering Aquinas on politics,
what was he trying to do in his writings on politics?
He was trying to modify the traditional Christian view, as stated classically by St. Augustine,
in response to the knowledge of Aristotle's works that was available in his time. Aristotle's
The ethics and politics were translated or made available in Latin translations in Aquinas' lifetime.
Aquinas wrote long commentaries on each one of these.
By commentary, he would take every sentence in Aristotle's book and have remarks about it.
So, what Aquinas modified from St. Augustine is this. St. Augustine held that because of
original sin, remember original sin is the doctrine that when Adam the first man and
from the political society considered in itself only by accepting Christian
revelation could you overcome original the the original sin and all the evils
St. Augustine held that government exists only because of man's sin.
Had there not been original sin, then government wouldn't have been necessary.
It's only because of sin that government exists.
Aquinas, although of course he accepted original sin, since it's one of the tenets, one of
the dogmas of Christianity, held that original sin didn't completely corrupt nature.
He said sin wounds nature, it doesn't destroy it.
So Aquinas thought there was a good deal to be learned from without, or we could learn
a good deal about politics without bringing in revelation.
We could just reason by reasoning without resort to revelation.
We could obtain knowledge of not only ethics and politics, but also metaphysics.
He didn't entirely, in this point, he didn't entirely differ with St. Augustine.
St. Augustine, after all, had philosophical proofs for the existence of God.
But Aquinas was much more someone who emphasized the independent value.
The Reason than St. Augustine did.
In the Treatise on Law, Aquinas distinguishes different types of law, and it's about one
of the types that I'll, since we'll be talking about, Aquinas distinguished first what he
called the Eternal Law, the Lex Iterna. This is the pattern of God's mind. God is, according
really, God's mind, then man or human beings, the image of God, so we have, we're able
to find out by our own reason some of God's plans, some of what God has in mind, and this
This is natural law. Then there's also laws that are not directly deducible from reason, but are just what's called positive law.
This is a term that's come down to us, we have to say the school of legal, we talked today about legal positivists.
So, what's meant by positive law, it's from the word, it's just sort of law that's promulgated, you have the word in English to posit something, meaning to state something, I posit this, so positive law is a law that is stated by someone holding authority.
So, it isn't something that's directly deducible by reason, then it would be part of natural law, but it's just declared by a competent authority.
And there are two kinds of positive law. There's divine law, which is different from the eternal law.
Divine law are specific precepts, say, that we get in Revelation telling us what to do.
Something can be part of both divine law and natural law.
For example, we would know in natural law, we would know that we can find out that we're not supposed to kill anyone.
We're not supposed to commit murder, but this is also part of divine law because it's one
of the Ten Commandments.
So something can be both in divine law and positive law, but there are divine laws that
are not part of positive law as well, and then there's human positive law, they're just
particular legislative enactments by competent authority.
And then, there's also a law of nations, which is really elements of both natural law and
positive law.
This is laws that regulate between various complete political communities, these communities
natural law is by far the most important for our purpose and I want to first go in, I want
What I'm going to concentrate on is what Aquinas says about natural law, how do we know it, how do we find out what are the demands of reason as it relates to reality and politics.
Here, Aquinas, like Aristotle, by whom he was much influenced, rejects the view that
people in acting are motivated only by their desires.
One view of action, it's one that David Hume held and von Mises also held this view, is
that we have desires for various things, various things we want, and then reason can tell us
how to achieve these desires, say, I just want something so then I can figure out by
reason what's the best way to achieve this, say, I want to lose weight so I can figure
What Diet Should I Adopt?
I can't find out through reason what to do.
That depends just on what my desires are.
Aquinas rejects that view.
One argument that shows that,
supposing someone is considering this very question,
question, does reason have any force other than a means, a way of helping us achieve
our desires? Is there any independent, can we say something is rationally mandated regardless
of how we desire it? So if we're thinking about this question, we must think it's valuable
to think about this. Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing it. We wouldn't be engaging in this
sort of reasoning. And so the very fact that we're raising the question shows that we think
that knowledge is good. It's not something that it isn't that, say, I have an independent
desire. I really like to find out things, but it's just that once this question is raised,
It gives me a reason to want to answer it, and the very fact that I'm engaging in the inquiry shows that I can be, that the reason itself is motivating me.
Now, this knowledge, then, is an example of something Aquinas thought could be motivated,
intrinsically motivated, but it's just one of a number of different goods he thought
were motivating in that way.
So according to Aquinas, the basic precept of natural law is, good is to be pursued and
chosen and evil avoided. It seems hard to quarrel with that. And then the issue is how
we find out what the good is. So how do we know what are the goods we're supposed to
do? And Aquinas thought that these goods, something like the way I just mentioned with
Knowledge. These goods are self-evident. He calls this, uses the term, per se nota. These are things that are just by examining the claim, the statement, we can see that it's true.
So, it doesn't mean that we can't have any arguments defending it, say, we can come up with, say, just an example, just giving knowledge, we can give dialectical arguments, if somebody rejects, say, somebody says knowledge isn't good, we can show that it is, well, just that the person is engaging in the question, would show that he does think it's good, so we can give arguments if anyone denies them, but the goods,
The goods are self-evident in the sense that they're not deduced from further principles
and just specifications of this preceptive natural law that good is to be pursued and
chosen and evil avoided.
So one of the goods, I won't give a comprehensive list of them, but one of them is marriage.
holds that marriage is something that's intrinsically good. He has a very strict view of what marriage
is involved with. The two people, the man and the woman, are bound to each other in
that they can't separate or have any relations with anyone else. So he said, if we think
Think about that, we'll see that it is an intrinsically good state of affairs.
Then another example is truth.
Aquinas has the view that it's always wrong under any circumstances to lie.
by lying, what he means by lying, stating or implying that something is true when you
believe the thing is false. So the primary badness in lying, according to Aquinas, is
It's not that you're trying to deceive someone, but that you're being too minded or too faced.
You're at odds with yourself because you're saying one thing while believing another.
So this is, according to him, it's going against the integrity of the human person if you do
this.
Now, of course, there are objections to the strict view that he was very familiar with.
What happens, say, if someone is, there's a murderer at the door and he asks you about
the location of somebody, aren't you able to lie in that sort of view?
Surely you don't have to tell the person where the victim is just because he's asked you.
So Aquinas says there, well, you're not obligated to reveal the truth to him, but you still
are not supposed to lie.
You can say something like, I know, but I'm not going to tell you.
He would also accept more artful statements that get around telling the person, but still
you can't actually tell a lie.
A lie doesn't have to be in words either.
For example, supposing we could think of cases where people actually done this, supposing
A politician wasn't religious, but he wanted people to think that he was, so he kept going
to church services, where people would notice this, even though he didn't really believe
anything.
This would be an example, according to Aquinas, of something you couldn't illicitly do, because
you would be lying.
Now, supposing somebody can't, doesn't feel able to follow this very strict counsel, has
he done anything very seriously wrong?
Well, Aquinas says, no, it doesn't follow that because you've done something that you
shouldn't, that you've committed some grave moral wrong, say if you tell a lie, say to
to avoid revealing where a victim is to prospective murder, you haven't done anything really
seriously wrong, but it's still, according to him, the wrong thing to do.
Now another good that he holds is respect for human life, and he holds that a private person,
someone who doesn't hold competent authority, say, as the ruler or official of a state,
Under no circumstances whatever can directly intend taking innocent life.
Now here, it's very important to see what Aquinas means by intention.
This is a key concept in his philosophy.
The intention in action is not just the motive for something, why I'm doing it.
can be described as an intention also, but there's also an intention involved in the
description of an action. For example, suppose I say I'm now giving a lecture, so in the
Thomist way of viewing things, it wouldn't be right to say the action that's taking place
This is just that there are sounds coming out of my mouth and the intention is just that
I want to give a lecture and so this is connected with these, joined with these physical sounds.
The intention, the description of the action would not be just physical sounds are coming
Now, the description of the action would be, there's, I'm giving a lecture, that would
be called the intention in the action, and then there's further intention, but why am
I giving the lecture? We could have further intention, why am I doing that? Then we could
have possibly further intention, we could have a whole nested series of intentions.
The important thing is the intention is what's involved in the description of the act that I'm doing.
There's a very important book that developed Quimes' concepts that are very influential in modern philosophy
by Elizabeth Anscombe that came out in 1957.
This is the best work to read on intention if you really want to get a good grasp of
what Aquinas had in mind. So, as I say, Aquinas held that a private person can never intentionally
to never directly intend the death of an innocent person.
Let me modify that. I made a stupid mistake.
To never directly intend the death of anyone, not just an innocent person, but anyone.
So, again, let's imagine that, say, someone is going to murder you.
Does this mean that you can't resist at all?
You can resist. In fact, you can even use force that you know will very likely result in the person's death.
But it's just that you can't directly intend the person's death.
The description of your action would be resisting the assault on me.
It wouldn't be that I want to kill this person, so you might say, well, what's the difference in practice?
Well, one way this could come about is suppose there were some means of stopping the person without killing him, then you would have to do that rather than kill him.
So the key here is that the description of the action, your direct intention, can never be to kill anyone, even in self-defense.
If you're a private person, the coin is held on the contrary.
The competent government authorities can directly intend to kill people.
For example, in capital punishment, or in war, you can directly intend to kill people.
People in war would be soldiers who were following the orders of the Compton authority could directly intend someone's death.
So, we have then, according to Aquinas, there are various human goods that we have reason to adopt.
And one point at which he's a little different from Aristotle, Aristotle, you remember, asked the question,
How can, each person will be asking, how can I lead the best life? What is the best life?
Now, Aquinas has also asked the same question. He holds that people are properly, properly have self-love.
Each person wants his own good. However, according to Aquinas, if something is a human good,
In this sense, I've explained it's one of these goods. You have a reason to do it, to seek it, to avoid evil, even if the good or evil has nothing to do with you personally.
So, say, if I see I could help you in some way that falls under one of these class of human good, I would have a reason to do it, even if I'm not in any special relationship with you, even if it wouldn't particularly benefit me to help you, I still have a reason to do it.
And we'll see how this comes out when I mention Aquinas' views on property a little later.
So then everyone then has this motivation to try to achieve the human goods and avoid
the evil.
But then we have a question about how you have all sorts of goods.
How do you decide which ones to pursue?
Aquinas holds that the basic way we decide this, we just follow the precepts in the Bible,
thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. By following that, we never will act against any of these basic human goods.
We're able to act in a systematic way just by pursuing that path, by trying to love our neighbor as ourselves,
we're trying to achieve the basic human goods.
Before turning from this topic of Mises' moral theory and going on to some of the political applications,
I should mention there's a big dispute among contemporary scholars of Aquinas and contemporary
tomas on a particular point in Aquinas's ethics, and that is when I gave this basic precept
of natural law, good is to be pursued and chosen, evil avoided, is this something that
deducible from human nature, is it that we say we can see just by thinking about what the nature of human beings is that this precept follows and all the other goods that are constituent parts of the human good follow from that, or is it an independent principle, something that's just not derivable from human nature?
So, the traditional view, which is defended by Ralph McInerney, he has a number of books on Aquinas, including one called Ethica Thomistica,
is that Aquinas holds that we get the basic precept of natural law by deriving it from human nature.
Henry Veach, who was a very good Aristotelian and Thomist philosopher, has the same view.
But there is a competing interpretation that was an important article by a philosopher named
Germaine Grisey, it came out in 1965, and he's allied with the Oxford legal philosopher
John Finnis, and they say, no, no, this is altogether wrong, Aquinas didn't think you
You could derive the precept of ethics, which is a statement telling you what to do.
Remember, good is to be pursued and chosen, evil avoided.
That's a statement.
It's an ought statement.
It isn't a statement that's at least related to an ought statement, not a strict statement
of ought.
But it's not a factual statement, it's a statement of what you ought to do.
So they say, no, Aquinas didn't think that such a statement was deducible from human
nature, it's independently postulated.
Now I think one reason they hold this view is that they accept the argument given famously
by David Hugh that you can't derive statements about what we ought to do just from descriptive
of State and State Fund. What is the case? So they say, oh, well, Aquinas wasn't guilty
of this fallacy. No, no, he didn't do this. And the other group, the more traditional
group, they, it isn't a fallacy. So there's no reason to try to say that Aquinas didn't
He committed, he did think he could deduce this basic principle of natural law from human
nature and there's nothing the matter with that.
So I should mention also Finnis' views, he has a very important book just called Aquinas
where he discusses his legal and political theory.
He gives a very elaborate account of his views on that.
I'm inclined to think, myself, that traditional interpretation has better the argument, but
it is important to realize that there are these great two main competing interpretations.
This has been going on for the fight between them, it's been going on for a long time.
If you're interested in that country, there's a book by Russell Hittinger called The Critique
of the New Natural Law Theory that came out I think around 1993 or so.
The views that Aquinas held on moral theory that I tried to explain have very direct implications
for Politics. If there are these basic human goods, it follows that there are things that
it's never permissible to do to anybody. For example, to kill the person or to steal property
from him that's justly his. We'll see what's involved in, as you say, in Quincy's views
on Property, but later it's never right to be involved in an adulterous relationship
with someone that the person is married to.
So we have, according to Aquinas, everyone has certain basic rights, and Aquinas says
everyone is born free and equal.
Now some people have objected, they say, oh, you can't say that Aquinas had the notion
of Rights at all. I mentioned, people said that about Aristotle also, and I mentioned
in my last lecture, Fred Miller and others have said, no, they're wrong, Aristotle did
have a notion of rights. And I think similarly, we can say here Aquinas clearly did have the
The notion of rights, because he, we can see this, he says, he defines justice as the firm
resolve to give to everyone what is his, and he says sometimes to give to everyone what
is his by right, using the term just.
So he, this clearly, in the context he's using clearly indicates that people do have, oh sorry, yeah, oh it didn't,
Good, that would violate Aquinas' posthumous rights if you hadn't noticed that.
All right, so everyone does have the basic rights, but in order to secure, or I should say also, on these rights, according to Aquinas, they don't altogether rule out, oddly enough, they don't altogether rule out slavery.
No one, according to him, is a slave by nature. He rejects what Aristotle says, that there are some people who are slaves by nature.
However, you can sell yourself into servitude. I guess he's read Walter Block on this issue.
So you can sell yourself into servitude. However, it's very strictly limited. If you do that, what can be done to you, for example, the owner would have no authority, because no one has this, other than the rulers, to impose anything more than minor punishments.
Also, you couldn't be forbidden from marrying someone or compelled to marry someone, and
you had the right to work on your own to provide for your family.
In fact, if a master wanted you to do something and you thought you were a slave and you thought
it would interfere with your needed work to help your own family, you could refuse to
to do the work. So the term for slave, actually, is service. It's doubtful whether this can
be really translated as slave. Probably it's more of a servant relationship, although you
couldn't leave voluntarily if you sold yourself into such a thing. But they're very strict
Restrictions. So it's not at all like, say, slavery in America or anything like that. It's a much more limited sort of thing. So then, again, so everyone has the basic rights, but like Aristotle, Aquinas thinks there's a people, in order to live well, must be part of a complete community
They can't just secure their needs just by having a group of families or households get together.
They have to form part of some larger group.
Unlike Aristotle, Aquinas isn't very particular about the size of the group.
Group. Sometimes he refers, or it can be a city-state, a polis, as in the classical
Greece, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes he uses the same term, kivita, to mean not
only a city, but a much larger entity, such as a province or a country. It doesn't really
for the Greeks, for Aristotle and Plato, it definitely did, the size of the city definitely did matter.
Aristotle holds that a city shouldn't be too large, and in fact, one of the reasons he thinks that the ideal city, the best city can regulate population,
is to prevent population from getting too large.
Similarly, Plato, in his description of the city, in the law's limits, he says the city should be composed of something like 5,040 households.
He wants this exact number, so Aquinas doesn't hold this view.
Now, then, I think the key point, though, once we have Aquinas once, this complete community,
is, this is, I think, one reason for agreeing with the great classical liberal historian
Laurie Acton that Aquinas was the first Whig, is that Aquinas holds that the complete community
is concerned only with external actions and behavior.
Say, what the object of the complete community is,
is to provide peace and order.
Aquinas quotes the beautiful definition of St. Augustine,
that peace is the tranquility of order.
So the basic idea is that people, in order to live well, have to coordinate their actions in some way.
And Aquinas thought he didn't have the Hayekian insight that order could emerge spontaneously.
He thought that if you have various ways of coordinating action,
You need someone in authority to set out how the order is to be done.
You need to have someone deciding.
Suppose we want to have a group of people living together.
We need to decide, say, how various, how they're to regulate,
how they're to live their, how they're to coordinate their actions.
And this process by which the state decides what to do, this process of legislation, Aquinas
calls this determination, he uses the term determinateo.
This is where you would have a choice of various ways to achieve something, you have to pick
one. Say, we're deciding, say, imagine we've sometimes done it this instant, we have to
have a picture of everyone in the group. We have to, somehow, someone has to decide how
the people are going to be arranged in the picture. There are various ways one could
Determinatio
You can promote virtue only as it relates to external actions.
It doesn't take us in a way that contemporary libertarians would be completely comfortable
with.
For example, he holds that, say, because children need to be educated in a certain way, you
You could say prevent pornography because this would have a bad effect on children and
this would interfere with the way people interacted in society, but say you couldn't prohibit
somebody from looking at pornographic materials by himself if he somehow got hold of them.
You couldn't interfere with purely private vices.
So the borderline isn't very clear, but he holds something like, as we'll see later,
John Stuart Mill holds, that if there's something that's purely self-regarding, the state can
interfere with it.
And this applies also to religion, even though, of course, he thinks that everyone should
be a member, they should be joining the Catholic Church and accept its doctrine.
The State doesn't have the right to force people to accept the true faith.
He makes an exception to this for people who are continued heretics.
I won't go into his argument for that in case someone wants to ask a question about it.
Basically, he holds that if someone is a continued in heresy after a number of warnings, then
He's really guilty for breach of promise, so he can be given over to the state for execution.
That's really, I think, is inconsistent with the main tenor of Aquinas' discussion.
Now a question that I think will be of interest to us, all libertarians, would be, what does
How does this view of Aquinas held about rights and nature? How does this relate to property?
How does this affect what are his views on right to acquire property?
He holds that the earth was originally given to everyone in common.
Common. However, this doesn't exclude at all people from acquiring property for themselves.
Quite the contrary, he thinks that the way people make parts of the earth available for
common use is just by acquiring it for their own use. Say, if you possess some property,
When you produce something and you put various products on the market, so just what you're
doing is making the property available to others.
This is how you make the property available, and he thinks that this is a much better way
of doing things than letting property just remain income, because I think very rightly,
people would be interested much more in producing what they own themselves and just trying to
to make do by taking something from a common store.
Though he was very definitely aware of the division of labor
and the need for people to integrate
their economic activities.
Now, he divided.
He didn't, though, have any view, say, as Locke
and later libertarians of Hall, that you
have held that you acquire property by mixing your labor with the property.
It wasn't any particular relationship between the person and an owned property that would
give you the property.
It was just that you were somehow putting it into use that gave you the rights to it.
Now according to him, when we think about property, there are really three classes of property.
First is what you need for your absolute necessity.
You couldn't live without this property, without getting this particular item.
Now, if there's a matter, something that's absolutely necessary for you to have, Aquinas
holds that you can take it.
No one has the right to withhold it from you.
Well, there's an obvious, what if somebody else needs the same item for his, is necessary
for him to live?
Then Aquinas says, well, then you don't really have any solution, there's no definite solution
to that but somewhat like a bit like Rand on emergency ethics but again if
something is absolutely necessary you can take it. Now the second class is a
property that you need to fulfill your responsibilities. These this would
include materials items such as defending I mean I mean securing the
Education for members of your household or enabling people in your household to make a living or conducting your business, your legitimate business, or paying your debts.
and here Aquinas thinks this is a it's reasonable you're entitled to hold this
property and if you know that somebody else needs the needs some of this
property or his absolute necessity you're not obligated to give it to him
if he can take it if he can but you don't have to offer it to him you're
The third class property is superfluous items, things that you don't need for either the
first two, and here Aquinas holds that you don't have any right over these things at
all, you really should give it to the poor, you don't have any right to these. However,
As I mentioned, he does hold that investment is a legitimate form of activity, so he wouldn't
favor any policy, say, that would tax businesses so that they'd have to lose all their profits
and give them to the poor, because this would be not their superfluous property, but would
to be part of their property that they were able to hold because they would be fulfilling
their reasonable obligation, namely to promote their own business.
While we're on the subject of economics, I should say something about Aquinas' views
on Price and Usury, Murray Rothbard in the first volume of his History of Economic Thought
has a characteristically good discussion at this point, but I'll say a few additional
things in respect of slightly different from the treatment you'll get in that book, which
everyone needs to consult.
Aquinas held, here he was following Aristotle, when Aristotle discusses what he calls reciprocal justice,
that in an exchange, if I trade something with you, I trade, say, apples for oranges, there has to be an equality,
And the equality is one where the, really, where the, based on need, the price has to
correspond to need in some way.
It isn't entirely clear how this is to be done, but the way, what Aquinas thought was
that really the measure of need is, in most circumstances, the going market rate for goods.
So basically held that in an exchange you were acting legitimately if you sold or bought
at the market price.
Now supposing you were selling something and you knew that the price of what you were selling
was going to go down very soon, are you obligated to tell the buyer about this or can you sell
You don't have to tell the person you can sell at the going rate.
However, suppose you have a case where someone, say, really wants something, say, someone
has always wanted a copy of my book on marks and he's willing to pay $500 for it, which
Which is somewhat above the market price. Can the seller say, okay, fine, I accept your
offer of $500 for it? Aquinas says, no, he can't do that. He has to sell it at the going
price. Now, the other interesting economic issue involves interest on money. And here,
Again, Aquinas followed Aristotle.
Aquinas thought there was a problem in getting interest on a loan, in that he said there
are some goods where you can distinguish between the good itself and the use of the good.
For example, suppose I rent an apartment from someone and I'm paying for the use of the
Department, but the apartment is, I can distinguish that from owning the apartment. It's intelligent,
makes sense to say, I'm just using the building, the apartment, but the owner of the apartment
retains his ownership, he's just letting me use it. But there are other goods where this
This isn't true. For example, suppose you consider wine. Well, when you buy wine, you're
not buying both the bottle of wine and the use of the wine. When you buy it, you drink
it, you've used up the good, there's nothing left. You couldn't say, okay, I'm just paying
for the use of the wine. I'm going to return the actual wine to the owner. There is nothing
to return. So Aquinas thinks money is like wine in this respect. When you're using money,
there's nothing, there's no such thing as having the money, owning the money, as using
If someone loans you money, then if you use it, that's all there is to it.
There's no money left that you can still return.
So if there's a charge for interest, then in effect you're being charged twice, you're
being asked to pay back the original money, plus a separate amount for the use of the money, so he said this is obviously illicit.
I think it's interesting to try to figure out what exactly is wrong with this argument.
I think, as I see it, the basic fallacy is that Aquinas is assuming that if you're paying back the money,
Say, that what you would have to pay back is the exact sum of money that you borrowed.
This would certainly make sense if we just took, just consider things in, an example
like this.
Suppose I say, how much, I have a $20 bill in my wallet, how much money will you give
me for it?
Well, obviously, you wouldn't give me more than $20, and I wouldn't sell it to you for less than $20, it would be pointless, it would just be an exchange of $20 for $20, but if there were a question, how much, what about, how much money will you give me in six months if I give you $20, it doesn't follow at all that, just getting back, the money would mean getting back
The price of the money would be $20.
Aquinas is just assuming that the value of the good is always the same, he's not taking
account of the time preference.
So if you do take account of the time preference and you really consider it as different goods,
there would be no particular reason to think that you want it at the price of $20 six months
The price from now would be $20 just as you would not know, say, for any two goods like apples and oranges, what the correct ratio is.
This would be just something that would depend on the market price.
So interest doesn't involve, as Aquinas thought, this double charge.
The last issue I want to discuss in Aquinas' theory is, I think, one that's certainly
very relevant for us today in contemporary America. His views on just war. Now, Aquinas
was developed using St. Augustine but had more to say on it than St. Augustine did.
According to Aquinas there are three conditions for a just war. It's the third of these conditions
that I want to stress the most because this is the one I think has great relevance for us today.
The first one is that he thought that the war has to be declared by someone holding authority.
You can't have private wars. Remember, one feature in Aquinas' theories is that the rulers,
those who have legitimate rule, have certain powers that private people don't have.
Remember, a private person can never directly intend the death of anyone, but those holding public authority can, because one reason for this is that they're able, according to him, to be impartial.
Say, a private person, say, was trying to decide when to use deadly force directly, would be likely to make mistakes in his own favor, but someone who's competent authority would be able to avoid this.
So the war has to be declared by competent authority.
Then, the second requirement is that it has to be for a just cause.
This doesn't have to be self-defense, but it has to be some injury, some violation of the natural law that the state is trying to rectify.
The third one is, I think, the key one. War has to be waged with the right intention.
So, you can only have a legitimate war if your intention is to rectify whatever the problem was that led to the just cause.
Say, if you had some other intention as well, that would knock out the war entirely.
Say, if you, in the conduct of the war, violated the proper rules, say, if you attacked someone who was innocent directly, that's something no one can ever do, that would invalidate the war entirely.
So I think, say, if we applied this to the Iraq war today, we could see very readily that would be out altogether because it wouldn't be waged with the right intention.
I won't go into any of the direct political applications, but again, there's an excellent essay by Elizabeth Anscombe in her collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, where she applies this view to various, she applies it to origins of World War II and U.S. policy in that war, so she shows that this Thomist doctrine has very strict implications
In fact, one authority on the Cardinal Charles Jurnet said, if we followed the just war teaching,
there would only be a handful of wars in human history that would turn out to be justified.
Now, the last topic I want to mention is, I mentioned on some of Quine's views on what
the proper course of conduct for the government is, but what about, what did he actually think
the structure of the government should be like?
What is the best form of government?
Here he says that ideally kingship ruled by one person is the best if it isn't corrupted,
but he thinks it very likely will be corrupted.
So in practice, a mixed form of government is best.
For example, say one where there was a monarch, but there's also an aristocratic element,
Say, there's a group of people who are advising, close advisors of the king that he consults before deciding on policies.
And also, there's a popular element, say, people can have a chance to elect some of the advisors or even a chance to elect who even have elect the monarch,
He also makes a distinction, besides this one between how many are ruling whether you have kingship or not,
he makes a distinction between what he calls regal rule.
This is not the same as kingship, it's just a particular type of rule and political rule.
Regal rule is where the ruler, whoever it is, is limited only by the natural law.
There aren't constitutional limits on the power of the government.
For example, the contemporary British government is meeting a case of regal rule because parliament really can pass any legislation it wants.
They're not, there's no constitutional limit to what the parliament can do.
There's certainly customary limits, if that would be considered very bad, very strange if the parliament were to violate them.
But the parliament would technically have a power to do that.
And then the political rule is where the government has their limits to what the government can do that are put in, that are explicitly part of the structure of the government.
Say, in our government, although these aren't always observed in practice, we have, say, the rule that only Congress can declare war, the president can't do it.
So, if that limit were observed, that would be certainly a limit on the present, is it not?
It's a limit put in by the Constitution, so it would be prior to political rule.
Even in the regal rule, though, the ruler can't do anything at all that he wants that consists of natural law.
One thing that he's limited is that he can't, he has to follow his own laws, he can't exempt himself from his own laws because this, in addition to the power of coercion that a law has,
According to Aquinas, a law also tells people, guides people, what to do. So if the ruler violates his own laws, this would confuse people. So he can't do that.
And then, the last thing I'll say, and this is again a reason that Lord Acton thought
that Aquinas was the first Whig, this is the reason he gave, is that he holds that if the
government doesn't follow the proper course, if it violates people's rights, you have the
The right to disobey and in some cases to revolt against the government if there are gross violations of people's rights.
However, you need to take account in considering whether to revolt or even possibly to kill the tyrant.
You have to take account of the possible bad effects this would have.
So there might be cases where, say, government is violating people's rights, but trying to overthrow it would cause a great deal of trouble and it would result in more disorder than it's worth to correct the government.
So we see here, I think, in conclusion, we can see how Aquinas developed some of the basic ideas of Aristotle on the complete political community.
But he had more clearly than Aristotle a notion of individual rights and the limits on the power of the state.
So I think we have some time for questions, objections.
One of the early fathers of the church that might have been Athanasius was pleading for him from the golden giraffe and they came across him and recognized him and asked him if Athanasius was around and he said he's not far distant and he's got a good chance of catching him and they said, oh thanks.
The question was, in the example where St. Athanasius was being pursued and he said, in response to the pursuers, they asked him, do you know where Athanasius is, and he said he's not far off, and then they rowed, but they went on rowing right by.
The question is, would this pass Aquinas' test? Yes, yes, I think it would because here it isn't that, remember for Aquinas, lying isn't that you're intending to deceive the person, it's that you're saying something that you know to be false, and what he's saying is perfectly true, the person isn't far off, and similarly, he gives the example, say, supposing
The soldiers in the battle, the general decides on a retreat in order to get the enemy to
advance and then he comes in and attacks them.
That's perfectly all right because all you've done is order the retreat.
If the enemy wants to conclude that you're in full retreat, that's their problem.
All you've done is withdraw your forces, that's perfectly all right.
So the key question is just, are you saying something that while you believe or are you
doing something that implies that you hold something to be true while really believing
it to be false?
It doesn't have to be a word, the quantum says you can lie, say with the nod of a finger.
So, again, the key question is truth rather than deception.
The question was in, say, a case where someone,
Someone has uncertain information and treats it as a certainty.
For example, President Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
His defenders say he wasn't lying because he was just basing himself on certain intelligence
reports that were uncertain.
He didn't say they were uncertain.
Would this count as a lie in Aquinas' sense?
Well, I think the key question would be, what does the person himself believe to be true?
When you assert something, you know, asserting something is claiming that it's the case,
claiming that it's true.
So if in fact Bush believed that it fell short of truth, it was just there was some possibility
there were weapons there.
I think it would be a lie because his real belief, the lie doesn't have to lie, to say
what you believe to be, to say something is true that you believe to be false, it doesn't
You don't have to believe the contradictory of what you assert, it's just you have failed
to believe what you actually assert.
So I mean, for chronological reasons, he didn't discuss that actual case, so I can't really
say.
Michael?
When you describe how Aquinas differs from the way we behave with credit card companies,
that is, we expect that if we borrow money, we are going to face the tributes of getting it now rather than later.
Why do you think Aquinas works differently about it than the way we do?
I would probably, they hadn't really, he hadn't really had the concept of time preference which is something that came into economics only later.
I think he took it, I mean it's very, seems very obvious that something like $20 is $20.
How could you say that $20 now is a different good from $20 six months from now, they're
still the same good. So I think it took quite a bit of, it was a great insight when people
saw that this wasn't the case. Economics wasn't the subject, the quietness was particularly
He's done an enormous amount of original work and he knew quite a bit about it, but that wasn't an area where he thought extremely deeply on his own, unlike most subjects that he covered.
Yes, Tom?
I was in the middle of my own writing, taking our position, and I remember saying to my father that I already hear my detector saying,
I think you know more than Thomas Aquinas on this subject, and my father very serenely replied,
The question was that Father James Sadowski suggested that perhaps Aquinas really in his heart of hearts didn't believe fully in the Church's doctrine of usury, but he held the hat to defend it because that was the official position.
Now, it's an interesting idea. One thing possibly we could say in favor of that is Aquinas does hold that a lender can be compensated for his loss in lending the money.
Supposing the lender was going to invest in a business, had he not loaned the money, he would have made money on that.
to get this profit. He has to take into account that he might not have gotten it, as we consider
in his decision. Also, Cuenas said, he couldn't say, well, if I hadn't loaned the money to
you, I would have loaned it to somebody else, so I would have made profit on that. That
would be rather circularly easy. One thing I should mention when you say this basic question
If Aquinas did hold that, what would he have been like?
I should mention in the talk, as usual, there's a Straussian interpretation of Aquinas.
Now, this one is not held by all or even most Straussians, it's more in the oral tradition.
In fact, if you look at the chapter on Aquinas in the basic Straussian textbook, History of
Political Philosophy, edited by Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, the chapter on Aquinas is
by Father Ernest Fortin, who is an extremely good scholar and gives a very standard view
of Aquinas' recommenders. But in the oral tradition, there are some people who hold
this, that Aquinas was really a secret atheist, didn't believe any of this stuff. Say, when
He says in the Summa, it seems there is no God. That was what his real view was. He wasn't just giving the objection, but that was what he really held. I must say I don't find that altogether plausible.
I guess of course it doesn't follow, she was just drowsy.
Also on the history question, if I remember correctly, Aristotle employed the argument
everybody is saying that because money is ...
well I think he quotes the erosome. I think he relies
on his own argument. The question was
... does Aquinas use Aristotle's
point against usury that when Aristotle says money is barren. Well, I think probably a
better answer would be he regards his argument really as a counter explanation of what Aristotle
meant by that. It's not, after all, it's not altogether clear what Aristotle means by saying
money is barren. It's somewhat of a metaphor. So I think what Aquinas is doing is really
Are we explaining what this means? Anybody else? All right, well, thanks very much. Thank you.